By Jonathan Glancey

Timothy Brittain-Catlin’s Bleak Houses, examining the architects who failed the tests of their contemporary critics and historians, is a provocative look at architectural meaning

George Basevi, a pupil of John Soane, is not exactly well known. He did his level best with Belgrave Square, a handsome essay in brick-and-stucco Neoclassical London terraced housing, along with the more delicate Pelham Crescent in South Kensington. He had a crack at early Gothic Revival churches in Chelsea, yet was condemned for his Gothic competition designs for Balliol College, Oxford, rounded on in no uncertain terms by the fiery young Augustus Pugin for whom there could be no dabbling between styles. An architect must either be a Classicist, and thus a pagan, a sham, and unpatriotic to boot, or a Goth, and therefore honest, Christian, an upholder of true national values and, above all, right.

Caught between Regency flounce and muscular Victoriana, Basevi was prematurely outmoded. The Goths were out to get him, and, in 1851, Gothic really did do for him: he plunged to his death through the floor of the old bell chamber of the west tower of Ely Cathedral while surveying the decayed fabric. Poor Basevi was − says Timothy Brittain-Catlin in this beautifully written sentimental journey through the ways in which architecture is presented to the public, and history, through books, journals, magazines, newspapers and other media − a disappointment, a failure, or, in modern parlance, a ‘loser’.

History is littered with architectural losers, who, for the most part have either been swept under the carpet or overlooked by writers and even historians because they do not fit the picture of the heroic, Howard Roark-style architect, that priapic, lantern-jawed, muscular hero who designs according to the highest − and most righteous − principles in one seamless, machismo style, and who is always, but always, right.

Which is why, says Brittain-Catlin, students can be found even today poring over the works of Peter and Alison Smithson, master and mistress (disturbingly) of the ‘cock- flashing’, ‘locker-room intimidation’ school of who-can-piss-highest-up-the-wall Modernism. ‘It is our intention in this building’, wrote the Smithsons of a design for an uncompromising Soho house published in AD, December 1953, and quoted here with relish, ‘to have the structure exposed entirely, without internal finishes wherever practicable. The contractor should aim at a high standard of basic construction, as in a small warehouse.’..Continue Reading

> via The Architectural Review