APRIL 2006 » book review

How The West Was Won

A History of Western Architecture, 4th Edition
by David Watkin
Watson-Guptill Publications, New York, NY; 2005
704 pp.; softcover; 50 color and 905 b&w illus.; $40
ISBN 0-823-02274-9

Reviewed by David Mayernik

History is written by the victors.
- Winston Churchill

Architectural history was invented in the 18th century.
- Colin Rowe

There are many Classicists and traditionalists who lay the blame for Modernism at the feet of architectural historians, and perhaps no historian is as willing to accept the blame on the part of his profession, and redress it, than Cambridge's David Watkin. His seminal book Morality & Architecture (1977) laid out the case against the early apologists for Modernism who re-wove the thread of history to suit their ends. Maybe ironically, or else justly, Watkin published his own survey history of architecture about nine years after Morality, and it has just been released in its fourth edition. A History of Western Architecture is just that: a history, one among many, and it is decidedly Western (although Watkin's catholic sense of "western" is also a hallmark of his approach). Watkin is an unabashed sympathizer with modern Classicism, and one can't help but think that part of his agenda is to structure his history in such a way that being a Classicist today doesn't sound as strange as it would in the light of other histories.

Watkin's book could be thought of not so much as a history of architecture as a history of architectural taste, and this is perhaps one aspect that distinguishes his thesis from the others that are out there. Why make the distinction between a history of architecture and a history of taste? Because Watkin is prepared to see changes in approach to architectural form as a constantly shifting question of cultural influences, a desire for innovation and sometimes the result of sheer boredom. He presents architecture in the contexts of how it was appreciated by its public (which is a decidedly English approach to connoisseurship) and of how it was made. This colors both the buildings he chooses to discuss, and the ways in which he presents them. There is no problem in that, but it should be taken account of by the reader.

Watkin's connoisseurship-driven approach, and his being British, means one will find some buildings here that won't be found elsewhere; for example, it is almost certain that no other contemporary historian would include a treatment of Charles Cameron's Gallery at Tsarskoe Seloe, Russia (1782-5), feature a color image of the chimneypiece in the Chaucer Room at Cardiff Castle (William Burges, 1877-90) or discuss John Nash's proto-New Urbanist Park Village West (1824-8). At a broader level, Watkin's coverage of Eastern Europe, it must be said, is positive indeed, and his expertise in the 19th-century German architectural debate (he is the author of German Architecture and the Classical Ideal) makes that excursus an ably condensed version of his longer argument – although his treatment of the seminal work of Karl Friedrich Schinkel is the most extensive of any single architect in the book.

Watkin's eccentricities as regards mainstream history are not confined to British architects: it is safe to say no other historian today writing such a book would include American Classicism like Miami's Villa Vizcaya or the work of Philip Tramell Schutze (even Leland M. Roth's wide-ranging American Architecture: A History [2003] does not cover these); nor will you find in any other English-language survey a section titled "Early Twentieth-century France and the Louis Seize Revival;" while his widening of the context of German modern Expressionism allows us to see better-known architects like Peter Behrens in a new light.

This aspect of the unfamiliar (in light of mainstream modern histories), not only in text but in image, is a delight of the book. Watkin's readers are treated to little-known images of sometimes long-destroyed buildings (like Endell's façade of the Elvira Photographic Studio in Munich from 1896-7), spectacular incomplete buildings like Cosimo Fanzago's Palazzo Donn'Anna near Naples or out of the way gems like Portugal's Bom Jesus do Monte (near Braga). Watkin has an unfailing eye for the judicious insight and the compelling view, which are the mark of a true connoisseur, and they make him good company.

His book is copiously illustrated (there are 50 color and 905 black-and-white illustrations, including many plans), making it a valuable reference and studio companion not only for the author's vast erudition but also for his appreciation of sheer visual delight. He seems to revel in offering up images of buildings with which he expects his average reader is unfamiliar, and if I am any indication, he is often likely to be right.

However, his choices of emphasis won't be to everyone's taste: there probably aren't many out there like me who relish his affording only 70 pages to "The Classical Foundation: Greek, Hellenistic, Roman" (a span of about 19 centuries, from Knossos to Constantine) while giving 86 pages to "Baroque Expansion" (covering roughly a century and half). What's fine by me about his approach is that it deals with more buildings still standing and in use, and of a wider spectrum and influence (and influences) than a, shall we say, more chronologically representative sampling would have. But for those who might think that the truly Classical is confined to a few decades in Greece in the mid-5th century B.C. (and, God bless him, he still uses that old-fashioned historical notation), the choice will be troubling.

Outweighing any concern about the critical choices Watkin made in his subject matter is the impressive scope of his scholarship; he has made himself knowledgeable on a vast range of topics, both regionally and chronologically, and the sheer density of information will make this book a standard reference one can return to again and again with pleasure and surprise. His taste in architecture appears to be quite catholic, and he is fairly non-judgmental even about the recent Expressionist Modernism (he calls Daniel Libeskind and Peter Eisenman's work "positive nihilism"), although he juxtaposes it with a healthy dose of new traditional architecture. And, he does interject his opinions (beyond what he chooses to include) throughout the book, as when in discussing Dominikus Zimmermann's Wieskirche he concludes by saying "These buildings have survived every change in architectural fashion and have even been untouched by the liturgical reordering which has wrecked so many churches since the Second Vatican Council."

At 704 pages, A History of Western Architecture is not be taken lightly (literally and figuratively), but it is a burden worth bearing. We live in an era of extreme specialization in many disciplines, art history among them, and there are very few scholars out there with both the interest and the information to tackle the historical sweep that Watkin does so deftly and with such passion. It takes him, in the end, as far afield as Japan to look at the complex interplay of influences between West and East in today's architecture. If he feels compelled, as other historians have, to needlessly speculate on where this might all be going – looking into the tea leaves of building in the new millennium for signs of an emerging pattern – we can forgive him because of his enthusiasm and curiosity.

In addition to new material on Mesopotamia and Egypt, Watkin has made an effort in this new edition to introduce the issue of urbanism into his erstwhile exclusively architectural discourse. In this he is catching up with what is emerging as the dominant apology for contemporary traditional architecture: its sane urban attitude. While noble and appropriate, Watkin's urbanism still feels a little like a tack-on to his discussion, and not a driving force in the winds of change he charts through the history of taste.

A rival history, the late Spiro Kostof's A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals (1985 and 1995), is more cogently structured around urban evolution; Kostof's specialty in fact, and that of his home university of Berkeley, was urban history, and his wide and deep knowledge of the subject is everywhere apparent. Moreover, Kostof is keen to see the development of form as being conditioned by what he calls "rituals," or more broadly the question of meaning. About this subject Watkin has relatively little to say, and it leaves his treatment lacking somewhat in substance in favor of style.

Watkin claims in his new preface that his first edition (1986) was "the first history of western architecture from the ancient world to the present day to have appeared since the demise of the certainties of the Modern Movement." Well, not exactly. Kostof's first edition came out only a year earlier (1985), when those certainties were just as moribund, and if the test of the premise is whether one includes a modern Classical lightening rod like Léon Krier in the closing chapter, Kostof does too.

What, in the end, distinguishes David Watkin's A History of Western Architecture is its author's appreciation of the continuity of the classical tradition throughout millennia of history; and indeed, thinking the past has any relevance at all today is radical enough in most schools of architecture. As he says in the preface, "Who are we… to assume that we have nothing to learn from the past?" Which lessons we take from the past, though, are largely determined by how we view history, and for that we need a trustworthy guide. Watkin is one of the best, and his history goes a long way toward restoring to contemporary Classicists and traditionalists what might be called "cultural legitimacy." Beyond the remarkable sweep of Watkin's book, it is that "rehabilitation" project for which it will be most appreciated by readers of this magazine. TB

David Mayernik is an urbanist, architect, painter, author and professor at the University of Notre Dame's School of Architecture. His book Timeless Cities: An Architect's Reflections on Renaissance Italy was published by Westview Press (Perseus Books Goup) in 2003.

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