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<\/p>\nBy Richard Marshall. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Bleak Houses: Disappointment and Failure in Architecture<\/a><\/em>, Timothy Brittain-Catlin, MIT Press 2014.<\/p>\n ‘If you’re so good looking, why are you sleeping alone tonight?’<\/em> – Morrisey.<\/p>\n Only the dullest can’t imagine the collapse of their world. For the imaginative it is the starting point and an incentive to stop living within one’s hopes. Why write well of losers? Sheer terror for our future selves, who remain both threatened and threatening strangers. Burroughs said that in deep sadness there was no place for sentimentality. But this book champions architectural sentimentality. It is justified on the grounds that some things are too important to be taken seriously, and triviality is the refuge of the serious. Such is the source of its mournfulness. Only sheer heartlessness would prevent a reader from laughing, as if it’s a Morrissey lyric about sad architects. And if there’s a shadowing resentment running through it’s nothing if not a redeeming vice. <\/p>\n How should we read? In circumstances where disasters are daily presented like a statement of accounts then the recommendation to read inattentively has appeal. Of course when Beckett did make the recommendation he read Proust as a writer on the prowl for laws and found Kafka plain alarming. \u2018Nothing is sure but emptiness and error,’ writes Beckett, \u2018 \u2026 nothing but this idiotic race that every man seems condemned to engage in for no gain and which seems rather, as in Kafka, to be the effect of some divine curse.’ Readers crawl over their pages like across a burning globe, and our futile wheels turn in dying fires. Not one in a thousand make sense of what’s there, what’s absent, what’s clear and what else mad in the soul. A readers’ life is passion where the mind moves and is moved, is an affective life of movement, spontaneous and reflective, is a hungry pathos. Pathos might literally be translated from the Greek into Latin as \u2018morbus’ as suggests Cicero in his \u2018Tusculan Disputation’ . In so doing the Stoic idea of suffering and fear and inopportune offense becomes an illness where vulnerability is passivity regarding the whole external pressure of a world. Cicero decides on \u2018perturbatio’ instead. The affective life of the reader is one of perturbation. <\/p>\n The pathos of reading is connected in this with Stoic movement against Aristotelian moderation. With this movement is collapse, a leap, a plunge, a fall, a virility inflecting the irreversibility of the vocabulary of physics towards its moral pertinence. And Augustine translates pathos again as \u2018affectus’. Hobbes made a further move: \u2018These small beginnings of motion, within the body of man, before they appear in walking, speaking, striking, and other visible actions, are commonly called endeavours.’ This is the movement Giulia Sissa says \u2018\u2026 is the condition of all desire and all repulsion.’ Readers desire to find themselves written as a kind of world. There is often only silence and a despondent absence. Listening to \u2018Dido’s Lament<\/a><\/em>‘ sung by Jeff Buckley at the Meltdown Festival is to glimpse a correlative of the reader’s mode of existence. There is a quiet and terrible disappearance and disappointment in Purcell’s sound. <\/p>\n Octavio Paz writes: \u2018 Death enters into everything we undertake and it is no longer a transition but a great gaping mouth that nothing can satisfy.’ This is the territory of suicide and identity burning to a thin crisp, the geography where isolation maps out loneliness, madness, horror and despair. How should we read? Carefully, with respect for the dread that creeps in and the risk that’s more an instruction than anything else. Heads or tails, you lose. The loser is the commoner, the everyman, the standard for our prototypical experience, though each of us has a different experience of it. Cockroaches get lonely, unlike ants. Elephants mourn. Whales stay with their dead calves. Monkeys nurse their corpse young and are sad. These facts taken together give you a solid example of how a reader creates a space in between. Sometimes it’s a fact that we need to screen ourselves off. Parts fall away so there are things gone and the images that are left are just those you have. Some books you read as a test. Sometimes you stay up all night and treat reading as an amputee. <\/p>\n This series of losers are treated as theatres. There is no significance in the sequence in which they appear. But if you stop reading and instead watch them then they become nearby spectacles. Some narratives mean more than what they seem. Even narratives that are not especially dark may be dark enough to call for an explanation. This book seems obvious. It seems to be about architecture and architects. Yet the narrative doesn’t quite fit that. The explanation seems to have only the appearance of an explanation. There is an obscurity in the narrative, a fey oracular shimmer, where an affective tone, a feeling, spreads over that’s not so much discovered as detected. Its sense of loss and regret points to mysteries the obvious explanations cover up. Yet the various sub-narratives tend to repeat and give the impression that there is nothing else to be seen. What we suspect lies underneath these is the secret master narrative. Each example of a loser \u2013 a key trope for the book – picks up a theme but distorts it somewhat, as if in a bad mirror. This may be due to the reader’s own restless search for development rather than repetition. But it may also be a concern or suspicion on the reader’s behalf that the narrator’s explicit exegesis of his own subtleties are too clumsy or half-hearted. There seem dense secrets being unfolded and then covered up. The stories are not to be taken at face value and like a riddle have explanatory traps attached. The straight-forward explanations lead us away from the real intentions.<\/p>\n Riddles and parables can provoke a simple question, and tempt a simple answer. We can ask; what is this book about? About this one the MIT Press put out this blurb to answer that question:<\/p>\n \u2018The usual history of architecture is a grand narrative of soaring monuments and heroic makers. But it is also a false narrative in many ways, rarely acknowledging the personal failures and disappointments of architects. In Bleak Houses, Timothy Brittain-Catlin investigates the underside of architecture, the stories of losers and unfulfillment often ignored by an architectural criticism that values novelty, fame, and virility over fallibility and rejection. Brittain-Catlin tells us about Cecil Corwin, for example, Frank Lloyd Wright’s friend and professional partner, who was so overwhelmed by Wright’s genius that he had to stop designing; about architects whose surviving buildings are marooned and mutilated; and about others who suffered variously from bad temper, exile, lack of talent, lack of documentation, the wrong friends, or being out of fashion.As architectural criticism promotes increasingly narrow values, dismissing certain styles wholesale and subjecting buildings to a Victorian litmus test of \u201creal” versus \u201cfake,” Brittain-Catlin explains the effect that this superficial criticality has had not only on architectural discourse but on the quality of buildings. The fact that most buildings receive no critical scrutiny at all has resulted in vast stretches of ugly modern housing and a pervasive public illiteracy about architecture. Architecture critics, Brittain-Catlin suggests, could learn something from novelists about how to write about buildings. Alan Hollinghurst in The Stranger’s Child, for example, and Elizabeth Bowen in Eva Trout vividly evoke memorable houses. Thinking like novelists, critics would see what architectural losers offer: episodic, sentimental ways of looking at buildings that relate to our own experience, lessons learned from bad examples that could make buildings better.’<\/p>\n So it’s obvious \u2013 it’s a book about British architecture. About how it’s a mess and useless. About how architectural criticism is to blame. About how sentiment needs defending. About Queen Ann and Mock-Tudor styles. About gay sensibilities and about being a loser. About disappointment. And attached traumas. As one astute critic puts it, \u2018Bleak Houses returns, time and again, to sites of trauma, such as the Queen Anne-style master’s lodge at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where the author was \u201conce refused admission to join (his) parents for lunch by the then master”. I think I would have returned with a petrol can and a box of matches. Had my nerve failed, the episode would certainly have instilled an irrevocable loathing of Queen Anne architecture. But Bleak Houses remains transfixed.’ And it is this oddness, this transfixed sadness that haunts every sinew of the stories in a cumulative strangeness of narrative that suggests that there is something else going on, offering more than the simple answer, and to varying degrees of opacity. <\/p>\n There’s the calculation of its straightforward meaning becoming part of the mystery. We have a literary example of such a narrative in Kafka: \u2018 Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes part of the ceremony.’ The words mean more than they say but remain serene and are disposed to incorporate our interpretative designs upon them. In doing this, they create the disquiet of a contradiction where words, meaning exactly what they say, don’t.<\/p>\n Beckett<\/a> was too much at home with Kafka<\/a>, and disturbed by the serenity of Kafka’s catastrophes. The parable in Kafka’s \u2018The Trial<\/a><\/em>‘ makes the enormity of these catastrophes a matter of devastating self-cancellation. When the doorkeeper guarding the shining law finally closes the door on the man who has waited for admittance all his life and is on the brink of dying he explains: \u2018 \u2026 this door was intended only for you. Now I am going to shut it.’ Glosses on the meaning remain \u2018unsatisfying or unfair’, as Frank Kermode puts it. The notion here is one of exclusion. The reader is excluded from what the narrative means and there is a sense that all Brittain-Catlin is doing is guarding a meaning without the need to have understood it. The regret and immense emotion in the book feels as if the meaning has already been lost and is irretrievable. What is being offered as an interpretation is an inferior substitute. Odd things happen in such situations. The force of the narrative keeps the mystery obscure. It is of little expansiveness as a narrative though there is expressiveness and coherence. It is a narrative that tends to circle and narrow down. It is a similitude and as such requires a comparison. But to what?<\/p>\n Perhaps the verisimilitude and realism of the soft voiced argument is a clue. After all, this is a non-fiction narrative, an exercise in historical specificity steering us to what we need now, not a vaguely impending situation suggested in a storybook. The characters are real characters, the architecture real buildings, the polemic addressing an actual crisis. The book is suggesting action and has no ostensive room for incomprehension. Further allusion to mystery of any sort is an unnecessary accessory. Blanchot writes that writing \u2018\u2026issues from its own absence, addressing itself to the shadow of events, not their reality.’ And it is sometimes unclear at the onset whether these stories are decisively comical or tragic. “A writer who writes, ”I am alone”… can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.” Well maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but what seems right is Blanchot’s further recognition that when writing a writer remembers himself when not writing, so it becomes a memoir of himself \u2018when he is alive and not dying and without truth.’ This book leans over the author’s shoulder, so to speak, contemplating a professional duty, a personal feeling and a profound misery that suppresses first something like a meaning and then something like reality. The book affirms everything in its obscurity like a road leading to itself. The reader, having read everything, remains puzzled, as if what they’ve read is a just a beginning. <\/p>\n So much is done in silence, in shadows, in what is a negative actuality. Concrete material objects are the denizens of positive reality. Me, you, chairs, mountains, planets are concrete material objects. Concrete immaterial objects are the denizens of negative reality. Shadows, holes, silence, the absent Napoleon in your room, these are examples of concrete immaterial objects. Social order turned on its head may lead to solutions, so we might opt for the fundamentality of a negative, immaterial over a positive, material reality. Negative truths may be more fundamental than positive ones. This may seem too obscure. But a photographic negative, though hard to read and seemingly opaque, contains all the information we see when developed. Assaults on culture have to consider that biases may be psychological and physiological. Human psychologies have difficulties processing negatives. But processing without the use of negatives is even more difficult. There are hazards to drawing metaphysical conclusions from psychological biases. To assume that the map of the London underground corresponds to an equally schematic reality would strike us as an obvious mistake. Computers, lacking psychologies like ours, wouldn’t have such problems. Given this lack of psychological bias, we might hand over metaphysics to the machines. <\/p>\n But philosopher Robert Kraut, commentating on Willfred Sellars, says; \u2018the world depicts the demands we place upon ourselves.’ Ontologies, he goes on to say, are the shadows of social practices. This Sellarsian reversal of the traditional ontological view – which supposes the world is what is the case, and therefore a constraint on what we pick it out to be \u2013 hands us back a counter-culture. A Sellarsian is an inferentialist: constraints are placed only on her next sentences, and the world is the shadow of those inferences. Sentences are not constrained by the world. Kraut noted that shadows are real, but failed to note that their reality is a negative, immaterial concrete existence, as are holes and silence and cold. Shadows are immaterial objects we can see, as are holes, just as silence is an immaterial object we can hear, cold an immateriality we can feel. Kraut’s metaphor extends further than where he expected or desired to go perhaps. No matter; an immaterial ontology where social practices determine inferences \u2013 such as writing and telling stories \u2013is numinous and uncanny. In reading, the uncanny silence that absorbs us can be the hole into which we fall, a vortex of absence and a dark that is lived. This is all a matter of getting a hold on the almost inevitable absurdity of our loser selves.<\/p>\n In writing about the losers Brittain-Catlin writes against the bias towards positive reality. In our lives, the absent , the missing, the lost, the losers, these are now as urgent and ontologically secure as the positive concrete material objects. The author, contrary to Sorensen<\/a>, thinks that there is more information in the negative reality of the losers than in the triumphant positive reality of the winners. <\/p>\n How do we turn out to be who we are? How do we become losers? In this book the losers are all architects but they could be anyone of us. Many of them are losers because they had no sense or interest or understanding of what was going on. For these the world became a ground of unintelligibility where none but the presiding figures had any idea why anyone would want to build in the way the triumphant did. Brittain-Catlin wonders aloud whether the pre-Gothic revivalist Georgians felt the same as he does today, baffled and not interested by the prevailing orthodoxy . Georg Basevi did Tudor Gothic \u2013 pre-Pugin Gothic – but his design for Balliol College was rejected by Pugin himself and he became gradually a loser. \u2018We do not know what he felt of the new, correct, \u2018truthful’ version of the style, it is a fair bet that he could not produce it himself, because if he had been able to, he would have done.’ Basevi fell to his death off Ely cathedral roof in 1845 and has been forgotten. How do we become losers? One way is that cleverer, more talented, less principled, better-connected interlopers from cities take the jobs. Pugin swept aside all before him with his revival on a wave calling for \u2018true’ buildings. If being good and right are the only criteria by which one can write about and explain architecture then the bad and the wrong are condemned to oblivion. But being good and right aren’t the sole criteria: this is one of Brittain-Catlin’s explicit points. <\/p>\n He discusses links to literary preoccupations, how the words describing architecture are chosen to link the architectural style to the client interest rather than to describe the actual style. Brittain-Catlin is dismissive of much architectural writing as publicity cant: \u2018 \u2026 words used to describe their own buildings by some architects, across the twentieth century from CFA Voysey to Daniel Libeskind, is, although sonorous and inspiring, quite clearly daft and meaningless if interpreted literally.’ These architects grab words that are fashionable. When Gothic revivalists talked about truth and morality their clientele were a Christian intellectual elite to whom such words had traction. But was the architecture really truthful and honest? In our day, is modernism really functionalist? <\/p>\n Brittain-Catlin wants to write about architecture differently and tell a story of each example of architecture to create its secondary world . He finds joy in sadness when writing about the architects who fell outside the canon. His parade case is Horace Field who designed a Lloyds bank in Wealdstone. It seems desperately forlorn as a building and reflects Field’s own career trajectory of sadness and failure as he falls. His buildings speak of a freshness , optimism and innocence that he never fulfilled. His neo-baroque buildings were built before the style became popular via Lutyens moving to his \u2018Wrenaissance’ in 1906. Although he designed some charming buildings he never became the bank architect for Lloyds. He came second in prestigious competitions. Early clients included cabinet ministers and a duke. He ended up in Rye building charming cottages for widows and a doctor. His hero Richard Norman Shaw visited one of his rooms but didn’t say anything about it. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n An inspired dreamer of the idealized early eighteenth century village life of Kate Greenaway and Randolph Caldecott Brittain-Catlin writes; \u2018It is the variety of failure in Field’s career that makes him interesting. \u2026 when the true extent of Field’s disasters are known , from the sheer impossibility of realizing his old-fashioned village idyll in industrial late-Victorian England, to the decline in his powers, to the seedy, sad nature of some of his forlorn surviving buildings \u2013 in the case of his lovely bank branch in Wealdstone, its ravishing beauty surrounded by all the ugliness of an uncared-for high street is an almost unbearable sight \u2013 the story is suddenly a great deal broader, a great deal more interesting..’ <\/p>\n Jean-Marie Rouart in \u2018La Noblesse des Vaincus<\/em><\/a>‘ looks at failures in cultural history such as \u2018Alfred de Musset , most of whose life was blighted by hopeless passion for George Sand’ and Perec’s abstruse writing \u2018so abstruse as to lead to rejection.’ Rouart says: \u2018 Life’s losers. What writer is not kin to them? \u2018But these are not failures so much as successes who are most interesting when they failed. Rudolf and Marot Wittkower in \u2018Born under Saturn<\/a><\/em>‘ says something like that about the architect Francesco Borromini. The East German film \u2018Die Architekten<\/a>‘ is about the futility of personal ambition in GDR as well as the personal breakdown of the characters and so tracks some of Brittain-Catlin’s interests. Niels K Prak notes architects are in constant retreat in the face of consultants, commercial and speculative builders and ironically are pushed away from creativity by the very forces used to draw a line between creative artists and producers. Architectural competitions create huge numbers of losers and the endless dashing of dreams. \u2018Every one of them has lost time, energy, nerves, ambition, money, and of course pride; pride to their spouses and partners, to their children, perhaps to their parents, to the more successful architects in their circle of family and friends, to their rivals, to their bank managers.’ <\/p>\n Corrupt competition can kill as for example in 1835 Francis Goodwin who as a result of such corruption died of apoplexy. Some architects are known because they were forced to not exist. At the start of his career Frank Lloyd Wright’s best friend was Cecil Corwin who Wright described as \u2018the fine looking , cultured fellow with pompadour and beard’. He is later annihilated by Wright. Deep friends, Corwin supported Wright, but after a while something goes wrong. Corwin says to Wright, \u2018I’ve found out there’s no joy in architecture for me except as I see you do it. It bores me when I try to do it myself. There’s the truth for you. You are the thing you do. I’m not and I never will be. I’m no architect. I know it.’ Wright notes much later: \u2018Cecil went off East and \u2013 God knows why \u2013 never have I seen him since.’ Wright’s giant shadow was too much and killed sunlight for Corwin. <\/p>\n How do we become losers? By being the undistinguished pupil of untalented fathers of great ones. \u2018George Gilbert Scott’s son George junior was a finer designer than his father, but his best building \u2013 the church of St Agnes, Kennington, in south London \u2013 was damaged during an air raid in 1941 and then gratuitously demolished , to be replaced by a disappointing cheap shed of a church so no one can appreciate it anymore; and he himself became mad, was certified insane in 1884 and later died in his father’s magnificent Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras Station in London.’Augustin Pugin’s son , Edward Welby Pugin, died at 40 in the Turkish baths in the Grovesner Hotel at Victoria Station. A bachelor, lonely, bitter and bankrupt, most traces of his architecture gone, it was his bad temper that was partly to blame for his loser status. Erich Mendelsohn was intolerably arrogant and repellant. He fell out with the Bauhaus architects and once in exile everyone else. <\/p>\n How do we become losers? Early demolition or mutilation of your work will do it. Wells Coates has had everything he did in London destroyed, including his BBC radio studios of Japanese-Hollywood modernism. James Wyatt’s buildings were either demolished, fell down or caught fire. Some architects are too lazy or too well-off. Others lose their talent. M.H. Baillie Scott spent the second half of his career being uninteresting. William Crabtree designed the Peter Jones store in Sloane Square but nothing else, ending with some mediocre stuff in Harlow. Some are too complex, difficult, demanding or unclassifiable. Lucien Kroll and Peter Hubner are both \u2018untidy, disordered, threatening anarchy, breaking what is seen as good architectural manners’ according to Peter Blundell Jones, and that’ll be enough to condemn them. Up until recently women have been losers almost by definition in architecture. Many, such as Swede Ingrid Wallberg, weren’t allowed to be architects and were just influences. Yet she influenced Albert Lilienberg, Le Corbusier and Albert Roth. <\/p>\n Young architects tend to be losers. Their work is either lost or subsumed to their leading partners or superiors. \u2018The thing with Rodney Gordon is that he couldn’t be bothered to publicise himself’ says Jonathan Meades. Gorden is a Brutalist architect whose building got credited to Owen Luder for whose partnership he was working. Decade after decade of hard work can be buried in frustration and obscurity. Some are losers as people as well as architects \u2013 \u2018Stanford White’s reputation was forever sullied after he was murdered by a young psychotic.’ Some offices are full of losers. John Soane of the early 19th century had an office of losers \u2013 \u2018most were hopeless, unremembered or remembered for the wrong reasons..’ Some losers are high scoring students with had the wow factor who then never made anything afterwards. James Adams, a Royal Academy gold medalist working between 1806 and 1809 was an example of this unrealized genius type of loser. RD Chantrell, a Soane pupil, supported the right style and yet was no good at it and was mocked and boycotted and driven to exile. <\/p>\n Some losers are losers because they were doing the right thing but were not as good as others doing the same thing. William Railton, who designed Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square was of limited talent and technical ability and couldn’t keep up with the Gothic revivalists. Brittain-Catlin tells us that \u2018 he was bullied or shamed by his employers into abandoning architecture altogether.’ Others are losers because they were out of their depth. The designers of the Anglican Cathedral in Valetta in Malta were all like this. They were ignorant of the local stone, it needed rebuilding, five builders were killed during reconstruction, the Maltese press hated it and Lanksheer the architect was branded a \u2018Protestant devil.’ Cost cutting and political battles can also cause losers. Ralph Knott designed London’s County Hall but his original design was criticized and changes ruined its proposed grandeur and \u00e9lan. He died suddenly in 1929 aged 50, wrecked by drink and disappointment. His loser status has been rubbed in posthumously. He designed the former Speaker’s House in Stormont but Wikipedia attributes it to his hated rival Lutyens .<\/p>\n Some losers are losers because we remember them only because they ruined a better building. Josef Klarwein wrecked a family villa by Mendelssohn in Jerusalem. His work was rubbished by fashionable youth. Thomas Robinson ruined Vanbrugh’s Castle Howard, whilst another loser Daniel Garrett added silly steps to Hawksmoor’s noble mausoleum there. Other losers are remembered because they built something on the remains of something wonderful that wasn’t realized. Those who designed the building replacing the original Penn Station and those who replaced Thomas Hardwick’s propylaeum at Euston are remembered this way. Losers are also made from those who built ugly buildings such as the Elsom Pack and Roberts office and transportation hub at Hammersmith after the plans by Foster didn’t come through. Frederick Gibberd is remembered this way for his Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral. He was on the losing side of a battle between Brutalists and Scandanavianists as well as not being Lutyens and delivering his original design. <\/p>\n Failures are also made out of great \u2018unbuilts.’ Shaw in 1864 failed to build the Bradford Exchange. For Lutyens in 1907 it was the London County Hall. Architects in exile also become failures. Oskar Kaufman left his smart Shoneberg flat in Berlin for Tel Aviv because of the Nazis. He nearly starved, couldn’t find work, was commissioned to design a theatre, didn’t finish it and left Tel Aviv in despair to face persecution in Budapest. Brittain-Catlin writes that; \u2018Among the dead there must surely have been countless geniuses. Among the wounded and the damaged there must have been many who had been forced to abandon their dream of becoming an architect.’ Death is another way of becoming a failure. Edward Reynolds contributed to the design of the Brutalist Alton West estate at Roehampton but died \u2018after a long and painful illness’ on January 1st 1959 aged 32. Accidents also contribute to this species of the posthumous loser. Maciej \u201cMathew” Nowicki a pioneer of the hyperbolic paraboloid was killed in an airplane crash in 1950 after visiting the site of the new city of Chandigarh where he was going to be the master planner. Michael Ventris died of a road accident at the age of 34. His unremarkable house in Hampstead is remembered because of this fact and nothing else. <\/p>\n There is real and there is fake. Why don’t some buildings get on the critics radar? Some just don’t, such as high-Victorian provincial-classical and mid-twentieth-century almost-tudor. The buildings are unsurprisingly clumsy, badly judged, derivative. Much contemporary housing in UK is like this done in a washed out, cheap and unhistorical style. Without a reasonable conversation with architecture, which is also about life and experience, the buildings turn out losers as do their architects. Of Quinlan Terry’s boring and neo-Georgian riverside scheme for Richmond Peter Blundell Jones wrote: \u2018The tragedy of Terry is that he is unable to reinterpret\u2026 He is not working in a living tradition and so cannot enjoy the corrective influence of colleagues.’<\/p>\n Brittain-Catlin says: \u2018\u2026 most contemporary housing in Britain is actually designed in incompetent versions of historical styles, an example of the dimness of debate that I am struck by as year follows year.’ A counter example is the \u2018Essex Design Guide’ but architects attacked it. All critics hate tudor architecure. Brittain-Catlin finds this is weird because it is good architecture and important and even fits with modernism’s criteria for good. He writes: \u2018No one who wrote about the importance of function, or the logic or potential of a structural frame\u2026’ could miss the fact that \u2018\u2026 the Elizabethans had been here before. Elizabethan architects could do symbolic geometry as well as anyone, and they construct using and expressing the natural properties of materials\u2026’ Mark Girouard writes on this. But mock-tudor isn’t discussed as a proto-type paradigm for modernism. An 1820s and 30s revival of mock Tudor style caused architectural rage. Alfred Bartholomew had a chapter title of his book \u2018Specifications<\/a><\/em>‘ \u2018The Gross Corruption of the Kind of Building called \u201cElizabethan”‘ and wrote it was a style like \u2018a book with its morals reversed by negatives, its sentences misplaced, its words misspelled, its grammar corrupted, some of the words left in English, the remainder translated into different foreign languages, and the whole badly printed upon bad paper.’ Joseph Gwilt called it an \u2018 imperfectly understood adaption of classical forms to the habits of its day in this country.. full of redundant and unnerving ornament.’ <\/p>\n At the same time as architectural critics were damning it Sir Walter Scott was testifying to the fascination of the public’s interest in the Tudor and Elizabethan architecture. Now neo-Tudor houses are being designed and built all over but critics are silent. The idea of \u2018fakery’ is a key to this silence. This is another legacy of Augustus Pugin<\/a>. In his book \u2018Contrasts<\/a><\/em>‘ Pugin made the concept of \u2018fake’ important. \u2018Unless the ancient arrangement be restored, and the true principles carried out, all mouldings, pinnacles, tracery, and details, be they ever so well executed, are mere disguise.’ ‘Beautiful’ and ‘true’ became the watchwords. What he was doing \u2018 was trying to drag architecture out of one of its most disappointing and frustrating periods through the quality of design, and his packaging of the \u2018Gothic revival’ as \u201cmoral” was part of his attempt at steering his design idea through to the people who would adopt and pay for it\u2026 This was their language \u2026’ Brittain-Catlin argues that Pugin ate other architects and created the language of bullying cannibalism. Charles Cockerell’s Royal Academy lectures were \u2018a perfect disgrace’, John Shaw’s words were \u2018a sad failure’, John Soames’s extensions at the Bank of England were \u2018\u2026 the most costly masses of absurdities that have ever been erected.’ This hectoring and bullying tone predominates when style is discussed by Anglo Saxons and has done since the early nineteenth century. <\/p>\n Brittain-Catlin prefers novelists’ approaches to buildings. Alan Hollinghurst’s \u2018The Stranger’s Child<\/a><\/em>‘ contrasts two houses a la \u2018Waugh’s \u2018Brideshead Revisited<\/a><\/em>.’ One is in Stanmore (near Horace Field’s Lloyd’s Bank) . The house is described as having \u2018 a way of resolving itself into nooks’. There is no concept. No overall description of form or style. Specific areas are associated with feelings and expressions of the people discovered in them. Is this a phenomenologists’ approach? Brittain-Catlin says: \u2018Phenomenology is a winners perspective: it attributes meaning to the spaces by virtue of the associations they arouse. Yet it is possible to put this familiar approach precisely in reverse, and say that the elements of the house are here created by the associations that frame it.’ In this novel it’s a pair of homosexual situations, \u2018 \u2026 one in which two attractive university undergraduates , who in later sections of the story both turn out to be straight, have the kind of sex one associates with Edwardian aesthetes, with much fresh air, swimming, and poetry, the other in which a plain and straight young man, George’s lonely and inadequate brother, much given to masturbation, is pursued ardently but hopelessly by an older and richer man until he meets a sad end. There is no separation between the house and these situations\u2026’<\/p>\n Hollinghurst’s \u2018Two Acres’ works like EM Forster’s Howard’s End<\/a><\/em>, the house a metaphor for a family rooted in English soil. Elzabeth Bowen’s \u2018Eva Trout<\/a><\/em>‘ is also set in a defining house called \u2018Cathay’ in bleak Thanet in Kent. Alexandra Harris writes of Bowen as a novelist \u2018whose buildings and their contents are alive, or breathing, staring or dying.’ Michael Cunnington’s \u2018By Nightfall<\/a><\/em>‘ shows the decadence and confusion of a mind via unrelated rambling set pieces of the enormous rambling house\u2026 \u2018Bach, French doors, Jean-Michel Frank, Giacometti, Art Deco, Dogon.’ Brittain-Catlin finds these approaches to writing about architecture superior to what he describes as the triumphantalism of architectural critics.<\/p>\n He notes that architectural critics don’t write about minor second and third rate building. He contrast this situation with the other arts. He argues that where most fiction, music, films and poetry are third rate there are critics for them and people like it. But the attack language of the architectural critic can’t discuss what they consider third rate ideas that the public like such as rooms, feelings, vignettes, comfort, coziness, retreat, leisure. Brittain-Catlin thinks the critical silence a result of the Pugnite triumphalist hangover. Things are broadly Puginite and Pesvenerite plus tinctures of a Peter Davey type moral commitment to sustainability and public service. Brittain-Catlin writes: \u2018\u2026 my argument is that mainstream architectural criticism has failed to address attempts to work with what looks like traditional types of building or variations on them\u2026 and this has left a large hole in the national debate.’ He connects this with the notion mentioned in passing above that architectural superstars are bluffers. He quotes with approval Hugh Casson: \u2018 All professional people\u2026 depend very largely on bluff, whether they are dentists, veterinary surgeons , or architects.’ He also connects philosophical accounts of architecture with self publicity, his parade cases being Daniel Libeskind and Rem Koolhaas.<\/p>\n He discusses the bullies and sissies and the discourse of violent attacks that became the settled way of talking about buildings firstly in the writings of Loos, Le Corbusier and Gropius and then generalized across the whole profession. Brittain-Catlin identifies this with a tendency to espouse a narrow political rhetoric and the linking of a style with a politics eg neoclassical = Speer. It mobilizes a violent language of repudiation.<\/p>\n Is there a moment we seize in this where the losers are a sacrifice? This is a modern use of the term not found in biblical, rabbinical nor medieval Hebrew, nor Greek or Latin and found in Arabic, Spanish and German before Hebrew. In modern Hebrew \u2018korban’ denotes both an offering and a victim of a crime. Moshe Halbertal<\/a> discusses this in his book \u2018 On Sacrifice<\/a><\/em>.’ Can we understand losers in terms of an offering within a structured hierarchy? Is sacrifice essential to human expression and life? Would it be something that Brittain-Catlin’s account of losers might require. It would give his notion of a loser a depth of hinterland . Why a loser is refused can be obvious up to a point but perhaps there is always a mystery attached. <\/p>\n The result is to face a rejection that remains inexplicable at some level, and so unpredictable and out of our hands to overcome it. The inherent potential for rejection stands in all our existential predicaments. It is part of our superiority when we enter into a sacrificial cycle voluntarily, a symbolic recycling of the gift to its origin. Halbertal writes: \u2018Sacrifice is\u2026 a gift given within a hierarchical context in which the ordinary obligation to receive and return is not valid. As such, a cycle of gift exchange is not necessarily established with the presentation of the offering, and a dangerous gap between giving and receiving is opened up, creating a potential for rejection and trauma.’ If there is a way of opening up the real resonance of the loser it is here with the rejection and trauma both primordial and privileged. It defies conventional ethics because acceptance is never secured. <\/p>\n The establishment of ritual is to try and deal with the unpredicatable mystery of rejection. Magical readings of ritual endow protocols with causality but rob it of personal elements. Halbertal writes: \u2018causation cannot replace desire.’ Rene Girard<\/a> discusses the relationship between sacrifice and violence. On his account, sacrifice is purification to end escalating violence. It requires the careful calibration of the scapegoat. The loser as scapegoat is intended to place the sacrifice on the side that refuses to retaliate and thus the violence cannot escalate. But Halbertal rejects this: the loser is not a scapegoat because the loser is placed outside the sacrificial bond, outside the ritual protocols, outside the cycle of gifts. The loser is not part of the protocol, afforded a special significance and role within it, as the scapegoat is, but is annihilated, humiliated and her desire to take part crushed. She is denied the meaning of gift giving and this results in a forced barrenness. The stakes, being so high, are therefore a reason for the violence. Cain killed his brother once his sacrifice was rejected. The reason for the gift is to be part of the relationship. It is not the reason for the relationship. It is a symbol for a gift that cannot be reciprocated. <\/p>\n Do we seek justice for the loser? Kierkegaard says that human justice is very prolix and yet at times quite mediocre, the divine justice more concise in needing nothing from the prosecution. As Kafka retells it, we are infomers of our own guilt. We help ourselves to eternity’s memory of that. <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/9780330483278.jpg\")
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