The lecture hall in the Art Workers Guild, 6 Queen Square, Bloomsbury, London, venue for British Architecture Seen from Abroad
Photograph: EAHN

The elaborate ceiling of the Art Workers Guild lecture hall
Photograph: EAHN

Some of the SAHGB-EAHN symposium participants chatting during a break in the proceedings.
Photograph: Kamalika Bose

SAHGB-EAHN Annual Symposium Report

London, 16 May 2009

British Architecture Seen from Abroad was the subject of the annual symposium of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, this year held in conjunction with the European Architectural History Network. The theme is important, yet no book has attempted to discuss it. Chronologically arranged papers covered a remarkable range of interpretations of the theme.

After introductions by the joint chairs, Andrew Ballantyne and Dirk van den Heuvel, Ute Engel, of the University of Mainz, opened with “British Cathedrals Seen from a Continental Perspective.” Twentieth-century German scholars identified English Gothic as eccentric and wilful in accordance with their preconceptions. She believed that Nikolaus Pevsner had “reinforced the view that English art is peripheral,” but acknowledged that English scholars later added depth not by formal analysis, but through social and linguistic parallels.

Susan Klaiber, an independent scholar from Winterthur, Switzerland, examined an encounter of contemporaries, Wren and Guarini. No domes existed in England before Wren, whose design development for St. Paul’s can be related in all its phases to Guarini’s designs, especially those for the unfinished Theatine church of Ste.-Anne, Paris, later demolished.

“Historians love the quest for models,” announced Marcus Becker (Berlin), stripping away simplistic expectations about “Frederick II of Prussia and ‘English’ Neo-Palladianism.” Although certain English Palladian prototypes were reproduced in Potsdam under Frederick’s rule, they were an aspect of a theme-park like set of samples from Europe, and English models were chosen more for reasons of state than for their architectural significance.

Calcutta took the place of Potsdam as Kamalika Bose (Ahmedabad, India) showed how a prosperous Bengali merchant class built versions of English country houses along narrow streets, with massive porticos, while interior courts and plan forms followed local typology. These were the work of British engineers, loose impressions of the originals, with all the trappings of the nouveaux riches. Change the streets, and it could have been Bishop’s Avenue, Hampstead, or any other “millionaire’s row.”

Alex Bremner (Edinburgh) looked less at the buildings than at the people, the Anglican episcopate after 1841 who carried their contacts with architects when posted overseas. In the most methodologically oriented paper of the day, he challenged the neglect of colonial architecture in standard histories of “mother countries.”

Stefan Muthesius (University of East Anglia) compared two texts, the famous Das Englische Haus of 1904, and the little-known Die städtische Bodenparzellierung by Rudolf  Eberstadt. The first was concerned with the historical causes of the model English lifestyle, the second  with methods of land division and speculative development in England, although the real intention of Eberstadt’s views was disputed in discussion.

Two afternoon papers took us to Singapore, where Oscar Wilson organized the architectural profession in the 1920s (Raymond Quek, Nottingham), and Turkey, where two British Council exhibitions of architecture and planning were shown in the later stages of World War II, offering a modernism that was not in the “cubist” style, by then out of favor (Elvan Altan Ergut, Ankara).

The two final papers had been selected from a large number of offerings on New Brutalism, which is evidently a hotter topic abroad than at home, where there is widespread reluctance to engage with its complex meaning.  Christoph Grafe (TU Delft) examined the Queen Elizabeth Hall and Hayward Gallery, confessing himself baffled by the intention of the designers and their apparent ambivalence towards the welfare state. M. Christine Boyer (Princeton) closed with a study of the Smithsons, largely composed of readings from unpublished writings by Alison Smithson, rich as plumcake but risking indigestion at the end of a rewarding day, not lacking in the eccentric and wilful.

Alan Powers
University of Greenwich

A fuller account of the symposium will be published in the Autumn 2009 issue of the SAHGB newsletter, which will be available for download at http://www.sahgb.org.uk/index.cfm/display_page/Publications.