by Roberto Dulio

Modern Architecture, Alan Colquhoun, Oxford University Press, Oxford-New York 2002
(pp. 288, £ 11.99, $ 18.95)

Alan Colquhoun’s new book, published as part of the Oxford History of Art – is one of the most engaging attempts yet to summarize the history of modern architecture.
Born in Britain in 1921, Colquhoun graduated from London’s Architectural Association in 1949 and then became part of a circle of architects and critics – including Reyner Banham and Colin Rowe – who moved to the United States and taught at elite American universities. From the start of his career, Colquhoun was unusually sensitive to nuances in architectural history; as a result, he is able to underscore the complexities and contradictions of the very idea of the modern movement.

Colquhoun reviewed Banham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age in the January 1962 issue of the British Journal of Aesthetics. He asserted that one of the book’s merits was having emphasized the basic ambiguity of the 20th century’s architectural avant-garde, which was highly polemical toward the Beaux-Arts tradition yet simultaneously influenced by it (particularly the recapitulative formula characteristic of Julien Guadet’s writings).
Banham’s stance differed, since he believed that the unresolved conflict inherent to modern architecture derived from its being taken as a branch of technique, rather than the will to experiment formally and symbolically (albeit within technique). While Banham supported the concept of technique and mourned its failure, Colquhoun’s review implicitly claimed a different role for the historian.
In his new volume he argues the need to analyze the facts, to dwell on ambiguities and conflicts. The purpose is not the quest for absolute truth or the desire to correct a mistake, but rather to reveal to the reader – who probably is an architect, though not necessarily so – the substance and paradoxes of critical and historical constructions. The aim is to make readers at least cognizant of their existence and to provide them with directions that can help lead them through the narrative of modernity.

As Giorgio Ciucci stressed in his presentation of the Italian translation of Colquhoun’s essays, Architettura moderna e storia (1989), the author seeks to ‘imbue architects with the awareness of history and, at the same time, warn them of history’s seductions’. To do so effectively and concisely, in a simple yet not oversimplified fashion, in Modern Architecture Colquhoun has deliberately chosen to address only the so-called masters. He divides the work into 12 chapters that can be read as a whole or as independent essays. He pares the story of those events to the bone in order to bring out their principal contradictions. ‘Based on an idealistic and teleological conception of history,’ he writes, ‘modernist theory seems radically to have misread the very Zeitgeist it had itself invoked, ignoring the complex and indeterminate nature of modern capitalism, with its dispersal of power and its constant state of movement’.

Colquhoun’s account runs from 1890 to 1965. According to the author, the beginning coincides with the moment when the conviction that architecture contained universal, abstract principles, independent from technical aspects, collided and merged with contemporary theories, namely those that considered innovative techniques and the architect’s social consciousness to be attributes of a new age. Terminating the volume in 1965 allows the reader to glimpse the diverse, fragmentary directions that emerged from this crisis, the germs of which were contained in the illusory unity of modernism.
Although Colquhoun’s book may be considered a ‘refined handbook’, it may simply become a ‘handbook for the refined’. In other words, the problem for Colquhoun – and all who deal seriously with the history of architecture – is the compatibility of a popular publication and the refinement of an account that does not use a purely narrative approach. The former is clearly the technique used in Modern Architecture. For every chapter and ‘moment’ of modernist architecture, certain elements or issues are presented for consideration. The way that the book develops these ideas is extraordinary and pioneering, going far beyond traditional concepts. However, if readers are unfamiliar with the ideas of figures like Pevsner, Giedion, Zevi and Benevolo, they will miss one of the primary traits of this and other works. The notes permit a more detailed examination of the author’s sources.

Works included in the notes and bibliography are almost exclusively British and American. Among the few exceptions are references to Manfredo Tafuri and other Italian historians who trained with him or worked at the University of Venice. In some cases, paradoxically for Italy and the figure of Wright, the lack of the latest general or specialized research is surprising. Although brief, this publication is significant and rich in original ideas; the illustrations, though limited, are first-class. The book boasts new image of well-known buildings in the revealing fresh views or details.

Roberto Dulio is an architect