Context 163 - March 2020

C O N T E X T 1 6 3 : M A R C H 2 0 2 0 53 Book reviews Moral dimensions Making Dystopia: the strange rise and survival of architectural barbarism James Stevens Curl, Oxford University Press, 2018, 512 pages, 79 black and white illustrations and 39 figures, hardback, ISBN 978 0 198753 69 8 £45 One of the strengths of this book is reflected in the fact that a traditional review format is not a fitting one to communicate either the scale of the authority on offer here or the challenges laid down, or even – perhaps more relevant – the author’s own personal engagement with a topic that could challenge Brexit for its capacity to divide. After the opening position is played – explicit from the title – little room is left for nuanced, subtle or holistic takes. The strategy is familiar from Dystopia ’s most ardently invoked muse AWN Pugin, and its most fitting backdrop his 1836 Contrasts , which similarly boasts a titular thematic strapline spoiler: ‘ … Shewing the Present Decay of Taste ’. Both authors and their volumes focus on a polemic intent on overturning a century and more of received and part-digested ideas on form, taste and style, a legacy promulgated by a contemporary and interested majority as universal solutions to society’s (and societies’) manifest failings. Such a hegemonic legacy inevitably generates the counterblasts that Pugin and Professor James Stevens Curl respectively wring across every line and letter of their productions. Each author forensically dissects their target and mercilessly promotes their positions across a raft of informed, erudite and insightful historically led deconstructions of the dominant architectural languages of their day. Equally under their scalpels is the concomitant tenet that such an architecture might have some exclusivity in its capacity to create better places for people. Such a presumptive position is rooted in the tenet that harking back to alternative formal responses inevitably represents some visceral and fatally inappropriate form of recidivism, in these contexts gothic/gothick or classic/classical. Each author’s position is boldly stated and argued in depth. The scale of scholarship is easily recognisable, and even the most aligned classicist or modernist – whatever their century – should be able to recognise much of substance. For example, the imbalance in the more recent historico-critical record smacks of cultural imperialism, while some of the most egregious of modern developments noted by each take advantage of flaws and failures in the political and planning systems, or their equivalent, despite the centuries and standards separating them. Both register strongly how so many ‘progressive’ developments, touted as part of a century and more of civic and constitutional empowerment, have often been led more by money than morality and, consequently, have resulted too often in meanness and mortality. Both authors focus on the statement of case over the balancing subtleties that are more familiar, if less immediately arresting, critical tools. If, after their titles, there is a shortage of room for pedagogical manoeuvre or subtlety, there is not much need for it either. That would only undermine the intensity of the retort, a task rightly left to others more inclined to caution and compromise.Yet while ostensible targets are stylistic and formal – for Pugin classicism, and for his 21st-century partner in polemics, the modernist style and its successors and formal variants – each author’s objections possess a subtlety that their combative stances too easily disguise. Pugin is mostly remembered for attaching blame for the manifold perils and immorality of his modern age to the received classical style, and his offering of the revived medieval style as the solution. Such is the reductionist way of history when focused on taste. In fact Contrasts clearly indicts industrialisation as much as style, and stands as a more powerful and incisive statement of case than any provided by his more formalist successors: as much Greta as gothic. Similarly, the formalist trappings of the modern movement are the focus of our modern author. Looking beyond that surface