Remembering the extraordinary new developments in architecture that were under way in the 1760s two hundred years ago in the period with which the Introduction has dealt, the historian can only end by wondering whether in the welter of innovation of the last few years there lie somewhere the particular seeds from which the architecture of the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries will grow; whether, to use another dubious historical analogy, the stylistic development of this quarter of our century corresponds to the Mannerism of the central decades of the sixteenth century in Italy. May we look forward, towards 2000 perhaps, to some such immanent movement, at once a synthesis of many preceding technical and stylistic innovations and a return to some at least of the principles of the preceding ‘high’ phase, yet above all a vital new creation with a life-expectancy of a hundred years and more, as was the Baroque around 1600? From the latest Baroque Western European architecture turned away two centuries ago; to the Baroque, in any revivalistic sense, it is hardly likely to return. Yet after the ever-increasing divergencies, which have been as characteristic of the mid century as convergence was of twentieth-century architecture down to the 1930s, will we—perhaps before another decade has passed—begin to sense the beginnings of a new synthesis?
Today, the problem must be posed in world terms. So far Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa have, on the whole, been learners and disciples of the West. Will the countries of Eastern Europe and the new countries of Asia and Africa soon be making contributions towards a new world-style, such as in the last few decades first the North Americans, then the Latin Americans, and now the Japanese have made? Will the history of Western European architecture continue to be the principal story (which thanks to political conditions has been largely true up to the present) or will the Western European tradition, to which this volume has been almost completely devoted, become in the succeeding period somewhat peripheral and even alien to a basically changed situation in which under-developed countries will increasingly, as they come of age, tend to throw off cultural tutelage as they have mostly already thrown off political tutelage?
The Brazilians could design and build in these last years Brasilia by themselves as well, perhaps better than Europeans or North Americans—above all, certainly, the architects of their own Portuguese homeland—could have built it for them. The Indians, on the other hand, have employed Le Corbusier and other Europeans, and the Iraqis have assigned the designing and building of their University to an American firm headed by an architect of German origin. The Japanese, who are in this respect already at the forefront, had employed Wright half a century ago for the Imperial Hotel; today it may perhaps be said that their own best work is superior to the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo whose designs they obtained from Le Corbusier. Yet current Japanese architecture is not and is not intended to be—witness the foreign-language editions of two of their architectural periodicals—outside the tradition of Western European architecture; indeed, it represents the latest notable contribution to that architecture with which this book has hitherto dealt. It is appropriate, therefore, that the roster of plates in this book, which began with buildings conceived—in effect at least—in Rome and built in France, in England, and even in North America, should end with buildings built in Asia following principles first adumbrated by a Swiss in France. The later eighteenth century turned inward in architecture towards the Rome and the Greece that were at the fountain-head of the Western European tradition; today we should perhaps be turning outward towards the new non-European world which is still in the mid twentieth century, in architecture as in so much else, the child of Europe. Symbolically, at least, the best hope of a new architectural synthesis in the decades to come may lie in this fact; so that later histories of twentieth-century architecture will perhaps give as much attention and space to India or to some of the new African states as little Holland or vast North America have received in this account of the architecture of the last two hundred years.
NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOTES
INTRODUCTION - Notes
[1]. Sigfried Giedion introduced this term in his Spätbarocker und romantischer Klassizismus in 1922 and provided an extended discussion of the concept. Fiske Kimball first used the term in English in his article ‘Romantic Classicism in Architecture’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, XXV (1944), 95-112.
[2]. See Hautecœur, L., Rome et la renaissance de l’antiquité à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, Paris, 1912. However, the deeper background of theory was French, not Roman. Unhappily the brevity with which this whole matter must be treated here, where it is merely prefatory to an account of nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture, makes it impossible to discuss such French theorists of the early eighteenth century as J.-F. Félibien (1656-1733), A.-L. Cordemoy, and A.-F. Frézier (1682-1773); even Laugier appears somewhat out of context, since he was active not in Rome but in France. Hautecœur in Histoire de l’architecture classique, vols III and IV, and Kaufmann in Architecture in the Age of Reason—particularly in Chapter XI—elaborate this background of theory in France centring round the Cours d’architecture ..., Paris, 1770-7, of J.-F. Blondel (1705-74).