Architecture in the Public Eye: Buildings, Words, and Images in Britain, 1800-1950

Abstract

‘Architecture in the Public Eye’ examines the roles that words and images have played in the representation of cities and their buildings in a number of British illustrated media between the early 1800s and the mid 1900s. The research presented examines, on the one hand, how architecture was presented, explained and situated for the lay reader in newspapers and textbooks and, on the other, how the emerging genre of the architectural periodical negotiated the relationship between architect, the public and the building. It reveals how print documented and even drove the often intense interaction between the built and the public, in the face of the huge transformations occurring in Europe during the period. Evolving from an interest in the interlinking histories of perception and representation, this body of work focuses on three genres which defined printing and reading in the period: the magazine, the illustrated newspaper, and the historical survey. It traces the relationship between general-interest publications specialising in the combination of word and image and professional press publications equally making extensive use of graphic material. Arguing that the emergence of the architectural magazine, alongside the architectural profession, are intimately linked to an intensifying interaction between word and image that catered to a rising visually literate public, I scrutinize descriptions and illustrations of buildings from Britain and abroad in both general-interest publications and more specialized journals. The work investigates in what way words and images, together, form evidence for changing modes of public perception of the modern city and its buildings by examining the following questions: what are the relationships between the built and its verbal as well as graphic descriptions in the illustrated press? How did the distinct duality of word and image in such publications influence public perception of cities and their buildings? And what can one draw from such investigations regarding the role architecture, and the architectural profession, played within the public sphere? The habilitation thesis opens with the emergence of the architectural magazine in the 1830s to explore the dynamics between the architectural profession and the public, with particular attention paid to the first British periodical on purely architectural matters, John Loudon’s Architectural Magazine. Contesting a short-lived democratization of architecture, I then explore two early architectural history textbooks which targeted at a lay audience, by Captain Edward Boid (1829) and Thomas Talbot Bury (1849). Focus then shifts to the more commercial exploits of perhaps the most successful new print genre of the epoch, the illustrated newspaper, and the early Illustrated London News (1842-1989) in particular. The project closes with two pieces reflecting on the use of words and images in twentieth-century architectural publications, examining Nikolaus Pevsner’s contributions to the Architectural Review in the 1940s, and then contrasting these with Beatriz Colomina’s use of images in her book Privacy and Publicity (1994).