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Morality and Architecture Revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 May 2003

Frank Arneil Walker
Affiliation:
Frank Arneil Walker is Professor Emeritus in the University of Strathclyde. With John Gifford, he is co-author of the Pevsner Architectural Guide to Stirling and Central Scotland, recently published by Yale University Press

Extract

Twenty-five years after its publication in 1977, David Watkin's ‘time-bomb’ demolition of Modernist architectural theory has appeared under the cliché-augmented title Morality and Architecture Revisited. Whether the book merits this jubilee re-issue is open to some debate. Of the reasons given on the flyleaf, the suggestion that ‘many of the old fallacies still persist’ seems at once an unnecessary admission of the author's failure or, at any rate, partial success in convincing us of his thesis, and an equally unnecessary concern for the recidivist views of a handful of unreconstructed Functionalists. Can there really be many who are not, after a quarter of a fast-moving century, persuaded that Pevsner was wrong and Popper right? When it comes to architectural theory, historicism in the strict philosophical sense is surely largely discredited.

Type
Arq review
Copyright
© 2002 Cambridge University Press

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