Georgian London

"In the selection of these five books, I’ve been conscious of each of them giving us a way to potentially think about a style of architecture. We’ll begin with the Georgian, but we’ll see as we go along that each one has a particular lens that it offers on a known style of architecture. I’m doing this actually not to undermine, but to make more expansive, our understanding of style and the way we think about it. I do believe that the notion of style or the category of style has been the approach that architectural history and the lay public has used in order to make aesthetic determinations. When we discuss the aesthetics of architecture—this appearance of architecture that I’m talking about—in public debate, we tend see it through the lens of style. This actually constrains what we’re able to see and the way in which we’re able to think about the aesthetic dimension of architecture. These five books offer a different lens on aesthetics and architecture precisely because they might give us a slightly different perspective on the notion of style. What’s important about Georgian London and important for me as a historian is that this was a book that really opened architecture to a social and economic history when it was published in 1948. Although the book is called Georgian London , and Summerson is very clear and very specific about the formal characteristics of Georgian London—the window details, the cornice lines, the types of streets, the scale of streets—he then explains the ways in which these different aesthetic dimensions of architecture actually had their origins in social and economic determinations or calculations, either economic necessity or social desirability, reflecting things like the fire codes that resulted from the building act after the Great Fire of 1666. He points to the fact that, for example, window details are much more a result of a decision based upon building regulation and concern for the spread of fire than they are the result of an isolated, artistic aesthetic decision. Summerson lets us see the city now and the way it develops over time, yes, as an emergence of a style, but he binds that together, making it inseparable from the social and economic dimensions of architecture. That’s the real strength of the work, and its continued influence over time. This was written just after World War II and really opened up a different kind of architectural history following its publication, and its many republications and subsequent additions. It’s a very elegantly written book, with a masterful use of both metaphor and positioning to allow a reader to really see these otherwise invisible aspects of the city, its economic development. The book begins by asking the reader to take an aerial view. This is, of course, the time of World War II, when aerial views of city are just actually becoming something that public can imagine for the first time. Summerson presents this aerial view as a kind of accelerated film where you could see the city expand and grow and change as it takes shape during the Georgian period. He’s really using writing to project very strongly a visual understanding of architecture. Summerson includes illustrations, but those are more sparse given the publication constraints at the time. He’s really relying on the text, the language, to convey a visual understanding of architecture and the city, while at the same time giving you a sense of its mercantile activity—the decisions that are being made by an individual land speculator, by an architect, or by a sponsor for one or other social reasons or economic reasons."