“In those halcyon days of the 1940s and 50s bliss was it for an architectural historian to be alive” - Mark Girouard, 1976
The word ‘revolution’ is not generally associated with the 1950s but it saw the true coming age of architectural history in the post-War era in this country. The foundation stones of modern scholarship in the field were laid with the first editions of Nikolaus Pevsner’s The Buildings of England from 1951 and John Summerson’s Architecture in Britain 1530–1830 in 1953 in the Pelican History of Art series, edited by Pevsner. The following year saw the publication of Howard Colvin’s Biographical Dictionary while the volumes for The History of the King’s Works were commissioned in 1951 (although not beginning to appear until 1963). As a result of this galvanising ferment of activity the SAHGB was founded in 1956, aided by colleagues from the longer-established American Society of Architectural Historians. Overwhelmingly, however, this was the decade in which the impact of German Art History - which had arrived with the Warburg Institute in 1933 - truly came to fruition in the British Isles. In 1953 Reyner Banham reviewing Architecture in Britain wrote: ‘It is as much an event in our intellectual history as the Festival of Britain … a landmark in the development of English taste’. This new approach was seen as revolutionising how the past might be understood and interpreted by society at large, not just by specialists.
The ‘wondrous Pelican’, as Ernest Gombrich called it, was intended to reach a broad public and it is to this Pevsner series that the lecture will principally be devoted. The enthusiastic reception of Rudolf Wittkower’s Architectural Principals in the Age of Humanism (1949) by architectural audiences has been well-covered. However, the much wider association between the new art/architectural history and what was seen as a shift in modern culture at the time has received far less attention. The great longevity of these series of the 1950s has seen them inevitably become criticised as they, in turn, have been overtaken by new methodologies and preoccupations in the subject. Their initial pioneering impetus has become obscured, as well as their central place in post-War public discourse. In this 70th anniversary year of the founding of the SAHGB this lecture will disinter the subject’s roots in the 1950s to uncover the intellectual excitement and energy of this crucial time in the creation of modern British architectural history.
The Annual Lecture is to be followed with a drinks reception.
Registration
£5 Students, £10 Members, £20 Non-members.
Speaker Bio
Elizabeth McKellar is Professor Emerita in Architectural History at the Open University having previously held posts at Birkbeck College, London and the Victoria and Albert Museum, where she was Head of Higher Education.
She specializes in British architecture and culture and urbanism, particularly that of London. She is the author of many books and articles including: The Birth of Modern London: the development and design of the city 1660-1720 (MUP, 1999); Articulating British Classicism: New Approaches in Eighteenth-Century Architecture (Ashgate, 2004); Neo-Georgian Architecture 1880-1970: a reappraisal (Historic England, 2016); and Landscapes of London: the City, the Country and the Suburbs 1660-1840 (YUP, 2013). She held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2011-12 to research the latter book which was the winner of the Society of Architectural Historians (US) Elisabeth Blair Macdougall Award 2017.
She has previously been a member of the Editorial Board of The London Journal, the Georgian Group Journal, The London Record Society and a member of Historic England’s London Advisory Committee. She is currently the President of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain and is writing a cultural biography of Sir John Summerson, for which she was awarded a Paul Mellon Senior Fellowship in 2018-19 and a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship for 2021-24.
Location
To take place in person at The Art Workers’ Guild. The Hall, The Art Workers Guild, 6 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AT
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