![]() What that meant was made clear by a reference to the ‘great visual educator’ Uvedale Price, a model for the understanding of the ‘visual experience’ bound to the ‘pursuit of the visual life’ presented in ‘landscape and townscape’.ĭuring the War, the AR ran several surveys of bomb damage to buildings ‘of architectural importance’ Side by side with the obligation to provide a ‘third programme’ for architecture, the editors affirmed, was the equally strong mission to educate the public in the art of architecture, to act ‘in the cause of visual culture’. ![]() The ‘Modern movement in architecture’ was now finally accepted as ‘being made of very stern stuff indeed’, thus freeing the Review to widen its scope. Introducing the January 1947 issue of the AR, the editors – JM Richards, Nikolaus Pevsner, Osbert Lancaster and Hubert de Cronin Hastings – celebrated the opening of the ‘second half century’ of the Architectural Review’s publication with a bold statement of policy. The Editors, The Architectural Review, January 1947. (…) Underneath its more obvious aims, running through them and linking them together, is another less tangible one, which may be described by the words, visual re-education.’ ‘Let it therefore be boldly stated that the REVIEW has a “call”, a call of quite a low-class evangelical kind. Thus the AR’s revival of the principles of the Picturesque, through the lens of Townscape and the publication of Philip Johnson’s Glass House, with his historicist commentary, coupled with the shift to historical meta-analysis represented by Colin Rowe, all presaged the truly Postmodern theory of ‘Collage City’, published in 1975, the year in which Charles Jencks finally nailed down the term. This survey deliberately avoided using the term ‘Postmodern’, not because the word itself was bereft of a history of its own, but rather because, in retrospect, and viewed outside the lens of art-historical categorisation, the theoretical stances of the entire post-war period were all, already, ‘post-modern’. ![]() The first article in this series sketched a broad picture of the forms taken by architectural theory after the Second World War. The second essay in AR’s series: Troubles in Theory Introduction ![]()
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