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THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW

No. 487.-JANUARY, 1926.

Art. 1.-ARCHITECTURE, NEW AND OLD.

1. Laymen and the New Architecture. By Manning Robertson. Murray, 1925.

2. The Pleasures of Architecture. By C. and A. WilliamsEllis. Jonathan Cape, 1924.

3. Modern English Architecture. By Charles Marriott. Chapman & Hall, 1924.

4. The Architecture of Humanism. By Geoffrey Scott. Constable, 1924.

5. Southern Baroque Art. By Sacheverel Sitwell. Grant Richards, 1924.

6. Architecture: a Profession or an Art. Edited by R. Norman Shaw and Sir T. Graham Jackson. Murray, 1892.

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ONE of the unhappy results of the war has been the loss of standards of value in literature and the arts. It is not merely that these standards are dismissed as out of date. The new generation seems to be unaware that they ever existed, that poetry is not prose, that sculpture has to deal with form, that painting has something more to do than pattern-making, and that architecture is an art with its own tradition which cannot be defied with impunity. Serious students know that art cannot really be understood without going far back into its history, and tracing its course downwards to our own time, and that it is only in this way that it is possible to grasp the line of its true development. The modern tendency to ignore this lesson of the past is the opposite extreme to the exaggerated worship of fifty years ago. Both are equally futile. We are not better men than Vol. 246.-No. 487.

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our fathers, however much our bold young men may say
that we are.
On the other hand, we are not very much
worse.

Mr Manning Robertson has written a modest little book with the title of Laymen and the New Architecture,' and he evidently believes that there is such a thing as 'new architecture,' and that it is an advance on what for the purpose of his thesis he conceives to be old architecture. His essays, which have appeared in the 'Builder' and other technical papers, deal with a variety of subjects ranging from some sort of theory of aesthetic to advocacy of a method of central heating. Mr Robertson writes pleasantly, and much of what he says is sensible and to the point-the point, that is, of minor current practice. His illustrations are taken almost exclusively from post-war buildings, and though it is to be presumed that these buildings are efficient, with the exception of some half a dozen or so, they are exceedingly unattractive. The point that I have sought for in vain in Mr Robertson's book is what this 'new architecture really is. Nobody ever heard of it before the war. One recollects the efforts of Art Nouveau, which were speedily dismissed with ignominy, and the boldest innovator, in England at any rate, never imagined that he was doing anything but advancing along a track that stretched far back into the past. As for the future, he was content with that short length ahead, still hidden from his fellows, which the power of his imagination enabled him dimly to foresee. Take, for example, two men to whom perhaps modern English architecture owes more than to any other architect since the middle of the last century, and whose work seems already half forgotten, Norman Shaw and Philip Webb. Both these men in their different ways broke away from the architectural conventions of their time, but neither of them imagined for an instant that he was introducing a new architecture. What they did was to use their brains on architecture as they found it instead of taking it for granted, and their aim was to develop and extend its application to modern problems without breaking the art to pieces in doing so. But our younger generation, trained exclusively in our architectural schools, are convinced that they are introducing a new era in architecture. Mr Robertson says

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