IngentaConnect Celebrating the centenaries of Sir John Summerson and Henry-Russe...

Abstract:

Just as the ‘great makers' of twentieth century architecture were said to be four in number, so it has been said that the historian ‘makers' were also four: Reyner Banham, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, and Sir John Summerson.1 The greatness of Hitchcock (1903–1987) and Summerson (1904–1992) was the premise for a June 2004 symposium entitled Sir John Summerson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock: A Centenary Conference on Aspects of Architectural Historiography in the Twentieth Century . According to the symposium organisers, they were ‘two of the greatest architectural historians writing in English in the century in which the discipline itself emerged and became established'. The symposium's distinguished double sponsorship by The Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art and the Society of Architectural Historians (USA), and its inclusion in a series of planned collaborations between the American organisation and its sister foreign institutions, made the case ipso facto that their stature as great historians remains largely intact across the hyphen that joins Anglo-American history of architecture. In the light of the abundance of revisionist challenges to those reputations, the premise was indeed a bold one.2 As we shall see, despite much new research, many new findings, and engaged (and, given the circumstances), courageously honest and collaborative discussion, on balance, the two central figures eluded comprehension. Diametrically opposing views were left standing, with neither one side nor the other carrying the analytical day. This ‘critical stalemate, to use a Summersonian term,3 can arguably be used to develop an historiography of the architect-historian that is of general methodological pertinence and of special relevance for today's architect-intellectual.

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Celebrating the centenaries of Sir John Summerson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock: finding a historiography for the architect-historian