I read Owen Hatherley’s assessment of the C20 monograph series (“Buildingsromans,” #46/47) with great interest, as a fellow admirer—and sometime scholar—of postwar British architecture, particularly that “anonymous” stuff that makes up the everyday urban environment. I share his belief in both the quality of much of the municipal architecture that was produced for the welfare state in Britain and elsewhere and in the importance of its preservation and adaptation as a matter of cultural and political urgency. And I likewise share his belief that the history and theory of buildings should be made broadly accessible through the institutions of architecture and the work of architectural historians, as it was to great effect in the postwar period.
But certainly contributors to NYRA are not above the historical bloviating that Hatherley condemns. (Indeed, bloviating might even be the magazine’s house style. Criticism without a little bloviation is like a steak-frites without a glass of red wine—what’s the point?) However predictable it may have been, I was confounded by H…
