This article is taken from the July 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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The quality of books about architecture covers the full range from excellent to execrable. Recency of publication is not a reliable guide to greatness. Only two weeks ago, I picked up in a second-hand bookshop a luxurious six-part series called Cathedrals, Abbeys, and Churches of England and Wales by T.G. Bonney, published in 1892 for just £20. Professor Bonney’s work feels like the last word on the subject. So one must have a very good reason to write another book about architecture, and we all need an even better reason to read it.

Le Corbusier once said “the Styles are a lie”. Hugh Pearman, in his new book About Architecture, shares that sentiment, inasmuch as he believes we ought to evaluate buildings for what they do rather than the style in which they are built. Here he follows the venerable Nikolaus Pevsner’s A History of Building Types (1976), referenced in the endnote, and he does a very commendable job of introducing us (whether working architects or laypeople) to this approach. It is this that makes About Architecture worth reading.

Still, we begin with a quibble: I struggle to see what is “essential” about the book. Although the blurb paints it as a revolutionary treatise, About Architecture is not that, nor (as far as I can tell) does it seek to be. We do not find a cohesive argument for how we ought to think about architecture differently; the introduction sets the tone rather than establishes a manifesto.

What follows is a catalogue of 55 elegantly-described buildings, arranged by 11 “types”, almost all of which are made interesting and admirable through Pearman’s smooth exegesis — even, somehow, the Magna Park retail depot near Milton Keynes.

It is both enjoyable and useful to read not about styles or movements, but about why a given building was built and how the problems of its construction were solved by the architect in question. That is the idea behind About Architecture (a somewhat underwhelming title), and it soars.

How refreshing to find no obvious stylistic preference (or serious talk of “style” whatsoever), nor any sort of agenda or explanation for why or how a particular style emerged. The Old is presented neither reverentially nor dismissively; the New, by turns, is not presented as some sort of inevitability.

Buildings from around the world and across the centuries are displayed alongside one another without prejudice. (That said, there is a 20th century skew and a mournful lack of True Gothic, even if Pearman does suggest that the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai is one of the world’s finest Gothic Revival buildings.)

So we are left to judge for ourselves, based on the mostly brilliant photographic reproductions, which we deem the best. The Past is no longer something that Was, but becomes merely one of many possible solutions to the enduring problems of how to build the things we need and desire.

For anybody who has worked in an office building, the Centraal Beheer Insurance Offices in Apeldoorn will seem a majestic alternative to the uninspired surroundings with which we are familiar. Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele II is a vision of what the modern shopping mall might aspire to, as much a civic monument as a retail centre. Pearman’s neutrality helpfully reveals that many of our urban problems and needs are intractable and ancient. Cities need green spaces, for instance, and any weary metropolitan will yearn for the masterful Zen gardens of Kyoto.

About Architecture becomes a treasury of possibilities. Its internationalism also stimulates: by paying relatively little attention to historico-cultural differences, the buildings — and architects — are allowed to speak for themselves. We compare the town planning of 16th century Isfahan with post-reunification Berlin, or Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar with Hong Kong’s Langham Place Mall.

Pearman writes well. Occasional lapses into panegyric aside (the chapter on Lima’s Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología Campus being one of the few unconvincing case studies), his judgement is almost always sensible. He conveys the impression that he genuinely loves what he is writing about and relishes the chance to do so. When he describes the paper-thin onyx “windows” of the Beinecke Library at Yale glowing by night and bathing the interior in golden gloam by day, it is difficult not to share in his rapture. This, we are persuaded, is good architecture.

Even for the cognoscenti there will, I suspect, be surprises. Less joy comes from reading about the Parthenon or Angkor Wat, which feel like obligatory inclusions, than from reading about the Fiat Tagliero Service Station in Asmara, the Moulin Saulnier Cocoa Mill in Noisiel or the Ningbo Historic Museum in China.

About Architecture should not be read from cover to cover, though. Pick a single building, or better yet a whole “type”, and read that chapter. The section on offices might just be the best. It comprises London’s Somerset House, Hamburg’s Chilehaus, the aforementioned offices in Apeldoorn, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Headquarters in Wisconsin and the severe CCTV Headquarters in Beijing.

Pearman clearly explains the architectural thinking behind each building, and anybody suspicious of architects (regarded by the “proto-modernist” Adolf Loos as not really human beings) will have their concerns assuaged by Pearman’s pragmatism. The book succeeds in demystifying the architectural process and (re)humanising architects.

What is the book’s key lesson? That everything is capital “A” Architecture — not only extraordinary buildings, such as the expensive Villa Tugendhat designed by Mies for his wealthy industrialist patrons, but also edifices such as the Georgian stock-housing of Fitzwilliam Square in Dublin. Le Corbusier’s famous chapel in Ronchamp is interesting but of little import; Ljubljana’s modest Market Arcades feel like a workable solution to the ever-present problem of how we build in city centres.

We come away with the sense that everything ought to — and can — be designed well, even the most ordinary of buildings, even the Shenzhen Energy Ring. As for the architecture of the book itself, I rather enjoyed the lemon-yellow endpapers. Bravo.