Susie Harries

'It is not unreasonable to suggest that Pevsner’s creed was less a developed and coherent philosophy than an assemblage of faiths. Pevsner himself had admitted in his RIBA Gold Medal speech, “I know I am deplorably unphilosophical”. He had, after all, once described work as an escape from philosophy....

 

 

But if Pevsner was writing from emotion as much as cold reason, so too was David Watkin. Morality and Architecture is, in its tactics and techniques, a polemic. As a tract, it works through generalisation, selectivity, misrepresentation, and guilt by association, and its argument is politicised beyond anything that Pevsner ever contemplated.'