Art: Plumbers v. Sculptors

Architecturally speaking, Frank Lloyd Wright and John Ruskin are as uneasy a pair as a modern canvas roof supported by a Victorian marble arch. Yet Osbert Lancaster, a onetime editor of Britain’s Architectural Review, thinks that Wright’s Modern Functionalism and Ruskin’s Gothic Revival movement have a striking similarity. Last Week, in a talk over the BBC’s polysyllabic Third Program, Critic Lancaster charged that both schools rode their horses too hard:

“The Goths maintained, perfectly correctly, given … the prevailing intellectual climate of their time, that Gothic was the only style for churches. Where they went wildly wrong was to advance from this premise the untenable proposition that Gothic was the only style for railway stations.

“Similarly, the moderns were 100% correct in maintaining that crenellations and lancets were out of place on power stations.” Where the moderns stumbled was in thinking that homes and churches can have their “function” worked out with all the architectural austerity of a powerhouse or railroad station.

What should an architect try to do, anyway? Said Lancaster: “The role of the architect lies between that of the plumber and the sculptor, but seldom midway. If, like the majority of 19th Century architects, he is an esthetic snob, he will get as close to the sculptor as he can. If, like most contemporary artists, he is an inverted snob, he will suck up to the plumber . . . Their conflicting theories [are] almost exactly complementary and, in my view, equally suspect.”