43

The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 10
Number 1

Celebrating the centenaries of Sir

John Summerson and Henry-Russell
Hitchcock: finding a historiography
for the architect-historian
Hélène Lipstadt MIT School of Architecture and Planning,
Cambridge, MA, USA

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 Hitch-
cock, 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 dis-
cipline itself emerged and became established’. The symposium’s distinguished double spon-
sorship 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.

The tandem of ‘Russell’ and ‘Summerson’ (the
names they carried throughout the symposium)
initially appeared to occur naturally, even without
the coincidence of the centenaries that inspired
the symposium’s organisers. Frank Salmon, Assistant
Director for Academic Affairs and symposium organ-
iser for the Mellon Center, pointed out in his intro-
duction that they were both originally trained as
architects, brought to that training a classical back-
ground, and introduced interests and insights from
the artistic and cultural avant-garde circles in
which they moved easily. They were journalists and
critics, museum curators, and monumental survey
authors, maintaining strong connections to con-
temporary architecture at home and abroad. They
both contributed volumes to the Pelican Series—
Summerson, Architecture in Britain, 1530 to 1580
(1953) and Hitchcock, Architecture: Nineteenth
and Twentieth Century (1958)—and each contributed
to architectural history’s development as an aca-
demic discipline and to conservation, although with
significant differences in the way that they did so.

# 2005 The Journal of Architecture 1360–2365 DOI: 10.1080/13602360500063428

 44
Celebrating the
centenaries
Hélène Lipstadt
Authors of large syntheses, they also wrote small
books of enormous consequence, namely Hitchcock
and Johnson’s International Style (1932) and
Summerson’s Georgian London (1945), Heavenly
Mansions (1949), and The Classical Language of
Architecture (1963). Their Pelican volumes had a
lasting resonance, in so far as they ignited and, in
Summerson’s case, continue to feed revisionist
historiographical debate. Each became a presence
and even something of a celebrity on his own
country’s ‘scene’ in architecture—to use a word
that Summerson precociously used almost
immediately after it was coined4 —as well as on the
other’s.
‘Greatness’ included, the symposium themes
were four in number: their contribution to the ‘con-
struction of architects’ creative identities’; and to
that of ‘chronological periods or typologies of archi-
tecture’; and ‘their involvement in the physical con-
servation and museological presentation of historical
architecture’, especially as it related to their roles as
‘apologists for the Modern Movement’ at the high
point of its dominance. In addition, a ‘transatlantic
strand’ was to be traced through the other four.
The presentations, collected through a Call for
Papers and, presumably, by invitation to the prota-
gonists’ colleagues, divided into almost equal
groups: Summerson attracted eight papers,
Hitchcock, seven, and five papers were devoted to
them as a pair.5 Speakers known to have strong
and strongly opposing views on these topics were
joined in the same programme, adding a certain
anticipatory frisson for those who were bibliographi-
cally au courant. Candour reigned and presenters
addressed subjects normally reserved for the gossip
that, as Andrew Saint pointed out during the dis-
cussion, both protagonists viewed as a necessary
component of architectural history and practised
themselves with great skill.
All in all, the judicious pairings of topics and
persons and a commitment to especial frankness
engendered exceptionally valuable discussion, and
it was in discussion that the symposium made
many a contribution unequalled by the existing pub-
lished literature. It was the discussion too, that left
many persuaded that, ultimately, dissimilarities pre-
vailed over similarities.6 However, merely to report
on this outcome and to applaud the courage it
demanded would miss the symposium’s important
unintended consequence. One must ask if the sym-
posium’s undergirding method of the intellectual
history of history, namely one that examines individ-
ual historians and their problematics, did not con-
tribute to and even invite the ultimate ‘critical
stalemate’. Reflecting on the symposium’s inability
fully to construct the constructing historians leads
us to argue for the introduction of an alternative
history of history, one that considers architect-histor-
ians as ‘professionals of culture’ and members of an
intellectual field, a field of cultural production. Con-
sidering what was left out as a result of the method
employed helps us understand the qualities that dif-
ferentiated the symposium’s protagonists from other
‘makers’, an effort worth making, for it may help us
understand what continues to make them signifi-
cant for today, given our understanding of the
relationship of architecture and history, and of
architects’ intellectual processes.7
Summerson wrote that greatness was a term that
was too ‘vague,’ even when applied to Wren, and

should not be left undefined.8 It is incumbent on a
reviewer to define it, even if the symposium itself
took greatness as a given. If there is no need to
rehearse in these pages the greatness of Summerson,
either as the director of the Soane Museum and the
man who made it into the modern museological
and research institution it is today or as a rival to
Ruskin for the palm of best writer in English on archi-
tecture,9 there is a clear need to do so for Hitchcock.
Saint, who in 1984 classified Hitchcock, Giedion and
Pevsner ‘as three great pioneers of modern architec-
tural history, as authoritative and imposing in their
way as the triumvirate of Le Corbusier, Gropius, and
Mies’, concluded that nonetheless, ‘in Britain at
least, Hitchcock’s significance is the most opaque’.10
This, then, was not the first time greatness had
been attributed to them. The claim was surely justi-
fied by the size and quality of each one’s oeuvre, the
extent and diversity of their publics in both Britain
and North America, the chronological spread of
subjects they treated, the importance of their
contribution to the interwar architectural avant-
garde, and the resonance and influence of the
above-mentioned individual elements of their vast
bibliography. The label ‘great’ not only matched
their output; it matched the figure they cut in
architectural circles. In the case of Summerson—
elegant and reserved, but also able to be warm
and friendly—‘his writings were at one with his
person’, as Robin Middleton has observed. Summerson
had made that case himself. When asked why he, a
Bartlett-trained architect, had abandoned design,
according to Middleton, the extremely tall Summer-
son ‘replied no doubt ironically, that tall men tended
to design small-scale buildings, short men worked
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on the grand scale; he preferred to do nothing
fiddly’.11 Summerson described Hitchcock in terms
that suggest that his writings, too, were at one
with his person. He was ‘a big man, [whose]
. . . voice . . . to put it mildly, carried, . . . a grand,
rather lonely figure . . . not always easy to cope
with but really rather a great man’.12
Greatness was therefore justifiably assumed. But
it was failure that became the oft-repeated leitmotif,
although not officially so. To its great merit, the sym-
posium grappled not only with the historians’ short-
comings, but also with their own sense of where
they had fallen short. Saint introduced the notion
of Summerson’s pessimism, his ‘dark view’ and fre-
quent admissions to failure, as well as his better-
known negative view of conservation. McKellar
contributed new documentation of that sense
from Summerson’s archive, and asked us to consider
this knighted and honoured ‘member of the estab-
lishment’ as an outsider, as did Neil Jackson. As for
Hitchcock, if students are the measure of a teacher’s
lasting success, then, according to Mosette Broderick,
Hitchcock did not achieve it, for when he was finally
appointed to an institution with a PhD programme,
he attracted few doctoral students.
It should be said that many, like Searing, were
inspired by his work to take up previously unstudied
topics. He had a following among architects in
Britain, but not for long. For, as Banham recalled,
he had served as a lode star for younger modernists
in the 1950s, who saw him as an anti-Pevsner until
the publication of Hitchcock’s Pelican volume in
1958 disappointed them and extinguished its
light.13 According to Summerson, he was neither
accepted in ‘English academic circles’, nor in the
 46
Celebrating the
centenaries
Hélène Lipstadt
professional ones, if we take the failure of several
campaigns to get him a Royal Gold Medal as
evidence. One learned that Hitchcock, whom
Summerson described as ‘madly egocentric’, as well
as a ‘bit of a dandy’ and a ‘bon viveur’, was also
capable of critical self-reflection, in so far as he recog-
nised that his Pelican volume had a period feel to it,
as Helen Searing explained. He was also aware that
his convoluted sentences that have been character-
ised as ‘late Henry James translated back into
German’ were an obstacle to comprehension.14
All this is not to deny the importance of the sym-
posium’s empirical findings. Much new information
about the historians’ common interests and activities
was conveyed. Their career trajectories had criss-
crossed and had made them ‘friends’, Summerson
wrote.15 Traces of that friendship are found in
reviews in the British journals or in the dedications
and acknowledgements of each other’s books. The
periods they examined and defined and the individ-
uals who caught their attention also crisscrossed.
Both were interested in Victorian architecture at an
early date, including that of Glasgow. Gavin Stamp
showed it to be a city which figured not only in
their lives but in their works. ‘Greek’ Thompson,
the city’s preeminent Early Victorian, was both a
common interest and a strong one, and each con-
tributed in his way to the conservation of his work.
This they did at a time when Englishness was the
focus of architectural attention among the emigré
historians, notoriously for Pevsner, and less
famously, but no less prominently, as Elizabeth
McKellar noted, for Rudolph Wittkower.
Interests also dovetailed across the historical date-
line that divided their Pelican volumes, dates, as we
learned, that were imposed on them by Pevsner, the
general editor. Soane and Schinkel were shared con-
cerns; and Schinkel’s student, Ludwig Persius, was
the occasion for Hitchcock first to take notice of
the existence of Summerson, as Barry Bergdoll has
discovered. As young modernists, both looked—as
did their entire generation—to Le Corbusier, but,
unlike their contemporaries, they were among the
first Anglo-Americans to pursue an interest in Dutch
modernists, albeit in different ones, Summerson
in Dudok and Hitchcock in Oud. Neither Dutchman,
however, took preeminence over Le Corbusier for
either of them, and it was in writing about Le
Corbusier as painter in Heavenly Mansions, Powers
maintained, that Summerson was at his most
superb. Both wrote extensively about the Renais-
sance, parts of the Renaissance that were then
under-studied and might even be considered the
‘other’ of Italy’s Renaissance, Summerson on
England’s and Hitchcock on Germany’s.
Where else but at this symposium could one have
learned that Hitchcock’s confident sense of self kept
his homosexuality from ever becoming a sensitive
issue, as Broderick, Hitchcock’s long-term research
associate and now his executor, explained, or
about his political convictions as a ‘classic liberal’,
as Searing noted? It is more than likely that it was
only in this context, at once protective and provoca-
tive, that it could be said (by Margaret Richardson)
that financial need drove Summerson to fill his
agenda with honoraria-producing tasks, such as
lecturing in the United States on his ‘Soane space
stuff’ or on Victorian topics, or that he reported
back on American politics during his sojourn there.
The fact that he reserved the subject of Victorian

architecture for American audiences exemplified
how something that might well have been gossiped
about in his time can fuel historians’ debate in ours,
for Summerson’s attitude to the conservation of
Victorian architecture is a burning issue, as Michela
Rosso demonstrated. Broderick’s intervention went
far in persuading those who had not known Hitch-
cock as much or as well as they had known Summer-
son, or merely knew his work, of the aptness of the
latter’s assessment: ‘rather a great man’.
Another symposium achievement was the treat-
ment of a subject missing from its explicit agenda:
style. Although style was not mentioned in the
symposium announcement, it was evoked in many
of the paper titles—the Renaissance, Mannerism,
Palladianism, Classicism, Romanticism, Victorian
and Modernism. At first glance it appeared as if
style, having found the door locked, had managed
to come in through the window. Upon hearing the
papers, however, it became clear that style had
been invited after all, but in a more contemporary
guise. This was style, new style, problematised as
these two historians’ particular ‘constructions’, and
not as self-standing realities. In other words, this
was style history as the history of an idea, or
better, as a thematic. And there was good reason,
since, as Adams has pointed out, ‘for each of them
success was measured in their ability to define a
style’.16
Several styles, or rather, ‘constructed periods’,
and their protagonists, were discussed, but pride
of place and position in the presentations was
given to Romanticism. It had been the inseparable
companion to Modernism, but had functioned very
differently for each man. Alan Powers proposed
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that Summerson’s ‘intellectual project’ was the
demonstration of the integrality of Romanticism as
an alternative form of Modernism, much as it had
been defined by his friend, the poet Geoffrey
Grigson. He summed up his proposition as follows:
‘the modern movement is essentially a romantic
movement’, which meant that as early as the
1930s, Summerson favoured a poetical and psycho-
logical interpretation of Modernism that was differ-
ent from and opposed to the reigning rational,
analytic, and, among MARS members, mechanistic
one. That would make Summerson’s Modernism
one that was non-doctrinaire and a matter of conti-
nuity rather than rupture.
Powers again, as he has in print,17 set out the
points of agreement and disagreement between
himself and Michela Rosso.18 He maintained that it
was Romanticism, and not materialism or Marxism
that was the inspiration for the innovative
methods deployed in Georgian London. For
Powers, who agrees with Rosso that the sum of
Summerson’s writings on Modernism constitutes a
fragmentary history of Modernism, the inconsisten-
cies in his approach to Modernism, and his seeming
abandoning of it after 1957, represent a ‘considered
inconsistency’. In other words, since Summerson
saw Modernism as continuous with Romanticism,
and thus tradition, making his inconsistency a prin-
cipled one that creates a continuity across his career.
Rosso looked at the purported inconsistencies in
Summerson’s positions on conservation, especially
that of Victorian architecture, and, to the contrary,
found continuity in his constant adherence to his
principle of a ‘rational, selective, non-obstructive,
preservation policy’. She extended her published
 48
Celebrating the
centenaries
Hélène Lipstadt
characterisation of Summerson’s Modernism as the
uncommitted kind of the operative tradition, anti-
dogmatic and pluralist—and thus distanced herself
from the symposium description of him as an
‘apologist’ for Modernism.
Bergdoll spoke about Hitchcock’s relationship to
Romanticism, which he found unsurprisingly in the
eponymous book, Modern Architecture: Romanti-
cism and Reintegration (1929) and, far more surpris-
ingly, in Hitchcock and Johnson’s International
Style. For Hitchcock, Romanticism and Modernism
were stylistically separate entities, the first a necess-
ary phase leading to the second within a long
development of a vaguely Hegelian dialectic.
The Romanticism/Modernism pair was later
replaced by a new dialectical coupling of American
vernacular and individual genius, which would
undergird Hitchcock’s exhibition work of the
1930s, and which he pursued by pairing individuals
and nineteenth century cities. Bergdoll thus under-
mined the conventional view of Hitchcock’s lack of
interest in anything urban. Hitchcock applied the
new pairing to Modernism, first, in the late 1930s,
to Marcel Breuer’s proposed integration of vernacu-
lar and Modernism, and, in the postwar period, to
the antinomic pair of bureaucracy and genius.
Bergdoll’s synthetic and chronologically far-reaching
review thus flowed seamlessly into both Ann Gilker-
son’s analysis of Hitchcock’s construction of Henry
Hobson Richardson as a dialogically constructed
‘modernist Victorian’ and Philip Goad’s interpret-
ation of the genius antinomy—embodied by Frank
Lloyd Wright—and bureaucracy—as instanced by
SOM—and its equivalent in Summerson’s consecra-
tion of ‘men of genius’ as the only begetters of
‘architectural change’ in ‘The Mischievous Analogy’
(1949). Goad, however, also highlighted Summer-
son’s prescient advocacy of collaborative practice,
revealing an underlying commitment to non-heroic
urbanism and his own sublimated sympathy with a
certain kind of architectural practice.
Subsequent discussions of their construction of
periods, and the ‘creative identities’ associated
with them, also returned to the touchstone of
their Modernism. Take the Renaissance, a subject
both men treated. According to Carol van Eck, Mod-
ernism subtended Summerson’s concept of ‘artisan
mannerism’, first formulated in 1953 in his volume
for the Pelican series. For her, Summerson was a
closet style historian with a modernist diagnostic
view of architecture, based on plan, elevation, and
section. Moreover, as a formalist, he was inattentive
to the cultural and spiritual components so import-
ant to today’s historian of the Renaissance, for
these did not fit with his predisposition to diagnosis.
Christy Anderson argued that, to the contrary,
Hitchcock’s and Summerson’s Modernism enabled
them to perceive the Renaissance as the beginning
of the modern age and as a reaction to tradition.
Both also viewed the Renaissance as trained archi-
tects. Summerson looked for signs of the emergence
of the ‘professional’ architect and of the design
process. Hitchcock treated the Renaissance as a
training ground for Modernism, or more precisely,
for the modern-day architect, whose eye would be
sharpened by the little-known and bewilderingly
varied architecture that he was cataloguing in his
ground-breaking overview, that synthetic yet scho-
larly history of a kind not previously attempted
in English or in German. His aim was to make

a Renaissance that would educate, not be one to
imitate, to use Anderson’s formulation. Each
treated his unfashionable topic in an unusual
manner that would only later become the very
height of methodological fashion, Summerson dis-
cussing the Renaissance in psychological terms and
Hitchcock defining it as constituted by overlapping
style periods that were distinctively national, or
what today are called national renascences.
However, Hitchcock, on the one hand, knew a
Renaissance or even a renascence when he saw
one, for they appeared to him as bounded certain-
ties. Summerson, on the other, was troubled by his
Renaissance and unsure of his treatment of it,
knowing its nature to be contradictory. His self-
doubts thus left space open for others, which is evi-
denced by the fact that revisionist historians of very
different methodological orientations now take him
as a starting point.
The UK being home to David Watkin’s Morality in
architecture (1977) and its sequel, Morality in
architecture revisited (2001), any discussion of an
historian’s modernist sensibility obligatorily conjures
up what Anthony Geraghty called the Z word: the
Zeitgeist. Giles Worsley, who has developed a critical
view of Summerson in previous publications, argued
that his Modernism invaded and invalidated his
work on Palladianism, for he conceived of it, and
of other English developments, in essentially moder-
nist terms as a single dominant architectural manner.
Worsley, and to a lesser degree, Geraghty, found
Summerson ‘guilty’ of frequenting the Zeitgeist.
Powers, Rosso, Van Eck, Anderson, and McKellar,
however, found fault with that characterisation,
thereby aligning themselves with Watkin’s position
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The Journal
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that Summerson maintained a ‘too sophisticated
and independent a stand to ally himself to the
cause of [that] crusade’.19
The other thematic that cut across many papers
was objectivity, although no one called it the O
word. Hitchcock is strongly associated with objec-
tivity. His objectivity, for which a working definition
might be said to be, in Anderson’s words, ‘an
attention to the object, to details of architecture
that are studied for their own sake’, is often
evoked to rebut the charge of formalism that is
also often brought against him. His penchant for
objectively reporting the facts about them, and
nothing but the facts, is precisely what differen-
tiated his Pelican history from Pevsner’s and
Giedion’s ‘discredited polemical histories’, according
to Bergdoll.20 Marie Frank traced that objectivity
back to the educational climate at Harvard that
prevailed in philosophy and art history depart-
ments, beginning around 1900. It fostered a kind
of formalist approach to art appreciation or the
experience of the object, based on the close exami-
nation of objects and attention to technique, vying
with the ‘appreciationism’ based on quality that
had previously reigned there. Broderick, however,
had underscored the training in connoisseurship
Hitchcock received, a skill well served by his
phenomenal ‘photographic’ memory for objects
and for facts. Both strands of his training neces-
sitated that the ‘actual monuments’, to use the
phrase Hitchcock introduced in The International
Style, be seen, which made him a ‘snooper’,
ready to trespass in the cause of architecture, as
John Harris recalled, and earned him the reputation
in the UK as a man who had seen everything.
 50
Celebrating the
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Hélène Lipstadt
Here and there, however, we were given reason to
believe that there had been more to him than atten-
tive accounts of those ‘actual monuments’. His curi-
osity about, and consideration for, buildings outside
the canon had been previously noted by Banham.21
Nigel Whitely took up that claim and strengthened it
by tracking Banham’s changing attitude toward
Hitchcock from the soured enthusiasm mentioned
above to a later alliance with the man whom he
called ‘fellow field worker’, one forged in the face
of the rise of ‘architectural Toryism’. Helen Searing,
Hitchcock’s former student, agreed with Whitely’s
assessment of Banham’s assessment, confirming
that, like Banham, Hitchcock abhorred the classicis-
ing postmodernism of which she herself had been
an early proponent. His interest in Dutch Modernism
extended to building types, which he approached in
a manner she considered ‘ecumenical.’ He, she held,
was no apologist for Modernism, in the sense that
he was not exclusively interested in and did not
uniquely champion Modern architecture but was
able to appreciate and analyse other architectural
manifestations. Moreover, as befitting his training
in architecture at Harvard, his initial interest was in
the material and technical aspects of buildings. It
was only much later, she concluded, that he
retreated to real formalism in Netherlandish Scrolled
Gables of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth
Centuries (1978). In other words, much like the
Summerson described by Jackson, for most of his
life he wrote with an architect’s eye.
Summerson’s possession of an architect’s eye was
one proposition on which the symposium partici-
pants reached agreement. Views of his relation to
objectivity were far more varied. With regard to
conservation, Rosso was clearly in the O camp.
For Geraghty, through intentional mischievousness,
Summerson balanced both the rational and the
psychological, or to use the antinomy he developed
in his essay on Wren, between ‘the intellectual and
imaginative factors’.22 Anderson noted a similar
reason/imagination antithesis at work in his com-
parison of Alberti and Colonna, and remarked on
the parallels between the qualities admired in the
former and those deemed essentially architectural
by modernists. But for her, the psychological dimen-
sion was the most interesting, for Summerson was
concerned with the experience of buildings or the
effect of building on affect, and effect of affect, in
the form of the differing emotional frameworks of
artisan or architect, on the creator. These concerns
went hand-in-hand with the objectivity of attention
to the object in its materiality, one trait that he
shared with Hitchcock.
For McKellar, Summerson did not experience a
Pauline conversion to objectively empiricist historical
studies and away from modernist engagement after
waves of criticism engulfed his 1957 RIBA paper,
‘The Case for a Theory of Modern Architecture’, as
Rosso has suggested. To McKellar, the historical
writing continues the journalistic, and the sense of
failure to which he confessed arose from his inability
to reconcile the two. His treatment of eighteenth
century architecture illustrated both change and
continuity. She found interwar modernist pre-
cedents for it, notably in his analysis of Dudok.
Summerson later synthesised Wittkower’s interwar
modernist-informed syntactical approach to eight-
eenth century Anglo-Palladian architecture with
(Sir) Howard Colvin’s postwar research-based

documentary approach, into a ‘continuous narrative
of typological and stylistic evolution’ in the Pelican
volume. His modernist internationalist outlook,
however, caused him to depart from the Wittko-
werian approach, which supported an insular ‘all
English, all the time’ attitude to the Georgian
which in turn supported the increasingly uncritical
enthusiasm for that period, leading to the emotion-
alism of ‘heritage’. This pioneer in the social history
of the country house also abhorred its commodifica-
tion and the publishing boom that it left in its wake.
McKellar’s position was diametrically positioned
to that of Marlene Heck, who saw Summerson’s
Appendix to the Pelican, ‘English Architecture in
America’, as the begetter of a non-critical attitude
toward the American colonial house only recently
put right by a cultural studies methodology of the
type championed by Dell Upton. McKellar con-
cluded, as did Anderson, that Summerson’s doubt-
ridden approach to historiography is one reason
for his special pertinence for today, a conclusion
with which Heck and Worsley would certainly take
issue. Warning us of his intentional propensity to
contradiction and to the laying of false scents,
even in the design of the archive on which she
was relying, McKellar nonetheless believed that
one could identify the one path which he ultimately
thought was the right one, that of architecture in
society and society in architecture. Characteristically,
it was one that he felt he had not adequately
followed. In so doing, he returned to the concerns
that had motivated Georgian London and is now
rightfully viewed as a guiding light by both prac-
titioners of the new urban history (not to be con-
fused with New Urbanism) and construction history.
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Scholars have been described as individuals who
have agreed to the subjects about which they will
disagree, and the symposium speakers were no
exception. Summerson turned out to be one such
topic. Thus, his study of Palladianism was deemed
both insufficiently internationalist (Worsley) or a
useful internationalist antidote to parochial national-
ism (McKellar); he was a perpetuator of hegemonic
interpretations of the eighteenth century dwelling
(Heck) or an early practitioner of its social history
(McKellar); an outsider of sorts (Jackson, McKellar)
or an insider of sorts (Anderson); an apologist (the
symposium organisers) or not (Rosso)—and this list
is far from complete. Scattered remarks suggested
that the sharpness of the delineated positions
owed a lot to sustained controversies now on-
going in the United Kingdom, among them those
concerning Englishness, the particular nature of
the so-called ‘Albion’s Classicism’ and the cult of
stately homes and of heritage, and to apparently lin-
gering ones, such as the value of Lutyens as an infall-
ible polygraph test capable of detecting adherence
to the Zeitgeist. If so, much about what was at
stake and in play was lost on those unfamiliar with
the British version of what Summerson would have
called ‘the game’ of the ‘professional’ historian
and the competitors who play on its various
‘history wicket [s]’.23
By comparison, Hitchcock was relatively free of
entangling interpretive controversies. Perhaps
because the subject of Hitchcock was less fraught
and the man less personally familiar to the
participants than Summerson had been, our under-
standing of him did shift, while that of Summerson
remained unchanged. Hitchcock, one now recognised,
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Celebrating the
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Hélène Lipstadt
had on occasion championed the architectural
underdogs, the underestimated and unappreciated,
in a prescient and promising manner: the Early
Victorian, the Glaswegian Greek Thompson, and
the Amsterdam School. Bergdoll’s paper made it
clear that his reputation for an aversion to the
subject of the urban and his uninterest in anything
political was unwarranted. It was illuminating to
learn that the Great Depression was one of the
motors of his interest in his exhibitions about
nineteenth century cities for the MoMA (of all
places!) and that he broke with his friend and
co-author Johnson during the latter’s flirtation with
the anti-semitic far right, something only hinted at
in Franz Schulze’s biography of Johnson.24 All in
all, he controverted the canon as well as established
it and courageously took unpopular or, in the case
of the conservation controversy surrounding Mies’s
1966 Mansion House design for Lord Palumbo,
dangerously unwelcome, positions.
However, much remained about Hitchcock that
was unclear. For example, the possible contradiction
between the two strands in his Harvard training,
objectivity and connoisseurship, and the corres-
ponding conception of authorship and design as
either collective or individual, was noted in discus-
sion, but that contradiction was not fully resolved.
Nor was it reconciled with Paolo Scrivano’s argu-
ment that his youthful interests in philosophy
made him aware of a general cultural ‘crisis of
rationalism’. Rather than, as is usually believed,
‘institutionalising modern architecture’, Hitchcock’s
earliest books ‘anticipated its decline’.25 So if
our understanding of Hitchcock gained in both
nuance and detail, much about his methodological
significance remained as ‘opaque’ in 2004 as it
had been to Saint in 1984.
Summerson, however, remained as enigmatic, or,
to use the term many employed at the symposium,
‘mischievous’, in death as he had been in life.
Enough was learned, however, for many at the sym-
posium to conclude that, on balance, the men were
more unlike than like each other.
As respondent, David Van Zanten’s appointed task
was to take the opposite tack, that of demonstrating
the rightness of the pairing. He correctly pointed out
that we now knew more of their interests and
contexts, and about the parallels and connections
between them. For example, thanks to the dove-
tailed papers of Richardson and Strizler-Levine26
and of Powers and Frank, both the museological
context and the intellectual climates in which they
developed their ideas are now clearer. But he too
underscored the ‘discontinuities’ between the two
men and within each intellectual project. He con-
cluded that while they both were engaged in the
enterprise of discussing modernity and both felt
uneasy about that activity, they went about their
self-assigned task in very different ways. They did,
however, both feel the modernist’s confidence that
they could make a better world. It is this confidence
that we have lost.
Thus, despite the many gains described above, we
were back at square one in certain key respects: in
the case of Hitchcock, to his methodological com-
plexity, objective, to be sure, but also formalist (at
least sometimes). In that of Summerson, to his
elusiveness. After all, both qualities are staples of
the existing scholarship and were also noted in the
ample necrological literature. If one had consulted

them, one already knew, for example, that Summer-
son might primarily be a man of intellect or, to the
contrary, one of aesthetic taste, or that either
Wren or the very different Sir John Soane was his
alter ego.
Reading him, one also knew that he had pro-
nounced opinions about historiographical method,
but that his texts sent conflicting signals. In his
1976 Royal Gold Medal speech at the RIBA, it was
Pevsner and Colvin of the objectivist empirical
school who ‘embod[ied] much of what is best in
present day architectural historiography’.27 A scant
four years later, he was of the opinion that
in England, at any rate, it should all have hap-
pened differently. Economic and social history
rather than art history are studies in which . . . [it]
established pre-eminence . . . Why did not a
school of writers on building issue from that soil
with, among them, historians of technology and
historians of the artistic and symbolic manipu-
lation of structure? That, it is possible to feel,
would have been the right way for things to go
and a great, many mansioned school of ‘building
history’ could have arisen. However, it is no use
complaining. Things did not go that way.28
One did know that there was a point on which he
was consistent and about which all the obituary
writers agreed. He demanded the highest quality
in buildings as he did in historical analysis, and
abhorred the ideological and the uncritical in the
latter—especially in Giedion’s Space, Time and
Architecture, as Jackson reminded us.
One also knew that Summerson had put obstacles
in the way of historical study by creating an archive
that controls the work done in it, as McKellar
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discovered. (The Hitchcock archive is sealed until
2008 by the decision of his heirs, rather than by
his decision, but the obstacle is there all the
same.)29 But both had overcome the impediments
to historical study that result from inadequate docu-
mentation, as did Summerson in his study of John
Thorpe, or from architects’ willful manipulation, as
Hitchcock had to do when faced with a Frank
Lloyd Wright who backdated drawings and lied
about his birth date. That Hitchcock, at least,
would be dissatisfied with a symposium that left its
ends dangling, almost goes without saying, for, in
Summerson’s words, ‘he let nothing slip’. On the
other hand, if the ‘mischievous’ interpretation of
Summerson as a willful contrarian persists, he
would have been delighted.
Is it churlish, curmudgeonly or impossibly old
fashioned to have wanted something more than a
plurality of interpretations? Are we to accept,
then, like Summerson, that ‘it is no use complaining.
Things did not go that way.’? Are we to take the way
out offered by Nicholas Adams, who concluded that
the comparative history of historians is well-nigh
impossible? Faced with the task of reviewing a
clutch of books about Hitchcock, Summerson,
Pevsner and Banham, he maintained that even
‘set[ting] aside such possible issues as nationality,
religion and sexual orientation’, the idea of compar-
ing ‘two knights . . . a Harvard man whose first name
was hyphenated . . . [and] a grammar school boy . . .
set one spinning?’30
Adams put his finger on a problem which itself
points to a solution. Certainly, one can arrive at
some certainty about precisely those things that
he set aside, for these are the components of
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Hélène Lipstadt
intellectual and professional trajectories, or one’s
objective relationship to one’s ‘scene’, to use the
consecrated Summersonian term. The question
then remains whether establishing these social or
sociological facts can illuminate the historian’s
craft, both its method and substance, and whether
the latter can, in turn, give cultural meaning to
those objective social factors.
One can, and many believe that one must take
such an approach, for not to do so is to write the
kind of intellectual history that is merely a history
of ideas. Getting to the fundamental problems of
the history of ideas as it is practised in several
countries is ‘surely one of the most difficult things
in the world to do’, as the French historian Roger
Chartier has observed. In its worst form, that
history described ideas as what the historian
Lucien Febvre has called ‘concepts engendered by
disincarnated minds’. This is the method that
Chartier believes has ‘haunted the history of
history as a discipline’.31 Needless to say, this kind
of history of ideas was not on offer at the
symposium, for the protagonists’ ideas were
frequently analysed in terms of their training and
their involvement in contemporary movements.
Nonetheless, there was a common predisposition
to what might be called ‘biographism’, a method
that has been described as the ‘biographical illusion’
and which shares with the history of ideas a ten-
dency to overlook the ‘socio-economic evolutions
that organise intellectual constructions and artistic
productions’.32 In this approach, the relationship of
the author to the work is a matter of intention and
consciousness. Similarly, authorship is a matter of
individual invention, part of a unidirectional chain
of influences and precursors. What are actually
complex social practices are reduced to abstract
acts of intellection, and what were the effects of
interactions of individuals within groups are
reduced to simple voluntarist acts on the part of
one member of the group.
Chartier offers an alternative, a cultural history of
historians as members of a group of intellectuals.
They are ‘professionals of culture’ who exchange
and share similar practices and representations,
ones that distinguish them individually and collec-
tively from other professionals of culture. The histo-
rian works both with and against the group of
historians who are allies and rivals, both as persons
and as authors. Practice is understood in the anthro-
pological sense of what people do, say they do, and
believe they do because they are members of a
group. Representations are the processes that
produce that group’s schemata of classification, i.e.
those divisions and groupings through which the
social world is apprehended. For Chartier, these
schemata are ‘true social institutions incorporating
in the form of mental categories and collective
representations, the divisions set up in social org-
anisation itself’, that is, in the social structure.
Analysing an historian’s concepts and methods as
representations, rather than as ideas, presumes that,
whatever their explicit topic, they are also represen-
tations of the social sphere, and thus unconsciously
express their position and interests, which them-
selves are the result of the historian’s interaction
with others in that universe. Accordingly, the
group’s schemata originate in the social positions
of its members and the differences and alliances
they engender, positions determined not only by

wealth and education, but by culture (including his-
torical knowledge) and the sense of distinction that
they confer.33
This method, although grounded in sociology, is
not entirely foreign to architectural historio-
graphy. Arguably, it bears some resemblance to
Summerson’s use of the notion of the ‘scene’ to
relate individuals and ideas to each other in a
dynamic but temporally and socially established
matrix, one which was characterised by a particular
intellectual or imaginative approach, or ‘practice’, a
word that Summerson himself used.34 It also has a
remarkable affinity with his awareness that taste,
‘in the exclusive, snobbish sense of the recognition
of certain fixed values by certain people, . . . plays
as great a part as money’ in what people do—in
his case, the building of Georgian London.35 It
is no accident that Chartier’s cultural history of
historians’ practices and representations resembles
Summerson’s ‘scene’ painting. They both incorpor-
ate a fundamental belief that relationships are
objective, one that is traceable back to Marx. Both,
however, depart from Marxian principles radically
by making culture an active element in those
relationships, equal to social factors such as wealth
and class, which Marxists would dismiss as super-
structure, especially in Summerson’s day.
Chartier’s proposal that we move from intellectual
history to a cultural history of intellectuals under-
stood as professionals of culture is especially suited
to the final task that the symposium set itself, the
tracing of a ‘transatlantic strand’. It has been
argued by the French historian Christophe Charle
that transnational comparative history is best
suited to the history of intellectuals, for they form
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the group that is the most likely to define itself in
extra-national terms, through affinities and, natu-
rally, rivalries and conflicts. Comparison, he writes,
constitutes the ‘access road to modes of perception
and of definition of the groups and individuals ana-
lysed [because] of their characteristic of . . . acting
and reacting on the basis of an historical horizon
that is . . . multi-national’. Finally, comparison brings
into focus aspects of the national experience that
might be taken for granted.36
Although such an analysis cannot be undertaken
here, we may point out that the symposium pro-
vided a model of how it could be done, when
Whitely triangulated the Banham/Hitchcock
relationship through Pevsner. His introduction of a
third term suggested the advantages of more
complex multi-part comparisons, and, unintention-
ally, showed the limitation of the simple pairing.
One was left wondering if the latters’s uncomfor-
table closeness to an art history lecture’s ‘compare
and contrast’ structure did not engender a similar
kind of biographical formalism, which, in turn, pro-
duced strong contrasts that obscured similarities
that could only be understood if analysed relation-
ally. Take the status of the outsider. A relational
method would have mapped that position as a
point in a moving space, for it would have both
placed these outsiders in relation to insiders and
established the shifting boundaries between the
entire group’s ‘outsideness’ or ‘insideness’ in relation
to other groups of professionals of culture. It may be
that the architect-historian is always an outsider,
relative to both the discipline abandoned and the
discipline embraced. Move that outsider, however,
into an elite of cultural producers, recognised as
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Hélène Lipstadt
powerfully cultured by those with power but
without that identical aesthetic culture, and then
they become insiders in a way no ordinary architect
or historian can be. Had this been attempted, we
would have learned more about the ‘game’ of
history, as a game, that is, as a competitive team
sport.
Summerson’s metaphor of the game suggests a
way in which to draw a practical lesson for architects
who are not historians. Pevsner and the emigrés,
Summerson said, had brought a ‘superb profession-
alism’ to history writing in the UK, and, as a result,
there were ‘two games now, not one’—the one pre-
viously played by architects, who ‘sketched what
they wrote about and wrote about what they
sketched’, and that of the professional historian.37
But it might be said that Summerson’s neat opposi-
tion is far too simple an account of the British scene.
There was a third game, one that contained
elements of each but in a different arrangement,
and it was this one that Hitchcock and Summerson
played.
They were architect-historians who played ‘on the
history wicket’, despite their lack of a doctorate, the
apparently essential credential to do so, and not-
withstanding their past service to the other team,
the team of practising architects. They had sketched,
and continued to examine buildings with an eye that
comes from incorporating the capacity to sketch and
to design. I have argued elsewhere that architects
possess an embodied knowledge of drawing, particu-
lar to the designer, as an essential part of their dispo-
sition.38 But, as journalists, they had written about
what others had sketched and built, which intro-
duced an entirely different kind of professionalism.
It was, however, not the combination of tasks,
which in that age of polymaths was hardly unique,
but the way that they were accomplished that set
them apart and makes them relevant for today.
Carlo Olmo has proposed that Hitchcock and
Summerson deployed critica operativa, that form
of teleological history writing practised by architect-
historians engaged with current production.
Manfredo Tafuri had put it decisively out of favour
but Olmo believes it worth reviving, if done in the
manner of Hitchcock and Summerson. They commu-
nicated with the larger society, deploying a broad and
varied set of instruments of communication in their
effort to provide a renarration of the history that
others had ‘reduced to a few easily recognisable
icons’, introducing a more complete yet more
nuanced definition of modernity.39 However much
Hitchcock’s and Summerson’s careers and interests
may appear to have conformed to the avant-gardist
mode of producing cultural products for the benefit
of other producers of cultural products (avant-
gardist, of course), their practice was the very opposite
of these advocates of the autonomy of architecture.
Hitchcock and Summerson succeeded in ‘detach-
ing . . . the[ir] “operativity” . . . from modernism’. As
a result, their historiography has the quality of a
‘moral action’; for while they ‘accepted’ their task
as the writing of ‘culture for mass-market
society’—and, as we know, succeeded in reaching
wide audiences, through popular travelling exhibi-
tions in the case of Hitchcock, and through the wire-
less, television, and general journalism, in the case of
Summerson—they conceived of it as an ‘intellectual
process’. That is, they furnished ‘patient, pedantic,
and often pedestrian interpretations that deliberately

set out to be educative’, so that the intellectual
process would be evident and pertinent to a ‘consu-
merist and inattentive society’. Olmo proposes that
their ‘operativity’ be taken as a starting point for a
re-examination of the architects’ and the historians’
‘tools of [the] . . . trade’, since in today’s architectural
culture, dominated as it is by the market and ‘strat-
egies of persuasion’, it is a romantic self-delusion to
believe in the independence of any architectural or
historiographical methodology, including Tafuri’s
philology—‘necessary though it is’.40
Tracing the ‘transatlantic strand’ meant engaging
in comparisons, and comparisons enabled one to
bring the subject of historiography into clearer
focus. Moreover, thanks to the symposium’s collegial
exercise in candour and research, Olmo’s notion of
‘operativity’ as ‘moral action’ now explains more
than their history writing. It helps us to make sense
of the Summerson who flirted with Marxism and
then became the quintessential ‘member of the
establishment’, omnipresent on state commissions
and public committees, and of the Hitchcock who,
while ‘madly egocentric’ and a ‘dandy and bon
viveur’ dared in 1966 to defy Lord Palumbo, much
as he had broken with Johnson in the 1930s
over the latter’s flirtation with the anti-semitic
American right.
As befits the sponsoring institutions’ own policies,
the success of their transatlantic endeavour allowed
us to see how their already wide doors could be
further opened to a comparative, transnational
history of architect-historians as transdisciplinary
‘professionals of culture’. Indeed, following Charle,
and thinking of other examples of international
exchange such as the Franco-Italian ones studied
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by Jean-Louis Cohen,41 it might be said that such a
transnational, transdisciplinary history is the one
that will allow us finally to understand the archi-
tect-historian as a ‘professional of culture’ because
it clearly reveals that architecture, too, is part of
culture in the anthropological sense as well as a
‘profession’ and, therefore, hardly ever auton-
omous. And that is exactly the way that Summerson,
always, and Hitchcock, sometimes, understood
architecture to be, whether during its various
‘renascences’, during ‘Georgian London’s’ eight-
eenth century, or through the ‘nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries’.
Notes and references
1. Cf.: Four Great Makers of Modern Architecture:
Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies Van der Rohe, Wright
(New York, Trustees of Columbia University, 1963),
the probable reference for Nicholas Adams’s descrip-
tion of them as ‘makers’; ‘Michela Rosso, La Stora
Utile..; Paolo Scrivano, Storia di Un’idea Moderna..;
Nigel Whitely, Reyner Banham.,’ Journal of the
Society of Architectural Historians 61, no. 3 (Septem-
ber 2002), p. 412. Cf. Maristella Casciato, ‘At a Dis-
tance: Thinking About History/writing About
Architecture’, in Back from Utopia: The Challenge of
the Modern Movement, ed. Hubert-Jan Henket and
Hilde Heynen (Rotterdam, 010 Publishers, 2002),
pp. 306 –11.
2. Two recent revisionist dialogues with Summerson’s
Georgian London are Peter Guillery, The Small House
in Eighteenth-Century London (New Haven, Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2004) and Elizabeth McKellar, The Birth
of Modern London: The Development and Design
of the City, 1660 –1720 (Manchester, Manchester
University Press, 1999). A critique of Summerson’s
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Celebrating the
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Hélène Lipstadt
Architecture in Britain, 1530 to 1580 is found in Dana
Arnold, Reading Architectural History (London, Routle-
dge, 2002), pp. 103–07.
3. Heavenly Mansions and Other Essays on Architecture
(New York, Norton, 1963), p. 75.
4. As early as 1937, Summerson used the term ‘scene’ in
the sense that was first introduced in 1931, meaning
‘the realm or sphere (of an activity or interest indicated
by a preceding attrib. n.)’, Oxford English Dictionary,
2nd edition s.v. ‘Scene’. Cf. ‘The Mind of Wren’ of
1937, reprinted in Heavenly Mansions, p. 70.
5. About Summerson: Summerson as Curator of Sir John
Soane’s Museum, Margaret Richardson; John Summer-
son and the Heritage of the Victorian Age, Michela
Rosso; A Marriage of Classicism and Modernism:
‘Artisan Mannerism’ Revisited, Caroline Van Eck; Sir
John Summerson and the Problem of Palladianism,
Giles Worsley; Minding the Gap: Rewriting Sir John
Summerson’s American Architectural History, Marlene
Heck; Summerson and Wren, Anthony Geraghty;
John Summerson and the View from the Outside,
Neil Jackson; and Architecture and History: Unresolved
Conflict or Creative Tension? Summerson and Eight-
eenth Century Studies, Eliabeth McKellar. About Hitch-
cock: Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Mosette Broderick;
Curating History, Exhibiting Ideas: Henry-Russell Hitch-
cock and Architecture Exhibition Practice at the
MoMA, Nina Stritzler-Levin; Romantic Modernity in
the 1930s—Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s Architecture:
Twentieth and Nineteenth Centuries?, Barry Bergdoll;
Formalism and Objectivity in American Aesthetic
Thought c.1900, Marie Frank; Henry-Russell Hitchcock
and Dutch Architecture, Helen Searing; Constructing
the Modern Victorian: Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s The
Architecture of H.H. Richardson and his Times, Ann
Gilkerson; High Hopes and Universal Disappointment:
Reyner Banham and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Nigel
Whiteley. About both: Personal Recollections of
Working with Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Sir John
Summerson, John Harris; Summerson, Hitchcock and
Glasgow: The Emergence of two Architectural Histor-
ians, Gavin Stamp; Summerson, Hitchcock and
Romanticism, Alan Powers; Not Quite the Renaissance,
Christy Anderson; Mischievous Analogy, Bureaucracy
and Genius: John Summerson, Henry-Russell Hitchcock
and Post-War Architectural Historiography, Philip
Goad.
6. They were ‘remarkably different in their skills and
approaches . . . In the end, the greatest and most con-
sequential differences . . . where [sic] methodological’,
Dietrich Neumann, ‘Hitchcock/Summerson Sym-
posium’, Newsletter of the Society of Architectural
Historians 48, no. 5 (October 2004), p. 6.
7. See Mark Jarzombek, ‘The Disciplinary Dislocations of
(Architectural) History’, Journal of the Society of Archi-
tectural Historians 58, no. 3 (September 1999), p. 489.
8. Heavenly Mansions, op. cit., p. 51.
9. Andrew Saint, ‘Obituaries: Sir John Summerson’,
Victorian Society Annual (1992), p. 7.
10. ‘In the Nature of the Magisterial. Review of In Search of
Modern Architecture: A Tribute to Henry-Russell Hitch-
cock’, A.A. Files, no. 5, p. 107.
11. Robin Middleton, ‘Sir John Summerson (1904–1992)’,
Burlington Magazine 135, no. 1081 (April 1993),
p. 277.
12. ‘Henry-Russell Hitchcock’, Architectural Review 181
(May 1987), p. 4. All subsequent quotations by
Summerson about Hitchcock are from this text.
13. Reyner Banham, ‘Revenge of the Picturesque: English
Architectural Polemics, 1945–1965’, in Concerning
Architecture: Essays on Architectural Writers and
Writing Presented to Nikolaus Pevsner, ed. John
Summerson (London, Allen Lane The Penguin Press,
1967), p. 269, n. 2.
14. Adams, ‘Rosso, Scrivano, Whitely’, op. cit., p. 412. First
said about Sydney Freedberg by Henri Zerner.

15. Scattered remarks at the conference suggest this
chronology of known contacts. The first indirect
contact was in 1928, when Hitchcock reviewed the
Fleetwood-Heskeths’ article, ‘Ludwig Persius of
Potsdam’, to which Summerson had contributed.
Summerson observed the man he was certain to be
Hitchcock in 1935 in the Café Royal (‘nobody, I
thought could talk that sort of language except
Russell Hitchcock’) and met him several days thereafter.
They frequented the same circles of emigrés and MARS
group architects. Their friendship was renewed with
Hitchcock’s return to the United Kingdom at the war’s
end for his research on early Victorian architecture,
the book of 1954 that he dedicated to Summerson
and Dorothy Stroud. Hitchcock also wrote the intro-
duction to Stroud’s book on Sir John Soane in 1961.
Summerson wrote several admiring reviews of
Hitchcock’s books; acknowledged Hitchcock’s help
in the preparation of the appendix to the Pelican
volume entitled ‘English Architecture in America’;
and wrote an obituary of him in which their friend-
ship was recalled, and which is cited throughout this
article.
16. Adams, ‘Rosso, Scrivano, Whitely’, op. cit., p. 416.
17. Alan Powers, ‘John Summerson and Modernism’,
in Twentieth-Century Architecture and Its Histories, ed.
Louise Campbell (London, Society of Architectural
Historians of Great Britain, 2001), pp. 153–75.
18. A summary of her position and discussion of Summer-
son’s fragmentary history of architecture is found in
Michela Rosso, ‘From Pioneer-Hunting to a Revisionism
Ahead of Its Time: John N. Summerson and “Modern”
Architecture [English Summary of “John Summerson
e l’Architettura del Movimento Moderno, 1929–
1942.”]’, Controspazio 38, no. 6 (November/December
1997), n.p., [54–58]. Cf. her ‘John N. Summerson and
Tales of Modern Architecture’, The Journal of Archi-
tecture 5, no. 2 (Spring 2000), pp. 65–89.
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19. David Watkin, Morality and Architecture Revisited
(Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 13.
20. Barry Bergdoll, European Architecture 1750– 1890
(Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 2.
21. Reyner Banham, ‘Actual Monuments’, Art in America
76 (October 1988), p. 174, who noted that unlike
Pevsner, Hitchcock ‘had good peripheral or exta-
canonical vision. He noticed things.’ (Italics in the
original.)
22. Summerson, Heavenly Mansions, op. cit., p. 81.
23. John Summerson, ‘Royal Gold Medal Award: Sir John
Summerson’s Tribute to Nikolaus Pevsner’, The Archi-
tects’ Journal, (28 June 1967), p. 1524.
24. Franz Schulze, Philip Johnson: Life and Work
(New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), p. 118.
25. Paolo Scrivano, ‘Hitchcock’s Humanism: Some Notes
on Two Seminal Books’ [Modern Architecture: Roman-
ticism and Reintegration; The International Style], DBR,
no. 41/42 (Winter/Spring 2000), p. 83.
26. Which this reviewer was unable to hear, and is there-
fore not noted in this paper.
27. John Summerson, ‘Sir John Summerson Receives the
Royal Gold Medal’, The Architectural Review 168
(December 1976), p. 495.
28. John Summerson, ‘Boom Period for Historians’, The
Architectural Review 168, no. 1001 (August 1980),
p. 70. (Italics in the original.)
29. Personal communication to the author from Helen
Searing, 29 October 2004.
30. Adams, ‘Rosso, Scrivano, Whitely’, op. cit., p. 412.
31. Roger Chartier, Cultural History Between Practices and
Representations, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Ithaca,
Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 19, 3.
32. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘L’illusion biographique’, Actes de
la recherche en science sociale 62/63 (1986),
pp. 69 –72; Chartier, Cultural History, op. cit., p. 23,
whose methodology is informed by Bourdieu’s soci-
ology of the field of cultural production.
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Celebrating the
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Hélène Lipstadt
33. Chartier, ibid., p. 6.
34. Summerson, Heavenly Mansions, op. cit., p. 80.
35. John Summerson, Georgian London (London, Pleiades,
1948), p. 10.
36. Christophe Charle, Les intellectuels en Europe au XIXe
siècle: essai d’histoire comparée (Paris, Editions du
Seuil, 1996), pp. 28 –30, quotation p. 29.
37. Summerson, ‘Royal Gold Medal Award’, op. cit., p. 1523.
38. Hélène Lipstadt, ‘Publications, Exhibitions, Compe-
titions’, in Architecture and Its Image: Four Centuries
of Architectural Representation, eds Eve Blau and
Edward Kaufman (Montréal, Centre Canadien d’Archi-
tecture/Canadian Center for Architecture, 1989),
p. 110.
39. Olmo is here distinguishing them from Giedion and
Pevsner, as had Bergdoll, cited above in note 20.
40. ‘International Architecture, Historical Research and
Working Critique’, Zodiac, no. 18 (September–
February 1997 –98), p. 89, translation modified.
41. ‘La coupure entre architectes et intellectuels, ou
l’enseignements de l’italophilie’, In extenso, no. 1
(1984), pp. 8 –268.
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