From the ground up: the pioneering life of architecture historian Pevsner
AT 866 pages, this is not a book to be read at one sitting, yet it is difficult to put down. Its subject, Nikolaus Pevsner, is a complex and fascinating character; the biographer, Susie Harries, has a fine style, her writing crisp and well-paced and as fresh as if her task had not taken 20 years, and as if art and architectural scholarship was everyone’s cup of tea.
It’s not easy to find the lure within these many pages with which to attract an uninformed reader. Maybe the lure is that Pevsner was a kind of architect, a builder of cultural consciousness and a pioneer in the development of art history as a profoundly important area of public enrichment. He was, and is, an eye-opener in the sense of opening eyes to what lies around us. An irony not lost on his contemporary critics or on himself is that his most resonant work was done in conditions inflicted by his native land on his adopted country. As an exiled German, his vast exploratory field stretched over the ruins of Great Britain after the Second World War, although he had taken his first steps in British architectural study before that cataclysm.
