Morality and Architecture Revisited

Twenty-five years after its publication in 1977, David Watkin's ‘time-bomb’ demolition of Modernist architectural theory has appeared under the cliché-augmented titleMorality and Architecture Revisited. Whether the book merits this jubilee re-issue is open to some debate. Of the reasons given on the flyleaf, the suggestion that ‘many of the old fallacies still persist’ seems at once an unnecessary admission of the author's failure or, at any rate, partial success in convincing us of his thesis, and an equally unnecessary concern for the recidivist views of a handful of unreconstructed Functionalists. Can there really be many who are not, after a quarter of a fast-moving century, persuaded that Pevsner was wrong and Popper right? When it comes to architectural theory, historicism in the strict philosophical sense is surely largely discredited.