A century of architecture.

The Architectural Review is 100 years old in 1996 and, during the year, each issue will celebrate our centenary in a different way. Here, we start by paying homage to our illustrious predecessor Henry Wilson, the first editor, and explain how much his example guides the magazine today.

Sometime in 1896, members of the British architectural profession (a small and exclusively male group(1)) received a rather tatty flier which promised a new monthly periodical would soon appear. It announced that: 'The publishers have determined to make "The Architectural Review" the leading magazine for those engaged in Arts and Crafts, and while in its illustration and letterpress, and general excellence of production, it will rival the finest Art periodicals of Europe and America, it will be published at a price that will bring the Magazine within universal reach'.(2)

The first edition emerged on November 12 with a cover drawn by the Editor, Henry Wilson (the present incumbent of his position would not dare to do the same). It is now the oldest architectural magazine in the world still published under its original title. This is not the moment to recount the history in detail (we shall be making a special issue later in the year which will tell the story), but we want to celebrate our links with Wilson, and try to explain our debt to him.

He was John Dando Sedding's chief assistant, and inherited the practice when Sedding(3) died suddenly in 1891. (In those days architectural monthlies were run almost casually in the practitioner/editor's spare time - only in Italy does this happen now). Wilson was the very model of an Arts and Crafts architect: not only the maker of fine buildings, but a fine draftsman, and a brilliant designer of metalwork, church plate, enamel and jewellery. (He was the first to use new small electric batteries and bulbs to give his pieces sparkle).(4)

In issue number one, he included articles on the artist-craft couple Nelson and Edith Dawson; a long essay on the restoration of the oldest church in London, St Bartholomew's, Smithfield by Aston Webb; the first of a series of articles on the great late-Victorian Goth, John Loughborough Pearson. And there was a piece on the competition for the dramatic and powerful buildings for the North Bridge in Edinburgh. (So it is particularly happy that, 100 years later, we are able to show the results of the competition we have sponsored for a for another key Edinburgh site at the Haymarket - pp58-79). In 1896, there was the equivalent of a leader about whether architecture is a Fine or Applied Art, which came very firmly down on the applied side: 'the Art, not of the few but of the whole; not the Art which can be shut up in a court-yard, or a rich man's gallery, or heard only in a concert-hall, or enjoyed only in a theatre'.(5)

Over the century, much has changed. We no longer argue about whether architecture is a pure or applied art (indeed the very term 'applied' has changed its meaning from 'put in use' to 'stuck on'). The debate now, particularly in places such as the RIBA and the AIA, is about whether architecture is an art at all, or just a branch of business involved with making large three-dimensional objects that will maximise profit for their developers. In the modern sense of the term, far too much architecture is now applied, stuck on as a thin veneer, or made into silly (but nonthreatening) gestures a la Koolhaas.

Yet for all the changes, today's AR has much in common with the one created by Wilson. It continues in the belief that architecture is for everyone: the English tradition of architectural criticism, which from Pugin, through Ruskin, Morris, the Arts and Crafts, and the British branch of the Modern Movement, has emphasised the proposal that architecture has a moral role - literally every line you draw will have an effect on someone's life. English criticism is different from that of France and the US, which tends to emphasise architecture as an autonomous art (the purity of which has to be sullied by the sordid process of building), and that of the German-speaking countries which draws so much from the awesomely rigorous technical and Kunstgeschichte tradition.

This is not to try to claim for architecture the determinist powers that the high Modern Movement asserted at its most arrogant. However well-meaning the intentions of its creators, architecture can only set the scene on which the play of human life is enacted. Yet undoubtedly (as the failure of the most reductively utilitarian Modern Movement schemes has demonstrated) it must be made with an understanding of the human condition, and the complexities of our psyche.

And, as Pugin explained with great clarity, if architecture is to have a moral role, it must itself have integrity. In True Principles, he announced that 'The two great rules for design are these: 1st, that there should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, construction or propriety; 2nd, that all ornament should consist of the essential construction of the building. The neglect of these two rules is the cause of all the bad architecture of the present time.'(6) It still is. For that reason we do not publish PoMo and other kinds of glued-on architecture, except in our Outrage column.

The magazine today continues Wilson's broad approach to the human-made word, with regular features on design of all kinds, urbanism, landscape, and when we can find the space, the other visual arts as well. But it has had to add other concerns. A hundred years ago, technology was changing at ever more frenetic pace. The advertisements showed new materials such as polished plate glass and asbestos wall coverings, new technologies such as electric power and aluminium manufacture, new aids to professional efficiency such as Remington typewriters and Ross architectural cameras. But nothing of all this was reflected in the editorial coverage. Today, we have to take in rapid technological change as one of the key elements in the creation of new buildings.

Partly as a result of the huge explosion of technology, the prospects of our continuing existence on the planet is threatened. Wilson and his contemporaries in the Arts and Crafts movement were aware of the physical and psychological problems of ever-increasing industrialisation (indeed, they can be regarded as some of the first Greens), but the environmental predicament had not acquired the importance it now has, and consideration of energy and materials use was not one of the conscious criteria for judging buildings as it must be today.

A third big change in the AR since Wilson's time is in our geographical coverage. His magazine was almost entirely British in its contents. Consciousness of the unity of the planet and new media, of which the periodical is the oldest, have made architecture into an international subject. Now, no single country can produce enough good ideas, designs and buildings to inspire the profession. We have therefore had to make the magazine truly international in its coverage. Though we retain our British bias in criticism, we search the globe to find buildings and ideas that make the world a better place to live in.

Finally, one further point we have in common with Wilson. The first edition lived up to the promise of the publishers and was indeed well illustrated, with (for the time) a large number of well-made photogravure and line plates. The AR has always been a highly illustrated magazine because all its editors have struggled to try to create the three-dimensional reality of buildings in reader's minds, using the hopelessly inadequate two dimensions of photography and drawing and the one dimension of linear prose. We are pleased when the pages look pretty, but manufacturing a glossy magazine is not our primary object. Like our predecessors, we are concerned first of all to make the buildings and projects we show live in your minds, for without an understanding of built reality, all critical judgement and theory is waffle. We know that we do not always succeed, but the challenge that Wilson laid down remains before us.

We are deeply grateful to him for setting so much of the programme that we have inherited. His example is one of the main reasons why we start our second century with confidence and hope.

1 The first woman, Ethel Mary Charles, was elected to the RIBA after a good deal of controversy in 1898. In 1891, the RIBA had 1344 members, a number which grew to 1649 by 1901. Barrington Kaye estimated that there were 7842 architects in Britain at the earlier date, and 10 781 by the later one. See Kaye, Barrington The Development of the Architectural Profession in Britain, Allen & Unwin, London (University College of Ghana), 1960, p 175. But though a few of the best architects such as Norman Shaw and his followers refused to join the RIBA on principle because it promoted architecture as a profession rather than an art, most of the people who claimed to be architects in trades directories would not now be recognised as such. The AR would have been aimed at the educated ones who were eligible to join the Institute. (For the story of the profession's arguments over education and institutionalisation see Davey, Peter, 'Profession or Art?', in AR CLXXXVI, July 1989, pp59-66.)

2 The price has risen (initially it was 6d, a fortieth of a pound, when a comfortable professional yearly income was [pounds]1000).

3 John Dando Sedding was a high Victorian and one of the fathers of the Arts and Crafts Movement.

4 See Davey, Peter Arts and Crafts Architecture, Phaidon, London, 1995,pp 121-122.

5 Vol I, 1896, p52.

6 Pugin, A.W.N, The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841), reprinted by Academy Editions, London, 1973, p1.