The Education of the Architect: Historiography, Urbanism, and the Growth of Architectural Knowledge.

This book is a Festschrift for Stanford Anderson, founder with Henry Millon of the Department of History Theory and Criticism of Architecture at MIT. In a brief essay Lawrence Anderson describes Stanford Anderson's role in the transformation of historical scholarship in architecture from, first, the predominantly descriptive mode of the Beaux Arts tradition and, next, the Modern Movement's 'de-emphasis' of historical studies. In her preface Martha Pollak proposes that this was achieved by wedding historical studies to theory and criticism in order to envision architecture 'as a world of inquiry and as a discipline anchored in the epistemological bases offered by contemporary philosophical thought, especially the philosophy of science'.

The 18 essays are grouped under six headings, American Debates, European Responses, Historiographic Constructs, Urbanisms and, finally, Teaching Architecture. As is appropriate in a book of this kind, eight of the authors are MIT graduates and eight of the others have taught there.

Inevitably the subject matter is wide and the quality of contributions is variable, but this, to some degree, validates the enterprise by conveying the impression of a broadly-based school in which the common ground is rooted in shared standards and methodology, rather than in narrow ideology. It is inevitable that each reader will be attracted more to some of the contributions than others. I particularly welcomed Gail Fenske's discussion of the debate between Lewis Mumford and Henry-Russell Hitchcock over the Significance of the Bay Region style, Sibel Bozdogan's account of Bruno Taut's pedagogical work in Turkey between 1936-1938, Mark Jarzombek's, 'Meditations on the Impossibility of a History of Modernity' and Charles Correa's wise parable on education, 'Learning from Ekalavya'.

In sum the book substantially achieves its purpose in demonstrating that the study of architecture must be bound to the wider cultural enterprise and that the essence of the discipline, of education and ultimately, therefore, of its practice, depends upon systematic and rigorous historical, theoretical and critical scholarship.