Rediscovering the Aesthetics of Architecture: From Geoffrey Scott to Mark Foster Gage
Rediscovering the Aesthetics of Architecture: From Geoffrey Scott to Mark Foster Gage

Summary/Abstract: Whilst the history of modern aesthetics is generally accepted to have begun in the eighteenthcentury, its intellectual roots can be traced back to classical Athens. This does, then, make the question of aesthetics an “old matter.” Not quite so ancient is the study of architectural history, whose emergence as a “discipline” can be located one hundred-years or so ago. In the opening scene of this brief history, one protagonist who played an important, but littleunderstood role was the British writer and sometimes “architect” Geoffrey Scott (1884-1929). In The Architecture of Humanism, first published in 1914, Scott argued against the “architectural fallacies” that he identified as characterizing his peers’ criticism of Renaissance and Baroque architecture. At the time that Scott was writing, architectural history was still a sub-category of the burgeoning discipline of art history. Thus, the ideas that Scott articulated in his book were timely, but the outbreak of the First World War curbed the reach that his writings might have otherwise had. A significantly revised edition made an impact in the early interwar years, but Scott’s untimely death in 1929 meant that his contribution to architectural thought appeared to have ceased with that work. Interest in Scott’s writings continued to ebb and flow across the second-half of the twentieth century, resurfacing in the criticism of Reyner Banham, Bruno Zevi, and David Watkin. However, by the close of the century, Scott had again been relegated to the footnotes of the architectural canon.

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