| buy book | ARCHITECTURE AND LANGUAGE: CONSTRUCTING IDENTITY IN EUROPEAN ARCHITECTURE c.1000-c.1650 Edited by Georgia Clarke and Paul Crossley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2000 This compelling discussion of style and nationality, and of the relation between vernacular and ‘official’ languages, sheds important light on the creation of modern Europe. Eleven essays by international scholars, providing a partial corrective to John Onians’ determinist study of the orders in Bearers of Meaning (1988), focus on architectural and linguistic debates over style and national identity. They show how the search for a canon of architectural rules was likened to the literary imitation of the Latin masters. On such impeccably Classical foundations, architecture-language comparisons entered the mainstream of Western architecture so that the style of individual architects was likened to literary styles and architecture compared to eloquence. Paul Draper describes the relation between architectural stylistic choices and the range of languages spoken in Post-Conquest England. Caroline Bruzelius brings similar considerations of nationality to bear on her study of French Gothic in Central and Southern Italy in the thirteenth century. Deborah Howard, investigating Gothic and Renaissance in Scotland, wisely explains how ‘the rapid transformation of society – hegemony, religion, and economy – makes the identification of any shared system of communication a complicated task’. Implicitly sceptical about the world of semiotics and linguistic philosophers such as Umberto Eco who claimed that, ‘architectural language is an authentic linguistic system obeying the same rules that govern the articulation of natural languages’, Caroline van Eck argues that, ‘By their beauty buildings do not spell out some truth that originated outside the architectural domain’, though she also sees them as ‘a variety of human communication’. DAVID WATKIN |