In 1933 the 31 year-old Nikolaus Pevsner, an art and architectural historian lecturing at University of Gottingen in Germany, was forced from his post and emigrated to the UK, settling in Hampstead where he would live the rest of his life. Like other notable migrants fleeing racist persecution and specifically Nazi race laws (e.g. Einstein, Heidegger, Freud and several notable Modernist architects that I’ll get to), Pevsner brought his interests and experience to his new home country.

Pevsner wrote a doctoral thesis on the Baroque Architecture of Leipzig (his home city) but was introduced to Modern architecture at the Paris Exhibition of 1925 and specifically the Pavilion of the L'Esprit Nouveau by Le Corbusier. He continued to write and lecture at Gottingen on art and architectural history for the next 8 years, but it was in England that his lasting reputation and influence would be felt.

Happening at the same time in Britain, the monthly publication the Architectural Review was undergoing an ideological (and generational) pivot. With an editorial stance far more rooted in the arts and crafts or neo-classical movements and styles (for the AR at this time portrayed architecture as art/decoration), the AR was lagging behind emerging ideas and also a commercial need to produce editorial content which was consistent with their advertisers, particularly manufacturers of modern building materials. In 1927 the 25 year-old Hubert de Cronin Hastings and 29 year-old Christian Barman took over editorship, enabling the beginning of a re-alignment between the AR, the interests of its advertisers and also of contemporary architects.

Barman and Hastings seem to have been quite intentional about this shift, with many well-established contributors pushed out and many new and younger writers and architects not just brought-in but also encouraged towards writing on Modernist architecture, technology and ideas.

Moving from the national and “established” architectural movements towards the Modern also meant a need to take an international viewpoint. Put more directly, the early examples of what would go on to be considered Modern architecture were not being built in the UK (nor designed by British architects – Mackintosh aside as one being sort of slotted semi-convincingly into the Modernist lineage).

In 1934, the year of Pevsner’s arrival to England, the Architectural Press contributor and architect F.R.S Yorke had concluded a tour of Europe and published “The Modern House”, in which 39 of the 57 houses were European, with America and the UK receiving far lesser attention. P Morton Shand was similarly arguing that until 1830 all architecture was necessarily nationally specific, but the 19th century’s technological and transportational advances had rendered such regionalism obsolete. This international outlook or even reverence was a prevailing mood among the Modern architecture and design promoters of the time. Institutions like the Design and Industries Association (DIA – formed 1915), Council for Art and Industry (CAI – formed 1933) and Modern Architectural Research Group (MARS – formed 1933) as well as the influential individuals within them, like Frank Pick, were all looking to Europe for direction.

Interesting time then, for a generation of architects and designers to seek refuge and patronage in the UK (as well as America). The employment of figures like Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Erich Mendelsohn each into partnership with practicing British architects shows the eagerness with which their closer experience with Modern design was embraced.

Into this context fell Nikolaus Pevsner, with experience writing on architectural history, having already lectured on the history of English art and with a personal interest in Modern architecture. Writing for the Architectural Review already in 1936, he would go on to publish “Pioneers of the Modern Movement” the same year and to write “An outline of European Architecture” between 1940 – 1942. If those weren’t challenging enough subjects, between 1945 and 1974 Pevsner settled into writing the 46 volumes that would comprise the “Buildings of England” series, part of the “Pevsner Architectural Guides” alongside series’ on Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

Here is a guy who likes to categorise and describe stuff and wow, did he carry through - I estimate I’ve read something like 1 or 2% of his published works. Wikipedia tells me he has also presented 78 talks for the BBC, including “The Englishness of English Art”.

Pevsner’s forced migration undoubtedly changed the course of his career. He found himself needing to build a new network, re-establish and even re-brand himself. To attract employment he had to respond to the available opportunities and interests in England – though he would go on to lecture at Birkbeck, Oxford and Cambridge, he first had to establish himself in a way which appealed to the academic and industrial spheres in Britain.

Pevsner’s book “Pioneers of the Modern Movement: from William Morris to Walter Gropius” illustrates this negotiation between personal promotion, self-consciousness about the location of his target audience and finally academic integrity. “Pioneers” establishes or at least proposes an ideological lineage of designs and designers, weaving between industrial design and architecture and culminating in the Modernist and in particular the German. In starting with the arts and crafts movement and specifically Englishmen Ruskin and Morris, looping through Art Nouveau (including Charles Rennie Mackintosh) before demonstrating the technological and ideological progression towards Gropius, Behrens and the Deutsche Werkbund, Pevsner’s narrative was, intentionally or not, surely well suited to the English readership who felt contemporary British architecture and design lagged behind German and European developments (while including celebrated British ideological figures).

Indeed, Pevsner’s foreword acknowledges awareness of “P Morton Shand’s excellent articles in The Architectural Review, of 1933, 1934, 1935”, though (perhaps improbably) claims he only became aware of his colleague’s articles “which coincide in so many ways”. In any case this shows he would have been confident in a positive reception for his historical narrative, which was complete enough to be seen thereafter as a foundational if flawed text on design history (e.g. see thereafter Pevsner’s “The sources of Modern Architecture on Design (1968), John Heskett’s “Industrial Design” (1980) and Peter Dormer’s “The Meanings of Modern Design” (1990) which follow the same basic idea).

So, we’ve got a British industrial design and architectural community looking West for Modern inspiration coinciding with the forced migration of many of the young movement’s early contributors – alongside an ambitious architectural historian. Who is influencing who?

Writing about FRS Yorke’s career (who separately partnered with Walter Gropius and Eugene Rosenberg) Jeremy Melvin emphasises the openness of the British establishment to Modern architecture even from the 1930s, but points out the importance of a knowing the right people, process and especially from the mid-30s onwards, planning rules. British architects could see the benefits of Modern techniques but lacked first-hand experience and thus benefitted from partnerships with notable émigrés – while in turn assisting their assimilation.

That Pevsner so directly recorded that specific moment in his writing (while “cross-referencing” to some extent with P Morton Shand) speaks of a similar process of cautiously and self-consciously announcing himself and the contribution he intended to make. I suppose the question then is just how much that influenced the objectivity of his historical writing, both in emphasising the contribution of British designers and the extent to which his fellow émigrés had reached final forms in their designs. But I think that’s a well-known topic.

What prompted this article was my frustration with Timothy Mowl’s 2000 “stylistic cold wars: Betjeman versus Pevsner” which sought to create an “English vs German” narrative for both architectural preference and migration. Mowl writes of Pevsner:

“terrible damage would be done, visually and socially, to the towns and cities of his adopted country largely in the name of the Modern Movement which he revered and uncritically eulogized… should a man with no English social background have been encouraged so quickly to a position where he could exert an unwise and, in a very real sense, an “alien” influence?”

I hope I’ve broken down the basis of Mowl’s two central arguments: that Pevsner had some sort of single-handed influence over British architecture, and that Pevsner brought with him and imposed Modernist ideas onto an unwilling British architectural community.

The adoption of Modern ideas around planning, new materials and technologies and building layout have much more to do with changing technological, economic and social factors and needs than they do with the success of a single writer or even of pure ideology. At the same time, that the Modern Movement developed initially in Europe before being keenly and rapidly received in the UK and USA as a result of forced migration does show that migration plays an important role in the evolution of design and industry – a conclusion that can be taken as much from Nikolaus Pevsner’s life as from his work.

I’ve been reading: