IN WHAT STYLE SHOULD WE BUILD?

For too long the Romanesque Revival has played the part of poor stepsister to the nineteenth-century’s Gothic Revival. While the Gothic Revival claims a copious scholarly and popular literature, its Romanesque counterpart has consistently been slighted. There is good reason for this. The Gothic Revival was strongly literary in character and boasted such gifted writers as John Ruskin and William Morris, who ensured that its ideas remained in circulation long after its quaint buildings were mocked and mutilated. The Romanesque Revival has no such literary foundation. Its roots are in German historiography and theology, much of it obscure to Anglo-American scholars. And its character was profoundly international, connecting architects, theologians, and intellectuals—mostly liberal Protestants—between Germany, England, and the United States. All this has made it notoriously difficult to capture the sweep and complexity of the movement.

Until now, that is. Kathleen Curran’s splendid Romanesque Revival is a spacious study of the subject, bolstered by research here and overseas. Hers is no easy task, for the revival was much more than a mere nostalgic revival of the round-arched architecture of the early twelfth century. The antiquarian nostalgia was certainly there, but it was offset by an equally strong modernizing tendency, which contended throughout the nineteenth century, and which gave the movement much of its peculiar vitality.

Both impulses were very much at play when the German architect Heinrich Hübsch published his celebrated pamphlet In welchem Style sollen wir bauen?(1828). Although his title is often taken to be a rhetorical question—literally, “In what style should we build?”—Hübsch had in mind something quite concrete. He wrote to advocate what he called the Rundbogenstil, literally, “round-arched style,” a modern synthetic style, in which elements from many styles might be brought together in a building that was disciplined and ordered by “objective” considerations of construction.

Objectivity was a concept new to architecture, and surely owes its origin to Hübsch’s early training in philosophy. By appealing to objective principles, rather than to the dead letter of the past, Hübsch gave a permissive cast to the Rundbogenstil. Unlike the Greek or the Gothic, styles that had reached an apex of stylistic refinement and then declined, the round-arched style of the twelfth century never achieved its fullest realization, but was superseded by the architecture of the pointed arch. For Hübsch this made the style susceptible of further development and elaboration, and rendered it strangely suitable for the demands of the present. Sustained by these ideas, the Rundbogenstil enjoyed great experimental vitality during the second quarter of the nineteenth century (which led from time to time to the odd architectural monstrosity).

Curran's accomplishment is to draw out the complex network of international connections that carried Rundbogenstil doctrines and designs beyond Germany. Remarkably, many of these connections converged in one man, Christian Carl Josias von Bunsen, the polyglot historian and theologian who served as Prussian ambassador, first to the Holy See and later to England. Bunsen was evidently everywhere: we find him in Rome in 1824, showing Karl Friedrich Schinkel its early Christian churches; in London in 1841, inspecting recent romanesque churches with the Bishop of London; and active even on shipboard, where he befriended the president of Bowdoin College, who promptly built the first Rundbogenstil chapel in America. Bunsen was also a key aesthetic advisor to Friedrich Wilhelm IV, the Prussian king, and his scholarly researches into the early Christian basilica provided the firm historical basis for buildings such as the Friedenskirche in Potsdam (1841-49).

Curran shows how swiftly architectural ideas ricocheted between England and Germany during this period. During the 1840s, Bowdoin College Chapel by Richard Upjohn, Brunswick, Maine ten churches were built as part of a unified campaign in the London slum of Bethnal Green. Six were Romanesque, clearly inspired by recent German trends. But by 1845, Friedrich Wilhelm sent his architect Friedrich Augustus Stüler to England to study them; the result was a battery of new brick churches in Berlin, predominantly Romanesque, and explicitly based on the Bethnal Green program. We tend to think of this period in which A. W. N. Pugin, the Tractarian movement, and the Gothic enthusiasts of the Ecclesiological Society comprised the principal forces for architectural creativity. Instead Curran shows that there was an independent channel of development, one that was intellectually sophisticated, hostile to medieval obscurantism, and broadly cosmopolitan in outlook.

Curran’s forte is institutional history, and she is at her best when documenting the activities of theorists and patrons in institutional contexts, such as Robert Dale Owen (the Smithsonian Institution), William Backhouse Astor (Astor Library, New York), and Philips Brooks (Trinity Church, Boston). The aesthetic life of buildings is generally subordinated to their intellectual roots, which is not altogether inappropriate for a style whose origin was academic. But this causes her to neglect some figures whose buildings are primarily of interest for their artistic qualities, such as the startling range of geologically inventive churches around Coblenz by the Rhenish architect Johann Claudius Lassaulx.

A few elements might have made this admirable volume even better. For

York, a striking combination of a progressive educational program and a technologically advanced Rundbogenstil essay by Frederick A. Peterson, a refugee from the failed Prussian revolution of 1848. And more might have been said about the domed churches of Charente, France, with their strong Byzantine influence. These buildings were exemplary for the vigorous French version of the Romanesque Revival, especially the churches of Paul Abadie. They were also studied in England, where they were published by the architect Edmund Sharpe, and perhaps in America as well.

But such is the ambitious scope of this admirable volume that one cavils only with reluctance. The Romanesque Revival is absolutely indispensable for any scholar of nineteenth-century architecture.

Dr. Michael J. Lewis is the chairman of the art department at Williams College. His books include The Gothic Revival and Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind.

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