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• W4387626006 abstract "Reviewed by: The Victorian Art School: Architecture, History, Environment by Ranald Lawrence Amy Woodson-Boulton (bio) The Victorian Art School: Architecture, History, Environment, by Ranald Lawrence; pp. xxiii + 202. New York and London: Routledge, 2021, $136.00, $39.96 paper, $39.96 ebook. The Victorian Art School: Architecture, History, Environment combines detailed architectural studies of three Victorian art schools in Birmingham, Manchester, and Glasgow with their broader cultural significance in these industrial cities. Ranald Lawrence frames these schools as embodying “culture” as a “mediating” force in their industrial cities, and as using light, space, and methods of air circulation to mediate their intensely polluted urban environments (178). Regarding the latter, he reveals surprising innovations in heating and ventilation, particularly in Charles Rennie McIntosh’s iconic Glasgow School of Art. The book will be useful to architectural historians and art historians interested in the context of art education at the end of the nineteenth century. Lawrence examines the art schools not only for what they intended and achieved but also for what they did not achieve and, occasionally, where they failed. The most interesting aspect of this project is the examination of the conflicting technical problems of art schools in industrial cities in a time of profound air pollution, gas lighting, and coal fires: how to create spaces filled with light that could be both spacious enough and yet kept at a reasonable temperature with relatively clean air for working. The solutions to these problems involved innovative designs that made the most of siting, incorporating as much north-facing light as possible and often letting internal volumes dictate elevation and decoration rather than vice versa. The huge windows and large spaces led to the use of new ventilation systems with central air shafts and fans. How this related to innovations in other buildings, however, is not entirely clear. Lawrence dismisses earlier ventilation systems in the Houses of Parliament, the Royal Albert Hall, and the Natural History Museum as “one-off installations in situations where the need for environmental control was paramount and cost was no obstacle” (133). (The idea of the British government doing anything where “cost was no obstacle” is a bit surprising.) Instead, Lawrence tries to understand these systems as showing how the art schools functioned within the polluted environment of these industrial cities both literally and metaphorically. As he argues, “new public institutions such as the art school demonstrate . . . the extension of culture as a mediating instrument between increasingly accountable local government [End Page 166] and urban populations ever more expectant of visible results” (178). Moreover, the architectural changes he traces embodied this relationship to the city: “The controlled sequences of light that connected the semi-public interiors of the art school to the street represent a physical embodiment of this process of mediation” (179). He tells this history as a triumphalist one of recovery, reestablishing the importance of overlooked institutions, and notes that “addressing these problems gave rise to a new architectural vocabulary of glass and light” (156). He interprets these institutions as offering a cultural and practical solution to the ugliness of industrial cities and as a new kind of semi-public space. In order to function in that industrial setting, their designers and builders had to navigate a series of technical solutions. The work is a useful contribution to the study of technical solutions in these important Victorian industrial cities. However, it is worth noting that for cultural historians, or at least for this reviewer, the question is a bit more complicated. Part of the issue is the author’s seeming lack of curiosity regarding what these art schools actually taught or produced, how they related to the art museums and libraries that were so closely connected in terms of administration and broader historical context, or how their solutions related to those of other types of buildings. In what sense was culture a contested idea in cities riven by class stratification and where universal education and suffrage were radical ideas? How did gender and class function in these semi-public spaces, where the public, as Lawrence acknowledges, was differentiated by time of day? While we get glimpses of these issues, Lawrence seems to want to..." @default.
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• W4387626006 date "2022-09-01" @default.
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• W4387626006 title "The Victorian Art School: Architecture, History, Environment by Ranald Lawrence (review)" @default.
• W4387626006 doi "https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.65.1.34" @default.
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