Katja Grillner

The Picturesque: Architecture, disgust and other irregularities

In its most popular understanding, picturesque is an attribute assigned to quaint little villages, pretty houses, tourist attractions and postcard views. In addition, most architects are likely to associate the term with a particular style in landscape gardening. Only a few will have reflected on the deeper implications of the term for modern architecture and the historical relationships between its interdisciplinary origins in architecture, painting and landscape design, and current architectural techniques and aesthetics. John Macarthur’s book The Picturesque: Architecture, disgust and other irregularities makes a splendid contribution to this line of inquiry. Detailed analyses of late eighteenth-century picturesque theorists and designers such as William Gilpin, Humphry Repton, Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price are put into the perspective of twentieth-century modernist architecture. In particular, the book gives an account of the contributions from 1930 to 1970 of Nikolaus Pevsner, and his colleagues at the Architectural Review, to the re-launching and re-appropriation of picturesque ideals in the Townscape movement. Five central notions organise the book: picture, disgust, irregularity, appropriation and movement. In the chapter ‘Pictures’, Macarthur explains in great detail the eighteenth-century implications of the term. Two significant points are stressed. The first is that ‘picture’ had a very concrete material implication. A framed portable painting, the picture marked a distinct separation between architecture and painting: the end of fresco and the beginning of independent object-hood for painting. Macarthur’s point is that an entirely new kind of spatiality was developed for the portable surface of the tableau. New techniques were invented for pictorial composition which took place in parallel with (not before) the development of new techniques for spatial composition in landscape and building. The second significant point has to do with the role of genre and the hierarchy thereby implied. The picture implied in the picturesque is a view that comes to challenge received opinions on subjects ‘worthy of painting’, and takes a particular interest in the everyday and the mundane. In the long run, Macarthur argues, this had a significant effect on the architectural profession, as a distinct interest in vernacular buildings develops, and ordinary housing becomes an architectural concern. This line of argument is developed further in the chapters on disgust and irregularity. The chapter ‘Disgust’ turns our attention to the significance of the ugly and the repelling for aesthetic theory. While the beautiful was something that created generally pleasing feelings, their vagueness was considered problematic in the eighteenth century. The physicality of repulsion, a feeling of disgust, was argued to be a very distinct contra669