The dilemma of style : architectural ideas from the picturesque to the post-modern /

Crook, the author of six earlier books on 18th- and 19th-century English architecture, undertakes here to untangle the web of ideas that have conditioned architectural style in England during the past two centuries-from the picturesque to postmodernism. Seven of the eight chapters focus on the 19th century. The book provides a fine and compendious review of ideas, but it suffers slightly from a kind of breathless inclusiveness. Scores of architects and buildings (many of which are illustrated) are summoned in each chapter to convey the impact of the principal theoreticians-so many that the text might well bewilder all but those already conversant with the history of English architecture during this period. Most of the 217 illustrations are made from line cuts and reproduce very well. An excellent bibliography and index conclude the work.-J. Quinan, SUNY at Buffalo

The subject of this book is really English Victorian architecture from 1840 to 1900, an area in which Crook ( William Burges and the High Victorian Dream ) is expert. Here he threshes out the contributions of Ruskin, Viollet-le-Duc, and others, and briefly extends his argument back into the late 18th century and up to the present. But despite its narrow scope this is an important book, one of a very few that explore in depth 19th-century architectural discourse. It is aimed at specialists and is far more detailed than Robert MacLeod's Style and Society (Riba, 1971), which covers much the same ground. Peter Kaufman, Suffolk Community Coll. Libs., Selden, N.Y. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.