Review: Modern Architecture: Representation and Reality by Neil Levine

Neil Levine Modern Architecture: Representation and Reality New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010, x + 364 pp., 30 color and 311 b/w illus. $65, ISBN 9780300145670 This book is a compilation of Neil Levine’s Slade Lectures in Fine Art given at the University of Cambridge in the academic year 1994–95. Published in 2010 under the title Modern Architecture: Representation and Reality , it is to some extent a recasting of the received history of Euro-American architecture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Comprising eight chapters plus an introduction and a conclusion, this sub-titular opposition between reality and representation becomes qualified in the course of lectures by a number of other loaded terms, including: appearance , truth , abstraction , history , and imitation , all of which serve to articulate in different ways the discrimination between representation and reality in the evolution of modern architecture. Levine often employs these terms in a series of propositional, titular inversions beginning with the appearance of truth versus the truth of appearances, as we shall encounter this in his treatment of the Abbe Laugier’s anti-Vitruvian model for an ideal primitive hut, as this appears as a frontispiece in the second edition of his Essai sur l’architecture published in 1755. For Levine, as for Sigfried Giedion in his canonical account of the modern movement— Space, Time and Architecture— published in 1941, modernity is deemed to begin with Alberti in Florence in the mid-fifteenth century, where for Levine it begins with Alberti’s Palazzo Rucellai and its representation of the Roman Colosseum inscribed skin-deep into the facade of load-bearing masonry structure.1 Right at this moment we have an instance of that time-honored split between building and architecture, which runs as a latent theme throughout Levine’s historical account without ever once being fully acknowledged. Taking his cue from Emil Kaufmann’s insight that the legacy of the Renaissance-Baroque system first began to disintegrate in the eighteenth century, Levine demonstrates through a painstaking analysis of …