Nikolaus pevsner biography of george
G. F. Troup Horne
One of the gifts of google to the biographer is the ability suddenly to put a face to someone who has just been a name. Birkbeck College has put online a collection of its historical photographs, and amongst them is an image of George Francis Troup Horne, who was Secretary to the college and Clerk to its Governors from 1919 to 1952.
He was also one of the most significant contacts of Pevsner’s life, in that it was Troup Horne, a neighbour in Hampstead, who seems to have suggested to Birkbeck that they might use Pevsner as a lecturer during the war, when many of the college’s regular staff had been called up. Pevsner’s first lecture at Birkbeck, early in 1940, was entitled ‘Enjoyment of Architecture’. By the time he gave his second, he had been briefly interned as an enemy alien and spent an equal number of months clearing the remains of bombed buildings from the streets of North London.
Photo: Herbert Mason
The first talk was not followed by any offer of regular employment, and Pevsner’s second appearance was not in Birkbeck’s lecture hall but on its roof – again, probably thanks to Troup Horne. After the devastating fire bombing of the City on December 29, 1940 – the ‘second Fire of London’ – compulsory firewatching was introduced. Standing between Chancery Lane and Fetter Lane, Birkbeck – then in Bream’s Buildings – had been lucky to escape the worst of the damage in the City and it was now anxious to comply with the regulations. Pevsner was signed up, and saw it as a welcome release from rubble-shovelling: ‘It is by no means the kind of return to academic surroundings that one would fancy,’ he wrote, ‘but it is a decided improvement’.
Bream's Buildings
Troup Horne also took his turn on the roof, and seems to have put the time to good use. A portly man, he was an excellent cook and selected members of the coll Born Nikolai Pewsner into a Russian-Jewish family in Leipzig in 1902, Nikolaus Pevsner was a dedicated scholar who pursued a promising career as an academic in Dresden and Göttingen. When, in 1933 Jews were no longer permitted to teach in German universities, he lost his job and looked for employment in England. Here, over a long and amazingly industrious career, he made himself an authority on the exploration and enjoyment of English art and architecture, so much so that his magisterial county-by-county series of 46 books on The Buildings of England (first published 1951 - 74) is usually referred to simply as 'Pevsner'. As a critic, academic and champion of Modernism, Pevsner became a central figure in the architectural consensus that accompanied post-war reconstruction; as a 'general practitioner' of architectural history, he covered an astonishing range, from Gothic cathedrals and Georgian coffee houses to the Festival of Britain and Brutalist tower blocks. Papers from the 2015 Cornish Buildings Group conference ‘Only a Cornishman would have the endurance to carve intractable granite’ In stock In 1950 Nikolaus Pevsner opened his Buildings of England Series guide to Cornwall with the words ‘Cornwall possesses little of the highest aesthetic quality though much that is lovable and much that is moving’. Sixty-four years later Pevsner’s iconic work was updated and revised. To celebrate this achievement the Cornish Buildings group, in conjunction with the Yale University Press, Cornwall Heritage Trust and the National Trust, held a two-day conference that championed the Cornish built environment, thereby proving that Cornwall has a rich and varied architectural heritage and examples of some of the most important building types in the country. This book draws on the papers delivered at the conference. Each chapter has been written by a recognised expert in their field, taken together this collection of essays constitute the most important contribution to Cornish architectural history for several generations. .
Susie Harries explores the truth about Nikolaus Pevsner's reported sympathies with elements of Nazi ideology, his internment in England as an enemy alien and his sometimes painful assimilation into his country of exile. His Heftchen - secret diaries he kept from the age of 14 for another sixty years - reveal hidden aspirations and anxieties, as do his numerous letters (he wrote to his wife, Lola, every day that they were apart).Harries is the first biographer to have read Pevsner's private papers and, through them, to have seen into the workings of his mind.Her definitive biography is not only rich in context and far-ranging, but is also brought to life by quotations from Pevsner himself.
He was born a Jew but converted to Lutheranism; trained in the rigour of German scholarship, he became an Everyman in his copious commissions, publications, broadcasts and lectures on art, architecture, design, education, town planning, social housing, conservation, Mannerism, the Bauhaus, the Victorians, Z Celebrating Pevsner
Chapters include