The Printed and the Built: Architecture, Print Culture and Public Debate in the Nineteenth Century ed. by Mari Hvattum, Anne Hultzsch (review)

“This will kill that,” wrote Victor Hugo in his novel Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), set in the fifteenth century in the wake of Gutenberg’s invention. He meant that modern print culture would supplant architecture as the primary means of mass communication. Yet amid the nineteenth-century boom of mass-produced literature and ephemeral architecture, this pronouncement turned out to be premature. The book did not kill the building—instead, they enjoyed an unusually symbiotic partnership. Despite the rich body of work produced in recent years on architecture’s relationship to print culture during the Renaissance and early modern era, and to media for the twentieth century, this relationship in the nineteenth century—the great age of novels, the popular press, lithography—remains curiously neglected. Mari Hvattum and Anne Hultzsch’s edited collection, stemming from a research project funded by the Norwegian Research Council between 2014–18, sets out to rectify this oversight, bringing together essays and think pieces that identify moments of collaboration between the printed and the built.

Part one of the book presents scholars who have previously addressed this theme in their work, but who use this opportunity to investigate new case studies. They are thus exploratory in scope, and some are more successful than others. Barry Bergdoll’s essay centers on popular illustrated journals, such as The Penny Magazine in Britain and Le Magasin Pittoresque in France, arguing that they played a pedagogical role in informing the larger public about matters of art, architecture, public space, and national identity. Stephen Bann studies three British publications between 1813 and 1822 that incorporated early architectural prints to suggest that they nurtured antiquarians’ preoccupation with the past, encouraging further image production in turn. Focusing on two reconstructed elements of the San Paolo basilica in Rome, Richard Wittman gives a rich analysis of conflicting interpretations in official texts of conservative clerics versus the popular press. In the nationalist discourse of the latter, he identifies a nascent political modernity that could express itself through architectural exegesis.

Two of the essays in part one lie on the margins of the nineteenth century. Maarten Delbeke recounts the fascinating story of the Bastille’s post-humous fate during the French Revolution, in the first flush of press freedom. Its demolition appeared to signify the power of print over building, but Delbeke suggests that Pierre-François Palloy’s distribution of its dismembered stones across the nation indicates the enduring power of materiality for memorialization. Beatriz Colomina begins with the x-ray’s invention in 1895 to make a parallel between this new way of seeing and the transparent aesthetic of twentieth-century Modernism. It is an evocative essay, but one that veers away from the particular concerns of the nineteenth century that this volume seeks to address.

Part two of the book (“Printed Places”) emulates a “magazine”—a word initially signifying a storehouse, but eventually applied to publications that compiled a variety of written and illustrated items. This section is also an encyclopedia of sorts, offering concise entries on potential themes for interrogating the print/architecture relationship. There is no room here to describe every article, but I wished that some of them could have been developed in greater depth for part one. Several entries (e.g. Marit Grøtta’s “Feuilleton,” Hultzsch’s “Masthead,” André Tavares’s “Street Views”) explore texts that emulated the experience of the city—a collision of the dis-cursive and urban public spheres expressive of nineteenth-century flânerie. Most of the articles are variations on a theme—print that represents, promotes interest in, or gives meaning to, architecture—but a few introduce compelling new departure points. I was particularly intrigued by the moral dimensions at work in Hvattum’s study of architectural plans in murder novels and trials, and Barbara Penner’s analysis of sex, sentiment...