November 2008

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Sennett only briefly touches on ‘Japanese values’. I wish he had spent some paragraphs in discussion of the archetypal master, even now much in evidence, and how that status relates to the strength of ‘family’ – applied to empire or factory as the case might be. The respect for and attention to hierarchy that he notes as the clue to Japanese industrial pre-eminence is, after all, sui generis. So too was the onward path indicated to an entrant to a medieval guild, apprentice to journeyman, even perhaps journeyman to master – the latter a figure combining authority and autonomy in equal measure.

Towards the end of the book Sennett tellingly compares two ostensibly rather similar houses built in early-20th-century Vienna; one was designed by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein for his sister, the other by Adolf Loos for himself. In the latter, the Villa Moller, every mistake had to be absorbed by the architecture – there was no deep purse for adjustment – while in the former, all errors were erased and rebuilt, leading to a result that Wittgenstein himself judged to be a deep disappointment. There had been no ‘creative dialogue between form and error’. Surely, Sennett suggests, these lessons could be widely applied? Evolution rather than instant perfection is, we must conclude with him, the one persuasive argument.

Gillian Darley’s biographies of John Soane and John Evelyn are both published by Yale University Press.