Press Release

“if the whole of a town is in the end not visually pleasing, the town is not worth having ”
Nikolaus Pevsner 1955
Visual Planning and the Picturesque, by Nikolaus Pevsner, edited by Mathew Aitchison is published in
London by the Getty Research Institute on Monday 14th June price £21.95 (232 pages, hardcover 19 x 27cm,
7½ x 10½ inches, 100 b/w illustrations ISBN 978-1-60606-001-8). Trade distribution in the UK and Europe is
through Orca Book Services, Poole, Dorset, UK (order line +44 (0)1202 665432).

Nikolaus Pevsner, hitherto best-known for his 46-volume series, The Buildings of England, which
comprehensively details English architecture, also fully planned, wrote, and almost completed a seminal work
on town planning and “the picturesque”, or townscape.

The book’s account of the history behind this “largely unknown” work unfolds with a sense of unearthing a
treasure. “The manuscript is kept in box 25.” This is one of 143 boxes of Pevsner’s papers, consisting of
typed and handwritten notes, clippings, photographs, books, lecture notes and manuscripts, acquired by the
Getty Research Institute in 1984. Editor Mathew Aitchison travelled from Berlin to California to research the
manuscript in the Getty’s archives following a lead from his doctoral supervisor John Macarthur, who had in
turn been inspired by his supervisor at Cambridge Joseph Rykwert. Now, Aitchison and Macarthur jointly
write the introduction piecing together the story of Pevsner’s writing and planning the unpublished work, and
analysing the content. Part I and II of the three-part work were not only written but illustrations had been
chosen and largely assembled by Pevsner. During his time as Acting Editor of Architectural Review from
1942-6, Pevsner had written a succession of articles on townscape, which he continued to develop into the
1950s. However the project was to remain “dormant for another half century”.

Using Pevsner’s plans for part III and from the articles and essays he wrote at the time, Aitchison has been
able to reconstruct this final unfinished part of the work. Part I, largely pictorial, analyses the English
planning tradition before 1800. Part II surveys English planning theory and the history and theory of the
picturesque. Part III “shows how a correct understanding of picturesque principles could allow the
development of an urban-design theory appropriate to modern architecture”. The work as a whole is a
surprisingly fresh plea for a visual approach to urban design and common sense in architecture, one that
sought to incorporate and mediate rather than idealize and exclude.

In an aspect, tangential to the work itself, Aitchison and Macarthur write that its publication will “now answer
some of the criticism that stymied [Pevsner’s] reputation late in his career and since his death.” They write
that had Visual Planning been published at the time of writing, “it would have seen him assume an influential
position within the mid-twentieth-century British Townscape movement with which he is rarely associated.”

Nikolaus Pevsner, a German-born British scholar of the history of art and architecture, familiar to many for
his frequent BBC broadcasts between 1945 and 1977, was best known for his forty-six volume series of
comprehensive county guides, The Buildings of England (1947-74). He received a knighthood in 1969.
Mathew Aitchison is Research Fellow and Manager of ATCH (Architecture | Theory | Criticism | History) at
the University of Queensland’s School of Architecture.

If you would like a copy of Visual Planning and the Picturesque, by Nikolaus Pevsner for review, if you
would like to interview editor Mathew Aitchison, or if you require high resolution picture files from the book
or any further information, please contact:
Alistair Layzell
(telephone: 020 8855 0320)
e-mail acl@layzellpr.com

Layzellpr
FOR PUBLISHERS & THE ARTS
52 VERNHAM ROAD, PLUMSTEAD COMMON, LONDON SE18 3HB
TELEPHONE: 020 8855 0320

on behalf of Getty Publications