Organicism in Nineteenth Century Architecture: An Inquiry Into Its Theoretical and Philosophical Background.

Throughout this history of Western architecture key thinkers and practitioners have made reference to 'organic' principles evident within acts of bringing fine buildings into being. In the twentieth century such references have become commonplace, creating both a tacit consensus as to the modern meaning of the term and a strong sense of its attachment to a generalized field of architectural achievement which is everything that the contrived and the stylized are not. Perhaps because of its apparent transparency of meaning, the field of enquiry denoted by the term 'organicism' in architecture does not have a wide literature - Geoffrey Scott's Architecture of Humanism, first published eighty years ago, is usually a first bibliographic resort, and this only deals with the subject in order to dismiss it as fallacious. A study such as van Eck's, which is specifically dedicated to historicizing and defining organicism, is therefore warmly to be welcomed. However, she does not address matters characterized by Scott and Wright but only incidentally contextualizes them in a theory which shares their vocabulary. She intentionally …