James Stevens Curl | The Necessity of Classicism : A Rich & Varied Language | BUA 2024

The Necessity of Classicism: A Rich & Varied Language
Capable of Infinite Applications

Having graduated in Architecture at Oxford, JSC went on to study Town Planning, writing his Dissertation under the direction of the German architect, Arthur Korn. He later read for his Doctorate at University College London. He has held Chairs at three Universities, and has twice been Visiting Fellow at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge.

JSC has had an especial interest in historic buildings and conservation, and became a full-time academic in 1978, having already published perceptive articles and books which began to establish his reputation for impeccable scholarship, a fine prose-style, and penetrating insights. Subsequently, he developed his career as a professional writer, producing influential and acclaimed books and papers on architectural history and taste.

His forays into relatively unexplored fields of research still blaze trails inevitably followed by others of more timid dispositions. Among his most famous books are Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism and the Oxford Dictionary of Architecture cowritten with Susan Wilson.


The term ‘Classical’ implies something of the first rank, highest class, order, authority, or importance, a standard, or a model. It is therefore exemplary, characterised by clarity, completeness, symmetry, deceptive simplicity, repose, harmonious proportions, and is associated with civilised life, perfection, taste, and serenity. The ‘Classical Language of Architecture’ is not a free-for-all in which elements are arbitrarily thrown together: it is a highly sophisticated, adaptable system, and suggests something coherent, not meaningless, with all sorts of allusions, capable of enormous ranges of expression (like the spoken language of a culture). Modernism, however, has discarded a great language, a mighty and expansive vocabulary, and a whole system of grammar and syntax, in favour of a series of monosyllabic grunts, with the predicatable making of a ghastly Dystopia of uninhabitable cities: so, without an alphabet (only a few images of approved exemplars), a vocabulary, or a language, Modernism only represents itself and Barbarism.