Spirit of the age [antikvár]

of all the arts, architecture is the hardest to avoid. Yet, in a curious way, its very omnipresence can make it almost invisible. We take it for granted. Only when we go away from home or visit a place we don't know do we succeed in reopening our eyes to the things that surround us. Perhaps, since so few of us have more than a restricted choice of the kind of building in which we actually live or work, or how that building relates to the others around it, this selective blindness is partly self protection. Perhaps the jumble of buildings of all periods in both town and country makes the overall picture hard to decipher. By placing the architecture of this country in its historical and intellectual context, this book, like the television series on which it is based, encourages us to respond more readily to the Architectural Heritage that we often only recognise exceptionally. Books about architecture have a distinguished history going back at least two thousand years. Television programmes on architecture are rather more recent and have to contend with a number of problems that don't trouble the reader - problems of size, of scale or atmosphere. Nevertheless, Spirit of The Age sought to overcome some of these problems through a real fusion of words and images. Eight outstanding writers, deliberately chosen for the diversity of their approach to architecture, each took a ' period of our history and related the buildings of that age to the society that produced them; to the ideas, the techniques, the preoccupations of the men who created them. Not just architecture or architects but people. This approach, perhaps not new, but newly presented, was the result of close collaboration between the writers and the directors of the films. 1 would like to pay tribute to the writers for the flexibility of their response to the advantages and disadvantages of the television screen. Some of them here regain the dry land of the printed page with, 1 am sure, a sense of relief As producer of the television series 1 would like to thank three outstanding figures of our time who, though they didn't actually participate in the making of the series, gave me valuable help and advice in its preparation; Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, who has taught us all more about British architecture than we thought there was to know; Sir John Betjeman, who has encouraged us not only to recognise but also to care; and Lord Clark whose own achievements for television gave us a standard to aspire to. To them, and to the many others who also helped, we are sincerely grateful. john drummond