Sir Banister Fletcher’s ‘History of Architecture’: Re- Examining the architectural dogma set through

The era of Enlightenment during the 17th C created a wave of curiosity in terms of knowledge accumulation and decoding ‘the unknown’. It was a movement that strove to re- examine the teachings and reasoning laid out by the bible and the church; to look at any phenomena with fresh scientific eyes.

Thus such endeavours in knowledge unearthing were began to be funded and commissioned. The major centres of this movement were Paris, Salzburg and Vienna.  Such voyages would generally be carried out by a group of people who would ideally be experts in scientific fields including biologists, geologists etc., along with deep sea divers and voyagers. This mission was considered at that time, the responsibility of the Elite, who in fact were the only lot who could afford to pool in the time and energy for such expensive missions. The findings made by these various voyages were then put together in public forums, to be shared with the public at large; in the form of ‘Great Exhibitions’ (E.g.: The Great Exhibition, London 1851, Crystal Palace.)

A major outcome of the Era of Enlightenment was the invention of ‘knowledge banks’ commonly known as ‘The Encyclopaedia’. The first of the kind was compiled by Denis Diderot. The idea behind the Encyclopaedia, was to get the larger, zoomed out world view to make connections that would lead to a lot more meaningful decoding of various phenomena.

Sir Banister Fletcher was credited with compiling the first Encyclopaedia of Architecture in 1890. Although the first few editions have a heavy bias towards European architecture, they were an attempt to document what was happening in the larger picture. The book blatantly epitomizes Roman and Greek architecture, putting them on the pedestals as the benchmarks of what ideal Architecture should be. The buildings that were omitted were not considered important enough. The tree of architecture illustrated in the book clearly suggests the same. The 4th edition goes as much as to insult South Asian architecture terming it as overtly ornamental and grotesque. The obvious audacious stand taken by Sir Fletcher was fortunately negated by Lady Fletcher, his Daughter –in –law, who questioned the completeness of the encyclopaedia without the inclusion of Micro- narratives and regional architecture of the Eastern continents. Surprisingly by the 19th edition, the book underwent complete re-structuring to accommodate Indian and Japanese architecture. The reason why this addition took so long was because the Europeans never understood Indian architecture in its fullness. The reason being, most European architecture were abstract forms devoid of layers and one could interpret them quite easily. Indian architecture, particularly Hindu architecture on the other hand had abstract forms with layers of stories in the form of ornamental carvings or paintings that could only be understood with several visits.

By the 1980’s Banister Fletcher’s book came up with the 100th edition. There was thus a constant endeavour of changing strong biases in the book. It almost became an act in activism by various people to produce an unbiased encyclopaedia of architecture.

The Era of Enlightenment thus laid a base for unveiling a lot of hidden truths. But on the flipside, one cannot argue that various biases came through in these endeavours since voyagers would always carry with them their own canons, weighing and interpreting foreign cultures through those very dogmas.

Comparing that era with today’s context, one can see how biases have diminished to a great extent with the enormous cross culture exchange and globalization happening. The outlook has broadened to a large extent and one does tend to question the various narratives that Historical accounts have to offer.