The rhetoric of classicism remains politically powerful, as we were reminded by an executive order from Donald J. Trump’s second term, that US public buildings henceforth be erected in a classical style (US Executive Order 14344 of 28 August 2025, https://federalregister.gov/d/2025-16928). Such power should make us suspicious. A.’s book undertakes to use the urban transformation of newly imperial London and two new capital cities, Athens and Rome, to judge the historical role of classicism.
A. is a historian, not an architect. Wisely, he does not do what the White House did and defines ‘classicism’ via a list of acceptable architectural firms. Instead, he introduces his three main essays (with a fourth on Rome under Mussolini) with a compressed historical survey from Vitruvius through Andrea Palladio, James Stuart and Nicholas Revett to later architects, garnished with generalisations drawn from late twentieth-century intellectuals about architecture’s ideological role.
The story A. tells ought to be fascinating. The post-1821 devastation of Athens left a blank canvas of ruins and market gardens, but not the financial resources for grandiose urban planning for the new capital of a would-be autocrat from Bavaria. In London and Rome architects struggled to justify to patrons the cost of expropriation and demolition in pursuit of broad vistas and monumentality. The rhetoric of classical/imperial grandeur was a vital tool in mobilising public and private resources.
For London A. uses the example of the expansion of Regent’s Park to illustrate the influence of class ideology in shaping London’s early nineteenth-century expansion. His narrative implies that commercial calculations played a greater role than ideology. His historical summary of the Greek War of Independence is colourful but disorganised; rapid shifts of topic likewise make the discussion of nineteenth-century Rome a kaleidoscope (Mussolini’s Rome gets more linear treatment). The sociological themes that interest him are illustrated using excerpts from popular literature. They convey something about social conditions (or British elite attitudes towards those conditions) as one driver of urban reform. Generalisations abound, and we do not learn how ordinary Athenians, Romans and Londoners related their ancient and medieval surroundings to the classicising rhetoric that would, planners hoped, transform the citizenry as well as the cityscape.
A. assembles a reasonable roster of human actors, but we seldom see them in action. Mostly, the passive voice prevails. I came away with little sense of the architects’ creative vision, classical or otherwise, or their tactics and alliances in the bureaucratic competition that determined whether their vision would be realised. Abstractions do not sign cheques. Decision-makers and their resource constraints are alluded to but not given the attention their importance deserves.
The format leaves the reproduced city plans too small and faint to judge their classical character, once we manage to define it. Still, the labour A. has undertaken is a good reminder that urban planning has always been a tool of politics and that any tool, especially one involving broad boulevards and expensive marble columns, has the potential to be misused.
