Curl’s Dictionary was first published in 1999: sixteen years on, the third edition is substantially enlarged and even more useful. Some of the credit must go to his co-author, Dr Susan Wilson, who has contributed new entries on landscape architecture. Battle-gardens and snail-mounts are now elucidated, alongside Bengal cottage and zecca.
The sheer quantity of entries is remarkable. They cover technical terms (often of a profound obscurity), stylistic handles, construction methods, building types, materials, symbols and a very wide range indeed of biographical entries. A random test of five middling or obscure seventeenth-century English architects and masons scored 100 per cent – each one was written up. Some Fellows may be familiar with most of the entries, but few will fail to make new discoveries. A margin-draft is the ‘dressed band the width of a chisel all around the face of an ashlar-block, contrasting with the rest of the exposed stone’. Perceptions are sharpened when one has the terminology to describe what one sees before one’s eyes. The technical mastery is undoubted, and this dictionary wins over any rival by dint of its thoroughness. One minor point: knowing the derivation of terms can be really helpful, and the inclusion of these would be welcome. Once you know that an echinus is a sea urchin, then the bulbous moulding at the top of a Doric column makes perfect sense and is forever fixed in the memory.
The biographical entries are extraordinary in coverage. Some inclusions verge on the peculiar: architectural journalist Colin Boyne (1921–2006) is included ‘because his belief in Modernism was a faith; a social determinant akin to religious fundamentalis’. Followers of Curl’s prodigious output will already know that the Ulster professor has clear and firm views about modern architecture of the flashier sort, and will want to know how this stance is maintained in light of the lexicographer’s duty to impart knowledge in an even-handed way. The answer is that the voice of the author is allowed to be very clearly expressed, and opinions are readily offered: this is not a fence-sitting volume.
Living architects are excluded – perhaps just as well. Recently deceased architects such as Alison and Peter Smithson, designers of the controversial Robin Hood Gardens in east London, come in for fairly rough handling, and for an objective appraisal of some careers you may have to look elsewhere too. Some living figures (including historians) sneak in under the radar, via inclusion in survey entries: the long entry on New Classicism shows Curl in more approving mode, and it is clear where his sympathies lie. One of his interests is in urbanism: and the entry for New Urbanism amounts to a personal manifesto. He reports that the concept ‘has been denounced by Modernists as “escapist” and “historicist”: some would argue that, if this is the case, we need more Escapism and Historicism’. For a specialist dictionary, this is rousing stuff.
One of the most illuminating entries so far encountered is reserved for the word ‘Go’: ‘pejorative term used by some Victorian commentators … to describe work of Rogue Goths that was restless, animated, “acrobatic”, and embarrassing. It implied empty fashion, hamfistedness, clumsiness, discord, clashing colours, decadence, furious vigour, recklessness, exaggeration, vulgarity, and generally something overdone for purposes of self-advertisement (so could easily be applied to some fashionable architects of the early C21)’. This is gale-force Curl. The sheer number of entries on little-known (but deserving) architects of recent times, from across the globe, shows that he is very conversant with modern achievement as well as ancient. How many readers know that the architect of streamlining, Norman Bel Geddes (1893–1958), was the author of Magic Motorways (1940)? Entries such as that on Kazuo Shinohara (1925–2006) make you want to find out more about the subjects, and that has to be a good test of a dictionary of this sort. Curl is an architect as well as a historian, and his drawings are admirable.
The third edition is thus very welcome and remarkably informative. It is opinionated, yet characterful – and you cannot have one without the other. The late poet Geoffrey Grigson, another great anthologiser and discoverer of hitherto-concealed fascination, with equally strongly held opinions on many matters, would very much approve.
