How to judge architecture: a popular guide to the appreciation of buildings — A Reader’s Guide

Movement Through Time and Style

The book’s structure is chronological, but Sturgis does not treat periods as airtight categories. Instead, he traces how forms migrate and mutate. In discussing the Chapel of the Pazzi, he notes that Filippo Brunelleschi, working in the 15th century, had to invent a small-scale classical design because he lacked antique examples of refined, intimate buildings. Sturgis highlights the “coupled pilasters of the upper story” as a feature that would become characteristic of Neo-classic architecture, yet he points out that Brunelleschi likely saw himself as doing what a Roman designer might have done. This attention to the designer’s mindset—what they knew, what they lacked, what they dared—gives the narrative a dynamic, almost biographical quality.

Recurring Images: The Pilaster and the Arch

Two motifs recur throughout the excerpts: the pilaster and the round-arched window. Sturgis tracks the pilaster from its rare appearance in Roman external architecture to its revival by Alberti in the Palazzo Rucellai, then notes its swift rejection in the Palazzo Strozzi and Medici Palace. He calls this back-and-forth “surprising” evidence of “common sense” among early Renaissance architects. Similarly, the round-arched window head appears in the Rucellai front and is later abandoned. By following these small elements across buildings, Sturgis shows how architectural judgment involves noticing what is retained, what is dropped, and why.

The Role of Ornament and Its Limits

Sturgis frequently pauses on ornamental details—rondels filled with cherubs, carved flutings taken from sarcophagi, strigil ornaments—and evaluates their appropriateness. In the Pazzi Chapel, he notes a “mistaken use of ancient forms” in the uppermost frieze, but excuses it because Brunelleschi, as a sculptor, “dared not undertake architectural carving of would-be classical intent.” This willingness to see ornament as a site of tension between knowledge and invention is typical. Sturgis does not simply praise or condemn; he reconstructs the designer’s dilemma. The reader learns to look at a frieze or capital not as a fixed symbol but as a decision made under constraints.

Scale and the Challenge of the Small Building

A striking observation in the excerpts concerns the difficulty of designing small buildings in a classical idiom. Sturgis remarks that Renaissance masters had to study “huge monuments, the Pantheon and the Colosseum” and lacked examples of refined small-scale design. The Pazzi Chapel portico, he estimates, “cannot exceed thirty-five feet in total height.” This focus on scale—how a building sits in relation to the human body and to its precedents—runs through the book. Sturgis implies that judging architecture requires sensitivity to proportion and to the way a building’s size shapes its effect, a point often overlooked in general guides.

Sturgis’s method rewards a patient reader willing to follow his eye from column to cornice. The book is best read with images at hand—the plates are integral to his argument. Rather than offering a checklist of virtues, he demonstrates how to weigh a building’s choices against its historical moment. For anyone interested in why a building looks the way it does, and how architects think through form, this guide remains a sharp, grounded tool.

Sturgis’s patient walk through old stones often leaves me thinking how taste drifts like weather. The same quiet fondness surfaces whenever I open Happy England — a book less about judging than simply noticing. Happy England — Context and Discussion feels like an afternoon spent looking, not deciding, which is its own kind of architectural truth.