ABSTRACT
Geoffrey Scott’s The Architecture of Humanism of 1914 is known for its well-argued critique of nineteenth-century British architectural theory, but Scott also offers a new theory of architecture explained as “space,” which draws upon German empathy theory of the previous decades. Scott’s is the first account in English of space in the modern sense, as a perceptible quality of architecture, and indeed its medium. It is generally agreed that Scott’s attack on nineteenth-century theory, what he called “the Fallacies,” cleared the way for new thinking in the twentieth century. Whether the “humanist values” that the book proposed were that new thinking or a clever defence of tradition remains unclear, though, as his examples are almost exclusively drawn from the Italian baroque, and the humanist values draw as much on the picturesque as they do on empathy theory.
