ABSTRACT
In 1891 the young Dutch architect Willem Kromhout (1864-1940) delivered a trenchant, satirical lecture to his colleagues entitled “Tout à l’égout.” In his lecture Kromhout fictitiously sends all the handbooks of style, all the architectural critics, and all the practitioners of historicist architecture, whether classicist, rationalist, eclectic, or Dutch Renaissance, into the sewer to be regenerated. Meanwhile he builds a new school of architecture that teaches no conventions, invents no new style, but encourages each student to reflect his own character through the application of his natural aesthetic sense to construction and materials. When the school is ready, he revisits the sewer and finds the architects, now reformed and reconciled with each other, ready to join him and study design afresh. The handbooks of history, have, however, all disappeared (Kromhout 1891).
