The Architecture of Neurasthenia

The introductory chapter, “The Architecture of Neurasthenia,” asserts the value of considering architecture as a frail, literary object. Critically, the idea of architectural frailty is explored through a reference to human frailty: the “change in character,” or anxiety brought about by neurasthenia, which plagued members of the Anglo-American “leisure class” during the beginning of the twentieth century. Literariness is allied to both the contemporaneous desire to write a “humanist” architectural history and the sensualized aestheticism such a history entailed. The introduction further contextualizes the principal figures of the book – the architectural critic, Geoffrey Scott (1884–1929), and his mentor, the Renaissance connoisseur, Bernard Berenson (1865–1959) – within a larger milieu of critical ideas and historical forces. Despite their eccentricities, Scott and Berenson were wholly representative of an impulse that sought to reject the emergence of modernity by turning to the humanist art of the Italian Renaissance. In this way, these anti-modernist impulses were also driven by a desire to define history.