Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life

Volker Welter illuminates the work of Patrick Geddes from the perspective of an architectural historian. Biopolis is based on the author's PhD work at the University of Edinburgh and has also benefited from his work as an archivist cataloguing the visual material of the University of Strathclyde Geddes papers. Because I write here in a journal of art history, it must be stressed that the visual art side of Geddes's endeavours per se is not addressed here. From an art-historical point of view this is a little disappointing, but it is made up for by Welter's emphasis on Geddes's wider importance as a visual thinker. As the title makes clear, the focus is on Geddes's idea of the city, and if any idea can be regarded as central to Geddes's thinking, it is of course that one. But what distinguishes Welter's work is that he understands that Geddes's idea of the city is just that, namely an idea, and further, that it is to a large extent this idea that drives Geddes's practical achievements.

For Welter, diagrams which some commentators on Geddes have preferred to avoid, such as the 'Notation of Life', with its interdependent four-part division into Town, School, Cloister, and City, become central to the understanding of his thought. Thus Welter makes the move that needs to be made: he begins by taking seriously Geddes's interest in the city as a conceptual entity that can be expressed both philosophically and diagrammatically. For Welter, to understand Geddes we must revisit the first principles of his thinking. Furthermore, historical origins also must be revisited, and Welter argues that insight can be given to Geddes through a consideration of the writings of that pioneer of the theory of the European city state, Plato. Welter develops this comparison of Geddes's thinking and that of Plato's Republic in a way that is both stimulating and elegant, and such thinking characterises the entire book. As with any work on a polymath such as Geddes there are areas where one would have preferred more analysis, but any such quibbles are vastly outweighed by the overall interest of this book. Rather than side-stepping Geddes's ideas because some of them became tangential to architectural and planning practice as it developed, Welter gives them the attention they deserve. He is thus able to conclude his work with three chapters that give an analysis of one of Geddes's key concerns, namely the idea and actuality of the temple. Welter ranges through Geddes's commitment to secular temples of art and science, to the temple as a guiding core-presence in the city. But instead of noting this as some kind of maverick concern unique to Geddes, we find instead that Geddes is operating firmly within a current of European architectural thought, indeed a chart is devoted to 'secular and quasi-religious temple projects, 1880s to 1920s', which includes work by, among others, Olbrich, Lutyens, Ashbee and Taut. Welter is able to fimly situate Geddes's thinking with respect to this tradition.

One should, however, note that while the European dimension is well stated, Geddes's debt to the intellectual and religious traditions of his own background is not really addressed. For example, coming from a Free Church family, Geddes would have taken the necessity of the building of new 'temples' for granted throughout his childhood, simply because he was part of a new church which inherited no buildings. But any such weak points in Welter's analysis are compensated for by wonderfully suggestive European links such as an analogy drawn between Geddes's proposed geographical institute and Tycho Brahe's Uraniborg. The fact that Welter is able to appreciate Geddes as a key thinker in the European modernist tradition, rather than as a kind of northern adjunct to an Anglo-Saxon modernist cul-de-sac, gives this book a major role in any contemporary effort not only to understand Geddes, but also to understand the unrealised aspects of the modernist project. This is an illuminating study and an excellent addition to the literature, both of Geddes and of modernism.