Watkin sets out to draw very close parallels between the arguments made in favour of the International Modern style of architecture in the early to mid 20th century and those made in favour of the Gothic revival a hundred years earlier. In short, he shows that Pevsner, like Pugin before him, invented moral arguments in favour of aesthetic judgements and did great harm thereby to their discipline.
In both cases, the preferred style of building is claimed to be necessary (as an expression of the Zeitgeist), honest (in being true to the materials and techniques used) and therefore moral. If you don't like International Modernism, Watkin claims Pevsner says, then you are simply wrong not to, very likely because there is something wrong with you. Watkin's critics claimed that this was a strawman. Whether it is or not, the similarities in the arguments are striking.
From our position in the early 21st century it is slightly boggle-making to read of Pugin's defence of Gothic revival as a purely functional style, but having seen that we are primed to view Pevsner's similar claim for International Modernism in a new light. Together with the Gothic revival came the mediaevalism of Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, which leads through the Bauhaus directly to the heart of IM. The exposed steelwork and unrelieved concrete planes of IM seem to be from a different planet to the ornate gingerbread of Gothic revivalism, but both claim to be the direct, inevitable heirs of mediaeval craft building and the only moral way to build. IM also lays claim to an Albertian route to the pure rationalism of the the Classical style.
From our position we can also note that, in the UK, some of our best-loved and most successful buildings are Victorian gothic, whereas most of International Modernisms claimed triumphs (Pevsner was a great admirer of Paternoster Square) have been demolished, being uninhabitable, unmaintainable, unsuited for adaptation to new uses, and just plain ugly.
Watkins has plenty of evidence to suggest that, during the period of interest, young architects soon learned that failure to be sufficiently Modern, any hint of the dreaded "pastiche" (re-using historical forms), would bring their careers to a sharp halt, irrespective of their merits. And so Britain was left a legacy of horrific planning, design and building blunders that we have still to recover from.
It's interesting that that many of the complaints made against Modernism by the Postmodernists are echoed in Watkin's book, but Watkins himself is no po-mo hero. He is a don at Cambridge, a Fellow of Peterhouse. Peterhouse is almost a byword for Tory high-church reactionarism.
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