“Three-Dimensional” Modernism: The Language of Architecture and British Literary Periodicals

Although periodicals have long been vital to modernist studies, architectural journals have been widely ignored, despite the fact that authors from all major British literary groups were committed contributors. Through their efforts, writers bridged two momentous publications: London's Architectural Review, a trade journal that became British architectural modernism's mouthpiece in the 1930s, and Horizon, which, as Sean Latham argues, “deliberately ... staged the end of the modernist ‘little magazine.‘” In these journals, D.H. Lawrence, W.H. Auden, and others submitted not just fiction and poetry but also buildings and architectural publications to close reading processes, while architects proclaimed that modernist structures displayed formal difficulty akin to that of modernist poetry. By exploring architecture as a “new, three-dimensional poetry,” these figures merged Le Corbusier's “a house is a machine for living in” with I.A. Richards's “a book is a machine to think with” to create a shared critical impulse in the 1930s and 1940s.