The architectural “return of historicism” that so infuriated Sir Nikolaus Pevsner in the mid-1960s coincided, not surprisingly, with an invigorated scholarly interest in nineteenth-century architecture, which he greeted quite enthusiastically. Pevsner’s divided reaction to this apparently spontaneous interdisciplinary coincidence illuminates a fundamental contradiction that I find especially acute in the American variant of the postmodernist ethos. And I believe that the book under review, although a work of unquestionably serious scholarship, unintentionally illustrates this paradox.

In the United States, the event that more or less catapulted postmodernist architectural history to broad public attention was the 1976 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art of an enormous selection of nineteenth-century student projects from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts curated by the late Arthur Drexler. In addition to its mordant critique of contemporary modernist architecture and theory, the catalog contained a collection of revealing—and at times brilliant—essays by three young scholars: Neil Levine, Richard Chafee, and David Van Zanten. At the time, Van Zanten was the only scholar who had completed his dissertation and thus served, according to one of them, as the vital force binding the academic to the museological enterprise. Given the exhibition’s adamantly polemical tone, it is noteworthy that his essay shunned the dispute. The same is also true of Chafee’s fastidiously factual, and stunningly informative, contribution. Levine’s essay, by contrast, while teeming with flashing insights and dazzlingly synthetic detective work, explicitly offered refined intellectual ammunition to the postmodern movement. This brilliant performance, along with a very small