"A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture. Nearly everything that encloses space on a scale sufficient for a human being to move in is a building; the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal."
So wrote Sir Nikolaus Pevsner (1902—1983), the author, as Wikipedia states, of a "46-volume series of county-by-county guides, The Buildings of England (1951-74), one of the great achievements of 20th century art scholarship."
To order the latest editions of these celebrated guides, click here. And to hear one of Pevsner's Reith radio lectures about English art, click here.
Originally posted on An Aesthete's Lament on 5 December 2008.