Throughout the middle decades of the 19th century architects lacked a clear view of their role in the history of architecture. Nevertheless, William Butterfield and G. E. Street in England built magnificent urban churches quite unlike anything previously known; Alexander Thomson in Scotland and Henri Labrouste in France both produced masterworks of genuinely urban architecture for the bourgeois industrial cities. These might exploit technology and material, but without worrying about its being suitably clothed, or they might exploit the conventional language of architecture, but not become overanxious about the “right” style. At the same time an architecture with a rather different meaning beginning to appear in the history of architecture. Since the 1830s there had been powerful arguments (initially in England) for an “honest”, “organic” and “true” architecture, coupled with an anti-industrial mood which encouraged the use of sensible traditional detailing and commonsense forms. Windows, for example, could now be allowed to cluster as required, and be large or small according to the needs of each room, rather than being elements in the abstract geometry of a facade. The whole design of a building would be informed by the process of its production and by its intended occupation.

The ideas often produced better hooks than buildings, from A. W. N. Pugin’s True Principles (1842) via John Ruskin, Andrew Jackson Downing (in the USA) and William Morris to Viollet-Le-Duc’s How to Build a House (1874). Originally based on the precedent of medieval building, this stream of ideas was swollen by the Arts and Crafts Movement, centred around Morris, and the structural rationalism advocated by Viollet-le-Duc which was based on the concept that the best architecture grows directly from straightforward, logical building. Gradually the search for “a style” assumed a less central position and the copying of Gothic shapes died away, but these design principles held centre stage until the turn of the century. It was these concepts that formed the ideas of Norman Shaw and Philip Webb, then of William Lethaby, Baillie Scott and C. F. A. Voysey, of Parker & Unwin in England; of Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Scotland, Frank Lloyd Wright in America and many more.

The most influential book of the time, extolling the houses of the British domestic architects, was Hermann Muthesius’ Das Englische Haus (The English House), published in Berlin in 1904/5. After the First World War new designers took up Muthesius’s principles without relying on the images he had illustrated. These principles, such as “unassuming naturalness” and “absolute practicality”, where form responded to and intimated its use, both helped channel the notion of sachlichkeit (uneasily translated as “objectivity”) central to the work of Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus and led to the organic “functional” tradition of the German architects Hans Scharoun and Hugo Haring who talked, as had Lethaby, of “building” rather than of “architecture”.