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Chapel Street Hall, later known as the 'Church of Humanity', c. 1874. Courtesy of British Library of Political and Economic Science, London Positivist Society, 5/4.
Source publication
Positivism captured the Victorian imagination. Curiously, however,
no work has focused on the architectural history and theory of Positivist halls in Britain. Scholars
present these spaces of organised Positivism as being the same in thought and action throughout
their existence, from the 1850s to the 1940s. Yet the British Positivists’ inherently...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... the festi- vals of the Positivist calendar (Martineau 1858: 305-50). The guardianship's purpose was to devolve all Western empires into a global network of republican city-states. Congreve published the lectures in 1869, two years after the Positivists had moved into their first proper urban intervention, which was called Chapel Street Hall (Fig. ...
Citations
© 2021 All rights reserved for Pars University Press
This book is printed in Iran.
Title: History of Thoughts and Theories of Space Analytical Ontology of the Concept of Space from an Architectural Perspective Volume One: From Descartes to Ruskin
By: Ali Akbari
Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture, Faculty of Art and Architecture, Yadegar-e Imam Khomeini (RAH) Shahre Rey Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran.
Project Manager: Reza Aliloo
ISBN: 9786226893701
LCC: NA 2765
DDC: 720/1
National Library No: 8680046
Pars University Press
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Scholars of political thought, sociology, and the arts have yet to fully explore the impact of positivism on modernist design theory and practice. This paper offers an intellectual history of the works of three generations of positivist sociologists who built on each other's works. They are Auguste Comte and Richard Congreve, Frederic Harrison and Charles Booth, and Patrick Geddes and Victor Branford. These actors developed different types of sociological survey, established a network of urban interventions, and proposed a series of planning programs and manifestos. It will be argued that their intention was to systematically reconcile international and domestic issues to realize a modern eutopia. Following this analysis, it will be shown that a similar language and practice appeared in the work of a diverse range of such modernist designers as Patrick Abercrombie, Sybella Gurney Branford, Louis Sullivan, H. P. Berlage, and Le Corbusier, among others.
Historians of modern design and sociology have shown little interest in the leaders of the ever resourceful and influential British Positivist Society. One of the aims of this essay is to show that the Positivist polymath Frederic Harrison (1831–1923) cultivated ideas and practices that are compatible with modernists’ aspirations to improve the lives of the masses. It is accordingly shown that Harrison was an ardent supporter of working-class causes and that on this basis he developed sociological survey methods and produced social programmes to initiate the comprehensive reorganisation of cities. Harrison intended to realise a modern utopia called the “Occidental Republic”, created by Auguste Comte, the Positivist Philosopher who – during the 1830 and 1840s – introduced both sociology and the Religion of Humanity. While many studies pore over the Positivists’ “church” rituals, this essay is the first to argue that the Religion of Humanity and sociology were of equal consequence – and that together they formed the basis of their controversial spatial theory and practice, which was considered the means to realise Comte’s utopia. This vision, it is argued, is central to appreciating how Positivism percolated into the “modern movements” of architecture and planning.
