PART III: THE BEAUTIFUL
NECESSITY, A STUDY OF THE POLITE
[1]
CHAPTER SIX: THE VITRUVIAN TRIAD
Well-read men are obsessed with
Politeness. Elias Canetti, Auto da Fe.
Evil only upsets people now and then, but
the visible signs of evil hurt them from morning until night.
Diderot, Rameau's Nephew.
Introduction
The
central problem of Garbett's Treatise
is contained in one question:
...whence the necessity
of architecture proper?
[2]
This
question forces the confrontation between a society and its architectural
setting. As a consequence the subject of architectural theory becomes
politically involved at this point. But answers to questions like the one just
quoted are invariably unstable and their value always relative. They cause
discourse to become permeated with contemporary and personal beliefs and
preoccupations. It is important to keep this in mind.
Similarly, when asking his reader to
consider the question why society needs architecture,
Garbett was just as concerned with removing the interference of effete explanations
concerning the nature and purpose of architecture as providing new ones
himself:
Observe it will be no
answer to say, that it is man's nature not to be satisfied with the supply of
necessities, but to seek luxury, and to admire the beautiful. That will not
do.
[3]
Man's nature,
qualified in Garbett's vocabulary to stand for an irreducible and instinctive
lust for luxury, is no longer able to satisfy as an explanation for society's need
for architecture. The concept of human nature had to be further qualified to
answer the questions which the concept of human nature begs: why is man not
satisfied with the supply of necessities, why does man admire the beautiful?
and especially: why does he appear to need
beauty? Those were the questions which now had to be answered.
On a very general level, the rules
of explanation had been altered in the nineteenth century. This was in great
part due to the rise of popular science. Recent developments in physiology and
psychology were able to take the process of explanation a step further and
Garbett wanted to make full use of these opportunities. The object of the
following section of this dissertation is threefold. Firstly it is to analyse
the question quoted above, dissecting the substructure of assumptions upon
which it rests. The second objective is to trace the answer Garbett prepared to
his own question and the last is to assess the implications of that answer on
architecture. The next four chapters of this dissertation will constitute an
analysis of the first chapter of Garbett's Treatise.
We start off with an inquiry into
Garbett's definition of architecture, investigating the semantic oppositions
erected to contrast architecture with its social opposite, mere building. This shows us what exactly it was that Garbett
wanted society to need. To analyse Garbett's concept of architecture we have to
look carefully at each of the three elements of the Vitruvian Triumvirate, Firmitas, Utilitas and Venustas. The
first chapter of this section tries to seek out the role played in Garbett's
definition by the concept of structure. The following chapter launches into an
investigation into Garbett's use of the concept of utility; the use of use.
That leads to a discussion on Garbett's Functionalism and its relation to
nineteenth century utilitarianism, ending up with the use of beauty and the
ethics of architectural space. The last chapter in this section assesses the
practical implications of the concept of an architectural politeness.
The definition of architecture
When
we begin to analyse the question, Whence
the necessity of architecture proper, we have to take account of the
assumptions upon which Garbett's view of the world rests. The questions begs
clarification on two points: a. What does Garbett mean with the word
architecture? The answer to that will describe an icon which will serve as the
foundation of all his prescriptions to architects. The second question, b., is related to the first, but focuses on the
word necessity: What are the premises which apparently make architecture an
social imperative?
Definitions of the word architecture are generally normative and even
prescriptive; they set up an icon of the good which is the first step of a
program in which specific actions are deducible from the premises contained
within that definition.
[4]
Every definition of architecture therefore relates theory to practice by way of
intentions. These intentions are not always the result of a discursive and
consistent logic where things would add up without reference to the social,
religious, political and philosophical circumstances in which the definition
arose. Every definition is in that sense a dogma, its constitutive elements are
made to add up by violence. In order to answer his own question therefore,
Garbett had to provide a definition of architecture which would imply, or at
least prepare for its social necessity. The aim of the present chapter is to
argue that that lead was provided by Garbett's organic conception of
architecture.
The quotation introducing the Treatise's first chapter entitled:
"Definition of architecture - its necessity, uses and requirements,"
is Sir Henry Wotton's well known paraphrase of Vitruvius: Well building, writes Wotton,
hath three conditions; Commodity, Firmness and Delight.[5]
That is also Garbett's point of
departure: Architecture, the latter
writes, is the art of well building; in
other words, of giving to a building all the perfection of which it is capable.
This differs in no respect from another definition lately put forth, `the art
of the beautiful in building;' for those who have undertaken to investigate the
abstract nature of beauty, appear not to have arrived at any more definite
conclusion than that it consists in perfection of any kind; so that, whether we
speak of the beauties of a building, or its perfections, we mean the same
thing. The term beauty is often restricted, in architecture, to those merits of
a building which are not necessary to its use, or its mechanical perfection;
and hence the classification of the aims of architecture under three heads-
Fitness, Stability, and Beauty. Nothing can be called architecture which does
not aim professedly at all these three objects...if there be any structure
which professes to embody only two of these requirements (no matter which two),
that is not architecture at all.[6]
Any analysis of this
passage must start with the last sentence. The one condition needed to make
architecture even possible, Garbett argues, is that Vitruvius' Firmitas,
Utilitas and Venustas must be seen as strictly interdependent. Each element in
that definition is seen as no more than a special case of the other. That
correlation is made possible through the use of the idea of perfections.
Perfection is here used as a meta-quality by which each one of the three
conditions of good building can be translated into the other.
[7]
The point was that perfections when made synonymous with beauty, as it had been
in the middle ages in the slogan Pulchrum
et perfectum idem est, would be able to lift beauty into the sphere of
social imperatives by being applicable to the other two conditions of good
architecture.
Architecture and the argument of design
Garbett's
use of the words purpose, design and perfection is closely dependent on
Christian logic. His concept of good architecture, with its insistence on perfections, its revelation of design and its emphatic deliberation of purpose, recalls the concept of deity.
The words design and purpose relate Garbett's architectural theory to theology,
more specifically to natural theology.
Natural theology has been
appropriately defined as the reasoned account of natural religion which, in
turn, is defined as man's conscious
recognition of purposive intelligence in the universe of things, similar to
that exercised by himself.[8]
Natural theology argues and generally accepts the existence of God not in the
first place through Revelation but as a hypothesis required by reason and
logical extension. It sets out to prove the existence of God by virtue of the
argument of design. As has already been mentioned in chapter 2, design and the
presence of a designer, can only be assumed on the basis of an analogy with
human industry. But natural theology is not just a reasoned account of religion,
it is an account of experience generally. The theologian expresses wonderment
at the intricacy and obvious purposiveness of nature and on that basis
expresses a need for God as nature's primary postulate to explain his
experience of nature.
Garbett's specified intention was to base the precepts for architectural
design on an analogy to nature, the second book of God. It is not for nothing
that Garbett talks of nature as God's language of symbols.
[9]
He is implicitly forced to take Gods existence as a given because it is only
the concept of God that can imbue nature with purpose. On that basis Garbett is
able distil a course of architectural action from his experience of nature.
Garbett's Treatise is therefore
related to natural theology in that it emphatically recognises the purposive
character of nature. Garbett provides what is essentially a reasoned account of
architecture's complete dependence on the phenomenological laws of nature. The Treatise is the architectural equivalent
of Paley's Natural Theology, proving
the existence of architectural principles, that is, the existence of absolute
standards for architecture on the basis of analogy between the creativity of
God and the creativity of man. In other words he turns the tables around. Where
Paley needed the evidence of human design to provide an analogy to prove divine
providence. Garbett uses divine providence to justify the existence of
architectural principles. Those absolute standards are represented by the
concept of perfection.
Perfectibility
Perfections,
with which Garbett completes the concept of architecture, are superlatives
projected beyond experience. In Judeo-Christian theology, especially as it was
infected by Platonic and Neo-Platonic thought, perfection stands for God.
Again, the logical basis for the consigning of certain attributes to deity lies
in the analogy between the concept of God and the (human) experience of his
product: nature. Garbett's definition of good architecture uses a very similar
model to project imaginable superlatives to which architecture must strive.
Those superlatives are only possible on the condition that the
Platonic/Neo-Platonic conception of the world is a truth, i.e. that perfection
is possible.
Having used the words purpose,
design and perfection in his definition of well-building, Garbett makes the
word architecture stand for the product of a providential activity. Good
architecture expresses a desire for purpose and demands a proof of that purpose
in appearance. The word design then, which is another word for purpose,
consciously relates each of the three conditions of well-building to each other
through its assumption of intentionality. The definition of architecture
therefore must cover all possible purposes and must remove architecture from
the separating activity which would have it reduced to mere decoration.
The
correlation between the three necessary conditions for well-building is a
continuation of the organicism hinted at in Garbett's preface. That organicism
had as its main objective the demonstration of the connection between beauty
and use or beauty and purpose, a theme which Ralph Waldo Emerson had already
elaborated in his Essay on Art:
Art, writes Emerson,
now in a critical spirit, makes the same
effort which a sensual prosperity makes; namely to detach the beautiful from
the useful, to do up the work as unavoidable, and, hating it, pass onto
enjoyment. These solaces and compensations, this division of beauty from use,
the laws of nature do not permit. (...) The art that thus separates itself is
thus separated.[10]
The
Kantian desire to separate beauty from use, that is from interest, would imply
a trivialisation of beauty into something optional and luxurious. It tends to separate
from content. To counter this trivialisation Garbett had to join the growing
clamour in the world of architectural theory which actively opposed the
insidious act of separation which divided architecture from building.
Architecture versus building and useless
versus useful
The
problem with Ruskin's Seven Lamps of
Architecture, as far as Garbett was concerned was precisely the attempt to
sever beauty from use by trying to
distinguish architecture from building. Their separate and contrasted existence
would instigate the destruction of architecture.
Ruskin's justification for making the distinction between architecture
and building in the opening lines to "The Lamp of Sacrifice" does not even
attempt to hide the underlying motives.
[11] By
themselves the two words -architecture and building- already differ
sufficiently for there to be no real reason to insist on an emphatic hierarchy
of meaning. Even so, Ruskin forces them into différance for the
sake of his program. [12] He needs two forms of architecture, a greater and a lesser. That is why
he sets architecture and building up as supplementary opposites. First he brings
the words together by pointing out their semantic vicinity. Then he separates
the two words again after contaminating each with a value relative to the other.
Ruskin is a particularly good example of Nietzsche's evaluator, he practices a
Machiavellian linguistics in which the motto is: distinguish and rule.
[13]
The key word in his definition of
architecture, and therefore in his distinction between architecture and
building is fine. Architecture
proper, writes Ruskin, must not be allowed to squander, by loose nomenclature, its status as a fine art. The distinction between fine-arts and arts, between arts
and crafts is primarily a social division, its philosophical division is
instituted at the desire for arts to separate itself. Ruskin's definition of architecture is shaped
by the wish to avoid the cris-crossing of social strata's.
[14]
Ruskin uses the word uselessness to describe the added feature
which distinguishes architecture from building. He does not, of course, really
mean uselessness. He wishes to use
the word useless to indicate a certain refinement of usefulness. It is an aristocratic uselessness he alludes to, a fine uselessness, a use which confines
itself to higher preoccupations
similar to Kant's concept of dis-interest. Plain usefulness, in Ruskin's
dictionary, has all to do with sweat and physical labour. The hierarchy of
values by which usefulness is graded and described is crowned by the negation
of itself: the highest form of use is uselessness, that is an intellectual and
moral usefulness. Ruskin's attempt to tie down the meaning of architecture more
precisely is intended to exclude from the word's circumference what Garbett was
later to describe as the lower beauties
of architecture. The word Architecture had to be kept free from any
undesirable social contamination.
The distinction between building and
architecture was instituted at around the same time as architecture was
undergoing a process of professionalisation. For many architects the
distinction between architecture and building was motivated by social or
professional ambitions. Architects wanted to be associated with a particular
sort of intellectual
activity, not so much with the groundwork. Ruskin's distinction between
architecture and building fortuitously overlapped with the social concerns of
architects. Ruskin's distinction between architecture and building was however
more directly concerned with establishing an icon of architecture modelled on
the metaphysical hierarchies of Platonism and related Christian thinking. Ruskin
wanted to stress architecture's intellectual "higher" status. Architecture was
separate from all that was low and manual. Art was concerned exclusively with
beauty, and beauty, to the Platonic man is an independent quality, absolute,
irreducible, divine and isolated: a static form, well removed from the hustle
and bustle of everyday life, where beauty had been expressly
forbidden.
[15]
The organic interdependence of the Vitruvian triad, making beauty dependent on
what Ruskin had just rejected as building, would thus be a disintegrating
influence on that sense of absolute beauty. Such an approach to architecture
would make architectural beauty a relative value and destroy the Platonic ideal
to which we know Ruskin subscribed.
Garbett's insistence on the
interdependence of Wotton's or rather Vitruvius' three conditions of
well-building, leads him to reject the polarising tendencies of his age:
The distinction between architecture and
building is a distinction of very recent origin; for it is an idea quite
peculiar to the present age, and nearly confined to the English nation, that
building may be unarchitectural. Never, till very lately, was the notion
entertained of erecting buildings professedly with no design beyond convenience
and stability. I say professedly,
because a very slight examination will, in most cases, detect the complete
hollowness of this profession, and will beget a doubt whether, in any case, the
pursuit of these two ends alone, to the exclusion of every other, is really
possible in the nature of man. Without pretending, however, to decide whether
this is possible or not, we may observe that the mere proposal of it necessarily
removes the design in which it is proposed entirely out of the province of
architecture; and thus it happens that we have at present in England (what was
never thought of before or elsewhere) a large amount of building which is not
architecture, or at least pretends not to be so. As many profess then to build
"without any attempt at architecture," there has hence arisen a habit of
restricting the term Architecture to that which they do not attempt,-viz., to
those objects of well building which are not included in or essential to use and
stability. Now, this is a most pernicious habit, calculated to lower while it
affects to raise the sphere of the art; tending, in fact, to reduce it...to
decoration, and its professors to mere decorators. The art which engrossed great
part of the attention of a Phidias, a Michael Angelo, and a Wren, and the whole
mind of a Palladio, is something more than decoration.
[16]
The passage anticipates,
and to some extent exposes, the logical problems that Pevsner would later get
into when, following Ruskin, he wanted to divide architecture and building along
a line vaguely intersecting the connection between Lincoln Cathedral and the
sadly unwanted bicycle shed.
[17]
It is not that Garbett wants to do away with such hierarchies. To put a bicycle
shed on the same level as Lincoln Cathedral would have been a provocation also
to him. Garbett was certainly not less of a snob, if snob is the right word,
than Ruskin or Pevsner.
Structure and genesis: John Robison and
Alfred Bartholomew
In
order to prove the use of beauty, the whole concept of architecture had to be
reconsidered so that the aesthetics of architecture could be seen to be based
on qualities that were integrated in the whole substance of the building rather
than those merely grazing its surface. Garbett was certainly not the first to
attempt this.
The division between architecture
and engineering had become a progressively complicated issue during the
nineteenth century. This was largely due to the tortuous attempts to justify
that division conceptually. As the gap between the two disciplines widened, a
small number of theorists became aware of the dangers inherent in such a
division. They argued that although the architects had initiated their own
isolation, they themselves were ultimately going to be the worse off for it.
This line of normative thought, through three successive generations was
represented by Samuel Ware, Alfred Bartholomew and Edward Lacy Garbett. One
thing they had in common was their enthusiasm for the writings of John Robison,
the Scottish professor of mechanics and the author of an impressive series of
articles on mechanical engineering and architecture for the 3rd edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.[18]
Robison had formulated the idea that structure was the originating and
providential principle of every aspect of architecture, including the aesthetics
of architectural form. He may well have arrived at this formula through indirect
knowledge of Carlo Lodoli, either via the engineer Robert Mylne or Giovanni
Poleni.
[19]
He will also have been influenced by the architectural mathematicians
Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke. Wherever he got the idea from, Robison's
followers sought to reunite the two disciplines of architecture and
engineering. They believed that a return to a structural approach to
architecture would eventually bring contemporary practice to develop a system
of building as self-consistent, as pure as the architecture of the Greeks and the
Gothicists; a system where even the decorations were derived from a single
unifying structural principle. This idea had also been forwarded by two
antiquaries and scholars of architecture William Whewell and Robert Willis. In
Germany the idea had been worked out by Bötticher and Hirt, to teacher's at
Schinkel's Bauakademie.
[20]
Garbett's exact relationship to Bötticher is unclear. Some of the resemblances
between their ideas are too striking to be ignored, suggesting either that
Garbett knew of Bötticher's Die tektonik
der Hellenen, Berlin 1874 (1844-52) or that Bötticher knew of the latest
developments in English theory, having consulted Bartholomew, Willis or even
Robison.
Whatever the case regarding
Bötticher, Garbett's merit was to distil from Alfred Bartholomew's treatment of
structure in his On the Decline of
Excellence in the Structure and in the Science of Modern English Buildings[21]
the idea that a new style of construction would lead to a complete, pure and
uncontaminated style of architecture. For Bartholomew structure was the single
most important explanatory principle of his world; it embodied an aesthetic
from which every other criterion or quality, such as style, beauty, goodness,
truth and above all purity could be distilled:
I hope to be able to prove satisfactorily
to most candid and inquiring minds, THAT PURE TASTE IN ARCHITECTURE HAS IN PAST
AGES BEEN PURELY STRUCTURAL; and that a departure from this wisdom is the
true cause of the TASTE (or to speak more properly the WANT OF
TASTE) in modern architecture being so VARIABLE, SO
CAPRICIOUS, SO MUCH QUARRELLED ABOUT, SO MUCH QUESTIONED, AND SO
SHORT-LIVED.
[22]
Bartholomew
declared Gothic architecture to be the apogee of a refining philosophy in which everything superfluous was cut away to
produce pointed arches by necessity.[23]
The possibility of necessitarian design by instituting the concept of structure
as the organising principle of architecture constituted a forceful attraction
to Garbett. Emerson had similarly insisted on necessity as the
agent of purpose linking cause and effect. [24]
Structure as the causal principle of architecture promised a cogency and a
self-consistency which could beat off the loose and seemingly arbitrary appeal
of skin-deep nostalgic fashions in style. Structural necessity binds processes
to a purpose and gives their formulation into prescriptions something
scientific, something positive.
Because of the necessitarian causality structure makes possible, it
becomes a religio-scientific concept in Bartholomew's thinking, binding the
processes of the world into one omniparous system. By establishing a direct link
between form and function, structure is allowed to determine every aspect of
architecture even its historical development.
[25] Once
Bartholomew was able to explain that, he turned around to the architectural
establishment of his own time and stuck his finger deep into the wound,
accusing architects of not being concerned with structure but with peripheries
such as the mere outward forms, the pelleterie of
architecture, as he called it, that is, only the visible aspects of
style.
[26]
The cause of the problem, according to Bartholomew, was language. The
misconception of what constituted the essence of architecture in modern England
could be reduced to talking about architecture using the wrong
language.
[27]
Those architects and writers who were not conversant with structure as the sine qua non, the very essence of all
architecture, talked of architecture using heretical categories. The
contemporary crisis in architecture was, as far as Bartholomew was concerned,
caused by ignorance of the fact that structure constitutes the metaphysical basis of architecture. One
can even go further than that. Structure was not only the grammar of
architecture, in Bartholomew's world it was seen as the grammar of existence
generally. The Vitruvian trinity was to be seen as a divine principle which
spoke the language of the Almighty!
...convenience, adaptation to the purpose,
duration, and the other cardinal properties (...) are to be found in all the
works of the Almighty[28]
Architecture
is but a special distillation of a ubiquitous architectonic. An architectural
crisis erupts as soon as this principle, this rigidity, is lost sight, that is,
when architecture is thought of in terms of wrong categories, such as artistic principles and unnecessary names. Artistry in
architecture, by which he means ornamental clothing, stands for a form of
decadence as the result of a blatant mistake of category. Because of this,
everything in modern architecture oozes a progressive decline relative to the
perfections of both Greek and Gothic firmitas.
Once architecture was no longer thought of in terms of the architectonic, but
in terms of visual effect etc. decline ensued: by necessity.
The programmatic similarity between
Bartholomew's essay on the decline of architecture in England and Emerson's
essay on Art is striking. Both are
concerned with the prevention of aesthetic insulation, with the abolition of a
distinction between, in very general terms, form and substance, beauty and its
causal substructure, its purpose. Their common concern provided the groundwork
for Garbett's two architectures: an architecture of surfaces, of hollow
appearances, and an architecture of deeper causes, based and built on
principles. Confining one's precepts to the copying of forms, creates a
nostalgic but shallow historicism of surfaces. A penetration through the first
into the second by causal analysis will ultimately show a way forward, a real
progress.
How
then does Garbett use the word architecture
proper, quoted at the beginning of this chapter?
All that relates to the
appearance of buildings and their parts has been termed architectural design, or
sometimes, "architecture proper," as not being reducible to the principles of
any other art. (...) The present treatise is intended to confine itself to this,
as far as it can be separated from the other branches, which, however
(especially as regards the branch of construction), is not always
possible.
[29]
This
passage is meant as a development of Ruskin's use of the phrase architecture proper.[30]
When read in the light of the last sentence just quoted, architecture proper
stands for that part of architecture where utilitarian and constructional needs
have already been incorporated into the development of an aesthetics of architecture.
Architecture proper now has to concern itself with the visual refinements of
those necessities. With Ruskin architecture proper stood for the severance of
architecture from building. Ruskin demanded the complete bisection of socially
graded activities. Building was concerned with physical necessities,
Architecture with intellectual and moral ones. As far as Garbett was concerned
the severance of beauty from construction, of the physical from the
intellectual and moral was not always
possible. This was in fact an understatement. While reading the text, it
soon becomes clear that such a severance was never possible. With every precept
Garbett formulated, the correlation between the three conditions of
well-building was re-emphasised and strengthened. Whenever Garbett used the
phrase architecture proper it had
always be understood to incorporate architecture's roots in social purpose and
structure. Even so, Garbett does concede different gradations in architecture
proper. Where Garbett speaks of the lower
beauties of architecture, Ruskin would speak of mere building.
To
recapitulate, the concept of architecture was sharpened to a program whereby it
was possible to integrate beauty with all the purposes of architecture. The
separation of the concept of beauty from use and therefore from other
conditions of good architecture such as adequate construction would lower
architecture instead of making it more superior. Only a fully integrated
definition of architecture, whereby everything is interrelated would make
architecture a social imperative rather than a mere luxury.
1.
The
phrase: beautiful necessity is taken
from Claude Bragdon (1978). He took the phrase, rather appropriately in the
present context, from Emerson: Let us
build altars to the beautiful necessity.
5.
Henry
Wotton (1624) Part I. cf. Vitruvius: Haec
autem ita fieri debent, ut habeatur ratio firmitatis, utilitatis, venustatis.
Granger ed. I, iii, 2.
7.
The
notion that beauty constitutes perfection can be traced back to Greek
philosophy where ethics and aesthetics were combined in the concept of beauty,
where beauty made up part of yet another philosophical trinity: Beauty,
Goodness and Truth; beauty being the signature of truth and therefore good. The
actual synonymity of beauty and perfection can be traced to the Medieval Pulchrum et perfectum idem est. W.
Tatarkiewicz (1980). I have also consulted John Passmore (1970).
11.
It is very necessary, he writes, in the outset of all inquiry, to
distinguish carefully between Architecture and Building. To build, -literally
to confirm,- is by common understanding to put together and adjust the several
pieces of any edifice or receptacle of a considerable size. Thus we have church
building, ship building, and coach building (...) but building does not become
architecture merely by the stability of what it erects; and it is no more architecture
which raises a church, or which fits it to receive and contain with comfort a
required number of persons occupied in certain religious offices, than it is
architecture which makes a carriage commodious, or a ship swift. I do not, of
course, mean that the word is not often, or even may not be legitimately,
applied in such a sense (as we speak of naval architecture); but in that sense
architecture ceases to be one of the fine arts, and it is therefore better not
to run the risk, by loose nomenclature, of the confusion which would arise, and
has often arisen, from extending principles which belong altogether to
building, into the sphere of architecture proper. Let us therefore, at once
confine the name to that art which, taking up and admitting, as conditions of
its working, the necessities and common uses of the building, impresses on its
form certain characters venerable or beautiful, but otherwise unnecessary.
Thus, I suppose, no one would call the laws architectural which determine the
height of a breastwork or the position of a bastion. But if to the stone facing
of that bastion be added an unnecessary feature, as a cable moulding, that
is architecture. It would be similarly unreasonable to call battlements or
machicolations architectural features, so long as they consist only of an
advanced gallery supported on projected masses, with open intervals beneath for
offence. But if these projecting masses be carved beneath into round courses,
which are useless, and if the headings of the intervals be arched and
trefoiled, which is useless, that is Architecture. It may not be always
easy to draw the line so sharply, because there are few buildings which have
not some pretence or colour of being architectural; neither can there be any
architecture which is not based on building, nor any good architecture which is
not based on good building; but it is perfectly easy, and very necessary, to
keep the ideas distinct, and to understand fully that Architecture concerns
itself only with those characters of an edifice which are above and beyond its
common use. J. Ruskin, Seven Lamps,
pp. 31-32)
14.
Ruskin's desire to have everyone socially clearly stratified and
recognisable in their status, is well known. cf. for example Praeterita, Vol. i, Chapter 1
17.
Both Ruskin's definition and Pevsner were recently Juxtaposed in Hyman and
Trachtenberg (1986) p. 41. For Pevsner's definition of architecture see the
intr. to his Outline of European
Architecture, many editions. The logical problems of this definition have
been discussed by T.A.P. van Leeuwen (1982) 1-7.
19.
Lodoli's ideas had gained wider currency in Italy from where they had
indirectly infiltrated England, particularly through the rather problematic
interpretation of Francesco Algarotti. Lodoli's disciple Francesco Algarotti
was a well-read author in England, his various popular explications of
Newtonianism running into several editions. A treatise on Painting which was
published in 1764, was also translated into English. His Saggio sopra l'architettura of 1753 was surprisingly never
translated into English. I have never come across a mention of Memmo's Elementi d'Architettura Lodoliana in the
architectural theorists I have consulted. see also Edgar Kaufmann Jr. (1966) p.
159-175; Joseph Rykwert (1976) 21-26, reprinted in Rykwert (1982) pp. 115-122;
Rykwert (1980) pp. 288-337 as well as Rykwert (1981) pp. 49 ff.; Greenough's
connection with Lodolian functionalism and his admiration for Garbett in the
same breath may represent two branches of the same historical development
re-fusing. cf. Georg Germann (1987) pp. 214-223; Kruft (1985) pp. 179 ff. Lodoli's connections with English thinking
are tenuous however and because of his own Socratic reluctance to publish, his
ideas have been heavily polluted. Only the engineer Robert Mylne has hitherto
been incontrovertibly identified as one of his disciples in England. Eileen
Harris (1987). Bartholomew and Ware certainly were well-acquainted with the
works of Robert Mylne; having said that, Bartholomew did not include the
particular pamphlet in which Mylne expressed his own debt to Lodolian ideas in
his Bibliography. John Robison, through his mechanical interpretation of
architectural form was similarly well-acquainted with Mylne's ideas, using his
works as illustrations to his own arguments, so that a connection between a
watered down version of Lodolian functionalism and the
Robison-Ware-Bartholomew-Garbett lineage of English architectural structuralism
certainly cannot be discounted. Furthermore, Francesco Milizia's absorbtion of
Algarotti's interpretation of Lodoli would certainly have worked their way
through to Garbett who quoted Milizia extensively on several relevant issues.
At the same time another dubious link is indicated by Bartholomew's wild
enthusiasm for Piranesi: The astonishing
labours of this wonderful artist engraver and architect, will ever excite
admiration: every architect should have always beside him in his study, some of
the very best of Piranesi's engravings, in order to banish from his mind every
inroad of meanness, either in design or drawing. (...) more insight into the
construction of the Roman buildings, may be gathered from Piranesi's
delineations, than from any other published works. In: Specifications, § 196-197.
21.
Bartholomew was probably the
first to enumerate a principle now generally accepted by writers on art, viz.
that the condition of true taste in architecture have always been intimately
associated with those of structural excellence, and that, whenever the latter
have been disregarded, the former have suffered in consequence. Eastlake (1970) p. 215. See
also G. Germann (1972) p. 128; Pace (1942) pp. 99-102 and Pevsner (1972) pp.
86-94. Alfred Bartholomew's Specifications
was first published by John Williams in 1840. The preface is dated 1839. The
second more common edition (which I have used) came out with the same publisher
in 1846. Later it enjoyed renewed popularity when it was reissued in 1872.
Incidentally the same date as Eastlake's A
History of the Gothic Revival was published. The issue in 1872, was not,
however a mere reprint, the new title may serve as an indication to the degree
which Bartholomew no longer was himself: Specifications
for Practical Architecture..With an Essay on the Structure and science of
Modern Buildings Upon the Basis of a work by A. Bartholomew, Thoroughly
revised, corrected and greatly added to by Frederick Rogers, 8o. pp. 415.
It was published by R.A Sprigg, Atchley & Co., London 1872. This edition
obviously met demand as it was reissued by Lockwood & Co. (the same
publishers who issued the later editions of Garbett). A second revised addition
with further additions was published in 1886 and a third in 1893.
24.
For example, when Emerson writes that No man can quite exclude this element of Necessity from his labour.
Emerson (1883) p. 77.
25.
All these points of structure
were the keys to everything else in architectural design: excellence of
workmanship, intrinsic material, and the wisest structure of the time, were
united with such artfulness, and with such beauty of thinking, that the several
styles of architecture in different ages and in different countries were as
highly wrought and beautiful as they were distinct, and were constantly
progressing in science, with the exception of those minor fluctuations which at
times threw art back for a season, till it revived and throve again more
beautifully.
In: Specifications, § XXVI.
27.
I know that this doctrine [of
structure as the basis of architecture] cannot be understood by the superficial
un-architectural writers upon architecture and upon architectural taste; to
them convenience, adaptation to the purpose, duration, and the other cardinal
properties which are to be found in all the works of the Almighty, and which
every wise man endeavours to imitate in his buildings, pass for coarseness and common-place
vulgarity; they forget that all the inventions in Architecture have resulted
from the calls of necessity and utility; the discoverers of them designing and
elaborating as new wants demanded their efforts: under this feeling, they
produced works in the highest degree artistic, without claiming to be artists;
while all the works which have been professedly undertaken upon artistic
principles, to the conformation of which no motives of structure have led, and
consisting only of old inventions worked up afresh, (but of necessity
degenerate as all secondary works are,) have been constantly questioned upon
the very artistic grounds upon which they were professedly formed. The
unstructural pretender to architecture, gives names to that which he would have
us imagine to be taste; he would surprise the ignorant with a confusion of
classical terms. Bartholomew, Specifications, §
XXVIII-XXIX. W.H. Leeds is singled out as the main representative of this class
of critic, even though: he can perhaps be
least quarrelled with, than most upon the score of some of his opinions with
regard to external forms, the Pelleterie of architecture. But this
does not stop Bartholomew throwing Leeds’ own words back into his face: No doubt this gentleman himself gives very
wholesome advice when he says, ‘No doubt shallow smatterers, superficial
dabblers, half educated pretenders, ought to be exterminated.’ Specifications, § XXX. The quotation
comes from Leed’s Essay on Modern
Architecture. (Which I have not been able to consult) The fault Leeds is
made to represent is a common one, he does not allegedly know what he is
talking about, Bartholomew continues: It
is a sad penalty for a man of ability to pay, a harsh squeezing in the
parturition into public notoriety, to join those far gone in architectural
shallowness who depreciate a knowledge of masonry and the intrinsic means by
which have been constructed all the existing Buildings upon which could
have been formed his taste and theirs: were I to go to him in his old capacity
in the book-trade and to deride the structure of his day-book or ledger, or
insult his knowledge of the fabrick of different kinds of paper, or speak
flippantly of his knowledge of Pica and Nonpareil, he would perceive
immediately the folly and impertinence, and would not scruple to tell me that
my idle tongue is active upon a subject which I do not understand.
[29] Treatise, p. iii-iv
[30] Treatise, p. 2-3.