CHAPTER SEVEN:
ARCHITECTURE AND THE VIOLATION OF SPACE
It is fitting that at
the centre of a monstrous house there be a monstrous inhabitant.
Jorge Louis Borges, The Book of Imaginary
Beings.
Introduction
In
the previous chapter we examined how the concept of structure was made
prerequisite to an organic conception of architecture; how that structural
conception of architecture and its relation to the other two aspects of the
Vitruvian Trinity was considered fundamental to the genesis of style and
architectural beauty by a small group of English architectural theorists. They
had absorbed the engineering traditions developing in their own industrializing
country; had assimilated relevant ideas alive in France and Italy and had found
a theoretical substructure extant in the mathematical analysis of pressures
confirmed by the archaeology of the Gothic as it was being performed in
Germany, France and England.
This chapter will take the argument
one stage further, examining how the concept of utility, in its various guises,
similarly cannot be dislodged from the Vitruvian trinity without violence; how,
in fact, utility is fundamental to Garbett's conception of architecture,
especially with regard to his aesthetics of architectural expression and the
consequent formulation of an architectural etiquette.
Utilitas
Utility
weaves itself into the fabric of English nineteenth-century architectural
theory on several levels. Traditionally utility constituted the way that architecture
sought to differentiate itself from the other fine arts. Architecture was, so
it was argued, first and foremost a useful
fine-art. Such fine distinctions automatically take us back to the revealing
deconstruction of oppositions such as uselessness and usefulness as talked
about earlier. Through the agent of use architecture
often attempted to gain in status relative to the other arts and crafts, or was
alternatively forced to lose it.
[1]
The usefulness of a building could reside in providing shelter for the owner or
the occupant for whom it provided a physical setting for certain activities.
Wider purposes, for which architecture had to assume a symbolic role in
society, were thought of as essentially separate to these physical needs. But
during the eighteenth century, especially in the France of J.F.Blondel and
Ledoux, architecture was consciously given a normative role in society. As a
consequence of this, architecture could also be used as a barometer of
civilization. This meant that the symbolic use of architecture could be
directly related to the other physical uses of architecture. This is what
Garbett attempted to do.
In the first chapter to his Treatise, Garbett defined good architecture
in terms of a projection into perfection of the three interdependent elements
of the Vitruvian triad: Firmitas, Utilitas and Venustas. In the preface to the
book Garbett anticipated that definition:
Architecture,
he wrote,...is the art of building
Well,-well as regards every purpose intended in building, and not only the
actual fitness of a building or its parts to their several purposes, but also
the fitness of their appearance thereto...[2]
This observation, in
which the concept of purpose or utility plays a central role, especially when it
is seen to stress the social purpose of architectural beauty, forces
architectural theory to turn back on itself. Architectural theory in fact
becomes indistinguishable from moral philosophy. In a recent article on the
architectural metaphor, John Onians investigated the way society constructs
itself using architectural activities to describe social, political,
philosophical and religious relations and structures.
[3]
With Garbett this process comes full circle. In the Treatise architecture is described in terms of social metaphors,
the concept of architectural selfishness and politeness illustrate this
clearly. One can speak of a process of reciprocation involving the exchange of
metaphors: Architecture is often used to explain society's relations and
structures but in Garbett's case this role is reversed, social qualities are
used to explain and prescribe qualities in architecture.
Garbett sees architecture as a way
to express belief in the purpose and progress of civilization, as a method to
further civilization. This had earlier been expressed by the seminal influence
on English architectural thought, namely Quatremère de Quincy who writes in his
Dictionnaire d'architecture of 1788,
that architecture is only possible in civilized society:
L'art de bâtir suivant
des proportions & des règles déterminées & fixées par la Nature &
le Goût. L'art de bâtir se trouve chez les peuples même sauvages; l'art de
l'architecture au contraire n'a pu être que le fruit de la société la plus
perfectionnée par la civilisation, par toutes les causes morales, par les
concours de tous les autres arts.
and
again:
L'architecture ne
commence à être un art chez les différens peuples où elle peut s'introduire,
que lorseque déjà ceux a sont parvenu à un certain degré de culture, d'opulence
& de luxe. C'est alors que, s'éloignant toujours de plus en plus des
travaux & des occupations rustiques, & s'enfermant dans les
villes, les hommes
cherchent à remplaces les plaisirs de la Nature qu'ils perdent de vue, par les
jouissances des arts qui en sont les imitateurs.
[4]
But
as we have seen, Garbett would not have found himself in Quatremère's
distinction between building and architecture. Nor would he have agreed, as we shall
see, with the assertion that savages are not capable of architecture. But most
architectural theorists, especially, Ruskin Quatremère de Quincy and Garbett,
shared the perceived connection between architecture and civilization, between
architecture and the need for its incorporation into a greater social purpose.
That is what motivated many of them to concern themselves with architecture in
the first place. Garbett specifically sought that connection in his definition
of architecture.
That definition became the basic ingredient in a sort of gnosis -a
salvational knowledge- in which the concepts and the prescriptions which follow
from those concepts become the symbols of an elaborate ritual, a form of magic
with the specific intention of promoting a specific attitude or emotion in the
architect or the spectator.
[5]
That attitude or emotion, in Garbett's case, served to further the process of
civilization through its architecture. Morality welded itself onto the concept
of good architecture in the sense that good architecture becomes prerequisite
to a healthy society.
The climate for such a broad purpose for architecture had been made much
earlier. Edward Gibbon had sketched the decline and fall of the Roman Empire,
using its architecture as a unit of measure to calibrate
decadence.
[6]
Every utopia started from a political structure which had its equivalent in
architectural forms determining the ideal geometry of specifically utopian
activities; ideal political structures had to be maintained by their
architectural forms. Architecture as the gradometer of social and political
relations was and still is the primary standard of measurement of any
civilization. Peter Legh, following Alberti, illustrates this directly by
emphasizing the moral even specifically Christian role of architecture in a
moral world.
[7]
Legh writes that it is the duty of every man to do everything in his power to
promote universal civilization, so that the promotion of architecture is a
necessary part of that program. This would, similarly have sounded as music in
the ears of James Fergusson whose Historical
inquiry into the true principles of beauty in art, more especially with
reference to architecture, (1849), had precisely this goal.
The reciprocation of cause and
effect between architecture and society is essential to Garbett's proof for the
necessity of architecture; a healthy society, or civilization cannot exist
without a similarly healthy architecture. Without architecture, civilization
would cease to exist. Without civilization, architecture would be impossible.
Utility
In
the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century,
the idea of utility played a central role in contemporary ethical thought
generally. For Jeremy Bentham the concept of utility became the keystone of his
philosophical system. But to appreciate Garbett's assimilation of this more
general concept of utility, it is necessary to go back to earlier links in the
chain of this development, notably to the ideas of the third Earl of Shaftesbury,
Frances Hutcheson and David Hume. Their thought, which had a seminal influence
on English art-theory, illustrate clearly how the disciplines of ethics and
art-theory both let the formulation of norms be preceded by a descriptive
aesthetics defining a society's icons and ideals.
For Shaftesbury and Hutcheson this had far-reaching implications, they
reinvigorated the desire for a link between appearance and the quality of moral
action, producing what may be described as a moral
functionalism.
[8]
Words such as fitness, aptness and propriety in their writings describe a
relationship between (social) form and function which, though Socratic in
origin, was more directly based on the immensely influential Ciceronian concept
of decorum.[9]
It was because of the broader European revival of the concept of decorum as well as
its centrality in the thinking of the Earl of Shaftesbury, that fitness had
become increasingly important to English art-theory during the eighteenth
century.
[10]
Burke, Hogarth and Reynolds, all of whom discussed the concept of fitness in
their writings, were all three direct influences on Garbett.
The moral philosophy of David Hume,
partly worked out in response to Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, attempts to trace
some of the implications of an aesthetics of utility by which civilization is
allowed to progress. We shall come back to this in due course.
The extension of
functionalism; the example of Palladio
To
understand the function of the concept of utility in Garbett's argument, we
have to return to the question which forms the thread of this inquiry and begin
by quoting in extenso the passage in
which that question occurs:
Why, are not
convenience and stability enough to constitute a fine building? -in other words,
Whence the necessity for architecture proper? 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 for luxury, and to admire the beautiful. This will not
do, because it is generally admitted that in all other arts, at least all other
useful arts, and in all objects of use, whether natural or artificial
(buildings alone excepted), the appearance of design, the correct adaptation of
means to an end, seems in itself to constitute beauty, and even a beauty of the
highest kind; so that those who have undertaken to investigate the laws of
taste in general, as applicable to all the arts, have commonly ended by
referring them all to this principle; in fact denying that beauty can
ultimately be distinguished from utility. Thus they say, that a piece of
furniture, or an utensil, appears well-formed, or well-proportioned, whenever
its form or these proportions are such as fit it best for the end it is to
serve; and that whenever, by deviating from this form or these proportions, it
becomes less fit for its purpose, so will it appear less beautiful. (...) Not
so, however, with buildings; they may be perfectly fitted to their purpose, and
yet not only devoid of beauty, but positively hideous and disgusting to the
eye. Indeed, they are always so, when really designed with no view
beyond utility and strength. If mere building, or engineering works, not
affecting architecture, ever appear pleasing or even inoffensive, it is because
they were intended and designed to please, and therefore are really
architectural, and their designers really architects.[11]
This passage plots
Garbett's exact attitude to a classic Socratic functionalism as applicable to
architecture.
[12]
Later in the Treatise Garbett would
confirm that the highest beauty is
fitness, even using the words beauty and fitness interchangeably. By this he
meant that beauty erupts from a symphonic play between form and its
cause.
[13]
The relationship between form and
function in which the idea of utility plays an emphatic role in architecture, had
become increasingly popular during the eighteenth century. The Abbé Laugier had
used "the first cause" of architectural forms such as the column to
justify their emphasis in contemporary architecture. This first cause was
reconstructed in a mythical tale of a noble savage with the intelligence of a
Deadalean demiurge. Any forms that were excluded from that cosmological
reconstruction of the origin of architecture, such as the pilaster were
rejected as derivative and therefore not belonging to architecture's essence. The concept of architecture
was reduced to first needs, the refinement of
bare necessities. Carlo Lodoli also determined form on the basis of
structural needs. Form had to be seen as structurally efficient. One can
recognize both ways of justifying form in Garbett's Treatise.
The point Garbett was making
however, is that these forms of functionalism could not be applied to
architecture without being qualified and extended:
Every structure that is
really planned on these utilitarian principles every one that is really
unarchitectural, is ugly, -not merely indifferent, but positively
offensive.
[14]
Garbett
does not reject functionalism as a suitable aesthetic dogma for architecture.
Nor is he prepared to make concessions to Ruskin's dislocation of the Vitruvian
trinity. The severance is precisely what makes something unarchitectural and those who attempt such distinctions are
actively involved in what he later calls anti-art, that
is, performing an unnatural act of artistic aggression.
[15]
Instead Garbett is imposing a hierarchy of functions to which architecture has
to answer. As architecture approaches semantic completion the elementary
concerns and needs of the individual for shelter and protection are dissolved
into the greater concerns and needs of the masses, of society generally.
Architecture's usefulness becomes increasingly generalized as we move up the
ladder of architectural beauty. The so-called higher reaches of architecture
play upon the so-called higher qualities of life, the higher uses, primarily intellectual and more
broadly beneficial to the processes of civilization as a whole.
At one level there is the primordial
need to provide shelter to various human activities, each of them with specific
geometrical and structural needs. That is a basic architecture, amply covered
by a classic functionalism. Pevsner's bicycle shed would qualify to be called
architecture on those grounds. Transcending that level of utility, the frame of
reference of a building is extended from its inhabitants and users to
incorporate the needs of the people always on the outside of the building. This
is a civic functionalism, concerned with the use of geographical, temporal,
political, economic and social identities. The battleground of this civic
functionalism is the elevation. The physiognomy of the elevation institutes
social difference and integrates that difference into the concept of beauty.
Palladio, to take Garbett's example,
would adjust the proportions of his buildings to indicate a studied
progression, not only satisfying what convenience required, but what it suggested,
meaning that he would make use of symbolic sizes in his architecture to
indicate differences in significance and thereby modulate value. It is a process
similar to the one used by Garbett's publisher to arrange the title-page of
Garbett's Treatise:
...where a mere
constructor would have made two things of the same kind equal, because
convenience and stability afforded no motive for making them unequal, this true
architect [Palladio] somewhat exaggerates one, and reduces the other to the least
dimensions that its use will allow, in order to carry out the beautiful
(because natural) principles of variety, subordination and contrast. Or again,
where an ordinary builder would have made certain divisions in the height or
breadth of a building equal, or varying according to no definite law, simply
because, in the first idea which occurred to him, the dimensions suggested by
convenience happened to be equal or irregular, this artist-builder by
consideration, and carefully distinguishing between what convenience required,
and what it suggested- would contrive, without sacrificing a particle of
convenience, so to adjust these dimensions as to make them exhibit a studied
variety, a contrast, a law of variation, a gradation, a progression a
proportion, a fanciful idea, a quaint trifle if you will. light as air in
itself, but weighty and valuable as an indication of mind, of
thought, of unnecessary design, of care bestowed on the spectator, and
therefore pleasing; or in other words, adding to the beauty of the building.[16]
Even
though convenience is to some extent limited by structural possibilities, it
dictates the division of space and mass. Most builders quietly submit to purely
utilitarian demands, varying spaces and masses on the basis of physical needs
alone or by way of an uncritical habit. In other words, most builders conform
to classic functionalist demands or to tradition. To become an architectural
quality, convenience has to confirm the relative values of a society by
emphasizing one space or mass at the expense of another, making every part of a
building conform to the vicissitudes demanded by social hierarchies. This is
done by the thoughtful application of symmetries and orders, which consequently
become part of a social aesthetics.
Garbett's Palladio assumes that the
inhabitants of his buildings constitute a community of separate but
interdependent beings. They live within a clear social structure, confirmed by
the relative sizes and emphasis of the various parts of the building. Every
part of the building has a clearly defined purpose, that purpose extends all
the way to the building's spatial and decorative iconography which confirms
relative values.
Palladio's architecture thus becomes
an architecture parlante, in a sense
very similar to Ledoux's designs for his ideal city of Chaux. Palladio's
architecture, in Garbett's interpretation of it, not only informs the outside world
about what goes on inside, it also directs and supplements physical barriers
such as walls and doors with psychological ones. Certain doors, because of
their size and because of their decorative emphasis, will only allow certain
persons to use them. Because of its symbolic content, form becomes socially
selective. Palladio's architecture exudes an emotive quality in order to guide
social intercourse and confirm social values. Such an architecture performs
magic in Collingwood's sense of the word, by dictating a social liturgy,
defining sacred spaces and setting them apart from the rest.
The violation of space
So
far we have explained that Garbett wants classic functionalism extended to
include architecture's iconographical and symbolic purposes. We have not yet
explained why. The thread of the argument presented here is the question why
Garbett believes we need architecture. According to Garbett that need is caused
by one single feature which distinguishes buildings from all other human
products. It is because of that single distinguishing feature that a classic
functionalism cannot be sufficient as a full theory of architecture,
particularly when architecture is consciously being asked to participate in
social intercourse. This distinguishing feature puts architecture at an
immediate and necessary theoretical disadvantage with regard to the other arts.
Buildings are subject to an inherent
ugliness:
whence the inherent
ugliness of buildings,
which it is the first object of `architecture proper' to correct? As there
seems nothing analogous to it in other useful arts, it must arise from some
evil peculiar to the nature of building, as distinguished from agriculture,
gardening, furniture, pottery & c.
In 1893 August Schmarsow
would connect architecture and space in a normative equation.
[17] From that
moment on, the spatial qualities of architecture would dominate its theoretical
substructure. To borrow Emerson's phrase, the concept of space would give an all excluding fullness to the object
and become the tyrant of the hour. There had been earlier anticipations of the equation between space and
architecture but they did not emphasize the same prescriptive possibilities of
Schmarsow's essentially painterly conception of architecture.
[18] Alberti had described the origin of architecture in terms of the
subdivision of spaces into public and private functions.
[19]
Garbett
also refers to space in his concept of architecture. Architecture sets itself
apart from the other arts through the philosophical collision between space,
(that is, its division or interruption), the several levels of utility and the
physiognomical working of the concept of property. The idea of space is
specifically used to emphasize the philosophical gap between nature and
culture. The products of human activity are seen as metaphysically separate
from the products of nature. That dichotomy, as we shall see, sets architecture
at an immediate disadvantage in a culture where the romantic worship of nature
has taken a firm foothold.
In
trying to find the cause for the inherent
ugliness of buildings, Garbett looks to Ralph Waldo Emerson. As a prelude
to an early statement of the machine aesthetic, Emerson's essay on
"Art" complains of
the selfish and even
cruel aspect which belong to our great mechanical works...
[20]
I cannot help
suspecting, writes Garbett, that these words touch the roots of the evil. Have we not here a clue
to the solution of the riddle? and is not an unarchitectural building ugly
simply because it looks selfish? It will be observed that the productions of
other arts have not this inherent defect: they are goods to their owners
without being defects to anyone. But a great building is, in certain respects,
a necessary evil: it shuts out from us air and light, and the view of beauteous
nature; it encumbers a portion of the earth's surface, and encloses a portion
of the free atmosphere. It has no right to do so, without making or attempting
what compensation it may for these injuries.[21]
The
evil in building is antecedent to any possible good because every building is
an obstacle in nature. Every obstacle is an evil for as long as it does not
compensate or resolve the obstruction it causes and make what amends it can for
its necessarily rude intrusion into
the natural creation. A building's quality as obstacle makes every building
subject to an inherent ugliness, a prepossessed evil. Ugliness, like pain, is
by Garbett to be considered similarly palpable and obstructive.
Ugly furniture does not constitute a
necessary evil simply because it is
avoidable. Furniture can easily be made to withdraw by being moved. A chair
does not impose itself on the spectator with the same inexorable compulsion as
a building. Every spectator is inevitably forced into submission by a
building's hard and immovable presence. Buildings by their very nature are
forced to thrust themselves upon the environment; they even inflate themselves
and by extension their owners towards those who do not need to enter the
building, who want nothing to do with the building. Most people experience
every building primarily as an obstacle. Nearly everything else thought up by
the mind of man has at least the element of choice woven into its existence.
Most things are made on a scale that they can be easily ignored. The only other
choice a building has, if it is to be avoided in any way, is not to exist at
all. In order to perform their function therefore, buildings have to divide and
intercept nature. For a building to lose its quality of inescapability is for
it to lose its nature, to be destroyed.
Garbett
chose this quality of obstruction as the point at which Architecture had to be
separated from the other arts and the point at which a simple or narrow
functionalism lost its suitability as an all-excluding paradigm for
architectural design.
That was new. No other theorist had
chosen the violation of nature and of free-space as the point at which
architecture distinguished itself from other human products. Nor had anyone
been so decisive about the nature of the relationship between a building and
it's environment before. Building, according to Garbett, was a metaphysical
deed. Buildings channel human activity, provide direction, define free space by
becoming obstructions within it. A building, to promote the health of society
had to avoid being a blood-clot.
Writing
in the year that Garbett's Treatise
was published, Schopenhauer reformulated and elaborated some of the central
ideas he had first expounded some thirty years earlier in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819). Schopenhauer is unlikely
to have been known to Garbett but he is all the more useful to illustrate the
peculiar character of the idea that the act of obstruction must be considered a
positive evil. In the section of Parerga
und Paralipomene (1851) which deals with the suffering of the world,
Schopenhauer compared normal life to the flow of a river. Pain or evil in that
description were defined as positive obstacles
to its easy flow. Evil, Schopenhauer
argues, is precisely that which is
positive, that which makes itself palpable, while the good is the negation of
that evil.[22] Garbett similarly sees the act of
obstruction as a palpable and positive evil.
No earlier architectural theorist
had been quite so pessimistic about the nature of buildings as Garbett.
Architecture constituted the profanation of nature. As a child of his times,
Garbett defined nature anthropocentrically as belonging to humanity as a whole. Therefore it was not nature so
much as humanity that had to be compensated by a building's inherent evil.
That compensation had to be in the
form of an architectural politeness. Politeness thus constituted the
translation of unavoidability and obstruction into its compensation. That
compensation had to be added to the concept of functionalism to make it
adequate as a theoretical dogma for architecture.
The first step towards
refinement, whether in language, manners, or any useful art, such as building,
consists in mere politeness, or the avoidance of the expression of
selfishness.
[23]
But
how is it possible for a building to be selfish? Does it live?
1.
William Chambers for instance: Amongst
the various arts cultivated in society, some are useful only, being adapted to
supply our natural wants, or assist our natural infirmities; others again are
instruments of luxury merely, and calculated to flatter the pride or gratify
the desires of man; whilst others there are, contrived to answer many purposes,
tending at once to preserve, to secure, to accommodate, delight and give
consequence to the human species. Architecture, the subject of our present
inquiry, is of this latter kind; and when viewed in its full extent, may be
truly said to have a very considerable part in almost every comfort or luxury
of life. Chambers (1826) p. 55.
5.
The word magic is taken from Collingwood (1938) p. 66: ..the similarity between magic and art are
both strong and intimate. Magical practices invariably contain, not as
peripheral elements but as central elements, artistic activities like dances,
songs, drawing or modeling. Moreover these elements have a function (...) they
are the means to a preconceived end,...this end is the arousing of emotions.
p. 65. and again The primary function of
all magical acts, I am suggesting, is to generate in the agent or agents
certain emotions that are necessary or useful for the work of living; their
secondary function is to generate in others ...emotions useful or detrimental
to the lives of these others.
7.
..an art which as
the chief of those arts, which are emphatically called the 'peaceful arts' is
highly calculated to lead the human mind, (which by its nature must be active
on something,) from war and bloodshed, to the contemplation of what will afford
unlimited, pleasing and useful occupation for the mind, nor, it seems to me,
can we sufficiently despise those, who, while speaking of the late improvements
in London, declared architecture an art only calculated to fan the vanity of
the world. I cannot help thinking, that the encouragement of an art, of so
elegant and fundamental a nature, and so full of endless variety, may be
productive of the greatest benefit of society, it may be laying the
corner-stone for a multitude of other arts of a peaceful nature, and perhaps,
if I may allude to Scripture in a secular work, for the commencement of that
period when they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears
into pruning hooks; when the nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more (Isaiah II,4.) and they shall build
houses and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat fruit of them;
they shall not build and another inhabit, they shall not plant and another eat.
(Isaiah, LXV, 21,22). Legh (1831) pp. ix-x.
8.
On the origin of the word functionalism see De Zurko (1957) and Joseph
Rykwert (1982) p. 117-118.
12.
De Zurko (1957) treats Garbett's relation to functionalism on pp.
140-144 & 221-222. First in relation to Ruskin and secondly in relation to
Horatio Greenough. On the Socratic origin of Functionalism see Xenophon's, Memorabilia, III, viii; Tatarkiewicz
(1980) p. 133.
13.
Therefore, when
you see a thing highly beautiful, beware of copying it till after mature
study; for the more beautiful (i.e. fitter) it may be in its situation, the
less likely fit for any other. In: Treatise,
p. 255.
17.
"Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung," Inaugural
lecture Leipzig, 1893; "Malerische gesichtspunkte in der Baukunst,"
Schmarsow (1897) pp. 5 - 10, quoted in T.A.P. van Leeuwen (1982) 88-92; see
also van de Ven (1978) pp. 90-93.
22.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1985) p.41: I
(...) know of no greater absurdity than that absurdity which characterizes
almost all metaphysical systems: that of explaining evil as something negative.
For evil is precisely that which is positive, that which makes itself palpable;
and good, on the other hand, i.e. all happiness and all gratification, is that
which is negative, the mere abolition of a desire and extinction of a pain.
The theme of comparing life to a river was particularly popular at the time as
a subject for representation. Ruskin compares life to a slowly cooling stream
of lava, cf. Seven Lamps, "The
Lamp of Life." § III, p. 177