CHAPTER FOURTEEN:
THE DISSECTION OF TRUTH AND PURITY
Truth is content, when it comes into the
world to wear our mantles, to learn our language, to conform itself as it were
to our dress and fashion...it speaks with the most idiotical sort of men in the
most idiotical way, and becomes all things to all men.
John Smith, Discourses, 1673.
Society sails through the infinitude on
Cloth. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus.
Nobody with a good car needs a
justification. John Huston,
Wise Blood.
Introduction
There
can be no such thing as a truthful or honest architecture existing by itself.
If one asks an architecture to be truthful, pure or honest, one is asking stone
to wear our clothes. Truth with reference to the inert and inanimate, can at
most be an index of the relationship between man and his buildings.
From the middle of the eighteenth century the ideas of truth, veracity,
honesty and their opposites such as deception, the lie and the falsehood play an
increasingly important role in architecture.
[1] Why was
this? What were the assumptions needed for a truthful architecture?
In this chapter, which deals with
the second half of the fourth chapter in Garbett's Treatise, I shall argue that the increasing concern with truth in
architecture from the eighteenth century onwards is linked to the desire for a
personally defined external reality.
Stylistic truth and purity preceded other design strategies against the
arbitrary such as industrial standardisation and empirical averages. But the
concepts of truth and honesty as abstractions of an external reality were still
linked to a theological paradigm. Despite its reputation for nihilism,
modernism accepted those abstractions wholeheartedly without consciously
accepting the assumptions upon which they were based. If issues such as truth
and honesty, purity etc., became important elements in the ethics of modern
design then that was because modern architecture was never freed from the
residues of another world order which it tried to overcome. In fact those very
residues became the main justification of modernism in its attempt to rid
itself of history. What had been forgotten is that architectural truth and
honesty had been conjured up to come to terms with the stylistic pluralism of
the historicists. To explain Garbett's use of the words truth, purity and
honesty, is to show how the translation from metaphysical to normative truth
was effected and how the metaphysical assumptions went completely unquestioned.
Truth as a way of talking
The
dilemma of style introduced by figures such as Horace Walpole during the middle
years of the eighteenth century, sublimated the concept of truth so that it
came to designate a formal consistency categorising national and temporal
identities. There was Englishness and Frenchness, manners and styles. In
calling them true they became types. Truth, in this sense, really meant type.
Because of the process cell division called historical differentiation, the
choice in available historical styles, and therefore of types, increased
dramatically during the nineteenth century. This led to a problem. The
profusion of types prevented the nineteenth century from seeing their own type.
Within this atmosphere the continuous redefinition of style in the face of this
onslaught of styles became an increasingly important process in the formulation
of design norms and justifications. The word style became the focus of
architectural discourse, the tyrant of
the hour, the medium towards the new.
Style was something you had to own.
Modernism erupted from this obsessive concern with the ownership of style. Modernism, as Reyner Banham has
shown, was to a large extent a formal creation, a creation of forms abstracted
from a wide diversity of deeper concerns. A number of theorists in the
nineteenth century, the cauldron in which a desire for the modern in terms of
an ownable style became so traumatic, believed the concept of style (which they
had only just invented) to have been already hollowed out by the emphasis on
surface treatment and the use of ornament. For some reason clothing structure
had become less and less acceptable. In the profusion of possible styles, they
felt there to be a lack of style. In the profusion of possible surfaces the
supposed lack of substance became acute. That was the cliché. In fact the
surface had become the substance, but they were not going to admit that. It was
felt, by many, that the historical styles were being subjected to gross
trivialisation by being badly applied. Truth became the authentic. It was felt,
by some, that the styles of the past simply did not belong in the nineteenth
century. Truth as the authentic became the complement to a separate identity.
Some took this a step further and were not satisfied with the fact that the
forms pertaining to each style were being categorised only according to time,
place and social function. They wanted these forms related to causal
principles, such as structure or culture, that is technology in the service of
vision.
Reading
through the architectural theories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
who were concerned with this reduction of truth to cause, one gets the general
impression that architectural truth was primarily defined by the individual
theorist's loyalty to a theory, a causal principle he had isolated with regard
to a particular style, and very little beyond that. No cynicism is intended
here, loyalty to that causal principle was paramount as it provided normative
discourse with a measure of consistency. The word truth as it appeared when
theorists were talking about causes, really stood for loyalty to a cause.
Loyalty to a cause discourages
hybridisation and discourages relativity. The concept of architectural purity
was born out of loyalty to an account of architectural origins. Each theorist,
therefore, was in a position to define his own purities. Even hybridisation
could be made pure if it was seen as a super-factional syncretic ideal. That
was the case with Eclecticism. Eclecticism tried to institute its own purities
by collating the impure and unifying it into a system. It never managed to
succeed fully, always having to defend itself against the charge of being a mixed style. The hybridisation of styles
could be considered wrong as long as some form of national or temporal,
functional or structural purity could
be presupposed. This was made all the more easy with the truth which stood for
structural cause.
In the end truth really stood for
persuasion. A truthful architecture convinces on the basis of premises shared
between the maker and the beholder. For the last two hundred years theorists
have been able to convince the general public that a truthful or honest
architecture is philosophically possible. It is a remarkable feat of logical
coercion.
Garbett
truly believed that those shared premises indicated a universal and timeless
validity. For him truth was something tangible, existing outside the mind like
absolute forms. Garbett's concept of truth in architecture was the product of
his view of the world as a rigid, complex structure which could be overcome and
standardised by the refinement of language. Truths represented values which
made possible a natural and permanent language of nature which was also
applicable to architecture. Truth represented a corpus of assumptions which
related the owner to the perceiving subject through the artefact. This implies
that the concepts of truth and purity in architecture were further affected by
the psychology of associationism. This is indeed so, truth in architecture
consisted in a building's ability and skill to make the perceiver follow the intended direction of a particular train
of thought. The idea was that that train of thought could be controlled by the
forms and the setting of the building. As such, truth in architecture has to be
understood as one of the implications thrown up by the concept of character and
working itself out.
Truths I: Truth of character
Garbett's
text reveals three basic variations in the use of the word truth. The first
idea conforms to the idea of honesty, integrity or sincerity. Truth in this
context is merely a question of veracity. An architectural assertion such as a
wall proclaiming that it is made of marble, must, in order to be truthful, be
made of marble. True art should not try to deceive. The notion that art was
essentially illusionistic was rejected by Garbett who once again let Reynolds
speak for him:
Connected with the error
that imitative art consists in the imitation of what is commonly called nature,
i.e. of particular or individual nature, is also the most destructive notion
that its perfection is to "deceive the eye"
[2]
The whole truth-debate
may be seen as part of a Platonic urge in Garbett's aesthetics with its
hostility against mechanical copyism. It is not surprising therefore that
Garbett was quite happy to follow Ruskin on the subject of veracity as set down
in the "Lamp of Truth".
[3]
Garbett rehearsed all of the former's well-known arguments about gilding,
marbling etc., demanding that the material should not be asked to sacrifice
it's own character to
appear too much like something it is not.
[4]
Garbett, however, departed from
Ruskin's authority with regard to the application of natural forms in architecture. This was primarily because
Garbett's principle of imitative generalisation and exaggeration got in the
way:
No one thing in nature,
Garbett wrote, is natural enough for
decorative use.[5]
We
have already seen how this paradox is resolved by the identification of the
word natural with the generic rather than the specific. This is then supported
by the Platonic directive that architecture must
not copy a natural form, but a natural idea.[6]
The use of flowers as direct models for architectural ornament, without an
antecedent process of generalisation was thus made into a taboo not unlike the
second commandment.
[7] It was however,
precisely this process of generalisation and exaggeration which was ridiculed
by Ruskin in his Lectures at Edinburgh and in his Stones of Venice.
Garbett meekly returns to Ruskin's
sphere of influence when the problem of veracity starts interfering with the
demand for architectural politeness, which subsequently realigns itself as a
moral criterion with Ruskin's desire for sacrifice with regard to buildings. It
could not be considered a lie to turn one's best side outward. To do so was in
fact an important part of the courtesy of building. Having said that it was
important to do so honestly:
...to proclaim at the
same time 'This is my best side.'.(...) If you cannot beautify without deceiving
do not beautify at all. Rudeness is better than a lie.
[8]
An
honest architecture could conceal if it so wished, it was not bound to exhibit
its construction. But in hiding, it had to avoid deception. The first is merely
a question of reticence, the second was a question of pretence.
Decoration was particularly sensitive to pretence: gilding on wood was
acceptable. The spectator knew that gilded wood could never look like real solid
gold. But gilded iron, on the other hand, was considered deceptive. Gilded iron
was judged to resemble gold too closely, and could be accused of trying to
defraud our system of value as based on supply-, or rather scarcity and demand.
Both Ruskin and Garbett were heavily influenced by Alison with regard to the
problem of deception. Alison had argued that the discovery of pretence in an
object causes disappointment. This disappointment was caused by the realisation
that the object was in fact unfit or unworthy of exhibiting the character of the
thing it pretended to be.
[9]
Garbett adopted this reason wholeheartedly, as well as the morality
behind it. Deception in architecture was morally wrong as it opened the values
of society up to inflation. Deception therefore became the basest purpose of
art: a form of prostitution. Rising to his pulpit Garbett chanted that it was as
if a man who had learnt writing in order to write sermons, should employ his
skill in committing forgery.
[10]
True art did not consist in manual dexterity, or illusionistic effects: The object of all real art, as of all
science, is to elicit truth.[11]
In other words, art is, or should be, like science and philosophy, another probe
in the analysis and reconstruction of reality. Art forces man to withstand a
further stage in the test distinguishing the artificial from the real.
[12]
Truths II: Useful truth
A
second use of the word truth in Garbett's Treatise
refers, quite simply, to a higher reality and requires the theorist to project
an ideal. This type of truth served a pragmatic purpose in that everything
which was considered useful or beneficial was also true. This form of truth was used in the Treatise as an adjective for all Garbett's irreducible likes and
dislikes. Everything that Garbett considered good and beautiful he used as
axioms on which his principles could construct themselves. Nature, as the living garment of God, also derived its authority from this type of intuitively held truth.
Truth here refers to a paradigm based on an immediate and opaque authority
usually in the form of a personal desire to have things so, subsequently
disguised by words such as natural.
[13] Despite
Garbett's elaborate reference to science and the teleological construction of
his histories, his truths referred just as often to his own personal beliefs.
Truths of this sort represent values connected with tradition and the concept
of permanence, but have a very unstable character.
Truths III: Truth by dissection
The
conceptual dislocation of the Vitruvian triad into separate principles, had
encouraged the concept of architecture as clothing. This in turn had eventually
caused the battle of styles. Ware,
Bartholomew and a number of other theorists did not like the idea of
architecture as clothing. Instead they wanted to conceive of architecture as an
integrated organism; a body where the form was the necessary product of
content. The grammar of forms symptomatic of a style had to be seen as the
eruptions of a structural cause. The truth content of these forms therefore
necessitated dissection. Here is Ware on the subject:
It is true,
he wrote, elevations of the exterior and
elevations of the interior of very magnificent buildings of the Middle ages
have been made with scrupulous accuracy; but these drawings have served to
amaze the unlearned, rather than to instruct...The most useful drawing to a
builder in erecting an edifice, the most difficult drawing for an architect to
make, and the drawing least intelligible to the gentleman, and which makes
least show in a collection is a section. It is from sections (...) that a
knowledge of the construction of buildings is to be obtained.[14]
The
dissection of a building allowed architecture to be conceived as a body, rather
than as a frame with loose hanging clothes. Dissection allowed the theorist to
discover the causal principle of style:
the improvements
naturally arising out of the frequent use of vaults during the middle ages,
would have led to the discovery of the pointed arch; whether Norman walls had,
or had not been ornamented with intersecting circular arches.
[15]
Only
once a building had been dissected could the elevation be considered
physiognomically interesting as referring to correspondences between the inside and the outside.
This particular conception of
architectural style descended from a large and complex pattern of influences
which centre around the rationalisation of the Gothic. It begins, perhaps, with
the mathematicians of the seventeenth century such as Robert Hooke, David
Gregory and Sir Christopher Wren. Later this pattern of influences embraces the
writings of Cordemoy, the teaching and subsequent interpretation of Lodoli and
the work of the engineer of Giovanni Poleni. A prominent member of this group
is Soufflot who specifically admired Wren's gothic construction of St. Paul's
and used the ideas for his St. Geneviève.
Ware, Bartholomew and Garbett used
this structural cause of style to rewrite architectural history in terms of the
changing size of the gap separating the decorative and constructive aspects of
building.
The separation of the organic conception of the Vitruvian triad had, as
far as Garbett was concerned, inaugurated the possibility of the stylistic
pluralism so characteristic of the architecture of Rome and the Romanesque and
the Renaissance, the Baroque and the nineteenth centuries.
[16]
This pluralism was only possible when the separation between the decorative and
the constructive aspects of building had become complete, that is to say, after
the death of a particular style of
construction. In fact that pluralism was the instrument of murder.
Construction was sensitive to the parasitical tendencies of decoration.
Decoration began to take over the mind of an ambitious architect as soon as he
felt himself to be unable to contribute further to the perfecting of a style of
construction. As soon as he switched his attention to matters of detail and
surface, the style had eclipsed its perfection and was launched into a painful
process of degeneration. All this because of an undue emphasis on decorative
ingenuity. This was the disease of which both the Greek and Gothic styles had
died of. Once construction was lost sight of its forms became separated from
their cause. Once the forms symptomatic of a style became no more than
applications the choice of a style was allowed to be determined by other
criteria than a structural truth. Stylistic truth could therefore only be
delivered by dissection.
All
three truths address an issues which is larger than their particular target.
They concern the need for constructs and the consequent projection of
metaphysical realities which defend against the arbitrary. Beauty is the vision
of necessity. All three truths are not really any different, they represent
various stages during the nomadic wanderings of a single concern, that is with
the desire to have cracked the mystery of the way the world works. It may sound
a little frivolous to tie architecture to such enormous metaphysical concerns.
But aesthetics is primarily a metaphysical discipline. Each definition of
beauty proclaims its discovery of the mechanics of the mind and the creation.
Each system of philosophy claims to have reconstructed the way things are and
proceeds to formulate ethical norms of behaviour with reference to that
reality. Those so-called discoveries are full of the pathos of certainty and
serve as the basis for the theorist with which he can start to work out its
practical implications.
Constructive truth & constructive
unity
Constructive
truth, as discovered by the anatomical
dissection of a building, brings us to the normative meaning of the word truth.
This truth is dependent on the idea of consistency, or that which exhibits
unity. It is a form of truth which is derived at by following out the
implications of the interdependent assumptions given above. Furthermore it is
based on the irreducible axioms which have the concept of nature as their
ultimate authority:
I am convinced,
Garbett wrote, that if we really
understood this principle of contrast, and determined to embody it alone
without compromise, in a vertical pressure building, we should be led to the
complete Doric order, though we had never seen it.[17]
Garbett
wanted to demonstrate the completeness of the perfection of the Doric order by
subjecting its rational to an inversion. The process of design, being based on
reason, must be completely reversible. The quotation explains the nature of
purity as understood by Garbett. Purity signifies conformance to a
self-consistent set of principles which are believed to be a priori and so rigorous as to be completely reversible. The Doric
order is an inevitable eruption during the purposive analysis of truth. There
is nothing arbitrary in its genesis, it is the necessary result of a meticulous
search for the implications of a self-consistent set of principles.
This way of thinking lead to two
important normative principles which eventually led Garbett to make a
remarkable prophecy with regard to the emergence of a modern and
self-consistent style of architecture. These are the principles of constructive
truth and constructive unity:
The
principle of constructive truth coincided largely with the idea of structural
honesty as implied by Laugier, explained by Lodoli and promoted, among others
by Pugin's True Principles. It
required that a building [should] never
appear to be constructed on different statical principles from those really
employed in its construction.[18]
To break this principle was to lie. Garbett used the principle to formulate an
accusation against the contemporary building world: The whole of modern Gothic architecture is a constructive falsehood
an assertion which he based on an adaptation of Samuel Ware's definition of
Gothic which stated that the
peculiarities of this style [the Gothic] grew from the practice of constructing
a vaulted ceiling of stone.[19]
The second principle is that of
Constructive Unity, which says that what is true for construction is also true
for decoration. Constructive unity requires a uniform style of ornament
throughout the same building. But, he wrote, Architecture is not mere beauty of form, mere eumorphy; if it
were so a beautiful form would be beautiful wherever exhibited. The beauty
of form must be subordinate to statical
fitness and in order for that to be seen, it is necessary that the various pressures be perceived.[20]
And if it is necessary to treat form consistently, it is even more necessary
that the treatment of pressures is consistent. This leads us onto the concept
of style.
Unity
of style, as formulated by Garbett, consisted in applying a single principle of
construction throughout a building. Alfred Bartholomew, following John
Robison's articles on structural mechanics in the Encyclopaedia Britannica,
defined three styles of construction. That is, three methods of applying force
to solids: by Cross strain, by compression and by tension. These three modes
could be divided into three styles of building namely the depressile, the compressile
and the tensile.
The depressile system involved the
exclusive use of cross-strain, i.e. of vertical pressure. Greek architecture
used this system most consistently and may therefore be called pure. The
compressile system involved the exclusive use of oblique pressure and in order
for it to represent a unified whole it had to avoid any hint of cross strain.
The purest use of this principle is exhibited by the Gothic of the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries as exemplified by the great cathedrals in England,
France and Germany. The tensile system was thought to combine the advantages of
both previous systems. This was because all its active pressures would be
vertical like the depressile system. Yet it would avoid the necessary wastage
of material by avoiding cross strain like the compressile system.
Now there were three available
systems of building. And yet, Garbett observed, there had been only two systems
of architecture, i.e. only two systems which exhibited a constructive
truthfulness and a constructive unity. These are the Greek and the Gothic. The
third system has yet to be elaborated into an architectural style:
The first two systems
are passed and dead; we may admire the fading vestiges of their loveliness, but
can never revive them. The third is the destined architecture of the
future.
[21]
Style, like his third
use of the word truth, is for Garbett the logical result of the consistent
application of underlying ideas and not the mere sum of details.
[22]
3.
...though falling into many dangerous
fallacies, [Ruskin] has truly treated on this subject. Treatise, p. 124.
4.
Ruskin's
position with regard to truth and deception in architecture is contained in his
Lamp of Truth. For an historical and critical treatment of Ruskin's concept of
truth see Ball (1972) Chapter 2: 'Ruskin and "The Pure Fact"' and
more generally Garrigan (1973) and Landow (1972).
7.
Exodus, 20,4: Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor the likeness of any
form that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath etc.
9.
Treatise, p. 71,: It is possible, for instance, [Alison]
proceeds, to imitate the winding of the ivy, the tendrils of the vine, or the
beautiful curves of the rose-tree, in iron or in any other metal. It is
possible, also, to colour such imitations in so perfect a manner as at first to
deceive the spectator. If I am not mistaken, however, the moment we are
undeceived, -the moment we know that the subject is so different from that
which characterises such forms in real nature, the beauty of the forms is
destroyed, and instead of that pleasing sentiment of tenderness which the delicacy
of the vegetables excites, a sentiment of disappointment and uneasiness
succeeds; of disappointment, from the absence of that delicacy which we
generally infer from the appearance of such forms; and of uneasiness, from the
conviction of force having been applied to twist the subject into so unnatural
directions. Alison (1825) chap iv, sect. 1. part 2.
12.
Alan Turing devised a test to distinguish artificial intelligence from
natural intelligence which consisted of an endless series of random questions.
The longer the computer was able to disguise its artificiality, the closer it
approximated a natural intelligence. The object of computer technology is to
ultimately to wipe out the difference between real and artificial intelligence,
so as to be able to establish the difference between computer and man on
another basis. Alan Turing's test is useful as an allegory of the development
of culture in relation to nature, or architecture in relation to nature and the
process of its humanisation.
13.
To illustrate what I mean I have the following anecdote. I was watching
children's television during the autumn of 1993. A short bulletin in the Jeugdjournaal (children's news bulletin)
concerned the pollarding of willow-trees. The journalist interviewing the man
doing the job, asked jokingly, is such a
haircut subject to fashions, is this one for example, pointing to the bald
willow behind the man which had just a few sprouting branches left on its head,
a bit punky? No, replied the man decisively, it
is a natural haircut. The man and the journalist, fully appreciating the
joke, both appeared oblivious to the irony.
16.
Samuel Ware had already criticised Vitruvius on this score writing: Vitruvius, who has treated on all the
subjects which appeared to him to have any relation to architecture, has been
wholly silent in respect to the advantage to be obtained from mechanics, in
acquiring a knowledge of, and in decomposing forces, and in determining the
point to sustain them. The art of construction does not form any part of his
Treatise. From this circumstance alone, were not their buildings in
confirmation, we may conclude that they were employed, like many modern
architects, in the pleasing investigation of interior and exterior decoration
and internal arrangement, leaving the question of stability, and the details of
the means of execution to the workman. Ware (1822) p. 44.