Chapter SIXTEEN:
The Poetry of Architecture
Humpty Dumpty's king and wall
In
Garbett's chain of beauty, poetry occupies the apex. It is the highest rung to
which the art of architecture can aspire, it is that which teaches, which
elevates the mind and makes a permanent impression on the beholder. When
architecture becomes poetic, it becomes semantically complete; poetic
architecture is architecture in the fullest sense of the word. It serves not
just the owner, the user, the beholder but the nation as a whole, the nation as
a movement towards a greater purpose. What does poetry mean? What is it? and
How does it apply to architecture?
Three sorts of poetry without language
Where there is no language,
writes Garbett, there can be no poetry in
the strict sense; yet we hear of the poetry of music and of architecture; hence
this term must be taken in a more extended sense. It may be understood in three
ways: first, as applying to the untaught portion, or that portion which
transcends the rules and theory of the art in their present state;
That
is where it becomes the product of genius,
...secondly, as including those beauties
or perfections in each art, which are not, or have not been, conveyed in any
other -consequently not in words;
That
is where architecture is asked to remain true to itself, i.e. where it is pure
and truthful
...thirdly, as applying
to those qualities by which its highest productions are calculated to produce,
not only a transient emotion, but a permanent effect on the beholder.
[1]
This
last refers to the didactic appeal of poetry, its function to create an
identity for a nation or epoch and thus to bundle the energies of that subject
to some greater cause. So the poetry of architecture is pure, evades or
outstrips formulation, and elevates. It is a medium between the low and the
high and a category which, by soaring higher, evades categorisation.
Architecture,
not being a phonetic art, cannot utter meaning in the same way that words can,
it is confined to exploiting emotive possibilities. The poetry of architecture
lies not in the narrative handling of a building, but in the satisfaction of
rhetorical aims that are similar to those of written poetry: that is, to exalt
spiritually and thereby to teach. In that sense architecture and music are subject to a langue.
Poetry is a grammar of approach to experience. It reformulates experience to
exploit emotions for a moral purpose.
is and ought I
The
poetry of architecture as Garbett understood it, like heroic poetry, points to
an ought, and redefines reality and
truth in terms of that ought. Ruskin's definition of poetry in the third volume
of Modern Painters provides a very Aristotelian definition of poetry which says
that poetry is the suggestion by the
imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.[2]
That sets the program for the redefinition just mentioned.
The rational of nature
In
order to exalt and teach, the object has to be made to conform to a particular
explanation of experience. That engages words like truth and purity. We know
that Garbett's poetry of architecture relies on the ideas of purity, unity, and
truth. These concepts were, as we have seen, elaborated into the principles of
constructive truth and constructive unity as the causal ideas of true style in architecture. That is one
aspect which is related and anticipates Garbett's concept of poetry. Ruskin, in
his Poetry of Architecture insists on
a unity of feeling.[3]
Both Ruskin's unity of feeling and Garbett's constructive unity probably rely
on Alison's insistence on a unity of
character of expression. [4]
As far as Garbett is concerned, the idea of unity also relies on William
Whewell's demand that any new system of architecture would demand a principle of unity. For Garbett a
building cannot be poetic if its essential qualities can be conveyed equally
well by another art, such as writing, hieroglyphics or heraldry, painting,
sculpture and so forth. In other words Garbett's sense of architectural purity
makes every effort to distinguish itself from Ruskin's supposed decorative,
painterly and sculptural approach. For Garbett purity means that architecture
must not be made reliant on its sister arts. Architecture degrades itself by
trying to become something it is not: a tailor's dummy for the pinning on of a parole,
or by being subservient to another art. And yet he uses the ambitions of poetry
to formulate those of architecture. He can do this because poetry stands for an
approach to experience, namely: the synthetic understanding of nature projected
onto a moral purpose. Written poetry and architecture both conform, each in
their own way, to the laws of nature and their aims overlap where nature is
seen as purposive.
purity as the loyalty to an explanation
Architecture
must rely exclusively on the rational of Nature to become pure. That rational
when devoted to a greater cause, becomes poetic. Poetry, or rather the
systematic analysis of nature that is called poetic, exploits the significance
of correspondences between phenomena extrapolated from an experience of nature:
the metaphor, the simile, etc. and projects them to a moral purpose. On that
basis sympathies are generated between, for example, the landscape and the
building, the idea of nation, national character and style etc. Al these
factors become political. The poetry of architecture does not analyse the
prejudices upon which these correspondences rest, it accepts, confirms and
relies on them and takes them further, poetry glorifies and exalts prejudice.
After all it teaches, and teaching implies knowledge of nature and knowledge of
nature is necessarily based on prejudice, or to put the same meaning in a
kinder light: on interpretation. Truth is merely a form of loyalty to that
interpretation.
Is and Ought II
Having
defined what is pure, Poetry has to divide the world into an is and an ought. Having done
that it immediately rejects the former. The latter, according to Aristotle's
rules of poetry, binds good looks to good character.
[5]
Louis Étienne Boullée expresses a very similar idea at around the same time as
Alison. Boullée writes that,
Our buildings -and our
Public Buildings in particular- should be to some extent like poems. The
Impression they make on us should arouse in us sensations that correspond to the
function of the building in question.
[6]
But
this has to be read with all missing words and that Boullée takes for granted
put back in place. With function he means to celebrate that function in a
utopian, or ideal setting. Boullée refers to function in a world he wants to
create, a world as the world ought to be.
The correspondence in sensation and
function that Boullée demands extends the idea of an architecture parlante to include Aristotle's rules of rhetorical
correspondence, which in turn anticipate far more closely the ideas on
expression as developed by Alison. Boullée sets up a system of rhetorical
sympathies between particular ideals and their appropriate expression which is
strongly reminiscent of Garbett's theory of expression: a particular function
requires a particular expression that enhances the object and what it stands
for as it ought to be.
Poetry and nation
The
most interesting of these persistent sympathies is the correspondence which
architecture seeks with the idea of nationhood. Ruskin's Poetry of Architecture was particularly concerned with
that correspondence.
[7] Ruskin on
the basis of Burke's very influential formulation of the idea of nationhood,
promoted the idea that architecture has the ability to be poetic in the sense
that it projects an ought for the nation to enhance itself with. The connection
between nation and architecture manifests itself very clearly in the
correspondence felt between material decay and moral decay of a nation. This
correspondence had been described by Gibbon although the metaphorical role of
architecture with regard to nation and moral strength had already been
exploited in texts as old as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Bible. The
metaphorical connection between nation, age and architecture becomes a specific
concern in the nineteenth century. And it is a connection which is peculiarly
appropriate to the idea of a poetical architecture. Plato had banished the
poets from his Republic because they
told lies; Aristotle had responded to this radical eviction by reserving a
special place for the kind of poetry which subordinated daily truth to greater
truths, putting these greater truths, which were nothing if not small but
useful lies, in the service of the moral improvement of the nation or
city-state. The presumed aesthetic health of a buildings had already been related
to the presumed health of a society by
Alberti. This connection was rediscovered in the eighteenth century. It
derives, or finds its equivalent in the Raphael
versus Rembrandt aesthetics of Reynolds. Poetic truth is not a
Rembrandtesque truth of tangible reality, it is a greater truth floating in the
world of absolutes and represented in the visions of the androgenising Raphael.
That is poetry's normative function.
Poetry, as system for emotional
mobilisation, has particular metaphysical feature which involves both division
and re-unification. Poetry seeks out universal correspondences and sympathies
in form, meaning and purpose. It dislocates the world as it is understood, to
generate new and supplementary forms and meanings which specifically serve the
purpose of creating purpose, a moral purpose. The idea of nation does something
similar. The idea of nation achieves a particular force when it is invoked by
those sections of society which feel themselves and their life to be under
threat. Poetry similarly serves a special purpose under these conditions. And
remember that Garbett had identified a crisis of. The architectural crisis he
focused on was only a diagram of a much greater crisis, a national crisis. For
this reason a poetry of architecture was invoked.
The morality of synthesis
Poetry
on this level is the celebration of re-union. The destruction of society
presupposes a separation, a division. The poetic architect, armed with the
principles of constructive truth and unity, having diagnosed the separation
between content from form, glorifies their subsequent welding. Thus meaning and
form, content and shape are resolved into a state of interdependency and are
allowed to enhance each other. Poetry in architecture refers to symphonic
qualities, whereby separate and distinct entities developed by a new
understanding of experience, work together purposively and in union within a
normative setting. Poetry, music, architecture etc. work upon the basis that
they separate experience into distinct and newly perceived truths and fuse
these truths into a comprehensible and newly identified whole:
The poet, described in ideal perfection,
brings the whole soul of man into activity, with he subordination of its
faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity. He
diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and
magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of imagination.
This power (...) reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or
discordant qualities: of sameness with difference; of the general with the
concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the
sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual
state of emotion with more than usual order; judgement ever awake and steady
self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it
blends and harmonises the natural and artificial, still subordinates art to
nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy
with the poetry.
[8]
In
other words poetry is a synthesis of disparate elements, of meaning, emotion,
image, it is a celebratory concordance to our dictionary of experience. Poetry
is an act of metaphysics. Architecture
as poetry must then show its connections to a mind, must synthesise all its
separate principles into one violent statement about desires, histories and
their meaning, the future, hope and the understanding of nature. Poetry is the
construct which binds the building to the ideas and values with which it is
associated, it is the synthesis of our divisive metaphysics, resolving the
hermeneutic dilemma by tying everything which had fallen apart by a new
understanding, together again into an impression of wholeness.
Poetic architecture then, as far as
Garbett is concerned is that architecture which is made sacred by being able to
represent past achievements which he and his contemporaries have projected as
desires:
Whoever wanders among
the hundred columns of the great hall of the temple of Karnac; whoever, by
assistance of designs or models, and of the fragments in the British Museum,
restores and rebuilds in his mind's eye, the small but glorious temple of the
Athenian goddess; whoever climbs the ruined stairs of the Colosseum, to the edge
of its artificial crater; whoever enters the cathedral of Amiens, or walks round
the exterior of that of Salisbury; whoever views any of these works of
architecture, and finds no poetry in it, must be incapable of discovering it in
anything else - in Nature or in Art.
[9]