INTRODUCTION
Garbett’s Treatise
In
1850 Edward Lacy Garbett (1824-1900) published A Rudimentary Treatise of the Principles of Design in Architecture as
Deducible from Nature and Exemplified in the Works of the Greek and Gothic
Architects. The aim of the Treatise
was to search for constants in the relationship between meaning and form in
architecture and to use those constants to obtain standards of design based on
the author’s experience of nature and from his reading of the architectural
forms of the past.
The
purpose of my commenary is to question the desire, the assumptions needed and
the methods involved in that search. My reasons are twofold. On a theoretical
level I am interested in the mechanisms appropriate to belief and knowledge. On
a practical level I am concerned with how the resulting attitudes and views are
made to work on buildings. Before I explain that I would like to justify the
choice of my case history.
Garbett’s
Treatise enjoyed considerable
success. From the time it was first published in 1850, it went through no less
than nine unaltered editions; the last appearing in 1906. Despite the undoubted
success of the book, it is difficult to assess Garbett's real, or immediate
influence on nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture or architectural
theory. Few people in England have given him the credit for a change in their
own attitudes and ideas. America was more generous in this respect; Garbett was
praised by seminal thinkers of the time such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horatio
Greenough, John Welborn Root and William Le Baron Jenney. Through their
mediation Garbett's ideas directly influenced the course that architectural
aesthetics was to take in the surge of modernism. Some of his attitudes even
show a homological resemblance to Louis Sullivan’s ideas but I have not yet
been able to prove even the slightest connection.
In any case Sir Nicolaus Pevsner
judges the Treatise to be one of the most advanced statement[s] of
architectural theory of the whole mid-nineteenth century.[1]
Later he adds that it is the only book of
its date in England to face fully what architectural theory ought to involve.
It is in its setting of problems much more like textbooks on architectural
design today than like any of the writings so far examined.[2]
and again: He is the most intelligent,
the most rational, the most far-seeing of the prophets of an original style of
the future...[3] When
reading this praise from one of the most devout and dogmatic modernists, it
would seem paradoxical that many of Garbett's propositions similarly
anticipated the arguments used by the critics of modernism. But then the
contradiction implied in a paradox is never more than a trick of perspective,
as will become clear in the course of the arguments presented here.
Many of the issues which Garbett
discussed in the Treatise were themes
which have concerned historians from Charles Eastlake until the present. But
Garbett's way of addressing them did not necessarily conform to the way that
historians and polemicists like to divide their material into opposing camps involved in battles of styles. It is not that Garbett was a coward or
indecisive in that battle, remaining on the fence when others were taking
sides; it is rather that he disputed the legitimacy of the border which the
fence enforced. This made him too complex a figure for the dialectical approach
of most histories.
In a teleological reconstruction of
history justifying the rise of the modern movement Garbett's clear prophecy of
a new style of architecture based on a new style of construction, for instance,
might have accorded him a more significant role in the emergence of modern
architecture. The problem is however, that he failed to reject the past out of
hand, nor was he able to provide a compelling model of a style for the future.
In any case, most of the Treatise
appeared to be concerned with a reappraisal of Greek and Gothic architecture.
The book ends, without due preparation, with the rather sudden and unexpected
recommendation to contemporary architects to abandon both the Greek temple and
the English Parish Church as appropriate models for the present and to adopt
instead an Italianate Renaissance style! Should Garbett then have been allowed
to play a greater part in histories of the battle of styles as a devout renaissancist?
No! Again, Garbett tried to avoid the problem by reformulating the question. He
did not take a stand which was thoroughly sympathetic to any historicist camp,
he was not a revivalist, nor was he an eclectic in anything but an abstract
philosophical sense. His recommendation to architects to adopt an Italianate
style was too obviously meant as a quick, short-term solution to a problem
which he knew would not go away so easily. To call him Italianate, or anti-Goth
would be to have misunderstood his position completely. His problem was not: Welchen Stil? but: what is style? And he wanted to know that in order to know what to
look for in his attempt to find a style appropriate to his sense of time and
place. He did not succeed. Nevertheless
he went a long way.
But the complexity of his position
does not constitute the only reason he was ignored by contemporaries in England
and later historians. The surfaces of his theory appear, on a first reading, to
coincide seamlessly with many of Ruskin's ideas. Much of the blame for
Garbett's obscurity and the difficulty of assessing his place in history must
be due to the unrivalled success of Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture which appeared a year before Garbett's Treatise in 1849. It is fair to say that
Ruskin's book overshadowed everything within its vicinity. But to call Garbett
a Ruskinite as many have done, is patently wrong. The latter's influence on
Garbett was subject to many conditions as we shall see. More interesting than
the question of Ruskin’s influence on Garbett is the fact that Garbett’s Treatise, together with William
Whewell's extensive review of The Seven
Lamps in Fraser's Magazine,
represents one of the earliest and most penetrating critiques of the notions
advanced by Ruskin during that period. That in itself is a good reason to take
a closer look at Garbett. A similar issue is Garbett’s relation to the slightly
later publications of Viollet-le-Duc. The Frenchman’s far more rigorous
rationalism eventually won the day causing Garbett’s rather more cautious and
esoteric attitudes to pale in the comparison.
Although
the issues talked of above, his place in history, his relevance to the Modern
Movement and his relationship to two superstars on the nineteenth century
architectural stage, etc. are important to my analysis of Garbett, they do not
constitute my main interest in him. I like his obscurity and have no real wish
to change it. My primary concern is more abstract. The urgent theme of this
book is the relationship between society and its shell, its architectural
setting. In this text I want to take Garbett as my case-history. My aim
therefore, is to investigate the way that relationship was experienced by
Garbett. I want to do that by tracing the assumptions and implications
contained in a single question Garbett posed his readers in the opening chapter
of the Treatise, namely:
Whence the necessity for
architecture proper?
[4]
The
question reformulated to hint at the context in which it was put would go
something like: Why does society need
works of Architecture as opposed to making do with mere buildings. This was a popular distinction at the time which,
despite its horrible and judgmental logic persisted right up to Pevsner’s
introduction to his Outline of European
Architecture,[5] where a
bicycle shed was inexplicably denied the right of constituting architecture, a
situation which is intolerable to a Dutchman.
The
various assumptions on which Garbett's concept of architectural value and
expression was based reveal a curious personal and rather pragmatic metaphysics
which could explain how an artefact could be thought to possess moral content.
I will try to argue that architecture was allowed such a moral content on the
basis of an analogy with the concept of justice with special reference to the
concept of (material or intellectual) property. Because of this analogy a
building was able to participate in certain aspects of life by which it could
assume an attitude, by proxy. For the
spectator the building thus became a symbolic extension of the (material or
intellectual) owner. If that interpretation is correct then Garbett's theory
has to be placed within the more general developments in English utilitarianism
on the one hand and the psychology of associationism on the other.
On top of that every one of Garbett's ideas is guided by an all-pervasive
theological paradigm; one in which nature, as God's second book knowable through
its language of symbols, was held to be purposive and rigidly structured
according to a chain of being.
[6]
On that basis Garbett used the question why
do we need architecture to launch an architectural doctrine grounded on the
supposition that society has not just a physical and sensual desire for beauty
but that beauty constitutes a moral necessity. This dual purpose for beauty was
subsequently polarised, creating a spectrum of values arranged according to a
chain of beauty; a scale of architectural worth, differentiating the aesthetic
priorities of each design dilemma. At the lowest and most fundamental level
Garbett demanded that a building be polite and benevolent in its attitude to its surroundings and
conciliatory to its onlookers. With each anabatic step in the chain the emotive
possibilities, a building could become more and more refined and noble, eventually achieving architecture's highest aim which was to be poetic and
didactic; endowing time and space with national and temporal identities.
A highly original idea of his,
strongly reminiscent of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, was that Architecture
should be considered an inherent evil
forced on a meek and powerless environment. Aesthetic concern to invert this
evil into a positive and beneficial good to society was no mere luxurious
indulgence but became a social imperative. To improve society one needed, among
other things, to improve it's shell and to control that shell's language so
that it would be allowed to confirm, enhance and guide the process of
civilisation.
This
program involved Garbett in a philosophical odyssey which started with the
recognition of the need to find an adequate normative definition of good architecture founded on an organic
conception of the Vitruvian triad Firmitas,
Utilitas and Venustas. Not only
did Garbett insist that these three conditions
for good architecture were completely interdependent, but he even went so
far as to insist that the one was really no more than a special case of the
other.
Such conceptual interpenetration was
achieved by two steps. Firstly Garbett adopted a residue of medieval
scholasticism whereby beauty, through its abstraction to- and identification
with, perfection became a meta-quality which in turn was able to represent all
the virtues architecture could
contain and express. This definition of beauty could then follow out its
implications to formulate a number of precepts according to an epistemological
framework derived from contemporary physiology.
The second step, already implicit in
the first, was achieved by extending the traditional boundaries of
Functionalism. Classic Functionalism extrapolated a sense of beauty from the
appropriateness of an object's form with regard to the mechanical functions
allowing that object to perform efficiently. Garbett felt that this excluded
the broader social purposes and obligations of architecture. He therefore
extended the conceptual reach of Functionalism to include the moral and
psychological functions of an object's experience.
[7] For example,
the column was only so beautiful if it confined itself to supporting the roof.
It could be considered far more beautiful if it was able to provide adequate
compensation for interrupting the environment by becoming a symbol of the
owner's benevolence towards his surroundings. It became even more beautiful,
indeed poetic, if the column was able to give expression the wider implications
of that act of support, by, for example, confirming the order of nature or of
nation and glorifying a divine purpose. In other words Garbett submitted
architecture to the various levels of meaning embedded in the Bible
interpretation industry ranging from the literal to anagogical.
The possibility for that extension
of Functionalism was directly derived from the behaviour of the concepts of use and purpose in English eighteenth- and nineteenth century ethical
thought. This allowed Garbett to consider beauty a purpose as basic to
architecture as, say, structural excellence. The idea of beauty being nothing
more than perfection meant that the beauty of a building was dependent both on
its structural excellence as well as its usefulness to owner and society as a
whole. By extending usefulness to include expression and beauty, the outward
appearance and setting of architecture became an issue as basic to society as
construction and planning was to the owner. This hybrid body of ideas
ultimately served to politicise and engage the object of art, more especially
the object of architecture, into social and political discourse.
Garbett's place in an intellectual
tradition
If
my personal interest in Garbett is confined to his explanation of architectural
value, I was forced to recognise that it would be a wasted opportunity not to
take things a few steps further. Garbett was an eclectic thinker, every one of
his ideas participates in a complex web of connections. In its deliberate
critique of other thinkers the Treatise
is as much an essay as a compendium. Many of the ideas he discusses derive from
books by persons who have remained on the sidelines of contemporary
architectural and intellectual historiography. This makes an analysis of
Garbett's theory transcend the narrower purpose of this book as discussed
above.
His Treatise represents a knot which ties together a number of
architectural doctrines from the eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries,
incorporating the undercurrents from the relevant developments in many other
disciplines such as moral philosophy, science and theology. Garbett's explicit
reliance on those sources make him an interesting case-study in the
investigation of intellectual cross-pollination during the first half of the
nineteenth century. In fact Garbett's definition of architecture derives to a
large extent from what I have identified as a loose grouping of architectural
thinkers who have not been given adequate historical attention. This group
includes figures such as John Robison (1739-1805), Samuel Ware (1781-1860)
Alfred Bartholomew (1801-1845) as well as others such as the better known
Robert Willis all of whom acknowledged and made use of a profound influence of
German, French and Italian theorists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Despite the fact that the authors just listed are mentioned together in a
number of works on architectural theory of the period and despite the fact that
they were highly regarded during their time, they seem to have been lost to
recent histories of the period, forgotten in lieu of the traditional frame of
reference of architectural history. Their place in English architectural
history must however be re-examined. They represent part of what may in the
broadest sense be identified as a "movement" and that movement
concerned itself with the concept of style and its relation to structural and
organisational issues.
The identification of style with structure is traditionally thought to
have prepared the ground for modernism. Far from being a conceptual break with
the past, modernism was born out of the theoretical attitudes formed during the
nineteenth century. There is nothing new in those two assertions. What this
dissertation does hope to show however, is firstly that the figures just listed,
including Garbett, played a far more significant role in that development than
has hitherto been credited to them, and secondly that the rational of modernism
as it was being prepared in the nineteenth century was far from straightforward.
Much of it rested on assumptions that look very uncomfortable when analysed
using the critical apparatus of post modernism.
[8]
There
are two further reasons not to confine this dissertation to an analysis of
Garbett's concept of architectural expression alone. The first is that the
problem of architectural expression
only occupies a part of Garbett's Treatise.
A further objective object of this dissertation therefore must be to analyse
the Treatise as a whole.
The second is that it is time to
devote a study to Garbett as a person. That is not easy. Edward Lacy Garbett is
an obscure figure. Even in the relatively small world of nineteenth-century
architectural history he is remembered only on account of a single, small
octavo book with a long title and few illustrations. It is only because of this
book that his name occasionally crops up in the various histories of
nineteenth-century architecture. More often than not he is mentioned rather
perfunctorily, crowded together with other historical wall-flowers in a single
often dismissive sentence or paragraph. To make matters worse his identity has
been consistently confused with his father, his grandfather as well as with an
over-zealous preacher of the same name. Whether his historical status is
justified or not does not concern me; as I said earlier, I like his obscurity.
The primary objective of this book
must be to reconstruct his thought for its own sake and to evaluate its
practical use to architecture. As such this dissertation must be seen as an act
of understanding of his mind, or at least an attempt at such an understanding.
Some of the ideas which Garbett introduces or adapts from others deserve to be
excavated and re-evaluated with regard to their possible relevance to
contemporary design problems. These include, of course, his argument for the
need for an architectural etiquette encapsulated in the concept of the polite
and the poetic. They also include his refinements of the concept of
architectural style as well as his lively and occasionally brilliant analysis
of Greek and Gothic architecture. In the end all these issues were just part of
Garbett's larger scheme which was to relate the purpose of art and architecture
to the purpose of society as a whole.
The end of Garbett
Eventually
Garbett's intellectual eclecticism reciprocated and drew back on itself. In the
Treatise he had taken from every
possible intellectual discipline, processed the ideas attached to each by way
of sophisticated analogies and applying them to architecture. As a result his
architectural theory, right from the start, was being prepared to be transformed back into something more general, something
larger: a complete and more generalised view of the world as a whole. It is a
lovely cycle. He took from all sorts of disciplines to formulate his thoughts
on architecture and then used those thoughts to formulate solutions to more
general problems. A complete reciprocation.
The Treatise already contains indications of this development. His
basic concerns to improve society would eventually spill over from architecture
into every discipline he initially brought to bear on his architectural theory,
including optics, geology, astronomy and biology. Architectural theory provided
the basis but was ultimately not sufficient to satisfy his drive to propound
and impose. He spent most of his mature years on exercises in biblical exegesis
and the construction of tortuous utopias. His thinking piled itself up,
remaining largely unchanged. In the end his strong and inflexible opinions
would squash most of his early perspicuity. If he began as an architectural
theorist, he ended as prophet or even a self-proclaimed messiah. But even when
Garbett came to the end of his journey towards self-apotheosis, one can still
sense the preoccupations that dominated his architectural thinking just as one
can sense the bitterness about a career which looks, to all intents and
purposes, as if it had never really taken off. The Treatise represents the fountain-head of a progressively mystical
and contorted philosophy which tried to syncretize a bricolage of different
beliefs increasingly coloured by personal grudges and loneliness.
He ended his life in Baku, Azerbaijan, presumably preparing, or returning
from a mission to Ararat to convince the world of it's momentous mistake in
rejecting God in favour of his shadow: theism for atheism; genesis for
evolution. Like some before and many after him, he was going to prove that the
Flood and Noah's Ark were literal truths, not just backed by the Bible, but by
science. He was fully convinced that his explanation of events would be enough
to bring the world to order.
[9]
The source for this gruelling recipe of interests is
contained within his architectural theory. Here Garbett first tried to
systematise aesthetic judgement into rules for conduct. One of the aims of this
dissertation is to show that this development was linear, accumulative and
curiously consistent.
The route
The several and largely
opportunistic purposes for this book make it difficult to think about the
presentation and relation of each separate part. In the end Garbett himself
supplied the answer. The structure of the text follows his chain of beauty when
I want to analyse the Treatise. Nevertheless a number of more or less arbitrary
choices had to be made guided by no more than a vague and hesitant sense of
relative significance. Edward Lacy Garbett did not become less elastic through
my ignorance of him as a person. If the task of the biographer was made
difficult by the lack of data concerning his personal life, that of the monographer
was made frankly impossible by the immense wealth of intellectual
cross-breeding that his thinking exhibits.
I interpreted my brief, as I have said before, as an act
of understanding, not as an act of historiography. Therefore I thought it best
to confine the core of the present study to an investigation into the
precipitation of intellectual residues visible in Garbett's text. While
analysing and assessing the theories themselves, I have tried to look for their
sources, examining the range of thinking that helped him to form his opinions
rather than actively trying to defend Garbett's right to an historical role as
one of the many precursors of later developments.
Enveloping the analysis of the Treatise there is the cyclical development of Garbett as a mind.
Folding out from his background and his attitudes to all sorts of issues in
youth which lead to the Treatise, and
folding back in when his architectural ideas lead back to wider issues such as
social welfare and the science of faith.
The text then is divided into 6 parts. The first two
chapters making up part I, give a short biographical sketch of Garbett and
attempt to place him within an intellectual context relevant to an analysis of
the Treatise. The next four parts
constitute a critique of the Treatise
itself. The framework in which Garbett presented his ideas and the sequence of
his arguments were an essential support to the ideas he wanted to get across.
The Treatise's structure provided an
anabatic progression of values from low beauties to high ones. That structure
was itself part of the program as an expression of the order of Garbett's
world. For the sake of clarity I have remained faithful to that order. The last
three chapters making up part VI, are concerned with the reception of the book,
an appreciation of Garbett's further writings, his intellectual development and
the manner of his death.
Jacob Voorthuis,
Kingston Jamaica, Friday, January 05, 1996
1.
Pevsner
(1972) p. 189. The quote actually goes: These
[referring to the essays by Horatio Greenough] are the most advanced statements of architectural theory of the whole
mid-nineteenth century, except for those contained in 'Mr. Garbett's learned
and able treatise'. cf. Horatio Greenough (1947) pp. 20-22. For the sake of
brevity I have paraphrased Pevsner's compliment to bring out the implication.
5.
Pevsner
(1981) p. 15. Pevsner's use of this archaic distinction shows his thinking and
that of many modernists to have been firmly rooted in the nineteenth century.
Kostof in his History of Architecture,
Settings and Rituals, (1985) finally rubbished that distinction irrevocably
in the first chapter.
7.
cf.
Colin St John Wilson (1992) pp. 20 ff. for a similar attempt to extend the
concept of Functionalism.