These have been translated to mean “Commodity, Firmness, and Delight” - Robert Bruegmann considers the exposition of these concepts by Geoffrey Scott in his 1914 The Architecture of Humanism to be the best. According to Scott, the first criterion is commodity.
Buildings maybe judged by the success with which they supply practical ends they are designed to meet. Or, by a natural extension, we may judge them by the value of these ends themselves; that is to say, by the external purposes that they reflect. These, indeed, are two different questions. The last makes a moral reference, which the first avoids, but both spring, and spring inevitably, from the link which architecture has with life. (Bruegmann, 1985, 3-4)
On this account Commodity, or perhaps a more faithful translation is Utility, requires that the design of a building both be suited to the function it is supposed to perform and exhibit that function. The first seems reasonable enough, the second is a bit less obvious. Taken to extremes we might require that a Post Office look like a giant envelope and surely that is not what is entailed here. But it is not uncommon to expect, for example, governmental buildings to be larger than life, exhibiting the transcendent function of government over the interests of a single individual.
The second criterion is Firmness.
On every hand the study of architecture encounters physics, statics, and dynamics, suggesting, controlling, justifying its design. It is open to expression of material properties and material laws. Without these, architecture is impossible, its history unintelligible. And if, finding these everywhere paramount, we seek, in terms of material properties and material laws, not merely to account for the history of architecture but to assess its value, the architecture will be judged by the exactness and sincerity with which it expresses constructive facts and conforms to constructive laws. (Bruegmann, 1985, 2)
Bruegmann interprets this to mean that “Firmness ... is about structure and composition. A building should not only be sound and logical in is construction, but it should appear this way as well.” (1985, 18) It is not clear what it means for a building to be logical. Further, with the advent of newer construction materials and techniques, the appearance of the soundness of the construction has lost some of its force. Consider large enclosed sports stadiums. The supporting structure of the domes is often not clear and obvious. It is also not at all obvious that allowing the building visually to expose the source of its soundness necessarily is a good idea. This example is not completely on point, but it should highlight the issue. Corning Industries is a large U.S. firm specializing in products made from ceramics and glass. When the Corning Plant in Christiansburg, Virginia, was built in the 1960s there was an expressed desire by management to use as many Corning materials in its construction as possible. So, some wise designer decided to use glass tubing for the plumbing and to have the tubes exposed overhead. When the plant was opened and tours were being given, the obvious mistake was noted and the tubes were quickly wrapped in duct tape.
The third criterion handed down to us by Vitruvius was Venustas or Beauty or sometimes conceived as Delight.
We may trace in architecture a third and different factor - the disinterested desire for beauty. This desire does not, it is true, culminate here in a purely aesthetic result, for it has to deal with a concrete basis which is utilitarian. It is, nonetheless, a purely aesthetic impulse, an impulse distinct from all the others, which in architecture may simultaneously satisfy an impulse by virtue of which architecture becomes art. It is a separate instinct. It will borrow a suggestion from the laws of firmness or commodity; sometimes it will run counter to them, or be offended by the forms they would dictate. It has its own standard, and claims its own authority (Bruegmann, 1985, 4)
And therein lies the rub. What makes a building beautiful? Surely we want to resist the idea that beauty is simply in the eye of the beholder, but can we? Who is the arbiter of beauty? In what some call modernist architecture and then in post-modern historicist architecture, the arbiter has become the architect. But there is a difference between the architect of the 19th century and the architect of the 20th. The Enlightenment architect of the 19thth century believed in the power of reason to reveal the nature of things. In this case, it was the nature of beauty. There was a deep-seated belief that there existed natural laws governing the beautiful and that the architect was best qualified to find those natural laws. In dealing with this ineffable quality of beauty, the modernist 19th century architect, while taking it upon himself to be the arbiter of taste, argued for taste allegedly based on reason. As Bruegmann puts it,
Modernists believed the job of the architect, at least the genuine avant-garde architect, was to discover what these laws [of beauty] were and to insist on them even if they ran counter to society’s expectations. In fact, as the nineteenth century progressed, the avant-garde moved further and further from the tastes of the population at large. (Bruegmann, 1985, 22)
The search for and hoped for discovery of universal laws of beauty by the chosen few (i.e., avant-garde architects) was seriously under-minded by those who followed Robert Venturi (1972) who, thanks to his criterion for post-modern architecture, that the present must recapitulate the past, inadvertently helped spawn the ubiquitous large office buildings with various embellishments such as columns and arches that line the sides of such places as the highway that leads from Dulles International Airport outside of Washington D.C. into the U.S. capital.127 With recapitulation of the past as the sole criterion, beauty becomes taste, and we all know de gustibus non disputandum est. Couple this with the architect’s retained conviction, a holdover from the 19th century, that he or she is the anointed arbiter of taste, this time not based on reason but fad or ego, and you get the architectural plague of the 1980s and 1990s.
What I am claiming is that the traditional criteria for evaluating the product have been undermined. They have been undermined by the development of new materials and techniques and by abandoning the 19th century modernist conviction that there are laws of nature governing beauty. Whatever criteria are provided have to do with the taste of the individual critic, motivated perhaps by a reaction to modernity and modernist architecture, and that tells us very little about the building itself.
Architects design spaces, but not all spaces are designed. As an undesigned space consider a forest, although there are designed forests in the Netherlands, France and elsewhere. Furthermore, spaces are always to be found in other spaces. And it is to the spaces within spaces I would direct our attention. I am not concerned with questions of the intention of the designer, for his or her intentions have their own problems. Instead I want to focus on the space itself. If spaces are always to be found in spaces, then the relationship between and among spaces seems a logical starting point for a new discussion of design criteria. I should also like to note that spaces have histories. A particular space is what it is because it has come to be that space over time. This applies to a building, a city, or an environment. The forces that create the spaces differ, some are through human intervention, like zoning, some are forces of nature. But spaces have histories and the interesting thing about these historical spaces is that there seems to be something like an evolutionary success story to the spaces that have sustained a certain continuity over time.128 That is, some types of spaces work better in some spaces than in other spaces. And when it comes to building new spaces, I would suggest that we apply something I want to call architectural common sense. This is basically the normative claim:
127
Steven Moore has rightly pointed out that Venturi was not directly responsible for this blight. Venutri was motivated by political and populist concerns, seeking to harvest interpretations from the past, rather than impose them from some
128
This idea that spaces have histories and that knowing that history is important in design derives in part from some earlier ideas. In (Pitt, 2006a) I introduced the notion of