In homage to Vitruvius, we might pass the time on car journeys aligning the pillars of motorway bridges to appropriate bipedal counterparts. A drive might reveal a sedentary and cheerful woman holding up one bridge, a punctilious, nervous accountant with an authoritarian air supporting another.
If we can judge the personality of objects from apparently minuscule features (a change of a few degrees in the angle of the rim can shift a wine glass from modesty to arrogance), it is because we first acquire this skill in relation to humans, whose characters we can impute from microscopic aspects of their skin tissue and muscle. An eye will move from implying apology to suggesting self-righteousness by way of a movement that is in a mechanical sense implausibly small. The width of a coin separates a brow that we take to be concerned from one that appears concentrated, or a mouth that implies sulkiness from one that suggests grief. Codifying such infinitesimal variations was the life’s work of the Swiss pseudoscientist Johann Kaspar Lavater, whose four-volume Essays on Physiognomy (1783) analysed almost every conceivable connotation of facial features and supplied line drawings of an exhaustive array of chins, eye sockets, foreheads, mouths and noses, with interpretative adjectives appended to each illustration.
What faces mean:
Johann Kaspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, 1783
The wealth of information we are attuned to deducing from living forms helps to explain the intensity of feelings generated by competing architectural styles. When only a millimetre separates a lethargic set of the mouth from a benevolent one, it is understandable that a great deal should seem to hang on the differing shapes of two windows or roof lines. It is natural for us to be as discriminating about the meanings of the objects we live among as we are about the faces of the people we spend time with.
To feel that a building is unappealing may simply be to dislike the temperament of the creature or human we dimly recognise in its elevation – just as to call another edifice beautiful is to sense the presence of a character we would like if it took on a living form. What we search for in a work of architecture is not in the end so far from what we search for in a friend. The objects we describe as beautiful are versions of the people we love.
Who would we want to be friends with?
6.
Even when objects don’t look anything like people, we can find it easy to imagine what kinds of human characters they might have.
So refined is our skill at detecting parallels to human beings in forms, textures and colours that we can interpret a character from the humblest shape. A line is eloquent enough. A straight example will signal someone stable and dull, a wavy one will appear foppish and calm, and a jagged one angry and confused.
Consider the struts on the backs of two chairs. Both seem to express a mood. The curved struts speak of ease and playfulness, the straight ones of seriousness and logic. And yet neither set approximates a human shape. Rather, the struts abstractly represent two different temperaments. A straight piece of wood behaves in its own medium as a stable, unimaginative person will act in his or her life, while the meanders of a curved piece correspond, however obliquely, with the casual elegance of an unruffled and dandyish soul.
The ease with which we can connect the psychological world with the outer, visual and sensory one seeds our language with metaphors. We can speak of someone being twisted or dark, smooth or hard. We can develop a steely heart or fall into a blue mood. We can compare a person to a material like concrete or a colour like burgundy and be sure thereby to convey something of his or her personality.
The German psychologist Rudolf Arnheim once asked his students to describe a good and a bad marriage using only line drawings. Although we might be hard pressed, working backwards, to divine Arnheim’s brief from the ensuing squiggles, we could come close, for they are strikingly successful at capturing something of the qualities of two different kinds of relationship. In one example, smooth curves mirror the peaceable and flowing course of a loving union, while violently gyrating spikes serve as a visual shorthand for sarcastic putdowns and slammed doors.
Two stories about married life from Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking, 1969
If even crude scratches on a piece of paper can speak accurately and fluently of our psychic states, when whole buildings are at stake, expressive potential is exponentially increased. The pointed arches of Bayeux Cathedral convey ardour and intensity, while their rounded counterparts in the courtyard of the Ducal Palace in Urbino embody serenity and poise. Like a person weathering life’s challenges, the palace’s arches equitably resist pressure from all sides, avoiding the spiritual crises and emotional effusions to which the cathedral’s appear ineluctably drawn.
Contrasting temperaments: Left: Ducal Palace, Urbino, 1479; right: Bayeux Cathedral, 1077
If, to take Arnheim’s exercise several steps further, we were tasked with producing metaphoric images of Germany in two periods of her history, as a fascist state and a democratic republic, and if we were allowed to work with stone, steel and glass rather than with just a pencil, it is likely we could not better the iconic designs of Albert Speer and Egon Eiermann, who created national pavilions for World’s Fairs on either side of the Second World War. Speer’s offering, for the Paris Fair of 1937, makes use of the quintessential visual metaphors of power: height, mass and shadow. Without even laying eyes on the insignia of the government which sponsored it, we would almost certainly sense something ominous, aggressive and defiant emanating from this 500-foot Neoclassical colossus. Twenty-one years and a world war later, in his German Pavilion for the 1958 World Exposition in Brussels, Egon Eiermann would resort to a trio of very different metaphors: horizontality to suggest calm, lightness to imply gentleness and transparency to evoke democracy.
Albert Speer, German Pavilion, World’s Fair, Paris, 1937
Egon Eiermann, Pavilion of the Federal Republic of Germany, World Exposition, Brussels, 1958
So eloquent are materials and colours, then, that a façade can be made to speak of how a country should be ruled and which principles ought to govern its foreign policy. Political and ethical ideas can be written into window frames and door handles. An abstract glass box on a stone plinth can deliver a paean to tranquillity and civilisation.
7.
There is yet a third way in which objects and buildings communicate meaning, one we might begin to get a feel for if we were invited to dinner at the German Ambassador’s in Washington, DC. Sited on a wooded hill in the north-western section of the capital, the residence is an imposing structure with a formal and Classical air, its outer walls clad in white limestone and its interiors dominated by marble floors, oak doors, and leather and steel furniture. Ushered out onto the veranda for a preprandial glass of sparkling Rhine wine and a cocktail sausage, we would – given a relevant historical awareness – see something so unexpected and shocking that we could only gasp as our impeccably polite hosts pointed out features of the skyline in their flawless English. It would not be the silhouettes of the city’s landmarks, however, that occasioned our astonishment but rather the portico itself, whispering in our ears of torch-lit parades, military processions and martial salutes. In both its dimensions and its forms, the rear elevation of the German Ambassador’s Residence bears an uncanny likeness to Albert Speer’s ambulatory at the Nuremberg Parade Ground.