Insofar as buildings speak to us, they also do so through quotation – that is, by referring to, and triggering memories of, the contexts in which we have previously seen them, their counterparts or their models. They communicate by prompting associations. We seem incapable of looking at buildings or pieces of furniture without tying them to the historical and personal circumstances of our viewing; as a result, architectural and decorative styles become, for us, emotional souvenirs of the moments and settings in which we came across them.
Albert Speer, ambulatory, Zeppelinfeld, Nuremberg, 1939
Oswald Matthias Ungers, Residence of the German Ambassador, Washington, DC, 1995
So attentive are our eyes and our brains that the tiniest detail can unleash memories. The swollen-bellied ‘B’ or open-jawed ‘G’ of an Art Deco font is enough to inspire reveries of short-haired women with melon hats and posters advertising holidays in Palm Beach and Le Touquet.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Just as a childhood can be released from the odour of a washing powder or cup of tea, an entire culture can spring from the angles of a few lines. A steeply sloping tiled roof can at once engender thoughts of the English Arts and Crafts movement, while a gambrel-shaped one can as rapidly prompt memories of Swedish history and holidays on the archipelago south of Stockholm.
C. F. A. Voysey, Moorcrag, Cumbria, 1899
Stallarholmen, near Mariefred, Sweden, c. 1850
Walking past the Carlton Cinema on London’s Essex Road, we may remark something oddly Egyptian about the windows. This stylistic term will occur to us because at some point in our past – perhaps on an evening when we watched a documentary about Ancient Egypt while eating dinner – our eyes took note of the angles of the pylon gateways to the temples at Karnak, Luxor and Philae. That we can now retrieve that half-forgotten detail and apply it to the narrowing of a city window is testament to the synaptic process by which our subconscious can master information and make connections that our conscious selves may be wholly incapable of articulating.
Temple of Isis, Philae, c. 140 BC
George Cole, Carlton Cinema, Essex Road, London, 1930
Relying on our associative powers, architects can dimple their arches and windows and feel confident that they will be understood as references to Islam. They can line their corridors with unpainted wooden planks and dependably allude to the rustic and the unpretentious. They can install thick white railings around balconies and know that their seaside villas will speak of ocean liners and the nautical life.
A more disturbing aspect of associations lies in their arbitrary nature, in the way they can lead us to pass a verdict on objects or buildings for reasons unconnected to their specifically architectural virtues or vices. We may make a judgement based on what they symbolise rather than on what they are.
We may decide that we hate nineteenth-century Gothic, for instance, because it characterised a house in which we were unhappy at university, or revile Neoclassicism (as exemplified by the German Ambassador’s Residence or by the work of the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel) because it had the misfortune to be favoured by the Nazis.
For proof of the capriciousness with which architectural and artistic styles fall victim to baleful associations, we need only note that, in most cases, little besides time is required for them to recover their charm. The remove of a few generations or more allows us to regard objects or buildings without the biases which entrammel almost every era. With the passage of time, we can gaze at a seventeenth-century statuette of the Virgin Mary untroubled by images of overzealous Jesuits or the fires of the Inquisition. With time, we can accept and love Rococo detailing on its own terms, rather than seeing it as a mere symbol of aristocratic decadence cut short by revolutionary vengeance. With time, we may even be able to stand on the veranda of the German Ambassador’s Residence and admire the proud, bold forms of its portico without being haunted by visions of storm troopers and torch-lit processions.
We might define genuinely beautiful objects as those endowed with sufficient innate assets as to withstand our positive or negative projections. They embody good qualities rather than simply remind us of them. They can thus outlive their temporal or geographic origins and communicate their intentions long after their initial audiences have disappeared. They can assert their attributes over and above the ebb and flow of our unfairly generous or damning associations.
8.
Despite the expressive potential of objects and buildings, discussion of what they talk about remains rare. We appear to feel more comfortable contemplating historical sources and stylistic tropes than we do delving into anthropomorphic, metaphoric or evocative meanings. It remains odd to initiate a conversation about what a building is saying.
We might find such activities easier if architectural features were more explicitly connected with their utterances – if there existed a dictionary, for example, which systematically correlated media and forms with emotions and ideas. Such a dictionary would most helpfully supply analyses of materials (of aluminium and steel, of terracotta and concrete) as well as of styles and dimensions (of every conceivable roof angle and every thickness and type of column). It would include paragraphs on the significance of convex and concave lines, and of reflective and plain glass.
The dictionary would resemble the giant catalogues which provide architects with information on light fittings and ironmongery, but, rather than focusing as those do on mechanical performance and compliance with building codes, it would expound on the expressive implications of every element in an architectural composition.
In its comprehensive concern with minutiae, the dictionary would acknowledge the fact that just as the alteration of a single word can change the whole sense of a poem, so, too, can our impression of a house be transformed when a straight limestone lintel is exchanged for a fractionally curved brick one. With the aid of such a resource, we might become more conscious readers, as well as writers, of our environment.
9.
As useful as such a handbook might be, however, in annotating what architecture talks to us about, it would not on its own ever be able to explain what it is about certain buildings that makes them appear to speak beautifully.
The buildings we admire are ultimately those which, in a variety of ways, extol values we think worthwhile – which refer, that is, whether through their materials, shapes or colours, to such legendarily positive qualities as friendliness, kindness, subtlety, strength and intelligence. Our sense of beauty and our understanding of the nature of a good life are intertwined. We seek associations of peace in our bedrooms, metaphors for generosity and harmony in our chairs, and an air of honesty and forth-rightness in our taps. We can be moved by a column that meets a roof with grace, by worn stone steps that hint at wisdom and by a Georgian doorway that demonstrates playfulness and courtesy in its fanlight window.