Our understanding of the psychology of taste can in turn help us to escape from the two great dogmas of aesthetics: the view that there is only one acceptable visual style or (even more implausibly) that all styles are equally valid. A diversity of styles is a natural consequence of the manifold nature of our inner needs. It is only logical that we should be drawn to styles that speak of excitement as well as calm, of grandeur as well as cosiness, given that these are key polarities around which our own lives revolve. As Stendhal knew, ‘There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.’
The buildings we call beautiful contain in a concentrated form those qualities in which we are deficient:
Left: David Adjaye, Dirty House, London, 2002
Right: Michele Saee and Bruno Pingeot, Publicis Drugstore, Paris, 2004
Nevertheless, this breadth of choice leaves us free to determine that particular works of architecture are more or less adequate responses to our genuine psychological needs. We can accept the legitimacy of the rustic style, even if we question the way M. Frugès’s tenants attempted to inject it into their homes at Lège and Pessac. We can condemn the gnomes while respecting the longings which inspired them.
8.
The clashes and evolutions in our sense of what is beautiful may be painful and costly, but there seems little chance of insulating ourselves from them entirely: of producing chairs or sideboards, for instance, which could be guaranteed to provoke a unanimous or permanent aura of charm. Clashes of taste are an inevitable by-product of a world where forces continually fragment and deplete us in new ways. As long as societies and individuals have a history, that is, a record of changing struggles and ambitions, then art, too, will have a history – within which there will always be casualties in the form of unloved sofas, houses and monuments. As the ways in which we are unbalanced alters, so our attention will continue to be drawn to new parts of the spectrum of taste, to new styles which we will declare beautiful on the basis that they embody in a concentrated form what now lies in shadow within us.
V. The Virtues of Buildings
1.
When we aren’t aiming to be either precise or conclusive, it can be easy to agree on what a beautiful man-made place might look like. Attempts to name the world’s most attractive cities tend to settle on some familiar locations: Edinburgh, Paris, Rome, San Francisco. A case will occasionally be made for Siena or Sydney. Someone may bring up St Petersburg or Salamanca. Further evidence of our congruent tastes can be found in the patterns of our holiday migrations. Few people opt to spend the summer in Milton Keynes or Frankfurt.
Nevertheless, our intuitions about attractive architecture have always proved of negligible use in generating satisfactory laws of beauty. We might expect that it would, by now, have grown as easy to reproduce a city with the appeal of Bath as it is to manufacture consistent quantities of blueberry jam. If humans were at some point adept at creating a masterwork of urban design, it should have come within the grasp of all succeeding generations to contrive an equally successful environment at will. There ought to be no need to pay homage to a city as to a rare creature; its virtues should be readily fitted to the development of any new piece of meadow or scrubland. There should be no need to focus our energies on preservation and restoration, disciplines which thrive on our fears of our own ineptitude. We should not have to feel alarmed by the waters that lap threateningly against Venice’s shoreline. We should have the confidence to surrender the aristocratic palaces to the sea, knowing that we could at any point create new edifices that would rival the old stones in beauty.
Yet architecture has repeatedly defied attempts for it to be set on a more scientific, rule-laden path. Just as the secrets of good literature have not been for ever unlocked by the existence of Hamlet or Mansfield Park, so the works of Otto Wagner or Sigurd Lewerentz have done nothing to reduce the proliferation of inferior buildings. The masterpieces of art continue to seem like chance occurrences and artists to resemble cavemen who succeed in periodically igniting a flame, without being able to fathom how they did so, let alone communicate the basis of their achievements to others. Artistic talent is like a brilliant firework which streaks across a pitch-black night, inspiring awe among onlookers but extinguishing itself in seconds, leaving behind only darkness and longing.
Even those who privately harbour a notion of the operative principles behind architectural beauty are unlikely to make their suppositions public, for fear of committing an illogicality or of being attacked by the guardians of relativism, who stand ready to censure all those who would dress up individual tastes as objective laws.
2.
Fear has not always been so prevalent. In previous periods, architectural theorists held fervently to the claim that great buildings could be made to yield up their secrets. Architecture was thought as susceptible to rational analysis as any other human or natural phenomenon. The careful study of the finest buildings promised to lead to laws of beauty, whose crisp expression would inspire apprentices, rightfully intimidate clients and spread sympathetic architecture more widely across the earth.
It was in the Renaissance that this sporadic codifying ambition reached an apogee with the publication of Andrea Palladio’s The Four Books of Architecture (1570), perhaps the West’s most influential attempt systematically to decorticate the secrets of successful buildings.
Palladio specified that when designing Ionic columns, a pleasing result could be achieved only if the architrave, frieze and cornice were designed to be one fifth of the height of the column, while a Corinthian capital had to be equal in height to the breadth of the column at its lowest point. With regard to the interior, he insisted that rooms should be at least as high as they were broad, that the correct ratios between the lengths and the sides of rooms were 1:1, 2:3, 3:4 and that a hall should be placed on a central axis, in absolute symmetry to both wings of a house.
3.
Yet, despite the confidence of such assertions, Palladio’s laws were not to prove as enduring as the reputations of his houses. What discredited these laws – and indeed spelt the gradual end of any attempt to develop a science of attractive buildings – was the number of exceptions which they seemed to let through with all the regularity of a torn fishing net.
At the northern end of London’s Regent’s Park stands a mansion, constructed over 400 years after Palladio’s treatise was first published, which dutifully follows many of its tenets about proportion, the positioning of rooms, the axes of corridors and the diameters of columns. We might expect the house to have been recognised as one of the superlative buildings of contemporary London, an Anglo-Saxon heir to the Villa Rotonda, and yet, in reality, the structure has garnered less flattering verdicts and, among the more forthright, outright ridicule.
What laws allow: Quinlan Terry and Raymond Erith, Ionic Villa, London, 1990
The villa’s problems are multiple. Its forms seem out of sympathy with their era, they communicate feelings of aristocratic pride which sit oddly with contemporary ideals, the walls are too creamy in colour, while the materials have a lustre and flawlessness that mar the impression of aged dignity which endows Palladio’s own villas with charm. One regrets that Palladio found no opportunity to include another two dozen laws of beauty which might have placed additional tourniquets around the many sources of the mansion’s failings.