Just as following Palladio seems not to lead us ineluctably towards beauty, so ignoring his advice far from condemns a house to ugliness. Imagine a cottage in the Lake District: its hall is crammed into one corner, its rooms are on no axes at all, its columns are made of thick, untreated oak, its ceilings are hardly the height of a man, and its proportions seem to hew to no mathematical formula whatsoever. And yet such a cottage may profoundly seduce us despite its violation of almost every principle contained in the authoritative pages of The Four Books of Architecture.
4.
Such omissions have struck architects hard. In frustration, they have turned against the very idea of laws, declaring them naive and absurd, symptoms of Utopian and rigid minds. The concept of beauty has been deemed inherently elusive and therefore quietly sidestepped.
Yet a fairer response to the setbacks associated with Neo-Palladian principles would be greater subtlety rather than nervous silence. Even without knowing the sum of what contributes to the beauty of a building, we should find it possible to venture theories on the subject in the hope of provoking others to contribute further and complementary ideas to an evolving body of knowledge.
To help overcome our reluctance to pass open judgement on the aesthetic side of buildings, we should consider our comparative confidence in discussing the strengths and failings of our fellow human beings. Much of social conversation amounts to a survey of the different ways in which absent third parties have departed from or, much less commonly, have matched an implicit ideal of behaviour. In both casual and erudite registers, we are drawn to identifying vices and virtues, ‘gossip’ being only a vernacular version of ethical philosophy. Even though we seldom distil our grudges and admirations into abstract hypotheses, we frequently follow in the footsteps of philosophers who have written treatises aiming to identify and dissect human goodness.
We might learn to put names to the virtues of buildings as these philosophers have done to those of people, carefully pinning down the architectural equivalents of generosity or modesty, honesty or gentleness. Analogising architecture with ethics helps us to discern that there is unlikely ever to be a single source of beauty in a building, just as no one quality can ever underpin excellence in a person. Traits need to arise at congruous moments, and in particular combinations, to be effective. A building of the right proportions which is assembled out of inappropriate materials will be no less compromised than a courageous man lacking in patience or insight.
Armed with a comprehensive list of aesthetic virtues, architects and their clients would be freed from over-reliance on Romantic myths concerning the chance or divine origins of beauty. With virtues better defined and more readily integrated into architectural discussions, we would stand a fairer chance of systematically understanding and re-creating the environments we intuitively love.
Order
1.
From a traffic island at the upper end of a wide Parisian street, the view takes in a symmetrical, spacious corridor of stately apartment buildings, which culminate in a wide square in which a man stands proudly on top of a column. Despite the discord of the world, these blocks have settled their differences and humbly arranged themselves in perfect repetitive patterns, each one ensuring that its roof, façade and materials exactly match those of its neighbours. As far as the eye can see, not a single mansard or railing is out of line. The height of every floor and the position of every window are echoed along and across the street. Arcades rise to balconies which give way to three storeys of weathered sandstone, which in turn meet gently domed, lead-covered roofs, interrupted every few metres by solemn, geometric chimney stacks. The buildings seem to have shuffled forward like a troupe of ballet dancers, each one aligning its toes to the very same point on the pavement as though in obedience to the baton of a strict dancing-master. The dominant rhythm of the blocks is accompanied by subsidiary harmonic progressions, made up of lamps and benches. To the visitor or responsive inhabitant, this spectacle of precision presents an impression of beauty tied to qualities of regularity and uniformity, inviting the conclusion that at the heart of a certain kind of architectural greatness there lies the concept of order.
The street is the product of a distinctively human intelligence. We sense the sheer improbability of nature ever creating anything that could rival this setting for coherence and linearity. The scene confronts us with an externalisation of the most rational, deliberate workings of our minds. We can imagine the tumult that would have preceded the calm which now reigns in this place: the stifling summer days that would have echoed to the hammering and sawing of hundreds of labourers. The materials that make up the street would have had to be gathered from across the country over a period of years by a legion of suppliers, many unaware of their colleagues, all of them working under the guidance of the same master planner. Groups of stonemasons in quarries to the east and south would have spent months striking their chisels in similar configurations, so as to produce stones that would settle uncomplainingly beside their neighbours.
The street speaks of the sacrifice demanded by all works of architecture. The stones might have preferred to continue sleeping where they had lain down to rest at their geological bedtime 200 million years before, just as the iron ore of the balustrades might have opted to remain lodged in the Massif Central under forests of pine trees, before they were coaxed from their somnolence along with a symphony of other raw materials in order to partake in a colossal urban composition. An artisan’s cart would have travelled for days to reach the city, the driver having left behind a family and stayed in cheap inns, so that one day a piece of piping could quietly be united on the second floor of an apartment block with a hand basin, rendering life undramatically but significantly more habitable.
The Parisian street moves us because we recognise how sharply its qualities contrast with those which generally colour our lives. We call it beautiful from a humbling overfamiliarity with its antitheses: in domestic life, with sulks and petty disputes, and in architecture, with streets whose elements crossly decide to pay no heed to the appearance of their neighbours and instead cry out chaotically for attention, like jealous and enraged lovers. This ordered street offers a lesson in the benefits of surrendering individual freedom for the sake of a higher and collective scheme, in which all parts become something greater by contributing to the whole. Though we are creatures inclined to squabble, kill, steal and lie, the street reminds us that we can occasionally master our baser impulses and turn a waste land, where for centuries wolves howled, into a monument of civilisation.
Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine, rue de Castigslione, Paris, 1802
2.
Order contributes to the appeal of almost all substantial works of architecture. So fundamental is this quality, in fact, that it is written into even the most modest of projects at their very inception, in careful diagrams of electricity circuits and pipework, in elevations and plans – documents of beauty in which every cable and door frame has been measured and in which, though we may fail to grasp the exact meaning of certain symbols and numbers, we may nonetheless sense, and delight in, the overwhelming presence of precision and intent.