‘You like to complain that these dry numbers are the opposite of poetry!’ scolded Le Corbusier, frustrated that we might overlook the beauty inherent in such plans and in the forms of symmetrical bridges, blocks and squares. ‘These things are beautiful because in the middle of the apparent incoherence of nature or the cities of men, they are places of geometry, a realm where practical mathematics reigns … And is not geometry pure joy?’
Joy because geometry represents a victory over nature and because, despite what a sentimental reading might suggest, nature is in truth opposed to the order we rely on to survive. Left to its own devices, nature will not hesitate to crumble our roads, claw down our buildings, push wild vines through our walls and return every other feature of our carefully plotted geometric world to primal chaos. Nature’s way is to corrode, melt, soften, stain and chew on the works of man. And eventually it will win. Eventually we will find ourselves too worn out to resist its destructive centrifugal forces: we will grow weary of repairing roofs and balconies, we will long for sleep, the lights will dim, and the weeds will be left to spread their cancerous tentacles unchecked over our libraries and shops. Our background awareness of inevitable calamity is what can make us especially sensitive to the beauty of a street, in which we recognise the very qualities on which our survival hangs. The drive towards order reveals itself as synonymous with the drive towards life.
The pure joy of geometry:
Ludwig Wittgenstein, plan, Wittgenstein House, Vienna, 1928
3.
Architectural order attracts us, too, as a defence against feelings of over-complication. We welcome man-made environments which grant us an impression of regularity and predictability, on which we can rely to rest our minds. We don’t, in the end, much like perpetual surprises.
A sign of just how little we appreciate them is the lengths to which we often go to take in a view. We delight in reaching hill-tops, panoramic terraces, skyline restaurants and observation posts, where we encounter the basic pleasure of being able to see what lies in the far distance, and can follow roads and rivers across the landscape, rather than have them surge ahead of us without notice.
A comparable pleasure can be found in buildings, for example at the window of a country house which gives out onto a long regular driveway, or in a corridor extending from one extremity of a house to the other, or in a series of courtyards on a perfect axis. In these manifestations of ordered construction, we are granted a feeling of having tamed the unpredictabilities to which we are subject and, in a symbolic way, acquired command over a disturbingly unknowable future.
The pleasures of an ordered view:
Top: Carl Frederik Adelcrantz, Sturehof Estate, near Stockholm, 1781
Bottom: Christopher Wren and his successors, Greenwich Hospital, c. 1695
4.
Though we tend to believe, in architecture as in literature, that an important work should be complicated, many appealing buildings are surprisingly simple, even repetitive in their designs. The beguiling terraced houses of Bloomsbury or the apartment buildings of central Paris are assembled according to an unvarying and singularly basic pattern, once laid down in forceful municipal building codes. Over generations, these codes prevented architects from using their imaginations; they handcuffed them to a narrow palette of acceptable materials and forms, and, like the institution of marriage, restricted choice in the name of delivering the satisfactions of restraint.
That building codes have disappeared in many cities, and the modest ordered but satisfying edifices along with them, can be traced back to a perverse dogma which overtook the architectural profession in the Romantic period: a faith in a necessary connection between architectural greatness and originality. Over the nineteenth century, architects came to be rewarded according to the uniqueness of their work, so that constructing a new house or office in a familiar form grew no less contemptible than plagiarising a novel or poem.
This emphasis on individual genius had the unintended effect of tearing apart the carefully woven fabric of cities. ‘A day never passes without our hearing our architects called upon to be original and to invent a new style,’ observed John Ruskin in 1849, bewildered by the sudden loss of visual harmony. What could be more harmful, he asked, than to believe that a ‘new architecture is to be invented fresh every time we build a workhouse or parish church?’ He proposed that architecture should be the work of ‘one school, so that from the cottage to the palace, and from the chapel to the basilica, every feature of the architecture of the nation shall be as commonly current as its language or its coin’. Half a century later and in a similar vein, Adolf Loos appealed to architects to put aside their individual ambitions for the sake of collective coherence: ‘The best form is there already and no one should be afraid of using it, even if the basic idea for it comes from someone else. Enough of our geniuses and their originality. Let us keep on repeating ourselves. Let one building be like another. We won’t be published in Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration and we won’t be made professors of applied art, but we will have served ourselves, our times, our nation and mankind to the best of our ability.’
Few architects have listened. A commission for a house or an office remains an opportunity to reconsider from first principles the design of a window frame or front door. But an architect intent on being different may in the end prove as troubling as an over-imaginative pilot or doctor. However important originality may be in some fields, restraint and adherence to procedure emerge as the more significant virtues in a great many others. We rarely wish to be surprised by novelty as we round street corners. We require consistency in our buildings, for we are ourselves frequently close to disorientation and frenzy. We need the discipline offered by similarity, as children need regular bedtimes and familiar, bland foods. We require that our environments act as guardians of a calmness and direction on which we have a precarious hold. The architects who benefit us most may be those generous enough to lay aside their claims to genius in order to devote themselves to assembling graceful but predominantly unoriginal boxes. Architecture should have the confidence and the kindness to be a little boring.
5.
Then again, our love of order is not without limit, as we will recognise when we stand in front of a multistorey office building whose every window consists of an identical square of reflective glass locked into an identical aluminium frame, whose every floor resembles every other, which makes no obvious distinctions between right and left or front and back, and on whose surface not even a stray aerial or security camera is allowed to disturb the harmony of a master grid. Rather than exciting our admiration with evidence of its ordered nature, such a box may provoke feelings of lassitude or irritation. In its presence, we are likely to forget the effort that would have been required to wrest order out of chaos – and instead of praising the building for its regularity, we may condemn it for its tedium.
Insofar as we appreciate order, it is when we perceive it as being accompanied by complexity, when we feel that a variety of elements has been brought to order – that windows, doors and other details have been knitted into a scheme that manages to be at once regular and intricate. Thus, in St Mark’s Square in Venice, it is the façade of the Doge’s Palace which arrests and enchants us, not that of the Procuratie Vecchie, for though both façades are programmatic, only the palace’s is endowed with a pattern sufficiently elaborate to render vivid a sense of order. This great Gothic box, in which no one storey duplicates any other in its height or decorative motif, confidently holds our gaze as we try to decipher in its forms an intelligence we can intimate but not immediately understand. There is no simple system of repetition at work here. The top-floor windows and ground-floor arches are of the same family and yet are variously sized and interspaced. The cloverleaf niches at the very top echo the carvings over the columns of the first-floor gallery, without, however, being aligned with them, each storey seeming to pursue a congruent but independent path. There are shifts of mood as the eye ascends the façade, so that whereas the ground floor conveys a sensible and workmanlike air, with feet dug plainly and uncomplainingly into the ground, the first floor takes on the character of an embroidered dress. The smooth mass of white and pink brickwork which sits above evokes a patterned tablecloth, with the arches of the gallery now transformed into tassels and the ground-floor arches into table legs. The whole ends on a joyful note, the decorations of the roof line hinting at carnival hats saluting the skies of Venice.