The limits of order:
Office building, Trenton, New Jersey, 1995
By comparison, there are no puzzles to detain or astonish us in the Classical front of the Procuratie Vecchie. The eye at once deduces the scheme behind its design, where the ground floor sets a pattern which is unimaginatively imitated on a smaller scale on both the first and second floors. The difference between this building and the Doge’s Palace is like the difference between a monotone drum beat and a Bach fugue.
6.
The most obvious means of creating complexity in a façade is through variations in the handling of doors and windows. But a pleasingly complex effect can also be attained through the use of brick, limestone, marble, patinated copper, wood and concrete, materials somewhat rough and uncivilised in appearance, in each of which something organic and untamed seems to stir. Beauty is a likely offspring when order is imposed on such vital materials: when spirit is aligned with logic. As Novalis advised: ‘In a work of art, chaos must shimmer through the veil of order.’
The tedium of order: Mauro Coducci, Procuratie Vecchie, Venice, 1532
There are masonry walls that perfectly honour the German poet’s insight, where every brick seems alive, unruly and individual, freighted with a distinctive personality and story. One brick may be gnarled and dark, another pink and innocent, a third stubbornly small, a fourth coloured and textured like walnut bread. Yet all these disparate characters will settle side by side, end to end, in creamy mortar, conforming to the selfsame master scheme, perfectly balanced between singularity and concord.
The pleasure of order combined with complexity: Doge’s Palace, Venice, 1340–1420
Flagstone floors can present us with a similar picture of harmony between contrary forces. There are floors in which large, obtuse stones have been persuaded by a mason to take their place within a methodical grid. One senses how the excesses in the character of these stones was tempered, how they were educated out of the savagery still evident in the craggy cliff-faces from which they were heaved. They had to surrender their defiance, trim their mossy beards, and smooth their warts and bunions, all for the sake of communal discipline – contributing to a floor where, as we make our way across it, we can appreciate order without danger of boredom and vigour without the shadow of anarchy.
Wooden floors offer analogous pleasures when planks, which once had the pulse of nature flowing through them, submit to the will of the saw and yet when, within each plank, enough signs of life remain to counterpoint the carpenter’s geometry. We can see eddies, swirls and imperfections, as if the wood were a turbulent but frozen river. Irregularities remain – a knot that hasn’t been planed down, or a dip or buckle that hasn’t been smoothed – and yet these features are gracious rather than threatening, reminders of complexity, for they are neatly contained within a series of calm parallel lines and right angles, fixed in formation by long iron nails.
The animating tension between order and chaos can be explored not only through materials but also through contours and sites. John Nash’s Park Crescent in Marylebone, for example, had it been laid out in a straight line, would have amounted to a relatively banal row of terraced houses. What advances its particular beauty is our sense that the order it displays has been achieved against the contrary and subversive pull exerted by a curve. We can imagine the difficulty involved in setting each building at a finely graded angle to its neighbours, and in moulding a façade around the recalcitrant arc of a semicircle.
In Diener and Diener’s Langhaus apartment block in Amsterdam’s eastern docklands, a massive, highly repetitive structure finds its regularity mitigated by the combination of an asymmetrical rhythm in the windows (6:12:21), the coarse, variegated bricks of the façades and the siting of the block on the edge of a sombre, tempestuous waterway – details which ensure that the building will end up on the correct, magnificent side of ordered.
In an adjoining part of the same Dutch development, a strict building code forces rows of terraced houses to adopt identical dimensions, a width of 4.2 metres and a height of 9.5 metres. Yet within these boundaries, a high degree of exuberance and inventiveness is allowed in terms of materials, window styles and individual floor heights. As our eyes scan the façades fronting the canals, we delight in their variations while admiring the rigorous parameters within which they play themselves out. A similar ethic obtains in Telč, in the Czech Republic, where the rigid ground plan specified for the houses which line the main square is offset by a liberal attitude towards colours, mouldings and roof shapes. The result recalls an endearing line-up of schoolchildren whose chief (and perhaps only) resemblance consists in being all of the same height.
Diener and Diener, Langhaus, Java Island, Amsterdam, 2001
West 8/Borneo Sporenburg Houses, Amsterdam, 1997
Main Square, Telč, South Moravia, sixteenth century
7.
Such works emphasise the truth of the ancient maxim that beauty lies between the extremities of order and complexity. Just as we cannot appreciate the attractions of safety without a background impression of danger, so, too, it is only in a building which flirts with confusion that we can apprehend the scale of our debt to our ordering capacities.
Flirting with being boring, rescued by the scale and the curve:
John Nash, Park Crescent, 1812
Remove either one, and something is lost:
Karljosef Schattner, Institute of Journalism, Eichstätt, 1987
Balance.
1.
Beneath the pleasure generated by the juxtaposition of order and complexity, we can identify the subsidiary architectural virtue of balance. Beauty is a likely outcome whenever architects skilfully mediate between any number of oppositions, including the old and the new, the natural and the man-made, the luxurious and the modest, and the masculine and the feminine.
2.
For decades the U-shaped Baroque building which houses the Institute of Journalism in Eichstätt had a courtyard in the middle, empty save for a flower bed and a bicycle rack. Then, in the mid 1980s, pressure for space led the institute’s trustees to commission a new structure from the architect Karljosef Schattner, who dropped an unapologetically modern concrete and glass block into the void between the existing gabled and decorated wings. Although dramatically different in style, the old and new parts have nevertheless achieved a seductive harmony as well as a curious codependence, with each relying on the other to downplay its faults and enhance its charms. Removing either building would render the remaining one pedantically hidebound or brutally modern, while together they accomplish a beguiling synthesis of emotional temperaments.