In the lobby of Louis Kahn’s Yale Center for British Art, in New Haven, another reconciliation of opposites is effected through the interplay of concrete walls and inset panels made of English oak. It would be hard to name two materials with less in common than this pair. The strength, longevity and nobility of oak have long furnished the English with an idealised image of their own character. It is against backgrounds of richly textured oak that generations of gentlemen have read the Daily Telegraph in their clubs and dons have lunched in Oxbridge colleges. It was in oak trees that Robin Hood escaped the law and Charles II hid from Cromwell’s armies. It was English oak that provided Westminster Abbey with its ceiling and Nelson’s navy with its ships. Around polished panels of the wood, there therefore hover associations of rural life, aristocracy, history, the smells of leather and whisky – not to mention romantic notions of nationhood.
We are far from all of this with concrete, a material which embodies speed, economy and, in its reinforced variety, brute might. It is a quintessentially modern, democratic medium whose rediscovery by architects in the early twentieth century made possible many of the overtly functional structures of the technological age, including grain silos, garages, tower blocks and warehouses.
However, like an intelligent host faced with a couple of dinner guests from sharply opposed worlds, Kahn helps these two unlike elements to acknowledge each other’s virtues and surmount their mutual suspicion. He manages to reconcile them by making no attempt to disguise or minimise their differences. Unembarrassed to leave his concrete bare and unafraid to emphasise its poverty and starkness, Kahn encourages us to discover a new kind of beauty in its elephant-grey massing. At the same time, he lets us openly savour and celebrate the antique pleasures of oak, showing to full advantage the warm tones, clarity and striated grain with which time endowed it. As befits a building dedicated to the paintings of a nation more tortured than most by the competing claims of history and modernity, the Yale Center for British Art delivers an elegant essay on how past and present might learn to coexist and complement each other. In doing so, it sketches for us the dimensions of an ideal contemporary Englishness.
High in the Italian Alps, yet another building resolves a comparable tension between the country and the city, and the agrarian and the industrial. Herzog and de Meuron’s Stone House consists of an exposed concrete frame within which are set loose, mortarless stones quarried from the surrounding slopes. These stones, of the type used for centuries to build the region’s barns and farmhouses, are so irregular in colour and shape as to teeter on the edge of rustic incoherence, to be saved from it only by the rational geometry of their concrete frame. Like Kahn’s Yale Center, Herzog and de Meuron’s house achieves its effect by weaving a pattern of beauty from two aesthetic strands – meaning, also, two varieties of happiness – which we would never previously have imagined belonging together.
An ideal contemporary Englishness: Louis Kahn, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 1977
Herzog and de Meuron, Stone House, Tavole, Liguria, 1988
3.
To explain the appeal of balance between contrasting elements in buildings, it seems natural to move the discussion beyond architecture, for it is not only visual beauty which draws us to these balanced works, but also, and perhaps even principally, the evidence they emit of possessing a distinctively human kind of goodness, or maturity.
It appears we cannot keep ourselves from semiconsciously reading our own dynamics into buildings and correlating the oppositions that certain examples display with competing sides of our own characters. The tension between curves and straight lines in a façade carries echoes of the pull between reason and emotion in ourselves. It is a human integrity that we see in unvarnished wood, and a human hedonism in gilded panels. Panes of glass etched with imprints of flowers and black concrete blocks (such as those found on the exterior walls of the University Library in Utrecht) seem the natural twins of masculine and feminine traits.
It follows that the balance we approve of in architecture, and which we anoint with the word ‘beautiful’, alludes to a state that, on a psychological level, we can describe as mental health or happiness. Like buildings, we, too, contain opposites which can be more or less successfully handled. We, too, can descend towards extremes – of chaos or rigidity, decadence or austerity, machismo or effeminacy – even as we instinctively recognise that our well-being depends on our being able both to accommodate and to cancel out our polarities.
Men and women: Wiel Arets, University Library, Utrecht, 2004
Our attempts to harmonise our different aspects isn’t generally helped by the world around us, which tends to emphasise a range of awkward antitheses. Consider, for instance, the truisms which hold that one cannot be at the same time both funny and serious, democratic and refined, cosmopolitan and rural, practical and elegant, or masculine and delicate.
Balanced buildings beg to differ. Take, for example, the traditional antithesis between luxury and simplicity. The idea of luxury has tended to be associated with grandeur, pomposity and arrogance – while simplicity has been equated variously with squalor, incompetence and inelegance. However, the interior of Skogaholm Manor in Sweden, decorated towards the end of the eighteenth century, triumphantly contradicts any inclination to render the pairing of these two qualities impossible.
The furniture is detailed in a refined Rococo manner, carved with gentle, aristocratic curves and garlands of flowers. But as the eye moves towards the ground, something unusual comes into view. Where we might expect the chairs to meet a floor which resembled them in tone – made of marble, perhaps, or highly veneered parquetry – we instead find rough, unvarnished wooden planks, of the sort one might see in a hayloft. A similarly striking combination can be seen in the wall decorations, whose Neoclassical floral motifs, which might more predictably have been coloured in rich reds and golds, are instead executed in muted greys and browns.
A balanced building as a promise of a balanced life:
Interior, Skogaholm Manor, Närke, c. 1790
The manor house proposes a new human ideal, in which luxury would entail neither decadence nor a loss of contact with the democratic truths of the soul, and in which simplicity could be synthesised with nobility and refinement.
If certain subtly balanced buildings touch us, it is because they stand as exemplars of how we might adjudicate between the conflicting aspects of our characters, how we, too, might aspire to make something beautiful of our troubling opposites.
Elegance
1.
For the traveller who sets out from Zurich on a summer’s morning on a train bound south, for the Alps, the view is initially of a rolling pastoral landscape, in which cows feast on luminously green grass and occasionally glance up at the passing carriages with sad, almost wise brown eyes. For an hour, at least, nature is at her most benevolent. It is only beyond the town of Chur that the bucolic scene gives way to something more severe. The lush grass is gradually replaced by a terrain strewn with rubble and rock. Sheer walls of granite shoot up by the side of the train, alternating with precipitous canyons, silent but for the call of eagles and the cracking of branches. Along implausibly steep mountainsides, families of pine trees cling to narrow ledges like diligent soldiers on watch. While inside the carriage, everything remains as it was in the lowlands – pictures of a lake are still neatly screwed to the wall by the door, a bottle of apple juice continues to sit undrunk on the table – outside, we have journeyed to a place which resembles one of the less hospitable moons of Jupiter.