5.
For us to deem a work of architecture elegant, it is hence not enough that it look simple: we must feel that the simplicity it displays has been hard won, that it flows from the resolution of a demanding technical or natural predicament. Thus we call the Shaker staircase in Pleasant Hill elegant because we know – without ever having constructed one ourselves – that a staircase is a site complexity, and that combinations of treads, risers and banisters rarely approach the sober intelligibility of the Shakers’ work. We deem a modern Swiss house elegant because we note how seamlessly its windows have been joined to their concrete walls, and how neatly the usual clutter of construction has been resolved away. We admire starkly simple works that we intuit would, without immense effort, have appeared very complicated.
6.
Cardinal opportunities for elegance or its opposite lie in the way that columns are designed to hold up ceilings. Even as laypeople, we are adept at guessing the thickness that would be required safely to support a structure and esteem those columns that appear most diffident about the weight they are supporting. Whereas some varieties have broad enough shoulders but look disgruntled at having been asked to carry even a single storey, others hoist up ceilings as high as those of cathedrals without apparent strain, balancing massive weights on their narrow necks as if they were holding aloft a canopy made of linen. We welcome an appearance of lightness, or even daintiness, in the face of downward pressure – columns which seem to offer us a metaphor of how we, too, should like to stand in relation to our burdens.
How we should like to stand in relation to our burdens:
Left: Foster and Partners, Underground Station, Canary Wharf, 1999
Right: The Comares Palace, Alhambra, Granada, 1370
Windows offer further opportunities for the expression of architectural elegance, the determinant here being the relationship between the amount of glass and the extent of the frame that supports it. When diminutive panes are clasped within heavy, unapologetically broad mountings, we are likely to feel some of the same discomfort as when too many words are being employed to say too little. By contrast, the Georgian houses of Bath charm us by the ethereal way in which the windows appear to hover over their façades. Recognising, as their subsequent colleagues often have not, the intense beauty of the tenderly held pane, the city’s eighteenth-century architects competed with each other to develop frames in which the slenderest fingers of wood could fasten around the greatest expanses of glass. Pushing at the technological boundaries, they reduced glazing bars from 38mm (in the earliest houses in Queen Square) to 29mm and eventually to a mere 16 – contributing to windows with some of the same impelling grace as a Degas ballerina, fluidly pirouetting her sylph-like body on an axis of a mere five toes.
A magical ratio of frame to glass, and foot to body:
Left: Marlborough Buildings, Bath, eighteenth century
Right: Edgar Degas, The Star, 1879
7.
If we define elegance as arising in part from the triumph over a given architectural challenge – spanning a river, supporting a ceiling or holding glazing in place – then to the list of challenges we might add the more abstract one of neglect. We appreciate buildings that seem to have shrugged off the weight of carelessness and indifference.
Within the robust arches of Henri Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, the observant visitor will notice a series of small flowers fashioned out of wrought iron. To think these elegant is to acknowledge how unusual was the care that lay behind their creation. In a busy, often heedless world, they stand as markers of patience and generosity, of a kind of sweetness and even love: a kindness without ulterior motive. They are there for no other reason than that the architect believed they might entertain our eyes and charm our reason. They are markers of politeness, too, the impulse to go beyond what is required to discharge brute tasks – and of sacrifice as well, for it would have been easier to support the iron arches with straight-sided struts. Below, the mood may be workmanlike, and outside, in the streets, there will always be hurry and cruelty, but up on the ceiling, in a limited realm, flowers swirl and perhaps even laugh as they wend their way around a sequence of arches.
Henri Labrouste, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, 1850
Although we belong to a species which spends an alarming amount of its time blowing things up, every now and then we are moved to add gargoyles or garlands, stars or wreaths, to our buildings for no practical reason whatever. In the finest of these flourishes, we can read signs of goodness in a material register, a form of frozen benevolence. We see in them evidence of those sides of human nature which enable us to thrive rather than simply survive. These elegant touches remind us that we are not exclusively pragmatic or sensible: we are also creatures who, with no possibility of profit or power, occasionally carve friars out of stone and mould angels onto walls. In order not to mock such details, we need a culture confident enough about its pragmatism and aggression that it can also acknowledge the contrary demands of vulnerability and play – a culture, that is, sufficiently unthreatened by weakness and decadence as to allow for visible celebrations of tenderness.
William Kinman (to a design by Robert Adam), detail of ironwork balusters, 20 St James’s Square, London, 1774
friar, Wells Cathedral, Somerset, 1326
Coherence
1.
For years, on my way to and from the shops, I passed a house which, despite being one of the ugliest buildings I have ever seen, taught me more about architecture than many masterpieces have done.
The house was positioned at one end of a tree-lined avenue in north London, where it attracted my attention through the evidence it gave of having undergone a severe identity crisis. It looked as though each wing and each floor of the house had been designed by a different team of architects, none of which had been permitted any knowledge of the work of its predecessors, so that the collective result was an uncomfortable patchwork of contrasting styles. While some aspects of the house aped the look of a Tudor cottage, others tugged towards the Gothic. There were clashing hints of the vocabularies of the Arts and Crafts movement and the Queen Anne. Even the top floor was contorted, seeming undecided as to whether it wanted to be a mansard or a regular, straight-sided storey.
Signs of an identity crisis: Left: London, NW3
The aesthetics of an English seaside bungalow applied to the dimensions of a skyscraper:
Right: Sidney Kaye, Tower Block, Shepherd’s Bush, 1971
2.
A few years later, I moved west, and there began to have similarly strong feelings about a tower block (one of four) on Shepherd’s Bush Green, built in the early 1970s by the architect Sidney Kaye. The block was imposing for this part of the capital, twenty storeys high, and visible from as far away as Hampstead. Its height did not, however, prevent it from seeming resolutely squat. Its roof ended dumbly, in a flat plane, below which a series of heavy white bands accentuated the horizontal axis. The windows, meanwhile, made no concession either to their views or to their upward progression, but remained identically shaped and sized from the ground floor to the top. It was as though the aesthetics of a post-war seaside bungalow had been applied to the dimensions of a skyscraper, resulting in a building which was unsure whether it wished to be seen from Hampstead or preferred to nestle modestly amid the dark, low, brick buildings more common to the area. Irritated by its uncertainty, I wanted to demand that it either make itself properly unobtrusive or else make the most of its height and bulk – but, in any case, that it stop straddling the line between meekness and assertion, like an adolescent who insists on taking to the stage but, once there, can only stare mutely and sullenly at the audience.