Not until several years later did I come to understand my dissatisfaction with the tower, thanks to an essay by Louis Sullivan with one of the more intriguing titles in the history of architectural criticism: ‘The Tall Office Artistically Considered’ (1896). Writing at the dawn of the age of the skyscraper, Sullivan advised his readers that many of the new tall buildings were in danger of stylistic incoherence. The problem was that even as their massing thrust upwards to a height of twenty or thirty storeys, their decorative motifs emphasised the horizontal axis, an orientation better suited to a two-storey Palladian villa. The combination caused them to seem artlessly conflicted about their aims, as if they were pulling at once upwards and sideways. Sullivan urged architects to let their skyscraper designs be guided by one coherent principle. ‘The chief characteristic of the tall building is that it is lofty,’ he proposed. ‘It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation so that from bottom to top it should be a unit without a single dissenting line.’ Within a few years, his suggestion would be consummately realised in the great skyscrapers of New York and Chicago, whose beauty seems the result of just such a decision to speak solely and in unison about height. From their tapered ground-floor entrances to their ruby-red lights blinking at the suburbs from the tips of their radio masts, these tall offices would be everything Sullivan wished: proud, soaring, exultant and inarguably coherent.
‘Every inch a proud and soaring thing’:
Cass Gilbert, Woolworth Building, New York, 1913
3.
When buildings talk, it is never with a single voice. Buildings are choirs rather than soloists; they possess a multiple nature from which arise opportunities for beautiful consonance as well as dissension and discord.
While certain buildings appear to have agreed on their aesthetic mission, persuading their disparate elements to pull together to make a logical contribution to the whole, others seem more conflicted about their intentions, their features heaving querulously in contrary directions. They may disagree about their size, with windows, roofs and doors clashing over questions of precedence. Or their forms may testify to unresolved squabbles about the nature of happiness.
Thus, in the portico of a Viennese villa designed by Otto Wagner, a statue speaks to us of the East, the columns around it of Ancient Greece and the ironwork of rustic Austrian lace, which generates a sense of a chaos nowhere evident in Palladio’s Villa Contarini, where the archway reconciles the columns, the plaster helps to counterpoint the roughness of the stonework and the statue offsets the austerity of the whole.
Otto Wagner, villa, Hüttelbergstrasse 26, Vienna, 1886
Andrea Palladio, Villa Contarini, Padova, 1546
We could say that nothing in architecture is ever ugly in itself; it is merely in the wrong place or of the wrong size, while beauty is the child of the coherent relationship between parts.
4.
Architectural incoherence is not limited to the designs of individual buildings. It can also, and no less grievously, reside in the relationship between a building and its context, geographical or chronological.
One summer, keen to take a break from routine, I booked myself into the Hotel de l’Europe, a vast red-brick building done up in the Neo-Renaissance style, of a kind often observed in the more expensive districts of Amsterdam. Rooms weren’t cheap: a standard double cost ¥42,000 (breakfast was a further ¥2,300 for the simplest order of rice, miso soup and vegetables). But at least the hotel was optimally positioned. It was only a five-minute walk from the Huis Ten Bosch royal palace in The Hague and, in the opposite direction, a ten-minute walk from Utrecht’s twelfth-century Nijenrode Castle. There were cheese shops everywhere, teams of Friesian horses and five ancient windmills. Furthermore, a field of 300,000 tulips bordered the buildings, giving way only where the ground began its steep ascent into mountains covered in dense Japanese cedar.
However, none of these details seemed able to shake me from an increasingly peculiar and heavy mood which had settled on me shortly after my arrival at the Hotel de l’Europe. My unhappiness must have had something to do with the fact that, certain appearances to the contrary, I was not in the Netherlands at all but rather in Japan, a forty-minute train ride outside Nagasaki, at a 152-acre theme park named Huis Ten Bosch Dutch Village. This surreal playland had been designed to re-create, with astonishing fidelity, the look of pre-twentieth-century Holland, complete with streets and squares, a network of canals and The Hague’s royal palace. In building it, the Japanese, masters of handicraft, had been meticulous in their concern for authenticity: they had consulted original architectural plans and imported wood and bricks from the other side of the world. But such historical exactitude had succeeded only in rendering the place more eerie and unnerving.
The discomfort generated by finding oneself in a corner of the Netherlands in rural Japan alerts us to a further requirement that we might have of buildings: that they should not only harmonise their parts but in addition cohere with their settings; that they should speak to us of the significant values and characteristics of their own locations and eras. For a building to reflect its cultural context may be as central to its mission as that it should respond to its meteorological one – a building which ignores it having the troubling quality of one whose windows fail to open in the tropics or to close in the mountains.
Huis Ten Bosch Dutch Village, Nagasaki, 1992
Hotel de l’Europe, Huis Ten Bosch, 1992
5.
Just as it is perturbing when our buildings deny their settings, so it can be pleasurable to find evidence of the opposite tendency – when buildings are marked by distinctly local architectural traits, even of the minor kind that often strike our eyes on touching down in a new country.
A few hours after having arrived in Japan, lying in bed in a Tokyo hotel vainly attempting to sleep, I noticed for the first time just how unusual were the light switches and plugs in my room. The excitement of having arrived in an unknown country coalesced around these fittings, which can be to a building what shoes are to a person: unexpectedly strong indicators of character. I discovered in them harbingers of the national particularities that had motivated my travels. They were promises of a distinctively local kind of happiness. My feelings stemmed not from a naive longing for folkloric exoticism, but from a wish to discover that the genuine differences that exist between lands might find adequate expression on an architectural plane. I wanted light switches, and by extension entire buildings, that could help to signal to me that I was here rather than there and alive now rather than then.
Taking a midnight walk around my hotel, I saw many more signs of an incontrovertibly Japanese identity. In a restaurant, I marvelled at the complex fascia of an electronically controlled toilet. Near a subway station, a vending machine offered bottled water and, as if this were an ordinary snack, packets of dried lobster claws. There were buildings fitted with rows of multicoloured fire-hydrants, and in a supermarket, tubs of seaweed floating in clear jelly. In an arcade, among driving and skiing games, a slot machine challenged me to make arrangements for dinner by catching a weary and confused crab using a set of motor-operated pincers.