The moral ineffectiveness of a beautiful house:
Hermann Göring (in white) at home with the French Ambassador and, to the right, Generals Vuillemin and Milch. In the background, Saints Margarethe and Dorothea, German (fifteenth century), and Lucretia (1532) by Lucas Cranach
We may need to have made an indelible mark on our lives, to have married the wrong person, pursued an unfulfilling career into middle age or lost a loved one before architecture can begin to have any perceptible impact on us, for when we speak of being ‘moved’ by a building, we allude to a bitter-sweet feeling of contrast between the noble qualities written into a structure and the sadder wider reality within which we know them to exist. A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.
In his memoirs, the German theologian Paul Tillich explained that art had always left him cold as a pampered and trouble-free young man, despite the best pedagogical efforts of his parents and teachers. Then the First World War broke out, he was called up and, in a period of leave from his battalion (three quarters of whose members would be killed in the course of the conflict), he found himself in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin during a rain storm. There, in a small upper gallery, he came across Sandro Botticelli’s Madonna and Child with Eight Singing Angels and, on meeting the wise, fragile, compassionate gaze of the Virgin, surprised himself by beginning to sob uncontrollably. He experienced what he described as a moment of ‘revelatory ecstasy’, tears welling up in his eyes at the disjunction between the exceptionally tender atmosphere of the picture and the barbarous lessons he had learnt in the trenches.
Life is not usually like this:
Ken Shuttleworth, Crescent House, Wiltshire, 1997
Sandro Botticelli, Madonna and Child with Eight Singing Angels, 1477
It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
9.
Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us. It requires that we open ourselves to the idea that we are affected by our surroundings even when they are made of vinyl and would be expensive and time-consuming to ameliorate. It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread. At the same time, it means acknowledging that buildings are able to solve no more than a fraction of our dissatisfactions or prevent evil from unfolding under their watch. Architecture, even at its most accomplished, will only ever constitute a small, and imperfect (expensive, prone to destruction and morally unreliable), protest against the state of things. More awkwardly still, architecture asks us to imagine that happiness might often have an unostentatious, unheroic character to it, that it might be found in a run of old floorboards or in a wash of morning light over a plaster wall – in undramatic, frangible scenes of beauty that move us because we are aware of the darker backdrop against which they are set.
10.
But if we accept the legitimacy of the subject nevertheless, then a new and contentious series of questions at once opens up. We have to confront the vexed point on which so much of the history of architecture pivots. We have to ask what exactly a beautiful building might look like.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, having abandoned academia for three years in order to construct a house for his sister Gretl in Vienna, understood the magnitude of the challenge. ‘You think philosophy is difficult,’ observed the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ‘but I tell you, it is nothing compared to the difficulty of being a good architect.’
II. In What Style Shall We Build?
1.
What is a beautiful building? To be modern is to experience this as an awkward and possibly unanswerable question, the very notion of beauty having come to seem like a concept doomed to ignite unfruitful and childish argument. How can anyone claim to know what is attractive? How can anyone adjudicate between the competing claims of different styles or defend a particular choice in the face of the contradictory tastes of others? The creation of beauty, once viewed as the central task of the architect, has quietly evaporated from serious professional discussion and retreated to a confused private imperative.
2.
It wasn’t always thought so hard to know how to build beautifully. For over a thousand discontinuous years in the history of the West, a beautiful building was synonymous with a Classical building, a structure with a temple front, decorated columns, repeated ratios and a symmetrical façade.
The Greeks gave birth to the Classical style, the Romans copied and developed it, and, after a gap of a thousand years, the educated classes of Renaissance Italy rediscovered it. From the peninsula, Classicism spread north and west, it took on local accents and was articulated in new materials. Classical buildings appeared as far apart as Helsinki and Budapest, Savannah and St Petersburg. The sensibility was applied to interiors, to Classical chairs and ceilings, beds and baths.
Alhough it is the differences between varieties of Classicism that have tended to interest historians most, it is the similarities that are ultimately more striking. For hundreds of years there was near unanimity about how to construct a window or a door, how to fashion columns and pedimented fronts, how to relate rooms to hallways and how to model ironwork and mouldings – assumptions codified by Renaissance scholar-architects and popularised in pattern books for ordinary builders.
Rules for Classical columns:
Architectural plate from Denis Diderot, editor, Encyclopédie, 1780
A city-wide consensus about beauty:
John Wood the Elder, north side, Queen Square, Bath, 1736
The Arch of Constantine, Rome, c. AD 315
Robert Adam, rear elevation, Kedleston Hall, 1765
So strong was this consensus that whole cities achieved a stylistic unity that stretched across successions of squares and avenues. An aesthetic language dating back to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi ended up gracing the family homes of Edinburgh accountants and Philadelphia lawyers.
Few Classical architects or their clients felt any impulse towards originality Fidelity to the canon was what mattered; repetition was the norm. When Robert Adam designed Kedleston Hall (1765), it was a point of pride for him to embed an exact reproduction of the Arch of Constantine (c. 315) in the middle of the rear elevation. Thomas Hamilton’s High School in Edinburgh (1825), though it was made of sombre grey Craigleith sandstone, sat under sepulchral Scottish skies and had steel beams supporting its roof, was lauded for the skill with which it imitated the form of the Doric Temple of the Parthenon in Athens (c. 438 BC). Thomas Jefferson’s campus for the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville (1826), quoted without shame from the Roman Temple of Fortuna Virilis (c. 100 BC) and the Baths of Diocletian (AD 302), while Joseph Hansom’s new town hall in Birmingham (1832) was a faithful adaptation, set down in the middle of an industrial city, of the Roman Maison Carrée at Nîmes (c. AD 130).