An invitation to a Classical ideal:
Above: Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Schlossbrücke, Berlin, 1824; statue by Albert Wolff, 1853
Below: Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Altes Museum, Berlin, 1830
When von Humboldt’s friend, the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, began to endow Berlin with Classical bridges, museums and palaces, he knew that Berliners would only ever be able to admire from a distance, rather than rekindle, the antiquity he revered, but he trusted that something of the period’s integrity and grandeur could through architecture still come to permeate the Prussian capital. As residents crossed the Schlossbrücke to attend a meeting or passed the New Pavilion at the Charlottenhof Palace on a Sunday walk, Schinkel’s architecture – his statue-laden bridges, his sober columns, his delicate frescos – could play a small but pivotal role in ushering in a renaissance of the spirit.
4.
However much it may seem as if we have lost all patience with idealisation, contemptuous as we are of decorated bridges and gilded statues, we are constitutionally incapable of abandoning the concept itself, for, freed of all its historical associations, the word ‘idealisation’ refers simply to an aspiration towards perfection, an objective with which no one, not even the most rational of beings, may ever be completely unacquainted.
It is in fact not ideals per se that we have forgone but the specific values once honoured by prominent works of idealisation. We have given up on antiquity, we have no reverence for mythology, and we condemn aristocratic confidence. Our ideals now revolve around themes of democracy, science and commerce. And yet we remain as committed as ever to the project of idealisation. Behind a practical façade, modern architecture has never ceased trying to reflect back to its audience a selective image of who they might be, in the hope of improving upon, and moulding, reality.
Idealising ambitions become especially evident whenever the construction of high-profile civic buildings is undertaken. The national pavilions of the World Exposition in Seville in 1992, for example, were in their understated way just as idealistic about their sponsoring countries as Veronese had been in his rendition of the virtues of Venetian government. Finland’s entry, made up of two separate but conjoined halves – a polished steel slab nestling against a curved extension of blond wood – spoke of a society which had succeeded in perfectly reconciling the opposing elements of male and female, modernity and history, technology and nature, luxury and democracy. Taken as a whole, the ensemble comprised an austerely beautiful promise of a dignified and graceful life.
An ideal life in Finland: Above: Monark Architects, Finnish Pavilion, Expo ’92, Seville, 1992
An ideal of a career in banking: Above: Frank Gehry, DZ Bank, Berlin, 2000
The workers of the DZ Bank in Berlin were offered a comparable version of an ideal by their headquarters beside the Brandenburg Gate. While their work itself might often be routine and repetitive, on their way to the cafeteria or a meeting, the bank’s employees could look down into the giant atrium of their building at a strange, elegant conference room, whose lithe forms hinted at the creativity and playfulness to which their solemn bosses aspired.
Oscar Niemeyer, National Congress, Brasília, 1960
Entire cities may even be born out of the wish to summon Schiller’s ‘escort descended from the world of the ideal’. When President Kubitschek of Brazil unveiled plans for the construction of Brasília, in 1956, he vowed that the new capital would become ‘the most original and precise expression of the creative intelligence of modern Brazil’. Deep and high in the country’s interior, it was to be a model of modern bureaucratic efficiency, an ideal to which the rest of Kubitschek’s sprawling, struggling country could pay only insecure and occasional homage. Brasília was intended not to symbolise an existing national reality but rather to bring a new reality into being. It was hoped that with its broad avenues and its undulating concrete and steel buildings, it would help erase Brazil’s legacy of colonialism, as well as the chaos and poverty of her coastal cities. Brasília would bring about the modernity it epitomised. It would create a country in its own image.
Richard Neutra, Edgar J. Kaufmann House, Palm Springs, 1946
The fact that Brasília would end up having its share of beggars and favelas, burnt grass on its spacious thoroughfares and cracks in the walls of its cathedral, would not have dissuaded the champions of idealisation in architecture, any more than would betrayals and incompetence beneath Veronese’s ceiling, stupidity within the Athenaeum, alcoholism and despair in Finland or terminal boredom in the offices of the DZ Bank. For them, such lapses merely underscored the need for idealised forms to stand as a defence against all that remains corrupt and unimaginative within us.
In the modern age, idealisation has proved as attractive in the domestic sphere as in the civic one. The bourgeois couples who lived in Richard Neutra’s mid-twentieth-century steel and glass pavilions in California may at times have drunk too much, squabbled, been insincere and overwhelmed by anxiety, but at least their buildings spoke to them of honesty and ease, of a lack of inhibition and a faith in the future – and would have reminded their owners, at the height of their tantrums or professional complications (when their fury rang out into the desert night), of what they longed for in their hearts.
In 1938, on a remote, rocky outcrop on the island of Capri, the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte conceived a home for himself which would be, as he wrote to a friend, ‘a self-portrait in stone’ (‘ritratto pietra’) and ‘a house like me’ (‘una casa come me’). With its proud isolation, its juxtapositioning of ruggedness and refinement, its unblinking, hardy defiance of the elements, and the aesthetic debt it owed to Ancient Rome on the one hand and Italian modernism on the other, the house did indeed pick up on key traits of Malaparte’s character. Fortunately for visitors, however, it turned out not to be a slavishly faithful portrait of its owner in all his facets – a difficult prospect for any house, certainly, but particularly so in Malaparte’s case, for that would have necessitated the inclusion of pretentious furnishings, dead-end corridors, perhaps a shooting range (he was a Fascist until 1943) and a few broken windows (he liked a drink and then a fight). Rather than reflecting the author’s many foibles, Casa Malaparte, like all effective works of idealisation, assisted its gifted yet flawed proprietor in orienting himself towards the noblest sides of his personality.
5.
The architecture produced under the influence of an idealising theory of the arts might be described as a form of propaganda. The word is an alarming one, for we are inclined to believe that high art should be free of ideology and admired purely for its own sake.
Yet the term ‘propaganda’ refers to the promotion of any doctrine or set of beliefs and in and of itself should carry no negative connotations. That the majority of such promotion has been in the service of odious political and commercial agendas is more an accident of history than any fault of the word. A work of art becomes a piece of propaganda whenever it uses its resources to direct us towards something, insofar as it attempts to enhance our sensitivity and our readiness to respond favourably to any end or idea.
A self-portrait in stone:
Curzio Malaparte (with Adalberto Libera), Casa Malaparte, Capri, 1943
Under this definition, few works of art could fail to be counted as propaganda: not only pictures of Soviet farmers proclaiming their five-year plans but also paintings of peas and lustre bowls; chairs; and steel and glass houses on the edge of the California desert. Taking the apparently perverse step of giving each of these the same label merely serves to stress the directive aspect of all consciously created objects – objects which invite viewers to imitate and participate in the qualities encoded within them.
From this perspective, we would be wise not to pursue the impossible goal of extirpating propaganda altogether, but should instead endeavour to surround ourselves with its more honourable examples. There is nothing to lament in the idea that art can direct our actions, provided that the dir
ections it points us in are valuable ones. The theorists of the idealising tradition were refreshingly frank in their insistence that art should try to make things happen – and, more importantly, that it should try to make us good.
John Wood the Younger, Royal Crescent, Bath, 1775
6.
A perplexing consequence of fixing our eyes on an ideal is that it may make us sad. The more beautiful something is, the sadder we risk feeling, so that standing in front of a painting by Pieter de Hooch of a grave-faced little boy diligently bringing his mother some loaves of bread, or of John Wood the Younger’s Royal Crescent in Bath, we may find ourselves not so far from tears.
Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.
Pieter de Hooch, A Boy Bringing Bread, c. 1665
Pieter de Hooch’s figures and the curve of the Royal Crescent stir us through the contrast they present to the emotions which more usually colour our days. The gentle manner of the mother and the trusting, dutiful expression of her son make us conscious of our own cynicism and brusqueness. The Royal Crescent, in all its solemn dignity, shows up the trivial and chaotic nature of so many of our ambitions. These works of art touch us because they are unlike us and yet also like the way we might wish ourselves to be.
Christian philosophers have been singularly alive to the sadness which beauty may provoke. ‘When we admire the beauty of visible objects, we experience joy certainly,’ observed the medieval thinker Hugh of St Victor, ‘but at the same time, we experience a feeling of tremendous void.’ The religious explanation put forward for this sadness, as rationally implausible as it is psychologically intriguing, is that we recognise beautiful things as symbols of the unblemished life we once enjoyed in the Garden of Eden. While we may one day resume this sublime existence in Heaven, the sins of Adam and Eve have deprived us of that possibility on earth. Beauty, then, is a fragment of the divine, and the sight of it saddens us by evoking our sense of loss and our yearning for the life denied us. The qualities written into beautiful objects are those of a God from whom we live far removed, in a world mired in sin. But works of art are finite enough, and the care taken by those who create them great enough, that they can claim a measure of perfection ordinarily unattainable by human beings. These works are bitter-sweet tokens of a goodness to which we still aspire, however infrequently we may approach it in our actions or our thoughts.
Even stripped of its theological elements, this story helps to account for the sorrow that can cling to our encounters with attractive objects. Imagine a man in an especially tormented period, sitting in the waiting room of a Georgian townhouse before a meeting. Uninterested in the magazines on offer, he looks up at the ceiling and recognises that at some point in the eighteenth century, someone took the trouble to design a complicated but harmonious moulding made up of interlocking garlands of flowers and painted it a mixture of white, porcelain blue and yellow. The ceiling is a repository of the qualities the man would like to have more of in himself: it manages to be both playful and serious, subtle and clear, formal and unpretentious. Though it must have been commissioned by people no less practical than he, it has a profound unsentimental sweetness, like that of a smile breaking across a child’s face. At the same time, the man is aware that the ceiling contains everything that he does not. He is embroiled in professional complications which he cannot resolve, he is permanently tired, a sour expression is etched onto his face, and he has begun shouting intemperately at strangers – when all he wants to explain is that he is in pain. The ceiling is the man’s true home, to which he cannot find his way back. There are tears in his eyes when an assistant enters the room to usher him to his meeting.
The man’s sadness points us to a subsidiary claim. It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things. Our downhearted moments provide architecture and art with their best openings, for it is at such times that our hunger for their ideal qualities will be at its height. It is not those creatures with well-organised, uncluttered minds who will be most moved by the sight of a clean and empty room in which sunlight washes over a generous expanse of concrete and wood, nor will it be the man with every confidence that his affairs are in order who will crave to live under – and perhaps even shed a tear over – the ceilings of a Robert Adam townhouse.
7.
While a common reaction to seeing a thing of beauty is to want to buy it, our real desire may be not so much to own what we find beautiful as to lay permanent claim to the inner qualities it embodies.
A human ideal on a ceiling:
Robert Adam, Home House, Portman Square, London, 1775
Owning such an object may help us realise our ambition of absorbing the virtues to which it alludes, but we ought not to presume that those virtues will automatically or effortlessly begin to rub off on us through tenure. Endeavouring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.
What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
Why Ideals Change
1.
An antique shop on one of north-west London’s more ragged edges. Outside, ambulance sirens hint at the homicidal conclusions to disagreements, police helicopters hover overhead, and people with unmatched socks advance down the street announcing millennial disasters to indifferent passers-by.
But the term ‘antique shop’ may be too quaint and tactful to capture the nature of this establishment. There are no smells of old leather and salesmen with half-moon glasses here; this more closely resembles a bailiff’s depot or junk yard. This is where objects make a last attempt to tempt the partially sighted before they are carted off to erode in a landfill.
In one corner stands an especially grievous-looking item, a sideboard with bulbous wings, two bay windows, Corinthian columns and a gilt-edged mirror. Though the piece’s drawers still work and the finish remains miraculously unspoilt, its price is closer to that of firewood than furniture, testifying to an ugliness too blatant for even the most generous-minded or myopic to ignore.
And yet how loved this sideboard must once have been. A maid might have run her duster over it every few days in an ample house in Richmond or Wimbledon. A cat perhaps playfully rubbed its tail against it on the way into the living room. For a generation, it would have proudly displayed Christmas pudding, champagne glasses and wedges of Stilton. But now, in the corner of this shop, it has all the poignancy of an ageing exiled Russian princess, dreaming of a palace in St Petersburg from a fleapit in Paris, letting all who will listen know of how attractive she looked at seventeen – even as despair and alcohol hang heavy on her breath.
Finding things beautiful naturally invites us to imagine that we will remain loyal to our feelings. But the histories of design and architecture offer little reassurance as to the fidelity of our tastes. The fate of the sideboard imitates that of numberless mansions, concert halls and chairs. Our impressions of beauty continually swing between stylistic polarities: between the restrained and the exuberant; the rustic and the urban; the feminine and the masculine – leading us ruthlessly to abandon objects to expire in junk shops at every swerve.
Precedent forces us to suppose that later generations will one day walk around our houses with the same attitude of horror and amusement with which we now consider many of the possessions of the dead. They will marvel at our wallpapers and our sofas and laugh at aesthetic crimes to which we are impervious. This awareness can lend to our affectio
ns a fragile, nervous quality. Knowing that what we now love may in the future, for reasons beyond our current understanding, appear absurd is as hard to bear in the context of a piece of furniture in a shop as it is in the context of a prospective spouse at an altar.
No wonder, then, that architects so assiduously try to distinguish their craft from fashion, and that they set such store (in vain, of course) on creating works which the decades will not render ridiculous.
2.
Why do we change our minds about what we find beautiful?
In 1907 a young German art historian named Wilhelm Worringer published an essay entitled ‘Abstraction and Empathy’, in which he attempted to explain our shifts from a psychological perspective.
He began by suggesting that during the span of human history there had been only two basic types of art, ‘abstract’ and ‘realistic’, either one of which might, at any given time in a particular society, be favoured over the other. Through the millennia, the abstract had enjoyed popularity in Byzantium, Persia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Congo, Mali and Zaire, and it was just then, at the opening of the twentieth century, returning to prominence in the West. This was an art governed by a spirit of symmetry, order, regularity and geometry. Whether in the form of sculpture or carpets, mosaics or pottery, whether in the work of a basket weaver from Wewak or that of a painter from New York, abstract art aspired to create a tranquil atmosphere marked by flat, repetitive visual planes, the whole being free of any allusion to the living world.
By contrast, Worringer noted, realistic art, which had dominated aesthetics in the Ancient Greek and Roman eras and held sway in Europe from the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century, sought to evoke the vibrancy and colour of tangible experience. Artists of this stripe strove to capture the atmosphere of a threatening pine forest, the texture of human blood, the swelling of a teardrop or the ferocity of a lion.
The Architecture of Happiness Page 8