It was in the Renaissance that this sporadic codifying ambition reached an apogee with the publication of Andrea Palladio’s The Four Books of Architecture (1570), perhaps the West’s most influential attempt systematically to decorticate the secrets of successful buildings.
Palladio specified that when designing Ionic columns, a pleasing result could be achieved only if the architrave, frieze and cornice were designed to be one fifth of the height of the column, while a Corinthian capital had to be equal in height to the breadth of the column at its lowest point. With regard to the interior, he insisted that rooms should be at least as high as they were broad, that the correct ratios between the lengths and the sides of rooms were 1:1, 2:3, 3:4 and that a hall should be placed on a central axis, in absolute symmetry to both wings of a house.
3.
Yet, despite the confidence of such assertions, Palladio’s laws were not to prove as enduring as the reputations of his houses. What discredited these laws – and indeed spelt the gradual end of any attempt to develop a science of attractive buildings – was the number of exceptions which they seemed to let through with all the regularity of a torn fishing net.
At the northern end of London’s Regent’s Park stands a mansion, constructed over 400 years after Palladio’s treatise was first published, which dutifully follows many of its tenets about proportion, the positioning of rooms, the axes of corridors and the diameters of columns. We might expect the house to have been recognised as one of the superlative buildings of contemporary London, an Anglo-Saxon heir to the Villa Rotonda, and yet, in reality, the structure has garnered less flattering verdicts and, among the more forthright, outright ridicule.
What laws allow: Quinlan Terry and Raymond Erith, Ionic Villa, London, 1990
The villa’s problems are multiple. Its forms seem out of sympathy with their era, they communicate feelings of aristocratic pride which sit oddly with contemporary ideals, the walls are too creamy in colour, while the materials have a lustre and flawlessness that mar the impression of aged dignity which endows Palladio’s own villas with charm. One regrets that Palladio found no opportunity to include another two dozen laws of beauty which might have placed additional tourniquets around the many sources of the mansion’s failings.
Just as following Palladio seems not to lead us ineluctably towards beauty, so ignoring his advice far from condemns a house to ugliness. Imagine a cottage in the Lake District: its hall is crammed into one corner, its rooms are on no axes at all, its columns are made of thick, untreated oak, its ceilings are hardly the height of a man, and its proportions seem to hew to no mathematical formula whatsoever. And yet such a cottage may profoundly seduce us despite its violation of almost every principle contained in the authoritative pages of The Four Books of Architecture.
4.
Such omissions have struck architects hard. In frustration, they have turned against the very idea of laws, declaring them naive and absurd, symptoms of Utopian and rigid minds. The concept of beauty has been deemed inherently elusive and therefore quietly sidestepped.
Yet a fairer response to the setbacks associated with Neo-Palladian principles would be greater subtlety rather than nervous silence. Even without knowing the sum of what contributes to the beauty of a building, we should find it possible to venture theories on the subject in the hope of provoking others to contribute further and complementary ideas to an evolving body of knowledge.
To help overcome our reluctance to pass open judgement on the aesthetic side of buildings, we should consider our comparative confidence in discussing the strengths and failings of our fellow human beings. Much of social conversation amounts to a survey of the different ways in which absent third parties have departed from or, much less commonly, have matched an implicit ideal of behaviour. In both casual and erudite registers, we are drawn to identifying vices and virtues, ‘gossip’ being only a vernacular version of ethical philosophy. Even though we seldom distil our grudges and admirations into abstract hypotheses, we frequently follow in the footsteps of philosophers who have written treatises aiming to identify and dissect human goodness.
We might learn to put names to the virtues of buildings as these philosophers have done to those of people, carefully pinning down the architectural equivalents of generosity or modesty, honesty or gentleness. Analogising architecture with ethics helps us to discern that there is unlikely ever to be a single source of beauty in a building, just as no one quality can ever underpin excellence in a person. Traits need to arise at congruous moments, and in particular combinations, to be effective. A building of the right proportions which is assembled out of inappropriate materials will be no less compromised than a courageous man lacking in patience or insight.
Armed with a comprehensive list of aesthetic virtues, architects and their clients would be freed from over-reliance on Romantic myths concerning the chance or divine origins of beauty. With virtues better defined and more readily integrated into architectural discussions, we would stand a fairer chance of systematically understanding and re-creating the environments we intuitively love.
Order
1.
From a traffic island at the upper end of a wide Parisian street, the view takes in a symmetrical, spacious corridor of stately apartment buildings, which culminate in a wide square in which a man stands proudly on top of a column. Despite the discord of the world, these blocks have settled their differences and humbly arranged themselves in perfect repetitive patterns, each one ensuring that its roof, façade and materials exactly match those of its neighbours. As far as the eye can see, not a single mansard or railing is out of line. The height of every floor and the position of every window are echoed along and across the street. Arcades rise to balconies which give way to three storeys of weathered sandstone, which in turn meet gently domed, lead-covered roofs, interrupted every few metres by solemn, geometric chimney stacks. The buildings seem to have shuffled forward like a troupe of ballet dancers, each one aligning its toes to the very same point on the pavement as though in obedience to the baton of a strict dancing-master. The dominant rhythm of the blocks is accompanied by subsidiary harmonic progressions, made up of lamps and benches. To the visitor or responsive inhabitant, this spectacle of precision presents an impression of beauty tied to qualities of regularity and uniformity, inviting the conclusion that at the heart of a certain kind of architectural greatness there lies the concept of order.
The street is the product of a distinctively human intelligence. We sense the sheer improbability of nature ever creating anything that could rival this setting for coherence and linearity. The scene confronts us with an externalisation of the most rational, deliberate workings of our minds. We can imagine the tumult that would have preceded the calm which now reigns in this place: the stifling summer days that would have echoed to the hammering and sawing of hundreds of labourers. The materials that make up the street would have had to be gathered from across the country over a period of years by a legion of suppliers, many unaware of their colleagues, all of them working under the guidance of the same master planner. Groups of stonemasons in quarries to the east and south would have spent months striking their chisels in similar configurations, so as to produce stones that would settle uncomplainingly beside their neighbours.
The street speaks of the sacrifice demanded by all works of architecture. The stones might have preferred to continue sleeping where they had lain down to rest at their geological bedtime 200 million years before, just as the iron ore of the balustrades might have opted to remain lodged in the Massif Central under forests of pine trees, before they were coaxed from their somnolence along with a symphony of other raw materials in order to partake in a colossal urban composition. An artisan’s cart would have travelled for days to reach the city, the driver having left behind a family and stayed in cheap inns, so that one day a piece of piping could quietly be united on the second floor of an apartment block with a hand basin, rendering life undramatically but significantly more habita
ble.
The Parisian street moves us because we recognise how sharply its qualities contrast with those which generally colour our lives. We call it beautiful from a humbling overfamiliarity with its antitheses: in domestic life, with sulks and petty disputes, and in architecture, with streets whose elements crossly decide to pay no heed to the appearance of their neighbours and instead cry out chaotically for attention, like jealous and enraged lovers. This ordered street offers a lesson in the benefits of surrendering individual freedom for the sake of a higher and collective scheme, in which all parts become something greater by contributing to the whole. Though we are creatures inclined to squabble, kill, steal and lie, the street reminds us that we can occasionally master our baser impulses and turn a waste land, where for centuries wolves howled, into a monument of civilisation.
Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine, rue de Castigslione, Paris, 1802
2.
Order contributes to the appeal of almost all substantial works of architecture. So fundamental is this quality, in fact, that it is written into even the most modest of projects at their very inception, in careful diagrams of electricity circuits and pipework, in elevations and plans – documents of beauty in which every cable and door frame has been measured and in which, though we may fail to grasp the exact meaning of certain symbols and numbers, we may nonetheless sense, and delight in, the overwhelming presence of precision and intent.
‘You like to complain that these dry numbers are the opposite of poetry!’ scolded Le Corbusier, frustrated that we might overlook the beauty inherent in such plans and in the forms of symmetrical bridges, blocks and squares. ‘These things are beautiful because in the middle of the apparent incoherence of nature or the cities of men, they are places of geometry, a realm where practical mathematics reigns … And is not geometry pure joy?’
Joy because geometry represents a victory over nature and because, despite what a sentimental reading might suggest, nature is in truth opposed to the order we rely on to survive. Left to its own devices, nature will not hesitate to crumble our roads, claw down our buildings, push wild vines through our walls and return every other feature of our carefully plotted geometric world to primal chaos. Nature’s way is to corrode, melt, soften, stain and chew on the works of man. And eventually it will win. Eventually we will find ourselves too worn out to resist its destructive centrifugal forces: we will grow weary of repairing roofs and balconies, we will long for sleep, the lights will dim, and the weeds will be left to spread their cancerous tentacles unchecked over our libraries and shops. Our background awareness of inevitable calamity is what can make us especially sensitive to the beauty of a street, in which we recognise the very qualities on which our survival hangs. The drive towards order reveals itself as synonymous with the drive towards life.
The pure joy of geometry:
Ludwig Wittgenstein, plan, Wittgenstein House, Vienna, 1928
3.
Architectural order attracts us, too, as a defence against feelings of over-complication. We welcome man-made environments which grant us an impression of regularity and predictability, on which we can rely to rest our minds. We don’t, in the end, much like perpetual surprises.
A sign of just how little we appreciate them is the lengths to which we often go to take in a view. We delight in reaching hill-tops, panoramic terraces, skyline restaurants and observation posts, where we encounter the basic pleasure of being able to see what lies in the far distance, and can follow roads and rivers across the landscape, rather than have them surge ahead of us without notice.
A comparable pleasure can be found in buildings, for example at the window of a country house which gives out onto a long regular driveway, or in a corridor extending from one extremity of a house to the other, or in a series of courtyards on a perfect axis. In these manifestations of ordered construction, we are granted a feeling of having tamed the unpredictabilities to which we are subject and, in a symbolic way, acquired command over a disturbingly unknowable future.
The pleasures of an ordered view:
Top: Carl Frederik Adelcrantz, Sturehof Estate, near Stockholm, 1781
Bottom: Christopher Wren and his successors, Greenwich Hospital, c. 1695
4.
Though we tend to believe, in architecture as in literature, that an important work should be complicated, many appealing buildings are surprisingly simple, even repetitive in their designs. The beguiling terraced houses of Bloomsbury or the apartment buildings of central Paris are assembled according to an unvarying and singularly basic pattern, once laid down in forceful municipal building codes. Over generations, these codes prevented architects from using their imaginations; they handcuffed them to a narrow palette of acceptable materials and forms, and, like the institution of marriage, restricted choice in the name of delivering the satisfactions of restraint.
That building codes have disappeared in many cities, and the modest ordered but satisfying edifices along with them, can be traced back to a perverse dogma which overtook the architectural profession in the Romantic period: a faith in a necessary connection between architectural greatness and originality. Over the nineteenth century, architects came to be rewarded according to the uniqueness of their work, so that constructing a new house or office in a familiar form grew no less contemptible than plagiarising a novel or poem.
This emphasis on individual genius had the unintended effect of tearing apart the carefully woven fabric of cities. ‘A day never passes without our hearing our architects called upon to be original and to invent a new style,’ observed John Ruskin in 1849, bewildered by the sudden loss of visual harmony. What could be more harmful, he asked, than to believe that a ‘new architecture is to be invented fresh every time we build a workhouse or parish church?’ He proposed that architecture should be the work of ‘one school, so that from the cottage to the palace, and from the chapel to the basilica, every feature of the architecture of the nation shall be as commonly current as its language or its coin’. Half a century later and in a similar vein, Adolf Loos appealed to architects to put aside their individual ambitions for the sake of collective coherence: ‘The best form is there already and no one should be afraid of using it, even if the basic idea for it comes from someone else. Enough of our geniuses and their originality. Let us keep on repeating ourselves. Let one building be like another. We won’t be published in Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration and we won’t be made professors of applied art, but we will have served ourselves, our times, our nation and mankind to the best of our ability.’
Few architects have listened. A commission for a house or an office remains an opportunity to reconsider from first principles the design of a window frame or front door. But an architect intent on being different may in the end prove as troubling as an over-imaginative pilot or doctor. However important originality may be in some fields, restraint and adherence to procedure emerge as the more significant virtues in a great many others. We rarely wish to be surprised by novelty as we round street corners. We require consistency in our buildings, for we are ourselves frequently close to disorientation and frenzy. We need the discipline offered by similarity, as children need regular bedtimes and familiar, bland foods. We require that our environments act as guardians of a calmness and direction on which we have a precarious hold. The architects who benefit us most may be those generous enough to lay aside their claims to genius in order to devote themselves to assembling graceful but predominantly unoriginal boxes. Architecture should have the confidence and the kindness to be a little boring.
5.
Then again, our love of order is not without limit, as we will recognise when we stand in front of a multistorey office building whose every window consists of an identical square of reflective glass locked into an identical aluminium frame, whose every floor resembles every other, which makes no obvious distinctions between right and left or front and back, and on whose surface not even a stray aerial or security camera is allowed to disturb the harmony of a master gr
id. Rather than exciting our admiration with evidence of its ordered nature, such a box may provoke feelings of lassitude or irritation. In its presence, we are likely to forget the effort that would have been required to wrest order out of chaos – and instead of praising the building for its regularity, we may condemn it for its tedium.
Insofar as we appreciate order, it is when we perceive it as being accompanied by complexity, when we feel that a variety of elements has been brought to order – that windows, doors and other details have been knitted into a scheme that manages to be at once regular and intricate. Thus, in St Mark’s Square in Venice, it is the façade of the Doge’s Palace which arrests and enchants us, not that of the Procuratie Vecchie, for though both façades are programmatic, only the palace’s is endowed with a pattern sufficiently elaborate to render vivid a sense of order. This great Gothic box, in which no one storey duplicates any other in its height or decorative motif, confidently holds our gaze as we try to decipher in its forms an intelligence we can intimate but not immediately understand. There is no simple system of repetition at work here. The top-floor windows and ground-floor arches are of the same family and yet are variously sized and interspaced. The cloverleaf niches at the very top echo the carvings over the columns of the first-floor gallery, without, however, being aligned with them, each storey seeming to pursue a congruent but independent path. There are shifts of mood as the eye ascends the façade, so that whereas the ground floor conveys a sensible and workmanlike air, with feet dug plainly and uncomplainingly into the ground, the first floor takes on the character of an embroidered dress. The smooth mass of white and pink brickwork which sits above evokes a patterned tablecloth, with the arches of the gallery now transformed into tassels and the ground-floor arches into table legs. The whole ends on a joyful note, the decorations of the roof line hinting at carnival hats saluting the skies of Venice.
The Architecture of Happiness Page 10