What NOT to do...

from The New Combination of Modern and Classic House by Studio Octopi
By Modern Residential Design July 16, 2010

 

Does this project really have "a unique geometry which seems to blend very well with this building." It may be nicely detailed, however this is just the wrong solution. What do you think?

Classical Architecture: Three Fallacies

7 May, 2010 The Architect's Journal | By Robert Adam


Hindon Lane, Tisbury by Ben Pentreath

Classicism has been wronged, argues Robert Adam. Although its longevity proves people still want classical buildings, three fallacies about style, relevance and authenticity are used to justify the hostility it receives from the profession.

In Europe, the Americas, the Antipodes and even India you can’t get away from classical architecture. It’s been around for 2,000 years and has had an unbroken run in Europe for 500 years. Classical forms are so deeply lodged in our collective subconscious that every time an architect designs a building with a row of columns, square or round, and puts a beam over them, there seems to be something classical about it. Some contemporary architects, like Eric Parry, say this is deliberate, while others, like David Chipperfield, claim it isn’t. Classicism can even be attributed to its antagonists: Robert Venturi claims that Mies van der Rohe was a classicist and architectural historian Colin Rowe famously linked Le Corbusier’s houses with Palladio’s villas.

For all this, 60 years of anti-traditional architectural education have created [a] profession largely ignorant of the history and vocabulary of classical architecture. Although they don’t know much about them, few architects will condemn great buildings of the past. To give their designs some sort of classical pedigree, architects sometimes claim they’ve used classical proportions (often of dubious provenance) or have drawn inspiration from the abstract qualities of a classical building. When dealing with literal new-classical designs, however, there’s little sympathy, and they’re frequently attacked as being ‘pastiches’ or ‘not of our time’. Justifying this hostility, and fuelled by ignorance, architects entertain three common fallacies about classical architecture.

The first is that classicism is just one style.

While there is a common ancestry in ancient Greece and Rome, the differences between the renaissance, baroque, rococo and early 20th-century ‘Swedish Grace’ styles (to name only the most obvious) are profound and very visible. Use-types have moved from temples to churches, huts to palaces, and offices to airports. Following the single-style fallacy is the idea that classicism inevitably represents some distasteful political regime that corresponds with one period in its history. But such is the variety, flexibility and ubiquity of the type that it has, in its time, been used to express democracy in the USA, autocracy in Nazi Germany, civic pride in the 19th century, paganism in antiquity, Christianity from the renaissance onwards, and much more besides.

The second fallacy is that, due to its antiquity and origins in ancient building technology, classicism simply doesn’t belong in the modern world.
 
But this can only be claimed if you have some determinist theory of what the modern world ought to be. Classical architecture is a part of the modern world. It continues to be widely demanded and supplied (both well and badly) around the world. It’s never been limited to one form of construction: the ancient Greeks imitated wood; the Romans not only added the arch, but made brick structures look like marble; renaissance domes introduced tension members and the industrial revolution cast-iron; early skyscrapers were classical; and glass walls date back to the 16th century. Now, to the surprise of many, the traditional construction at the source of classical design turns out to be the most sustainable. The idea of obsolescence often leads to a comparison with dead languages – usually Latin. As any linguist will tell you, however, a language is only dead if no one uses it.

Most architects may have abandoned it, but in the wider world the classical language is alive and well. The overwhelming desire for traditional and classical houses has been established beyond doubt and the sale of classical cast stone, plaster mouldings and plastic details (regardless of how well they are produced) continues apace. These things mean something to those who want them. Research would be required to find out what this might be, but we can be fairly sure it’s not an association with the Greek Dorian tribe or animal sacrifice. In all languages meanings change, but this doesn’t mean the language has died. In fact it is exactly this quality that gives languages their richness and complexity.

The third fallacy is that it’s no longer possible to build ‘proper’ classical buildings, due to a lack of skills or the expense of decoration.

In the first place, the skills are available and modern technology helps to deliver what was once complicated and labour-intensive. Classical buildings need be no more or less expensive than any building. In the second place, and most significantly, a lack of design practice has led to the idea that classicism is only the application of decoration, and the more of it the better. In fact, classical design is as much about what’s omitted as what’s included. Due to its complete familiarity, when decoration is stripped away there’s still the lingering impression that it could be put back. This gives classical design great flexibility, but it can also lead people to believe that buildings such as Foster + Partners’ Carré d’Art (1993) in Nîmes, France, are classical when they’re not.

This ambiguity is evidence of the underlying persistence of the classical ideal, which should be exploited rather than ignored. The architectural establishment often freezes out the few practising classicists or locks them safely in a box marked ‘reproduction’. For their part, too many classicists see modernity as the enemy. Neither attitude is healthy. A public desire for both the benefits of modernity and the depth of tradition is commonplace. A liberal profession should accept and even combine the energy of invention and the wisdom of classicism. The creative potential is enormous.

Classical architect Robert Adam is a director of Adam Architecture

Pavilions??

Dezeen's recent feature on pavilions caught our eye for three reasons...  
Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2010 Kensington Gardens, London by Jean Nouvel  photographed by Julien Lanoo.
One:   
OOOOOOOHHH!!!  Look it's RED!!!...




Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2009 Kensington Gardens, London by Kazuyo Sejima & Ryue Nishizawa ofSANAA  photographed by Iwan Baan.
Two:   
I don't know what that thing is in the front, but it is hiding quite a beautiful building and...


Shanghai Expo 2010 Dutch Pavilion by John Kormeling  photographed by Montse Zamorano.
Three: 
OK, WTF?

A New Humanism

Frank Gehry, Disney Hall (2003): Today’s avant-gardist architecture
tries hard to draw attention to itself, but it does not express any social ideal.


In architecture...we need to reject the avant garde’s pursuit
of novelty, its belief that new technology should sweep away the
past, in favor of humanistic design. Christopher Alexander has laid
the groundwork with his theory that there are common patterns
underlying traditional architecture, which modernists have abandoned
but which we must return to in order to build on a human scale.
New Urbanist planners have led the way by building humanscale
neighborhoods. In ethics, economics, and art, the new humanists
are still a small minority, but the New Urbanism has already
established itself as our most important theory of urban planning.
Architecture can also help lead our society toward a new
humanism. Just as modernist architecture helped to promote faith in technology and progress during the twentieth century, a humanistic
architecture can help promote the focus on human values that we
need in the twenty-first century.
Modernist architecture symbolized the triumph of technology
over culture, with decisions made on technical grounds. Today, we
need an architecture that symbolizes the triumph of culture over
technology, with decisions made on human grounds.

from An Architecture for Our Time: The New Classicism
by Charles Siegel
[originally published, in a slightly different form, on the website
of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism (INTBAU)]

Modern Faves: The Open Ended Box

Today we are exploring in photo-montage the ubiquitous Modern Architecture element:  

The Open Ended Box.

Some may say it is a reference to early cave dwelling and has a deep seated existence in our unconscious mind. Some say the environment is participating in the architecture by being the "fourth wall". Some say it is the culmination of a "journey" through it to a framed view in the distance, or a view capturing device.  Some may even say it  is aimed at man's hopes and dreams for the future.

Whether on the ground or raised up; singly placed or stacked in mock nonchalance; no matter how beautifully described by written word, we can't get enough of it.... drum roll please, I give you:

The Modern Open Ended Box! (or MOEB in the biz.)

Why Grand Central Works

 

by Urban Omnibus August 5th, 2009

Vishaan Chakrabarti offered Omnibus readers a searing critique of stimulus spending: calling out the “shovel-ready” prescription as the kind of medication that will enable and encourage our gluttonous land use and development habits at the expense of intelligent investment in infrastructure. Chakrabarti doesn’t merely opine on the ways and means of reimagining the American landscape, however. In his current role as an Executive Vice President of Related Companies, he is in charge of design and planning efforts for the Hudson Rail Yards and Moynihan Station: two sites that, in order to be done right, require a careful calibration of public-private partnerships and a farsighted appreciation of the nexus between transportation infrastructure, commercial capacity and urban density.

Does that sound impossible? Politically unpalatable and financially unsound? Like it will take too long and is just too hard?

Well, we have an example of exactly that kind of accretive process in one of the city’s most beloved places, Grand Central Terminal. Why does it work so well? Listen to Vishaan tell it like it is. First, he reflects on some design details of the spectacular Main Concourse. Next, he wanders down Park Avenue and shares some of the history of how private sector competition led to a major public amenity and transformed the entire metropolitan region. Then he explores the terminal’s tentacular North-end Access and reflects further on how the terminal has transformed urban and regional economies. Finally, as he delves into the food court, he ponders lessons to be learned from Grand Central that could be applied to Moynihan Station.

Main Concourse

Lesson #1: Design matters. Beyond the obvious grandeur of its public spaces, Grand Central relies on a sophisticated layering of uses that has influenced the design of airports and train stations around the world.
Video running time: 3:22


Park Avenue and Midtown East 

“It’s more than just the building. It’s about how hundreds of thousands of people move around a region.”

Lesson #2: The building is only part of a larger exercise in citymaking. Grand Central catalyzed the development of some of the most valuable real estate in the world.

Running time: 4:27. Right-click here to download mp3.

North-end Access

All great train stations… have tentacles that reach out into the city. There’s not just a front door.

Lesson #3: Plan for phases. Grand Central wasn’t built in a day, and part of what makes it work can be found in the less than glamorous network of pedestrian access passageways.

Running time: 2:41. Right-click here to download mp3.
.

Lessons for Moynihan Station 

Train stations still have an openness about them. … as hubs [they] speak to the nature of the city that’s around them.

Lesson #4: Think big. If we could make a commuter terminal this nice – and one that’s had such wide-ranging urban and metropolitan ramifications – imagine what we could do with a major inter-city regional rail hub?

Running time: 4:36. Right-click here to download mp3.



Listen to Bob Yaro reflect on the destruction of the original Penn Station and imagine a new future for Midtown West. Perhaps realizing that future will require looking carefully into the city’s past. -C.S

For a terrific documentary on the construction of Grand Central Terminal:
American Experience - PBS

...from the "Screw The City" file

[Parkway Gate by Ian Simpson Architects, 2008 | image source]
 
"In Manchester England Parkway Gate by Ian Simpson Architects. Three towers for student housing exhibit similar forms and facade patterns, but each uses different materials in the solid areas to create a unique identity for each and for variety on the skyline. Not surprisingly the Cor-ten-clad tower exudes a particularly strong presence, especially when it is reflected in the glass of the other towers." 

from A Daily Dose of Architecture, Sunday, October 11, 2009.

Come on people!! These rusty buildings may look "cool", but they meet the city at street level with a THUD. There is absolutely no relationship to the living city, except from a high speed vehicle on the highway. Buildings like this are destroying our cities. Along with the opportunity to create such buildings comes a responsibility to respect the fabric in which they are located. Remember, these were created for use by human beings... They don't have any kind of human scale to relate to. However the ego scale is HUGE!

A Redesigned Boston City Hall

The Boston Globe recently featured ideas from readers for a few ditched projects around Boston, including the idea abandoned by Mayor Menino of demolishing and rebuilding City Hall.

 
Cambridge resident Aaron Helfand rendered a new Boston City Hall. "I think Boston does need a new city hall, and I think it should be built on the site of the current City Hall Plaza, in the heart of the city," he said in an e-mail to Boston.com. Aaron recently graduated from the architecture school at Notre Dame, one of only three or four in the country with a classical curriculum.

This illustration depicts the west and south elevations of Helfand's proposal.
Helfand, who completed University of Notre Dame's graduate architecture program in May, used these renderings for his senior thesis. This interior detail shows a reception room.






















"With my project, I have attempted to figure out why the current City Hall and its plaza are as unpopular as they are and to offer an alternate vision, one which will create a lively public plaza, defined by inventive architecture that builds on Boston's rich architectural traditions," he said.

"Most importantly, I sought to design buildings that would last, since this is one of the most important requirements of sustainability in architecture," Helfand said in his e-mail. This image shows more details from Helfand's rendering.

The South Lawn at the University of Virginia

Architectural Criticism from Traditional Architecture Compendium
A Compilation of Articles of and About Classical and Traditional Architecture
Posted by Dino Marcantonio
May 26, 2010

A student recently reminded me of the architectural hubbub of a few years ago at our alma mater, the University of Virginia. In September 2005, to kick off the semester, a large majority of the faculty members of the school of architecture signed "An Open Letter to the Board of Visitors, the University Administration, and the University Community" which criticized the university's periodic tendency to commission traditional architecture for buildings on grounds. It was penned in response to the university's firing of the staunchly modernist firm Polshek Partnership and the hiring of the slightly less staunchly modernist firm Moore Ruble Yudell to design the South Lawn Project.

There was a fierce reaction from the international community of traditional architects, culminating in a full page ad in the school paper, The Cavalier Daily, supporting the university's efforts to extend the principles embodied in The Lawn, the university's original buildings.

The University of Virginia Lawn, designed by Thomas Jefferson.
 

Architects, historians, alumni, students, and concerned citizens lobbed more letters back and forth over the net, attracting national attention. But the most thoughtful attempt to spur the university in the direction pictured below was provided by Professor Edward Ford, one of the letter's signatories, in his talk Some Thoughts on Architecture at Virginia.

The University of Virginia's Hereford College,
by architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien.

To his credit, Ford was reserved in his praise for the hope-sapping Hereford College, surprising considering the school had recently awarded Williams and Tsien the prestigious Thomas Jefferson Medal. Nevertheless, his talk is a good reprise of the standard fallacies which dominated the discussion. They are the same prejudices which paralyze architecture schools and the profession today. It is worth reading if only because it is not so couched in jargon as your average manifesto.

I summarize his points and offer rebuttals below.

1. The Traditionalist's argument that buildings should respect their context is a fallacy. In Venice, for example, the Renaissance interventions in the Gothic context were not contextual. Therefore, buildings don't have to be contextual to be good.
2. The argument for Classicism is based on the fallacy of Associationism, i.e., the meanings we associate with certain forms are constantly changing, therefore they provide an unsound foundation on which to form judgments. There are "deeper structures" to which we must appeal if we are to judge architecture properly. We see that deeper structure when we take away the "cow skulls" (i.e., the extraneous ornament) of Classicism.

Ed Ford, Pages from Venetian Sketchbook.

Superfluous detail on the left, essence on the right.

3. Modern Classicism (presumably as opposed to traditional Classicism) is a fraudulent appliqué concealing a building's true construction.

4. Diversity vs. Euro-centrism: we cannot achieve the intellectual (and therefore stylistic) unities of the past and we are richer for it. Therefore we are bound to look beyond style.

I answer Ford's points as follows:

1. To argue that a Modernist building is to a traditional context what a Renaissance building is to a Gothic context is really to misunderstand Modernism, the Gothic, and the Renaissance. The Renaissance developed naturally out of the Middle Ages. In no serious way can it be argued that the Renaissance represents an approach at odds with the Gothic. In both periods the very same tradition is being tended to, but in the Renaissance period improved scholarship and economic power are brought to bear, as well as a change in taste and emphasis. Modernism, in stark contrast, seeks to end the Greco-Roman tradition, and it pursues the pipedream of an abstract architecture whose forms have no substantive meaning. It is impossible to build an abstraction.
2. Classicists do not argue for a superficial architecture, the smearing of molding sauce all over mediocre buildings without integrity. We hold, as suggested in my point one above, that forms have substantive meaning. Ford's drawing "Pages from Venetian Sketchbook" is perfect evidence for our case that the Modernists oversimplify classicism. I can't imagine many would believe Ford has revealed the reality behind the style with these sketches.
3. If Ford really believed he had revealed the reality behind the style, Ford would have to denounce the whole history of architecture. Greek moldings are not intrinsic to ancient stone construction--would the Parthenon be better without the intricacies of the Doric entablature to disguise the real load bearing going on underneath? Are the triglyphs "inauthentic"? Roman architecture is all revetment. When the Romans invented the arch (the high technology of the day) they didn't reveal the bricks that bore the real loads, they covered them up with archivolts.
4. Ford's point here seems to contradict his point regarding context. Was Venice, a pre-modern city, uniform or not? The classicists are not arguing for perfect uniformity in any case. We are arguing for intelligibility. Renaissance buildings in the Venetian context were and are eminently intelligible, just as modern Classicism in the context the University of Virginia makes perfect sense.
Ford's principles lead to Hereford College. And had Polshek not been fired and continued with the now almost complete South Lawn Project, we can be certain it would have turned out in a similar vein. Moore Ruble Yudell, however, are a more compromising firm, shall we say. The results are now coming into full view as the project nears completion.

A view of the Commons Building,

a pale imitation--mockery, really--of Jefferson's Rotunda.

Cue the trombone: WAH-wah! Alas, had the university hired a competent, staunchly traditional firm, the result would have been so much more edifying. The site plan is not awful. There is a fairly clear sequence with good spatial definition. The open circus at the end of the axis is supposed to frame the originally intended view of the mountains, blocked a century ago by McKim Mead and White's Old Cabell Hall. Strikes me as a rather weak frame, however. Jefferson positioned pavilions at the end of the Lawn to punctuate the composition, while here there is no such gesture.

The South Lawn is in the foreground, Jefferson's Lawn

in the background. In between the two are

New Cabell Hall, and Old Cabell Hall behind.

The basic diagram, a miniature of the Lawn set at right angles to the original, is getting to be a rather trite response at this point, having already been tried at the Darden School and Hereford College (such as it is).

The details of the building are an utter disappointment. We've already seen the boring and out-of-place glass curtain wall. The masonry bits which attempt to abstract traditional classical elements betray a decided lack of interest if not literacy on the part of the architect. What else can explain these columns and entablature?

Certainly not budget, as in ages past we have been able to do a lot more and with fewer resources. Omitting detail is sometimes a practical necessity; however, there are ways to do it while retaining elegance in proportion. Here is my favorite example, from Palladio's Villa Pojana.

Palladio, Villa Pojana

So powerful, yet there is so little there! And it is not about capturing the essence of the orders. The essence is not captured by removing architectural detail any more than a symphony's essence would be captured if we removed half the notes. Remove half the notes and you destroy the symphony! No, it is about calibrating expression to suit the occasion. Here the message had to be toned down, simplified, and it was done with a sure hand.

What is Palladio's secret? How does he know which lines to remove and which to keep? I can assure you, it is not through the Ed Ford method. The answer is: years of careful study of the canon, from the grandest gestures, to the most minute detail. There are no shortcuts.

Why We Need a Third Architectural Treatise

by C.W. Westfall

Street View of Alessandria, Italy by Léon Krier
Vitruvius famously opened the first treatise on architecture with the statement that architecture requires the interaction between practice (fabrica) and reasoning (ratio). The former takes its form in buildings, the latter in treatises. Now that the practice of traditional and classical architecture and urbanism has been firmly reestablished, it is time to take another look at the complement to practice. Two treatises have dominated theory. Vitruvius, writing in the first century A.D., wrote the first one.¹ Leon Battista Alberti revised and reformulated that body of theory in the early years of antiquity’s restoration and renewal at the dawn of the modern age.² Together, these two treatises present a comprehensive and rigorous theoretical complement to a rich and maturing practice in architecture. We know a little about the role of Vitruvius’ treatise before Alberti wrote his, and we know a great deal about the role they both played afterwards. To remain current they needed only fragmentary contributions or partial and respectful amendment to absorb new knowledge or to give theory a different emphasis. For example, Filarete³ sought to give a princely perspective that would counter Alberti’s republican bias, and both he and Francesco di Giorgio Martini⁴ restored and expanded Vitruvius’ comments about the anthropomorphic analogy Alberti had left implicit. Philibert de l’Orme⁵ adapted the full body of material to address conditions in France. Serlio, following Cesariano’s publication of Vitruvius, introduced images to supplement the text.⁶ And Palladio, knowing that his audience was familiar with the body of theory, wrote his in a kind of shorthand.⁷The treatises link buildings to the larger body of knowledge that an educated person ought to possess. Buildings and treatises provide complementary ways to investigate and comprehend the content and meaning of the stable, coherent, rational, moral universe within which individuals pursue their destiny, which is to “Know Thyself.”

The career of architectural theory resembles that of political philosophy. All the principles concerning man as a political animal that a person needs to know are encompassed in a few books by Plato and Aristotle. Subsequent writing on the topic has been based on experience that suggests amendments to that initial body of knowledge. Yet, while Aristotle’s Politics and Nicomachean Ethics are no longer adequate descriptions of the form political societies ought to take, they continue to provide valuable insights to anyone who seeks to live nobly, justly and well. Like political theory, architectural theory takes it as a given that the universe has a moral content, that the world man lives in is orderly and coherent in ways that are beyond comprehension, that man is endowed with the tools required to gain an understanding of the moral order that is adequate for his flourishing in the world, that revelation is compatible with reason, and that it is man’s fate and obligation to devote his natural gifts to fulfilling his duty to live abundantly and well in a just human society. But even before this understanding had reached mature form, philosophers such as Heraclitus had raised doubts about the validity of giving the continuity and rationality of the universe that lies outside perception superiority over its much more obvious and easily accessible discontinuities and unpredictability. These doubts remained submerged until a series of new discoveries made during the Renaissance.

Léon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria Florence, 1486, opening page, Book

The discoveries covered a wide range of topics. The potent combination of newly available ancient texts, the distribution of identical texts produced with the printing press and textual criticism led to doubt about whether we had exact knowledge of what Plato or Cicero said, much less what Moses or Paul had said. Wide ranging exploration turned up formerly unknown peoples and places with incomprehensible habits and ways of living together. Things previously invisible—what the telescope made visible in the heavens and the microscope revealed in everyday earthly things—shook the confidence people had in the adequacy of their knowledge about things they thought they knew well. New interpretations of ancient and modern theories about the structure of the physical universe and increasingly extensive and accurate observations about the movements of the heavenly bodies led, first, to a displacement of the earth from the center of the universe, then to contending theories about how those bodies behaved and why they behaved as they did, and then to the more serious question about where things terrestrial left off and things celestial began. Even the validity of the proportions that architectural theory said were necessary to instill beauty in the architectural orders, the principal ornament of architecture, was called into question when new, accurate measurements of ancient examples revealed that none of the examples that were considered models of beauty embodied those proportions. While Palladio and Vignola could present particular examples of the orders as illustrations of different forms of common beauty, Claude Perrault would present generic examples of the orders based on rules sanctioned by nothing more than the pleasure they customarily produced.⁸

Sebastiano Serlio, Tutte L’opere d’architettura Venice, 1537, Book IV

The Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns that engaged Perrault revealed that people had lost confidence in the received tradition and that they would seek certainty in more, and more accurate, data. Sir Isaac Newton used the twin pillars of precise, measurable observation and newly powerful mathematics to make the most impressive discoveries, because they led to the most accurate descriptions of how material bodies in the heavens and on the earth behave. He demonstrated conclusively that, if we have accurate information about the present configuration of things, we can predict the future configuration, both in the celestial realm where we cannot intervene and in the terrestrial where we can. Enthusiasts of Newtonianism, as it was called in the Enlightenment, undertook a program of stripping away received ideas and extrapolating the system of the natural sciences into the realm of the human sciences. The most successful reduction of architecture to minimalism was in Laugier’s presentation of the primitive hut as the model for the basis of all architecture.⁹ The most obvious and best-understood application of Newtonianism to architecture was in the field of statics, or structural engineering. Two other less direct applications were in historical studies, one of them becoming archaeology, the other anthropology. These focused on the origins of things—things closer to the beginning were thought to be more truthful, that is, more revealing of the essence or the nature of the thing. Whereas Renaissance architects believed that what Rome had achieved had more to teach than did the buildings that preceded the Romans, people with serious architectural interests for the first time now turned their attention to Greek buildings, making their first visits to well-preserved remains in Athens and Paestum in the middle of eighteenth century.¹⁰ This interest quickly spread to other non-Roman and even non-Mediterranean peoples and locales, although even ancient Rome got a reassessment by the discovery of a vast new range of things Roman when Pompeii and Herculaneum came to light during these same years.

By the end of the eighteenth century, people had available an ever-expanding body of precise information about ancient buildings by people akin to us, by others unaffiliated with us in any direct way and in remote places such as China and Polynesia, where people and things were utterly unfamiliar to us. This body of newly acquired accurate information was regarded as having qualities that were equal to, although incommensurable with, those that the received traditions of building and theory said were required for a good building. It was not long before the standards for what constituted a good building migrated from the concept of beauty resulting from judgment to that of accuracy based on reproducing approved precedent. Knowing the historical past became more important than knowing traditional theory.

To serve in this new role, history emerged from its subordinate role within theory to become an independent discipline. During the course of the nineteenth century, it became wedded to anthropology and took on a polemical edge. Historians organized the new information about the diversity of mankind in the present and the past into eras or ages, each with a distinct culture identified by a distinctive style composed of commonalities among a variety of artifacts, among which architecture occupied a prominent position. This new concept of culture was then hitched to various newly invented philosophical positions that Hegel, Comte and various Darwinians formulated to explain why people acted as they did and why the forward march of history would inevitably lead to mankind’s perfection on earth.¹¹ The historical narrative presented each culture as unique; each has its distinctive style, and each style is “of its time.” If we adapt the style of some other time to our own time, we can associate our time with the cultural attributes of that time, a way of thinking that Geoffrey Scott identified as the Romantic Fallacy.¹² The role that theory used to play in assisting the architect in rendering judgment about how to make a good building that satisfied the criteria of architecture was displaced by histories that taught him the proper, past styles and how to use them in the present.

In the early twentieth century people involved in architecture quite properly identified this nineteenth-century position, which produced an age of stylistic eclecticism, as a sham. In seeking a unique identity for their culture and an alliance with the idea of progress, they devised a style of their own so that their buildings would be “of their time.” To be “of its time” required that a building be unlike any building of any other time. Constantly changing time and the inevitable march of progress require ceaseless innovation. The old, whether in the form of fabrica or ratio, must be discarded in favor of the new. Now neither theory nor history would guide the architect. Instead, the manifesto appeared to point the way into the future that the architect was obliged to hurry into existence with a building that was a novel and “of its time.”¹³

The only survivor from traditional theory in the twentieth century was the Vitruvian trilogy of commodity, firmness and delight. It has gone largely unnoticed that Vitruvius presented these as conditions for building that must be satisfied before building can become architecture and that architecture has its own criteria, namely, symmetria, eurythmia and decor.¹⁴ The reduction of architecture to mere building occurred in accord with the extraction of architecture from among the liberal arts, or the arts of a person who enjoys and defends his free status in society, to being a building art, that is, a craft used to satisfy immediate needs with material means. Another victim was the concept of imitation, which was fundamental to the classical tradition. Despite the best efforts of Quatremère de Quincy¹⁵ through his important position in the École des Beaux-Arts, the distinction between imitating and copying was lost, and the copy became accepted because it was factual. The first comprehensive presentation of these positions was the handbook of J.N.L. Durand, based on lectures he presented between 1802 and 1805 at the École Polytechnique, which Napoleon had established to train engineers for his army and public works program.¹⁶ It is often cited as a foundational text of modernist architecture. In suffering this reduction from liberal artist to building artisan, the architect fell hostage to experts outside architecture. To satisfy commodity, he consults his client and the social scientist. For firmness, the engineer is the expert. And for delight, he depends on his own inclination and preference, or he responds to what be believes is required to produce a building that is “of its time,” something he learns by seeing what historians, critics and publishers are presenting as the architecture “of our time.” In all three fields the material he needs to know is so specialized, his knowledge cannot be as accurate and profound as that of these experts. He has become dependent on them, and what he knows as an architect about architecture necessarily takes second place. In this circumstance, what would be the point of architectural theory, much less of a comprehensive treatise?

But theory was not so easily dismissed. After the experience of the first half of the twentieth century proved that new architecture was incapable of delivering on its promise of perfection, architects sought a different liaison for building. They did not look at practice and the body of knowledge aimed at clarifying the role of man in the world, which is where theory had first originated and continued to flourish. Instead, they looked at one of two places outside architecture and building. One was at their own preference, hunches, inclinations, instincts and attraction, and defined whatever they liked as almost all right.¹⁷ The other was in the obscure (and therefore profound) musings of nihilistic philosophers.¹⁸ These sources provided theories that were de rigueur in the schools and in academic journals but useless in the professional offices, unless the architect was working for a client who was treating a building as simply an addition to a collection of art objects.

The outpouring of manifestos, histories and theories has produced a tremendous din, but it has not stilled the voices of reason that understand that ratio is a complement to fabrica and that theory is a guide to practice and a link to the larger body of knowledge that assists men to know themselves. One of the first to disregard the distractions and listen to the music of architecture was Thomas Jefferson. He had copies of both Vitruvius and Alberti, but he considered Palladio’s treatise the bible of architecture. These surely guided him in formulating the role architecture needed to be given in the new republic he was helping to found, as he set about producing a series of important buildings and city plans suitable for the new republic’s civil purposes and the unique American landscape.

Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l’Architecture Paris, 1753, frontispiece

Jefferson’s way of operating has persisted, even as his successors have pushed traditional and classical architecture forward while resisting the attractions of the concurrent modernism. The differences between the two positions are well defined by remarks made a century ago. In 1910 Adolf Loos delivered a lecture whose title would become a modernist maxim, “Ornament and Crime,” while only a few years earlier the American Institute of Architects’ Committee on Education said the American schools teaching architecture sought to produce “gentlemen of general culture with special architectural ability.”¹⁹

New buildings and urban projects, both in this country and abroad, attest to the vitality of the newly restored practice of traditional and classical architecture. But the buildings have yet to find their complement in theory. There have been profound contributions to the existing body of theory.²⁰ But there is not yet a comprehensive treatment that does for the present age what Vitruvius did for the Romans and Alberti for the Renaissance. Those engaged in practice are therefore often left without strong moorings in theory when buffeted by the turmoil modernism carries in its wake.

Leon Krier, Architecture: Choice or Fate London, Andreas Papadakis, 1998, p. 33

No one treatise can encompass the full and complete body of knowledge about architecture. Vitruvius’ and Alberti’s come closest, although even a fragment or shorthand version can give access to it, as Jefferson learned by consulting his “bible.” In a telling passage, Vitruvius explained why this is so. When he surveyed the range of knowledge that the architect must possess, he observed, “…perhaps it will seem wonderful to inexperienced persons that human nature can master and hold in recollection so large a number of subjects.” He then continues: “When, however, it is perceived that all studies are related to one another and have points of contact, they will easily believe it can happen. For a general education is put together like one body from its members.”²¹

Some missing members can be filled in, but others must be present if the body is to have vitality, and that calls for a third architectural treatise. The topic that seems most missed today concerns the subject that moved Alberti to revise Vitruvius’ treatise, namely, the position architecture occupies in the moral structure of the universe. That topic formed the central core of both treatises, the one that gave coherence to all the other topics. Vitruvius’ universe was pagan, Alberti’s Christian, so Alberti had to revise Vitruvius’ treatise. Ours is different again, although like theirs, it is stable, coherent, rational and moral. Like theirs, it rests on the foundations of natural law. Nevertheless, it differs in that the moral framework of our political structure exists outside an established institutionalized religion. Still, in ours as in theirs, for Vitruvius, for Alberti, for Jefferson and for us, a building is a form given to a moral proposition. When architecture is not a moral proposition, it is mere fashion.²² The current renewal of traditional and classical architecture and urbanism is often dismissed as mere fashion. Only theory’s formulation of the moral content of architecture in the reality of the present day can refute that charge and support an enriched restoration and renewal of traditional and classical architecture and urbanism.

Originally printed in American Arts Quarterly, Volume 23, number 3.

Notes
1. Vitruvius, De architectura, ed. and trans., Frank Granger (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press; Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols., 1933–35), is a standard en face edition; The Ten Books on Architecture, trans., Ingrid Rowland, with commentary by Thomas Noble Howe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) is a useful addition. For a recent study, see Indra Kagis McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press: 2003).
2. On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans., Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1988); written about 1452, first printed ed. 1485.
3. The complete, illustrated treatise of Antonio Averlino, called Filarete, from 1462, remained unpublished until a facsimile edition of one manuscript with translation appeared as Filarete’s Treatise on Architecture, trans., John R. Spencer, 2 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1965).
4. Less a treatise than accumulations of notes and drawings from 1475 until his death in 1501, distributed in various manuscripts, it is accessible in Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Trattati, ed., Corrado Maltese, 2 vols. (Milan: Polifilo, 1967).
5. Philibert de l’Orme, Traités d’architecture: Nouvelles inventions pour bien bastir et à petits fraiz (1561), Premier Tome de l’architecture (1567), repub. (Paris: Laget, 1988).
6. Cesare Cesariano, trans. and commentary on Vitruvius, 1521, ed., Arnaldo Bruschi, Adriano Carugo and Francesco P. Fiore (Milan: Polifilo, 1981). Sebastiano Serlio’s treatise appeared serially, beginning in 1537, with Book IV devoted to the orders. The entire treatise is now available in English: Sebastiano Serlio, On Architecture, trans. and commentary, Vaughn Hart and Peter Hicks, 2 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale, 1996–2001).
7. Andrea Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture (1570), trans., Robert Travenor and Richard Schofield (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1997).
8. Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, Canon of the Five Orders of Architecture (1562), trans., with commentary by Branko Mitroviç (New York: Acanthus, 1999). Claude Perrault, Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns after the Method of the Ancients (1683), trans., Indra Kagis McEwen (Santa Monica: Getty Center, 1993).
9. Marc-Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture (1753), trans., W. and A. Herrmann (Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1977).
10. Dora Wiebenson, Sources of Greek Revival Architecture (London: Zwemmer, 1969).
11. David Watkin, Morality and Architecture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977); 2nd ed. as Morality and Architecture Revisited (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
12. Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism, 1914 (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1999).
13. See, for example, Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style, 1932 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1966), p. 95. A number of manifestos from 1903 to 1963 have been conveniently collected in Ulrich Conrads, ed., Programs and Manifestoes on 20th Century Architecture, trans., Michael Bullock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970).
14. See Herman Geertman, “Teoria e attualità della progettistica architettonica di Vitruvio,” in Le project de Viturve, Actes du colloque internationale . . . 1993 (Rome: École Française de Rome, Palais Farnèse, 1994), pp. 7–30; and Mark Wilson Jones, Principles of Roman Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press., 2000), esp. pp. 38–45.
15. See Samir Younés, The True, the Fictive, and the Real: The Historical Dictionary of Architecture of Quatremère de Quincy: Introductory Essay and Selected Translations (London: Papadakis, 1999).
16. Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, Précis of the Lectures on Architecture (1802–05), trans., David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2000).
17. Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966).
18. See, inter alia, Peter Eisenman, “The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning; the End of the End,” K. Michael Hays, Architecture Theory since 1968 (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT, Press 1998), pp. 524–538, from 1984. He finds that the “underlying purpose” of representation in architecture “was to embody the idea of meaning; [of] reason . . . to codify the idea of truth; [and of] history . . . to recover the idea of the timeless from the idea of change,” which he then dismisses as fictions that have persisted from the fifteenth century down to the present, even in modernism, only to dismiss the fictions as simulacra, leading to the position: “Architecture in the present is seen as a process of inventing an artificial past and a futureless present.”
19. Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” Conrads, op. cit., pp. 19–24; the date of the 1910 lecture is often given as 1908; it was first pub. 1913. The AIA definition from 1906 is given in Joan Draper, “The École des Beaux-Arts and the Architectural Profession in the United States: The Case of John Galen Howard,” The Architect: Chapters in the History of the Profession, ed., Spiro Kostof (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 209–37, 217.
20. See in particular Demerti Porphyrios, Classical Architecture (London: Academy Editions, 1991) and Léon Krier, Architecture: Choice of Fate (Windsor, Berks.: Papadakis, 1998).
21. Granger, ed., op. cit., I, i,12.
22. At the conference at the University of Notre Dame where I made that statement, Michael Carey added the important proposition that, when it is mere fashion, architecture can easily become a form of cynicism. See my article “The Humanity of Monumental Architecture,” American Arts Quarterly, vol. XIX, no. 1 (Winter, 2002), pp. 9–14ff.
 

Opening Day

If you have found this site, you know "modern architecture" does not always mean glass and steel. It is just as modern and more relevant than ever to discuss an architecture of humanism for today. An architecture comprised of livable spaces filled with lasting beauty that enriches people's lives is attainable. Some historians say that the architects of the Renaissance were the first "modern" architects. A reconnection with the architecture and principles of the Greeks and Romans resulted in a renewed confidence in "man as the measure." This belief continues to today with many architects and admirers of architecture seeking a meaningful link with the past while revealing ideas for the future. We would like to celebrate them here.