The Australian Ugliness (27 page)

Complacent fanciers of architecture scorn all these earnest efforts. While admitting the desirability in certain circumstances of a code of criticism, they oppose all attempts to tie art down to any sort of formal agreement. ‘Does it
look
right?' they ask. ‘That is the only test.' They quote Oscar Wilde: ‘There are two ways of disliking art; one is to dislike it; the other is to like it rationally.' Any rule binding any art, they claim, will choke all life and subtlety out of it. If a man has not the native taste to appreciate a fine building, no amount of argument will convince him; if he has, don't hound him. Let him enjoy it in his own way.

Here is the difficulty which arises in some form in every study of any art: should we attempt to define it, to tie down what ‘right' is when we say something looks right—right to whom, when, where?— or must we leave it free? Or can we do both, define it just sufficiently for comprehension and appreciation on the widest plane but not sufficiently to dampen enjoyment of it on any plane? No doubt every critic of every art and age has tried for this compromise, and today the architectural critic is still trying. He is seeing a total order, a coherent pattern in man's flimsy structures on the face of the globe. His order is not the architect's order of beautiful plastic form. He sees that the most sensitive intellects which twentieth-century architecture has produced might create only a more refined sort of chaos if their buildings sat down together to reform the world. His is not the planner's order of a blueprint for expansion of city or nation which may untangle the traffic and pipe-lines and even on occasion provide a glorious perspective to the war memorial. It is not a practical, nor an aesthetic, nor even a visual order. He is intent on the order of ideas, on the ultimate order of man's motive for building.

The search leads many critics where few can follow them. Last century John Ruskin found his order in a divine purity of decorative style, and he passionately felt the need to communicate his discovery to others. Before he could write a book on his dearly loved
Stones of Venice
he felt obliged to write a preceding volume laying
The Foundations
of his appreciation. He wished to determine ‘some law of right which we may apply to the architecture of all the world and of all time; and by help of which…we may easily pronounce whether a building is good or noble, as, by applying a plumb-line, whether it be perpendicular.' He thus led himself to state ‘three great branches of architectural virtue': that any building should act well, speak well and look well. By acting well he meant in effect the first two parts of Sir Henry Wotton's tripartite definition: commodity and firmness. He insisted that a building should answer its purpose ‘in the simplest way, with no over-expenditure of means'. His third virtue, to ‘look well', was Sir Henry's ‘delight', and his second, to ‘speak well', meant that a building should express its purpose in its character. But he was not quite sure how this should best be accomplished so he was content to leave the question of architectural expression ‘for incidental notice only' while he subjected the other virtues to laws.

With every respect for the Venetian magic we do not see St Mark's Square today through Ruskin's eyes. Even in his own day he was criticized for insisting on using the words ‘beauty' and ‘ornamentation' interchangeably, and his rhapsody on Venice as a series of ornamented boxes finds little response with us, who are more impressed by the spaces, perspectives, and relationships between the buildings and their two paved squares and the vertical exclamation marks and the great open vista to the sea. Ruskin's metaphysics succeeded only in doing what many earlier architectural theorists had done: in building an order upon the moist foundations of his special private delights, preconceptions and prejudices in building.

We may be as precise as Ruskin was about the things we admire in Venice, and no doubt a future generation, reading the various appreciations of St Mark's Square still being written in the twentieth century, will respect our reasons for admiring it, as we can respect Ruskin's. But when we try to devise an order, immutable rules of architectural behaviour, on the strength of our own visual reactions, we are being pompous and ridiculous. The beauty of the square may well be attributed by a future generation to qualities unperceived by us, and not consciously intended by its creators. If we are seeking universal canons we should be wary about stressing our preoccupation with space. We may turn out to be as misled as Ruskin was in his concentration on the intricacies of opaque form. He who could not be daunted even by the prospect of the next century went so far as to censure ICI House and the whole curtain-wall era. Ruminating on the great glass spectacle of the Crystal Palace in 1851 he saw a future which he could not approve, for it fitted no pattern of the past. ‘It is thought by many,' he wrote, ‘that we shall forthwith have a great part of our architecture in glass and iron, and that new forms of beauty will result from the studied employment of these materials.' He saw no cause for optimism. The glass, he believed, would lead firstly to the degradation of colour and secondly to the end of the majesty of form. ‘You can never,' Ruskin insisted, ‘have any noble architecture in transparent or lustrous glass or enamel. Form is only expressible in its perfection on opaque bodies, without lustre. This law is imperative, universal, irrevocable.' But it was not of course any such thing, and the ‘new forms of beauty' are recognized by us in some, if not all, of the shimmering, reflecting transparencies of modern commercial building.

There is no constancy in the appreciation of architectural forms. The conception of beauty, the things that delight, may change radically within a few years even in the towers of architectural learning. A thousand styles of mass and surface treatment have had their day somewhere, sometime, when they were judged sublime. The task of extracting from them specific universal laws of architecture is like seeking universal manners of good taste in social intercourse. Yet architecture has always been clearly distinguishable from routine buildings; there must be a single golden key which turns in any age and transforms unfeeling stone or steel: the key to the critic's order.

The search for this key has led many to amplifications of the Platonic and Vitruvian theories, and others to poetic analogies. ‘Architecture is frozen music,' Schelling mused, to the delight of a romantic generation. The twentieth century is not satisfied so easily. In its search for something more precise and businesslike the themes of integral order and organic unity reappear frequently. ‘Only those buildings can be accepted as architecture which are transfigured by a gesture of unification and have acquired the tension characteristic of an organism,' wrote Victor Hammer in 1952 (
A Theory of Architecture
), drawing heavily on Sullivan and Wright. The key is seen by many to be contained in the idea that architecture is a vital and sympathetic expression of society. ‘Architecture sums up the civilization it enshrines,' wrote Lewis Mumford in 1924 (
Sticks and Stones
). ‘Architecture is the art of making the content and the forms of a civilization coincide,' wrote William Lescaze in 1942 (
On Being an Architect
).

The four spiritual fathers of twentieth-century architecture, who have or had little else of theory or practice conspicuously in common, subscribe in their writings to most of the above generalizations and come close to agreement on definitions of their art. ‘Good architecture should be a projection of life itself,' said Walter Gropius in May 1937 (
The Architectural Record
). ‘Architecture is that great living creative spirit which from generation to generation, from age to age, proceeds, persists, creates, according to the nature of man and his circumstances as they change,' wrote Frank Lloyd Wright in 1939 (
An Organic Architecture
), later giving capital initials to the Great Spirit. Le Corbusier also speaks of ‘the pure creation of the spirit' and in 1937 he defined architecture as ‘the harmonious and proportional disposition of materials used for the sake of erecting living works' (
When the Cathedrals Were White
). Mies van der Rohe, contrary to appearances, agrees with the others in writing on almost all counts. Regarding the Great Spirit of architecture and its pure creation from the human spirit, he said in 1950: ‘Architecture is the real battleground of the spirit.' Later, speaking of architecture as a projection of organic nature, he explained that his aim in building is to ‘emphasize the organic principle of order', and touching on the question of artistic unity in the design he told of the ideal of ‘achieving the successful relationship of the parts to each other and to the whole.' On architecture as the expression of society he said in 1923: ‘Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space; living, changing, new.'

Thus it seems that the different camps of modern architecture can still meet under the one roof, provided the eaves are broad enough. Despite many conflicting ideas, technical habits and personalities, unanimity of aim still shines through. But immediately the definitions are made more precise, dissenters start to drift away. Even Louis Sullivan's attractive and widely accepted idea that architecture is a further stage of organic form (‘Nature who made the mason made the house') is not acceptable to Joseph Hudnut. In a series of lectures in 1952 titled
The Three Lamps of Modern Architecture
he tried to snuff out some of the new, more pretentious lamps while defending architecture as a vital and eloquent medium for an artist. He dismissed the thought of an architect being able to extend organic nature, or express progress, or democracy, or anything but himself. Our buildings, he said, involuntarily express something of our era, our technologies and our democracy, simply because they exist in our time, but architects cannot take any credit for this and should not continue to believe that it excuses them from the performance of their duties as creative artists.

Sullivan's most famous maxim, ‘form follows function', the banner under which most modern architects rallied for half a century, is now questioned in theory and often discarded in practice. Under the prevailing influence of advanced engineering and geometry, form follows fabrication. Every specific rule built up by some camp is demolished by another, yet as long as architecture remains without accepted codes or canons it cannot remove the barrier between it and the busy man in the street. Creative architecture will tend to remain the province of a coterie of individualists,
prima donnas
and dedicated if somewhat befogged reformers; and ordinary building will remain in the hands of commercial Featurists.

But is a code really necessary? Can it be true that the key to classification of the architectural ideal is simply to be found, without intellectual help, along the primrose path to beauty? Then what is beauty? No matter how liberal we may attempt to be in defining universal laws of visual enjoyment, we can be sure someone will disagree. For one thing, we will be limited by the narrowness of our experiences to this date. With the most perfect understanding of the aesthetic education of Western man, with the broadest outlook on the whole world story of building, still we must be limited by our ignorance of the future's eye. If a canon of architecture proposed now is to be worth anything it must convince that it is capable of embracing all the buildings which civilized men have loved: a stone temple, a glassy cultural centre, a medieval cathedral, a hyperbolic shape in concrete, and anything which the future may produce including new forms for new social orders, soft walls, wind curtains, and other mechanical, electronic, or chemical devices which may extend our range of vision and understanding. Any narrower view of beauty is doomed to be soon as obsolete as Ruskin's measured prejudices.

Undaunted by Ruskin's failure to describe his sublime architectural vision in terms of permanent meaning, other writers tried to illuminate the darkness as the seven lamps grew dim. In his study of Renaissance building, Sir Geoffrey Scott in 1924 counter-attacked Ruskin on behalf of the quattrocento, dismissed his pontifical artistic laws and explained the phenomenon of architectural beauty in purely humanistic terms as empathy,
Einfühlung
, visual satisfaction on the highest plane. In the development of a theory established by Lipps, he described the architectural art as the transcription of the body's state into the forms and terms of building. The major elements of a structure give certain promises to the roving eye; if these are fulfilled by the remainder of the elements, beauty is experienced; if the expectations are unanswered or falsified the end is dissatisfaction, the contrary of beauty. Again, any grossly unbalanced structure is discomforting because it disturbs the observer's projected feelings of his own bodily balance.

These generalizations are convincing, but they are all but demolished by an untenable example given by Sir Geoffrey. Top-heaviness discomforts us, he said, and ‘sooner or later, if the top-heaviness…is sufficiently pronounced, every spectator will judge that the building is ugly.' But even as he wrote this architects were toying with top-heaviness as a valuable new expression in their language, a qualification of bulk which was made possible by frame construction, and by the middle of the twentieth century top-heaviness was almost as familiar in the streets as symmetry was in the middle of the eighteenth century. Urban buildings stood on sheets of glass, houses balanced on thin sticks, everywhere heavy loads projected in cantilever, defying gravity; and beauty grew with familiarity. Finally Oscar Niemeyer designed a museum for Caracas which is a pyramid upturned and caught by its apex as it was about to tumble down a dangerous hill. Top-heaviness could not be more pronounced, and eyes practised in balancing feats quickly judged it one of the most beautiful buildings of the mid-century. In short, the specious theory of empathy, of architectural beauty somehow relating to bodily balance, collapses when we move outside the aura of classical repose.