Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

Introduction

Buildings can be the most expensive things that civilizations produce. They can absorb any amount of effort and money if they are to compete with the great buildings of rivals, and of the past. It might seem misguided to try to outdo others when the costs are so high, but no one remembers the civilizations that took such a decision, at least not in architectural history. By contrast civilizations such as ancient Egypt and Rome, which built extravagantly, seem unavoidable. The imperishable buildings seem to go hand in hand with an imperishable reputation, which has always been the appeal of monuments for the powerful. When enough time has passed, all human achievements can seem fragile, and Shelley’s famous poem Ozymandias shows both the attraction of the monumental and also how delusory its promise of everlasting glory can be. One of the things that matters about architecture is how it gives us clues to what really mattered to rulers of the past. Another thing is how it makes it possible for us, the living, to live in certain ways, and to demonstrate to each other and ourselves what it is that we really care about, as individuals and as a society. Different civilizations strike different balances between what seems to be owed to the living, and going beyond immediate needs in order to make things that build a reputation in posterity.

What this very short introduction tries to do is to explain how architecture goes about doing what it does. Buildings keep us warm and dry, and are closely involved in the practicalities of living, but ‘architecture’ always has a cultural dimension to it, if we choose to pay attention to it. Chapter 1 is about how buildings are involved with our sense of who we are. Chapter 2 looks at the way in which buildings are made to look like one another, so that they carry the right sort of messages to those ‘in the know’ in a particular culture. Chapter 3 considers what it is that makes some works of architecture come to be more culturally important than others.

One of the things that makes buildings particularly interesting to archaeologists is that they are caught up in so many aspects of life. The way they are organized tells us something about the way people interact in them, if we can work out which groups of people are brought together, and which kept apart. The materials from which buildings are made, and the way the materials are handled, can also tell us a great deal. If the stone came from a long way away, then we know that either there was an efficient transport system or that the stones were very special and worth a great deal of effort. If a building has a steel frame, then we know that it belongs to the modern age because the ancient world didn’t know about them.

Buildings are an important part of the evidence available to us in knowing about what went on in the distant past, and they also tell us a good deal about what we really care about now. If we, as a society, allow motorways to be built across the countryside, then it can only happen because our care for the countryside is less than our desire to travel conveniently. As individuals we might have made a different decision, but as a society, given the flows and concentrations of money that circulate, and given the political processes that mediate the decisions, the buildings that surround us are produced. As individuals, most of us can do very little to shape the built environment in general. In some circumstances, though, concentrations of wealth and power have made it possible for individuals to command great changes. It was said of the Roman emperor Augustus that when he came to Rome it was built in brick, but when he left it was marble. And Ozymandias (Rameses II) evidently commissioned grand and extensive works. Buildings can be beautiful and inspiring, but if they are built (rather than just imagined) then they always have an economic and political aspect, as well as an aesthetic aspect. There are other aspects too, such as the technical side of things. Will it stand up? Will it keep the rain out? Can it be kept warm? Will it overheat? Can I use it as a place where I can live the life I want? Do I want to be the sort of person who lives in a place like this?

Given that a building has all these aspects, it is possible to write about architecture in ways that bring one or another of them to the fore. A history of building technology would be one possibility. This would be a story of progress, as more technically sophisticated ways of building superseded the more primitive ones. There would be significant advances, like the introduction of cement, and the arch, and a demonstration of the new types of building that these innovations made possible. What we lose sight of in this particular narrative is the fact that, at a given time, it is likely that few buildings will be technically advanced. Most buildings are just ordinary, and do not fall down or stop being useful the moment a technical advance has been made. Just as many people in Europe live in houses that were built a hundred years or more ago, so in ancient Rome the vaulted structures for which we now particularly remember the Romans were not the buildings that made up the fabric of most of the city, and in fact nearly all the famous Roman structures date from quite late in the history of the Roman Empire, so they were unknown to most Romans. Most significantly, they were unknown to the only Roman writer on architecture whose writings are known to us: Vitruvius. He lived too early.

It is possible to exclude technical matters, or relegate them to the background. Then the history of architecture can become a story about different styles of building. One set of shapes gradually transformed into another over the course of time. This type of history makes it sound as if there is in architectural forms a will to evolve and develop. Traditions grow up, and the architects keep trying out new possibilities, some of which are seen as improvements and are copied by others, before being improved upon in their turn. This approach can lead to a preoccupation with stylistic analysis that can lose sight of the fact that there is a practical rationale to building. It can also lead to the setting aside of the social and economic issues, which can be interesting, and which are sometimes certainly the most important aspects of a building. There is also the complicating fact that things look different from close at hand and from a distance. What looks to us like a gradual change across the course of centuries might well have been a much less even-tempered process at the time. It is always unusual for people to change their ways of doing things, and often what happens when a new idea takes over is that a generation of people grows old and inactive, while younger people inculcated with the new idea take up the tools. Whether the change looks gradual or abrupt may depend on how far we are from the event. Tragedy is farce in close-up.

There is a great deal of architecture around, from the recent and distant past around the world. It would be impossible to collect it all together and present it to a reader, especially in a very short introduction. It is necessary to be selective, and the particular buildings that one selects will very according to the story that has to be told. The aim of this book is to open up ways of thinking about architecture that show how rich the topic is, which might make it confusing at times. The following chapters discuss different themes, and I have introduced buildings in order to help make particular points in the argument. Therefore the illustrated buildings are not ordered chronologically. In order to help give an idea of the order in which things happened, there is a timeline at the back of the book. It will be noticed that there are more examples of recent architecture than from the distant past. This is for two reasons. One is that there simply are more buildings now standing that are of recent date. The other is that we tend to be more interested in things that are closer to us. If I look at a pyramid as a building that stands for a civilization that lasted for, say, 3,000 years, then I can feel that in the grand sweep of things the coverage is adequate. But if I were to take the same approach to the architecture of the last 3,000 years, then I would feel that the coverage had been ludicrously inadequate. It would sound facetious and satirical to summarize European architecture in a single monument. The medieval cathedrals would be the large monuments from the middle of the period in question, but I would worry about presenting them as the only things that really mattered.

Clearly the point of view of the writer is implicated in the selections that are to be made, and my selections are shaped by my immersion in and formation by Western culture. Other points of view are possible, have validity, and would generate different choices. This is not to say, though, that the ideas presented here have no more than a personal significance. They connect with a tradition that has gone through many transformations and developments, and the ones that are closest to us seem perhaps to be the most significant. Perhaps computers, televisions, and telephones have given us not only new ways of living, but also new ways of being human in a global system of networks. From another perspective, however, these recent developments might look like the continuation of a tendency that has been developing over the last 200 years, or the last 500.

The language of architectural history includes words that designate different styles of architecture, and they are associated with different places and times. It has been convenient to divide up the history of human culture into broad periods. It is possible to quarrel with the appropriateness of these divisions, but they are now well established in our language, and they are necessary for finding one’s bearings. We start with the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome, which were admired for their literature, philosophy, and grandiose ruins. These civilizations were called ‘classic’, as a term of approbation. They were seen as the basis of authority and accomplishment in artistic matters, and so the products of those societies were in a general way called ‘classical’. The Oxford English Dictionary gives a date of 1607 for an early use of the word in this way (referring to texts, rather than architecture). The other important classical age was the contemporary one, beginning at the Renaissance, the rebirth of classical learning that was also known as ‘the revival of letters’. This gives us four periods in the history of the world, two enlightened ages and two dark ages. There was the primordial world to which ancient Egypt belonged, then the classical world of ancient Greece and Rome. Then, between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance there was a middle age with nothing particular to recommend it: the medieval period. And then came the Renaissance, the modern age, reason, and progress. While this is an over-simplification, it is a useful one for understanding why different types of architecture have their different reputations. The architecture of the classical age was admired and imitated. The architecture of the medieval period was taken less seriously. This has all changed since the terms were coined. We now know a good deal more about the Middle Ages, and would not want to write off the architecture so readily. Nevertheless the periodization remains in place. We still talk about the ‘Middle Ages’, even when we don’t mean to suggest that they deserve to be neglected, and have forgotten what they were supposed to be in between.

If we look more widely then this division of time becomes problematic, because the cultural changes that they signify were not in fact changes in the history of the world, just changes in Western European culture as we have chosen to constitute it. Not only were Asia and the Americas going through completely independent developments, even Eastern Europe developed quite differently. Ancient Greece is certainly included in the Western tradition, because of the influence it had on the Roman ways of thinking about fine buildings. Properly it makes no sense to speak of ‘medieval Greece’, because despite the fact that the Byzantine Empire produced memorable and sophisticated buildings, there was no Renaissance. In a way the whole of Byzantine culture was a succession of renaissances, and the Greek emperors’ sense of who they were was built on their links back to the ancient world. In 1453, just at the point when we might want to say that the Greek ‘middle ages’ came to an end, the capital Constantinople was overrun and the cultural change relocated the city, now called Istanbul, in a different tradition, where it became the capital of the Ottoman Empire. This caused the flight of Greek scholars to the west, and was one of the causes of the upsurge of knowledge of ancient texts that was so important in bringing about the Renaissance. So it is clear that the idea of the Middle Ages and a Renaissance is a fairly local tradition. There was no medieval period in America, because there had not been a classical civilization. There was no medieval period to the east of Europe because there was no reawakening of classical culture. It is worth noticing also that there is some doubt about whether, with the Renaissance, we are talking about a change in the art world or in a wider socio-economic world. In architectural history it is commonly agreed that the Renaissance began in 1420, when Brunelleschi started to build the dome of the cathedral at Florence. The dome not only surpassed the achievements of the Roman dome-builders, but Brunelleschi is supposed to have made careful studies of Roman ruins before embarking on the enterprise.

In art history the corresponding break is seen to be with the discovery of geometrical perspective, in Brunelleschi’s circle. However there was another far-reaching change that had been making more gradual progress, and that was the breakdown of feudal power as the merchant traders amassed fortunes that were greater than those of the hereditary princes. The sense of the novelty of Brunelleschi’s artistic enterprise was perhaps more because it was funded by new money than because it marked any radical break with the artistic achievements of his predecessors. I would not want to argue that the break away from feudalism and the invention of geometric perspective might have sprung from a common cause, which to me sounds too metaphysical. What does make sense to me is that the adoption of the new art by the people with new money made it seem all the more radical a departure. In our own day we see the great fortunes made from film, music, and computer businesses taking their place alongside the great inherited fortunes, and a different sense of style is associated with the way of life. The houses of the rich and famous often do not conform to the established canons of respectable taste, and may not be treated seriously by architectural historians now, but in the future, looking back, they will look as astonishing and unrepeatable as the houses of the 18th-century landed aristocracy. And strange as it may seem, we could find our own era represented in the architectural history books by these outlandish creations that seem utterly remote from our own experience of living now. Written up with one critical agenda the story might be called ‘Late Capitalism and the Triumph of Kitsch’. From another, imbued with the values of the new age, the same buildings could be exhibited as evidence that ‘Your Dreams Can Come True’.

What I am trying to do here is to give a sense of how different perspectives influence what it is that we see when we see buildings. They are involved in a complex way with an indefinite number of cultural and technical matters, and therefore they can have different levels of significance in different spheres. Moreover, when we try to pigeonhole them in categories, they have ways of escaping. We establish the categories, but then have to acknowledge that if we look closely they are not exact, and there are borderline cases. The more we know about a specific culture, the more statements about it sound like sweeping generalizations. What looks like a gradual evolution from a distance might have been a painful disillusionment for individuals, and on the contrary something that looks like a fault-line across Western culture might actually have been a fairly gentle process that was no more traumatic than a number of other changes. Nevertheless, we need some sort of framework if we are to understand anything about our orientation in the subject, and this is the framework that we have. It is just as well, though, to realize that it must not be expected to carry too heavy a load.

Within each of the broad periods mentioned above, there is room for subdivision. For example, when the ancient world is understood in a very general way it can be quite adequate to call the architecture of Greece and Rome generically ‘classical’, but for a more detailed discussion this would not be helpful. The architecture of ancient Greece itself has a classical era, the 5th century BC, preceded by an archaic era, and followed by the Hellenistic era. Rome has its own archaic period, a Republican, and then an Imperial period. These divisions are taken from a mixture of artistic and political changes. The work from the archaic periods looks less accomplished and developed than the later work, but the Greek Hellenistic and the Roman Imperial phases are political eras, which had an effect on architecture, because the increased concentration of wealth in each of these periods meant that some buildings could be more lavish than ever before.

In the medieval period many different styles of architecture developed. Churches that tried to imitate Roman vaults and arches are now called ‘Romanesque’. Later churches that used pointed arches and more decorative window tracery are called ‘Gothic’. Gothic is subdivided into different local styles. In England we find the Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular styles. In France we find High Gothic, Flamboyant, and Rayonnant. The names of local styles are mostly derived from ideas that describe the effect of the architecture, or the shapes of tracery. ‘Romanesque’ also refers us back to the form of the building, which is reminiscent of those of Rome. In England and northern France, Romanesque architecture can be called ‘Norman’, after the dukes of Normandy who commissioned it, so this is a ‘political’ name for the same style. Similarly the name ‘Gothic’ is political, in that it refers to a body of people, the Goths, who laid waste to Rome. This does not tell us anything useful about the architecture, but it does tell us about how the architecture was seen at the time that the name was coined, in the 17th century, long after the cathedral-builders had stopped building in that manner.

Similarly, it no longer seems quite satisfactory for us to think of ourselves as living in the late days of the Renaissance. At some time, somewhere, it must have come to an end, but just when that happened is difficult to decide. The austere work of Brunelleschi and Alberti was followed by more decorative work by architects such as Bernini and Borromini, that overlaid rich ornament on a classical background, in a manner that we call Baroque and which reached its fullest development in 18th-century France and Germany (Figure 11). While this is certainly part of the same tradition, there is a different range of artistic intentions here, and so there is a different stylistic name. There was a reaction to these excesses, when the elaboration was, so to speak, stripped away and the classical order made clear again. This movement, known as Neoclassicism, was also nourished with new knowledge from archaeological investigations in Greece, which brought to light a better understanding of the architectural forms of the ancient Greek world, which had been officially revered, even when they were not really known.

By the end of the 18th century, then, there were rival versions of classicism in circulation, based on various understandings of Greek and Roman architecture, ranging from the fundamentalist simplicity of austere Doric temples, to the highly ornamental work of the Adam brothers. There was also a growing antiquarian interest in medieval architecture that developed into the very serious-minded architecture of the Gothic Revival of the mid-19th century (Figure 5) and various forays into exotic spectacle, such as the Brighton Pavilion (Figure 3). This eclecticism has flourished ever since, more visibly at some times than at others, marking the fact that the tastes of the classes that have money to spend on building were no longer unified. If the Renaissance marked the passing of power from the feudal to the mercantile classes, the coming of eclecticism marked the arrival of the great industrial fortunes. The people who made their money from the East India Company, from sugar plantations in the West Indies, or from industrial production in England, did not feel bound by the aristocratic canons of taste, and they experimented in idiosyncratic ways. There has been no consensus since, despite a concerted attempt to promote an internationally unified style for modern architecture through the CIAM (Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne) guided by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier in the mid-20th century starting in 1928. He enthused about the poetic qualities of machines, ships, and grain silos, which were held up as models for the new architecture. While the architecture of the Modern Movement (also known as the International Style) dominated the architectural journals, it was rarely adopted by (for example) builders of housing aimed at a popular market, where versions of vernacular architecture, mock-Tudor, and notional Regency styles predominated. CIAM’s consensus was maintained by excluding voices with alternative views about what modern architecture should be like, and it broke down altogether in 1959, since when contemporary architecture has been very varied (Figures 18, 19, 24, 25).

The terminology used to label the architecture of the last few decades has tended to shift its meaning as new buildings have appeared that seem to need new labels. The term ‘postmodern’ was used to describe some of Le Corbusier’s late buildings, such as the pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp, which has pronounced sculptural qualities and had clearly moved on from the ‘machine aesthetic’ that he had previously been promoting. The term however did not catch on with a wide architectural public until later, when Charles Jencks published The Language of Postmodern Architecture (1977). He associated postmodernism with a concern for the meaning of buildings. However a less exact usage of the word is in circulation, as a name for the fashion for making use of noticeably historical forms in modern buildings, especially when they were used in ways that undermined their original effect, for example by being made of lightweight materials, being enlarged to gigantic size, or being brightly coloured. Commercial buildings of this type dating from the 1980s are to be seen in many cities around the world (Figure 1). There have been other rallying cries and manifestos in the architecture-world since then, but they have not as yet been given names that have made a lasting impression on a wide public. Frank Gehry’s art museum in Bilbao might conceivably be presented as an example of Deconstructivism (Figure 24), but an explanation of what that term means certainly lies beyond the scope of a very short introduction to architecture.

_{1. AT&T Building, New York (1978–80); architect: Philip Johnson (born 1906). Philip Johnson had been involved in a hugely successful exhibition ‘The International Style’, that introduced modernist architecture to the USA in 1932. He worked with Mies van der Rohe on the authoritatively modern Seagram Building (Figure 18) and his writings had on the whole been persuasive in the modernist cause, though they made some mischief along the way. His design for the AT&T building, making use of classical motifs such as the broken pediment against the skyline, was seen as profoundly shocking at the time. It caused a furore and the architect was pictured on the cover of Time magazine. The building was correctly described as marking a turning point in attitudes to architecture, and in the following years there were many more colourful and flamboyant designs, which make the AT&T Building (now owned by Sony) look restrained and sober.}

In the chapters that follow, the text is organized in a fairly conversational way, moving between views of different aspects of the buildings that are used as examples. I have tried wherever possible to refer points back to the buildings that are illustrated, which may give an exaggerated impression of a building’s importance, when it is used to make different points at different places in the text. The buildings are not discussed in the order that they were built, but they are all located on the timeline at the end of the book (p. 117). It will be noted that the buildings are not spread evenly across the time that is spanned, but are disproportionately from times close to our own.

In Chapter 2, the classical tradition is pieced together from a series of buildings beginning in the relatively recent past, and moving backwards in time, which may seem like a perverse way to order the material. In fact it reflects the way in which we piece together our traditions. We start with a familiar building (in this case Monticello, which is one of the most visited buildings in the world) and look for its precursors. Then we look for the precursors’ precursors, and so on. Then what usually happens is that the sequence is reversed, to move forward in time, and that produces a narrative drive that brings with it an idea of forward movement, and it seems that the point of the whole tradition was to bring about the flowering of the final most developed works. This effect of historical narratives can be used in order to persuade us that one type of architecture is right for the future, or for the present. If we approach the present from a particular direction then it is obvious where the next step will take us. If we approach it from a different direction, then the next step will be going somewhere else. I have tried to avoid this kind of tendency in the text, but if I am asked what the architecture of the future will be like, then my answer is that it is likely to be more varied than ever before.

Since the end of the Middle Ages, commerce has been gaining ground steadily. Productivity and efficiency have been increasingly important in everyday lives, especially with the development of the industrial revolution, and then telecommunications and the information revolution. Whatever the commodity, we expect it to be with us quicker than was possible a hundred years ago, or ten years ago. Whatever the task, we expect that it will be done more speedily and with less human effort. In order to make things more efficient, we divide up complex tasks into simple ones, and we all become more specialized. This causes fragmentation of knowledge. Our cultures tend to separate out, so that even the mass media, like television, now reach smaller more specialized audiences, because there are more stations than there used to be. It would be astonishing if, against this cultural background, architecture were to find a new consensus. The generality of architecture never conforms to the canons of taste of any particular ‘high culture’. The traditions of high culture in architecture are pieced together from carefully selected buildings of the finest quality that remind us of what can be achieved by noble endeavour. It is comforting to think that we will not have to explain to an archaeologist from another age how it came to be that we were surrounded by buildings such as those that we actually have, and we turn a blind eye to most of them. Buildings always tell the truth, but in an ambiguous way, bearing many possible interpretations. In Manchester, a new shopping centre has great atrium spaces and classical columns with gilded capitals, looking the very image of excess, like a setting from the last days of Rome. I expect that architecture will connect with a variety of élite and popular traditions, and we will continue to find buildings that are close together on the ground that connect with cultures from disparate parts of the globe. The place where I have seen this tendency at its most marked is in Singapore, where I came across a Mongolian café next to an Italian–American pizzeria, with an Irish pub across the way. They were in a shopping and leisure complex that had been made by converting an old colonial building, the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus, the chapel of which is still in use, especially for weddings, and is ablaze with the light from rows of sparkling chandeliers.