Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

Chapter 2 Growth of the Western tradition

In the ancient Greek world, one of the most sacred places was the sanctuary at Delphi, on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. This was where the god Apollo and the nine Muses who inspired artists were supposed to live. It also had other older associations, and had been used as a place of worship from very ancient times, when snakes were considered to be divine. There was not a city here, but buildings accumulated, many of them gifts from the various city-states that made up the Greek federation. People came here from all over the Greek-speaking world in order to consult the oracle: an arcane procedure that involved a priestess inhaling the intoxicating fumes from burning laurel leaves, and uttering a flow of wailing sounds that would be turned into a neat but cryptic prophecy by the attendant priests. An extraordinary set of things was juxtaposed here. On the outside, set in breathtaking natural scenery, there were artistically accomplished buildings, fine statues, and the recreational buildings that belonged in sanctuaries — a stadium and a theatre. But at the core there was a religious mystery that involved the surrender of rationality to wild hallucination. The site was supposed to be the earth’s navel, the point at which its umbilical cord had long ago been attached, and therefore in some sense the centre of the world. An ancient carved stone remains, the omphalos, which stands up from the ground, tied off with sets of sculpted bandages, evidently in imitation of an earlier stone which would have had real bandages tied round it in solemn ceremonies. The place was special, and was a place of pilgrimage. This meant that by classical times, when the temple dedicated to Apollo was built, the priests at Delphi were unusually well informed about what was going on across the whole of the Greek-speaking world, and would therefore have been in a good position to give political advice. The superstitious practice of consulting the oracle would have been effective in part because the weird ululations were interpreted by people who were highly knowledgeable about current affairs. The buildings here, which include some very fine ones, had various functions — marking the centre of the Earth, housing the mysterious oracle, keeping secure the offerings brought by the various states (and the buildings themselves were offerings) as well as housing visitors and priests, and entertaining them with athletics and dramas.

The most famous of the Greek sanctuaries now is the Acropolis in Athens — a rocky plateau that rears up from the floor of a broad valley. In very ancient times it was a fortified citadel, but by classical times it had become a religious sanctuary. Again, there were a number of buildings here, the most famous of which is the Parthenon (Figure 7) which is famously a building of the highest artistic accomplishment, built with astonishing precision, out of blocks of solid marble, very finely and accurately shaped. This was the artistic high point of the Acropolis. The most sacred building, though, was the Erechtheion, a rather quirky asymmetrical building, which seems to have been pushed into its final shape because it had to take account of various immovable features on its site. The tomb of an ancient king of Athens was here, and so was a scar in the rock that had been made when the sea-god Poseidon’s trident, a thunderbolt, had struck the ground when he was fighting with the goddess Athena. The story goes that the ancient city enjoyed the favours of the sea, and of the olive tree, given by Athena, a warrior virgin. When it came to the point at which a decision had to be made as to whose city this was, the two fought for it, and of course Athena won, which is why the city is called after her. At the Erechtheion there was in a courtyard a descendant of the original olive tree that Athena had brought to the city. Also inside there was a folding stool that had been made by Daedalus — the inventor, who had built the labyrinth on Crete, which housed the Minotaur, half-man, half-bull (whose conception Daedalus had engineered). Daedalus was later imprisoned in the labyrinth with his son Icarus, and they escaped when Daedalus made them wings so they could fly away. The story about how Icarus flew too high and came to grief is surprisingly better known than the story of the successful flight that Daedalus himself made. For us this is all plainly mythological, and we do not think of these events as historical facts, but at the Erechtheion there was an ingenious folding stool that had clearly been made by someone. There were other relics of a similar status — very ancient, with mythical provenances — that made the building a remarkable repository of the city’s claims to sacred and cultural authority. The natural features of the place that marked it out as sacred were supplemented with portable relics that enhanced its status, and they were housed in a building of exceptional quality that helped to make the high status of the place even clearer.

When a site is revered in this way, it is often seen as necessary to build something expensive and well designed at the site, as a way of showing how important the place is. The cathedral at Chartres is a good example of the same set of feelings and ways of behaving, but adapted into the culture of a different time and place. It was built in France during the 12th century, over the site of a sacred spring that had apparently been a place of worship from long before Christian times. The cathedral was placed over the spring, but its authority was enhanced by the presence of a portable relic: a length of silk fabric that the Virgin Mary was wearing when she gave birth to Christ. It is still on display in the cathedral today, though it no longer has the cultural importance that it had during the Middle Ages. The building that was put up here was extraordinary. There was an attempt to rebuild the church, but there was a fire before the work was completed, and the authorities concluded that this was because the building was not magnificent enough, so it was reconsidered, and the building was finished in an even more extravagant manner. This was one of the first large-scale buildings in ‘Gothic’ style, with pointed arches and large areas of stained glass windows. It was here that the spire was invented — a really remarkable leap of the imagination at the time. Here it seemed not only technically possible, but also worth the effort, to make a huge neatly finished tapering pile of stones, and hold it up in the air above the town, visible from the farmland for miles around. The idea spread. The spire served no very clear utilitarian purpose, but was a new way of amazing people. The natural scenery at Chartres is pleasant enough, but unspectacular, and the architecture helped to make up for the lack of natural drama by housing the sacred institution in an arresting way. The interior of the church is also remarkable. It took up the idea that had been worked out in Paris by a team of masons working for the Abbot Suger at Saint-Denis. (The area of Saint-Denis is now best known as the place where the Stade de France is located, the arena at which France won the football World Cup in 1998, and it is easy to reach on the Métro.) It is supposed to have been founded at the spot where Denis, the first bishop of Paris, walked to, carrying his head, after he had been executed for his faith on the hill at Montmartre — a vigorous walk for someone in his condition. Again the church there has an ancient foundation, but it was very richly endowed and had high status because it is the burial place for many of the kings of France. It was here that a way of arranging the stone vaults was devised that allowed large areas of stained glass to predominate, shored up from outside by flying buttresses that arc through the air to lean against the building, helping to shore it up. By using these props, a good deal of masonry could be left out of the walls, without disastrously weakening them. They were taken to an extreme in the cathedral at Bourges (Figure 8) which from some angles looks as if it is nothing but flying buttresses. What happens on the inside here is spectacular, as the whole building is flooded with light coming in through the coloured windows. At Bourges the images in the stained glass are particularly clear, and the familiar stories they tell can be recognized and followed as clearly as if they were a comic book with speech-bubbles. Here too the interior space is vast, as there are two sets of aisles running right round the building, with a row of windows letting light into each of them and then another set directly illuminating the central nave. These large vertical windows, together with the stretches of sloping roof in between, stack up together to make a building that is enormously high. It is so spectacularly convincing that, looking at it, one forgets that it is the natural inclination of stones to make low mounds of rubble. Here the stones have been persuaded to leap into the air, and (even more remarkably) to stay there. The point to be made here is that at Bourges we have a completely unremarkable site, on fairly flat ground, that has been turned into something special mainly by building. And this cathedral stands in a tradition of making light-filled spaces that began two generations earlier at Saint-Denis. The abbey church there is a fine and spectacular building, but it is not large compared with the cathedrals at Paris (Notre Dame), Chartres, and Bourges that were built later, so if we study the buildings carefully, paying attention to the order in which things happened, we can see how the ideas developed and were used with increasing confidence and daring. It would not have been possible for an ancient Greek mason to have decided to build something like Bourges. It would have been, in the first instance, absolutely inconceivable, because the ideas would not have been available to him. It depended on various imaginative leaps, each one of which was in its time as great as that involved in inventing the first spire. And then beyond that, even if he could have had the idea, he would not have been able to imagine how on earth it would be possible to build it. Even if he could have done that, he would not have been able to persuade his contemporaries to believe in him and to finance his efforts, which would most likely have led to huge sums of money just ending up as collapsed rubble. Something like the cathedral at Bourges cannot happen overnight as the whim of an individual, but depends on a cultural and technical background that makes it possible to imagine and realize such things. Another point to notice is that the Gothic style was never adopted with great enthusiasm in the south. There is a fine Gothic cathedral at Milan in the north of Italy, but it is isolated, and the churches with pointed arches and vaults in the south of France and Italy tend not to take on the idea of large windows, but retained the flat walls of the earlier Romanesque style, often using these flat wall surfaces for paintings. One reason for this could be that the spaces enclosed by so much glass would overheat uncomfortably in the summer. Bourges is the most southerly of the really glassy cathedrals.

The pilgrimage chapel, the Wieskirche, in Bavaria is from a later date, from the 18th century (Figure 11). It belongs to a different architectural culture, but a similar religious culture to that which produced Chartres. Here, though, the religious community was not composed of highly educated monks, with a concern to embody arcane numerical symbolism in the fabric of the building, but a much more popular band. The church was founded following a miracle witnessed by a peasant. He joined together various bits and pieces from broken carved statues, using leather to make the flexible joints, so the finished figure of Christ is rather puppet-like. It is not a fine work of art, but was effective as a focus for pious devotions, and it was enshrined above the altar of a spectacular Baroque church. It does many of the same things as the Gothic churches did, but by different means. From the outside the building looks quite plain and simple. It is hardly decorated, except around the entrance, and the windows look like straightforward openings in the walls. It is evident from the outside that it is not quite an ordinary building, because it is the largest building around, set among fields, with little else in sight. One might expect that inside it would be more or less a large well-appointed barn. Certainly nothing would prepare the pilgrim for the drama within, modelled on the lavish architecture of palaces of the day. There is gold and profuse ornament, swirling clouds, and draperies that seem to have been caught up in an upward rush of air. Everything is designed as a piece, and expresses movement and fluidity, whilst remaining quite solid and still in fact. Much of the effect is achieved by the use of paint, which is stippled to make the real columns look as if they are made of marble, and painted on flat surfaces to continue the architectural effects into illusionist space, so that the limits of the barn-like space become difficult to define. There are columns piled up on top of one another, draped with impressively solid-looking robed figures, supported by impressively solid-looking clouds. The actual shape of the architectural enclosure was made so as to allow this sort of painting to be done. The edges of the ceiling are curved down to join the walls, so there is no definite break between the two that would make a hard line that the eye could fix upon, and could then accurately find the limit of the room. Instead, we are not quite sure whether we are responding to the real volume or the illusion. Even if we try to see the space without its illusions, it is difficult, and to make the effort is certainly to miss the point. Everything here was conceived for the sake of its theatrical effect, so every detail was considered as part of the whole, and there is no room for standard fixtures and fittings. The pulpit seems to float on air in an agitated way, and even the pews are ornately carved so that they seem to go along with the general exaltation of the spectacle. It is a total all-enveloping work of art — the German word for it is Gesamtkunstwerk. There is the same concern for precious things and for dematerialization of the architecture as in the medieval era, but it is pursued here in a different architectural language, with different technical means. Behind and beneath all the ornament there is still an idea of classical order — Roman columns and entablatures are in there somewhere, giving a basic discipline, which then seems to have been stretched, shaken, and draped with festoons. It is a style of architecture that developed at royal courts in the 17th century, and was showy in a way that the lesser nobility could not match because it was so expensive to build. It remained popular among the peasantry, for whom it represented a form of escapist glamour. Again it is worth looking back to the Brighton Pavilion, which once belonged to this tradition of glamorous royal extravagance, and which now reaches a popular audience, that has its breath taken away by the whole thing (Figure 3). The particular style is different, but something about the motivation that produced it is the same, and so are some of the reactions to it.

_{11. Wieskirche, Steinhausen, Bavaria, Germany (1745–54); architect: Dominikus Zimmerman (1681–1766). This pilgrimage chapel, set in the midst of fields, is quite plain on the outside, but inside it is breathtakingly theatrical and seems at first to be little more than an ornamental froth of plasterwork. This initial impression masks a wealth of technical accomplishment and expressive skill. The building marks the end point of the development of a long tradition of lavish architectural effects, based on an underlying idea of classical ornament, and indeed classical columns and entablatures are to be found in amongst the riot of ornament. The general effect however is to give the impression of a building that has overcome the force of gravity, and the plasterwork looks as if it has been blown about by a great rush of air, causing turbulence in the detail and drift in the whole. Light comes into the building not only from the obvious windows, but also from unseen sources that should have the effect of spotlighting. The theatre is clearly an influence on the design decisions, from the illusionistic ceilings to the plasterwork and timber painted to look like marble. Impressively, everything that was originally in the church was adapted to the same vision, so the pulpit, the lectern, and all the pews are modelled and carved using the same ornamental style and seem as lively and exuberant as the building. When this church was being built, the Abbé Laugier, who worked at the Royal Chapel at Versailles — a building with many qualities similar to the Wieskirche — published a famous and influential essay on architecture, calling for a return to fundamental simplicity and structural clarity in architecture. One can understand why, but nothing else has matched the intense drama of the best Baroque work, which depended on wealthy patrons — the court and the church — with a need for settings for pageantry and ritual. It enjoyed an afterlife in 19th-century theatres.}

Thomas Jefferson’s house, Monticello, has also become a place of pilgrimage of a rather different kind (Figure 12). Jefferson built the house for himself to live in, and it served him well. However it is visited not principally because it made a good house, but because of the other things that Jefferson did such as writing the Declaration of Independence that announced, in particularly sonorous phrases, that America would no longer be a colony but would be a free land. He had an illustrious political career that made him one of the most important founders of the USA. His house however was not the home of a president but of a plantation-owner. It was from here that he ran his estates, which were vast by European standards, and prosperous. Jefferson travelled in Europe and took a particular interest in architecture, designing not only the central group of buildings at the University of Virginia (around The Lawn) but also the Virginia State Capitol — hiring some trained professional help in order to have the work carried out properly. The decisions he took about his house say a great deal about him — what he cared about and what he hoped to be. First, this is not a showy and extravagant dwelling. It is larger than many houses, but not large by the standards of stately homes. Moreover it is clear from the whole approach to the design and furnishing of the house that Jefferson did not aspire to make it a sumptuous palace, but was trying for something more sturdy and austere that nevertheless remained cultivated and comfortable. It deliberated avoided flamboyance, and stylistically we could call it Neoclassical, because it belongs with other post-Baroque attempts to go back to the fundamentals of classical architecture. In doing this he was not alone, but in Jefferson’s case the ambition is particularly resonant because it echoes his efforts to think through from first principles what a nation should be, and what rules would govern an ideal society. Jefferson’s estate can be seen as a microcosm of the new nation, and the house was the estate’s seat of government.

_{12. Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virginia (1796–1808); architect: Thomas Jefferson (1743–1836). Thomas Jefferson is best known for writing the 1776 Declaration of Independence, stirringly calling for the nation to support ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’. He went on to be the third president of the United States (1801–9). He built a house at Monticello (1770–9), and then extended and remodelled it (1797–1808), and it has the reputation of being the finest house in America of its age. It has a commanding position, looking out over a great fertile plain. Jefferson’s accomplishment was all the more surprising because he had no formal training but picked up his knowledge of building while travelling in America and Europe, and his architectural accomplishment was shaped by his meetings with foreign professional architects, so he was engaged with the thinking of the artistic élite in a way that his contemporaries at home were not.}

The house has many interesting features, where things were thought out afresh, rather than having everything done in the conventional and established ways. By laying out all the main rooms on a single level, he avoided the need for a space-consuming ceremonial staircase, and the stairs in the house that lead up to the private bedrooms are narrow and cramped, making rather a point of their utilitarian character. Jefferson’s own bed was built into an alcove that opened into his bedroom on one side and his library on the other. Culturally speaking, the detailed arrangements of the house are idiosyncratic, but the general impression made by the house is very dignified and familiar. The reason for that is that Jefferson chose to adopt the classical language of architecture for his house, and in doing so participated in a culture that traces its roots back to ancient Greece. Jefferson’s house has echoes of other buildings in it, buildings that belong to the Western tradition. His design for the Virginia State Capitol was a copy of the Maison Carrée at Nîmes, the best preserved of all the Roman temples (Figure 13). The central building on The Lawn at the University of Virginia was adapted from another Roman monument, the Pantheon in Rome (Figure 14). We can analyse the possible sources that are combined in his house, or just enjoy it without being particularly well informed about it. Even without any detailed and particular knowledge, we will understand that this is a building with some authority, that belongs to a tradition of high-status buildings with which we are familiar, and which therefore feels stable and authoritative, rather than being confrontational and challenging. The building asserts its claim on the landscape without anxiety or heightened emotion, but calmly as if it is naturally and appropriately a seat of power. Given that the practical politics of its designer were revolutionary, this sort of expression is not to be taken for granted. By describing the house in this way, I hope I make it clear that there is scope for alternative interpretations. If I do not belong to this ‘Western civilization’ then I may well see things quite differently, particularly if my ancestors previously made use of this land and lived here without claiming to own it. Instead of it seeming authoritative and familiar, it would then seem alien and arrogant. If I were descended from slaves who worked on the estate, then I might see the architecture as symbolic of oppression.

A traditional education in the arts has often inculcated a familiarity with acknowledged masterpieces. Even though ‘educated taste’ in these matters can be very different from ‘popular taste’, this does not mean that it need feel forced and affected. For someone who is immersed in a tradition, the response will be felt as a spontaneous and natural reaction to the building in question, even if it is a tradition that has been learnt from books, rather than picked up unconsidered in the course of daily life. Whether the educated or the popular taste gains the upper hand in a given situation has more to do with cultural politics than it does with right and wrong.

Which earlier buildings of the Western tradition does Jefferson’s Monticello call to mind? It is a classic example of a villa in a landscape setting, the symmetrical pavilion with a central entrance through an arrangement of classical columns. They were built throughout northern Europe in the 18th century, and here is Jefferson building his own version in Virginia. The examples that he would have studied would have been mostly Italian, and in books. Jefferson did not travel widely in his youth, and learnt by reading. He taught himself Italian from books, and he owned a copy of Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture in an Italian edition, calling it his architectural ‘Bible’. He also had other illustrated books about architecture, by English architects. When the Marquis de Chastellux visited Monticello in 1782 he said that the house was unlike any other in America, and that ‘Mr. Jefferson is the first American who has consulted the Fine Arts to know how he should shelter himself from the weather’. In other words he was working in a tradition of architecture that Chastellux recognized as his own, that of the European élite.

_{13. Maison Carrée, Nîmes, France (AD 1–10); architect: unknown. This is a fairly typical temple in the centre of a provincial Roman city, more finely judged than many similar Roman temples, but in its day it would have had no more than local significance. It is now much more significant than that, because most Roman temples have perished, and this one is the best preserved, so it has been much visited and has been important in forming the architectural taste of — for example — the grand tourists of the 18th century. The arrangement is typical for a Roman temple. The single room of the interior would have housed the cult statue, which would have been able to look (as it were) through the open door to the outdoor altar where sacrifices would be made on feast days, as a public spectacle. This room (the cella) is raised quite high above the surrounding street level — about 4 m (12 feet) — and it is reached by way of a flight of steps at one end of the building. At the top of the flight of steps is a row of fully modelled columns, which support the roof above. They follow the ‘Corinthian’ pattern, so their capitals have an arrangement of conventionalized acanthus leaves, making a showy decorative top to the column. This was a typical Roman choice for a prestigious building, but the columns are unusual for Roman work in being fluted — most Roman columns were built up from cylindrical sections, which were quicker and easier to carve than those with the vertical striations that followed the admired Greek models. Round most of the building the walls support the roof, and there are decorative half-columns which have no functional significance, but which maintain the visual rhythm of the Greek type of temple. Many Roman temples had plain sides, and the expenditure involved in carving these columns gives an idea of the extravagance and prestige of the project.}

One point to make here is that Jefferson chose to follow the sense of taste and decorum in Palladio’s work, and to consider the building with reference to ideas of proportion and balance, rather than try to pile up an exuberant display of pomp and ornament in the Baroque manner. The house is characterized by its simplicity, and it has an air of repose about it that contrasts with the agitation of some Baroque interiors (such as the Wieskirche, Figure 11, or the Brighton Pavilion, Figure 3, which is not normally classified as Baroque, but since it uses all the same devices — combinations of architecture, sculpture, and illusionistic painting — and has much the same effect, I am inclined to think that it is Baroque in a way, even though the architectural detail is a Western idea of the Chinese). Monticello is not copied from a single Italian or English building, but has absorbed the general idea of Palladio’s villas and, working with the underlying principles, Jefferson designed a rather original building suited to his own needs, but clearly belonging to the Palladian tradition. In fact what happened is that Jefferson first designed and built an ‘English Palladian’ house, and then over many years, and after he had travelled (particularly in France) it was adapted with French refinements and elegancies, such as the dome. He had seen this arrangement at a grand house in Paris (the Hôtel de Salm) and adapted it for his own use.

_{14. The Pantheon, Rome, Italy (AD 118–25); architect: anonymous, but worked under the direction of the Emperor Hadrian. The Pantheon was not a typical Roman temple, but was unique in its design, though it drew on traditional models. Its entrance front for example is not unusual in its conception, though it is larger and more magnificent than an ‘ordinary’ temple would have been. Like the Parthenon (Figure 7) it had eight columns across the front instead of the more usual six (octastyle instead of hexastyle). The entrance doorway itself is flanked by two niches that once held statues, and remarkably the ancient bronze doors that close off the interior are still in position. The interior is unexpected and spectacular: a circular domed space, with a great coffered ceiling, illuminated from a circular hole in the roof (the oculus) that has no covering. The dome is a triumph of Roman engineering achievement, built in concrete and covering a vast expanse. No dome larger than this would be built for well over a thousand years, when Brunelleschi’s dome at the cathedral in Florence was made — begun in 1420. Originally each coffer in the ceiling had a gilded rosette fixed in it, making the dome an image of the heavens. One way in which the building was unusual for a temple was in the elaboration of the interior, which suggests that the rituals that went on here would have made use of the internal space more than was usual. It was this aspect of the building that made it so readily adaptable into a church, which happened at an early date, soon after the official adoption of Christianity in the Roman Empire, and which accounts for the building’s remarkable state of preservation. The gilded bronze tiles that once covered the roof were taken away to Constantinople (‘New Rome’), the Christian capital founded in the east by Constantine, where treasures accumulated around the Byzantine court as the role of old Rome waned, and the city became depopulated during the Middle Ages.}

What is this ‘English Palladian’ tradition? Well, it was inspired by Andrea Palladio, a 16th-century Italian architect, who not only designed buildings but also wrote about them. In 1570, he published four finely illustrated ‘books’ on architecture, and included woodcuts of his versions of Roman monuments, which were presented not in their ruined state but conjecturally restored so that they looked how Palladio thought they did when they were new. Along with these ancient buildings he included works that had been inspired by them, executed by modern architects such as Bramante and above all by Palladio himself. In gathering together this work, both archaeological and creative, he presented an authoritative compendium of knowledge about ancient Roman architecture and the principles that informed it, together with designs that showed how those principles and ancient authority could be adapted for use in modern buildings, in churches and impressive villas. The treatise was written towards the end of Palladio’s career, and he had a wealth of experience to draw on in saying the things he did. He had been a prolific architect, working particularly around Vicenza and Venice. Venice was prosperous mainly because of its trade with the East, on which it had a firm hold. The Venetian state controlled traffic through the eastern Mediterranean, and its empire was a string of fortified ports that protected and sustained their commerce so that goods could be brought from Constantinople and beyond without being lost to pirates on the way. The ruling class of Venice owned the palaces that lined the Grand Canal in Venice itself, and also had villas on their estates back on the mainland, that they would visit during the summer. The villas are more or less farmhouses, from which the estates were run, and which include in a single building rooms that served agricultural purposes (barn-like attics) and residential accommodation for farmers, farm and domestic servants, and the nobility, who would have a suite of grand rooms with a ceremonial character. Palladio very skilfully designed buildings that combined all these elements into graceful and dignified arrangements of classical forms, so that the whole unified mass of a substantial building took on a rather stately character.

One of his most celebrated villas departs from this pattern rather. The Villa Capra near Vicenza (Figure 15) is on top of a gentle hill, and was not a self-contained dwelling, as it was designed to be used in conjunction with the owner’s principal residence in Vicenza. Its principal purpose was for entertaining, and it was within reach of the town. Uniquely among Palladio’s designs, it had four identical façades, each with an entrance through a classical porch — a portico — with steps up to it, and Roman-style columns. There is a dome over the central space, and when the doors are open it is possible to see out into the countryside in all four directions, so it seems as if the villa is an extension and completion of the hill. The slope of the ground is continued in the flights of steps, and from the inside one seems to be on a solid raised platform, sheltered by a painted vault. Monticello is sited in the same way, on top of a hill, with just two entrances, likewise through porticoes with Romanstyle columns. The hill in Virginia is rather higher — ‘Monticello’ means small mountain in Italian — but there is a similar attitude to the placing of buildings in the landscape. Frank Lloyd Wright for example would never have positioned a building right at the top of a hill, and even Falling Water, which looks so dramatic when seen from below the waterfall (Figure 10) is tucked away in the forest, and approached from higher ground, so it seems to ingratiate itself into its surroundings, rather than command them. It is only once one is inside, or on the lower ground, that the building’s spatial drama unfolds.

_{15. Villa Capra, Vicenza, Italy (1569); architect: Andrea Palladio (1508–80). Palladio published an illustrated treatise showing his own designs alongside his restorations of some of the great ruins of antiquity, such as the Pantheon (Figure 14). He worked at Vicenza and in Venice, and designed villas and churches for the Venetian nobility, who had palaces in Venice and farmland on the mainland in the province known as the Veneto, which is where Vicenza is to be found. Most of Palladio’s villa designs were for buildings that operated as the base for the running of an estate, which made them more or less farmhouses with a few ceremonious palatial rooms that would be used by the lordly family when they visited during the summer months. The Villa Capra is unusual because it was not used in that way, but was set up as a retreat at a short distance from Vicenza, where it sits on a small hill and looks out across the surrounding countryside with varied views in all directions. It was never a principal residence, but was used for entertaining. A typical Palladio villa would have had a portico with columns at the principal entrance, but this building uniquely among his designs, has four, all identical, looking out into the countryside equally on all four sides. In the centre of the building there is a circular room, from which one can circulate freely out into the porticoes and into the landscape.}

Palladio’s four books are very practical in their outlook, and very clearly written, intended for architects and their patrons rather than a scholarly audience. In England they were taken up by Inigo Jones in the 17th century. He had travelled to Italy and had been won over to Palladio’s ways of thinking, and he put up some remarkable buildings influenced by him, such as the Queen’s House in Greenwich and the Banqueting House in Whitehall. What is most remarkable about these buildings is that they were erected at a time when the princes of continental Europe were building increasingly elaborate Baroque palaces, whereas in England the greatest Baroque flourishes were still in the future — St Paul’s Cathedral by Sir Christopher Wren, for example was not conceived until towards the end of the 17th century, after the Restoration of the monarchy had brought splendour back on to the agenda, and the Great Fire of London had cleared the ground. Inigo Jones’s architecture involved simple massing and a concern for the harmonic proportions favoured by Palladio, who, influenced by the proportions that resonate beautifully in music, liked volumes to have simple ratios in their dimensions, so that a room might happily be as high as it was wide, and be twice as long as the width. This would be a double cube, and these are the proportions of the Whitehall Banqueting House that Jones built for Charles I, and outside which Charles was executed. There are Baroque gestures here, such as the flamboyant painted ceiling by Rubens, but the taste overall is austere when compared with that of the court at Versailles.

Jones’s buildings influenced by Palladio were isolated and untypical of their age. English Palladianism is more firmly associated with the 18th century, when it became the normal modern architecture for the time, ushered in under the patronage of the Earl of Burlington, who built a small but carefully wrought pavilion next to his house at Chiswick in west London (Figure 16). He worshipped Palladio and collected his drawings, and set himself up with his close friend William Kent as arbiters of architectural taste. The artistic salon that operated at Chiswick was presided over by Lady Burlington, who was the only person who actually lived in the villa, and was undoubtedly important in seeing that there was a congenial atmosphere at the place, in which ideas could be freely exchanged. The villa became a focus of artistic creativity, which accounts for a part of the building’s great influence. Without this influence it is quite possible that the Baroque in England might have flourished for as long as it did in France and Germany. It is possible that Jefferson, isolated in Virginia and learning from books, might have picked up on Palladio’s ideas, but he might have been seen as an eccentric individualist rather than a man of taste by Chastellux when he visited. The current of changing taste cannot be generated entirely by a very small group of people — there must have been receptive audience ready to listen to the Burlington circle’s ideas — but nevertheless the villa has a significance in architectural history that is much greater than its small size would suggest. Along with the architectural work and the influence of Lady Burlington’s salon, the architect Colen Campbell worked to achieve similar ends with his monumental scholarly undertaking, Vitruvius Britannicus, which was a three-volume publication that illustrated architectural works that met with Campbell’s approval — all of them in a classical manner, and many of them Campbell’s own designs, some of them executed commissions, some of them flights of fancy. Burlington employed James Gibbs, who designed in an Italianate manner that evidently suited Burlington well enough, when he returned from his travels, to remodel his town house, Burlington House in Piccadilly. However, he was replaced by Campbell, who persuaded Burlington that he, Campbell, was the more correctly schooled and authentically Palladian architect. (The building incidentally was on the same site, but is not the same building, as the current Burlington House on Piccadilly that houses the Royal Academy.) Campbell’s publications helped to establish and to spread the idea of simple well-proportioned buildings as a model of excellence, always contrasted with the trashy barbarism of the Baroque, which was portrayed as overladen with ornament that distracted the viewer from its neglect of fundamental principles.

Burlington’s villa at Chiswick established an idea of fashionable architecture that dominates our view of 18th-century architecture. What did it mean to Burlington and his contemporaries? It should be noticed in passing that it is only in the wealthiest part of society that there were fashions in architecture. Houses are always expensive to build, and finely wrought carefully considered houses built in dressed and sculpted stone were only ever available to the rich, who had retinues of servants to support their domestic arrangements. Most people were not caught up in any concern to live in a fashionable house, but would be content to have a sound dwelling to live in. Inevitably, in understanding what the building would have meant to its designers, we are involved in seeing the world from a particular point of view, that could be characterized as élitist, because it has always been most readily accessible to the people who did not have to worry about making money for basic necessities. The consequences for the working population of being fired with a passion for the arts gave rise to the Romantic stereotype of the starving artist, who finds a way into an élite culture without having the means to support a reasonable level of comfort. Talented people without private means managed to make their way in 18th-century England by having a patron adopt them, though this was not seen as a suitable arrangement for a man of property to make with a woman, and few women managed to establish themselves as artists, except in acting, which was rarely seen as an altogether respectable profession. William Kent was very respectably adopted by his patron Lord Burlington, and became a closely integrated member of the family. Colen Campbell was not, as he had a healthy income from his flourishing architectural practice and did not need to make himself dependent on the earl. The type of projects in which the two men could engage were therefore rather different, as Campbell needed to have an eye to the business, whereas Kent could experiment more freely and was not dependent on attracting commissions but only on the goodwill of his patron. The fashionable building, whatever its form, had meaning, as it automatically marked its proprietor as belonging to a social élite. It could be said that this is the most important thing to be said about the building, and it is possible that it could be the main reason for wanting to build it. However, for someone like Lord Burlington who belonged absolutely securely to the highest level of society, with or without a fashionable villa, that was not the point at all. For him it worked the other way round: he conferred social status on architecture by taking an interest in it.

_{16. Chiswick Villa, London, England (1725); Lord Burlington (1694–1753). Lord Burlington had a Jacobean mansion to the west of London, and was an enthusiastic amateur architect and devotee of Palladio, whose drawings he collected. The villa shown here was built next to the large house, and was an architectural showpiece that was used for entertaining, most famously for entertaining artists, some of whom Burlington supported with his patronage. The villa therefore had an influence much greater than its size alone would indicate. Lady Burlington had her bedroom here, and was the only person who actually lived in the building, which operated as an adjunct to the house (which is now demolished), and she had an important influence on the interiors, as did William Kent (1685–1748) who lived as part of the household and was responsible for the design of much of the furniture and the gardens. In designing the villa, Burlington took his inspiration mainly from Palladio’s Villa Capra (Figure 15) and Rocca Pisani, at Lonigo (1576) a villa by Palladio’s pupil Vincenzo Scamozzi (1552–1616), which adapted Palladio’s design by reducing the number of porticoes to one, and making the central rotunda an octagonal salone (or saloon). Burlington followed him in these modifications.}

The matter of artistic accomplishment works by altogether different means, and can be reached only by acquiring familiarity with culture and by developing skills. Buildings often acquire meaning by artfully alluding to earlier buildings — admired prototypes — as we have seen before. Here there was the model of the Villa Capra, and also a villa designed by Scamozzi, Palladio’s pupil, the Rocca Pisani near Lonigo, the design of which was published in Scamozzi’s book, L’idea della architettura universale, of 1615. Colen Campbell had already built a version of the Villa Capra as Mereworth Castle (1722–5), and the villa at Chiswick has variation from one façade to another, rather than making them all identical. Nevertheless, all the elements in the building have their precedents in either Palladio or Scamozzi, and the building was therefore authoritatively Italianate. Why was that seen to be a good thing? Because at this time the English gentry all knew that Italy was the cradle of the arts and culture, and therefore travelled there if they could. One of the important educational accomplishments that gave a man social standing and ease in polished company was the Grand Tour, usually a visit to France and Italy, made at an impressionable age by way of education. The grandest of the grand tourists would take a retinue of servants and a tutor with them, but they would also meet artists and scholars who were resident in the places they visited. Indeed Burlington met Kent when he was travelling in Italy. The tour could take years — the point was to absorb the culture, not to cover a great distance. Young men whose schooling had immersed them in Latin literature therefore learnt to appreciate the ruins of Roman buildings, and the splendours of Italian art and countryside. It was also an important part of growing up, and being away from home left them feeling liberated. There was scope for romantic adventures without fear of having to live with the consequences, and they came back with reports of how free and easy the Italian women’s sexual morals were. On their return to England they would be expected to find a profession or a role in the running of the family’s estate, and adult responsibilities would come crowding in. The love of Italian architecture therefore was part of an association of pleasurable ideas involving youth, freedom, pleasant climates, and carefree living. There should also have been a steady application to study along the way, and introductions to the high society of the places en route, so when they returned they were socially polished men of the world, who carried with them a nostalgia for Italy and antiquity. This aspect of the architecture touched personal memories and experience, and could not be pinned down and codified, but it was certainly present as a spontaneous emotion. The rules that architects such as James Gibbs and Colen Campbell did try to set down were rules that would have produced architecture that looked appropriately Roman, and would produce sentimental feelings in men of the patron class, even when the architects might not have those feelings themselves.

Almost the whole history of high-status Western architecture is the story of attempts to revive and recapture the magnificence of the ancient world, principally the ancient Roman world, which had left behind it some spectacular ruins. One of the most spectacular was the Pantheon (Figure 14), the great domed temple that had been built by the Emperor Hadrian, and then later, in the Christian era after Constantine, turned into a church. Palladio published woodcuts of it in plan and section, and Brunelleschi is supposed to have studied it and other Roman ruins when he was trying to work out how to construct the great dome of the cathedral at Florence of 1420. It is well known that the architects of the Renaissance set themselves the challenge of rivalling the work of the ancients, but there is also a good deal of medieval work that had the same idea, though perhaps with different examples at hand. This is particularly clear in the medieval churches that are called ‘Romanesque’ precisely because they learnt from Roman examples. For example the Romanesque cathedral of St Lazare at Autun in Burgundy has a row of arches running along its nave, leading into the side-aisles, while up above there is a row of smaller arches that act as windows (a clerestory) and bring light into the space. The same pattern of small arches above large arches is to be found in the town’s surviving Roman gateways, which are on a rather smaller scale than the cathedral. The scale seems to have been given by the ruins of an unusual Roman temple — a mass of Roman brick and concrete — that towers over a low-lying field just outside the town. Its surface facing has long since gone, so it is a rather ungainly shape of rubble, but it is impressively large. If we combine the scale of the temple with the finished workmanship of the gates, then we have a pattern that can easily be adapted into the cathedral. The nave there is vaulted, which is an idea that was learnt from Roman buildings such as the Pantheon and from the great bathing complexes built by the later emperors. In the 16th century, Michelangelo would adapt the vaulted space of the Baths of Diocletian in Rome into a church, Santa Maria degli Angeli, and from the 11th century new churches were built with vaults in Burgundy, starting with the church of St. Philibert at Tournus (c.950–1120). The Burgundian Romanesque churches looked to the great abbey at Cluny as the seat of their authority, and it made use of pointed arches running along its nave. These pointed arches appear unusually at Autun, both in the nave and in the vault over it — in Burgundy pointed arches do not necessarily indicate that the building is Gothic.

We think of great engineering structures as characteristically Roman. The engineering works included roads, aqueducts, and military structures such as Hadrian’s Wall, that went across the island Britannia, from coast to coast. The scale of operations was stupendous, especially when measured against the available resources — no electronic means of communication, no earthmoving equipment larger than picks and shovels, just large numbers of people involved in highly disciplined working groups. Many of these structures were treated as utilitarian, and were made to work efficiently without being expected to have any artistic merits. For example, the Pont du Gard near Nîmes is a spectacular aqueduct that carried a water supply across a steep-sided river valley (with the River Gard at the bottom of it). The bridge was built from great blocks of stone, which were left ‘unfinished’. Temporary timber supports were needed in the making of arches, but once the arches were complete the supports were removed and the arches supported themselves, and much more besides. Some of the stone blocks protruded to make supports for the temporary timbers, and when the bridge was completed these protrusions were just left, and remain to this day. The bridge was in the depths of the countryside — it is visited today for its own sake, and because people like to bathe in the river there, not because it is close to a town centre. When it was new it would certainly have amazed and astounded the few people who went to visit, but would have been visited in the way that a new dam might be visited nowadays, as a spectacle but not as an artistic accomplishment. Had it been in a city centre then it would certainly have been given a more polished treatment. By contrast the imperial baths in Rome and the Pantheon were very finely decorated and finished. The basic engineering structures were covered in marble panels, carved ornament and mosaics. This decorative work, that showed the buildings to be of high status, was derived from the temples that had been developed by the Greeks. This can be seen very clearly in a building such as the Maison Carrée at Nîmes (Figure 13) which immediately looks rather like the Parthenon (Figure 7), but there are also differences, and they belong not just to these individual temples but to the groups of temples of which each of these is a representative. So, for example, the Greek temple has columns all the way round, sitting on a platform that has three steps on all sides (rather large steps, calculated for their visual effect, rather than being convenient to walk up — there is a stone ramp at the end of the building by the way in). By contrast the Roman temple has columns only at the front, and a flight of steps only at the front (and these steps are designed to be walked up). The reason for this is that the Roman temple developed from an earlier type of temple that we call Etruscan, which is what the Roman architect Vitruvius called it in his treatise on architecture (Ten Books of Architecture) (Figure 17). The name alludes to the ancient days of Rome, when the settlement was a provincial town in Etruria. The means by which it developed its ambitions are lost, but it grew in importance and came to establish itself as the capital of Etruria, before going on to annex the regions round about — first those close at hand, and then most of the rest of the lands around the Mediterranean, and some way beyond. The Etruscan temple according to Vitruvius was built on a stone platform, and had timber columns making a porch at the front. Its walls were made of sun-dried bricks, which turn soft if they come into contact with water, and can wash away. That is why the stone platform held them up above the level of the ground, and why the roof was made to overhang. The columns were spaced much further apart than in the Greek temple (proportionally further apart, that is) because both they and the beams spanning between them were timber. These temples were quite small in size, and the timber and mud-bricks were perishable, whereas the Greek temples, by the time the Romans came into contact with them, were monumental in scale and built of stone. Not only that, but they had developed a very precisely codified system of sculpting the columns and beams, which developed over a long time and became an exacting set of proportions and adjustments, so that for example the columns were modelled with ridges in them (flutes) that were cut on site so that they would not be damaged in transport, and the columns and flutings tapered so the top of the column was narrower than its base. What is not obvious at first is that the taper does not follow a perfectly straight line, but bulges out very slightly from where that straight line would have taken it. This bulging (which is called ‘entasis’) was carefully worked out, and was supposed to make the columns look right when seen by eye — without it there is apparently a tendency for the columns to look as if they grow slightly thinner than they should be in the middle. The Greeks, it can be seen, lavished attention on their temples, or at least on the important ones such as the Parthenon, which was decorated discreetly with fine sculpture. There was not only the cult statue inside the temple, cast in bronze and covered in gold and ivory as was traditional. It was made by Phidias, who was also responsible for the celebrated statue of Zeus at Olympia (which is always listed, along with the Pyramids, as one of ‘the wonders’ of the ancient world). These statues are now lost, but most of the marble sculptures that decorated the Parthenon survive (many of them in the British Museum, where they are known as the Elgin Marbles). It was a building of enormous prestige, and it impressed the Romans, who adopted the Greek architectural language, simplified it, and applied it to the buildings that they built across the whole of their vast empire, making this classical language the most widely used system of decorating buildings across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.

_{17. Model of Temple of Juno Sospita, Lanuvium — Etruscan temple, according to Vitruvius (5th century BC). The building shown here is a model made following the description of an Etruscan temple given by Vitruvius in section 7 of the fourth of his Ten Books of Architecture. It is therefore a Roman architect’s idea of the ancient type of Roman temple, before the days of the empire. The walls of the cella were made of sun-dried mud-brick, which is vulnerable to water. Therefore the building was raised up on a stone base, to keep the walls clear of ground water. The columns were of timber, and the buildings were not large by later standards, and the spacing between the columns is shown as much wider than would become characteristic later on. Then the building would have been in stone, which needs sturdier proportions because although it is very strong when downward pressure is applied, it will crumble easily if it is pushed sideways or bent. The roof was given a wide overhang, again to protect the walls from water — this time from falling rain. There are three rooms in the cella, arranged across the podium. This is the type of temple that the Romans built before they had learnt to emulate the Greeks’ masonry and artistry in making monumental buildings.}

So, going back to the Maison Carrée at Nîmes (Figure 13) which is the best preserved of the typical Roman temples, we can see a cultural memory of the old Etruscan temple, overlaid with the sophisticated architecture of the Greek temple. There is an enclosed room at one end of the platform in which the cult statue would have been, looking out through the doorway to the public altar where sacrifices were made. The outside of the wall of this room (called the ‘cella’) however is sculpted to remind one of the row of columns that runs right the way round a Greek temple.

Buildings can carry in them cultural memories of the architecture of the past, and when there has been a need to give a sense of decorum or authority to a building, one of the ways that has been used most frequently in Western culture is to make the building in a way that recalls aspects of the architecture of the past, often the ancient past. Because there has been continuity in this enterprise, it is possible for a building like Monticello, that was built in a remote spot, with knowledge gained from a limited number of books, to resonate with a whole tradition of buildings going back to ancient times. Each time that architecture’s classical language has been revived, different aspects of it have come to the fore as being its crucial aspects, and so it has been reinterpreted in a great many different ways and come to mean many different things — some of them completely incompatible with one another. For example, Albert Speer made use of a version of classicism for the Nazis’ projects for Berlin, and we see that version of classicism as looking totalitarian and oppressive, but Jefferson’s classicism at the University of Virginia looks benign and expressive of freedom and optimism. The classicism of ancient Greece is often presented as emblematic of democracy, as the idea of democracy was invented in Athens; but when it was used by the Roman state it was expressive of a different kind of order, and became something like a multinational company’s ‘corporate identity’ programme. There are sometimes claims that classical architecture has escaped the vagaries of time and culture, and represents a set of forms that has eternal validity. This is a mistake, because although the forms have remained more or less the same their meaning has shifted dramatically over the centuries, so that what it meant to build in a classical manner in the 5th century BC is vastly different from what it meant in the 3rd century AD, and different again in the 16th century. We always see buildings against a background of buildings that we have seen before, and this influences what it is that we feel about the buildings — indeed it means that we notice different aspects of the buildings. The forms of the buildings might remain more or less the same, but we would see them as different architecture from age to age, from culture to culture, and even perhaps from person to person, depending on what our experiences have been, and what it is that we know.