Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

Chapter 3 How buildings become great

Some buildings are more important than others. It would be unthinkable for example to write a book about ancient Greek architecture without mentioning the Parthenon (Figure 7), but the Temple of Aphrodite on Kythera could be missed out without the study necessarily seeming incompetent. It was an important temple in its day, but its ruins are not now visible. In fact the remains of genuine ancient Greek temples are rare enough for it to be possible in a book-length study to mention all of them, or at least all of those where excavation has restored the impression of a substantial building on the site. In the ancient world there were far more temples, some of them perhaps in perishable materials that have vanished without trace. The passage of time has reduced the number to something manageable. There are times and places where even less has survived. For example in Anglo-Saxon England (the period between the departure of the Romans and the arrival in 1066 of the Normans) most of the buildings were made of timber, and they have rotted away leaving little for anyone to find. The buildings that do survive were — unusually — built in stone, and they survive in fragments, because they have been extended or rebuilt over the years. Houses on the whole were not built in stone, but churches sometimes were; and where the church was part of a settlement that thrived and grew, the church was remodelled or rebuilt at some point during the thousand years and more that have passed since then. The few Anglo-Saxon buildings that we know are therefore churches from settlements that were at their most important a thousand and more years ago, so civic pride never took over to build a more magnificent Gothic church. In recent decades the knowledge of buildings has been supplemented by information inferred from the remains of timbers that have rotted in the ground. Rotted timbers change the colour and consistency of the earth that has claimed them, and if the site has not been built over in the mean time, or ploughed with a deep modern blade, then it is possible to guess what the buildings might have been like. So, if we are trying to put together a picture of Anglo-Saxon architecture, we find that the positions of discoloured samples of earth are important evidence for us, and we would not dream of ignoring a surviving house, if one were ever to be authenticated. Historically it would be sensationally important, even if it were an unprepossessing little building.

If we are trying to write a history of modern architecture then we have exactly the opposite problem. There is too much of it to be able to mention everything, and almost everything in fact has to be left out. In a large modern city the largest modern buildings are likely to be commercial — office blocks, shopping malls, multi-storey car parks, and so on. These buildings tend to be edited out of the picture presented in an architectural history, because the buildings do not seem to be culturally significant. There are rare exceptions, like the Seagram Building in New York (Figure 18) which has an unusual status, for reasons that will be explained. Even buildings of great prominence and visual interest (like the Philadelphia City Hall) do not have a wide enough cultural significance to justify their inclusion in a traditional overview, whereas a small house like the Schröder House (Figure 9), tucked away inconspicuously out of the centre of Utrecht — itself a much smaller city than Philadephia — is one of the best known buildings of the 20th century. Among architects it is without question the best known 20th-century building in the Netherlands. In fact among architects outside the Netherlands it is probably the best known building of any age in that country. And this is despite the fact that in central Utrecht, in a prominent position, there is a spectacular post office, dating from about the same time. It is adventurous in its use of materials, making the traditional Netherlands bricks into a series of parabolic arches with glazing between them, so the post office’s central hall is flooded with light in a spectacular way. It is a more prominent building, more technically accomplished, and its interior is just as striking, and yet only a specialist would know who designed it, and it is seen to be of only local interest.

_{18. Seagram Building, Manhattan, New York City (1954–8); architects: Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) and Philip Johnson (born 1906). Mies van der Rohe was an architect of great seriousness, who was head of the experimental design school, the Bauhaus, in Berlin. He left Germany during the 1930s and moved to Chicago, where he developed his concern for carefully considered steel-frame buildings. His earlier American commissions were in and near Chicago, and included a startlingly transparent steel-frame house for Edith Farnsworth (1945–51) and a pair of apartment buildings overlooking Lake Michigan, 845–60 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago (1948–51). Here too the outer skin of the building is all glass, subdivided by an absolutely regular steel grid. The Seagram Building was a far more prestigious project, both because of its prominent site and its lavish budget. The glass here is bronze-tinted, and the vertical mullions between the windows are dark bronze. Instead of making the building step back from the pavement line on its upper storeys in order to conform with the building codes, the building makes the extravagant gesture of devoting a good deal of the site to a public open space, and then the building is taken up vertically from the edge of the plaza to the top, without breaking the lines of the mullions. In a city where the price of land was lower, the gesture would have been less sensational and more easily imitated. The building has been seen as authoritative, as showing how to shape a classic steel-framed tall office building, and it has been much imitated, without its mystique being undermined.}

Cultural prestige is at work here. We tend to feel that there is no need to give an account of ordinary things, because their ordinariness means that they are not worth our attention. We can focus on only one thing at a time, and so it makes sense to focus on the special things that stand out from the crowd. Therefore we pay attention to the Parthenon and the Sydney Opera House (Figure 19) but the homes of ordinary Greeks and ordinary Australians do not feature in the architectural history books, even though we would certainly learn a good deal more about how life is lived in these places if we were to study the dwellings. Where ancient Greece is concerned not much remains of the houses, and it is not possible to say with any great certainty how they were used, but there are now attempts to guess, whereas for most of the time that antiquity has been studied, it did not seem to be a question that was worth raising, given that there seemed to be so little evidence to go on. Looking at a home in a modern suburb of Sydney would not give the same aesthetic pleasure as would looking at the Opera House, but it would tell us something about the kind of life that is lived in the culture that produced the Opera House, and would make the fact that it was built seem all the more clearly remarkable — and remarkable it certainly is. There are numerous cultural and practical reasons why it is unlikely that the place would ever have been built. Internationally the Australians are more famous for their love of surfing and barbecues than for their love of opera, and yet a great international competition was held to find a design, and it was won by a Danish architect, Jorn Utson, with some evocative sketches. He did not know how to build the design that he proposed, and the design changed significantly in order to make it possible. It was always an expensive project, but because it was experimental and innovative, the costs escalated unpredictably, and new sources of funds had to be found (a lottery was set up to generate the money). The architect was shot at, and was dismissed, and someone else was brought in to finish the building off and find a way of making the astoundingly expensive volumes work for the staging of operas. Now that it has been built and has settled into the cultural landscape of our times, we treat it as if it were an almost natural wonder of the world, and it is used as a way of symbolizing the whole continent of Australasia in images that circulate around the globe. It is one of the most remarkable of modern buildings, yet it sits rather unconvincingly in histories of modern architecture, because it is difficult to tell a story about a line of development that runs through this project. It seems remarkable and unique, and does not obviously lead on to the next chapter in the story.

_{19. Opera House, Sydney, Australia (1957–73); architect: Jorn Utson (born 1918). The Danish architect, Jorn Utson, won the commission to build Sydney’s opera house in an international competition in 1957, on the basis of some vague but graceful sketches. The design changed as it developed with the engineers Ove Arup and Partners, as they worked with the architect to find a way to realize the ideas. The saga of the building’s construction is extraordinary, and well before it was fitted out internally it had become the most often used symbol of the Australian nation. The building’s lower levels are housed in an almost windowless mass, jutting out into Sydney harbour, looking like a land mass that makes a plinth on which to display to the photogenic tile-covered concrete shells that house the auditoria.}

By contrast the Seagram Building in New York does exactly that (Figure 18). It was designed by Mies van der Rohe, who had been the last director of the famous radical German design school the Bauhaus. During the 1930s, with the Nazis’ rise to power, many people left Germany and went to live in the USA. They had different reasons for doing so. Some knew that their lives were in danger. Mies tried to stay in Germany, but found it impossible to produce the architecture he was intent upon, because Hitler took an interest in design and decided to encourage a more traditional type of architecture, and modernist buildings were suppressed as unGerman. With some difficulty therefore, Mies uprooted himself in mid-career, and moved to the USA, settling in Chicago, where he became Professor of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, whose campus he designed. (Walter Gropius, the first director of the Bauhaus, had made a similar move, and became Professor of Architecture at Yale.) Mies had great personal authority and played on it to the full. His artistic aim was to iron out the role of personal idiosyncrasy and develop building types that expressed their steel-frame construction in a rational manner. The tall buildings in Chicago all had steel frames, but the earlier ones were decorated with historical ornament in order to give them a veneer of cultural respectability. The process is exactly parallel with the way that the Romans covered their daring new vaulted structures with traditional Greek architectural decoration. For example the Chicago Tribune Tower, which was designed by Raymond Hood as a conspicuously beautiful building, was covered in stone and had Gothic ornament, so it made a good architectural show and stood comparison with the monumental architecture of the past (Figure 20). Indeed its proprietor invited such comparison by embedding fragments of stone chipped off illustrious buildings around the world. It is to be hoped that they are not all authentic, and that the original monuments were not damaged in order to give up these souvenirs, which are labelled as coming from such places as the Pyramids at Giza, and the Taj Mahal. What these fragments of stone do is to remind us to look at the building in comparison with the great accomplishments of the past. In contrast with the Tribune Tower, Mies avoided any forms of historical ornament and tried to make his buildings look as if they were made of little more than the steel frame that did in fact support them. This is more complicated than it sounds, and Mies was famous for designing in an artful way that made the finished appearance look very simple. ‘Less is more’, he would say; and he inverted the traditional saying ‘the devil’s in the detail’, which means that grand ideas often don’t work out because some minor technicality gets in the way. Mies said: ‘God is in the details’, meaning that what makes a building special is that its minute parts have been well considered and perfectly resolved. Mies established the pattern for the modern tall building first of all in his Lake Shore Drive apartment buildings in Chicago, and then in the Seagram Building in New York, which was much imitated in the following years as a model of no-nonsense corporate glamour. That is why in retrospect it looks rather boring in photographs — because of the influence it had, it just looks like a normal office building. In fact it is a good deal more special than that, not only because it was the first in the line. There is bronzetinted glass in the windows, and the crisp dark mullions that run right up the building are also bronze, and the whole building looks rather dignified and inscrutable. It was a very expensive building, which has meant that its imitators have tended to produce noticeably inferior versions of the original, but the reason for its historical importance is not so much what it is in itself, but that it had a huge influence and spawned so many imitations. That it why it seems culturally important and why it is always mentioned in architectural histories. By contrast the Tribune Tower has probably been admired as much, but it has been imitated very much less, and so it cannot be said to have had so decisive an influence. It was an admirable building, but it did not change the way in which architects saw the office building; therefore it has less historical significance, even though it might (arguably) be a finer work of art. The buildings that we tend to call ‘great’ are those which change the course of events, so they mark out the next chapter in the story that is being told, and for that reason in retrospect they always look ‘ahead of their time’. This is not at all the same thing as supposing that buildings that try to look futuristic are historically important. It is impossible to tell in advance which way things are going to develop, so we cannot always predict which buildings are going to be the historically important ones. It is necessary for them to have some degree of accomplishment, but there are so many buildings around that it would be impossible to tell a story that included even all the reasonably good buildings.

_{20. Chicago Tribune Tower, Chicago, Illinois (1923–5); architects: John Mead Howells (1868–1959) and Raymond Hood (1881–1934). In 1922 the proprietor of the Chicago Tribune organized an international competition to find a design that would make the finest office building in the world for his newspaper’s headquarters. It attracted entries from prominent architects around the world, and there was a touring exhibition of the entries, so the winning design, by Raymond Hood, was immediately well known and influential. It was on a prominent site in Chicago, a city that is built on absolutely flat ground, which makes almost every site seem rather neutral. The tower is on the city’s main street, Michigan Avenue, close to the Chicago River, the city’s only natural feature, with a plaza between the building and the river. The design put everything into the idea of making the building tower, and made use of Gothic ornamentation, in order to make the whole building look as if it is soaring up to the complex arrangement of masonry that makes the distinctive crown — modelled on the 13th-century Butter Tower at Rouen Cathedral, but very much larger than the original. The building’s steel frame made it possible, but it is nowhere visible, because it is covered in limestone. It is therefore a technically advanced building that was stylistically conservative. Looking to historic buildings to give an idea of soaring verticality took Howells and Hood clearly enough to the Gothic cathedrals, where this had been an aim. A less inspired sort of Gothic had also been the style adopted by Cass Gilbert for the Woolworth Building in New York, which was the tallest building in the world at the time of the competition. Howells and Hood had first met while studying at the highly traditional École des Beaux Arts in Paris, and Howells set up practice in New York, establishing a reputation such that he was one of the ten American architects invited to enter the competition. He enlisted Hood’s help, and Hood is generally remembered as the building’s designer. He was certainly the more flamboyant character, and at the time of the competition was living deeply in debt. When the firm won the competition, Hood’s wife Elsie borrowed the cheque, hired a taxi, and took it round New York to show to the various creditors.}

In the 19th century there were calls to invent a new architecture for the 19th century, that did not involve dressing buildings up in styles derived from the buildings of earlier centuries. Why couldn’t there be an original ‘19th-century’ style? Viollet-le-Duc for example argued that the new architecture would derive from the new ways of constructing buildings. It did not happen convincingly until the 20th century was already under way, and people like Mies and Le Corbusier devised ways of making architecture look as if it had shaken off historical ornament in order to adopt a modern way of doing things, using new materials — the steel frame and the concrete slab. It seemed as if they had managed to fulfil the 19th-century prophecies, which were by then deeply ingrained in the culture of architecture. Their ways of thinking became mainstream among architects during the middle part of the 20th century. The architecture of the generation before them is particularly interesting, because people then were trying to reinvent architecture without it having settled into the path that became orthodox modernism, from which point everyone seemed to reach a consensus about how things should be done. Le Corbusier’s masterstroke was to claim that the machine had taken over from the traditional craftsman, and that therefore mass-produced objects were legitimate style-icons. At the Paris Exposition of 1925, he designed a little pavilion, ‘le pavilion de l’Esprit Nouveau’ (the New Spirit) — named after the journal l’Esprit Nouveau in which Le Corbusier published his manifesto-like writings. The pavilion was supposed to be a prototype apartment for a vast city composed of many such units, stacked up into towers. He furnished it with mass produced furniture, along with Cubist-influenced paintings that he had painted himself. If it looks rather plain and routine now, then that is a measure of the influence it has had. It stood in marked contrast with the most sustained efforts of the previous generation, such as Victor Horta and Hector Guimard, who developed the Art Nouveau style, based on plant forms. Horta’s work in particular involved painstaking craftsmanship — the elaborate swirling shapes sometimes looked as if a building and its furniture had softened and slumped, and sometimes seemed to be sending out tendrils of fresh growth. Timber and stone did not naturally come in the right shapes, which had to be carved, so Horta and the people who worked in his studio made plaster models of the novel forms, and then they were copied by the joiners and masons working on the building. This was an expensive process, so Horta’s version of the Art Nouveau was initially only for the super-rich who could afford it — the aristocracy in the then-new Belgian state, who wanted to patronize a new architecture as a Belgian national style. Hector Guimard is best known for the entrances that he designed for the Paris Métro, which have droopily heavy-looking flower heads, with dull red lights that glow mysteriously. They seem to beckon the traveller into a dreamworld, rather than into an efficient transport system, but in their fabrication they were highly rational and depended not on individual craftsmanship but on repeated castings in iron from moulds. The imagery may look soporific, but the means of production was efficient.

This use of mass-production methods in architecture will have helped to prepare the way for Le Corbusier’s exhibition of mass-produced furniture, but in the avant-garde circles in which Le Corbusier moved another crucial influence would have been the provocateur Marcel Duchamp’s practice of exhibiting ready-made objects of mass manufacture in an art-gallery setting. He started doing it in 1914, with a rather striking bottle-drying rack, but the most famous of his ‘readymades’ was the white ceramic urinal that he exhibited with the title Fountain in 1917. Today the most startling thing about the sculpture is the date, 1917, and the tabloid press is still shocked when contemporary artists do rather similar things, now securely within the fold of the art establishment. Duchamp’s urinal, or ‘fountain’, has an architectural counterpart in a prominently placed white ceramic wash-basin, in the hallway of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye of 1928, where it seems to have some ritual significance, as if it is a holy water stoup. The mass-produced object is in each case used for its sculptural effect, and its unconventional positioning makes it gestural. It is clearly no accident that it has appeared there, but it makes no common sense. One is invited to see it as a gesture belonging to the realm of art and high culture, rather than to the lowly realm of practical utility, in which each object originated. It was part of the point of these objects that they were mass-produced and impersonal, cultivating a machine aesthetic, whereas with Guimard’s decorative panels the machine production was not the point, it was just the most effective way to produce the panels at a reasonable cost. Indeed Guimard’s panels were not standard-issue productions, but were carefully designed by him, and then produced in limited quantities as necessary for his building designs (but no one else’s). Indeed one of the ways in which Guimard’s designs for the Métro are interesting is that, despite their striking originality, they are all virtually the same, and clearly the entrances to the underground transport system were imagined as a ‘type’, rather than as unique individual creations. While Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe made it clear that they were interested in developing new types of dwelling, and steel-framed buildings, one associates Guimard’s idiosyncratic forms less readily with a rationalist programme of building production. Nevertheless it is plain that these buildings were as efficient and as rational as the transport system they led down to, even though that is not what the building expresses.

_{21. Métro entrance surrounds, Paris, France (1899–1905); architect: Hector Guimard (1867–1942). The first line of the Paris Métro opened on 19 July 1900, and from the outset was entered by way of the portals that Hector Guimard designed for them as a young man — he was 32 years old when he was given the commission. He had visited Brussels and seen Victor Horta’s Hôtel Tassel (1892), which had translated the fashionable Art Nouveau style into architecture. In the Métro stations, Guimard translated the style into prefabricated cast iron, and the portals would appear in their neighbourhoods with great rapidity, so that they seemed to have erupted from under ground overnight. Some of the portals had glass canopies, others did not, but they used standardized parts. There was an outcry in the press when these buildings appeared, and after the vogue for the Art Nouveau had passed, the portals were removed rather than repaired. Between 1927 and 1962 all but two of the original stations were dismantled, the remaining ones being at the Porte Dauphine and Abbesses. Many of them have now been replaced with reproductions.}

The artistic vision seems to be that the Métro is a sensuous dreamworld, and it certainly has an air of being set apart from normal life as we know it above pavement level. A journey on the Métro is framed as a descent to the underworld, from which we return like Orpheus. That does not stop it being a practical transport system, but the practicality is not what the architecture expresses, whereas by contrast Norman Foster’s design for the Bilbao subway system makes it as rational as possible, trying to conserve the passengers’ sense of direction on approaching the underground platforms, by having very direct links from the pavement, turning few corners on the way. By contrast the Paris Métro has labyrinthine passages that connect its lines, and the traveller is certainly in limbo, which further enhances the associations with the unconscious and perhaps accounts for the fact that it keeps playing a role in Parisian narratives, from Zazie dans le Métro by Raymond Queneau (1959), to Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Le Fabuleux déstin d’Amélie Poulain (2001).

For the avant-garde architects of Guimard’s generation, nature was the usual starting point. In Glasgow Charles Rennie Mackintosh produced intense flower drawings and landscapes, while his architectural work made use of sinuous lines and geometric figures. In Chicago Frank Lloyd Wright developed his ‘prairie house’ type, with wide overhanging eaves, that was supposed to echo the wide flat horizons of the prairies, though the buildings themselves were in the Chicago suburbs. In Barcelona Antoni Gaudí developed his own highly idiosyncratic way of dealing with buildings, studying bones and beehives along the way. The most ambitious of his buildings was the church of the Sagrada Familia, with its strange stalagmite towers, which he left incomplete at his death (Figure 22). They were all trying to reinvent architecture from first principles, and to find a new way of doing things that responded to new ways of living, and new ways of building. Stylistically they are quite different from one another, and it does not help to understand them by saying that the work should all be called by the same name (Art Nouveau, or whatever) but what they had in common was that they were designing individualistically, and evidently striving for originality. Previous generations of designers had habitually appealed to some idea of ‘correctness’ to give their work authority. The buildings would look like the admired models from the past, which would be refreshed with individual creative thought, but always working within an established framework of decorum. Even radical change could be authorized by appealing to precedents, if the architect looked to the distant rather than the recent past for the buildings that would be held up as exemplary. In Florence at the beginning of the 15th century, at the start of the Renaissance, the architecture that was all around was medieval in character, and adventurous architects such as Alberti and Brunelleschi brought about change by focusing attention on Roman architecture. In the mid-18th century, when Baroque architecture was at its most sumptuous and exuberant, there was a call for a return to simplicity and the expression of fundamental constructional principles. That appeal was made in the first instance by Marc-Antoine Laugier, a priest attached to the chapel at Versailles, which was more Baroque and excessive in its decoration than anywhere else on Earth. In 1753 he published an essay in which he imagined a primitive hut, made out of trees that were still growing in the ground, as the origin of monumental architecture. As the century progressed, and archaeological excavations produced better knowledge of the monuments of ancient Greece, it became possible to make an appeal for the revival of Greek taste in the name of turning towards purity and simple elegance. And then again in the 19th century, when classical architecture was normal, and other styles were used for exotic special occasions, Gothic architecture was revived, especially by Pugin who presented it as a truly Christian architecture, uncontaminated by association with a pagan past (Figure 5). In each of these examples a change in current taste and practice was brought about by making an appeal to the architecture of the distant past, and by making a break with the architecture of the immediate past.

_{22. Expiatory Church of the Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain (begun 1882); architect: Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926). This is not Barcelona’s cathedral, which is a fine medieval building in the heart of the old city, but a project initiated by a Barcelona bookseller, Josep Bocabella, who directed the efforts of the Association of the Followers of St Joseph (founded 1866) which grew to have half a million members, including the Pope and the King of Spain. The project’s first architect soon parted from the project, and Gaudí took over from 1883, when work had barely reached ground level. The church is being built slowly, from private subscriptions, and is still incomplete, but work continues, following Gaudí’s general intentions. Gaudí’s idiosyncratic and striking sense of form was grounded in a profound understanding and rethinking of structural principles, and of practical building techniques.}

One way in which to make a reputation as an architect is by producing work that is in some sense original, so that it is immediately apparent whose work it is. Gaudí’s architecture would be a case a point. No one else has ever put up buildings quite like his. However it is not the case that the more original a building is, the better it is, or the more worthy of attention. The Parthenon is a building of the highest quality, but it looks very like all the other Greek temples of its age and it would not have been a better building if it had departed more radically from that type (Figure 7). Having said that, it is not without originality: the building was not simply a repetition of earlier temples. For a start it is larger than most, and made of better stone, and its decorative sculpture was freshly considered and very well executed. The building is unusual in having eight columns across the façade instead of the usual six, and in being made with optical corrections, the effect of which is perhaps barely noticeable, but the shaping of the stone demanded more care and skill than was usual, and signals a preoccupation with precise refinement of the type. In addition to the decorative frieze running round the building above the columns, which was usual with this type of temple, there was another frieze running round the outside wall of the inner chamber, visible between the columns, and that had never been done before. So there was no doubt that the Parthenon belonged securely within the tradition of Greek temple building, but it was more magnificent and splendid than the temples that had gone before. It is inconceivable that it would have happened, but just suppose that instead of building the Parthenon, Phidias, Ictinus, and Callicrates had collaborated on a work that had turned out like the Sagrada Familia. How would it have looked to the citizens of Athens in the 5th century BC? It would have looked totally bizarre and barbaric. It would not have showed them that its designers knew or cared about their culture. When they looked at it they would not have seen any of the familiar signs that would have prompted in them feelings of recognition and being in familiar territory. Indeed our word ‘barbaric’ has its origins in the Greeks’ word for foreigners, which tells us what they thought of them.

If we are more appreciative of foreigners and their works than were the ancient Greeks, we are also prepared to read and misread signs in buildings that belong to cultures other than our own. A monument such as the Taj Mahal (Figure 23) is as rooted in its own traditions as the Parthenon, and it can be understood with reference to those traditions, as one of a long line of funeral monuments, which surpasses the others by being unusually extravagant and exceptionally beautiful. The image of the Taj Mahal is circulated all over the world, but when that happens, it is rarely read with knowledge of its local culture. In the international culture of global tourism, the Taj Mahal is presented as an alluringly exotic image of the whole subcontinent of India, just as the Sydney Opera House is used to signify Australia. These images become familiar around the world, and are part of the tourist culture. So it happens that when a traveller in a foreign land manages to track down these well-known sights and photographs them, what happens is not so much a confrontation with something original and unaccountable, as a recognition of something familiar. The classic tourist photograph (‘Here I am, standing in front of the Eiffel Tower’) is not a way of learning about world architecture — there are clearer photographs with better explanations in the guidebooks — but of having evidence that one belongs to the privileged élite that travels the world. More people than ever before can travel to the far side of the world, and do so without great difficulty and without needing any very compelling reason for doing so. News and ideas are transmitted round the world with even greater facility and speed, as certain aspects of our culture become globalized. If we want to know more about the Taj Mahal and its significance, then we need to study the architecture of Islamic northern India, and Persia, from where the architect came. If we want to know more about the meaning and significance of the forms of the Sydney Opera House building then we do not find them in the Australian outback, but in Denmark, and perhaps the Mediterranean, where the architect had built himself a house. The cultural influences are not tied to the place in the same way.

_{23. Mausoleum of the Taj Mahal, Agra, India (1630–53); architect: Ustad ‘Isa (dates unknown). The famously beautiful mausoleum of the Taj Mahal was built as a memorial to Mumtaz I-Mahal, by her husband the Shah Jehan, Emperor of Mughal India. The architect’s name was forgotten, but rediscovered from documentary evidence found in the 1930s. He was brought from Persia, and the design is the refined product of centuries of Islamic tradition. It is the centrepiece of a monumental complex that includes a red sandstone mosque and gardens with plants and reflecting pools. The mausoleum is entirely covered in white marble that gives the building an ethereal quality, whether it is reflecting intense sunlight into its shadows, picking up the subdued light of the moon, or the colour of the setting sun. The sight of the building moves all commentators to hyperbole, and it accumulates unsubstantiated romantic myths.}

The reasons for choosing Le Corbusier as the architect for Chandigarh (Figure 6) are similarly complex. He was not a local architect, but had established himself as a significant figure in Western architectural culture. His culture was in many respects the culture of the departing colonial powers, from which the new state wanted to distinguish itself. By showing that high-status modern buildings could be produced by local workforces, the state showed its aspiration to belong internationally in the modern world. A neoclassical building that looked like the imperial buildings of New Delhi would have been inappropriate, given the state’s aspirations. The designs, by being authoritatively modernist, suggest that the state was making a fresh start, but it is an irony that Le Corbusier would not have been commissioned had it not been for the sustained efforts of representatives of the former colonial power (Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew) to persuade both the authorities and Le Corbusier himself that he was the right person for the job. It is very much a postcolonial design, which can command the respect of the former colonials, while presumably satisfying the needs of the local community. In many respects it exactly reverses the attitudes to Indian culture on display at the Brighton Pavilion (Figure 3) where the idea of India is conjured up as an exotic fairyland. At Chandigarh we have an image of India, or more specifically the Punjab, as a modern working state that has a serious role to play.

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao belongs very securely in the realm of global tourist culture (Figure 24). It is a building that has had importance in reviving the fortunes of a small city, by making it a place that people from all over the world want to visit. The benefits to the city are much greater than the cost of the building, extravagant though that might seem. The collection of art works that it houses could have been seen just as clearly in a modest and inconspicuous building that excited no one. The cultural tradition to which the building belongs owes little to northern Spain, where it is located, and rather more to Los Angeles, where it was designed. Its form is part of a family of shapes for buildings developed in the remarkable and idiosyncratic studio of Frank Gehry, and it recognizably belongs to his own personal tradition, which has been developing for decades. More broadly, it makes sense in the tradition of the avant-garde, that was developed in the art world, and which makes the building highly appropriate for the housing of works of avant-garde art, which again are the works not of local artists but of internationally recognized stars of the art world. So the museum’s collection has more in common with the collections of contemporary art to be found in the great American cities than it does with collections of contemporary art in nearby provincial towns. By participating in the global culture of the international art world, the city is able to cut a dash on the international scene and attract visitors and investment, and the building is successfully assimilated in two cultures (of the artistic avant-garde and of tourism) which in this case work together to bring about that success.

The architect’s own culture is something else again. Gehry’s compositional sense might have developed by crumpling cardboard and arranging it loosely on a site plan, but there is a huge difference between having some crumpled card glued to a board and having a working art gallery built on a site in Spain. A host of technical questions arise, and they must be addressed with sensitivity and skill if the idea is not to be spoiled in the execution. If for example the shapes could not be built, then they would have to be changed, so a way of building them has to be found, which in this case involved making use of a steel frame to form the basic shapes, and then covering it with titanium-coated tiles that could adapt to the curving geometries. It would have been impossible before computers became a routine part of an engineer’s equipment for such a form of building to be seriously considered, because the mathematics involved are so complex. The steel and titanium pieces were cut into shape away from the site, in factory conditions, where the work can be done with much greater precision. That they could be brought on to the site and assembled is little short of miraculous. It is a world away from the studio conditions in which Gehry invents the building form. He once made an armchair by gluing corrugated cardboard into a large block, and then modelling it with a chainsaw.

_{24. Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain (1997); architect: Frank Gehry (born 1929). Frank Gehry was born in Canada, first moved to California as a student, and then settled and started an architectural practice there, initially making fairly conventional designs. His experimental work, starting with his own house in Santa Monica, has taken him in the direction of designing buildings that have more in common with the traditions of sculptural form than with architecture. The design for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is spectacular and eye-catching, and has helped to draw international attention to a provincial Spanish city, establishing it on the cultural map of the world. The building is constructed with a steel skeleton, clad in titanium tiles, and it seems almost beside the point that it contains gallery spaces for the exhibition of art works. It is the architectural equivalent of a firework.}

Architects who see their building through to construction must take an interest in the processes of building, and often it is that process of building that finds expression in the finished work. There would be an attempt for example to make bricks do the things that are particularly characteristic of brick, by making walls and arches, while steel would be asked to do the things that are particularly characteristic of steel, such as making grid-like frames. A building with a steel frame will usually need walls and windows in order to make it useful, and it is possible to make the walls cover the steel frame and hide it from view, which can make the building look solid. However an architect can make it a point of principle, as Mies did, to arrange the solid parts of the wall in such a way as to make it apparent that the steel frame is holding the building up, while the walls are just acting as non-structural screens. In becoming absorbed in the expression of such niceties of construction, it is possible to design fine buildings that are admired by other architects, but which look to the uninitiated very much like unexceptional industrial work. Even the Seagram Building, with its commanding reputation and its understated monumentality, has never been promoted as a tourist sight, except among architects. In fact the idea of ‘expression’ here is less straightforward than at first it seems, because the grid of evenly placed verticals and horizontals is not the whole story of the construction. A building also needs cross-bracing in it, to stop the whole structure collapsing sideways in strong winds (and winds are much stronger on the twentieth floor than they are at ground level). Mies did not let these diagonal bracings show, but others have done (for example, Skidmore Owings and Merrill at the John Hancock Tower in Chicago). Also it is problematic to expose steel columns in a tall building, because the structure needs to withstand fire better than steel does by itself. Therefore the steel columns in Mies’s buildings sometimes had to be cased in protective material, like concrete. In order to express the structure, he then cased the column in steel, making it look as if the building were held up by larger steel columns. The point to be made here is this: even when an architect decides that a building will express its own construction that does not mean that the process of design takes care of itself. There are many decisions to be made, which are often matters of judgement that could change the building’s appearance. Why, for example, does one express the fact that the structure needed to resist gravity, but not that it needed to resist wind? Why not express the fact that columns are protected to make the building safe in case of fire? The occupants of the building might find that very reassuring. The answer surely is deeply traditional. The Western tradition has for over two and a half thousand years found particular value in buildings with columns, and they have been seen as the basis of a building’s aesthetic effects. Monumental buildings had large columns. High-status buildings had finely wrought columns, made of good materials. The Greek word for column is stylos, which is the root of the English word ‘style’. The row of columns around a Greek temple is called the peristyle. A building without columns is called ‘astylar’, without style.

This tradition has been challenged as attempts have been made to express other important aspects of the building, such as the heating and ventilating equipment, which can amount to a large part of the cost, and be difficult to hide away. At the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, for example, the various service ducts and circulation systems — stairways, escalators, and lifts — are made highly visible, threading their way through the structure of the building to give it its particular character (Figure 25). The structure here is handled ingeniously, so that the large columns are mostly hidden within the building, and the structure that is visible in the main façade is hardly more than a network of fine steel, which has the appearance of scaffolding. The building, when it is swarming with people, seems to be little more than a support for the activities in and around it, which is its point. This is architecture conceived as a ‘facility’ rather than a monument. It is a place where events are made to happen, rather than a determinedly beautiful self-sufficient form. People who look at it in photographs see it as an assembly of girders, reminiscent of an oil refinery, but people who have visited it remember more clearly the journey up the escalator, the views from the top, which are extensive, and the rooftop café, the exhibitions, or the street performers. For such a large and colourful building, it is surprisingly reticent, but it works by such different means than does, say, the Parthenon, that we might wonder whether the same category, ‘architecture’, can be the right category for both of them.

In fact, though, both buildings belong to the same tradition and have some points in common. Of course there are differences, of attitude and atmosphere, which are so obvious that they hardly need to be pointed out. However each building is an artistic showpiece, that houses art treasures. In the case of the Parthenon, the much-admired statue of Athena dominated the interior space, but the holier relics were housed a short distance away in the Erechtheion. The Centre Pompidou exhibits major art works in changing exhibitions, but the art works to which the most serious reverence is due are housed a short distance away at the Louvre. Each building presides over an external space, which in the case of the Parthenon was more formally designated a sanctuary, but which in the case of the Centre Pompidou is a well-defined public square. The innermost part of each building is restricted and reserved for quiet contemplation, whether of the statue that embodied a god, or the works of art with their ineffable value. The area outside each building is equally festive. On days of sacrifice, the gods being immaterial beings were well satisfied with the aroma of the slaughtered oxen, and the citizens of Athens would feast on the flesh — a feature of Greek sanctuaries used to be the suites of dining rooms, arranged in stoas. In the Place Georges Pompidou there is street entertainment, and there are cafés. The Parthenon’s sculpted frieze depicts a procession, while the Centre Pompidou avoids sculptural decoration, but the visitors enact a procession as they queue and then ascend by the escalators that run across the front of the building. Moreover this procession is in more or less the same place in each building, somewhere between the outside and the inside, in the peristyle of the Parthenon, visible between the columns, and in Paris in a glazed tube visible from the square. It is possible that both buildings look the way they do because of concerns to express the building’s construction. There is a tradition (which is questionable) that the Doric frieze on temples such as the Parthenon is a memory of the time when these buildings were constructed in timber, and the geometric triglyph panels represent the ends of timber beams. In the Centre Pompidou the parts of the building are joined together in highly visible ways, so that the assembly of the elements itself becomes decorative. Also it is not incidental that both buildings seem to have well-defined rectangular footprints on the ground: an impression that is less than straightforward in the case of the Centre Pompidou, where parts of the building extend underground beneath the sloping square. It may seem that these points of comparison are trivial, and are less significant than the differences between the buildings, but the point to be made is that there is no doubt at all that we look at the Centre Pompidou with reference to other buildings, whether they be great cultural monuments or oil refineries. The same cannot be said of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which is to an astonishing degree unlike most other buildings we have encountered in images. It does not look like an authoritarian monument. It does not look like an oil refinery. It does not look like any other art gallery, but as its image becomes more familiar, we learn to recognize it as one. What, then, are we to make of it? Far from being the be-all and end-all of architecture, originality is a mixed blessing, because to be totally original is to be totally meaningless. In fact the building is not meaningless, because it connects strongly with another tradition that is entirely appropriate given the building’s function: it looks like a sculpture. We tend to look at it by the standards of sculpture, and are willing to enjoy its shapes for their own sake, regardless of the fact that they do not reflect the way the building is used internally, or articulate the means of contruction. The steel frame is entirely covered, so one need not notice that it is there. The interior spaces are as different from the external envelope as the Chinese interior of the Brighton Pavilion is different from its Indian exterior. Unlike most sculpture, the museum has an interior, but when seen from the outside it has more of the character of a useful habitable sculpture than it has the character of a building. This impression needs to be corrected if one is familiar with Gehry’s other buildings, which show a steady line of development that constitutes a personal tradition, in which each new building makes sense as a further step, which it would have been impossible to predict but which in retrospect seems to make sense.

_{25. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France (1977); architects: Renzo Piano (born 1937) and Richard Rogers (born 1933). The Centre Pompidou is a cultural complex housing libraries, galleries, and related facilities. It was introduced into a rundown area of central Paris (Beaubourg) and had the effect of reviving the area’s fortunes as it became a fashionable place to visit. It defies the tendency of this type of building to become monumental, by seeming to be no more than a scaffolding to hold the various lively activities in place. In the early stages of the design, almost everything about it was moveable — even the floors — but in the event that proved to be too expensive an idea to realize. In summer there are usually crowds outside, watching street entertainers in the plaza in front of the building, and a constant stream of visitors going up the escalators, prominent on the main façade, that bring expansive views across Paris into sight as one ascends.}

What we experience when we encounter buildings is felt spontaneously, but it is filtered through the culture that we have acquired on our journey to that encounter, and we will have acquired some of that culture deliberately, some of it by chance. The parts that we acquire by chance will be the things that we pick up from the culture that surrounds us, and so will be the result of accidents of birth, and the circles in which we move. This is the culture in which most of us feel most at home most of the time, and in which we live our everyday lives. The most important aspect of the things we encounter in this way is their familiarity. There is room for a little novelty now and again, so that we are not faced with unrelieved tedium, but the familiarity of our surroundings is as reassuring as the predictable attitudes of our friends. We start to worry if someone we think we know well starts to behave in unexpected ways.

Another part of our culture is that which we have deliberately set out to acquire, in one way or another. It is clear that we can deliberately educate our tastes. It is less clear why we would choose to do so, as at the outset the effort outweighs the immediate pleasures. We must have a conviction that something good will come of the effort that we put into these things. With music for example it is rare to find a piece that sounds best at its first hearing, and if it sounds worse as we get to know it then we are bound to think that it is bad music. We need to familiarize ourselves with the music’s sound-world, so that we have a sense of what sound sequences are possible, and then we can listen in a way where we can be happy with our immediate responses, so that one can be prepared for listening to a piece by Mozart by knowing other compositions by him; but familiarity with Mozart’s polished elegance would not be enough preparation to be able to enjoy one’s first hearing of a piece by Bartok, with complex astringent harmonies and the lively irregular rhythms of Hungarian folk dances. It is only when one is more familiar with his sound-world that the music comes to have the power to move. Similarly with architecture there are buildings that follow recognizable patterns — the most pervasive across the development of Western civilization being the varieties of classicism. There are also regional traditions, and the recent international tradition of modernism and its variants which can turn into individual personal traditions, as in the case of Frank Gehry and other architects who design ‘signature’ buildings around the world, where part of a building’s prestige comes from the fact that it is the work of an identifiable designer, and can be recognized by people who take an interest in contemporary architecture. A city’s prestige can grow by collecting such buildings, which show that it has a place in the cosmopolitan world. We can get to know our local buildings by chance, and especially if we use them regularly we can form strong views about them, responding to whether they help us or frustrate us as we try to go about our lives. Without particularly thinking about it, we are probably quietly pleased that these buildings continue to be there, acting as reference points against which to plot our progress through a familiar city. It would be possible for the buildings in question to be quite ordinary, or if my journey to work were to take me through Westminster, then I might find that I was treating national monuments such as the Palace of Westminster in just this way, as local landmarks. Our reactions to the buildings depend as much on our ways of thinking about them as they do on the buildings themselves, providing that the buildings remain reliably in place. But this way of thinking about buildings has only local significance, and would not prompt anyone to make a journey to see the buildings in question. For that we need to be convinced that the building in question is very special indeed for one reason or another. In some cases the building might be extravagantly eyecatching and unlike anything else that we have seen, or — as is the case with the Seagram Building and the Parthenon — be the highly accomplished ‘original’ example of a widely used building type, which makes it in some way authoritative. They have significance not only because they are fine buildings, but also because they are part of a story that is told about the development of architecture through the ages. The key buildings in that story form a ‘canon’ — a set of buildings that everyone with a certain level of polite culture might be expected to know. The German word for this level of culture is Bildung, for which there is no precise English equivalent, but there is nevertheless still a feeling that one ought to know about certain buildings. If I realized in the course of conversation that an architectural historian of towering reputation had not heard of the Parthenon, then I for one would feel inclined to think that there was something fraudulent about the reputation. Some buildings are so regularly used as reference points in our culture that not to know them is to show that one does not participate in the culture. And the culture in question here is not local but international — which is not to say that it is uniform everywhere. If I look back at the list of illustrations selected for this book, it is plain enough that I am writing from within a Western tradition. The cottage that is shown in Figure 2 was chosen as a fairly typical example of a low status traditional building, and no one would expect an architectural historian to recognize it with any precision. It is not famous. All the rest of the buildings are well known, with the exception of the Etruscan temple, which is more specialized but necessary for the story that I was trying to tell at that point. Most of the buildings have stood the test of time and have already shown themselves to be useful reference points in the discussion and analysis of architecture. Some personal favourites such as Hagia Sophia in Istanbul and the Kimbell Museum by Louis Kahn have not found their way into the discussion, which surprises me. Had I been from a different part of the world, then my attempt to give an impression of architecture would have included some different examples. I would have had fewer buildings from Western Europe, and my sense of what is central and what peripheral would certainly be different if I were rooted in a different tradition. However, many of the same buildings would certainly have been included in other people’s selections: the idea is to give an introduction to a range of buildings with wide significance, and most of them will be familiar to anyone who has taken an interest in the subject. It is possible to imagine alternative canons, based around the telling of different stories about architecture, that would generate a different choice of buildings. That would amount to a radical departure, whereas the aim of this book is to introduce a selection of buildings of acknowledged merit. Once a building has an established place in the canon then it does one no good as a novice to challenge its place there. There is no doubting the merit of the Parthenon or Bourges Cathedral, and if we go round telling people that we’re not impressed with them then that stands as a judgement on our understanding, which can be discounted, not on the buildings, which continue to be seen as outstandingly good. This is the means by which fine buildings become great buildings. They cross a threshold and become unassailable, as any attempt to denigrate them simply undermines the credibility of the critic. If one is not impressed with the pyramids, then one had better learn to be impressed by them. Naïve wonder still has a place in our experience, and buildings that make us feel it are certainly to be valued. Gehry’s building at Bilbao might do that. The building is striking and fascinating, and does not initially prompt a feeling of recognition, but of incomprehension, which is the root of wonder and exploration. It is however an emotion that we must experience in small doses in our everyday lives, partly because even the strangest buildings rapidly become familiar if they are part of the daily round, and partly because if we wondered too much then we would never get anything done.

We like to think that the canonic buildings have timeless value, that sails serenely across the vagaries of human histories, but on closer examination this view cannot be sustained. There is no doubt that some buildings have always been valued, but they are valued in different ways at different times. It would be idiotic to argue that the Parthenon, for example, had no great value, but it has been valued at different times because it seemed to express different things, such as the triumph of Athens over her adversaries, or as a symbol of the roots of democracy. The value remains high, but it is volatile. Buildings are solid things, and the properties that they have are inherent in them. Architecture is produced when a building and a culture come into contact, and connect in such a way that something valuable happens. We might be thrilled by it, or calmed, feel challenged or charmed, but if we do not pay attention to those responses and cultivate them, then architecture dies in us, and the built world is an arid place. But once one knows something about architecture then buildings come alive, and it is possible to see unconscious expressions of skill and intelligence at work wherever one goes, possibly set alongside expressions of vanity, greed, and incompetence. We like to see the great buildings around the world as the clearest expressions of one lofty ideal or another. We see them as something imperishable that embodies a fleeting glimpse of eternity, and we will travel across the world to encounter them. But there are also pleasures closer to home, which may be no less intense, involving a feeling of rapport with a place, which may involve a surprising range of the contradictory emotions involved in any long-term relationship.