The Architecture of Happiness

III. Talking Buildings

1.

If our interest in buildings and objects is indeed determined as much by what they say to us as by how they perform their material functions, it is worth elaborating on the curious process by which arrangements of stone, steel, concrete, wood and glass seem able to express themselves – and can on rare occasions leave us under the impression that they are talking to us about significant and touching things.

2.

We will, of course, run a risk if we spend extended periods analysing the meanings that emanate from practical objects. To be preoccupied with deciphering the message encoded in a light switch or a tap is to leave ourselves more than usually vulnerable to the commonsensical scorn of those who seek little from such fittings beyond a means of illuminating their bedroom or rinsing their teeth.

To inoculate ourselves against this derision, and to gain confidence in cultivating a contrary, more meditative attitude towards objects, we might profitably pay a visit to a museum of modern art. In whitewashed galleries housing collections of twentieth-century abstract sculpture, we are offered a rare perspective on how exactly three-dimensional masses can assume and convey meaning – a perspective that may in turn enable us to regard our fittings and houses in a new way.

3.

It was in the first half of the twentieth century that sculptors began eliciting equal measures of awe and opprobrium for exhibiting pieces to which it seemed hard to put a name, works that both lacked an interest in the mimetic ambitions that had dominated Western sculpture since the Ancient Greeks and, despite a certain resemblance to domestic furnishings, had no practical capacities either.

What abstract objects can say:

Henry Moore, Two Forms, 1934

Alberto Giacometti, Hour of the Traces, 1930; Jasper Morrison, ATM Table, 2003

Anthony Caro, Whispering, 1969; Mies van der Rohe, column, Barcelona Pavilion, 1929

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1989; Diener and Diener, Migros, Lucerne, 2000

Yet, notwithstanding these limitations, abstract artists argued that their sculptures were capable of articulating the greatest of themes. Many critics agreed. Herbert Read described Henry Moore’s work as a treatise on human kindness and cruelty in a world from which God had recently departed, while for David Sylvester, Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures expressed the loneliness and desire of man alienated from his authentic self in industrial society.

It may be easy to laugh at the grandiloquence of claims directed at objects which on occasion resemble giant earplugs or upturned lawnmowers. But, instead of accusing critics of reading too much into too little, we should allow abstract sculptures to demonstrate to us the range of thoughts and emotions that every kind of non-representational object can convey. The gift of the most talented sculptors has been to teach us that large ideas, for example, about intelligence or kindness, youth or serenity, can be communicated in chunks of wood and string, or in plaster and metal contraptions, as well as they can in words or in human or animal likenesses. The great abstract sculptures have succeeded in speaking to us, in their peculiar dissociated language, of the important themes of our lives.

In turn, these sculptures afford us an opportunity to focus with unaccustomed intensity on the communicative powers of all objects, including our buildings and their furnishings. Inspired by a museum visit, we may scold ourselves for our previous prosaic belief that a salad bowl is only a salad bowl, rather than, in truth, an object over which there linger faint but meaningful associations of wholeness, the feminine and the infinite. We can look at a practical entity like a desk, a column or an entire apartment building and here, too, locate abstract articulations of some of the important themes of our lives.

4.

A bright morning in the Tate Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall. On a plinth sits a marble sculpture by Barbara Hepworth, first exhibited in 1936. Although it is unclear what exactly these three stones might mean or represent – a mystery reflected in their reticent title, Two Segments and a Sphere – they nevertheless manage to arrest and reward our gaze. Their interest centres on the opposition between the ball and the semicircular wedge on which it rests. The ball looks unstable and energetic; we sense how keenly it wants to roll down the segment’s leading edge and bowl across the room. By contrast with this impulsiveness, the accompanying wedge conveys maturity and stability: it seems content to nurse gently from side to side, taming the recklessness of its charge. In viewing the piece, we are witness to a tender and playful relationship, rendered majestic through the primordial medium of polished white marble.

In an essay on Hepworth, the psychoanalytic critic Adrian Stokes attempted to analyse the power of this apparently simple work. He arrived at a compelling conclusion. If the sculpture touches us, he ventured, it may be because we unconsciously understand it as a family portrait. The mobility and chubby fullness of the sphere subtly suggest to us a wriggling fat-cheeked baby, while the rocking ample forms of the segment have echoes of a calm, indulgent, broad-hipped mother. We dimly apprehend in the whole a central theme of our lives. We sense a parable in stone about motherly love.

Stokes’s argument directs us to two ideas. First, that it doesn’t take much for us to interpret an object as a human or animal figure. A piece of stone can have no legs, eyes, ears or almost any of the features associated with a living thing; it need have only the merest hint of a maternal thigh or a babyish cheek and we will start to read it as a character. Thanks to this projective proclivity, we can end up as moved by a Hepworth sculpture as we are by a more literal picture of maternal tenderness, for to our inner eyes, there need be no difference between the expressive capacity of a representational painting and that of an arrangement of stones.

Barbara Hepworth, Two Segments and a Sphere, 1936

Secondly, our reasons for liking abstract sculptures, and by extension tables and columns, are not in the end so far removed from our reasons for honouring representational scenes. We call works in both genres beautiful when they succeed in evoking what seem to us the most attractive, significant attributes of human beings and animals.

5.

Once we start to look, we will find no shortage of suggestions of living forms in the furniture and houses around us. There are penguins in our water jugs and stout and self-important personages in our kettles, graceful deer in our desks and oxen in our dining-room tables.

A weary, sceptical eye gazes out at us from the roof of Alfred Messel’s Wertheim Department Store in Berlin, while upturned insect legs guard the Castel Béranger in Paris. An aggressive beetle lurks in Malaysia’s Putrajaya Convention Centre and a warmer, hedgehog-related creature in the Sage Arts Centre in Gateshead.

Hedgehogs, beetles, eyes and legs:

Clockwise from top left: Foster and Partners, Sage Arts Centre, Gateshead, 2005

Hijjas Kasturi, Convention Centre, Putrajaya, 2003

Alfred Messel, Wertheim Department Store, Berlin, 1904

Hector Guimard, Castel Béranger, Paris, 1896

Even in something as diminutive as the letters of a typeface, we may detect well-developed personalities, about whose lives and daydreams we could without great difficulty write a short story. The straight back and alert upright bearing of a Helvetican ‘f’ hint at a punctual, clean and optimistic protagonist, whereas his Poliphilus cousin, with a droopy head and soft features, strikes a sleepier, more sheepish and more pensive note. The story may not end well for him.

In a kitchenware shop may be found an equally vivid assortment of types. Stemmed glasses seem generically feminine, though this category nonetheless encompasses warm-hearted matrons, nymphets and nervy blue-stockings, while the more masculine tumblers count among their number lumberjacks and stern civil servants.

The tradition of equating furniture and buildings with living beings can be traced back to the Roman author Vitruvius, who paired each of the three principal classical orders with a human or divine archetype from Greek mythology. The Doric column, with its plain capital and squat profile, had its equivalent in the muscular, martial hero Hercules; the Ionic column, with its decorated scrolls and base, corresponded with the stolid, middle-aged goddess Hera; and the Corinthian column, the most intricately embellished of the three and the one with the tallest, slenderest profile, found its model in the beautiful adolescent deity Aphrodite.

In homage to Vitruvius, we might pass the time on car journeys aligning the pillars of motorway bridges to appropriate bipedal counterparts. A drive might reveal a sedentary and cheerful woman holding up one bridge, a punctilious, nervous accountant with an authoritarian air supporting another.

If we can judge the personality of objects from apparently minuscule features (a change of a few degrees in the angle of the rim can shift a wine glass from modesty to arrogance), it is because we first acquire this skill in relation to humans, whose characters we can impute from microscopic aspects of their skin tissue and muscle. An eye will move from implying apology to suggesting self-righteousness by way of a movement that is in a mechanical sense implausibly small. The width of a coin separates a brow that we take to be concerned from one that appears concentrated, or a mouth that implies sulkiness from one that suggests grief. Codifying such infinitesimal variations was the life’s work of the Swiss pseudoscientist Johann Kaspar Lavater, whose four-volume Essays on Physiognomy (1783) analysed almost every conceivable connotation of facial features and supplied line drawings of an exhaustive array of chins, eye sockets, foreheads, mouths and noses, with interpretative adjectives appended to each illustration.

What faces mean:

Johann Kaspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, 1783

The wealth of information we are attuned to deducing from living forms helps to explain the intensity of feelings generated by competing architectural styles. When only a millimetre separates a lethargic set of the mouth from a benevolent one, it is understandable that a great deal should seem to hang on the differing shapes of two windows or roof lines. It is natural for us to be as discriminating about the meanings of the objects we live among as we are about the faces of the people we spend time with.

To feel that a building is unappealing may simply be to dislike the temperament of the creature or human we dimly recognise in its elevation – just as to call another edifice beautiful is to sense the presence of a character we would like if it took on a living form. What we search for in a work of architecture is not in the end so far from what we search for in a friend. The objects we describe as beautiful are versions of the people we love.

Who would we want to be friends with?

6.

Even when objects don’t look anything like people, we can find it easy to imagine what kinds of human characters they might have.

So refined is our skill at detecting parallels to human beings in forms, textures and colours that we can interpret a character from the humblest shape. A line is eloquent enough. A straight example will signal someone stable and dull, a wavy one will appear foppish and calm, and a jagged one angry and confused.

Consider the struts on the backs of two chairs. Both seem to express a mood. The curved struts speak of ease and playfulness, the straight ones of seriousness and logic. And yet neither set approximates a human shape. Rather, the struts abstractly represent two different temperaments. A straight piece of wood behaves in its own medium as a stable, unimaginative person will act in his or her life, while the meanders of a curved piece correspond, however obliquely, with the casual elegance of an unruffled and dandyish soul.

The ease with which we can connect the psychological world with the outer, visual and sensory one seeds our language with metaphors. We can speak of someone being twisted or dark, smooth or hard. We can develop a steely heart or fall into a blue mood. We can compare a person to a material like concrete or a colour like burgundy and be sure thereby to convey something of his or her personality.

The German psychologist Rudolf Arnheim once asked his students to describe a good and a bad marriage using only line drawings. Although we might be hard pressed, working backwards, to divine Arnheim’s brief from the ensuing squiggles, we could come close, for they are strikingly successful at capturing something of the qualities of two different kinds of relationship. In one example, smooth curves mirror the peaceable and flowing course of a loving union, while violently gyrating spikes serve as a visual shorthand for sarcastic putdowns and slammed doors.

Two stories about married life from Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking, 1969

If even crude scratches on a piece of paper can speak accurately and fluently of our psychic states, when whole buildings are at stake, expressive potential is exponentially increased. The pointed arches of Bayeux Cathedral convey ardour and intensity, while their rounded counterparts in the courtyard of the Ducal Palace in Urbino embody serenity and poise. Like a person weathering life’s challenges, the palace’s arches equitably resist pressure from all sides, avoiding the spiritual crises and emotional effusions to which the cathedral’s appear ineluctably drawn.

Contrasting temperaments: Left: Ducal Palace, Urbino, 1479; right: Bayeux Cathedral, 1077

If, to take Arnheim’s exercise several steps further, we were tasked with producing metaphoric images of Germany in two periods of her history, as a fascist state and a democratic republic, and if we were allowed to work with stone, steel and glass rather than with just a pencil, it is likely we could not better the iconic designs of Albert Speer and Egon Eiermann, who created national pavilions for World’s Fairs on either side of the Second World War. Speer’s offering, for the Paris Fair of 1937, makes use of the quintessential visual metaphors of power: height, mass and shadow. Without even laying eyes on the insignia of the government which sponsored it, we would almost certainly sense something ominous, aggressive and defiant emanating from this 500-foot Neoclassical colossus. Twenty-one years and a world war later, in his German Pavilion for the 1958 World Exposition in Brussels, Egon Eiermann would resort to a trio of very different metaphors: horizontality to suggest calm, lightness to imply gentleness and transparency to evoke democracy.

Albert Speer, German Pavilion, World’s Fair, Paris, 1937

Egon Eiermann, Pavilion of the Federal Republic of Germany, World Exposition, Brussels, 1958

So eloquent are materials and colours, then, that a façade can be made to speak of how a country should be ruled and which principles ought to govern its foreign policy. Political and ethical ideas can be written into window frames and door handles. An abstract glass box on a stone plinth can deliver a paean to tranquillity and civilisation.

7.

There is yet a third way in which objects and buildings communicate meaning, one we might begin to get a feel for if we were invited to dinner at the German Ambassador’s in Washington, DC. Sited on a wooded hill in the north-western section of the capital, the residence is an imposing structure with a formal and Classical air, its outer walls clad in white limestone and its interiors dominated by marble floors, oak doors, and leather and steel furniture. Ushered out onto the veranda for a preprandial glass of sparkling Rhine wine and a cocktail sausage, we would – given a relevant historical awareness – see something so unexpected and shocking that we could only gasp as our impeccably polite hosts pointed out features of the skyline in their flawless English. It would not be the silhouettes of the city’s landmarks, however, that occasioned our astonishment but rather the portico itself, whispering in our ears of torch-lit parades, military processions and martial salutes. In both its dimensions and its forms, the rear elevation of the German Ambassador’s Residence bears an uncanny likeness to Albert Speer’s ambulatory at the Nuremberg Parade Ground.

Insofar as buildings speak to us, they also do so through quotation – that is, by referring to, and triggering memories of, the contexts in which we have previously seen them, their counterparts or their models. They communicate by prompting associations. We seem incapable of looking at buildings or pieces of furniture without tying them to the historical and personal circumstances of our viewing; as a result, architectural and decorative styles become, for us, emotional souvenirs of the moments and settings in which we came across them.

Albert Speer, ambulatory, Zeppelinfeld, Nuremberg, 1939

Oswald Matthias Ungers, Residence of the German Ambassador, Washington, DC, 1995

So attentive are our eyes and our brains that the tiniest detail can unleash memories. The swollen-bellied ‘B’ or open-jawed ‘G’ of an Art Deco font is enough to inspire reveries of short-haired women with melon hats and posters advertising holidays in Palm Beach and Le Touquet.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

Just as a childhood can be released from the odour of a washing powder or cup of tea, an entire culture can spring from the angles of a few lines. A steeply sloping tiled roof can at once engender thoughts of the English Arts and Crafts movement, while a gambrel-shaped one can as rapidly prompt memories of Swedish history and holidays on the archipelago south of Stockholm.

C. F. A. Voysey, Moorcrag, Cumbria, 1899

Stallarholmen, near Mariefred, Sweden, c. 1850

Walking past the Carlton Cinema on London’s Essex Road, we may remark something oddly Egyptian about the windows. This stylistic term will occur to us because at some point in our past – perhaps on an evening when we watched a documentary about Ancient Egypt while eating dinner – our eyes took note of the angles of the pylon gateways to the temples at Karnak, Luxor and Philae. That we can now retrieve that half-forgotten detail and apply it to the narrowing of a city window is testament to the synaptic process by which our subconscious can master information and make connections that our conscious selves may be wholly incapable of articulating.

Temple of Isis, Philae, c. 140 BC

George Cole, Carlton Cinema, Essex Road, London, 1930

Relying on our associative powers, architects can dimple their arches and windows and feel confident that they will be understood as references to Islam. They can line their corridors with unpainted wooden planks and dependably allude to the rustic and the unpretentious. They can install thick white railings around balconies and know that their seaside villas will speak of ocean liners and the nautical life.

A more disturbing aspect of associations lies in their arbitrary nature, in the way they can lead us to pass a verdict on objects or buildings for reasons unconnected to their specifically architectural virtues or vices. We may make a judgement based on what they symbolise rather than on what they are.

We may decide that we hate nineteenth-century Gothic, for instance, because it characterised a house in which we were unhappy at university, or revile Neoclassicism (as exemplified by the German Ambassador’s Residence or by the work of the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel) because it had the misfortune to be favoured by the Nazis.

For proof of the capriciousness with which architectural and artistic styles fall victim to baleful associations, we need only note that, in most cases, little besides time is required for them to recover their charm. The remove of a few generations or more allows us to regard objects or buildings without the biases which entrammel almost every era. With the passage of time, we can gaze at a seventeenth-century statuette of the Virgin Mary untroubled by images of overzealous Jesuits or the fires of the Inquisition. With time, we can accept and love Rococo detailing on its own terms, rather than seeing it as a mere symbol of aristocratic decadence cut short by revolutionary vengeance. With time, we may even be able to stand on the veranda of the German Ambassador’s Residence and admire the proud, bold forms of its portico without being haunted by visions of storm troopers and torch-lit processions.

We might define genuinely beautiful objects as those endowed with sufficient innate assets as to withstand our positive or negative projections. They embody good qualities rather than simply remind us of them. They can thus outlive their temporal or geographic origins and communicate their intentions long after their initial audiences have disappeared. They can assert their attributes over and above the ebb and flow of our unfairly generous or damning associations.

8.

Despite the expressive potential of objects and buildings, discussion of what they talk about remains rare. We appear to feel more comfortable contemplating historical sources and stylistic tropes than we do delving into anthropomorphic, metaphoric or evocative meanings. It remains odd to initiate a conversation about what a building is saying.

We might find such activities easier if architectural features were more explicitly connected with their utterances – if there existed a dictionary, for example, which systematically correlated media and forms with emotions and ideas. Such a dictionary would most helpfully supply analyses of materials (of aluminium and steel, of terracotta and concrete) as well as of styles and dimensions (of every conceivable roof angle and every thickness and type of column). It would include paragraphs on the significance of convex and concave lines, and of reflective and plain glass.

The dictionary would resemble the giant catalogues which provide architects with information on light fittings and ironmongery, but, rather than focusing as those do on mechanical performance and compliance with building codes, it would expound on the expressive implications of every element in an architectural composition.

In its comprehensive concern with minutiae, the dictionary would acknowledge the fact that just as the alteration of a single word can change the whole sense of a poem, so, too, can our impression of a house be transformed when a straight limestone lintel is exchanged for a fractionally curved brick one. With the aid of such a resource, we might become more conscious readers, as well as writers, of our environment.

9.

As useful as such a handbook might be, however, in annotating what architecture talks to us about, it would not on its own ever be able to explain what it is about certain buildings that makes them appear to speak beautifully.

The buildings we admire are ultimately those which, in a variety of ways, extol values we think worthwhile – which refer, that is, whether through their materials, shapes or colours, to such legendarily positive qualities as friendliness, kindness, subtlety, strength and intelligence. Our sense of beauty and our understanding of the nature of a good life are intertwined. We seek associations of peace in our bedrooms, metaphors for generosity and harmony in our chairs, and an air of honesty and forth-rightness in our taps. We can be moved by a column that meets a roof with grace, by worn stone steps that hint at wisdom and by a Georgian doorway that demonstrates playfulness and courtesy in its fanlight window.

It was Stendhal who offered the most crystalline expression of the intimate affiliation between visual taste and our values when he wrote, ‘Beauty is the promise of happiness.’ His aphorism has the virtue of differentiating our love of beauty from an academic preoccupation with aesthetics, and integrating it instead with the qualities we need to prosper as whole human beings. If the search for happiness is the underlying quest of our lives, it seems only natural that it should simultaneously be the essential theme to which beauty alludes.

But because Stendhal was sensitive to the complexity of our requirements for happiness, he wisely refrained from specifying any particular type of beauty. As individuals we may, after all, find vanity no less attractive than graciousness, or aggression as intriguing as respect. Through his use of the capacious word ‘happiness’, Stendhal allowed for the wide range of goals which people have pursued. Understanding that mankind would always be as conflicted about its visual tastes as about its ethical ones, he noted, ‘There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.’

A promise of playfulness and courtesy:

Thomas Leverton, fanlight window, Bedford Square, 1783

To call a work of architecture or design beautiful is to recognise it as a rendition of values critical to our flourishing, a transubstantiation of our individual ideals in a material medium.

Every architectural style speaks of an understanding of happiness:

John Pardey, Duckett House, New Forest, 2004