The Architecture of Happiness

IV. Ideals of Home

Memory

1.

If it is true that the buildings and furnishings which we describe as beautiful evoke aspects of happiness, we might nevertheless ask why we find such evocation to be necessary. It is easy enough to understand why we would want such qualities as dignity and clarity to play a role in our lives; less clear is why we should also need the objects around us to speak to us of them. Why should it matter what our environment has to say to us? Why should architects bother to design buildings which communicate specific sentiments and ideas, and why should we be so negatively affected by places which reverberate with what we take to be the wrong allusions? Why are we vulnerable, so inconveniently vulnerable, to what the spaces we inhabit are saying?

2.

Our sensitivity to our surroundings may be traced back to a troubling feature of human psychology: to the way we harbour within us many different selves, not all of which feel equally like ‘us’, so much so that in certain moods, we can complain of having come adrift from what we judge to be our true selves.

Unfortunately, the self we miss at such moments, the elusively authentic, creative and spontaneous side of our character, is not ours to summon at will. Our access to it is, to a humbling extent, determined by the places we happen to be in, by the colour of the bricks, the height of the ceilings and the layout of the streets. In a hotel room strangled by three motorways, or in a waste land of run-down tower blocks, our optimism and sense of purpose are liable to drain away, like water from a punctured container. We may start to forget that we ever had ambitions or reasons to feel spirited and hopeful.

We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need – but are at constant risk of forgetting we need – within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.

In turn, those places whose outlook matches and legitimates our own, we tend to honour with the term ‘home’. Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.

Our love of home is in turn an acknowledgement of the degree to which our identity is not self-determined. We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.

3.

It is the world’s great religions that have perhaps given most thought to the role played by the environment in determining identity and so – while seldom constructing places where we might fall asleep – have shown the greatest sympathy for our need for a home.

The very principle of religious architecture has its origins in the notion that where we are critically determines what we are able to believe in. To defenders of religious architecture, however convinced we are at an intellectual level of our commitments to a creed, we will remain reliably devoted to it only when it is continually affirmed by our buildings. In danger of being corrupted by our passions and led astray by the commerce and chatter of our societies, we require places where the values outside of us encourage and enforce the aspirations within us. We may be nearer or further away from God on account of what is represented on the walls or the ceilings. We need panels of gold and lapis, windows of coloured glass and gardens of immaculately raked gravel in order to stay true to the sincerest parts of ourselves.

4.

A few years ago, caught out by a heavy downpour, with a couple of hours to kill after being stood up for lunch by a friend, I took shelter in a smoked glass and granite block on London’s Victoria Street, home to the Westminster branch of McDonald’s. The mood inside the restaurant was solemn and concentrated. Customers were eating alone, reading papers or staring at the brown tiles, masticating with a sternness and brusqueness beside which the atmosphere of a feeding shed would have appeared convivial and mannered.

The setting served to render all kinds of ideas absurd: that human beings might sometimes be generous to one another without hope of reward; that relationships can on occasion be sincere; that life may be worth enduring … The restaurant’s true talent lay in the generation of anxiety. The harsh lighting, the intermittent sounds of frozen fries being sunk into vats of oil and the frenzied behaviour of the counter staff invited thoughts of the loneliness and meaninglessness of existence in a random and violent universe. The only solution was to continue to eat in an attempt to compensate for the discomfort brought on by the location in which one was doing so.

However, my meal was disturbed by the arrival of thirty or so implausibly tall and blond Finnish teenagers. The shock of finding themselves so far south and of exchanging glacial snow for mere rain had lent them extremely high spirits, which they expressed by unsheathing straws, bursting into ardent song and giving one another piggy-back rides – to the confusion of the restaurant staff, who were uncertain whether to condemn such behaviour or to respect it as a promise of voracious appetites.

Prompted by the voluble Finns to draw my visit to a precipitate close, I cleared my table and walked out into the plaza immediately adjacent to the restaurant, where I properly noticed for the first time the incongruous and imposing Byzantine forms of Westminster Cathedral, its red and white brick campanile soaring eighty-seven metres into the foggy London skies.

Drawn by rain and curiosity, I entered a cavernous hall, sunk in tarry darkness, against which a thousand votive candles stood out, their golden shadows flickering over mosaics and carved representations of the Stations of the Cross. There were smells of incense and sounds of murmured prayer. Hanging from the ceiling at the centre of the nave was a ten-metre-high crucifix, with Jesus on one side and his mother on the other. Around the high altar, a mosaic showed Christ enthroned in the heavens, encircled by angels, his feet resting on a globe, his hands clasping a chalice overflowing with his own blood.

The facile din of the outer world had given way to awe and silence. Children stood close to their parents and looked around with an air of puzzled reverence. Visitors instinctively whispered, as if deep in some collective dream from which they did not wish to emerge. The anonymity of the street had here been subsumed by a peculiar kind of intimacy. Everything serious in human nature seemed to be called to the surface: thoughts about limits and infinity, about powerlessness and sublimity. The stonework threw into relief all that was compromised and dull, and kindled a yearning for one to live up to its perfections.

After ten minutes in the cathedral, a range of ideas that would have been inconceivable outside began to assume an air of reasonableness. Under the influence of the marble, the mosaics, the darkness and the incense, it seemed entirely probable that Jesus was the son of God and had walked across the Sea of Galilee. In the presence of alabaster statues of the Virgin Mary set against rhythms of red, green and blue marble, it was no longer surprising to think that an angel might at any moment choose to descend through the layers of dense London cumulus, enter through a window in the nave, blow a golden trumpet and make an announcement in Latin about a forthcoming celestial event.

What can we believe where?

Left: Elsom, Pack and Roberts Architects, McDonald’s,

Ashdown House, Victoria Street, London, 1975

Right: John Francis Bentley, the nave, Westminster Cathedral, London, 1903

Concepts that would have sounded demented forty metres away, in the company of a party of Finnish teenagers and vats of frying oil, had succeeded – through a work of architecture – in acquiring supreme significance and majesty.

5.

The first attempts to create specifically Christian spaces, buildings intended to help their occupants to draw closer to the truths of the Gospels, date from some 200 years after the birth of Christ. On plaster walls in low-ceilinged, candlelit rooms, beneath the heathen streets of Rome, untrained artists painted crude renditions of incidents in Jesus’s life, in a primitive style which might have done justice to the less gifted students of an art school.

The Breaking of the Bread, Catacomb of Priscilla, Rome, third century AD

These Christian catacombs are only the more touching, however, for their inarticulacy. They show the architectural and artistic impulses in their purest forms, without the elaboration supplied by talent or money. They reveal how in the absence of great patrons or craftsmen, with no skills or resources to speak of, the faithful will feel a need to daub the symbols of their heavens on damp cellar walls – to ensure that what is around them will fortify the truths within them.

From AD 379, when the Emperor Theodosius the Great declared Christianity the official religion of Rome, church architects were free to create homes for their ideals on a grander scale. Their aspirations achieved an apotheosis during the age of the cathedrals, in giant jewels of stone and glass designed to make vivid the Paradise of the holy books.

In the eyes of medieval man, a cathedral was God’s house on earth. Adam’s fall might have obscured the true order of the cosmos, rendering most of the world sinful and irregular, but within the bounds of a cathedral, the original, geometric beauty of the Garden of Eden had been resurrected. The light shining through the stained-glass windows prefigured that which would radiate in the next life. Inside the holy cavern, the claims of the Book of Revelation ceased to seem remote and bizarre, and became instead both palpable and immediate.

Touring the cathedrals today with cameras and guidebooks in hand, we may experience something at odds with our practical secularism: a peculiar and embarrassing desire to fall to our knees and worship a being as mighty and sublime as we ourselves are small and inadequate. Such a reaction would not, of course, have surprised the cathedral builders, for it was precisely towards such a surrender of our self-sufficiency that their efforts were directed, the purpose of their ethereal walls and lace-like ceilings being to make metaphysical stirrings not only plausible but irresistible within even the soberest of hearts.

Above: west front, Reims Cathedral, after 1254

6.

The architects and artists who worked in the service of early Islam were likewise driven by the wish to create a physical backdrop which would bolster the claims of their religion. Holding that God was the source of all understanding, Islam placed particular emphasis on the divine qualities of mathematics. Muslim artisans covered the walls of houses and mosques with repeating sequences of delicate and complicated geometries, through which the infinite wisdom of God might be intimated. This ornamentation, so pleasingly intricate on a rug or a cup, was nothing less than hallucinatory when applied to an entire hall. Eyes accustomed to seeing only the practical and humdrum objects of daily life could, inside such a room, survey a world shorn of all associations with the everyday. They would sense a symmetry, without quite being able to grasp its underlying logic. Such works were like the products of a mind with none of our human limitations, of a higher power untainted by human coarseness and therefore worthy of unconditional reverence.

Islamic architects wrote their religion literally as well as symbolically onto their buildings. The corridors of the Nasrid kings’ Alhambra Palace displayed quotations from the holy texts, carved on panels in a floriated Kufic script. ‘In the name of the merciful God. He is God alone, God entire. He has neither begotten, nor is He begotten. And none is His equal,’ read one hymn which wrapped around a reception room at eye level. In the main chamber of the complex’s Torre de la Cautiva hung a panel featuring letters threaded through with geometric and vegetal shapes in patterns of phosphorescent complexity. Al-mulk li-llah (‘Power belongs to God’), declared the wall, the strokes of the letters prolonged so as to form semicircular arches which divided, crossed and then intersected with the limbs of a second inscription proclaiming, Al-’izz li-llah (‘Glory belongs to God’) – word and image consummately united to remind onlookers of the purpose of Islamic existence.

cupola of the Mausoleum of Turabeg Khanum, Kunya, Urgench, 1370

ceramic tiles, The Alcazar, Seville, fourteenth century

Ibn al-Jayyãb, decorative plaster panel, main room,

Torre de la Cautiva, Alhambra Palace, c. 1340

Al-mulk li-llah = Power belongs to God; Al-’izz li-llah = Glory belongs to God

7.

In both early Christianity and Islam, theologians made a claim about architecture likely to sound so peculiar to modern ears as to be worthy of sustained examination: they proposed that beautiful buildings had the power to improve us morally and spiritually. They believed that, rather than corrupting us, rather than being an idle indulgence for the decadent, exquisite surroundings could edge us towards perfection. A beautiful building could reinforce our resolve to be good.

Behind this distinctive claim lay another astonishing belief: that of an equivalence between the visual and the ethical realms. Attractive architecture was held to be a version of goodness in a non-verbal idiom – and its ugly counterpart, a material version of evil. Thus, a plainly sculpted door handle which pleased us through its simplicity could simultaneously function as a reminder of the virtues of sobriety and moderation, just as the delicate setting of a pane of glass within a window frame could covertly deliver a sermon on the theme of gentleness.

The moral equation between beauty and goodness lent to all architecture a new seriousness and importance. In admiring the noble patina of a mature wooden floor, we would – after all – no longer merely be delighting in a piece of interior decoration. We would be taking in a lesson in righteousness.

We might even, the early theologians suggested, come better to understand God through beauty, for it was He who had created every beautiful thing in the world: the eastern sky at dawn, the forests, the animals, and even more domestic items like a graceful armchair, a bowl of lemons and a ray of afternoon sun shining through a cotton window blind onto the kitchen table. In contact with attractive buildings, we could intimate some of the refinement, intelligence, kindness and harmony of their ultimate maker. In the eleventh century the Muslim philosopher Ibn Sina noted that to admire a mosaic for being flawless, ordered and symmetrical, was at the same time to recognise divine glory, for ‘God is at the source of every beautiful thing.’ In the thirteenth century, from across a divide of faith, Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, asked us to picture ‘a beautiful house, this beautiful universe. Think of this or that beautiful object. But then, omitting “this” and “that”, think of what makes “this” and “that” beautiful. Try to see what Beauty is in itself … If you succeed, you will see God Himself, the Beauty which dwells in all beautiful things.’

A second compelling claim was made for the visual when the early theologians speculated that it might be easier to become a faithful servant of God by looking than by reading They argued that mankind could more effectively be shaped by architecture than by Scripture. Because we were creatures of sense, spiritual principles stood a better chance of fortifying our souls if we took them in via our eyes rather than via our intellect. We might learn more about humility by gazing at an arrangement of tiles than by studying the Gospels, and more about the nature of kindness in a stained-glass window than in a holy book. Spending time in beautiful spaces, far from a self-indulgent luxury, was deemed to lie at the core of the quest to become an honorable person.

8.

Secular architecture may have no clearly defined ideology to defend, no sacred text to quote from and no god to worship, but, just like its religious counterpart, it possesses the power to shape those who come within its orbit. The gravity with which religions have at points treated the decoration of their surroundings invites us to lend equal significance to the decoration of profane places, for they, too, may offer the better parts of us a home.

Advocates of the pursuit of architectural beauty, whether secular or religious, ultimately justify their ambitions through an appeal to the same phenomenon: man’s inability to flourish in equal measure in whatever room he is placed in.

The challenge facing ordinary home-builders is no different from that which faced the architects of Chartres and the mosque of Masjid-I Imam in Isfahan, even if their budgets are closer to those of the painters of the Roman catacombs. In a secular context, too, our aim is to identify objects and decorative features which will correlate with certain salutary inner states and encourage us to foster them within ourselves.

9.

Imagine being able to return at the close of each day to a house like that in Rö, north of Stockholm. Our working routines may be frantic and compromised, dense with meetings, insincere handshakes, small-talk and bureaucracy. We may say things we don’t believe in to win over our colleagues and feel ourselves becoming envious and excited in relation to goals we don’t essentially care for.

But, finally, on our own, looking out of the hall window onto the garden and the gathering darkness, we can slowly resume contact with a more authentic self, who was there waiting in the wings for us to end our performance. Our submerged playful sides will derive encouragement from the painted flowers on either side of the door. The value of gentleness will be confirmed by the delicate folds of the curtains. Our interest in a modest, tender-hearted kind of happiness will be fostered by the unpretentious raw wooden floorboards. The materials around us will speak to us of the highest hopes we have for ourselves. In this setting, we can come close to a state of mind marked by integrity and vitality. We can feel inwardly liberated. We can, in a profound sense, return home.

Without honouring any gods, a piece of domestic architecture, no less than a mosque or a chapel, can assist us in the commemoration of our genuine selves.

Näs House, Rö, north of Stockholm, c. 1820

10.

Just like an entire room, a single picture can assist us in recovering the lost, significant parts of ourselves.

Take William Nicholson’s closely observed painting of a bowl, a white tablecloth and some unshelled peas. On first seeing it, we might experience a measure of sadness, as we recognise how far we have drifted from its meditative, observant spirit, from its modesty and appreciation of the beauty and nobility of ordinary life.

Behind wanting to own the painting and hang it where we could regularly study it might be the hope that through continued exposure to it, its qualities would come to assume a greater hold on us. Passing it on the stairs last thing at night or in the morning on our way to work would have the effect of a magnet which could pull to the surface submerged filaments of our characters. The painting would act as the guardian of a mood.

We value certain buildings for their ability to rebalance our misshapen natures and encourage emotions which our predominant commitments force us to sacrifice. Feelings of competitiveness, envy and aggression hardly need elaboration, but feelings of humility amid an immense and sublime universe, of a desire for calm at the onset of evening or of an aspiration for gravity and kindness – these form no correspondingly reliable part of our inner landscape, a rueful absence which may explain our wish to bind such emotions to the fabric of our homes.

Architecture can arrest transient and timid inclinations, amplify and solidify them, and thereby grant us more permanent access to a range of emotional textures which we might otherwise have experienced only accidentally and occasionally.

There need be nothing preternaturally sweet or homespun about the moods embodied in domestic spaces. These spaces can speak to us of the sombre as readily as they can of the gentle. There is no necessary connection between the concepts of home and of prettiness; what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistently available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding on to. As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.

William Nicholson, The Lustre Bowl with Green Peas, 1911

11.

Given the memorial capacities of architecture, it cannot be coincidental that in many of the world’s cultures, the earliest and most significant works have been funerary.

Some 4,000 years ago, on a hillside in western Pembrokeshire, a group of our Neolithic ancestors lifted up a series of gigantic stones with their bare hands and covered them with earth to mark the spot where one of their kinsmen lay buried. The chamber has been lost to time, as have the body and even the identity of the man whose name must once have been spoken with awe in the communities along this damp edge of the British Isles. But what remains to these stones is their eloquent ability to deliver the message common to all funerary architecture, from marble tomb to rough wooden roadside shrine – namely, ‘Remember’. The poignancy of the roughly chiselled family of mossy orthostats, keeping their lonely watch over a landscape around which none save sheep and the occasional rain-proofed hiker now roam, is heightened only by the awareness that we recall nothing whatsoever about the one they memorialise – aside, that is, from this leader’s evident desire, strong enough to inspire his clan to raise a forty-tonne capstone in his honour, that he not be forgotten.

The fear of forgetting anything precious can trigger in us the wish to raise a structure, like a paperweight to hold down our memories. We might even follow the example of the Countess of Mount Edgcumbe, who in the late eighteenth century had a thirty-foot-high Neoclassical obelisk erected on a hill on the outskirts of Plymouth, in memory of an unusually sensitive pig called Cupid, whom she did not hesitate to call a true friend.

Top: Neolithic burial chamber, Pentre Ifan, western Pembrokeshire, c. 2000 BC

Below: Memorial to Cupid, Plymouth, c. 1790

The desire to remember unites our reasons for building for the living and for the dead. As we put up tombs, markers and mausoleums to memorialise lost loved ones, so do we construct and decorate buildings to help us recall the important but fugitive parts of ourselves. The pictures and chairs in our homes are the equivalents – scaled for our own day, attuned to the demands of the living – of the giant burial mounds of Palaeolithic times. Our domestic fittings, too, are memorials to identity.

12.

We may occasionally and guiltily experience the desire to create a home as a wish to vaunt ourselves in front of others. But only if the truest parts of ourselves were egomaniacal would the urge to build be dominated by the need to boast. Instead, at its most genuine, the architectural impulse seems connected to a longing for communication and commemoration, a longing to declare ourselves to the world through a register other than words, through the language of objects, colours and bricks: an ambition to let others know who we are – and, in the process, to remind ourselves.

Ideals

1.

In 1575 the city of Venice commissioned the artist Paolo Veronese to paint a new ceiling for the great hall in the Doge’s Palace, the Sala del Collegio, where the magistracy held its deliberations, and where dignitaries and ambassadors were received.

The resulting work was a sumptuous celebration, in allegorical form, of Venetian government. In a central panel Veronese depicted the city as a sober, beautiful queen of the seas, attended by two ladies-in-waiting, one of whom symbolised justice (she was carrying a pair of scales) and the other peace (she had a sleepy but not unferocious-seeming lion on a leash – just in case). Smaller panels around the edges portrayed supplementary Venetian virtues. Meekness showed a young blonde with an obedient sheep resting its front feet on her lap. Next to her, in Fidelity, a melancholic brunette stroked the neck of a St Bernard. Across from these was Prosperity, represented by a ruddy-cheeked, slightly chubby woman in a low-cut dress, holding a cornucopia overflowing with apples, grapes and oranges. And opposite her was Moderation, in which a sturdy maiden with braided hair and one exposed breast smiled impassively as she plucked out the feathers of a vicious-looking eagle (most likely standing in for the Turks or the Spanish). To judge from Veronese’s ceiling, there was little that was not just and peaceful, meek and faithful, about the Venetian Republic.

Paolo Veronese, Meekness, Sala del Collegio, Doge’s Palace, Venice, c. 1575

Paolo Veronese, The Triumph of Venice, Sala del Collegio

Andrea Palladio, Villa Rotonda, Veneto, 1580

On a plot of land not many miles away, in 1566, a scholar, courtier and merchant named Canon Paolo Almerico asked Veronese’s contemporary Andrea Palladio to build him a country house, to which he and his family might retreat to escape the intrigue and disease endemic to life on the republic’s lagoons. Palladio was impressed by how well Ancient Roman buildings had managed to embody the ideals of their society – orderliness, courage, self-sacrifice and dignity – and he wanted his own designs to promote a comparable Renaissance conception of nobility. The title page of his 1570 work The Four Books of Architecture would make this didactic ambition explicit, through an allegorical engraving which featured two maidens of architecture saluting the queen of virtue. The balanced façades of the Villa Rotonda, the grand house which Palladio conceived for Almerico, seemed to imply that in this one place on earth, amid the sunlit flatlands of the Veneto, the struggles and compromises of ordinary life had been overcome and supplanted by equilibrium and lucidity. Along the villa’s pediments and stairways, a sequence of life-sized statues by the sculptors Lorenzo Rubini and Giambattista Albanese gave human form to figures from classical mythology. Stepping out onto the terrace for a breath of air after reading a few chapters of Seneca or reviewing a contract from the Levant, the villa’s owner could raise his eyes to take in Mercury, the protector of commerce, Jupiter, the god of wisdom, or Vesta, the goddess of the hearth – and feel that, in his country dwelling, at least, the values closest to his heart had found lasting expression and glorification in stone.

From Palladio’s time forward, and due in large part to his example, the creation of houses which could reflect the ideals of their owners became a central ambition of architects throughout the West. In 1764 Lord Mansfield, England’s Lord Chief Justice, tasked Robert Adam with coordinating the refurbishment of the library at Kenwood, his house on Hampstead Heath, overlooking London. Under Adam’s direction, the library became an opulent consecration of the character of the most senior legal authority in the land. Its shelves were filled with volumes of Greek and Roman philosophy and history, and its ornate ceiling was inset with an allegorical oval. Entitled Hercules between Glory and the Passions, the vignette showed a young Hellenic hero, clearly a version of Mansfield himself, trying to decide whether to devote his life to pleasure (in the shape of three comely girls, one of whom was baring a plump thigh) or to follow the path of sacrifice to a worthy civic cause (personified by a soldier who pointed towards a Classical temple). The viewer was given to understand that civic virtue would win the tussle – though the painting, with its masterly Italianate command of flesh tones, seemed covertly to be making a more compelling case for the alternative. Another section of the ceiling displayed Justice Embracing Peace, Commerce and Navigation (it looked like a much-longed-for reunion), while over the fireplace hung a portrait of Lord Mansfield by David Martin, who had chosen – or been directed – to portray him leaning against the Temple of Solomon (the wisest of all the kings of Israel), under the approving gaze of a bust of Homer (the greatest of all storytellers), with his right hand holding open a volume of Cicero (the noblest orator). Here was a man of biblical, Greek and Roman sagacity.

Some sixty years later, just a few miles to the south, the members of London’s Athenaeum Club, an institution catering (as its rulebook stated) to ‘persons of distinguished eminence in science, literature, the arts or public life’, commissioned a new building for themselves on Pall Mall. Classical figures, modelled after those in the Elgin Marbles and executed by the sculptor John Henning, were arranged on an extended frieze some 260 feet long, which wrapped around three exterior sides of the clubhouse. The figures were engaged in the Athenian equivalents of the activities which interested the English gentlemen inside: singing, reading, writing and orating. Above the front door stood a towering gilded statue of Athena. The goddess of craft and wisdom looked defiantly down Pall Mall, intent on offering all who passed a foretaste of the personalities and interests of the membership within. By all appearances, only a few metres removed from the shallow commercialism of Piccadilly, an institution had been founded which harboured within its walls a group of men fully the equals of those who had lent glory to Athens in her golden age.

Robert Adam, library, Kenwood House, 1769

Decimus Burton, Athenaeum Club, 1824; E. H. Bailey, Athena, 1829

2.

Faced with painted ceilings and statues, in front of allegories of nymphs and gods, our eyes are liable to glaze over and drift away. The idealising style that in many countries dominated architecture between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries has a habit of striking us as both tedious and hypocritical.

We find it hard to overlook, let alone forgive, the frequent discrepancies between idealised architecture and the reality of those who commissioned and lived with it. We know that Venice, whatever Veronese implied, repeatedly absconded from the virtues trumpeted by the maidens on the Sala del Collegio’s ceiling. We know that she trafficked in slaves, ignored her poor, dissipated her resources and exacted immoderate revenge on her enemies. We know that La Serenissima painted one thing, and did another. We know, too, that the Almerico family fell into disgrace before Palladio’s villa had even been completed and that their successors, the Capras, enjoyed no greater favour from the gods of commerce and wisdom, who seemed to mock the family’s aspirations from the villa’s rooftops. For his part, Lord Mansfield, far from uniting the talents of Cicero, Homer and Solomon, was an archetypal mid-eighteenth-century lawyer, ruthless, frugal with his humanity and adept at hiding his baser instincts behind Classical quotations. As for the Athenaeum, the majority of its members had joined the club for social advancement and wasted their days slumped in leather armchairs, watching the rain fall, slurping nursery food and neglecting their families, bearing as much resemblance to the contemporaries of Pericles as Piccadilly Circus did to the Acropolis.

By contrast with our idealising predecessors, we tend to pride ourselves on our interest in reality. We reward works of art precisely insofar as they leave roseate ideals behind and faithfully attune themselves to the facts of our condition. We honour these works for revealing to us who we are, rather than who we would like to be.

Nevertheless, the sheer eccentricity and remoteness of the concept of artistic idealisation invites closer examination. We might ask why, for some three centuries in the early-modern period, artists were applauded chiefly insofar as they could produce landscapes, people and buildings that were free of ordinary blemishes. We might wonder why artists competed among themselves to paint gardens and glades that would be more bucolic than any actual park, why they sculpted marble lips and ankles more seductive than those through which real blood might flow, and made portraits of aristocrats and royalty which showed them to be wiser and more magnanimous than they ever were.

It was rarely naivety that lay behind these efforts, or indeed the desire to deceive. The creators of idealised works were worldly creatures and credited their audiences with being so too. It was clear that the councillors gathering under Veronese’s ceiling would frequently have been swayed by impulses darker than those depicted above them. Likewise, it was known that Mansfield’s inclination to do honour to his office had to compete with the siren calls of wealth and fame, and that the hope of achieving something worthwhile over the course of an afternoon at the Athenaeum Club would seldom have withstood the lure of gossip and ginger biscuits in the tea room.

To proponents of the idealising tradition, the notion that artists were being naive in suggesting anything other than this would itself have appeared naive. The purpose of their art and their buildings was not to remind us of what life was typically like, but rather to keep before our eyes how it might optimally be, so as to move us fractionally closer to fulfilment and virtue. Sculptures and buildings were to assist us in bringing the best of ourselves to the fore. They were to embalm our highest aspirations.

3.

It is in German philosophy of the late eighteenth century that we find the most lucid articulations of the theory of artistic idealisation. In his On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794), Friedrich Schiller proposed that the perfections presented in idealised art could be sources of inspiration, to which we would be able to turn when we had lost confidence in ourselves and were in contact only with our flaws, a melancholic and self-destructive stance to which he felt his own age especially prone. ‘Humanity has lost its dignity,’ he observed, ‘but Art has rescued it and preserved it in significant stone. Truth lives on in the illusion of Art, and it is from this copy, or after-image, that the original image will once again be restored.’

Rather than confronting us with evocations of our darkest moments, works of art were to stand, in Schiller’s words, as an ‘absolute manifestation of potential’; they were to function like ‘an escort descended from the world of the ideal’.

If buildings can act as a repository of our ideals, it is because they can be purged of all the infelicities that corrode ordinary lives. A great work of architecture will speak to us of a degree of serenity, strength, poise and grace to which we, both as creators and audiences, typically cannot do justice – and it will for this very reason beguile and move us. Architecture excites our respect to the extent that it surpasses us.

The potential inscribed in an idealised building need never fully be realised to justify its worth. In the eyes of Schiller’s contemporary Wilhelm von Humboldt, it was the idealised buildings of the Ancient Greeks that presented modern Westerners with the most nourishing sources of inspiration, though he added in his essay ‘Concerning the Study of Antiquity’ (1793) that Greek architecture deserved our interest even if only a semblance of the perfections it alluded to could ever be re-created in the practically minded, bourgeois world: ‘We imitate the models of the Greeks in full consciousness that they are unattainable; we fill our imagination with the images of their free, richly gained life, knowing that such life is denied us.’

An invitation to a Classical ideal:

Above: Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Schlossbrücke, Berlin, 1824; statue by Albert Wolff, 1853

Below: Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Altes Museum, Berlin, 1830

When von Humboldt’s friend, the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, began to endow Berlin with Classical bridges, museums and palaces, he knew that Berliners would only ever be able to admire from a distance, rather than rekindle, the antiquity he revered, but he trusted that something of the period’s integrity and grandeur could through architecture still come to permeate the Prussian capital. As residents crossed the Schlossbrücke to attend a meeting or passed the New Pavilion at the Charlottenhof Palace on a Sunday walk, Schinkel’s architecture – his statue-laden bridges, his sober columns, his delicate frescos – could play a small but pivotal role in ushering in a renaissance of the spirit.

4.

However much it may seem as if we have lost all patience with idealisation, contemptuous as we are of decorated bridges and gilded statues, we are constitutionally incapable of abandoning the concept itself, for, freed of all its historical associations, the word ‘idealisation’ refers simply to an aspiration towards perfection, an objective with which no one, not even the most rational of beings, may ever be completely unacquainted.

It is in fact not ideals per se that we have forgone but the specific values once honoured by prominent works of idealisation. We have given up on antiquity, we have no reverence for mythology, and we condemn aristocratic confidence. Our ideals now revolve around themes of democracy, science and commerce. And yet we remain as committed as ever to the project of idealisation. Behind a practical façade, modern architecture has never ceased trying to reflect back to its audience a selective image of who they might be, in the hope of improving upon, and moulding, reality.

Idealising ambitions become especially evident whenever the construction of high-profile civic buildings is undertaken. The national pavilions of the World Exposition in Seville in 1992, for example, were in their understated way just as idealistic about their sponsoring countries as Veronese had been in his rendition of the virtues of Venetian government. Finland’s entry, made up of two separate but conjoined halves – a polished steel slab nestling against a curved extension of blond wood – spoke of a society which had succeeded in perfectly reconciling the opposing elements of male and female, modernity and history, technology and nature, luxury and democracy. Taken as a whole, the ensemble comprised an austerely beautiful promise of a dignified and graceful life.

An ideal life in Finland: Above: Monark Architects, Finnish Pavilion, Expo ’92, Seville, 1992

An ideal of a career in banking: Above: Frank Gehry, DZ Bank, Berlin, 2000

The workers of the DZ Bank in Berlin were offered a comparable version of an ideal by their headquarters beside the Brandenburg Gate. While their work itself might often be routine and repetitive, on their way to the cafeteria or a meeting, the bank’s employees could look down into the giant atrium of their building at a strange, elegant conference room, whose lithe forms hinted at the creativity and playfulness to which their solemn bosses aspired.

Oscar Niemeyer, National Congress, Brasília, 1960

Entire cities may even be born out of the wish to summon Schiller’s ‘escort descended from the world of the ideal’. When President Kubitschek of Brazil unveiled plans for the construction of Brasília, in 1956, he vowed that the new capital would become ‘the most original and precise expression of the creative intelligence of modern Brazil’. Deep and high in the country’s interior, it was to be a model of modern bureaucratic efficiency, an ideal to which the rest of Kubitschek’s sprawling, struggling country could pay only insecure and occasional homage. Brasília was intended not to symbolise an existing national reality but rather to bring a new reality into being. It was hoped that with its broad avenues and its undulating concrete and steel buildings, it would help erase Brazil’s legacy of colonialism, as well as the chaos and poverty of her coastal cities. Brasília would bring about the modernity it epitomised. It would create a country in its own image.

Richard Neutra, Edgar J. Kaufmann House, Palm Springs, 1946

The fact that Brasília would end up having its share of beggars and favelas, burnt grass on its spacious thoroughfares and cracks in the walls of its cathedral, would not have dissuaded the champions of idealisation in architecture, any more than would betrayals and incompetence beneath Veronese’s ceiling, stupidity within the Athenaeum, alcoholism and despair in Finland or terminal boredom in the offices of the DZ Bank. For them, such lapses merely underscored the need for idealised forms to stand as a defence against all that remains corrupt and unimaginative within us.

In the modern age, idealisation has proved as attractive in the domestic sphere as in the civic one. The bourgeois couples who lived in Richard Neutra’s mid-twentieth-century steel and glass pavilions in California may at times have drunk too much, squabbled, been insincere and overwhelmed by anxiety, but at least their buildings spoke to them of honesty and ease, of a lack of inhibition and a faith in the future – and would have reminded their owners, at the height of their tantrums or professional complications (when their fury rang out into the desert night), of what they longed for in their hearts.

In 1938, on a remote, rocky outcrop on the island of Capri, the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte conceived a home for himself which would be, as he wrote to a friend, ‘a self-portrait in stone’ (‘ritratto pietra’) and ‘a house like me’ (‘una casa come me’). With its proud isolation, its juxtapositioning of ruggedness and refinement, its unblinking, hardy defiance of the elements, and the aesthetic debt it owed to Ancient Rome on the one hand and Italian modernism on the other, the house did indeed pick up on key traits of Malaparte’s character. Fortunately for visitors, however, it turned out not to be a slavishly faithful portrait of its owner in all his facets – a difficult prospect for any house, certainly, but particularly so in Malaparte’s case, for that would have necessitated the inclusion of pretentious furnishings, dead-end corridors, perhaps a shooting range (he was a Fascist until 1943) and a few broken windows (he liked a drink and then a fight). Rather than reflecting the author’s many foibles, Casa Malaparte, like all effective works of idealisation, assisted its gifted yet flawed proprietor in orienting himself towards the noblest sides of his personality.

5.

The architecture produced under the influence of an idealising theory of the arts might be described as a form of propaganda. The word is an alarming one, for we are inclined to believe that high art should be free of ideology and admired purely for its own sake.

Yet the term ‘propaganda’ refers to the promotion of any doctrine or set of beliefs and in and of itself should carry no negative connotations. That the majority of such promotion has been in the service of odious political and commercial agendas is more an accident of history than any fault of the word. A work of art becomes a piece of propaganda whenever it uses its resources to direct us towards something, insofar as it attempts to enhance our sensitivity and our readiness to respond favourably to any end or idea.

A self-portrait in stone:

Curzio Malaparte (with Adalberto Libera), Casa Malaparte, Capri, 1943

Under this definition, few works of art could fail to be counted as propaganda: not only pictures of Soviet farmers proclaiming their five-year plans but also paintings of peas and lustre bowls; chairs; and steel and glass houses on the edge of the California desert. Taking the apparently perverse step of giving each of these the same label merely serves to stress the directive aspect of all consciously created objects – objects which invite viewers to imitate and participate in the qualities encoded within them.

From this perspective, we would be wise not to pursue the impossible goal of extirpating propaganda altogether, but should instead endeavour to surround ourselves with its more honourable examples. There is nothing to lament in the idea that art can direct our actions, provided that the directions it points us in are valuable ones. The theorists of the idealising tradition were refreshingly frank in their insistence that art should try to make things happen – and, more importantly, that it should try to make us good.

John Wood the Younger, Royal Crescent, Bath, 1775

6.

A perplexing consequence of fixing our eyes on an ideal is that it may make us sad. The more beautiful something is, the sadder we risk feeling, so that standing in front of a painting by Pieter de Hooch of a grave-faced little boy diligently bringing his mother some loaves of bread, or of John Wood the Younger’s Royal Crescent in Bath, we may find ourselves not so far from tears.

Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.

Pieter de Hooch, A Boy Bringing Bread, c. 1665

Pieter de Hooch’s figures and the curve of the Royal Crescent stir us through the contrast they present to the emotions which more usually colour our days. The gentle manner of the mother and the trusting, dutiful expression of her son make us conscious of our own cynicism and brusqueness. The Royal Crescent, in all its solemn dignity, shows up the trivial and chaotic nature of so many of our ambitions. These works of art touch us because they are unlike us and yet also like the way we might wish ourselves to be.

Christian philosophers have been singularly alive to the sadness which beauty may provoke. ‘When we admire the beauty of visible objects, we experience joy certainly,’ observed the medieval thinker Hugh of St Victor, ‘but at the same time, we experience a feeling of tremendous void.’ The religious explanation put forward for this sadness, as rationally implausible as it is psychologically intriguing, is that we recognise beautiful things as symbols of the unblemished life we once enjoyed in the Garden of Eden. While we may one day resume this sublime existence in Heaven, the sins of Adam and Eve have deprived us of that possibility on earth. Beauty, then, is a fragment of the divine, and the sight of it saddens us by evoking our sense of loss and our yearning for the life denied us. The qualities written into beautiful objects are those of a God from whom we live far removed, in a world mired in sin. But works of art are finite enough, and the care taken by those who create them great enough, that they can claim a measure of perfection ordinarily unattainable by human beings. These works are bitter-sweet tokens of a goodness to which we still aspire, however infrequently we may approach it in our actions or our thoughts.

Even stripped of its theological elements, this story helps to account for the sorrow that can cling to our encounters with attractive objects. Imagine a man in an especially tormented period, sitting in the waiting room of a Georgian townhouse before a meeting. Uninterested in the magazines on offer, he looks up at the ceiling and recognises that at some point in the eighteenth century, someone took the trouble to design a complicated but harmonious moulding made up of interlocking garlands of flowers and painted it a mixture of white, porcelain blue and yellow. The ceiling is a repository of the qualities the man would like to have more of in himself: it manages to be both playful and serious, subtle and clear, formal and unpretentious. Though it must have been commissioned by people no less practical than he, it has a profound unsentimental sweetness, like that of a smile breaking across a child’s face. At the same time, the man is aware that the ceiling contains everything that he does not. He is embroiled in professional complications which he cannot resolve, he is permanently tired, a sour expression is etched onto his face, and he has begun shouting intemperately at strangers – when all he wants to explain is that he is in pain. The ceiling is the man’s true home, to which he cannot find his way back. There are tears in his eyes when an assistant enters the room to usher him to his meeting.

The man’s sadness points us to a subsidiary claim. It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things. Our downhearted moments provide architecture and art with their best openings, for it is at such times that our hunger for their ideal qualities will be at its height. It is not those creatures with well-organised, uncluttered minds who will be most moved by the sight of a clean and empty room in which sunlight washes over a generous expanse of concrete and wood, nor will it be the man with every confidence that his affairs are in order who will crave to live under – and perhaps even shed a tear over – the ceilings of a Robert Adam townhouse.

7.

While a common reaction to seeing a thing of beauty is to want to buy it, our real desire may be not so much to own what we find beautiful as to lay permanent claim to the inner qualities it embodies.

A human ideal on a ceiling:

Robert Adam, Home House, Portman Square, London, 1775

Owning such an object may help us realise our ambition of absorbing the virtues to which it alludes, but we ought not to presume that those virtues will automatically or effortlessly begin to rub off on us through tenure. Endeavouring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.

What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.

Why Ideals Change

1.

An antique shop on one of north-west London’s more ragged edges. Outside, ambulance sirens hint at the homicidal conclusions to disagreements, police helicopters hover overhead, and people with unmatched socks advance down the street announcing millennial disasters to indifferent passers-by.

But the term ‘antique shop’ may be too quaint and tactful to capture the nature of this establishment. There are no smells of old leather and salesmen with half-moon glasses here; this more closely resembles a bailiff’s depot or junk yard. This is where objects make a last attempt to tempt the partially sighted before they are carted off to erode in a landfill.

In one corner stands an especially grievous-looking item, a sideboard with bulbous wings, two bay windows, Corinthian columns and a gilt-edged mirror. Though the piece’s drawers still work and the finish remains miraculously unspoilt, its price is closer to that of firewood than furniture, testifying to an ugliness too blatant for even the most generous-minded or myopic to ignore.

And yet how loved this sideboard must once have been. A maid might have run her duster over it every few days in an ample house in Richmond or Wimbledon. A cat perhaps playfully rubbed its tail against it on the way into the living room. For a generation, it would have proudly displayed Christmas pudding, champagne glasses and wedges of Stilton. But now, in the corner of this shop, it has all the poignancy of an ageing exiled Russian princess, dreaming of a palace in St Petersburg from a fleapit in Paris, letting all who will listen know of how attractive she looked at seventeen – even as despair and alcohol hang heavy on her breath.

Finding things beautiful naturally invites us to imagine that we will remain loyal to our feelings. But the histories of design and architecture offer little reassurance as to the fidelity of our tastes. The fate of the sideboard imitates that of numberless mansions, concert halls and chairs. Our impressions of beauty continually swing between stylistic polarities: between the restrained and the exuberant; the rustic and the urban; the feminine and the masculine – leading us ruthlessly to abandon objects to expire in junk shops at every swerve.

Precedent forces us to suppose that later generations will one day walk around our houses with the same attitude of horror and amusement with which we now consider many of the possessions of the dead. They will marvel at our wallpapers and our sofas and laugh at aesthetic crimes to which we are impervious. This awareness can lend to our affections a fragile, nervous quality. Knowing that what we now love may in the future, for reasons beyond our current understanding, appear absurd is as hard to bear in the context of a piece of furniture in a shop as it is in the context of a prospective spouse at an altar.

No wonder, then, that architects so assiduously try to distinguish their craft from fashion, and that they set such store (in vain, of course) on creating works which the decades will not render ridiculous.

2.

Why do we change our minds about what we find beautiful?

In 1907 a young German art historian named Wilhelm Worringer published an essay entitled ‘Abstraction and Empathy’, in which he attempted to explain our shifts from a psychological perspective.

He began by suggesting that during the span of human history there had been only two basic types of art, ‘abstract’ and ‘realistic’, either one of which might, at any given time in a particular society, be favoured over the other. Through the millennia, the abstract had enjoyed popularity in Byzantium, Persia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Congo, Mali and Zaire, and it was just then, at the opening of the twentieth century, returning to prominence in the West. This was an art governed by a spirit of symmetry, order, regularity and geometry. Whether in the form of sculpture or carpets, mosaics or pottery, whether in the work of a basket weaver from Wewak or that of a painter from New York, abstract art aspired to create a tranquil atmosphere marked by flat, repetitive visual planes, the whole being free of any allusion to the living world.

By contrast, Worringer noted, realistic art, which had dominated aesthetics in the Ancient Greek and Roman eras and held sway in Europe from the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century, sought to evoke the vibrancy and colour of tangible experience. Artists of this stripe strove to capture the atmosphere of a threatening pine forest, the texture of human blood, the swelling of a teardrop or the ferocity of a lion.

The most compelling aspect of Worringer’s theory – a point as readily applicable to architecture as it is to painting – was his explanation of why a society might transfer its loyalty from the one aesthetic mode to the other. The determinant lay, he believed, in those values which the society in question was lacking, for it would love in art whatever it did not possess in sufficient supply within itself. Abstract art, infused as it was with harmony, stillness and rhythm, would appeal chiefly to societies yearning for calm – societies in which law and order were fraying, ideologies were shifting, and a sense of physical danger was compounded by moral and spiritual confusion. Against such a turbulent background (the sort of atmosphere to be found in many of the metropolises of twentieth-century America or in New Guinean villages enervated by generations of internecine strife), inhabitants would experience what Worringer termed ‘an immense need for tranquillity’, and so would turn to the abstract, to patterned baskets or the minimalist galleries of Lower Manhattan.

But in societies which had achieved high standards of internal and external order, so that life therein had come to seem predictable and overly secure, an opposing hunger would emerge: citizens would long to escape from the suffocating grasp of routine and predictability – and would turn to realistic art to quench their psychic thirst and reacquaint themselves with an elusive intensity of feeling.

We respect a style which can move us away from what we fear and towards what we crave:

Top left: raffia skirt, Kuba, twentieth century

Top right: Agnes Martin, Untitled, 1962

Bottom: Byzantine mosaic, Basilica of Kampanopetra, Cyprus, sixth century AD

We can conclude from this that we are drawn to call something beautiful whenever we detect that it contains in a concentrated form those qualities in which we personally, or our societies more generally, are deficient. We respect a style which can move us away from what we fear and towards what we crave: a style which carries the correct dosage of our missing virtues. That we need art in the first place is a sign that we stand in almost permanent danger of imbalance, of failing to regulate our extremes, of losing our grip on the golden mean between life’s great opposites: boredom and excitement, reason and imagination, simplicity and complexity, safety and danger, austerity and luxury.

If the behaviour of babies and small children is any guide, we emerge into the world with our tendencies to imbalance already well entrenched. In our playpens and high chairs, we are rarely far from displaying either hysterical happiness or savage disappointment, love or rage, mania or exhaustion – and, despite the growth of a more temperate exterior in adulthood, we seldom succeed in laying claim to lasting equilibrium, traversing our lives like stubbornly listing ships on choppy seas.

Our innate imbalances are further aggravated by practical demands. Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored. Society ends up containing a range of unbalanced groups, each hungering to sate its particular psychological deficiency, forming the backdrop against which our frequently heated conflicts about what is beautiful play themselves out.

A wall to defend us against the threat of poverty and degradation:

Top: bedroom of Mme Adélaïde, Palace of Versailles, 1765

A defence against the dangers of privilege:

Bottom: Tomas Nollet and Hilde Huyghe, Nollet and Huyghe House, Bruges, 2002

3.

Viewed in this light, a given stylistic choice will tell us as much about what its advocates lack as about what they like. We can understand a seventeenth-century elite’s taste for gilded walls by simultaneously remembering the context in which this form of decoration developed its appeal: one where violence and disease were constant threats, even for the wealthy – fertile soil from which to begin appreciating the corrective promises offered by angels holding aloft garlands of flowers and ribbons.

We shouldn’t believe that the modern age, which often prides itself on rejecting signs of gentility and leaves walls unplastered and bare, is any less deficient. It is merely lacking different things. An absence of politesse is no longer the prevailing dread. In most Western cities, at least, the worst of the slums have been replaced by clean, well-charted streets. Life in much of the developed world has become rule-bound and materially abundant, punctilious and routine, to the extent that longings now run in another direction: towards the natural and unfussy, the rough and authentic – longings that bourgeois households may rely on unrendered walls and breeze blocks to help them to assuage.

4.

Historians have often noted that the Western world in the late eighteenth century acquired a taste for the natural in all its major art forms. There was new enthusiasm for informal clothing, pastoral poetry, novels about ordinary people and unadorned architecture and interior decoration. But we shouldn’t be led by this aesthetic shift to conclude that the inhabitants of the West were at this time becoming any more natural in themselves. They were falling in love with the natural in their art precisely because they were losing touch with the natural in their own lives.

Thanks to advances in technology and trade, existence for the European upper classes had become, by this period, overly safe and procedural, an excess which the educated looked to relieve through holidays in cottages and readings of couplets on flowers. In his essay ‘On Naive and Sentimental Poetry’ (1796), Friedrich Schiller observed that the Ancient Greeks, who had spent most of their time outdoors, whose cities were small and ringed by forests and seas, had only rarely felt the need to celebrate the natural world in their art. ‘Since the Greeks had not lost nature in themselves,’ he explained, ‘they had no great desire to create objects external to them in which they could recover it.’ And then, turning to his own day, Schiller drove home his message: ‘However, as nature begins gradually to vanish from human life as a direct experience, so we see it emerge in the world of the poet as an idea. We can expect that the nation which has gone the farthest towards unnaturalness would have to be touched most strongly by the phenomenon of the naive. This nation is France’ – a country whose late queen had only a few years before perfectly corroborated Schiller’s thesis by passing her weekends watching cows being milked in the rustic village she had had built at the end of her garden.

5.

In 1776 the Swiss artist Caspar Wolf painted a picture of a group of climbers resting in front of the giant Lauteraar glacier high in Switzerland’s Bernese Alps. Perched on top of a rock, two of the climbers gaze up at an immense crevasse-pitted floe of ice before them. Their stockings, the shapes of their hats and their expensive-looking and dainty umbrella suggest that they are aristocrats. Below them, at the bottom left of the canvas, oblivious to the view, is a mountain guide, holding a long walking pole and wearing a coarse cloak and a peasant’s hat. The painting is a case study in how differing psychological imbalances may result in contrasting notions of beauty.

Though he must know these mountains better than all his charges, the guide has none of the aristocrats’ interest in the scene. He seems to be hiding by the side of a boulder. One imagines him longing for the excursion to be over and inwardly mocking the gentlemen who knocked at his door the previous day, asking to be led into the clouds for lunch, in exchange for a sum he could not turn down. For the guide, beauty is likely to lie in the lowlands, in meadows and chalets, while high mountains are fearsome places which one would sanely ascend only out of necessity, to rescue an animal or to build a snow barrier to break the fury of avalanches.

Cottages to correct the excesses of a palace:

Marie Antoinette, Prince de Ligne, Hubert Robert,

Queen’s Hamlet, Petit Trianon, Versailles, 1785

Caspar Wolf, The Lauteraar Glacier, 1776

The date of the picture is significant, for it was at this point in the calendar of the Western imagination that mountains, having been dismissed for centuries as monstrous aberrations, began to exert a widespread attraction for aristocratic tourists, who found in their raw appearance and perilousness a welcome relief from the fastidiousness and gentility of their increasingly over-civilised lives at home. A century before and the gentlemen would have stayed on their estates, trimming their hedges in geometric patterns, feeling no call to be reminded of disorder or wilderness. A century later and even the native guide and his ilk would have started to look more benevolently upon the untamed aspects of nature, their newfound interest having been incubated by the spread of central heating, weather forecasts, newspapers, post offices and railway lines running along even the highest of the Alpine valleys.

But at this moment, at the top of a mountain, two assessments of beauty lie side by side, their divergence explained by two different, and differently deficient, ways of life.

6.

In 1923 a French industrialist named Henry Frugès commissioned the famous but still relatively untried architect Le Corbusier, then thirty-six years old, to build houses for a group of his manual workers and their families. Sited next to Frugès’s factories in Lège and Pessac, near Bordeaux, the resulting complexes were exemplars of Modernism, each a series of undecorated boxes with long rectangular windows, flat roofs and bare walls. Le Corbusier was especially proud of their lack of local and rural allusions. He mocked the aspirations of what he called the ‘folkloric brigade’ – made up of the sentimentalising traditionalists – and denounced French society’s intransigent resistance to modernity. In the houses he designed for the labourers, his admiration for industry and technology expressed itself in expanses of concrete, undecorated surfaces and naked light bulbs.

But the new tenants had a very different idea of beauty. It was not they who had had their fill of tradition and luxury, of gentleness and refinement, nor they who were bored by the regional idiom or the detailed carvings of older buildings. In concrete hangars, dressed in regulation blue overalls, they spent their days assembling pine packing cases for the sugar business. The hours were long and the holidays few. Many had been dragooned from outlying villages to work in Monsieur Frugès’s factories, and they were nostalgic for their former homes and parcels of land. At the end of a shift in the plant, to be further reminded of the dynamism of modern industry was not a pressing psychological priority. Within a few years the workers therefore transformed their all-but-identical Corbusian cubes into uniquely differentiated, private spaces capable of reminding them of the things which their working lives had stripped away. Unconcerned with spoiling the great architect’s designs, they added to their houses pitched roofs, shutters, small casement windows, flowered wallpaper and picket fences in the vernacular style, and, once that was done, set about installing a variety of ornamental fountains and gnomes in their front gardens.

The tenants’ tastes might have run in different directions from those of their architect, but the logic behind the exercise of these tastes was identical. Just like the renowned Modernist, the factory workers had fallen for a style evoking the qualities with which their own lives had been insufficiently endowed.

Le Corbusier, houses, Pessac, 1925 and 1995

7.

A grasp of the psychological mechanism behind taste may not change our sense of what we find beautiful, but it can prevent us from reacting to what we don’t like with simple disbelief. We should know to ask at once what people would have to lack in order to see an object as beautiful and can come to understand the tenor of their deprivation even if we cannot muster enthusiasm for their choice.

We can imagine that a whitewashed rational loft, which seems to us punishingly ordered, might be home to someone unusually oppressed by intimations of anarchy. We can likewise guess that the inhabitants of a roughly rendered building, where the walls are made of black bricks and the doors of rusted steel, are liable to be fleeing from feelings of their own or their society’s excessive privilege, just as we can presume that blatantly playful blocks, where the roofs are curved, the windows buckled and the walls painted in childlike colours, will touch an especially powerful chord in the bureaucratic and unimaginative, who will see in them an exuberance that promises an escape from overpowering feelings of inner seriousness.

Our understanding of the psychology of taste can in turn help us to escape from the two great dogmas of aesthetics: the view that there is only one acceptable visual style or (even more implausibly) that all styles are equally valid. A diversity of styles is a natural consequence of the manifold nature of our inner needs. It is only logical that we should be drawn to styles that speak of excitement as well as calm, of grandeur as well as cosiness, given that these are key polarities around which our own lives revolve. As Stendhal knew, ‘There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.’

The buildings we call beautiful contain in a concentrated form those qualities in which we are deficient:

Left: David Adjaye, Dirty House, London, 2002

Right: Michele Saee and Bruno Pingeot, Publicis Drugstore, Paris, 2004

Nevertheless, this breadth of choice leaves us free to determine that particular works of architecture are more or less adequate responses to our genuine psychological needs. We can accept the legitimacy of the rustic style, even if we question the way M. Frugès’s tenants attempted to inject it into their homes at Lège and Pessac. We can condemn the gnomes while respecting the longings which inspired them.

8.

The clashes and evolutions in our sense of what is beautiful may be painful and costly, but there seems little chance of insulating ourselves from them entirely: of producing chairs or sideboards, for instance, which could be guaranteed to provoke a unanimous or permanent aura of charm. Clashes of taste are an inevitable by-product of a world where forces continually fragment and deplete us in new ways. As long as societies and individuals have a history, that is, a record of changing struggles and ambitions, then art, too, will have a history – within which there will always be casualties in the form of unloved sofas, houses and monuments. As the ways in which we are unbalanced alters, so our attention will continue to be drawn to new parts of the spectrum of taste, to new styles which we will declare beautiful on the basis that they embody in a concentrated form what now lies in shadow within us.