The Architecture of Happiness

II. In What Style Shall We Build?

1.

What is a beautiful building? To be modern is to experience this as an awkward and possibly unanswerable question, the very notion of beauty having come to seem like a concept doomed to ignite unfruitful and childish argument. How can anyone claim to know what is attractive? How can anyone adjudicate between the competing claims of different styles or defend a particular choice in the face of the contradictory tastes of others? The creation of beauty, once viewed as the central task of the architect, has quietly evaporated from serious professional discussion and retreated to a confused private imperative.

2.

It wasn’t always thought so hard to know how to build beautifully. For over a thousand discontinuous years in the history of the West, a beautiful building was synonymous with a Classical building, a structure with a temple front, decorated columns, repeated ratios and a symmetrical façade.

The Greeks gave birth to the Classical style, the Romans copied and developed it, and, after a gap of a thousand years, the educated classes of Renaissance Italy rediscovered it. From the peninsula, Classicism spread north and west, it took on local accents and was articulated in new materials. Classical buildings appeared as far apart as Helsinki and Budapest, Savannah and St Petersburg. The sensibility was applied to interiors, to Classical chairs and ceilings, beds and baths.

Alhough it is the differences between varieties of Classicism that have tended to interest historians most, it is the similarities that are ultimately more striking. For hundreds of years there was near unanimity about how to construct a window or a door, how to fashion columns and pedimented fronts, how to relate rooms to hallways and how to model ironwork and mouldings – assumptions codified by Renaissance scholar-architects and popularised in pattern books for ordinary builders.

Rules for Classical columns:

Architectural plate from Denis Diderot, editor, Encyclopédie, 1780

A city-wide consensus about beauty:

John Wood the Elder, north side, Queen Square, Bath, 1736

The Arch of Constantine, Rome, c. AD 315

Robert Adam, rear elevation, Kedleston Hall, 1765

So strong was this consensus that whole cities achieved a stylistic unity that stretched across successions of squares and avenues. An aesthetic language dating back to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi ended up gracing the family homes of Edinburgh accountants and Philadelphia lawyers.

Few Classical architects or their clients felt any impulse towards originality Fidelity to the canon was what mattered; repetition was the norm. When Robert Adam designed Kedleston Hall (1765), it was a point of pride for him to embed an exact reproduction of the Arch of Constantine (c. 315) in the middle of the rear elevation. Thomas Hamilton’s High School in Edinburgh (1825), though it was made of sombre grey Craigleith sandstone, sat under sepulchral Scottish skies and had steel beams supporting its roof, was lauded for the skill with which it imitated the form of the Doric Temple of the Parthenon in Athens (c. 438 BC). Thomas Jefferson’s campus for the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville (1826), quoted without shame from the Roman Temple of Fortuna Virilis (c. 100 BC) and the Baths of Diocletian (AD 302), while Joseph Hansom’s new town hall in Birmingham (1832) was a faithful adaptation, set down in the middle of an industrial city, of the Roman Maison Carrée at Nîmes (c. AD 130).

Maison Carrée, Nîmes, c. AD 130

Joseph Hansom, Town Hall, Birmingham, 1832

Thus large parts of the man-made world in the early-modern period would not, in their outward appearance at least, have shaken many of the architectural assumptions of a magically resurrected contemporary of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius.

3.

When it came to simpler, cheaper houses, there was again a consensus about the most fitting way to build, though here the canon was the result not of any common cultural vision but of a host of limitations.

Foremost among these was climate, which, in the absence of affordable technology to resist it, usually dictated an austere menu of options for how most sensibly to put up a wall, pitch a roof or render a façade. The expense of transporting materials over any significant distance likewise limited stylistic choice, forcing the majority of householders to settle uncomplainingly for available stone, wood or mud. The difficulties of travel also hindered the spread of knowledge about alternative building methods. Printing costs meant that few ever saw so much as a picture of how houses looked in other parts of the world (which explains why, in so much of early northern religious art, Jesus is born in what appears to be a chalet).

Limitations bred strong local architectural identities. Within a certain radius, houses would uniformly be constructed of a particular native material, which would cede its ubiquity to another on the opposite side of a river or a mountain range. An ordinary Kentish house could thus be distinguished at a glance from a Cornish one, or a farm in the Jura from one in the Engadine. In most areas, houses continued to be built as they had always been built, using whatever was around, with an absence of aesthetic self-consciousness, with their owners’ modest pride at being able to afford shelter in the first place.

4.

Then, in the spring of 1747, an effeminate young man with a taste for luxury, lace collars and gossip bought a former coachman’s cottage on forty acres of land in Twickenham on the River Thames – and set about building himself a villa which gravely complicated the prevailing sense of what a beautiful house might look like.

Any number of architects could have furnished Horace Walpole, the youngest son of the British prime minister, Sir Robert, with something conventional for his new estate, a Palladian mansion, perhaps a little like his father’s home, Houghton Hall, on the north Norfolk coast. But in architecture, as in dress, conversation and choice of career, Walpole prided himself on being different. In spite of his Classical education, his real interest lay in the medieval period, which thrilled him with its iconography of ruined abbeys, moonlit nights, graveyards and (especially) crusaders in armour. Walpole therefore decided to build himself the world’s first Gothic house.

Because no one before him had ever attempted to apply the ecclesiastical idiom of the Middle Ages to a domestic setting, Walpole had to be resourceful. He modelled his fireplace on the tomb of Archbishop Bouchier in Canterbury Cathedral, copied the design of his library shelves from the tomb of Aymer de Valence in Westminster Abbey, and derived the ceiling of his main hall from the quatrefoil compartments and rosettes of the Abbey’s Chapel of Henry VII.

Few ever saw so much as a picture of how houses looked in other parts of the world:

Smallhythe Place, Tenterden, Kent, early sixteenth century

A new understanding of domestic beauty:

Horace Walpole, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, 1750–92

When he was done, being temperamentally disinclined to keep any of his achievements quiet, Walpole invited for a tour everyone he knew, which included most of the opinion-formers and gentry of the land. For good measure, he issued tickets to the general public as well.

The Long Gallery, Strawberry Hill

After a viewing, many of Walpole’s astonished guests began to wonder if they, too, might not dare to abandon the Classical mode in favour of the Gothic. The fashion started modestly enough, with the construction of the occasional seaside or suburban villa, but, within a few decades, a revolution in taste was under way which would shake to the core the assumptions on which the Classical consensus had formerly rested. Gothic buildings began to appear in Britain, then across Europe and North America. Transcending its origins as the fancy of a dilettante, the style acquired architectural seriousness and prestige, to the extent that, just fifty or so years after Walpole broke ground at Strawberry Hill, defenders of Gothic could claim – much in the way that the Classicists had done before them – that theirs was the most noble and appropriate architecture of all, the natural choice for both domestic buildings and the parliaments and universities of the great nations.

The most noble and appropriate architecture of all:

Imre Steindl, Houses of Parliament, Budapest, 1904

5.

The factors which fostered the Gothic revival – greater historical awareness, improved transport links, a new clientele impatient for variety – soon enough generated curiosity about the architectural styles of other eras and lands. By the early nineteenth century, in most Western countries, anyone contemplating putting up a house was faced with an unprecedented array of choices regarding its appearance.

Architects boasted of their ability to turn out houses in Indian, Chinese, Egyptian, Islamic, Tyrolean or Jacobean styles, or in any combination of these. Among the most versatile of the new polymaths was an Englishman named Humphry Repton, who earned a reputation for presenting hesitant clients with detailed drawings of the many stylistic options available to them.

For those of more modest means, new pattern books were created, the most popular of which, John Loudon’s The Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture (1833), presented self-builders with plans enabling them to construct houses from any part of the world, an initiative which rapidly wiped out regional types of architecture.

Options for your next home:

Humphry Repton, Characters of Houses, 1816

Left to right: Swiss style cottage and Old English style cottage From John Loudon, The Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture, 1833

Changes in the way property was developed served to promote further opportunities for eclecticism. In the eighteenth century, London, like most cities in Europe, had expanded primarily through the efforts of aristocratic landowners, who gave their names to the squares which they carved across their old farms and fields: Lord Southampton, the Earl of Bedford, Sir Richard Grosvenor and the Duke of Portland. These were men of shared taste: comfortable in Latin and Greek, students of Cicero and Tacitus, and unambivalent proponents of the Classical style. When the Earl of Bedford issued contracts for the building of his eponymous square in 1776, his stipulations revealed an almost maniacal obsession with Classical harmony, setting down as they did rules to govern the exact height of each storey, the depth of every window frame, the colour of the bricks and the specific kind of wood to be used in the floorboards (‘the best Memel or Riga timber without a trace of sap’). So concerned was the earl with Classical proportion and precision that he regularly rose at dawn and went out with a pair of garden scissors to ensure that the bushes at the centre of his square were trained to grow symmetrically.

But in the century that followed, royals and aristocrats withdrew from speculative construction even as demand for housing exploded. Those who came in their wake were not typically readers of Cicero and Tacitus. More often, they were entrepreneurs with a penchant for variety and whimsy. Instinctively scornful of the martial sobriety of the Classical tradition, they competed to attract clients through the playfulness and exuberance of their developments, as epitomised by a street in Plymouth which combined, within only a few hundred metres, a row of Roman Corinthian terraced houses, a Doric town hall, an Oriental chapel, a pair of private homes in the Ionic style and an Egyptian library.

A vanishing Classical consensus about beauty:

Bedford Square, London, 1783

New visions of beauty:

John Foulston, Kerr Street, Devonport, Plymouth, 1824

Front elevation, Castle Ward, Strangford Lough, 1767

6.

The only problem with unrestricted choice, however, is that it tends not to lie so far from outright chaos.

The danger inherent in such freedom first and famously broke through on the shores of a quiet lough in Northern Ireland, where, around the middle of the eighteenth century, a local aristocrat and his wife decided to build themselves a house. Both passionate about architecture, Viscount Bangor and Lady Anne Bligh nevertheless found that they couldn’t agree on an appropriate style. The viscount was a Classicist. He wanted something with three bays, engaged columns, Palladian proportions and windows topped with triangular consoled pediments. Anne, in contrast, was keener on the Gothic, preferring castellated roofs with pinnacles, centre-pointed windows and quatrefoils. She had heard about the ceilings at Strawberry Hill and longed to have a few of her own. The struggle grew stubborn and ill-natured, until the couple’s architect came up with a solution of Solomonic ingenuity: he would divide the house in two. The front half was built in the Classical style, the rear in the Gothic. The compromise continued inside, with the music room and stairwell being Classical in feeling, embellished with Doric friezes and columns, while the boudoir and private rooms had a Gothic air, complete with fan-vaulted ceilings and pointed-arched fireplaces.

Rear elevation, Castle Ward

The more sensitive critics were appalled and, with such buildings in mind, began an ardent search for a way to restore a measure of visual consensus. ‘We suffer from a carnival of architecture,’ complained Augustus Pugin in 1836. ‘Private judgement runs riot. Every architect has a theory of his own.’ In 1828 a young German practitioner named Heinrich Hübsch published a book whose title characterised the dilemma of an entire age: In What Style Shall We Build? There had to be a way for the defenders of the Gothic, Old English and Swiss styles to resolve their disputes; there had to be a way of knowing whether to furnish the dining room with Ancient Egyptian or Chinese chairs; a way of giving the upper hand to either Lady Anne or Viscount Bangor – and thus of ensuring that houses would never again be built facing in two different directions.

But where could such a principle be found? Just what style were architects to build in?

7.

The answer that eventually emerged was not really an answer; rather, it was an admonishment that it might be irrelevant and even indulgent to raise the question in the first place.

A prohibition against discussions of beauty in architecture was imposed by a new breed of men, engineers, who had achieved professional recognition only in the late eighteenth century, but had thereafter risen quickly to dominance in the construction of the new buildings of the Industrial Revolution. Mastering the technologies of iron and steel, of plate glass and concrete, they drew interest and inspired awe with their bridges, railway hangars, aqueducts and docks. More novel even than their abilities, perhaps, was the fact that they seemed to complete these projects without ever directly asking themselves what style it was best to adopt. Charged with erecting a bridge, they tried to design the lightest possible frame that could stretch over the widest span at the lowest cost. When they built a railway station, they aimed for a hall that would allow steam to disperse safely, let in a large amount of natural light and accommodate a constant crowd of travellers. They demanded that factories be able to house unwieldy machinery and that steamships carry cargoes of impatient passengers punctually across heavy seas. But they did not appear to give much thought to whether there should be a Corinthian or a Doric set of capitals gracing the upper galleries of a ship, whether a Chinese dragon might look pleasing at the end of a locomotive or whether suburban gas works should be done up in a Tuscan or Islamic style.

Yet, despite this indifference, the new men of science seemed capable of building the most impressive and, in many cases, the most seductive structures of their confused age.

8.

The philosophy of the engineers flew in the face of everything the architectural profession had ever stood for. ‘To turn something useful, practical, functional into something beautiful, that is architecture’s duty,’ insisted Karl Friedrich Schinkel. ‘Architecture, as distinguished from mere building, is the decoration of construction,’ echoed Sir George Gilbert Scott. If the Doge’s Palace deserved to be classified as great architecture, it was not because the roof was watertight or because it provided Venice’s civil servants with the necessary number of meeting rooms but rather, the architects defensively suggested, because it sported carvings on its roof, a delicate arrangement of white and pink bricks on its façades, and deliberately slender, tapering, pointed arches throughout – details that would have had no place in a design by a graduate of the École Polytechnique in Paris or the Engineering Academy of Dresden. The essence of great architecture was understood to reside in what was functionally unnecessary.

The irrelevance of aesthetic discussion:

John Fowler, Benjamin Baker, Forth Railway Bridge, construction of the central girder, September 1889

‘To turn something useful, practical, functional into something beautiful, that is architecture’s duty’:

Doge’s Palace (detail), Venice, 1340–1420

9.

The principles of engineering may have brutally contradicted those of architecture, but a vocal minority of nineteenth-century architects nevertheless perceived that the engineers were capable of providing them with a critical key to their salvation – for what these men had, and they so sorely lacked, was certainty. The engineers had landed on an apparently impregnable method of evaluating the wisdom of a design: they felt confidently able to declare that a structure was correct and honest in so far as it performed its mechanical functions efficiently; and false and immoral in so far as it was burdened with non-supporting pillars, decorative statues, frescos or carvings.

Exchanging discussions of beauty for considerations of function promised to move architecture away from a morass of perplexing, insoluble disputes about aesthetics towards an uncontentious pursuit of technological truth, ensuring that it might henceforth be as peculiar to argue about the appearance of a building as it would be to argue about the answer to a simple algebraic equation.

With functional principles standing as a new measure of worth, the entire history of architecture could be scanned and its masterworks reassessed in terms of their relative degrees of veracity and falsehood. The Romans were deemed dishonest for having added columns to the Colosseum, because these elegantly sculpted, costly pieces of stone only pretended to support the upper storeys, whereas in fact – as any engineer could see – the whole structure was being held up by the arches alone.

Equally, Johann Balthasar Neumann had lied in almost every aspect of his Vierzehnheiligen Pilgrimage Church in Banz. Here the inside walls made a show of holding up the building, but in reality that task fell to a separate and hidden frame. Even Neumann’s domed, painted ceiling had nothing to do with the real roof but was merely a stucco skin nestled beneath the actual, conventionally pitched design.

A mendacious ceiling:

Johann Balthasar Neumann, Vierzehnheiligen Pilgrimage Church, Banz, 1772

Charles Cockerell, Ashmolean and Taylorian Institute, Oxford, 1840

Similarly, Charles Cockerell was judged to have been almost disgracefully deceptive and wasteful in his design for the Ashmolean Museum and Taylorian Institute in Oxford. His crime had been to place massive Ionic columns, which could have supported four storeys’ worth of masonry, around the outside of the building, where they carried nothing heavier than pots and statues, while leaving the real weight of the structure to be borne by another set of columns concealed within the walls.

10.

But what would a house look like whose architect had renounced any interest in beauty in order to focus exclusively on mechanical functioning? To believe its creator in certain of his moods, it might resemble the Villa Savoye.

In the spring of 1928 a Parisian couple named Pierre and Emilie Savoye approached the 41-year-old Swiss architect Le Corbusier and asked him to design a country house for them and their young son Roger on a wooded plot of land they owned overlooking the Seine, in Poissy, west of Paris. Le Corbusier had by this point in his career built fifteen private houses and acquired international renown for his categorical views on architecture.

‘Our engineers are healthy and virile, active and useful, balanced and happy in their work,’ he exclaimed in Towards a New Architecture (1923), while ‘our architects are disillusioned and unemployed, boastful or peevish. This is because there will soon be nothing more for them to do. We no longer have the money to erect historical souvenirs. At the same time, everyone needs to wash! Our engineers provide for these things and so they will be our builders.’

Le Corbusier recommended that the houses of the future be ascetic and clean, disciplined and frugal. His hatred of any kind of decoration extended to a pity for the British Royal Family and the ornate, golden carriage in which they travelled to open Parliament every year. He suggested that they push the carved monstrosity off the cliffs of Dover and instead learn to travel around their realm in a Hispano-Suiza 1911 racing car. He even mocked Rome, the traditional destination for the education and edification of young architects, and renamed it the ‘city of horrors’, ‘the damnation of the half-educated’ and ‘the cancer of French architecture’ – on account of its violation of functional principles through an abundance of Baroque detailing, wall-painting and statuary.

From Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, 1923

For Le Corbusier, true, great architecture – meaning, architecture motivated by the quest for efficiency – was more likely to be found in a 40,000-kilowatt electricity turbine or a low-pressure ventilating fan. It was to these machines that his books accorded the reverential photographs which previous architectural writers had reserved for cathedrals and opera houses.

Once asked by a magazine editor to name his favourite chair, Le Corbusier cited the seat of a cockpit, and described the first time he ever saw an aeroplane, in the spring of 1909, in the sky above Paris – it was the aviator the Comte de Lambert taking a turn around the Eiffel Tower – as the most significant moment of his life. He observed that the requirements of flight of necessity rid aeroplanes of all superfluous decoration and so unwittingly transformed them into successful pieces of architecture. To place a Classical statue atop a house was as absurd as to add one to a plane, he noted, but at least by crashing in response to this addition, the plane had the advantage of rendering its absurdity starkly manifest. ‘L’avion accuse,’ he concluded.

From Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning, 1925

From Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, 1923

But if the function of a plane was to fly, what was the function of a house? Le Corbusier arrived (‘scientifically’ he assured his readers) at a simple list of requirements, beyond which all other ambitions were no more than ‘romantic cobwebs’. The function of a house was, he wrote, to provide: ‘1. A shelter against heat, cold, rain, thieves and the inquisitive. 2. A receptacle for light and sun. 3. A certain number of cells appropriated to cooking, work, and personal life.’

11.

Behind a wall on the summit of a hill in Poissy, a gravel path curves through dense trees before opening out into a clearing, in the middle of which stands a thin, white, rectangular box, with ribbon windows running along its sides, supported off the ground on a series of implausibly slender pillars. A structure on the roof of the Villa Savoye resembles a water tower or gas cylinder, but turns out on closer inspection to be a terrace with a semicircular protecting wall. The house looks like a piece of finely tooled precision machinery, some industrial object of unknown purpose, with flawless white surfaces that on a bright day reflect back the sun with the luminescent intensity of fishermen’s cottages on the islands of the Aegean. It seems that the house may be no more than a temporary visitor and that its roof-top equipment could at any point receive a signal that would lead it to fire its concealed engines and rise slowly over the surrounding trees and historically styled villas on the beginning of a long journey home to a remote galaxy.

The influence of science and aeronautics continues inside. A front door made of steel opens onto a hallway as clean, bright and bare as an operating theatre. There are tiles on the floor, naked bulbs on the ceiling and, in the middle of the hall, a basin which invites guests to cleanse themselves of the impurities of the outside world. Dominating the room is a large ramp with a simple tubular rail which leads up to the main living quarters. Here a large kitchen is equipped with all the conveniences of its era. Steel-framed strip windows feed natural light into the principal rooms. The bathrooms are shrines to hygiene and athleticism; the exposed pipe work would do justice to a submarine.

Even in these intimate spaces, the mood remains technical and astringent. There is nothing extraneous or decorative here, no rosettes or mouldings, no flourishes or ornaments. Walls meet ceilings at perfect right angles, without the softening influence of borders. The visual language is drawn exclusively from industry, the artificial light provided by factory lamps. There are few pieces of furniture, for Le Corbusier had recommended to his clients that they keep their belongings to a minimum, reacting with injured alarm when Madame Savoye expressed a desire to fit an armchair and two sofas in the living room. ‘Home life today is being paralysed by the deplorable notion that we must have furniture,’ her architect protested. ‘This notion should be rooted out and replaced by that of equipment.’

Le Corbusier, living room, Villa Savoye, Poissy, 1931

‘What [modern man] wants is a monk’s cell, well lit and heated, with a corner from which he can look at the stars,’ Le Corbusier had written. As the builders finished their work, the Savoye family had reason to feel confident that in the house he had designed for them, these aspirations, at least, would be consummately met.

Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye, Poissy, 1931

12.

Governed by an ethos conceived by engineers, Modernism claimed to have supplied a definitive answer to the question of beauty in architecture: the point of a house was not to be beautiful but to function well.

Yet this neat separation between the vexed matter of appearance and the more straightforward one of performance has always hung on an illusory distinction. Although we may at first glance associate the word ‘function’ with the efficient provision of physical sanctuary, we are in the end unlikely to respect a structure which does no more than keep us dry and warm.

Of almost any building, we ask not only that it do a certain thing but also that it look a certain way, that it contribute to a given mood: of religiosity or scholarship, rusticity or modernity, commerce or domesticity. We may require it to generate a feeling of reassurance or of excitement, of harmony or of containment. We may hope that it will connect us to the past or stand as a symbol of the future, and we would complain, no less than we would about a malfunctioning bathroom, if this second, aesthetic, expressive level of function were left unattended.

In a more encompassing suggestion, John Ruskin proposed that we seek two things of our buildings. We want them to shelter us. And we want them to speak to us – to speak to us of whatever we find important and need to be reminded of.

13.

In reality, the architects of the Modernist movement, just like all their predecessors, wanted their houses to speak. Only not of the nineteenth century. Or of privilege and aristocratic life. Or of the Middle Ages or Ancient Rome. They wanted their houses to speak of the future, with its promise of speed and technology, democracy and science. They wanted their armchairs to evoke racing cars and planes, they wanted their lamps to evoke the power of industry and their coffee pots the dynamism of high-speed trains.

It wasn’t that they ever lost sight of the importance of arousing feelings; their argument was, instead, with the family of feelings that previous architectural styles had generated.

With his central staircase in the Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier – just like Ange-Jacques Gabriel at the Classical pavilion of Le Petit Trianon in Versailles, a few miles to the south – was trying to do something other than simply carry people to an upper floor. He was trying to prompt a state of the soul.

Despite their claims to a purely scientific and reasoned approach, the relationship of Modernist architects to their work remained at base a romantic one: they looked to architecture to support a way of life that appealed to them. Their domestic buildings were conceived as stage sets for actors in an idealised drama about contemporary existence.

Two staircases to prompt two different states of the soul:

Left: Le Petit Trianon, Versailles, 1768

Right: Villa Savoye, Poissy, 1931

A stage set for actors in an idealised drama about contemporary existence:

Advertisement for the 1927 Mercedes-Benz, set against Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s Double-house, Weissenhofsiedlung, Stuttgart, 1927

14.

So strong was the aesthetic interest of the Modernists that it routinely took precedence over considerations of efficiency. The Villa Savoye might have looked like a practically minded machine, but it was in reality an artistically motivated folly. The bare walls were handmade by artisans using costly imported Swiss mortar, they were as delicate as pieces of lace and as devoted to generating feelings as the jewel-encrusted naves of a Counter-Reformation Church.

By Modernism’s own standards, the roof of the villa was equally, and yet more ruinously, dishonest. In spite of initial protests from the Savoyes, Le Corbusier insisted – supposedly on technical and economic grounds alone – that a flat roof would be preferable to a pitched one. It would, he assured his clients, be cheaper to construct, easier to maintain and cooler in summer, and Madame Savoye would be able to do her gymnastic exercises on it without being bothered by damp vapours emanating from the ground floor. But only a week after the family moved in, the roof sprang a leak over Roger’s bedroom, letting in so much water that the boy contracted a chest infection, which turned into pneumonia, which eventually required him to spend a year recuperating in a sanatorium in Chamonix. In September 1936, six years after the villa’s official completion, Madame Savoye compressed her feelings about the performance of the flat roof into a (rain-splattered) letter: ‘It’s raining in the hall, it’s raining on the ramp, and the wall of the garage is absolutely soaked. What’s more, it’s still raining in my bathroom, which floods in bad weather, as the water comes in through the skylight.’ Le Corbusier promised that the problem would be fixed straightaway, then took the opportunity to remind his client of how enthusiastically his flat-roofed design had been received by architectural critics worldwide: ‘You should place a book on the table in the downstairs hall and ask all your visitors to inscribe their names and addresses in it. You’ll see how many fine autographs you will collect’. But this invitation to philography was of little comfort to the rheumatic Savoye family. ‘After innumerable demands on my part, you have finally accepted that this house which you built in 1929 is uninhabitable,’ admonished Madame Savoye in the autumn of 1937. ‘Your responsibility is at stake and I have no need to foot the bill. Please render it habitable immediately. I sincerely hope that I will not have to take recourse to legal action.’ Only the outbreak of the Second World War and the Savoye family’s consequent flight from Paris saved Le Corbusier from having to answer in a courtroom for the design of his largely uninhabitable, if extraordinarily beautiful, machine-for-living.

Beautiful but not rain-proof:

Rooftop, Villa Savoye, 1931

15.

If Modernist architects privately designed with beauty in mind, why did they justify their work principally in technological terms?

Fear seems to have lain at the heart of their discretion. The end of a belief in a universal standard of beauty had created a climate in which no one style could be immune from criticism. Objections to the appearance of Modernist houses, voiced by adherents of Gothic or Tyrolean architecture, could not be shrugged off without inviting accusations of high-handedness and arrogance. In aesthetics, as in democratic politics, a final arbiter had grown elusive.

Hence the attractions of a scientific language with which to ward off detractors and convince the wavering. Even the God of the Old Testament, faced with the continual querulousness of the tribes of Israel, had occasionally to ignite a piece of desert shrub to awe his audience into reverence. Technology would be the Modernists’ burning bush. To speak of technology in relation to one’s houses was to appeal – now that the influence of Christianity was waning and Classical culture was being ignored – to the most prestigious force in society, responsible for penicillin, telephones and aeroplanes. Science, then, would apparently determine the pitch of the roof.

16.

Yet, in truth, science is rarely so categorical. In 1925 the architect and designer Marcel Breuer unveiled a chair which he touted as the world’s first soberly logical solution to ‘the problem of sitting’. Every part of the B3 chair was the result, he explained, of an intensive effort to banish ‘the whimsical in favour of the rational’.

The B3’s seat and back were made of leather for durability; its offset angular shape was the inevitable answer to the needs of the human vertebrae; and its steel frame, because it was a hundred times stronger than wood, would never splinter or chip.

But Breuer’s attempt to make a scientific case for his chair could not breach an impregnable reality: while it may be necessary to resort to specific materials and forms when constructing a bridge, there is no corresponding technical need to limit one’s imagination in designing a piece of living-room furniture, which must merely support the weight of a human body – and so can be built of curved steel but also as happily of oak, bamboo, plastic or fibreglass. A chair can equally well satisfy its modest brief in the guise of a B3, a Queen Anne or a Windsor armchair. Science alone cannot tell us how our seats should look.

Even in more complex commissions, the laws of engineering seldom dictate a particular style. The Montjuïc Telecommunications Tower in Barcelona, for example, could have taken on any number of forms while still managing to transmit its signals adequately. The antenna could have been sculpted to look like a pear rather than like a javelin; the base might have been made to resemble a riding boot rather than the prow of a spacecraft. Dozens of options would have each worked well mechanically. But as its architect, Santiago Calatrava, recognised, only a very few designs would have conveyed with appropriate poetry the promises of modernity to the people of Barcelona.

17.

The incoherencies of the Modernist relationship to science return us to the confusing plethora of architectural options that the early Modernists had once hoped to eradicate. We return to the carnival of architecture. Why not carve flowers on our buildings? Why not use concrete panels imprinted with pictures of aeroplanes and insects? Why not coat a skyscraper with Islamic motifs?

If engineering cannot tell us what our houses should look like, nor in a pluralistic and non-deferential world can precedent or tradition, we must be free to pursue all stylistic options. We should acknowledge that the question of what is beautiful is both impossible to elucidate and shameful and even undemocratic to mention.

A chair dictated by science?

Marcel Breuer, B3 chair, 1925

Functional chairs:

Left: Queen Anne japanned armchair, c. 1710

Right: High-back Windsor armchair, 1850s

Art rather than science:

Santiago Calatrava, Montjuïc Telecommunications Tower, Barcelona, 1991

18.

However, there might be a way to surmount this state of sterile relativism with the help of John Ruskin’s provocative remark about the eloquence of architecture. The remark focuses our minds on the idea that buildings are not simply visual objects without any connection to concepts which we can analyse and then evaluate. Buildings speak – and on topics which can readily be discerned. They speak of democracy or aristocracy, openness or arrogance, welcome or threat, a sympathy for the future or a hankering for the past.

The return of choice:

Left: Herzog & de Meuron, Library of the Eberswalde Technical School, Eberswalde, 1999

Right: Jean Nouvel, proposed skyscraper, Doha, 2004

Left: Tias Eckhoff, Regent Service, Porsgrund, 1961

Right: Blue Cameo Service, Sèvres, 1778

Any object of design will give off an impression of the psychological and moral attitudes it supports. We can, for example, feel two distinct conceptions of fulfilment emanating from a plain Scandinavian crockery set on the one hand and an ornate Sèvres one on the other – an invitation to a democratic graceful sensibility in the former case, to a ceremonial and class-bound disposition in the latter.

In essence, what works of design and architecture talk to us about is the kind of life that would most appropriately unfold within and around them. They tell us of certain moods that they seek to encourage and sustain in their inhabitants. While keeping us warm and helping us in mechanical ways, they simultaneously hold out an invitation for us to be specific sorts of people. They speak of visions of happiness.

To describe a building as beautiful therefore suggests more than a mere aesthetic fondness; it implies an attraction to the particular way of life this structure is promoting through its roof, door handles, window frames, staircase and furnishings. A feeling of beauty is a sign that we have come upon a material articulation of certain of our ideas of a good life.

Similarly, buildings will strike us as offensive not because they violate a private and mysterious visual preference but because they conflict with our understanding of the rightful sense of existence – which helps to explain the seriousness and viciousness with which disputes about fitting architecture tend to unfold.

19.

The advantage of shifting the focus of discussion away from the strictly visual towards the values promoted by buildings is that we become able to handle talk about the appearance of works of architecture rather as we do wider debates about people, ideas and political agendas.

Arguments about what is beautiful emerge as no easier to resolve, but then again no harder, than disputes about what is wise or right. We can learn to defend or attack a concept of beauty in the same way we might defend or attack a legal position or an ethical stance. We can understand, and publically explain, why we believe a building to be desirable or offensive on the basis of the things it talks to us about.

The notion of buildings that speak helps us to place at the very centre of our architectural conundrums the question of the values we want to live by – rather than merely of how we want things to look.

What do we want our buildings to talk to us about?:

Left: Michael Shanly Homes, Oakington Place, Middlesex, 2005

Right: Office of Makoto Yamaguchi, Villa, Karuizawa, 2003