Architecture Re-assembled

The Use (and Abuse) of History

Trevor Garnham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415522441
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134053063
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Beginning from the rise of modern history in the eighteenth century, this book examines how changing ideas in the discipline of history itself has affected architecture from the beginning of modernity up to the present day.

It reflects upon history in order to encourage and assist the reader in finding well-founded principles for architectural design.

This is not simply another history of architecture, nor a 'history of histories'. Setting buildings in their contemporaneous ideas about history, it spans from Fischer von Erlach to Venturi and Rossi, and beyond to architects working in the fallout from both the Modern Movement – Aalto, Louis Kahn, Aldo van Eyck – and Post-modernism – such as Rafael Moneo and Peter Zumthor. It shows how Soane, Schinkel and Stirling, amongst others, made a meaningful use of history and contrasts this with how a misreading of Hegel has led to an abuse of history and an uncritical flight to the future. This is not an armchair history but a lively discussion of our place between past and future that promotes thinking for making.

Chapter 1: Vico and the ‘New Science’ of History

Vitruvius Dethroned by Science

The first history was written in ancient Greece by Herodotus in the fifth century bc. There are earlier accounts of events, but in naming his work The Histories, Herodotus pointed to its specifically new purpose and significance. Older societies such as the Sumerians and Egyptians, kept records but there is no evidence of their interest in history as such.¹ Herodotus set out to record singularly ‘human achievements’, which distinguished his work from earlier epic poetry such as Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey, that focused on mythical heroes.²

Herodotus was born in about 484 bc, some 15 years before the birth of Socrates (c. 470–399 bc) and died about the time when the Parthenon was completed in 432 bc, so his mature years coincided with the time of Pericles (c. 495–429 bc) and Athenian classical greatness. F.M. Cornford described this as a time when ancient Greek thought shifted, in the title of his book, From Religion to Philosophy [1.1]. Herodotus’ work marks a similar shift from mythology to history. But just as Socrates and his most famous follower Plato (c. 429–347 bc) mark the beginning of a rational world-view rather than its consummation, so The Histories announce only the inception of a new and ultimately modern way of looking at the past. For it was not until the eighteenth century that a modern philosophy of history, or historiography, emerged through a more rigorous investigation of sources and a critical weighing of historical facts and processes rather than the broad outline sketched by ancient historians. This marked one significant moment in the onset of modernity.

1.1 The Parthenon on the Acropolis, Athens

But simply establishing facts … does not make the historian. What makes the historian is understanding the significance of what he finds.

Hans-Georg Gadamer,

Truth and Method

The earliest peoples conceived time as cyclical, quite different from our modern linear conception of time and progress. The monumental architecture of earliest societies symbolised the belief in an eternal order that Mircea Eliade called ‘the myth of the eternal return’: Sumerian ziggurats symbolised the sacred mountain around whose peak revolved the heavens: Egyptian pyramids made a place of eternal rest for the dead Pharaoh: Neolithic stone circles suggest a reciprocal relationship between mankind’s material culture and the eternal cycles of the sun and moon.³ There is no reference to historical time in their development: rather they refer to an unchanging, timeless pattern of the cosmos [1.2]. Archaeological evidence indicates that the Greek temple form, in contrast, shows a historical development from the megaron house of early kings or chiefs to become a metaphorical house for a god or goddess, appropriately transformed from timber to stone, a material resistant to the decomposition of earthly life-forms [1.3]. This historical awareness, the use and transformation of a historical precedent, corresponds broadly with the new sensibility shown by Herodotus.

1.2 Ziggurat, from William Lethaby’s Architecture, Mysticism and Myth

1.3 Temple of Apollo, Thermum, with older remains in outline

It was not until the rise of modern science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, that the process of history became investigated. Modern historiography, in contrast to the work of Herodotus and his classical or medieval followers, has been described as resting ‘on the discovery of man as a peculiarly historical being, subject to a development transcending the life of any individual, nation, or race’.⁴ This new understanding of history, and by implication of humankind itself, was first defined by Vico, culminating in the Scienza nuova, whose work was a late flowering of the widespread advance in learning that accompanied the Renaissance.

Renaissance architects believed in a divinely ordered world that architecture could articulate. When a renaissance architect drew his ‘lines and angles’ in defining the plans and planes of a projected building, he believed that this emulated the way the Creator ordered the world. Harmonious proportions were the key to this and Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72) was the decisive figure in articulating this idea drawn from classical antiquity. The enormous importance of proportions for the history of architecture stemmed from a discovery reputedly made by Pythagoras (born c. 570 bc) of a link between harmony in music and numerical relationships. This had a profound impact on the renaissance belief in a closed, harmonious cosmos which found an echo in music and potentially in buildings through geometry and proportion.⁵ But an equally vital part was played by the classical orders: ‘the grammar of architecture … embodying all the ancient wisdom of mankind in building’.⁶ The orders made proportions visible on the body of the building, as in the pilasters to Alberti’s Pallazzo Rucellai (c. 1450–60) in Florence [1.4].

1.4 Alberti, Pallazzo Rucellai, Florence

Behind Alberti stood the figure of the first century bc Roman architect Vitruvius. His importance cannot be overestimated, for his De Architectura was the only text on architecture surviving from classical antiquity. Humanists came to reaffirm the idea of ‘natural law’, which entailed stripping away the accidental to find the universal, unchanging order in nature. This lent support to Vitruvius’ account of a timeless beauty predicated on symmetry and the proportional relationship of parts to a whole. The rise of science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, came to challenge all such forms of ancient and received authority. In the words of Alexander Koyre, we moved From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Human beings on planet Earth became cast adrift in an infinite universe, such that the Vitruvian theory of architectural meaning became no longer tenable. So began the search for a new firm foundation for architecture. What this might be has preoccupied architects ever since. But scholars such as Vico investigating Roman law became increasingly aware that laws, like everything else, change with time and hence have a history.⁷ Architecture’s search for meaning became inextricably bound up with this new understanding of history and time.

The centre of architectural theory shifted from Italy to France in the seventeenth century, where the first serious challenge to Vitruvius emerged in the work of Claude Perrault (1613–88). Academies were being formed in this Age of Enlightenment to advance knowledge systematically, and Perrault was an active member of the Academy of Science founded in 1635. Elected to the newly formed Academy of Architecture in 1666, he was asked to prepare an authoritative edition of Vitruvius. The mandate of the new Academy was ‘the reform of the classical tradition in light of the perceived abuses of the baroque period’.⁸ Perrault’s investigations, however, led him to deny any essential beauty embodied in proportional systems, hence undermining the bedrock of the Vitruvian tradition. ‘Proportions are not certain and invariable’ as those that produce ‘harmony of sounds in music’, he noted.⁹ Perrault argued that there were neither laws of nature, nor ‘logical reasoning’ for precise proportioning of architectural elements. Beauty in architecture resided in richness of materials, fine workmanship, and symmetry, attributes obvious to all, as in beautiful music. This ‘customary’ beauty he contrasted with ‘arbitrary beauty’, which was ‘more the result of a social consensus of perception’ or ‘what most educated people of taste enjoy’.¹⁰

The architect should be equipped with knowledge of many branches of study and varied kinds of learning, for it is by his judgement that all work done by the other arts is put to test. This knowledge is the child of practice and theory. … An architect ought to be an educated man so as to leave a more lasting remembrance in his treatises… A wide knowledge of history is requisite.

Vitruvius,

The Ten Books on Architecture

Perrault published the evidence for this in his Ordonnance des cinq espèces de Colonnes (1683), which he described as an appendix to his Vitruvius (1673). From accurate measurements of many Roman buildings he found no consistent systems of proportion, which undermined the Vitruvian claim for ‘natural authority’.¹¹ From the range of measurements obtained, Perrault proposed instead fixing proportions empirically, ‘probable’ proportions ‘derived from the arithmetical mean for each unit of the column and the entablature’¹² [1.5]. In making this survey, Perrault had exposed ‘the fallacy that proportions are subject to influences outside of man’s control’.¹³ This chimed with the emerging view that everything might be measurable and hence controllable. In this recourse to precise measurement, analysis and calculation, we see how far Perrault and his compatriots had moved from a renaissance philosophy of nature, with its legacy of myth, to the Enlightenment’s creation of a modern world dominated by science.¹⁴ The new experimental method of science had produced remarkable insights into the workings of nature, which came to be seen, not as divinely created but, containing a ‘formative principle which moves from within’.¹⁵ The rise of the scientific world-view led inexorably to a split between a mathematical model of the world and the lived-world of everyday experience. Behind renaissance proportion and geometry, in contrast, lay a world of meaning shared by all involved in building: users, clients, architects and craftsmen.

1.5 Claude Perrault, Ordonnance des cinq espèce de Colonnes

The frontispiece to his Ordonnance illustrates both his argument and evidence by juxtaposing his design for the Louvre (1667–74) featuring a colonnade of coupled-up columns, an arrangement forbidden by Vitruvius, with an actual Roman triumphal arch that had just this arrangement [1.6 and 1.7]. (The design emerged from a committee comprised of Perrault, Le Vau, the premier architected du Roi and the painter Le Brun.)¹⁶ This mixture of empiricism, reason and historical fact contradicting Vitruvius eventually had to prevail in an increasingly scientific age. The French had been shocked by Bernini’s earlier Baroque proposal for rebuilding the Louvre where contemporary opinion saw his ‘inspiration of the moment’ at odds with Enlightenment reason and ‘care for detail’.¹⁷

1.6 Perrault, Le Vau, Le Brun: The Louvre, Paris

1.7 Perrault, Ordonnance, Frontispiece

Perrault’s rejection of Vitruvian precepts and his view that beauty resulted from ‘chance, fancy and custom’, caused a scandal amongst his fellow academicians.¹⁸ The director of the Academy of Architecture, Francois Blondel (1618–88) angrily reaffirmed the theory that a model of beautiful or harmonious architecture had been established in classical antiquity and that this remained legitimate and binding.¹⁹ This dispute initiated what became known as the ‘Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns’. Followers of the ‘Ancients’ believed that their work came closer to the origins of the art, which gave Vitruvius authority, whereas the ‘Moderns’ considered that they benefited from reflection and reasoning, which gave them greater access to truth. These conflicting possibilities – origins or progress – dominated debate in the years that followed.

Ever since René Descartes (1596–1650) expounded his famous ‘cogito ergo sum’ (I think therefore I am), in the mid-seventeenth century, only clear and distinct facts were accepted as guarantors of certain knowledge. This is more difficult for history than for a natural science such as physics.²⁰ Descartes ‘dismissed history as mere opinion and arbitrary subjectivity’.²¹ Vico was a Cartesian up until about the age of forty, when he came to see that the Cartesian method was not appropriate for understanding the humanities, from where emerged hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Vico and the ‘New Science’ of History
• 2. After Vitruvius: The Search for a New Fundamental Ground
• 3. Aesthetics and Questions of Style
• 4. In What Style Should We Build?
• 5. Nietzsche and the ‘History Beyond History’
• 6. Approaches to Modernism
• 7. Modernism Against History
• 8. Le Corbusier: For or Against History?
• 9. Regional Resistance to the International Style
• 10. Late Modernism and Critical Histories
• 11. From Post-Modernism to Meaning in Architecture
• Epilogue: History, Tradition, Memory
• Notes
• Illustration Credits
• Bibliography
• Index