The Old Way of Seeing: How Architecture Lost Its Magic - And How to Get It Back 039574010X, 9780395740101
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HOW ARCHITECTURE LOST ITS MAGIC (AND HOWTO GET IT BACK)
JONATHAN HAL
BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
THE OLD
JONATHAN HALE
WAY OF SEEING
4 A
Richard Todd Book
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY Boston
•
New
York
1994
Copyright
©
1994 by Jonathan Hale
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections
from 215
this
book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
Park Avenue South,
New York, New York 10003.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hale, Jonathan.
The old way of seeing / Jonathan
Hale,
cm.
p.
“A Richard Todd book.” Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-395-60573-3 1
.
Signs and symbols in architecture.
aspects.
I.
NA2500.H25 720. 'i'9
2
.
Architecture
— Psychological
Title.
93-23722
1994
— dc20
cip
Printed in the United States of America
RRD
10
987654321
Book design by Robert Overholtzer Excerpts from Frank Lloyd Wright Speaking, copyright
© Caedmon, are
reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Excerpts
from Drawing on
Edwards, copyright
the Right Side of the Brain,
by Betty
© 1979, 1989 by Betty Edwards, are reprinted by
permission of The Putnam Publishing Group. The passage from Klaus
Hoppe, “Psychoanalysis, Hemispheric Specialization and Journal of the American is
Academy of Psychoanalysis 17
reprinted by permission.
(2),
Creativity,”
Summer
1989,
To
my
teachers
Digitized by the Internet Archive in
2015
https://archive.org/details/oldwayofseeingOOhale
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS 1
.
2
.
3
.
ix
LIGHT AND SHADE, WALLS AND SPACE
ORDINARY PLACES 1830:
1
11
THE LOSS OF THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
4.
THE PRINCIPLES OF PATTERN
5.
SPIRIT
6.
CONTEXT
26
45
76
109
7.
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MODERNISM
8.
PARADIGMS
128
148
CONTENTS
Vll
9-
10.
REASON
CAN
IT
NOTES
164
HAPPEN?
192
199
BIBLIOGRAPHY
215
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
225
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
INDEX
viii
CONTENTS
229
227
ILLUSTRATIONS
page 10
The commercial
center of Newburyport, Massachusetts, in
the 1860s 12
Newburyport today
14 First Church, Congregational (1831), Jaffrey, 16
The Jonathan Stone House
17
A 1920s Neo-Colonial house in
19
Bank building
(circa 1775),
New Hampshire
Belmont, Massachusetts
Belmont
(circa 1850), Aurora,
New York
20 Post office (circa 1975), Aurora 23
Houses
27
A Greek Revival building
29
The Second Bank of the United
34 Prescott
in
Belmont, circa 1970
Bank
(1840) in
Union
Springs,
New York
States (1818-1824), Philadelphia
(1865), Lowell, Massachusetts
46 Regulating lines on an 1811 building in Newburyport 46 Church (circa 1880), Cheyenne,
Wyoming
47 Regulating lines on the O’Herlihy House (1989), Malibu, California 48 Diagonal regulating lines
49 Regulating lines on the Jonathan Stone House
ILLUSTRATIONS
IX
50 Regulating lines on a 1920s Neo-Colonial house, Belmont 50 Regulating lines on a 1930s house in Belmont 51
Vesica piscis patterns
on an
office building, Chelsea,
Vermont
53 Regulating lines on a 1985 house in Hamilton, Massachusetts
on
62 54 Regulating lines 55
a 1988
house
Cambridge, Massachusetts
in
The pattern on the campanile of the Mission San Gabriel
(1771),
California
56
The Robie House The logarithmic
62
The
63
Golden Section
shell
(1906),
Chicago
spiral of the
Golden Section
of a chambered nautilus spirals at Chartres
Cathedral
64 The Bavinger House (Bruce Goff, 1950) 65 Le Corbusier’s Modulor man 68 Golden Section proportions of Audrey Hepburn’s
face
69 Golden Section proportions of a sugar maple
pentagram
71
Golden Section relationships
in a
72
The pentagram
maple
structure of a
leaf
78 Regulating lines in Saint George’s Chapel (1482), 79 Vesica piscis patterns
on the Hotel-Dieu
(1443),
Windsor
Beaune, France
80 The west facade of Notre-Dame, Paris 82
A Pacific pompano
85
The
skylight of Louis Sullivan’s
Guaranty Building
(1894), Buffalo,
New York 92 The William Burtch House (1786), Quechee, Vermont 93 95
The Nathan Winslow House (1738), The Church of Saint-Severin, Paris
Brewster, Massachusetts
97 The Crane Library (H. H. Richardson, 1880), Quincy,
Massachusetts
99 The 102 115
118
119
x
Midway Diner,
Rutland, Vermont
The Bayard Building (Louis
Sullivan, 1897),
New York
The Kentlands (1990), Gaithersburg, Maryland The Elihu Coleman homestead (1722), Nantucket, Massachusetts An 1880s Shingle Style house, York Harbor, Maine
125
Office building (Eric
133
The Gropius House
LLUSTRATIONS
Owen Moss,
1990), Los Angeles
(1950), Lincoln, Massachusetts
139
143 145 145
Memorial Hall (1868), Harvard University The chapel at Ronchamp, France (Le Corbusier, 1950) Dulwich Picture Gallery (Sir John Soane, 1811), London The Sainsbury Wing (Venturi, Rauch, and Scott Brown, National Gallery of Art, London
150
Raymond
154
Drawing of a hand
155
Drawing of a hand
184
The
1987-1991),
Loewy’s illustration of the evolution of the automobile
interior of the
Zimmerman House
(1950), Manchester,
New Hampshire 187
Frank Lloyd Wright
s
plan of the
Zimmerman House
ILLUSTRATIONS
XI
.
.
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
1
Light and Shade, Walls and Space
down any
There was a time in our past when one could walk
and be surrounded by harmonious buildings. Such perfect,
it
wasn’t necessarily even pretty, but
buildings smiled, while our
new buildings
They saw
a pattern in light
them, they opened their
when
and shade.
ability to
was
alive.
The old
The old
no music
past succeeded easily where
cause they saw something different
a street wasn’t
are faceless.
ings sang, while the buildings of our age have
The designers of the
it
street
in
build-
them.
most today
fail
be-
they looked at a building.
When
they
let
make forms of rich
pattern guide
complexity.
The
forms they made began to dance.
About old
a
hundred and
way of seeing began
the magic, place.
sixty years ago, early in the Victorian age, the
to
go out of American design. With
and with the magic went the old
Only
it
went
feeling of being in a real
a few specialists retained the creative gift that
had once
been commonplace; a few scholars studied and preserved the ancient principles.
LIGHT AND SHADE, WALLS AND SPACE
1
We
now
live
in the
world Victorian inventors dreamed
of,
the
world of flying machines, automobiles, and hundred-story buildings. But unlike the Victorians, or even the Americans of forty years ago,
we
are jaded;
we disbelieve their dream. We
new
prospect of the next big
style is the real thing at last.
magic world, a
The
real
building;
What
is
world that comes
difference between our age
no such
patterns.
believe the latest
It is
dream of a
the
is
in
is
our way of seeing.
among
relationship
the buildings of today and
see fragmentation,
dullness,
The
parts:
we
see
mismatched systems, uncer-
This disintegration tends to produce not ugliness so
tainty.
much
as
and an impression of unreality. harmonious design
principles that underlie
where and
They
We
thrilled at the
alive.
and the past
Compare
from
we do not
our dream?
Everywhere in the buildings of the past contrast, tension, balance.
are far
in every time before
are the
same
are
found every-
our own; they are the historic norm.
in the eighteenth-century
houses of Newburyport,
Massachusetts, in the buildings of old Japan, in Italian villages, in the cathedrals of France, in the ruins of the Yucatan.
patterns organize Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie gelo’s Capitol. If a
The disharmony we
building makes us light up,
row of file cabinets
is
ordered.
House and Michelan-
around us
it is
What we
kind of pattern we see in every
The same
see
The same kinds of
is
the exception.
not because we see order; any recognize and love
face, the pattern
of our
is
own
the life
same form.
principles apply to buildings that apply to mollusks, birds,
or trees. Architecture
is
the play of patterns derived from nature and
ourselves.
To design harmoniously people
who
really
is
may be a few and there are some who can become
a natural ability.
cannot design,
There
great masters. Like speech, design requires great
meant
to
Design
2
be very good is
play.
at
skill;
and we
are
it.
The geometric elements of a building
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
are the mate-
the designer plays with. Design
rial
natural laws. To design intuitively
unconsciously.
way
In a
to, for
“therelessness.” Intuition
what we
is
a building
is,
ition,
is
is
way
feeling.
anomie,
to design patterns,
and
to write specifications or
play,
and shade, walls and
not raw
is
innate judgment.
through
alive
you
shift
your idea of
“The elements of
space.”
When you
you imbue the design with
how one shape
way
the practical
to see that, as Le Corbusier said,
architecture are light
Intuition
without intuition the result
Intuition
fire egress.
To make a design come
what
But intuition follows
not to lose control but to guide
the practical
call intellect is
arrange for
is
intuitive.
safe to turn the design process over to intuition.
It is
unsafe not
it is
is
turn design over to intu-
a system of proportions. Proportion,
relates to another,
is
at the center
of the old
way of see-
Mastery of proportion demonstrates a kind of judgment that
ing.
how
goes far beyond what your “practical” side knows sense, using intuition
far
is
more
practical than
to do. In a
any other method of
design. Intellect calculates effect, intuition organizes shapes. Effect
has
its
place; function has
But we are too good
we
do.
goal
is
The
at
its
keeping the rain out;
goal of design
to express
place; keeping the rain out has
life. It is
is
it is
alive, it
Intuition
is,
above
not necessary,
all,
it
isn’t
all,
almost the only thing
can be counterproductive,
To make
necessary to play
among
a building that
the patterns.
makes contact with nature, without sentimentality or un-
derstanding, without praise or worry. Keep it
place.
not to find the correct proportions; the
to try to be lively, interesting, mysterious.
comes
its
always
light.
Sometimes
it’s
dark.
it
light! says intellect.
Sometimes
it’s
But
heavy. Keep
it
says intuition.
When my first the clouds,”
meant
it,
I
client said to
me,
“All architects
resented the remark, which
But
as negative.
chitects to have their
I
is
have their heads in
to say
I
have since come to see that
heard it is
it
as
he
fine for ar-
heads in the clouds, so long as they have their
LIGHT AND SHADE, WALLS AND SPACE
3
feet
on the ground. Maybe some of the time they should have
feet in the clouds, too. It is
think society has need of more visionaries.
I
a function of buildings to unite the visionary
To be visionary doesn’t mean designer, “vision”
is
their
and the
to fly after the nearest
a sense of*
how
will be to
it
practical.
whim. For the
be there: what
is
this place? If you don’t
time, then strictly a
space.
have a vision,
you
can’t see
all
terms with intuition,
it.
stay
we can
get
too close to earth
— and
the term
is
all
the
no longer
carry the image of the earth seen from
all
have seen where we
When we
down
where you are
metaphor, for we
We
if you
are,
and
it is
our job to come to
our heads up in the clouds, following our
create the sense of reality.
That seems paradoxical,
but only because we are unaccustomed to respecting intuition. That
where we
we
power
get the
to create places that are
is
worthy of the place
really are in.
But most of the time, the designer’s that means,
nothing
among other things,
belong on the ground; and
that each building
need not look
else ever built. Novelty, expressionism, bizarrerie
wonderful, but
it is
gether and that at the
is
used and
The
to think that design
Even greatness In America
want, things
we
we
is
materials are put to-
expect, things
we
vision. Vision
make
outside of everyday, normal
in
life.
life.
don’t encourage vision.
get or get rid of them.
We
don’t want;
of things
we
and we have plans
for
have
lists
We have methodologies for creating the
sense of home, the sense of community. But the harder
we hear
can be quite
biggest mistake designers
not outside of daily
is
how the
same time embody the inner
doesn’t have to be sweeping.
our time
like
possible to design buildings that look like build-
how they are
ings, that express
how to
feet
we try,
the less
the old laughter.
The age
that
is
passing was an era of problems and solutions; the
sense of place was one problem to be solved. Intuition was outside the
4
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
equation. If times have changed enough,
We
no longer
it
be easy to reintegrate
will
and so recapture the old way of seeing.
intuition into our daily lives, distracted
from our sense of loss by a
evitable progress.
Now
we have
century imagined,
we
are
that
built the
notice the pain of
that the hardest part has
belief in in-
world the nineteenth
what
is
missing.
It
been waking up to a world we have
may be made so
cold, so dangerous.
A great building can give us the same exhilaration we natural landscape. We expect that of great buildings; forget that a
experience in a
but we tend to
townscape of ordinary buildings, embodying the same
principles, can also exhilarate us
—
exhilarate,
and make us
we
feel
belong. In a townscape of disharmonious buildings, such as today,
we
feel
no mystery, no promise.
We
When we
attention to signs
and symbols, comfort and
the daily landscape,
common
are not intrigued; there
nothing to explore.
street,
is
is
walk among our buildings, we give our utility.
The average
becomes more and more bleak or
foolish
or menacing.
When we visit the old towns, when we go when we
see a masterpiece
by a twentieth-century architect, we notice at these places
we
absent from the everyday buildings of our time
—
something most of our buildings
know something is
into an ancient cathedral,
lack.
As we look
the suburban house, the office building, the mall. lack.
We may
complain about
buildings to have that spark rists tell
us
we should
it,
we
but in the end,
And we
we
accept this
don’t expect our
see in the buildings of the past.
Theo-
accept the “Ugly and Ordinary” building.
We
assume there must be an unbridgeable gap between what our age builds
and what was once produced with
course. But there were once,
a light touch, as a matter of
and there can be
again, interesting, even
magical, ordinary buildings.
LIGHT AND SHADE, WALLS AND SPACE
5
Not very
two
far back, as recently as
common
buildings were designed to
lifetimes ago, virtually
visual principles derived
all
from
natural forms and supported by a long tradition of geometry and
measure. That tradition was a starting point. Most design today
works without such a
and so tends
starting point,
nowhere.
to go
Play created the beauty of the old traditions. Even the designers of the formal Georgian style played a
houses
alive in the
brow, animates a
Today we have
same way the
come
lost the old traditions.
how “good”
lost
magic. But no matter
was not a
what we
The
all
secret
way of
the
life
authentic the
of a design must
The designers
rules are in us.
— although mystical meanings ascribed
made
seeing
of a
know.
the ancient ratios were held secret. structure that
all
how
way of seeing was not consciously taught or
intuitive
tilt
We replicate old styles only as
the proportions,
intuition resonates with
It
subtle widening of an eye, the
straight out of the designer.
The
that brought their
face.
symbols to invoke the details or
game of nuance
came
it
It
followed.
to
some of
was not tradition of
style or
possible for a building to
naturally to any builder
come
alive.
The old
who assumed
that a
building was a pattern.
When,
a
hundred and
sixty years ago, the old
to go out of architecture, there
was no way
way of seeing began
to explain the problem.
enough
That something was missing seems to have been
clear
many
had drained out
observers at the time.
of the culture.
How
It
seemed design
could this be?
Why
talent
were we
to
now unwelcome
among our own buildings? Solutions proliferated: what architecture needed was to be rich,
or simple, or correct, or functional.
The Doric
style
was forthright
and democratic; but the innocent Gothic was more pious and mysterious; but the
on
6
Roman was
a single facade.
stronger. Several styles often
The twentieth century
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
created a
showed up
new manner of
designing meant to rise above region, time, or style
— the Interna-
tional Style.
The attempts
to bring design
back to
were by no means
life
all fail-
century the Arts and Crafts movement,
ures. In the late nineteenth
for example, regained the old feeling.
Machines had denatured de-
sign; handcrafting
Talented
beautiful objects
of the
it.
and buildings. Sixty years
Modern movement embraced
beautiful designs.
come
could revitalize
What remained
put the
life
new
consistent
styles,
work is
have the old vision often
deliberately eccentric
new, as
if
and
strangeness were the
methods, systems, that would
make
live
elite.
same
up
looks
artificial;
designer
is
this
form,
if it is
way
is
the
all, is
artist,
on the edges of
The
same way of seeing
— on
icing
is
a pedestal or
but
at the
on the
cake.
The
outside the concerns
no
influ-
If there are arts that
society, architecture is
style to another,
different,
a burden.
talented designers have
ence beyond a small coterie of followers.
which means
is
and therefore beyond un-
the designer
Many of our most
Lurching from one
and
to that expectation; their
as freshness,
perceived at
derstanding, or effete. Either
flourish
art,
frame of reference, preoccupation with form
seen to be either a great
of the real world.
but they
dull buildings.
that puts the designer outside the practical world
Within
it,
But the obligation to be always
point of view that leaves out composition
in a garret.
sixty years, de-
thought to be a rare and special
is
artists
was that beauty had be-
back into buildings. Great ones have achieved
Building composition
who
other talented
hundred and
are gifted; lesser designers are expected to
those
created truly
machine and produced other
the
the province of specialists. For a
signers have scrambled for
later,
artists
not one of them.
under pressure to be
same time
can
creative,
practical, economical,
contextual, even the best architects have a hard time producing places
one would
really
want
to be in.
The broadest purpose of
a building designed in the intuitive
way
LIGHT AND SHADE, WALLS AND SPACE
7
was simply something
to be.
Today every aspect of a building
a product of intellect. Intellect, not intuition,
else. It is
dominates design
every
at
for or about
is
from the routine commercialism of
level,
the tract house to the thousand-page building code to the hermetic «
erudition of the academic journal. Intellect has its place.
Although
I
learned
But we do not know when to stop analyzing.
many
things in architecture school,
I
have never
forgotten that Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe,
more
did not go to architecture school. Architectural education needs
of what they knew.
But
do enjoy the
I
analytical process of uncovering the
hidden pat-
terns in buildings, the regulating lines that connect key points.
me, they are the
secrets of
what
a building
and follow the diagonals
visible
is. It is
make
a pleasure to
make
until they
To
a triangle that
aligns beautifully several different parts of a building; or to reveal a
great circle that
and
all
happens
to touch
on
three or four key elements
—
The eye can
al-
these connections invisible, almost invisible.
most put them
in.
The underlying
beyond con-
patterns are just
sciousness, like the intuition that created the design in the place.
To search out the patterns
come up
in a
darkroom.
It is
like seeing a
is
always a
little
first
photographic print
new, a
little
exciting, to
see the invisible suddenly rise to the surface, to see the confirmation
own
of one’s it
intuitive pleasure in the design:
Oh,
yes, this
is
works!
At the core of
this
central guess. There at certain
is
book
is
what
I
call its
Premise.
It is
evidence for a good deal of what
points the evidence peters out, and
tions of experiences that
may or may not be
I
am
I
left
a theory, a
propose. But
with descrip-
agreed upon: the “feeling
of place,” the “magic” or “aliveness” of a building, “intuition.”
of what visual
8
why
I
Some
say will never be provable; but also the study of the intuitive
mind
is
new and
incomplete;
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
much more may
yet be defined
now know. And
than we
architecture back to
I
believe
we
already
know enough
to bring
life.
PREMISE •
An
•
The innate design sense becomes usable when
intuitive sense of
ceives the building to •
form
is
available to
all
designers.
the designer per-
be a pattern of light and shade.
When the building is designed as a composition of related forms, his informed by a system of proportions.
•
The
designer's
knowledge of this system may be conscious or un-
conscious. •
The
essential step
is
the decision to see the building as a visual
pattern. •
A
simple but fundamental
the paradigm for “building”
shift in
can give direct access to these universal principles of form.
This
is
a
book about
in everyday
that
life,
magic
we make. This
vision;
tions:
walls
seeing.
It is
it is
space;
who
a description of a
it
would be foolish
of the sense of sight can liberate
anything
we make and
reads this
else is likely to, it
book
way of
at
in the places
to
Goethe wrote that
it is
seeing and
its
can-
implica-
don’t.
hope that a purification
and save
us,
any more than
might nevertheless do much
good
I
will “have” the old
restoring us toward sanity, goodwill, calm, acceptance joy.
— magic
buildings as light and shade,
what happens when you
For although
book about magic
not a recipe book or a step-by-step guide.
is
what happens when you look and
a
in the things that
not promise that everyone
way of
and
in
and
to think, better to look
and
think, best to look without thinking.
— james agee, A Way of Seeing
LIGHT AND SHADE, WALLS AND SPACE
9
When Newburyport’s commercial center burned to the ground in 1811, it was this 1860s view, the streetscape is joyfully alive. The same proportioning system as well as the same materials, yet each one is different. Here a window is left out, there an arch penetrates the lintel line; some buildings are painted, others are left natural; there are
rebuilt
all at
one time. In
buildings use the
awnings, signs, lamps, a clock, a barber pole.
10
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
2
.
Ordinary Places
Newburyport, Massachusetts Everywhere one goes in Newburyport, one senses there are discoveries to
be made
order, but
One
ity
—
inside each house or
what one experiences
is
comfortable
among
is
to,
name, not so symmetrical,
the houses.
Many
from what
less neat;
is
built today
under
They are mixed
gether, buildings of different eras, uses, materials.
the 1850s stands next to a four-square
of them could be
and they have been added
often in styles quite different from the original.
across the street
is
not discipline but pleasure, curios-
called Colonial, but they are different
that
around each corner. There
A
to-
brick house of
wooden house of 1790, which
is
from a 1750s gambrel with an 1840s bay window. But,
always, every element holds to principle, so that the place feels strong,
and does not In 1800,
disintegrate into blandness.
Newburyport was
a thriving city, but
by 1875
it
had been
passed by. For a hundred years almost nothing was added or taken
ORDINARY PLACES
11
The old harmonies survive in Newburyport. The eye is drawn to the tower; the houses are a hundred and fifty years apart, and the tower is of 1848 atop church of 1756, hidden beyond the trees.
a
away; the town survived in genteel shabbiness, until a renewal project
up during the
Newburyport today preserves the old
fixed
it
spirit
of harmony, from the time before
1970s.
it
was
lost to
everyday Ameri-
can architecture.
At the center of town
is
Market Square, the commercial
square differs from the rest of the town in one striking way: buildings are of the to the
same
burned
to the
same materials and
height. This
ground
the uniformity of size different.
12
Each
is
is
in 1811
and
because the
and was
style,
a variation
are built in the
on
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
city’s
rebuilt
same
all
of its
style
and
commercial center
ail at
one time. Within
each building manages to be a
a theme.
The
core.
little
The
rebuilders of
rying about
how to
Newburyport
avoid visual
monotony
not stay up nights wor-
in their
new business
cen-
any more than others in their town had worried about “context”
ter,
when
day,
its
usual beauty; sets
old
it
homes
they built their
out in
it
was
for
its
looked very
it
apart today
is its
commercial success, and not for any un-
much
town of
In the
inghouse.
other prosperous towns.
What
completeness; everywhere in Newburyport the
Jaffrey, there is a
of brick.
It is
much
the
The brick church secretive
when
seeing.
attraction.
understand
you don’t
more
It
why
is
a smaller church
power and weakness: awkward
cheerful.
The church was
was on the edge, about
Maybe
wires,
Reticently in
interesting.
a mixture of
is
New England way.
and telephone
and brash and
architecture
way of
big white eighteenth-century meet-
grandly spartan in the
It is
the background, behind trees
and
like
New Hampshire
;
and
Newburyport stood
in the latest style. If
way of seeing predominates.
Jaffrey
its
in 1811 did
to lose
its
built in 1831,
grasp of the old
the date explains the building’s failings and
has an ungainly Gotho-Palladian tower
people ran wires in front of
But from close up,
it.
see the tower; close up, the facade
— you can
is
sweet and strong
subtle.
At the center of the facade two windows are
under a photo,
half-circle fan. I
together
On a
They look almost wrong, and yet they fit.
draw diagonals through the windows, and suddenly two
equilateral triangles appear, the point of
the other.
set close
The base of the bigger
fourteen oxen to haul
The pattern
is
it
triangle
one balanced on the is
a great stone step
tip
(it
of
took
over the shoulder of Mount Monadnock).
so striking
it
appears to have almost a mystic
signifi-
ORDINARY PLACES
13
The First Church, Congregational, in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, built in 1831. The pattern of regulating lines is so striking it appears to have almost a mystic significance. Was the pattern purely intuitive and unconscious? Was it a symbol legible to initiates? Whether the designer knew he was creating the pattern is less
important than that the pattern
cance.
Was
symbol
is
there.
the pattern purely intuitive
legible to initiates?
It
matters
or the designer’s knowledge of
what makes the building come
it,
less
and unconscious? Was which came
first,
than that the pattern
alive;
it is
is
it
the pattern there.
It is
the reason people love
“Never was there a building which down through the decades has ceived
more tender loving
it:
re-
care than the brick meeting house,” says a
local history.
14
a
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
But,
seen?
one wants
know* were these hidden
to
lines ever
meant
a deliberate geometric message? In a medieval church,
Is it
would have been: every dimension and proportion having ing.
No,
be
to
this energetic, simple, vibrant
child’s blocks
.
.
.
And
yet
one
is
mean-
as simple as a
reminded of the Masonic pyramid
is
symbol, the eye-pyramid on the dollar
The designer was
geometry
its
it
bill.
a thirty-one-year-old itinerant builder,
Howland. He knew what he was doing when he made those
Aaron
patterns.
Did he know he knew? He must have known he was composing. The geometry
is
any builder
try, as
lines are invisible.
white gle,
wood
and
itself,
He knew about geome-
too clear to be entirely accidental. did, in 1831. But,
They
one remembers, the regulating
are only hinted at in the
upper fan
gable formed by the chord of the upper circle
What
in the great granite step.
is
beyond doubt
the pleasure of organization, color, texture;
it is
and
in the
trian-
is
the pattern
very
much like a
piece of music.
The Jonathan Stone House
On
a
suburban
certain
street in
Belmont, Massachusetts,
charm and grace about
The house
it.
of windows and a couple of doors.
It
is
was
is
a house with a
very simple, just a lot
built
around
1775 for
Jonathan Stone. Surrounding the Stone House are 1920s Neo-Colonials, still
old house
prim and perfect
we look
at.
after
Next to
more than
it
sixty years.
But
it is
the
the twentieth-century houses are
bland and awkward. They don’t have the old smile.
Underlying the design of the eighteenth-century house was a
tem of proportions.
It
sys-
guided the location of the windows and doors,
the dimensions of the walls, the line of the cornice, providing a discipline so strong that to leave out certain elements merely enlivened the
ORDINARY PLACES
15
The Jonathan Stone House
in Belmont, Massachusetts, built about 1775,
Neo-Colonial house next to
it.
and
a
In the midst of suburban Belmont, the simple
box is magnetic, while the 1920s Neo-Colonial next door is routine. The old building is a geometric pattern; the newer house is a system, not of shapes, but of emblems, whose purpose is to evoke certain reactions. 1775 brick
effect.
The house, however
in light
and shade. By
simple, was designed as a form, a pattern
contrast, the facades of its neighbors are group-
ings of standard Coloniana: decorative shutters, eagles over the front
door.
The builder of the old house was not an
press
life
in his design; the
results of his
course.
way of
warmth and
artist struggling to ex-
vigor of his
seeing. In 1775, to see that
work
way was
are natural
a matter of
The harmony of the eighteenth-century house was common-
place.
The house appears left,
one bay out of the
ally a
16
to be missing a eight.
window above
But nothing
is
missing.
the door
on the
The facade
is
re-
double composition, a five-bay house on the right and a two-
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
bay addition on the
left.
Cover the
The
see a conventional five-bay house. rical
mirror of the right door, but
side at the left door,
left
it is
left
door looks
not;
it is
like a
and you
symmet-
the dividing line be-
tween the two parts of the house. The addition must have been made close to the time of original construction, as the brick
matches. Perhaps the
left
that
side
is
it
was even
a “wing,”
built at the
added on.
It is
same time, but
on both
sides
in the pattern
a joke: the symmetrical facade
isn’t.
When you start leading the eye this way, involving it in nundrums and to look
at:
patterns, the eye expects to go farther;
so the streaks
and blotches become
red color and slight unevenness
is
satisfying.
shapes and colors that attracts the eye,
it is
it
a play of co-
wants more
fun, the brick’s
It isn’t
warm
just the interest of
the contrast between the
order of the pattern and the disorder of the stains and flaws.
The years
haven’t mellowed the Neo-Colonial houses; they have
no
ORDINARY PLACES
17
patina and never
The Neo-Colonials “age”
will.
ken bricks or uneven colors in order texture.
But their way of building
isn’t
their walls with bro-
to look historic
a
game
or a
and
gift,
give
some
and the eye
is
disappointed.
The owner of the Jonathan Stone House makes changes and from season they are
off,
Sometimes the shutters
to season.
sometimes, for months
sometimes
are on,
at a time, half the shutters will
missing, sometimes a solid door covers the French door
The house
benefits
tern, so they
On
add
from these
variations; they
is
tern radiates
within
its
left.
pat-
a Neo-Colonial, circa 1925. Try leaving half
red brick
it! Its
is
variegated to imitate patina.
the six-over-six sash of its neighbor, identical to the
all fit
on the
be
interest.
the adjoining lot
the shutters off
repairs
one that
from
it;
is
and
at the
top
is
is
has
a fanlight almost
the focus of the Stone House. But
this fanlight
It
just a decal. Lines
no
pat-
drawn from
it
through the upstairs window corners do not connect with key points
on the lower windows. Nothing
upper and
joins the fanlight to the
lower windows.
As if
in almost
form
is
any house, there
no longer the guiding
upper windows
at right
and
left
is
an urge toward composition, even
force. Regulating lines firmly tie the
windows below, and
to the triple
the front door. But other major elements are
do
in the Stone
dow
sizes.
A
House
comes
are
all
first.
one
Where
size,
tremendous weight of
the
at the front door.
entry
is
dull.
One
the simpler door,
18
But
all
detail
—
these devices
much more intrigued to down the street. is
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
windows of
the
much
the Neo-Colonial has four win-
portico with a balustrade, the fanlight in a
look
intrigue, as they
House, because they are not contained within any
overall pattern. Effect
larger Stone
The quirks
left floating.
and mistakes and omissions of this facade do not add
to
sidelights, a
pediment —
make no see
columned
tells
one
to
pattern, so the
what might be inside
Funny
that people should call the style “Colonial.”
America wanted
to
meaningless word;
be in 1775 was colonial. But it is
name and
a
a style
really,
meant
The
last
thing
“Colonial”
to soothe
is
a
by evoking
old reassuring emblems.
Aurora
On
the
,
New
main
hundred
feet
York
street
of Aurora, a bank and a post office stand about a
from each
other.
The bank was
built
around
1850.
It
has
*
the attenuated, overscaled the old way; the facade gable.
You
looking
The
a pattern
its
time, but
it is
designed in
based on the diagonals of the
pleased to be near such a building; you find yourself
way; you recognize the neighborhood by
bank (circa 1850) from the post office.
little
years,
its
feel
is
windows of
is
a
It is
hundred
feet,
its
cheerful face.
and a hundred and twenty-five
designed as a pattern, in the old way.
ORDINARY PLACES
19
In Aurora,
New York,
walk right by
no pattern. You makes the bench and potted
the post office (circa 1975) has almost
as if it weren’t there. Its blankness
plants look surreal.
The post
office
is
from around
ing for three days before tern.
We
A
I
1975
noticed
it
bench and two potted plants
are
stayed next door to the build-
.
at
all. It is
almost devoid of pat-
float in front
of this blankness.
surrounded by such buildings. Reality has faded gradually
over the
last
century and a
half, so that
now
patches remain. Only occasionally, one can
still
only smudges and see the old smile,
disembodied.
Belmont Centre For the first time
in
human
history people are systematically ;
building meaningless places.
— eugene victor Walter, Placeways There
is
almost no one on the
keeps her back to me.
20
street.
A woman
polishing her door
A mailman looks through me.
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
I
notice a furtive
face as
pass another door.
I
am
I
photographing the Neo-Colonial
houses of Belmont. Every house, every hedge,
— empty
shadows are wrong, somehow negative landscape.
der
if
The
someone might
in Beverly Hills. in a
sunlight
is
call
But no,
as
the police, but I
get
back to
I
—
tells
bor greets me; another
me
won-
I
my car, two policemen pull up calls.
— warning
the police, this time
photograph the eighteenth-century Jonathan Stone House. The
gardener Smiles and
when
empty
doing walking around Belmont
go on to another part of Belmont
to
holes in an
dismiss the thought: only
with a camera. The station has received two I
Only the
perfect.
harsh, the shadows are threatening.
me what I am
squad car and ask
is
ten minutes before?
cause the old house
is
to take
me
invites
same
others in the
me
in.
the pictures
Why
until that night
beautiful
had been an obvious reason
I
A
neigh-
do
I
set the police
realize that
and the newer houses
to
want.
are these people friendly,
neighborhood had
sort of
Not
all
it is
photograph the old house and an
owners knew
their houses
in every way:
not grossly awkward, not too small, not too
owners assumed right.
I
I
was there
The
to
pected.
What
it
the houses omit
stayed.
to the
ture of a house, tidy
its
their houses.
just so
is life.
“Normalcy”
Bernstein’s catty song
is
The
much decor. The expression is banished. What the houses express is is
American suburb
architecture, the “little white
thing
large.
turned to a single purpose, to prevent the unex-
“Normalcy” came War, and
designed to be undistinguished
show what was wrong with
of intuition, of human nature, is
dull,
could be up to no good, and in a way they were
In such a streetscape, nature
control. Design
be-
are not. There
equally obvious reason not to photograph the other houses.
were
on
— the word house
from Trouble
is
after the First
just right for that ersatz
in Wellesley Hills” of in Tahiti.
Each house
and acceptable, but not quite
the same, even though each house
World
is
a
little
neighbors. To be identical would be to break the
Leonard is
a pic-
“there.” Every-
different spell; to
from be an
ORDINARY PLACES
21
accurate rendition of a real place, a
town must make some show of
variety.
The houses seem
all alike
because they are
tions.
The incomplete, unrecognizable
street,
become
a kind of noise;
becomes another. Visual the sense of
noise,
illegible as
patterns,
composi-
up and down every
and the babble of symbolic messages
and the absence of visual
empty sameness. The problem
is
play, causes
not that the houses are
too similar in style or shape; the architecture of ancient tradition
The houses of eighteenth -century Belmont
often highly uniform.
were more
were
alike
is
than those of twentieth- century Belmont, and they
plainer, as well.
The Neo-Colonial houses
them the
patterns
we know
are the landscape, but
we do not
to expect in a living landscape.
see in
They
are
not altogether disorganized, but their patterns are deformed and
compromised. Compared to the forms of art or nature or the buildings of former times, they are like freaks. Conflicting geometric forces vie with each other for control of a facade, like the jealous stepsisters
in Cinderella: “No, rules will apply to
major
me! No, me!” Three unrelated
windows on
a wall with only five
focal point, a “bull’s-eye”
window,
of geometric
sets
windows
it.
The disconnected
it.
A
while
say, will float alone,
powerful regulating lines converge on a blank area three
from
in
feet
away
patterns are like a series of sentences that
don’t form a paragraph.
The eighteenth-century house it
comes from
derive
his
own
is
the imprint of
its
builder’s
bodily perception. The harmonies of
from the proportions of the person who designed
builder shows himself to us in his house.
Does
it
reveal too
The implies
22
fear.
it.
walls
The
much?
Is
why
modern Belmont show me only masks, and
that
builders shy
builders of
its
that
the designer too exposed in such a process of design?
modern
mind;
Is
away from the old way of seeing?
They seem
to have
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
some weakness
to hide,
something to
Houses
in Belmont, Massachusetts, built
protect.
around
1970.
The twentieth-century houses express no
physical image of
— or of my mind or body. The NeoColonial wants something from me — approval? of mestheir designers’
minds or bodies
is it
sages about prosperity
It is full
and propriety and the American Way,
but, in
ORDINARY PLACES
23
The point
the end, the messages are just patter.
being talked
at.
The landscape
What houses,
There
not one
is
moment when
is
always on.” Quiet Belmont
human mental and
the
is
am
I
these houses just are.
a
a high-stress town.
is
revealed in the Stone House, what
is
simply that
is
is
concealed in the
bodily pattern;
its
new
tension and
its
imperfection, the harmony, not just within the house but with ourselves.
The old house
as highly conventional as the
is
who made
the sense of the person
comes through. As
it
old house reveals a simple sort of mastery. its
mask
street facade for a
mask
is
subsumed
recognize
is
strength.
the
There
—
built
is
— the
in transparent patterns,
—
as
much
ones, yet
a form, the
has only the formality of
It
traditional symmetries
a kind of desolation in
and natural
new
and
— and even what we
in those
of the American landscape
many visiting Europeans
have commented.
We are too used to it to notice most of the time, until an artist like Edward Hopper points
it
out.
But the desolation Hopper catches has an
aura of sadness, an ache, a premonition of death; In the blackness of
real.
death.
Hopper
there find
it
stays
bizarre.
Hoppers shadows
away from the
painful and
are mysteries of
faceless suburb. Artists
Diane Arbus, who was attracted
was the photographer of suburbia,
as
home
at
life
it is
and
who do
go
to the grotesque,
Susan Sontag has
Joseph Cornell seems to have been
artist
it is
in
said.
The
such surreality;
he lived in a neighborhood of breathtaking blandness, on Utopia
Parkway
—
emptiness;
a suitably surreal I
need
to
their unreality gives
name.
be away from
me
I
can’t
it.
I
come
to terms with such
avoid such neighborhoods;
a sense of anxiety in the pit of
my
stomach.
Why go to a place that is nowhere? Is
there a cure for suburbia? If seeing buildings as compositions
again becomes the norm, people will reject as monstrosities what they
now
think of as normal. But the
enough.
24
One
will
shift,
when
it
happens,
may be
easy
not change oneself; one will change, instead, what
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
one thinks one It
wont be
is
looking
here and there,
mont could be brought will
The medicine
will
be a
hammer and saw.
necessary to change the style of the house, but only to re-
window
arrange a
at.
alive.
be a house you can look
One might
The
at
move
a door,
result
won’t be Fallingwater, but
add some trim.
and even, perhaps, photograph.
of their clothing are far better than the lines
lines
And in the Tauruses, Audis, BMWs. of their houses.
driveways of those houses are truly elegant
People do have innate standards, but most do not
them.
it
think that the people of Belmont deliberately chose
poor design. But the
at
Bel-
know how to
get
hard for people to separate the important from the
It* is
unimportant, the primary geometry from the secondary applied symbol,
if
they do not
form, people just look that the pattern
from
is
is
When
there
is
no play of
other things, and they simply do not realize
at
my
know something
is
missing
walk in Belmont showed. The process of
unconscious, but the fact of pattern has to be
conscious, so that people can cial culture,
pattern.
not there. But they do
their houses, as
making pattern
know about
know what
you can have any
style,
any
to choose. In this effect
you want
made
commer-
— but you
have to make the choice to have pattern. Pattern
want
to
is
very simple.
make
patterns.
It is
very easy.
It is
already there in us:
The routine houses of suburbia
patterns, although they are incomplete. Pattern
now, even all,
in
our time, which seems so
lost,
is
pattern
we
are full of
the norm. Even is still,
under
it
the norm.
ORDINARY PLACES
25
3
The Loss of the Old Way of Seeing
1830:
There
is
a line of demarcation, a time
began to be
lost.
The turning point
when
the old
for architecture
way of
seeing
was the decade of
the 1820s. After 1830 the former sure touch started to waver; everyday architecture began to material, shape,
began
slip;
shadow
and charm, pleasure
— were
to strike poses or else
beautiful,
fall
and the routine —
bays — could have
a
less
in the thing itself
—
often to be found. Buildings
into routine.
The poses could be very
as in the endless repetition of factory
power of its own, but the meaning of design had
changed. Before 1830 pattern dominated design. After that time, use cluding the creation of effect
The
creation of effect
ness”
— has
The
houses.
26
it is
announced the new
1830, giant
The
— whether
over. Pattern
is
an end in
in-
itself.
“honesty,” “reality,” or “liveli-
a motive, to influence the observer.
style that
Around
— took
—
pillars
columns began
priority to
was the Greek
show up on
Revival.
the fronts of
represented heroic democracy, a greatness of vi-
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
A Greek Revival building (1840)
in Union Springs, New York. The new style The mini-Parthenon front porch, representing heroic democracy, has become more important than the house itself. A column blocks the front door.
puts symbol ahead of pattern.
sion that
many
at the
time
felt
was slipping away from America. The
Greek Revival could be quite beautiful
in
its
cool clarity of line and
form. The shapes were grandly simple, and designers sometimes went to extremes to keep
them
so.
Upstairs
rooms were
cast into
shadow
under the deep colonnades; windows might be made tiny or eliminated altogether in order not to disturb a cornice
line.
Jammed
be-
hind the unyielding simplicity of the facades were bedrooms and
smoky
kitchens, or counting
1830:
rooms and
tellers’
wickets
— the “Gre-
THE LOSS OF THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
27
dan” vogue came abandoned.
A
to
first
commercial buildings. Proportion was not
high elegance of line was sought: perfection. But the
sheer size of the shapely forms could be disturbing.
stuck onto the front of a
little
house or shop was
like
The “temple” an eighteenth-
century entry porch suddenly inflated, often to take up the whole
The
facade.
was
style
don the ancient play of shapes, but sage
and dramatic.
elegant, austere, it
was the
It
first style
did not abanto
make mes-
more important.
The Greek Revival swept types;
it
was the
first
across regions, traditions,
national building
style.
and building
Greek Revival houses
were frequently called “end-houses” because their gable ends often faced the street in the aggressive stance generally reserved for public
and commercial buildings during the previous century. Modest Greek Revival buildings sometimes dispensed with columns altogether
made do with
corner
pilasters.
and
“Temple- fronts,” people also called the
houses; however, the immediate model for the Greek Revival house
was not a temple, but
The building
a bank.
that started the
vogue was the Second Bank of the
United States in Philadelphia, designed by William Strickland in 1818
and completed
in 1824.
Other
architects,
had designed Greek Revival buildings
such as Benjamin Latrobe,
as early as 1798.
Strickland’s building that set off the explosion.
made Greek
wrote.
He was
ings. In
client,
architecture a personal cause.
great truths in the world are the Bible
and Grecian
was
Nicholas
“The two
architecture,”
he
the patron of other conspicuous Greek Revival build-
order to preserve the lines of the temple of learning Biddle
built for Girard College of Philadelphia in 1833, all the
rooms had
to
be lighted by skylights. Also in that
cled his wife’s pre-existing
upper
class-
year, Biddle encir-
mansion outside Philadelphia with white
columns and crowned them,
28
it
The leading advocate
of the style was not the architect, however, but his Biddle. Biddle
But
like his
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
bank, with a Parthenonian pedi-
The Second Bank of the United
States, Philadelphia,
designed in 1818 by
William Strickland, probably under instructions from Nicholas Biddle;
completed in
1824.
The building was
it
was
instantly famous. In the 1830s the style
crossed over from commercial architecture to houses: everybody had to have a “temple-front.”
1830:
THE LOSS OF THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
29
ment. Thomas
P.
was the architect
who
Walter, for
later
designed the U.S. Capitol dome,
both the mansion and the college building. The
white columns stood for purity, and they also stood for power; they
announced
that
power could be pure.
The Greek Revival opened the way
to the multitude of styles that
characterized the Victorian age. Each style was a
group of effects.
ferent
A building would try to
way to produce
evoke the meaning of
domesticity or financial security or religion. There are so tifully
proportioned Victorian buildings that
will
not
many beau-
call
them
ex-
away from harmony of line and shape began
ceptions, but the trend
was an era and an
in Victorian times. “Victorian”
a particular style.
I
a dif-
The
era
was roughly 1830
attitude rather than
(Victoria
until 1910
reigned from 1837 to 1901). The attitude was to put effect
first.
Beauty
or ugliness was not the issue; posing was the point. After 1830 architecture
became
self-conscious.
Two New England
carpenters handbooks, the
first
written in 1793,
the second in 1834,
show how
In 1793, there
mystery in the geometry of architecture:
The
is still
uses of
Geometry
the vision of everyday design changes.
are not confined to Carpentry
ture, but, in the various
branches of the Mathematics,
discovers to us their secrets.
is,
and
to follow
them
it
opens and
teaches us to contemplate truths, to
It
trace the chain of them, subtle
quently
and Architec-
and almost imperceptible
to the
utmost
as
it
fre-
extent. [Peter Nicholson,
The Carpenter’s New Guide]
In 1834, the focus of design
is
no longer play but professionalism,
not exploration but accuracy:
If
the builder attempts to apply the rules of Geometry to his
out the knowledge of
he
30
theory, his efforts will
at all succeed, yet his
art,
with-
prove abortive; or should
work would be void of proportion and
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
in-
complete.
It is
only by a competent knowledge of this science, that the
Architect can accomplish his
work
in a simple
Artist so construct his lines as to
and elegant
style;
or the
be able to complete his design.
[Chester Hills, The Builder's Guide]
In 1793 design
is
an adventure; geometry “discovers
teaches us to “trace the chain” of “truths.” In 1834,
“it is
secrets,”
and
it
only by a com-
petent knowledge of this science, that the Architect can accomplish his
work.” Geometry
is
a set of rules that
must be followed properly
to
produce a “complete design.” Correctness has superseded inspiration.
The designer is
in 1834
typical of that
concern
lest
is,
above
all,
careful to avoid
frame of mind that he
feels a
making mistakes.
It
sense of time pressure, a
the design not be completed, while the 1793 designer de-
lights to follow the possibilities “to the
utmost
extent.”
In comparison to today’s design, the average buildings of 1830 are
superb.
What carpenter’s handbook today talks about geometry at all?
Harmony, was
still
or, at least, elegance,
was then
still
admired, and geometry
important. But the 1834 author had lost the former
and the freedom
it
had
self-trust,
given.
The two handbooks express only
a change in point of view, not a
change in construction method, or in the structure of the carpentry profession, although
some changes were on
the way.
It
was around
1834 that the “balloon frame” of standardized lightweight nents, such as two-by-fours,
much chance
was invented
the
new
in Chicago; but there
come
construction methods,
east for another
not
when
twenty years.
they did come, did not
cause the change in point of view. Even today, carpentry
moved from
is
Chester Hills had heard of the system at the time, be-
cause the balloon frame did not
And
compo-
the craft of 1793.
Any
builder
way of seeing can adventure amongst
who
is
not
far re-
has access to the old
the truths of geometry as Peter
Nicholson did.
1830:
THE LOSS OF THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
31
Thomas
In 1829
Carlyle wrote, in Signs of the Times “It ,
is
the
Age of
Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word. Wonder, indeed,
is,
on
all
hands, dying out.
.
.
.
What cannot be
and understood mechanically, cannot be at all.” Carlyle
investigated
investigated
and understood
was writing about England and Scotland, but what he
said applied as well to America. Buildings
became more
literary
and
informational than visual, and reading became the mental process to perceive them.
A hundred years
after Carlyle,
“What we cannot read we cannot
on the old way of seeing beneath
ried
ment or erudition or the
first
Walter,
new life,
see.”
Lewis
Mumford
Many architects
after 1830 car-
screens of practicality or senti-
The generation
professionalism.
after 1830
professional architects in America. Biddles protege,
was
wrote,
were
Thomas
founder of the American Institute of Architects. The
a
professionalism tended to separate visual thinking from daily
but
also preserved the old
it
relatively
few buildings —
and
by
architects,
as
Le Corbusier defined
light
in
and shade but
way of seeing
as a specialty.
either before or after 1830
our age fewer it.
Today,
However,
— were designed
still
can be considered architecture
mo
buildings are not-pa tterrLs in
irpagps fltiarhpd
t
st
p functions
.
Many observers were aware of what had been lost. Richard Upjohn, who designed New York’s Trinity Church in 1839, wrote, “Might we not gain a valuable lesson while contemplating these works of our forefathers?
of our
.
.
.
Will
own hands
we not
see
by comparing them with the works
that their authors regarded the law of
between a building and
its
harmony
surroundings better than we do
at the
present day?”
For the
first
time, architecture, or
much
of it, came to be despised.
James Fenimore Cooper in 1836 ridiculed the pomposity of the temple-houses: “[The] children trundling hoops before their doors,
beef carried into their kitchens, and smoke issuing, moreover, from those unclassical objects’ chimnies” belied the formality of the
32
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
style.
Alexis de Tocqueville sneered at the
New York in
1831,
“wooden
palaces” he saw outside
and others made fun of what they
mania” and “the Greek Temple
The Greek Revival had
called “the
Greek
disease.”
run
largely
changed way of seeing remained.
its
course by 1850, but the
On many houses,
towers
now
took
the place of the big porticos. There were Gothic towers, Italianate
Empire towers, Romanesque towers, Queen Anne
towers, Second
Mansard
towers.
When
roofs were another
the effect was well done, as
yet be harmonious, fascinating,
way
to
make
many times it was,
and
full
the design might
of vigor. But pattern
found und£r or around or behind symbol and
An
the grand gesture.
now was
story.
old stereopticon photo of Lowell, Massachusetts, shows the
Bank
Prescott
Building,
when
was new, around
it
1865.
It is
High Vic-
torian, not quite halfway in time bet ween the beginnings of the
Greek
On
either
Revival in the 1820s and the Neo-Colonials of the 1920s. side of the
bank
are shuttered,
somnolent houses,
years earlier but closer to the old way.
photo
in the
is
as tall as
building, but the
bank
is
design
more
is
at
French, by
twenty
built only
The man lounging
in the
door
one of the windows of the neighboring older
windows of the new building
energetic than
its
are
much
taller.
The
neighbors, but something about
its
once alarming and funny. The roof is seventeenth -century
way of Napoleon
back to make a
III
roof-effect; the
—
it is
really a third-story wall tilted
dormers are more or
less
medieval; the
columns are off-the-rack Renaissance.
The former easy
discipline has cracked, but the building
is
not
completely out of control. The cornice does hold to the line of neighbor. pattern at
More important,
human
scale,
there are strong regulating lines
its
— one
and another, the dominant system,
at the
giant vertical scale of the high windows.
Why are those high windows — why is the whole building — a little
frightening?
Is it
1830:
because the designer has dug up so
many
differ-
THE LOSS OF THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
33
The
Prescott
street;
two
Bank of 1865
that
is
at Lowell,
Massachusetts,
is
is
it
prima donna on
sings in four styles
a strong geometric pattern, so the sense of place
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
a
its
and disturbing and funny. But there
allowable for a bank. However,
scales at once. Its aggressive indecision
is still
34
and
is
not
lost.
ent styles?
Or does
have more to do with the proportions, those
it
windows squeezed and
stretched out of relation to
human
and
size
shape?
many
But
of Newburyport a house of about i860
street It
upon
sits
a
the
main
little hilltop.
has big square bay windows, a flouncy cupola, festoons of white-
painted trim. richness,
and
It is, also, it is
a pleasure to look
some mystery in
There
As
is
its
at.
shadows. But
At the bottom of the same
have done
It
dour
its
far
hill
rambles interestingly; there
—
a very serious house.
Victorian neighbor.
numerous ugly buildings of the Victorian
day, they could
worse than to look awkward or scary or strange. Nine-
teenth-century buildings were “there”
it is
rndre of the age-old sparkle to
for the
and
a composition of sure-handed integrity
stands a big seventeenth-century house. is
On
Victorian buildings are very beautiful.
usually, “there.” It
still,
you would always want
to be in, but
it
was
might not be a
a lot better than
the “nowhere” the twentieth century was to build.
The Victorians did not want
pompous wanted 1830
buildings,
to
produce hideous or fatuous or
any more than twentieth-century designers
to build deserts.
The
loss of
harmony
in architecture after
was recognized immediately, but the idea that a particular
state
of consciousness was needed to design a harmonious building was
not understood.
When
the paradigm for buildings shifted, there was
no way to explain what had happened, because the harmonious design had centered upon the
upon
a
way of
seeing.
It
In the years leading
up
come from
to 1830, there
of
rules of geometry, not
was thought that those
plied to design, not that they could
earlier teaching
rules
were only ap-
the design process.
were hints of what was to
come, sudden jumps into the new way of thinking. For example, the gridding of Manhattan began around 1810, amidst strong objections, as
an 1893 history describes: “Irate landlords assailed the surveyors
with dogs, hot water, cabbages, and other distressful methods.”
1830:
THE LOSS OF THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
35
The and
it
grid plan was an ancient system
was not new
historian John Stilgoe writes,
and shapes passed;
—
and Savannah were grid
The map, with
legislatures
“The old
its letters
and num-
—
past or to come.
reliance
on natural edges
took notice neither of land nor of history
bers,
it
plan was different. The grid was not an en-
clave within a natural topography.
The
the Greeks had used
to America: Philadelphia
New York
But the
cities.
—
charged surveyors with creating a
graph-paper-like skein of townships. ... By 1820 the grid concept was
permanently established
in the national imagination.”
The new plan seemed Manhattan’s financial
efficient, yet
district first
eighty years later the towers of
sprouted not from the grid but
from the old hodgepodge of lanes and lively places; the grid
early as the 1780s,
Georgian
style
private than
Business thrived in the
was superimposed upon business
stamped upon the island As
alleys.
house plans had become more
columned
separate hall. In 1830, the
Around
it
exterior
was a gesture of power, not
was expressed
Durand
chitecture
more
now enter
a
to turn
greeting.
States, a
change occurred in Paris that
is
in
The new theory
two books by the teacher-architect Jean-Nicolas-
(i76o 8 i834),
who
economy joined
wrote, “The source of beauty in arto
fitness”
and “Architects should
concern themselves with planning and with nothing
Ware,
also
seemed again
to affect the teaching of architecture in America.
Louis
The
1800, well before academies of architectural education
were established in the United
was
rigid.
predecessors, which grew casually, in the medieval
way. Instead of bursting into the kitchen, a visitor would
outward, but
was
itself.
was more formal, more symmetrical, and
its
it
as
who founded
the
first
American school of
else.”
William
architecture, at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1868, echoed Durand: “Architecture
may be
called the prose, as sculpture
poetry, of art.” There
own
36
is
and painting
are the
plenty of poetry, both good and bad, in Ware’s
buildings, such as the Ruskinian Gothic
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
Memorial Hall
at
Har-
vard (see the illustration on page
hand, are
dull. Yet
139).
Durand’s influence
Durands
designs,
on the other
persists to this day.
Historians trace the mechanization of thought long before the
nineteenth century: to the clocks of medieval monasteries, to Gutenberg, to the cogitations of Descartes, to Newton’s perfect universe.
Some
see
beginnings in the agrarian revolution thousands of years
its
ago. But these changes of consciousness did not ture. Until 1830, styles
changed, but there was
undermine still
magic
architec-
in almost
any American house or barn or shop — magic and harmony. The old contact with inner pattern
expressed
th'e
lived; architecture still played;
still
ancient physical and mental awareness of mystery.
Some might
argue that what
call a loss is
I
nothing but a
equally valid viewpoint. Others say the old buildings
survived because they were the best of their time. buildings are gone, but
why
coarsening of taste?
Did
and love
the most beautiful house in wealthy
is
revered and cared for but because years.
see
And
poverty can
We have Newburyport not because it was
be a friend to old buildings.
hundred
we
an
shift to
Many of the poorest
twentieth-century Belmont two hundred years old?
for a
it still
it
was allowed
to collect
cobwebs
industrialization inevitably bring about a
Around
1830 people began to believe, as both
lohn Stuart Mill and Tocquevil le wrote, that magic was not to be expected in everyday social equality
.
I
life,
do not
that see
t
it
W. Pugin wrote
the changed
way of
^
-af
that way.
“The history of architecture tect A.
hf pri ce of comforU
,
is
in 1835.
that time.
the history of the world,” the archi-
Our
age
still
looks at architecture in
What happened
more
possible to answer that question
some
cataclysm, but as the
moment
if
in 1830?
the change
is
It
becomes
seen not as
of acquiescence to a series of
changes, great and small. It
seems odd that we can date the
specifically.
But the change
columns have something
1830:
is
loss of the old
way of seeing
so
right there in the buildings: those big
to prove, or hide.
Around
1830, architecture
THE LOSS OF THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
37
becomes performance. Why? What was the history
that broke the old
way of seeing? Quick
as
one can say “Industrial Revolution,” one seems
the answer. But in 1830, America
had barely begun
More than ninety percent of Americans
still
Canals and steamships had been
villages.
lived
built,
to industrialize.
on farms or
in tiny
and the new
textile
Lawrence and Lowell, Massachusetts, but not much
mills of
we would
shift to the
than to follow the
new way
of industry.
rise
else that
there were only the rawest beginnings of
call industrial;
The
railroads.
to have
of seeing seems more to parallel It
could be said that
like the
new
architecture, the machines, fa dories, inventions oLthe time expressed a de eper
change that
iad^eady .occurred
While America had barely
.
the Industrial Revolution, a
felt
mercial revolution had taken place during the
nineteenth century: the
rise
decades of the
of corporations and banks, a
power away from farms and
nancial
first
families
who
shift
many banks
of
fi-
bartered within
small communities to institutions, often located in remote
There were eight times as
com-
cities.
per capita in 1850 as in 1800. In
1830 the United States was not yet urban or industrial, but, as the historian Jack Larkin puts
it,
“A large number of rural Americans were
working more calculatingly and
way of seeing
occupy
Amos “I now
Lawrence, one of the
is
the
new
its
waking or
importance.
ought ever to be kept
by the incessant
first
American
industrialists,
find myself so engrossed in [business’s] cares, as to
my thoughts,
portionate to
“Calculating”
in a word.
In 1826
worried,
less socially.”
calls
free
.
.
sleeping, to a degree entirely dispro.
Above
between
all,
man and
that his
communion which
Maker
is
interrupted
of the multifarious pursuits of our establish-
ment.” In 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in the United States, where he travelled for a year. In 1835 he published
Democracy
in
America. The
accuracy of Tocqueville’s observations has been startling Americans
38
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
ever since; he seems to have visited our that
democracy led
own
time. Tocqueville argued
commercialism he saw everywhere, but he
to the
did not say that capitalism was democracy. Emerson, Tocqueville
contemporary, wrote, “The nobles lords,
have power of
life
before.” Tocqueville
not any longer, as feudal
shall
and death over the
other shape, as capitalists, shall in
all
love
and Emerson saw
put calculation ahead of
s
now, in an-
churls, but
and peace
eat
them up
as
new commercialism
that the
But Tocqueville believed that com-
spirit.
mercialism came out of democracy, while Emerson said
it
was inimi-
cal to
democracy, that democracy was essentially the expression of
spirit.
He wrote:
’T
the day of the chattel,
is
Web to weave, and corn to
grind;
Things are in the saddle,
And
ride
mankind.
There are two laws
Not reconciled
—
discrete,
Law for man, and law for thing; The
last
But
it
builds
town and
fleet,
runs wild,
And doth
the
man
unking.
Tocqueville argued that democracy
itself
saw to be the low standards of American “collective mediocrity,” as Mill called
To some in
1830,
no
it
porate power.
blame
culture.
He was
for
what he
believed that inevitable.
single individual symbolized Tocqueville’s
president from 1829 to 1837. fight
to
at the time,
“despotism of the majority” more than
was the Bank War, a
was
A
Andrew
central event of Jackson
by the new populism to
A single bank,
Jackson, s
who was
presidency
limit the
new
cor-
run by one individual, had become im-
mensely powerful in the national economy. Jackson was determined
1830:
THE LOSS OF THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
39
opponent was Nicholas Biddle, and the bank
to break that power. His
was the same Bank of the United
in question
duced the new way of seeing into American
States that
had
intro-
architecture.
The
build-
ing was the visual expression of a transformation that had
come
over
«
War was
America; and the Bank
was the
sion. Biddle
moment
political
who can epitomize an era, be its He came up with the style and the
symbols.
its
of the turning point.
Most of the public sided with Jackson though the Greek Revival was did not
fall
from
and economic expres-
sort of person
lightning rod, invent issue at the
its
favor. It
Bank War, but even
in the
closely identified with Biddle, the style
continued to be the American
throughout the Bank War, and the new values
it
only strengthened in the styles that succeeded
it.
Bank War, and Biddles tions were
career
now in power
individual tions,
upon
and
had never been
Jefferson
wealth.
large,
Most Americans seem
against,
,
now
made
Carlyle wrote at the time, “Wealth has
same time gathered
itself
strangely altering the old relations,
tween the rich and the poor.” As wealth in America was
now
Jr.,
puts
it
in
The Age
One handled
.”
more and more
more and more
increased,
into masses,
and increasing the distance be-
in England,
and
for similar reasons,
distributed far less evenly than
been a few decades before. Betsy Blackmar describes the new division of New York .
.
that
though
City: “
[By the 1830s]
it
it
had
social
had already become
clear
New York’s social classes still lived within walking dis-
tance of one another, the social distance between
immeasurably.”
40
the
had no choice
actualities.
bv exorcism, but actu alities by a djustment
.
the
impersonal institu-
to have felt they
of Jackson “The fears of Jefferson were
at the
won
Jackson
created, or sharply increased, a social hierarchy based
but to accept the change. As Arthur Schlesinger,
and
represented were
before.
had warned
more and more dependent upon it
of choice
was wrecked, but banks and corpora-
as they
The new economy, which
style
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
them had grown
The new commercialism, and the limited to
New York
or Boston
ticularly
pronounced
to farms
and villages
architectural
form
— or
most
classes, that
brought, was not
social division
became par-
As Larkin
writes, the
came
It
Greek Revival “gave
advance of commerce in the countryside.”
Most Americans denied
nomic
— where
it
to the hierarchical factory towns.
as well.
to the
stratification
had
that the nation
stratified into
new eco-
such inequality could be; America stood for the
radical personal
freedoms in the world. Perhaps their denial was
an adjustment to reduced personal power.
Work and
daily
life
began
to
change profoundly.
Many
at the
time
complained- that the fun seemed to have gone out of life. Around 1840
Horace Greeley (1811-1872) wrote that during been “more humor, more fun, more can be found anywhere in
play,
this anxious,
his
childhood there had
more merriment
plodding
.
.
.
than
age.”
heavy seriousness.
men and women went from color and play to a The man who in 1815 might have worn trousers of
lemon yellow and
a coat of cerulean blue
Clothing for both
or gray or black. 1815
began
The woman who had worn
was hardly visible
at all
to
wear only brown
a light clinging
gown
in
under the billows and bonnets of 1840.
This change was part of a newly general prudery. The master bed,
which had commonly taken
a place of
moved from
to
view. Sex
came
honor
in the parlor,
was
re-
be widely thought unhealthful, and
marriage manuals that had encouraged sexuality were replaced by tracts
about
its evils.
Amidst the new prudery and seriousness, there was phasis
on
order. Slovenly front yards
fences enclosed them.
became
neat,
Houses looked snappy
also
more em-
and white picket
in the excellent
new
white-lead paint. Drunkenness had been endemic, but alcohol con-
sumption dropped by more than half under pressure of the newly powerful temperance movement.
The though
factory in 1830
was the change
in
work
life at its
most
intense, al-
America, factories were more harbingers of things to
1830:
THE LOSS OF THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
41
come than
farm hours; the machines,
At
typical workplaces.
like
first
first,
seemed
the long hours
like
factory workers were said to be “tending” their
farmers watching their flocks. But by 1830 workers
were “operatives.” The schedule was rigid and endless, and the operatives
had no way to vary their
tasks or the
the farm, whole families often
mer
worked
rhythm of their labor. As on
together, but without the for-
self-respect or satisfaction in the work.
Connecticut manufacturer in
1835:
John Stilgoe quotes a
“The usual working hours, being
workmen and
twelve, exclusive of meals, six days in the week, the
children being thus employed, have
no time
spend
to
in idleness or
vicious amusements.”
America was
still
a rural society in 1830, but the
number of Ameri-
cans living in towns had begun to increase sharply during the 1820s.
It
was the beginning of the urbanization that has never stopped. The population was increasing very rapidly, from 3.9 million in 1790 to 12.9 million in 1830,
than sixteen. increase.
old
A
and
it
high birth
The high
way of seeing,
was very young; the median age was
not immigration, accounted for the
rate,
rate of growth surely
for the people
less
made
easier to overturn the
it
who were building in 1810 were a mi-
nority by 1830.
New
words came into the language
to express the
new way of
thinking: “idealistic” (meaning unrealistic) arrived in 1829, tarian” (to
mean merely
was named
material) in 1830.
in 1829. “Intellectualism”
The
was coined in
“The key
came
1829,
came
meant “right-angled” took on
its
in 1876.
An
modern meaning
The neotechnic
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
“aes-
into the language in 1837.
Lewis Mumford, in Technics and Civilization 1830 the “neotechnic” period.
and
to architec-
to the period [1820-1840] appears to be that the
become aware of itself,” wrote Emerson
“utili-
Industrial Revolution
thetics” (as the study of taste) in 1830. “Eclecticism”
ture in 1835. “Self-consciousness”
and
is
,
old
mind had
word
that
had
in 1828: “normal.”
calls
the time since
the age
when
the in-
ventions of such visionaries as Roger Bacon and Leonardo da Vinci
began to come into daily
life.
Mumford
notes such inventions as the
water turbine (1832), the reaping machine sia (1831),
machine
the sewing
chloroform anesthe-
and the dynamo
(1829),
new highways
automobiles chuffed along the railroads deliberately put
(1831),
was
built.
Steam
of England until the
them out of business. In
bage’s automatic calculator
(1831).
1832 Charles Bab-
When Samuel Morse
the electromagnetic telegraph in 1838, everyone said
it
invented
was only
a
matter of time until voices would be transmitted by wire.
Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre was a painter obsessed with
Diorama, a Paris theater
verisimilitude. In 1822 he created the
which a trompe at least
one
Voeil set
saw
critic
way of seeing: “The
was the
in
entire show.
It
was a huge
success. Yet
the emptiness that was to haunt the
it
idea produced
is
that of a region
— of
desolated; of living nature at an end; of the last day past
in
new
world
a
and
—
over.” In
Mumford writes, “The camphotography brought about a new self-
1837 Daguerre invented the photograph.
era-eye that developed with
consciousness
.
.
not self-examination, but self-exposure.”
.
In 1828 Hector Berlioz wrote his
Goethe completed
Faust; in 1831
and
sessed artists
writers; in
modern predicament: sacrificing
feared
—
its
soul.
It
flection
his last, Faust.
and
was not the new machines themselves that were
“We
many
—
it
by
Emerson.
direct vision; but only
dismemberment.
subjection to physical objects
was machine thinking.
criticism has set in,” wrote
see nothing
in anatomical
own unwise mode
The Faust legend ob-
power of industry, the world was
in gaining the
there were not yet very
Carlyle wrote,
masterpiece, Eight Scenes from
dozens of works they told the story of the
“The age of arithmetic and of
And
first
.
.
.
by
re-
This deep, paralysed
comes not from Nature, but from our
of viewing Nature.”
How must it have felt to watch the age-old sense of place, the sense of self, disintegrate in a generation?
1830:
“I
was myself last night, but
I fell
THE LOSS OF THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
43
asleep
on the mountain, and
thing’s changed,
they’ve changed
and I’m changed, and
who lam!” Washington
gun, and every-
can’t tell what’s
I
Irving set “Rip
my
Van Winkle”
my name,
or
in the 1770s, but
the story describes vividly the change of consciousness that had oc-
curred in the twenty years leading to
As the
last
its
own
time, 1820.
of the great old patriots of the Revolution died out, the
1820s looked back often to the 1770s, the heroic age, a lost time of
The grand
courage.
simplicity of the Greek Revival
that former integrity. In 1823 John Lowell,
happen
industrialist, wrote, “I
tion,
between the revolutionary
pears to have thought the
ill
was
a picture of
at ease in his
new
role as
to have lived ... in a middle generapatriots, 8c the
“modern man” would
modern man.” He apfind a
way to come
to
terms with machine thinking. But no such way has ever been found.
The
social historian
‘Who am
I?’
loomed
assumed even of
self,
the
Karen Halttunen writes of 1830, “The question
large;
.
.
.
and the question ‘Who
The way
greater significance.”
way
to create a sense of social place,
tude of complete honesty “by donning ‘sincere’
Looked
to
might be called the
first
you
remedy the was
‘sincere’
really?’
lost sense
to adopt
‘sincere’ dress,
forms of courtesy, and practicing at this way, the
are
an
atti-
adhering to
bereavement.”
Greek Revival, representing heroic
purity,
“sincere” style of American architecture.
The
Gothic Revival, the second, represented innocence of spirit. The NeoColonial house of the stands for
homespun
modern suburb tradition.
both be sincere and seem
When
the old
architecture.
But
buildings
recapture that sense of
a
form of such
Andre Gide
said,
“sincerity.”
It
“One cannot
so.”
way of seeing was
Our
as
is
life
show
displaced, a hollowness
a constant effort to
which was once
to be
fill
found
came
into
that void, to in
any house
or shed. But the sense of place was not to be recovered through any attitude, device, or style.
44
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
4
The
Principles of Pattern
Nature
is
contains
the
model variable and ,
infinite,
which
all styles.
AUGUSTE RODIN
Regulating Lines
To explore the regulating
lines in a building
is
to delve into the guid-
ing thoughts, the connections, the happy coincidences, that its
design, for these lines organize the
geometry of forms. The
are usually, but not always, hidden; they
may come
gables, for example, or decorative elements. ing, the regulating lines
show up
make up lines
to the surface in
When we analyze a buildof particles in a cloud
like the tracks
chamber, traces of the designer’s ordering thoughts. The regulating lines
merely connect the parts; to read them
tery but to be presented with
more and more
equipped with an unconscious (or nize such relationships
and
is
at least
to figure
not to solve the mys-
mysteries.
We
are well
nonverbal) ability to recog-
them out during
the design
process.
The presence of building
is
a
regulating lines does not necessarily
mean
the
harmonious composition, because another part of the
THE PRINCIPLES OF PATTERN
45
A system of 6o-degree regulating lines at three-foot intervals organizes the fa£ade of this 1811 commercial building in
Newburyport. The system are possible within far
it,
is
so strong that
and the
many variations
streetscape based
on
it is
from uniform.
On this church
(circa 1880)
Cheyenne, Wyoming, the little triangular dormers in
determine the placement of the lancet windows below, as well as of the
and the
46
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
finial
chimney
atop the spire.
Regulating lines at 45 degrees organize four simple openings in a plain white stucco wall of the O’Herlihy House, Malibu, California (Lorcan O’Herlihy, architect, 1989).
building
may
may have
regulating lines that define conflicting shapes, or
have no regulating lines
rudiments of pattern.
It is
at
all.
Almost every building has the
hard to draw a rectangle and divide
completely disharmonious segments.
with no pattern
at
all.
The mind
It is
key points on a rectangle. The eye
whole even
if
hard to make something
line
relates
the line
is
wall to determine the shape
is
a diagonal connecting
any element placed along
invisible.
might become the diagonal of a window;
yond the
into
balks.
The most common type of regulating
that line to the
it
it
The
regulating line
might continue up be-
and location of the chimney.
THE PRINCIPLES OF PATTERN
47
Lines parallel to
it
might become the roof slope. The
roofline, carried
through space to the ground beyond the building, might determine the location of a gate or an outbuilding, or
it
might point to a natural
object such as a boulder.
a c r
j
/
/ / /
d
/ / / /
2
/ /
b
/
/
/
/
f
/ /
/
/
b
L
71
'
7t
e
The diagonal marked
when
at least three
1-2-3
is
a
c
e
b
d
f
the regulating line. Shapes relate to one another
points line up
on
a regulating line.
One
of those points can
be the invisible center of the shape that contains the other shapes.
From any point on rectangle create relate to
two new rectangles of the same shape. For shapes
one another,
lating line.
One
the diagonal, lines parallel to the sides of the
at least three
of those points
key points have to
may be
fall
to
on the regu-
the invisible center of the
overall shape.
Regulating lines are usually the diagonals of the rectangles that
comprise an elevation; but they can be
48
circles or semicircles.
The lines
often
form a diamond grid on the
terns,
such as a sunburst fanning out from an arch or radiating
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
facade, but they can take other pat-
down
from
a
key point, as they do from the cross over the campanile
Mission San Gabriel in California (see page
55)
and
at the
at the
Jonathan
Stone House in Belmont.
On the Jonathan Stone House the unseen five
rays of the underlying pattern tie
all
bays of the right side strongly to the half-circle fanlight above the right-
hand door. Under the radiating pattern a regular diamond grid marches along, comes to a stop at the left door, then picks up again for the last two bays. The ratio of the rectangles these diagonals determine is 1 1.414 (V2), which the Romans favored. The regulating lines call out key points corners, midpoints, tops in the pattern of windows. The window spacings vary by as much as 15 percent, so the lines sometimes miss their mark. :
—
—
THE PRINCIPLES OF PATTERN
49
The 1920s Neo-Colonial adjoining the Jonathan Stone House has no overall pattern. Its central fanlight doesn’t connect to other elements, and a diagonal through the two center windows also leads to nothing. Note the similarity to the double windows and fan at Jaffrey (page 14). Regulating lines do link the upper and lower side windows and the front door. The goal is to “look Colonial,” not to create a form.
The
lines
pick-up
50
among key points on
sticks.
The
result
is
this 1930s
not so
much
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
house
in
Belmont are boredom.
ugliness as
as
random
as
On this little office building in
Chelsea, Vermont (circa 1825), two overlapform the ancient vesica piscis shape, and they set up a system of 30-degree regulating lines. The arrangement is too neat to be purely intuitive. The likely source would have been a pattern book. But there is enough play to keep it lively. Whether the builder or the pattern book maker did the playing
ping
circles
doesn’t matter. Unconsciously the photographer (the author) joins in the
game, making the building’s diagonals the basis of his picture.
The
much
regulating lines of the buildings
works the same way
from what
I
can
tell
as other designers’. In
make
me
my own
patterns very
that
my mind
experience,
of others’, the pattern of regulating lines
is
and
usually
or only partially known, to the designer. To set out deliber-
ately to design to a
with intuition;
most
design
those in other buildings. This says to
like
unknown
I
it
predetermined pattern
risks losing the
connection
can lead to dead designs, because the source of the
exciting inspirations
is
unconscious. But there are exceptions. In
THE PRINCIPLES OF PATTERN
51
designing renovations or additions or
infill
buildings, the
first
task
is
to figure out the pattern of the old building, if it has one.
many
In
sacred and public buildings of the past, the patterns of
regulating lines were deliberate because the shapes
had symbolic meaning.
It is
and
a sign of the mastery of the old designers
that they could be aware of the patterns
and not
part of the design doesn’t
seem
to
to analyze the regulating lines
Two Examples from
is
But in making the pattern
fit.
conscious, one risks having the design go
lose the magic.
own work when
Analysis of regulating lines can be useful in one’s
some
ratios often
stale.
I
believe the best time
after the structure
is
built.
My Experience
Sometimes the designer
through slow deliberation,
arrives at patterns
but often they are created very rapidly. Photographers produce highly ordered compositions, unconsciously, in for a
house
I
few seconds. The pattern
designed in Hamilton, Massachusetts, came to
instant, fully developed.
The house had
far.
a
I
was
with what
dissatisfied
a very elaborate floor plan
and
dull.
exterior looked
The plan was workable, but
The house needed I
The
I
just
an
seemed
levels,
and
to be flying
boxy and complicated
the elevation had to change.
a strong pattern to tie
suddenly had an idea, and
in
had designed so
on multiple
instead of pulling together, the different parts
apart in every direction.
I
me
it
drew
together. Riding
it.
That was
on
a bus,
how we
built
the house.
Three years
later
I
analyzed the facade and found that a pattern of
regulating lines organized the whole elevation. act
was deciding
to have a
sorb, consciously,
my mind labored
52
all
new
design.
It
took
My primary conscious me
a long time to ab-
the elements of the house, but
I
do not believe
slowly and silently behind the scenes to
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
make them
Regulating
lirfes,
invisible
and unconscious, organize the design
in the earliest
thumbnail sketch of the house in Hamilton, Massachusetts (Jonathan Hale, architect, 1985).
into a pattern.
relationships
I
believe the process of seeing
happened extremely
came
incidence that the design
rapidly,
to
once
me on
the drafting board. Watching the world
all
the implications it
began.
It is
and
no co-
the road rather than at
move by can
stimulate visual
intuition.
A
sunburst of regulating lines radiates from beneath the central
gable of a house
I
designed in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Radiating
patterns of this sort are sometimes found in stone arches; the joints
between the stones form
lines that
connect distant points on the
facade above. In the Cambridge house the pattern was a response to the clients request for a central gable that
In this case, there was
came out of
no
moment
single
a series of sketches. All
I
the elements of the house around until
same kind of pattern
made
a focal point.
of inspiration; the design
did consciously was to I
liked them.
The
result
move is
the
that organizes the campanile at the Mission
San Gabriel. But neither panile,
would be
I
nor,
I
suggest, the designer of the
that pattern consciously.
cam-
The house was designed and
THE PRINCIPLES OF PATTERN
53
The
regulating lines
on
this
house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, radiate from The client had
the central gable, determining the key points of the facade.
requested a focus at the gable. The conscious process of design was simply to move the windows around until they looked right (Jonathan Hale, 1988).
54
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
the working drawings were completed
gram of the
I
drew the
dia-
regulating lines onto them.
How do you
fit
the elements that
and those windows
—
make up
a facade
— those doors
into a proportioning system? Will
On the campanile of the Mission radiates
months before
from the center of the
San Gabriel
cross,
you be able
(1771) in California, the pattern
connecting the centers and spring points
of the arches, corners of openings, and steps in the wall.
THE PRINCIPLES OF PATTERN
55
The windows of the Robie House in Chicago (Frank Lloyd Wright, 1906) play on the regulating lines that govern the facade.
to find a
window
that does just
what you have
in
mind?
are a
How can you
compose when most of the elements of a building come out of a catalogue?
I
have found that the windows in catalogues are usually har-
monious forms. They
are designed to the ancient proportions. For
example, most of the Neo-Colonial windows and doors in the Andersen catalogue are variations on the famous Golden Section, the ratio 5
:
8, or,
more
precisely,
1
:
1.618.
The window shapes may have been
taken from eighteenth-century models, or their designers gravitated to the
Golden Section,
as
may
have
people often do without being
shown any models. If you
don’t find what you need in a catalogue,
dow made
56
up. For the
little
Cambridge house
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
I
you can have
a win-
used standard cata-
logue windows, except for two (the high, narrow windows
at the top).
Everything else came right out of a box. The designers of those win-
— they were Marvins and Broscos — knew, without thinking
dows about
what would be
it,
how to
likely to
knew
I
use them.
work
Regulating lines can
more three-dimensional House
work, and, in the same way,
No
in three dimensions.
exterior than Frank Lloyd
house has a
Wrights Robie
in Chicago. Its roofs slice across the air; instead of walls,
columns and
fins
and
it
floating planes. Yet the street elevation orga-
nizes perfectly into a two-dimensional system of regulating lines.
key points fit-within a diamond pattern very the Jonathan Stone
House of
1775.
much
like the
The Robie House
is
like a
multilayered ticktacktoe game.
exterior,
you
see
all
see only
one
flat
facade at a time.
In
my own
conceived
designs,
I
the Robie
works
House
make
you
have found that elements in very different
eye, seeing the finished building,
in distance, to
It
three dimensions at once; at the Stone House,
planes are also organized according to a
The
On
The
pattern of
within a two-dimensional grid and a three-dimensional grid.
both ways,
has
flat
system of regulating
lines.
compensates for the differences
the necessary connections.
Proportion
Proportion as c
is
is
the relation between two ratios: for example, a
to d. In a building, a
might be the width of
height, c the width of the wall in
d the height of that
wall.
a
which the window
The window and
is
to b
window, b is
placed,
the wall have the
its
and
same pro-
portions.
A
proportioning system
is
a framework. Departures
from
it
may
introduce excitement precisely because they differ from an under-
THE PRINCIPLES OF PATTERN
57
standable order. Openings in the facade
— doors, windows — may
follow the pattern, or their placement can be syncopated or purposely discordant.
When
changes are being
the pattern
makes
it
made
to a finished building,
possible to unify the alterations with the exist-
ing fabric.
Like other living things, the
proportions.
and
face,
When
human body
regulating lines are applied to the
are a few of the simplest
head
a person’s
and most common: the height
between head and
from
to the feet equals the distance
fingertip of the outstretched arms; the genital area feet;
fingertip to
the midpoint
is at
the ratio of the distance from the feet to the
navel to the person’s overall height
the
a rich system of
one finds an absolute symphony of proportional harmonies.
The following from
human body contains
is
human body has numerous Golden
the Golden Section,
1
:
1.618;
Section proportions and per-
mutations.
Proportion
is
may
if
get
you don’t tune
some
music, and still
We
is
to music. Ratios are the
harp on which you play the music.
strings of the
harp, or
to architecture as the scale
it,
you
are not going to get
interesting strange plunks
some
architecture, does that.
on the
much
and clanks
a
music. You
— and some
But in our modern age we
love to hear or see the old systems of prefer music based
you don’t have
If
harmonious proportions.
diatonic, or other
harmonious
scales
because those scales come from harmonic laws that are inherent in living nature.
What
I
call
magic
in architecture
is
not prestidigitation,
not supernatural emanations, but music. But the kind of power you
can get in music
is
lost to architecture if
you
leave out the
harmonic
relationships only proportioning systems can provide. Proportion
the nature of architecture. There
of shape.
And
that
58
—
architecture, but the
of all, they
an innately understood grammar
grammar, unlike speech,
things. Euclidian shapes
make
is
come from
the
cones,
is
expressed in
cubes, spheres —
deep patterns come from
human body and face.
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
is
all
living
are often used to life
forms. Most
Does
come
a building really
alive?
Music resonates
building, even a
power,
it
come
alive? Well,
in
does a piece of music really
our minds and our bodies.
good building, does not merely
own
brings out our
not an imitation of nature;
power.
it is
A
great
create an effect of
A building is not nature and
it is
an expression of our nature.
Scale
Scale in architecture in size that
fits
Adult humans are similar enough
most people. Dimensions based on the
to establish the
The house becomes size
relative size.
most furniture
body can be used
on the
is
dimensioning system of the house.
a composition of shapes, forms,
and spaces based
of its occupants.
The Ancient Canon of Measure If they exist today, if there are people or groups
who have
inherited the secrets of the ancient canon, their influence is
not very apparent. Clearly apparent, however,
modern need for
it,
the
those very qualities which the canon
ofproportion was supposed
adopted
is
to
impart
to societies
qualities of endurance, equilibrium
harmony under natural
which
and
law.
— john michell, The Dimensions of Paradise Ancient dimensioning systems combined sure, so that a building
embodied, quite
occupants and the world.
We have
human and
literally,
geodetic mea-
characteristics of
inherited an ancient international
system of measure whose numbers had geodetic, human, and tual
its
spiri-
meaning. The dimensions and ratios are found in the architec-
ture of dynastic Egypt, classical Greece
and Rome, medieval Europe,
THE PRINCIPLES OF PATTERN
59
and preindustrial Japan. Our twelve-inch foot is
such a dimension;
is
it
1/360,000 of 1/360 (one degree) of the circumference of the earth,
accurate to 99 percent. Did these cultures really size
may well
of the earth? They
was probably
for 360
it
precisely the
even more accurately,
a convention for the length of a year.
circumference of the earth
number of days
the real
known
have
know so
is
364.6
x 360,000
feet, a figure
The
real
so close to
one suspects the ancients had a
in a year that
reason to use the discrepancy deliberately; a multiplier of 365 makes
They would have
the foot accurate to 99.9 percent. five-day gap: 5
meaning and annual
x
x
6
12
=
closely tied to
scale,
sacred
the size of the earth, and the
cycle.
The Egyptian version of the shaku
number endowed with
360, each
human
reveled in that
is
11.93 inches.
represent
human
foot was 12.25 inches,
and the Japanese
The geodetic numbers were conventionalized
dimensions,
all
of which
fit
to
into a duodecimal sys-
tem: the twelve-inch foot; the eighteen-inch cubit (length from elbow to tip of
middle
finger);
and the
three feet, the English yard. is
three feet
by six
The
six-foot
is
three feet by three
only virtue of the meter, a geodetic measure the foot,
is
that
it is
divisible
by
is
tatami, the Japanese measure of area,
Our square yard
feet.
man, whose midpoint
ten.
It
The twelve-based foot-inch system
is
little
more
accurate than
associates to nothing but
harder to work with.
slow us down, but for a purpose: so that we can look
at
The
feet.
and
It
itself.
does
increase,
through everything we make, our part in the pattern. Unlike the ancients,
we tend not
to believe
we can
power of gods simply by making something three feet high, or
by using
a special ratio such as the
have no such innocence; and
measures and
ratios,
yet,
wide or
six
Golden Section.
We
feet
use their geodetic-human
our designs do link our bodies to the earth and
to time.
60
when we
tap into the
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
The Golden Section
An
egg,
human
an apple blossom, a
face, a seashell
—
all
embody
Golden Section proportions. The Great Pyramid of Cheops haps
its
most dramatic
facade follows
among
and Chartres Cathedral abounds
The Golden Section
Section harmonies. portion,
architectural expression, but the Parthenon’s
as well,
it
per-
is
is
Golden
also called the Divine Pro-
other superlatives. In this century
designated by the Greek letter
in
it
has
come
to be
Phideas, the architect of the
0, phi, for
Parthenon.
The proportion of the Golden Section plus b also equals
The
ratio a
is:
a
to b as b
is
+ V5V2,
or
is
to
c;
and a
b
is 1
equals 1.618. But in ancient times
it
would have been expressed
ratio of whole
:
+
=
length b
c.
numbers, such
length
c; c
+d=
:
as 3
e,
.
.
.).
The
numbers, but that if 0
=
1.618,
are related to
and so on. This
:
relation
is
1.618;
so 0 as a
represented
(1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21,
one another. Other
then 1/0 = 0.618, and 0
The Golden Section tions turn
1
34, 55, 89,
can extend to infinitely large and infinitely small
series all
(1
In the phi proportion, length a
5.
numerically in the Fibonacci series 144
:
is
up constantly
2
=
qualities of phi are
2.618.
intimately related to growth; phi proporin
growing forms. In one mode of growth,
elements of graduated sizes in phi proportion to one another are
added on without changing the shape of the whole. The best-known example
is
the nautilus shell,
whose chambers
increase in size while
keeping the same shape. Because of the relation of phi to the square root of 5, phi proportions are as starfish
and sand
dollars.
and the dodecahedron. The living structures.
ment
common
Phi
is
ratio,
to
all
contained within the icosahedron 1
:
1.272 (V0),
These numbers underlie
— and many
pentagonal forms, such
is
also
many an
common
ancient
in
monu-
a tree.
THE PRINCIPLES OF PATTERN
6l
a = .618
The logarithmic spiral of the Golden Section. Each dimension is
1.618
times the next smaller
dimension.
The shell of a chambered nautilus.
62
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
Golden Section the north rose
spirals in
window at
Chartres Cathedral.
The
oldest
known
rectangular space
embodying
phi-related pro-
Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, whose proportions are width = 1, length = 2, height = 1.118 (V5/2), and base diagonal = 2.236 (V 5). A rectangular volume is known as a rightportions
is
the King’s
angled parallelepiped (RAP). The overall volumes of
and Greek temples
RAPs of Golden
as well as
many
Egyptian
Romanesque and Gothic churches
Section proportions.
The RAP
1,
2.168 (o
2
),
are
4.236 (o
3
)
recurs in eighteenth-century furniture.
The
1
:
2 ratio,
which Frank Lloyd Wright favored,
the Golden Section because
its
diagonal
is
also relates to
the square root of
5,
from
THE PRINCIPLES OF PATTERN
63
Bruce Goff was the quintessential self- expressive artist- architect,
and the Bavinger House, 1950, one of his most famous and wonderful creations. Wild though the house may appear, in plan is
it
adheres to the logic of the
Golden Section as inexorably as a conch or a Greek temple.
which phi
is
derived.
It is
also easily adaptable to current building
products, such as 4-foot-by-8-foot plywood panels. Since the Golden Section proportion it
is
more
is 1
difficult to
:
1.618 (actually
an endless 1.618033989
use the ratio to cut
all
the parts to
very close, even-numbered approximation, however, tangle
64
(1
:
1.6).
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
is
the 5
.
.
size. :
.),
A
8 rec-
Le Corbusier’s Modulor man,
showing the key dimensions of his measuring system in inches, a
double
series
of
Golden Ratios (1 1.618) derived from human scale. :
The Modulor While Le Corbusier waited out the Nazi occupation of Paris during the Second
World War, he invented
corporated
human
scale
he called the Modulor,
a dimensioning system that in-
and the Golden Section. The system, which
is
a grid of
dimensions in phi proportion to
one another. The dimensions form two Fibonacci
series in
human
scale.
The Red
Series starts at 72 inches, the ancient conventionalized
height of a man; the Blue Series starts at 89 inches, the height of the
mans
upraised hand, or twice the height from floor to navel. For
larger sizes, these
dimensions are multiplied by 1.618; for smaller
sizes,
they are divided by 1.618 (or multiplied by 0.618). The system equally adaptable to meters or feet ries is
bers:
expressed in inches
(.
.
3, 5, 8, 13, 21,
it
and
34, 55, 89
.
.
when
the Blue Se-
series in
whole num-
inches, but
forms the Fibonacci
is
.).
Le Corbusier intended his system to be adaptable to every variety of design, from interlocking packing crates to the most elaborate buildings.
A
remarkably small number of Modulor dimensions can
be combined to create a wide variety of compatible shapes.
He
de-
signed a seventeen-story apartment house, the Marseilles Unite
THE PRINCIPLES OF PATTERN
65
d’Habitation, using only thirteen
Modulor dimensions. Le Corbusier
was fond of pointing out Modulor dimensions discovered
Modulor proportions
in
in old buildings;
he
thirteenth-century churches,
Egyptian tombs (the height of the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyra-
mid
is
a
Modulor
dimension)*, at Santa Sofia in Istanbul, at Pompeii.
Le Corbusier insisted that the proportioning system should not be the
first
step in designing a building.
for designing but for measuring.
beautiful designs, any architect
more than
and planner Jerzy
The Modulor was not
a system
The system alone could not
lead to
a piano alone can create music.
Soltan,
who worked
The
with Le Corbusier to
develop the Modulor, told me, “Le Corbusier forbade us to use the
Modulor
in
all
introductory stages of design. The Modulor
tremely dangerous
if
used to determine design.
It
is
ex-
should not be used
as a religion.”
The Modulor was invented war. But only a few followers
came forward
because Le Corbusier buried
The in
for the rebuilding of
it
in
its
uneven
sizes, is
to use the system, perhaps
and the extra labor involved
repaid by a wealth of harmonious
human-scaled forms. The Modulor awaits discovery.
66
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
after the
two almost impenetrable books.
struggle to understand the Modulor,
working with
Europe
Harmony, Ornament, and Symbol
Current arbitrary decoration lacks the
initial
emotional
impetus the authentic purpose, of gratifying the deep ,
primordial urge ... a pianist playing a Chopin nocturne
is
not concerned with acoustically adorning the living room.
RICHARD NEUTRA *
One purpose nect
it
to
is
to
ground the building
and con-
in nature
our bodies by imitating the ordering discipline of life forms,
especially
ing
of pattern
our own.
I
believe that to be recognized as a place, a build-
must embody the harmonic patterns of life forms. Talk of “har-
mony” and “embodying life forms” rubs some people The word “harmony” has been so apt.
I
mean
it
sentimentalized, but
wrong way.
the
no other term
is
in the musical sense, not in the sense of “have-a-
nice-day.”
As
for resembling
forms,
life
it is
underlying pattern, not any
“come
representation, that
makes
a building
ulate the landscape
much
as buildings do, are
alive.” Trees,
literal
which pop-
much more
generally
considered to be beautiful. But, as Frank Lloyd Wright said, a building should be like a tree, not look like a tree. tion,
The exception
where representation can work because
outside the patterns.
main form.
Harmony can be and
it is
it is
why we
that
embody
life
forms
refer to us,
are so attracted to them.
by the
It
can be
not immobility. The old way of seeing
not prettiness.
a diner
on or
it is
defined as the resonating play of shapes.
gentle or strong, but
cheap —
is
decora-
and people contain the same kinds of
Harmonious buildings
they are about us. That
repose,
Trees
applied,
it is
is
It
might be
side of the
soft or rough. It
road — or
it
is
not
might be
might be the Great
THE PRINCIPLES OF PATTERN
67
Audrey hepburn: Oh, no! How can you possibly make a model out of that?
You
can’t be serious!
fred astaire:
When
I
get
with you, you’ll look like
what do you
.
beautiful?
call
through .
.
well,
A tree.
You’ll look like a tree!
— from Funny Face
Pyramid, but the same design principles building means relationships that
One
it.
work with other
design can have a great deal of discord. In
no mistakes or mutations, the
will guide
result will
of the purposes of ornament
is
fact, if
be
it
Harmony
in a
doesn’t,
if there
Ornament
are
dull.
to pull the eye
toward the reg-
ulating lines of a building, to point out the key visual points of
geometry.
A
relationships.
its
strengthens the forms that are already there.
The powerful governing
patterns of the building are not decorative,
they are the architecture. They are inherent in the building, just as
what the building does also
embodies
inherent in
this pattern.
functions. In this
68
is
way
To be
a building
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
is
it:
this building
a pattern like
music.
is
is
a house,
and
it
one of the building’s
The sugar maple has the same proportions as Audrey Hepburn’s face;
she
but she
may not
is
look like a tree,
like a tree.
The
proportions are 2.618
:
tree’s
3.618,
both multiples of 1.618, or phi, the
Golden Section. Other
common tree shapes have the Golden Section proportions 0/2, 0/3, 1.5 0, and V0.
00
s no
2.618
Another purpose of ornament
is
symbolic. Decoration might take
the form of a series of statues that have specific meaning. But their
meaning may change or be
row of Paris
During the French Revolution
statues of the biblical kings
and smashed because the
later, replicas
not have able
lost.
from
was pulled off the Cathedral of
statues represented royalty. Fifty years
were put back. Unlike the
much
artistic
a distance.
spiritual or political.
originals, the
new
statues did
value in themselves, but this was not notice-
The row of kings had It
a great
lost all
was restored primarily
symbolic meaning,
in order to
complete
the composition.
THE PRINCIPLES OF PATTERN
69
Even routine embellishment can be
attractive.
The garlands and
swags of Neo-Classicism are entirely remote from the traditions and
myths
had meaning
that
On the friezes of old
for their first designers.
banks and courthouses you
protruding vertical
will often see little
groups of three, “triglyphs.” The architect had no idea what
stripes in
they meant; they were part of the Classical vocabulary, and the building would not be
comme
such decoration
social,
is
il
faut without them. The “form” dictating
and the sought-for
to express authority, which,
among
result
is
to instill respect,
other things, the Classical idiom
symbolized. ceases to emphasize the regulating lines that
make
the building a pattern, then the decoration weakens the design.
Weak
But
if decoration
design often shows up as confusion between ornament and deeper
happened
pattern, as
where
in
some Post-Modern
architects played with decoration
buildings of the 1980s,
tongue in cheek.
I
think they
burlesqued embellishment because they were nervous about bringing it
back
after
it
had been forbidden
thought to be wrong because
it
for so long. Decoration
was so often used
to conceal the absence of elemental forms.
comed
superficiality
part of a composition. But
meaning, while composition are almost invisible as is
ancient times buildings. falo,
and
one
all is
fit
(or not) if they are viewed as
symbols are freighted with verbal
nonverbal. Extremely strong symbols
forms because the mental noise of feeling and
common enough;
in
meant prosperity and well-being. Swastikas haunt old
They adorn the mosaic
floor of
for each elevator; they lurk in the
in the
The Post-Moderns wel-
too strong. The swastika used to be it
in the Victorian age
itself.
Symbolic elements can be seen to
association
had been
an
office building in Buf-
ornament of old churches
linoleum of old kitchen cabinets. But today the swastika
is
anathema.
Symbols have great power, but they do not have the same power
from one generation
70
to the next because their
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
meaning changes. The
meaning of proportional forms always and they are
tied to emotions,
Symbols are
stays the same.
also tied to information, special
knowl-
know about Nazism, a swastika will have no meanknow about proportion but you do know about
edge. If you don’t ing. If
you don’t
—
proportion, because to recognize proportion Section has the same meaning
now
that
it
is
The Golden
innate.
did two thousand years
ago.
The pentagram
a
is
right into the present. triangles.
symbol we have carried from the distant past It is
We have retained
the five-pointed star it, I
made of intersecting
think, precisely because
it is
a
Golden
Golden Section relationships in a pentagram. Each line segment multiplied by 1.618 (phi) gives the next line segment, and each line
segment added to the
previous one gives the next line
X
Z
R
X T
P
T
A'-
A'
D'
XZ/RX = RX/PT = PT/A'
XZ + RX =
PT,
0.382
02
0.618
0
1
1.0
P
A'-
segment.
1.618
0
2.618
02
4.236
0
3
P = A' T/A' D’
RX + PT =
A'
P,
A' P + A‘ T = A' D'
THE PRINCIPLES OF PATTERN
71
Section form;
it is
in a way, sacred.
a remarkable collection of relationships.
It is
on the wings of our
airplanes;
it is
It is still,
on our
flag;
and many
other peoples use the pentagram as well: a pentagram un-
derlies the
Canadian maple
a
leaf,
symbol of the human body but
for example. also a
The
five-pointed star
is
symbol of the heavens and an
unchanging symbol of life.
A pentagram connects key points on
maple
a
leaf.
great ancient symbols
The primary purpose of the
is
not to influ-
ence, not to remind, not to create a “sense” of devotion or history or
community or symbol such
value or place.
as the
The purpose of an ancient geometric
pentagram
knowledge of innate pattern.
72
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
is
to bring to awareness the innate
Mystery and the Rules of Proportion During the age of the old way of seeing,
seems people did not un-
it
derstand that beautiful patterns, precise and subtle, came from a process of intuitive play.
had
to
be prescribed. They believed
around them, even
and
They believed
in the
this
that proportioning systems
even as patterns flowered
most ordinary buildings
and sheds of simple houses, not
sides
just
didn’t matter that they did not understand their
making get
it
ability.
But when the magic was
lost,
light
own
there
facades.
and shade,
it
innate pattern-
was no
clear
way to
who had the old way of seeing did not know what it were doing. Harmony came from pattern, as anyone could
back. Those
was they
Pattern was measurable and teachable.
see.
— on the backs
on the public
So long as people saw buildings as patterns in
all
It
was understood
that a
building was a form of music.
The Gothics, tervals to
intentionally following the Greeks, used musical in-
determine architectural forms. They also understood the
proportions of the
human
body, and they put those patterns into
buildings. But they did not talk about the process of play; they did not talk
about the designer’s frame of mind. Pattern was taught; architec-
ture as music
was taught, and every place came
music went out of architecture, get
it
back.
It
great church
rules
But when the
and systems were not enough
had not been understood
embodied the same
alive.
that the village square
patterns,
and
that their
to
and the primary
source was unconscious knowledge. Until the Victorian age, the magical
sense of place was not discussed because
It
tion.
it
was always present.
was understood that there was something magical about propor-
An
air
of secrecy and initiation has always attached to propor-
tioning systems.
The
sign of the Pythagoreans, for example,
was the
THE PRINCIPLES OF PATTERN
73
pentagram; they were forbidden to reveal that
it
was an extremely
rich expression of phi proportions. Proportioning systems connect us to the nonverbal side of
our minds, the “magic”
“magic,” “secret,” “mystery” architectural proportion.
is
that the “mysterious har-
monies” are the source of much of the sense of in buildings. Until
common
in
human
The words
tend to crop up in literature about
still
The paradox
meaning
side.
reality, place,
and
our age proportioning systems were as
artifacts as
they are in trees and flowers. Per-
haps an element of fear underlay the old unconscious pattern making, we
rules:
we
will control the
not acknowledge what
will
is
not
conscious.
Form
is
a highly charged subject because
known powers form
inside
and outside
in nature tends to
why
past, mystical explanations
if
we
power, making
its
power
in ourselves
is
temples and pyramids, and
to bulldozers that
but they cannot easily say
unknown
at old
makes us aware of un-
our time the universality of
go unnoticed, and
unacknowledged. People gawk
some chain themselves
us. In
it
would demolish old houses,
they are so passionate about
it.
In the
were one way to put meaning onto that
it all
right to use one’s intuitive power. But
accept that intuition does have control, then intuition can link us
to the universe without mystical explanations.
The Old Priority The ancient Greeks There was
was
are said to have
had two kinds of mathematics.
utilitarian arithmetic, the lower, less respected kind,
for toting
up
their
which
amphoras; and then there were the number
systems of harmony, the patterns of geometry and music. These be-
longed to the higher branch, the “better” branch of mathematics. Similarly,
74
one can look
at a
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
house
in
two ways. The
first
looks at
comfort and place?
utility,
the other at form.
Does the house come
alive?
“here” in this building? In our age
because ages,
we have been
still
got
it
it is
is
we
focus
first.
the electrical service.
What
is
this
on the comfort compared
side.
And
to previous
important to our health in some ways, we
backward and that the Greeks had
— comes
asks,
alive here? Is there a
more important than form. But
bodies the sacred ratios bodies
Do we come
so successful at comfort
because comfort
tend to think
The second
—
it
I
hold that we have
right.
How a place em-
the patterns that define the form of our
Today a builder talking about “power” means
Comfort seems
to give freedom, but
do much with freedom unless you have the power
you
to express
can’t
it.
THE PRINCIPLES OF PATTERN
75
5
Spirit
The
Vesica Piscis
These walls these surfaces that you see are imprinted ,
,
with the life-giving flame that subordinates the world to
primary
ideas.
— claude-nicolas ledoux, There
is
a shape in architecture that symbolizes
the materialization of
spirit.
That shape
come
is
c.
a place
where symbol and
way
spirit
what architecture
is.
The shape
and animals.
the shape of a flame, or a seed, or a
— of
it is
the fish,
The vesica It
It is
and
piscis
may seem
known
is
it is
together. In this
is
also called the
is
mandorla
—
fish.
In sacred
literally
(Italian for
bladder
almond).
circles overlap.
questionable whether
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
the shape
be found everywhere in plants
to
as the vesica piscis, vessel
made when two
1790
that represents
life,
geometry, body and
architecture
76
architect,
we should
pattern our buildings
after fish or nuts or flames.
Christ
in a vesica piscis
sits
pointed arch
shape
is
But the Gothics did
is
repeated like an incantation wherever one looks, and
building
is
an efflorescence of overlapping
area where the circles overlap
is
the
where
it
We
circles.
may
a
Gothic
almost never join.
The
most important part of the
pat-
which they
represents the place of harmony, awakening, grace.
is
it
becomes an
The geometry of
see the complete circles, but only the places at
piscis
the Gothic
half of a vesica piscis. In every Gothic church, the
enclosing geometry of regulating arcs.
it
And
above the West Portal.
persist invisibly in the building’s cross section,
tern;
At Chartres,
just that.
an emblem of unity achieved from
—
joining of the temporal and the spiritual
duality.
The
vesica
represents the
It
as architecture itself does.
The Victorians loved the Gothic shadows and
spires for their
quaint wild innocence. They used the pointed arch to symbolize the passion of faith
— emotion
as
opposed
However, to a
to intellect.
twelfth -century builder, the vesica piscis represented not opposition
but the area where emotion and
To the Gothic
came
intellect
together.
architect, the vesica piscis appears to
ing symbol that imparted
its
have been a
qualities in real life to the
to the physical structure of the building
itself.
liv-
occupants and
At Saint George’s
Chapel, Windsor, a pattern of overlapping circles determines the thicknesses of the nave walls
and the locations of the
buttresses.
It
seems a risky approach to structural physics, but the builders did not leave out 1482.
common
sense altogether, for the chapel has stood since
Perhaps their goal was merely to align structure with sacred
geometry rather than
to derive structure
was some ambiguity
in their
physical
minds;
I
from
it;
but
I
suspect there
suspect they believed in the
power of spiritual shapes.
The Hotel-Dieu of Beaune,
built in 1443, nestles safely in a largely
invisible pattern of vesicas. Parts of vesicas
the ceiling
and the arch of the
central
can be seen in the curve of
window.
A
larger vesica sur-
SPIRIT
77
The
Windsor number, and relationships had sacred meaning. The church structure was meant to embody the patterns of heaven and invoke their power. It was not a matter merely of regulating lines in the cross section of Saint George’s Chapel,
(1482),
were
a highly deliberate pattern; their shapes,
inducing visual pleasure or reverence, for the view we see visitor; the
is
invisible to
any
purpose was to vibrate to the music of the spheres.
rounds the whole building and locates the roof peak and the base of the walls. sick,
The
secret
whose beds
The
shape
is like
giant amulet protecting the
line the walls of the great
force of such guiding
why medieval
some
room.
geometry makes
it
easier to
architects felt free to take liberties with
they were so casual about consistency of
detail.
understand
symmetry, why
In side view, the
Hotel-Dieu rambles; windows and moldings are misaligned, dormers sprout as needed. But in cross section
We, cles
78
in
it is
a finely
tuned instrument.
our day, cannot believe that the inscription of invisible
around
a hospital will heal the sick. Isn’t
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
it
mere
cir-
gesture, or delu-
The Hotel-Dieu
(1443) in Beaune, France.
The whole building
safely in the invisible pattern. Circles overlap to create vesicas vesicas,
symbolizing Christ and wholeness. The ceiling vault
is
nestles
upon half of a
circles. The center whose circles touch the vault and the tie-beam. The largest vesica, centered on the tie-beam, encloses the whole building, determining the roof peak and the base of the walls.
vesica; the
tiebeam forms the center line of its two
window is
the top of another vesica,
sion,
now, for us to express the old geometry in buildings?
Isn’t
the
poignant attraction of ancient architecture in part the ruined old belief that a
building can invoke heaven on earth?
Isn’t it just
mud-
SPIRIT
79
The three mandorla portals of the west fa9ade of Notre-Dame in Paris (circa 1210). A diamond pattern of regulating lines, at an angle of 7 on 6, links the portals as well as other key points on the fa9ade. This is only one of many systems of regulating lines that organize the cathedral. Drawing by Violletle-Duc, 1843.
80
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
died mysticism to think the ancient patterns have any power in the present?
On
the west facade of the Cathedral of
Notre-Dame of
Paris, just
over the left-hand portal (built around 1210), are two incised lines
make an
that
angle in the shape of a gable.
I
used to wonder
why they
were there, so plain, over only one door, the Portal of the Virgin. They are a rare explicit statement of regulating lines.
No
tracery softens
them, no roof projects from them. Here, in a most surprising place,
raw geometry. The shape pose If
is
clearly there for a purpose, but the pur-
not immediately obvious.
we extend
tern of three
the facade.
the lines,
diamonds
The
overlapping
diamonds point
is
grees has a slope of 7
same symbolism
Why
on
6.
is
to the four statues that
a mandorla,
and the bot-
an odd angle, one thinks
The reason
It
turns out that 49.4 de-
for that slope
is
woven
far
more ancient
number had meaning. Seven was
the
number of
This was her cathedral, and the sented perfection, and
it
left
portal
systems,
the Virgin.
was her door. Six repre-
also represented time. Ratios that expressed
certain spiritual qualities were built into the cathedrals. like
into the
diamonds and the mandorlas. In the
Gothic cosmology, which derived from every
at
square root of the Golden
not 45 degrees?
that locates the
of
the portals are segments of
much more common
Section, 51.8 degrees?
tier
bottom of a diamond.
also the
lines are at 49.4 degrees,
not the
bottom
that connect key points in the
Each area of overlap
tom of each mandorla
Why
see that they are the beginning of a pat-
The pointed arches of
circles.
The angled
we
sides of the
flank the doors.
first.
is
is
They were
numerical prayers.
We
do not believe
of
number and
on
earth,
it
can
son a cathedral
as purely as the cathedral builders in the
shape. But still still
if a
evoke what “works,”
powers
building no longer can create heaven is
still
heavenly and earthly in us. The reainspires, excites, attracts,
patterns resonate with the shapes of our
is
that
own bodies and the shapes
its
of
SPIRIT
81
the plants
and animals around
shape of seeds, peach sects, fish,
and
pits,
The
birds.
us.
many
The
vesica
leaves
form of the
flow. His
the conventionalized
trees,
controversial psychiatrist
helm Reich, who studied the vesica shape basic
and
is
living”
and
said
it
in
the bodies of in-
and
some depth,
scientist
came from
called
it
Wil“the
patterns of energy
term for the vesica was “orgonome.”
A Pacific pompano. This form
and
its
commonly
very
is
associated with the
Golden Section
permutations. In living things the vesica/mandorla/orgonome
tends to be somewhat flattened at one end, as in an egg. Reich points
out that
it
often curls into a bean or kidney shape,
than an almond. rives
overlapping
circles inscribed in a larger circle rather
circles.
growth, in which
like a
cashew
then resembles the yin-yang symbol, which de-
It
from adjacent
more
I
think the
size increases
orgonome
than from
relates to the process
while shape remains the same —
of a
process related to the Golden Section, which permits such additions.
There
is,
as yet,
no consensus about the reason
for the
of the flame shape in nature, although the question
than
it
now more open
has been. “You have seen leaves,” writes the physicist Albert
Libchaber.
“.
.
that the flame
82
is
preponderance
Now, is
this
in
your kitchen,
shape again.
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
It’s
if you
turn on your gas, you see
very broad. Its universal.
I
don’t
care whether
growing
it’s
crystal
a burning flame or a liquid in a liquid or a solid
— what I’m
interested in
is
this
shape .”
On Growth and Form is the most famous book Thompson discusses the shape in his studies of the
D’Arcy Thompsons
on natural shape.
energetic determinants of tissue forms, but he does not investigate
why a Dover It is
and
religion loves, because the
gonome
is its
ubiquity.
eat for breakfast,
need
to
same form.
a sassafras leaf should take the
surprising that science has paid so
which
1
sole
most obvious point about the
everywhere
It is
the oats
in
attention to this shape,
little
my
—
in a dandelion leaf, the egg
The orgonome
Cheerios.
be sought out. The shape
deeply sacred and
is
or-
doesn’t utterly
it is
ordinary.
I’m driving along, and
on
pass a yellow truck, and
I
red vesica piscis, and in the vesica are the letters Tire Warehouse.
A
No,
that the
don’t like
I
vesica
still
it
it is
painted a big
TW. They
stand for
twentieth-century vesica, a vesica for our time. life
has power, and
symbol should be used
to sell tires.
The
has the potential for misuse, and this
it
is
why should
misuse. But the sign maker never heard of a vesica piscis;
anyone care?
An it is
ear of corn, a thigh
.
.
.
that big red vesica
a sexual shape, of course. But
is its
value?
Not
just universality; that
awfully nice but too good.
shape look
calls to
at
what
something
The
is
is
very powerful, and
sacred about
word
vesica
in us, that
is
is
something
more
like
to us?
What
“brotherhood”
like
is
it
it, I
else.
think.
To say
We
—
this
have to
it.
Some
of the attraction of the vesica piscis
wildness and logic. kernels, eggs.
It is
is its
combination of
the visceral shape, the food shape:
The meaning of the
vesica piscis
stract goodness, the unity of all things.
muscle and blood and food. The vesica
The
is
more than
vesica piscis
piscis is
fish,
is
wheat
just ab-
sex
and
animal and therefore
SPIRIT
83
a
little
The
smelly.
The
vesica piscis
and
vesica attracts see the logo
I
The
and therefore a
spirit
little
abstract.
repels.
a van: F-o-r-d rolling along in a blue vesica piscis.
label looks like a sort of good luck
way you
Is it
on
it
is
charm.
I
say
it’s
fine.
Use
any
it
like.
important that we unify our buildings and other
the shapes
and patterns of nature? What does
it
artifacts
with
matter that the dead
fox by the side of the road curls into the same shape as
my kidney or
my stomach? But the shape of
life
in
it;
is fire.
he made the black
when we
flame leaps up in us
means allow things
dered
and life
Van Gogh painted
the burning bush, the
fire visible in trees. It is
see
we make
forms. There
it is
fire.
The
something we recognize. So by
that sexual connotation. Sex
places
our
fire
are another.
Our
to be seen in
is
one aspect of
reality
is
all
the
it;
a universe of or-
any bird or pinecone.
We call
back to those forms in the things we make. Vesicas
swarm up
the terra cotta of Louis Sullivan s Guaranty
Building in Buffalo. Vesicas are the glass skylights of the lobby; vesicas
stair balusters
surround the
and the stained
elevators. Sullivans
student, Wright, placed a vesica pool at the base of his spiral; there are
member the
A
Guggenheim
two dozen more vesicas in the museum’s plan. “Re-
seed-germ,” said Louis Sullivan.
building should be like a tree, said Frank Lloyd Wright.
comparison did not
refer only to structural systems,
such as the “tap-
root” foundations or “dendriform” columns he developed. tural analogy to a tree has
charm. But there
Wright was
way a
meaning,
its
The
practical use,
the flame of the tree to be considered.
also saying a building should express the fire of
struc-
and I
its
think
life,
the
tree does.
Why
84
is
its
The
is
a feather like a fish?
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
Why
is
a building like a
body? The
Vesica patterns of the skylight in Louis Sullivan’s Guaranty Building (1894),
New York.
Buffalo,
vesica piscis
is
a riddle
and
—
for
—
our time
a
dilemma:
in the past,
there were supernatural reasons to include the sacred shapes. are
thrown back upon
why
the vesica
builders stition, spirit.
had
—
is
ourselves.
Our
How
so important.
spirit
— without
they look childish; but
The animal truth
culture are
Now we
no longer has any idea
we
to get
what ancient
their belief in spirits? In their super-
we
wells up,
are far
more
and we blurt
ridiculous to deny it
out on the sides
of trucks.
In a is
dream
I
am
canoeing on a deep, clear
like a giant vesica leaf. Silvery fish
swim
lake.
My dark green canoe
slowly twelve feet down.
I
SPIRIT
85
notice
I
am
near a sandbar.
around me. Car
lots
and
On
fast
the sandbar
is
a gas station.
I
food restaurants parade up and
look
down
the shores.
The formerly sacred geometry Golden Section
—
still
— the
vesica piscis, the pentagram, the
comes out of us
our nature. The world of architecture
into the things
is still
we make.
It is
the world the ancient sys-
tems of geometry and measure describe. The architectural universe local to us;
it is
the world
we can
and touch. But the
see
and
vesica
is
all
of the other forms of ancient geometry are perceived mostly by the
mind
unconsciously, and such a
odds with the modern way of
mode
seeing.
of perception seems to be at
The old
fire-and-life
symbol
may seem more dangerous than it once did because we attempt to derstand
through
it
intellect.
The most famous is
un-
vesica (or half- vesica) in
American architecture
the top of the Chrysler Building, the single masterpiece of William
Van Alen, who designed
What could be more
it
in 1929.
What could be more modern?
ancient? Yet the form, for
all its
energy,
is
some-
how superficial. Even without its frieze of giant hubcaps and its hoodornament love I
gargoyles, the tower
would be
believe the principles of
its
know
growth and energy that underlie the
own all
sake.
I
am not in love with the mystery
But the way we know the vesica
piscis,
pattern, will always be in darkness, because
conscious.
86
we do
it.
vesica piscis in nature are knowable. for
a stunt, a pitch. But
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
it is
the
way we
largely un-
The Nothing John Donne’s “Negative Love or The Nothing”
Donne
leaps into blackness, the
worthy of his
a goal
love,
unknown
is
a song of intuition.
dark,
and there he
finds
only there in darkness, where the intellect
sees nothing.
I
never stoop’d so low, as they
Which on an Seldome
eye, cheeke, lip,
to them,
Then vertue or
can prey,
which soare no higher
mind
the
to’admire,
For sense, and understanding
Know, what
may
gives fuell to their
fire:
My love, though silly, is more brave, For If
I
may I misse, when ere I crave, know yet, what I would have.
If that
be simply perfectest
Which can by no way be But Negatives
To If
All,
,
which
exprest
my love is so. all
love,
any who deciphers
I
say no.
best,
What we know not, our selves, can know, him teach mee that nothing; This
Let
As
yet
my ease,
and comfort
Though I speed
“My
love,
Donne’s
though
poem
is
silly,
is
not,
I
is,
cannot misse.
more brave
that mixture of humility
.” .
.
What moves me
and courage. He
in
risks fol-
lowing what he does not understand, walking right into the unknown.
What
is
most important
to
him cannot be understood. What seems
to
be nothing contains the mystery and source of “perfectest” love.
SPIRIT
87
Donne
describes the primacy of intuition over intellect.
know, study, understand, control,
is lesser.
The
of prettiness,
details
the moral virtues, are a lower sort of love. But intuition goal, are invisible
and dark, “nothing”
What we
and
grace,
its
to intellect, “silly.” Intuition
goes where intellect cannot reach, without effort and outside of time. It is
the shift to the old
Poetry, flat
and
music, however,
it
way of seeing. on the page, often
silent
comes
to
life.
doesn’t reach me. Set to
In John Adams’s setting of Donne’s
poem, part of the composer’s “Harmonium,” the words struse in print are full of meaning.
crescendo
Adams
that
seem ab-
builds the music to a
at the lines
any who deciphers
If
best,
What we know not, our selves, can know, him teach mee that nothing
Let
What Donne ness.
I
sometimes think of
In architecture, the Nothing
shadow and space ness, in
and
the Nothing,
calls
life.
is
also space.
The shadows
are real.
my meaning of the word,
the
do not
in a building are the dark-
unknowable power behind love
represent they are the Nothing, there, in the ,
present, in the building. But create the effect that
one
is
if
one arranges shadows consciously
mystery of grace
is
not an
may I
feelings.
cludes judgment, and
if
misse
.” .
.
The
effect.
part of us that grasps the reality of the Nothing
do not mean
to
“there,” in the real darkness of intuition,
such manipulations will weaken the design: “For
I
In architecture,
In buildings, shadows and space do not symbolize the Noth-
ing, or grace; they
The
as the dark-
Not there
I
call intuition.
that feelings are bad, but intuition inis
one thing
feelings are not about,
it is
judgment. Architecture able,
88
is
intuitive. Intuition, as
but only within one’s
own
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
I
mean
it, is
experience. Intuition
entirely reasontells
me what
is
me
important for ence
me
tells
What can an
,
“tru e” for me. Science
the brick wall architect
is
often counterintuitive. Sci-
have just built
I
is
be a place,
to
know how much
I
mostly empty space.
do with such information?
the intellectual point of view for a time. If that
is
am
I
do not throw out the
I
must
leave
behind
to design a building
practical facts
weight the wall will support); but
I
(I
change
need to
my point
of view in order to design using the facts intellect has given me.
may
intellect
buildings
tell
me
mixing up “love-grace-the Nothing” with
that
childish at best; but
is
my intellect cannot make a place.
Unreal City
.
.
Unreal City
.
.
Unreal
The words
are strewn
My
through
.
.
T. S. Eliot’s
was working on that poem of modern
The Waste Land. While he
dissociation, Eliot gave a talk
about Donne’s way of seeing, the old way of seeing. “Tennyson and
Browning their
are poets,
thought
Donne was an The ture; lect,
split
as
and they
think,” Eliot said, “but they
immediately as the odour of a
experience
A
feel
thought to
.” .
from intuition
Donne’s “Nothing”
rose.
do not
is
.
Eliot describes
is
also
found
in architec-
absolutely real in architecture. But intel-
cut off from intuition, cannot perceive this Nothing; hence the
slightly
derogatory “Metaphysical” label
who was
entirely concrete
the Nothing was
critics
applied to Donne,
about his experience. Donne could see that
real.
SPIRIT
89
Darkness
Little to
is
be expected of that day
to
,
if it
can be called a day
;
which we are not awakened by our genius
... to a higher
we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear and prove itself to be good, no less than the light.
than
life
fruit,
its
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
I
have just come out of an early- eighteenth -century house in Dennis
on Cape Cod. charm.
It is
On
the outside the house has that familiar mysterious
just a little “off” a little asymmetrical,
Not
old temple.
— was — but has
literally
Greek Revival facsimiles
built a
it
it
however, the rooms were not
and
it
looks like an
hundred years before the
that old-young-wise
much more
Inside,
feel.
than compartments.
not want to stay in them. They were not delightful.
I
wanted
I
did
to get
out again. The inside seemed secondary to the outside.
The average eighteenth- century American
much
interior does not have
excitement in the daytime. The important space seems to be
the outdoors.
The rooms lighted.
The
inside
is
dim, the windows seem a
little
too small.
are not interestingly shadowy, they are just inadequately
The
furniture seems too big, the ceilings too low. In the day-
time such rooms usually became backgrounds for the tables and chairs
and
chests
and desks and
for the clothing of the occupants.
the house in Dennis the question tugs
come
to
life
and not the
A year later swer.
The
I
90
house
at night,
furniture fades into the dark.
become deep
the corners sparkle.
The
the outside
inside?
visit a similar
candlelight they
on me: why does
At
and there
I
have
The shadows belong
my an-
there;
by
rather than dreary. Little objects off in
ceilings
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
and the windows
are
no longer too
low, because
we
lives at night.
That
meant
when
meant
it is
is
to be seen.
whose meaning
a kind of darkness
A building can be like a body,
death.
We
is
And
interior
the outside
is
be seen by day.
to
There
down. The eighteenth-century
are sitting
and
is
fecundity rather than
inside our bodies,
it is
dark.
have become unused to the intimate darkness. Even more than
the old
American houses, the old
interiors of Japan
were designed for
darkness.
At
the edge of the
little circle
of light, the darkness seemed
to
fall from the ceiling, lofty, intense, monolithic, the fragile light
of the candle unable
from a black
to pierce its thickness,
wall. ... It
was a
repletion, a
luminous as a rainbow.
particles like fine ashes, each particle .
.
.
turned back as
pregnancy of tiny
The elegant aristocrat of old was immersed
suspension of ashen particles, soaked in
it,
in this
but the
man
of
today, long used to the electric light, has forgotten that such a
darkness existed.
JUNICHIRO TANIZAKI
Imperfection
Something draws us
to imperfection
which nothing works,”
as
Edgar Degas
ined building has a wildness about ent discipline.
An
begins to be a
it still
it
“that hint of ugliness without
is
supposed to have
little
more
way.
its
like
It
an old
has the old power, but the
said.
A ru-
and, at the same time, an inher-
eighteenth-century house that has
down can be very alluring in it
—
keeps
its
rhythm,
tree. It still
civility
become run-
has
its
its
form, but
outlines
and
has been stripped away.
Eighteenth-century designers seem to have been conscious of the
danger of being too perfect.
Many
houses of that time have what
SPIRIT
9i
92
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
Opposite page: this
house
The William Burtch House, Quechee, Vermont (1786). In decay genteel and its lines are more powerful. The same qualities
is less
of imperfection, wildness, incompleteness, cause
many architects to
like their
buildings best before they are finished.
The Nathan Winslow House called a “three-quarter
in Brewster, Massachusetts,
house” when
the struggle between dignity
it
was
would have been comes from
built in 1738. Its force
and lopsidedness.
SPIRIT
93
appear to be deliberate “errors .” The rhythm will be thrown off by a foot, so that
one of the bays
just a bit
is
wider than the others;
this
can happen in quite an elegant house. Such variations are often part of the original fabric.
Gothic cathedrals are famous for such vagaries. The cathedral will
be going along serenely, and with tremendous order and complexity,
when suddenly it will
take a
little
bend, or perhaps a
fairly large
Chartres, for example, goes off center; so does Notre-Dame.
be thought that
this
happened because the
bend.
used to
It
walls were following old
footings or for other structural reasons, or that the builders didn’t
have the technology to be accurate. the
human
sense that too
make your building too
perfect,
But the cathedrals go sional flaw.
I
think
it
much
far
think there
I
perfection
you throw
is
it
a
is
bad
off in
another reason, thing;
you don’t
some way.
beyond the mere inclusion of an occa-
was the conscious and deliberate purpose of the
builders to express both death
and
life
in the great churches: inconsis-
tency and decay amidst order and beauty. The cathedrals embrace mystery.
They
are
meant
to
embody
aspects of being, the qualities hate.
we
eternal radiance amidst
love
and the
qualities
we
all
fear
the
and
There are the exuberantly perfect rose windows and the myriad
harmonious patterns hidden
in the plans
and
elevations;;
and there
are the glaring mistakes, the arbitrary changes, the shadows,
and the
cabalistic secrets.
Above the arches of the
many Gothic the triforium.
them
is
churches
the triforium evoke
the glass, heaven. Just as death
was always
The
is
is
fear.
explicit in
implicit in the architecture
But above
many Gothic
itself. It is
more visible
there.
cathedrals are shadowy, like ruins; their flying buttresses
ribbed vaults, where the skeleton
94
band of arches and columns,
now that the brilliant paint and gilding and tapestries are gone,
today, it
a windowless
The shadows of
sculptures, death
but
is
but beneath the highest windows in
aisles
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
is
and
exposed, are like pieces of ruined
The Church of Saint-Severin in Paris. Gothic forms embody both sides of life, and death and the side of growth and joy and birth. The buttress soars, but it is faintly repellent, like a bone in a carcass. the side of decay
SPIRIT
95
The
buildings.
cathedrals are unfinished.
None was
built as
its first
master intended. As successive masters took over the design, they spected not the
master’s total concept but the principles the
first
master followed. Like a cathedral, a ruin also embodies both death. But a ruin
cathedral
is
a
accidental;
is
first
life
and
cannot be used or replicated.
A
working building.
and Tension
Taste
Some people
dislike the
Richardson (1838-1886). taste
it
re-
ponderous, dark buildings of Henry Hobson think his architecture
I
was acquired. In the
1950s,
when
good design were
the models for
is
wonderful, but that
was discovering
I
crystalline, clear,
and
architecture, light
—
glass
boxes, like Lever
House on Park Avenue. The work of Richardson was
hard to look
But Richardson used the same principles of pattern
that
made
tures;
at.
moderns
the
and shadows
and substance,
—
all
On
great.
modern
buildings;
and brown
buildings.
there are so few shadows in
and
that rock;
Richardsons buildings squat like his buildings, fat
top of that, he had wonderful tex-
and
color, red
Richardson himself looked
like trolls.
hairy.
But he knew his forms, the ancient
natural shapes. Richardson’s architecture shows tactile
and
physical,
and
how buildings
can be
same time keep the old grandeur, the
at the
old presence. In Richardson’s buildings, the pull
is
often between rich, subtle
proportion and rough, heavy materials. Richardson designed the
Crane Library, tiny dormers, in
its
lizards
Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1880. Eyebrow windows,
form a rippling wave across the
way. But the
—
are eyelid
96
at
reptilian.
windows They
is
The wave
is
pretty,
are also like the half-opened eyes of
are called eyebrow
windows. There
roof.
something
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
windows, but
faintly repellent
really
they
about those
Thomas Crane
Public Library, Quincy, Massachusetts (Henry
ardson, architect, 1880).
What makes
the roof fascinating
those rippling waves and the repulsion of those
slit
eyes.
is
Hobson Rich-
the beauty of
Do you
dare walk
through that door? The black shadows and the wall of stone say “No!” The geometric composition, as delicate as a flower, says “Yes!”
half-closed
lids.
What makes
the roof fascinating
those rippling waves and the repulsion of those
want perfection
in a building,
slit
is
the beauty of
eyes.
One
doesn’t
one wants some discord.
Design elements that play against an underlying system of regulating lines get our emotional attention. In the Jonathan Stone the conflict
window
is
within the pattern
creates a special mystery.
itself;
House
the riddle of the “missing”
The Stone House
also gives us con-
SPIRIT
97
trasts to pattern in the streaked
may
ings
within
it,
create
most of
and sensuous red
Other build-
brick.
their tension against pattern rather than
rough stone buildings, whose compo-
as in Richardson’s
nents are arranged with the delicacy of flowers. In the International Style the conflict
machine
ing, the
for living,
is
between the
and nature, the land
national Style buildings, there
is
also tension
artificial
In
itself.
build-
many Inter-
between the exaggerated
separation of the building from nature and the use of natural propor-
approach comes out of the old Classical tradition of the
tions. This
Greeks, the Romans, and the Renaissance: the building set apart but
encoding natural principles. The Classical building does not ignore its site;
the Parthenon
beautifully
and the other buildings of the Acropolis
and subtly oriented
are
to their surroundings, as Le Corbusier
and others have pointed
out. Le Corbusier also experimented with
the idea of discord by
making very rough-textured buildings of
board-formed concrete. To describe such designs, he used the term brut, “rough”; this
has a
ferocious sound;
less
beyond
became “Brutalism” it
relates
own
its
more
our animal
to
appeal.
You
see
it
quality,
a kind of scruffy messiness that
on secondary highways
boards, the motels, the truck stops.
We
all
know
— the
tough, a
little
The
strip
is its
own
do something wrong. world;
it
I
I
hostile;
no longer
come upon
form.
I
building
98
it
says
it’s
do not
okay to
relax,
it’s
a picture of a shiny old diner that
The okay
is
refer to the
strip
to
is
urgent
be casual.
very attractive as a
run a straightedge across the photograph. is
little
has a very different character from
the occasional garage or billboard or roadhouse.
and
is
raw. Such a landscape violates every principle of design
except, perhaps, one:
strip.
bill-
those roads; there
something tacky but comfortable about them, something a
—
it
intellect.
American landscapes often have has
in English, but in French
I
find that the
a strong, symmetrical, tightly ordered composition. Glitz
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
The tension between glitz and geometry makes the Midway Diner, in Rutland, Vermont, interesting. If you carry the regulating lines up to the left and right, you will see that the photographer has tied in the street lamp and the telephone pole.
and nostalgia
give an interesting edge to
rules
determine
its
gives
more than
it
tension, the tug fast
shape;
between
is
food restaurants leave out all
carnival way;
its
pleasing about the building
strong lines and
its
colors are not play; they are
form. The old elemental
sings the old song in
it
What
takes.
its
this tension.
its
cheesy
effects.
is
it
the
Newer
Their jingles and bright
business.
Neatness can be just as deadening as the
strip.
In
New
England,
neatness takes the form of signage control, spotless shopping districts, tidy sidewalks, neat
little
the whole world can
Neo-Nothing houses. At the
seem
to
scale of a street,
go dead. Suburban propriety
is
really the
SPIRIT
99
flip side
of the
which may be a block away.
strip,
Each neighborhood slams the door on the I
think there
room is
is
room
for deadness,
not the same as death.
world
is
ruins,
where
is
to
be
principle.
for
harmony. There
but cut off from
alive
emblems.
life.
real
is
no
Deadness
A ruin is an expression of real death,
Some
find this moving.
mess and room
for
which
life
It is all
and we
of the most passionate architecture in the
death has come.
A great deal of snobbery went along with the former idea that taste could be good or bad (“vulgar,” after while our society has accepted the
assume that what
common
is
common,
egalitarianism instead of beauty, as
we have thrown out nored the
we look
our
if
it
has also continued to
have decided to choose
we had
to
make
cities
we
we have ignored geometric
see right
away
And
a choice.
responsibility along with snobbery.
social pattern, as
at
We
trash.
is
meant “common”). But
all,
We
have
pattern.
ig-
When
that irresponsibility doesn’t
work, and we tend to ask the government for more regulation. But the discipline that brings a city alive
Why There Are Angels at the The buildings of old Broadway tury, the
time Lewis
Mumford
must be spontaneous.
Top of the Bayard Building
are of the called “the
end of the nineteenth cen-
Brown Decades.” They
caked with decoration: corbels, crockets, pediments, brackets, lasters.
They
are too somber, too narrow, too high. But
are fine in their way. This
ago,
and now
As
I
coming
into
its
neighbors,
masterpiece off on a side building, not
100
some of them
its
own
again. rises
up something quite
Bayard Building, by Louis Sullivan. The building
finer than
pi-
was the center of New York a hundred years
turn onto Bleecker, there suddenly
different, the
much
it is
are
it is
street.
like
But
brown but white-glazed
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
is
so
stumbling across some Gothic it
is
just
another 1890s office
terra cotta.
More than
color
sets
it
The building
apart.
is
evening
light;
but most of all, unlike
That
what
is
is
called Sullivan;
and
sensual,
its
it is
a bit magical in the
neighbors,
sure-handed.
it is
so pleasing. “Lieber Meister,” Frank Lloyd Wright
and
that
is
the character of the building, love
and
mastery.
under the cornice. Years ago
Six giant angels spread their wings
used to walk downtown and admire the Bayard Building, but in the context of
Modernism. Those angels above those
saw
I
frilly
I
it
arches
were a disappointment, they raveled the clean white proto-skyscraper lines. It is
much
now that
easier to appreciate Sullivan
him
to be a precursor of the International Style.
that
removing the extraneous does not have
Modernism pared to
its
rated, does
believed.
may reveal,
It
make
or
I
don’t require
I
see, for
example,
to lead to plainness, as
possible, richness.
Com-
neighbors, the Bayard Building, though heavily deco-
look simple because
ing straight up,
you can almost
patterns are very clear. Look-
its
see the regulating lines
running
diagonally through the spandrels to the leaf-clump capitals that are the springing points of double arches,
and on up
to the faces of the
angels. Sullivan’s simplicity later to tall buildings
Overleaf:
is
not spartan. The streamlining that came
made
The Bayard Building,
move
the eye
faster;
but the top of the
New York (Louis Sullivan, 1897).
Sullivan
wrote: In such times
And the
came
the white-winged angel of sanity.
great styles arose in greeting.
Then soon the clear eye dimmed. The sense of reality was lost. Then followed architectures, to all purposes quite
like
intents
and
American architecture of today
.
.
That she awaits,
That she has so long awaited I
.
.
can prove to you beyond a gossamer of doubt.
SPIRIT
101
«*r
I
IfM
..I'WUlii
Bayard Building
Embellishment can be annoying to an eye
slow.
is
not accustomed to lingering, but the Bayard Building slows you
because
it is
already there. Sullivan’s building
Montgomery Schuyler ity,
was not
for Sullivan,
much
as
said of it
The viewer’s experience
ment
in
architect
a sort of Eureka!
— and
is
was
the design. In such in,
as
is
to be,
the eye be-
taken out of
a parallel, a match, to the eternal
made
They proclaim
The presence of
symbol
is
and can be recognized
mastery, which
moment. As
in the pattern of a building, the viewer
which the
itself,”
ascetic purity or virtue. Simplicity
time.
into,
“the thing
the building was new. Simplic-
as possible, there, in the present
comes involved
comes
when
is
down
moments,
mo-
spirit
a building. Sullivan’s angels are
the building’s
the Bayard Building
is
spirit.
an expression of
Sullivan’s
the ability to organize material, function, structure,
still
be in the dark.
Towers
I
stand at the foot of a skyscraper from 1929, on Wall Street, looking
straight
that
it
up
casts,
feel
I
exhilaration
most any building cruelty to
black tower. Close up, in
at this great,
it,
that
is
among
and excitement, but
I
also feel fear. Al-
sixty stories high will have
a sense of danger.
I
am
not sure that
is
the shadows
an element of
altogether a
bad
quality in a building.
From tance,
we
a distance, skyscrapers sparkle
we look
at the spires
love about the spires
when we look street,
is
had
power,
104
way they evoke
scale.
we go
better provide
And
then you
rise up.
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
let
a dis-
in them.
What
the sky. In our minds,
to the top.
But down on the
something small, because peo-
you bring the tower down
ple are not very big. So
more human
the
From
are romantic.
and imagine ourselves up
at tall buildings
the architect
and
to the street at a
that power, that unbelievable
Skyscrapers are anthropomorphic.
in a drawing,
If,
you represent
a
person with a small head and a big body, that person will be read as tall
If
because
tall
you make
people’s heads are small in proportion to their bodies.
a gigantic tower
the building will citing,
more
seem even
loom up
bigger, even
soaring, but sometimes
dome
to a tiny
or a
little spire,
more immense, and more
more
ex-
frightening.
The Modern movement pretended not
to
be cruel in
its
gigantic
buildings. In Boston, the Federal Reserve Building, for example,
one of the
city’s
more
walls are of glass plants.
elegant skyscrapers.
and aluminum. Inside
is
a light building.
It is
a big
Some
of the
slits
The
sunny lobby and big
But armed guards patrol the lobby, and
tower are gun
is
at the
base of the
and bulletproof windows.
more
seem
recent towers
to be deliberately forbidding,
with their harshly detailed embellishments, those cold
steel shields.
Why do these buildings set out to look hostile? For some skyscrapers winning
is
the only thing.
A tower may be the
biggest building in Cleveland or Cincinnati or Detroit. But there
something “off” about a building it
takes over the town, while
its life.
Only
it
like that,
something wrong, because
participates in only a
New York
in cities like
is
narrow aspect of
many
or Chicago, which have so
towers that they form a landscape, and only at a distance, do the towers cease to threaten.
acquired
I
up
in
some of the
Manhattan
cal towers.
in the fifties,
I
feel
when
about architecture from growing it
was
still
the 1930 city of magi-
Each one was a special adventure that everyone shared.
That was the
city
Le Corbusier called the “fairy catastrophe,” an archi-
tecture of frivolity
and power.
Shortly before 1900, great towers,
when
thirty stories high. city
thrill
it
New
York took the leap into the time of the
began to put up buildings that were twenty and
Once they had
built a
few of those, the scale of the
jumped; there was no going back. There
of the early commentary:
is
a note of fear in
What have we done? Where
are
we
some
going?
SPIRIT
105
Do we
want them
really
wrote, in 1917,
found
it
there,
“New York
looming so high? Djuna Barnes
all
rose out of the water like a great
wave
that
impossible to return again and so remained there in horror,
peering out of the million windows
men had
caged
it
with .”
«
There are There
is
many
very good skyscrapers, but almost no great ones.
the Seagram Tower in
Tower, in Bartlesville, cause
its
Oklahoma — but
no very
city has
New York
tall
are,
isn’t it
is
a skyscraper only be-
is
marginally a skyscraper.
of course, great skyscrapers; but they are eight hundred
The
years old.
that
buildings. Like Sullivans thirteen-story
Bayard Building, the Price Tower
There
and, maybe, Wright’s Price
cathedrals are great because they are
possible for any kind of building to
embody
full
of grace. But
grace?
I
think
we
could have a kind of greatness in our towers, something beyond power, even in their cruelty. Contemporaries of the cathedrals
marked approvingly on There
may be
their fearsomeness.
a limit to
how great
primary purpose of the skyscraper purpose
from
is
play,
too narrow to admit
and
is
a skyscraper can be, because the to express corporate power.
much
that leads to grace.
much more down
re-
That
of the larger power that comes
The metaphysical
cathedrals were
to earth than the skyscrapers of our time.
It
may be
that the only buildings that should be as big as skyscrapers are build-
ings that reach out to everyone, buildings that tions, the greatest
embody
the aspira-
dreams, of the whole community.
Gothic Cathedrals
We go
into a cathedral,
pattern of the sort that
think about
it.
and we know
we
have.
we
We know it
are in a space that has a
fundamentally;
To enter the darkness of the cathedral
going into the darkness inside a body.
106
that
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
is
we
don’t
almost
like
Whatever weaknesses the cathedral builders had, or perhaps because of them, perhaps because they didn’t able to tap into a source of great power.
cause the energy
we
feel
I
how
they sensed
ated by the building
won’t say
was energy, be-
it
may be something which we
building, something brought alive in us that isn’t
know too much, they were bring to the
by our experience
But
there.
they thought the energy was there, cre-
it;
itself.
We walk through a community that has been
designed the way the
Gothic cathedrals were designed, by
many
using the same strong principles that
come from
different designers life
patterns
and
geodetic measurements, which do have a spiritual meaning even that
meaning
conscious memory, even
lost to
is
When we
consciously by the designer.
we can
get
some of the same
we
find in the old towns of Europe,
Newburyport,
is
feeling
also to
be found
if
was not known
if it
walk through such a place we
get in a Gothic cathedral.
what we find along the
at Chartres.
What
streets
of
We
are
made aware of
we
see
and the forms
the unity of underlying principle in the forms
we
all
are.
The Gothic
cathedrals involved the contributions of various mas-
ters,
but each designer could trust the next to continue the work in a
way
that
would be constant and
from one master
way of carving
to the next
beautiful.
The changes introduced
might be radical or
as small as a different
a molding; but the inconsistencies
from any lack of skill or
vision.
It
we
see
do not come
was not that people were too primi-
tive to notice the differences; the subtleties
of the great cathedrals are
unsurpassed. The variations expressed respect for the other designers
and a
for the principles within
profound
which they
all
worked. The work shows
spiritual belief in proportioning systems, a belief that goes
beyond what
is
expressed by any structures built since. They were not
attempting to produce beauty alone. Their purpose, builders of any temple,
was
to
embody the
like that
of the
aspects of universal spirit.
SPIRIT
107
The Gothic turies,
but the
carried
on
style itself
a
way of
came
seeing that had existed for cen-
into existence rapidly
around
1130. Its
development was not reassuringly slow. Tradition of style or structure
was not what guided the Gothic;
ratio
was
its
ancient authority.
The
numbers the Gothic builders used were the dimensions and proportions
found across
all
cultures
and across
all
times. Every church held
multiple layers of number, pattern, and form, each with
its
own
meaning. The Gothic builders also apparently believed that structural lines
of force followed the lines of harmonious proportion, and here
they were flagrantly wrong. enter a cathedral
We
smile at their naivete, but
we know its power
is,
somehow, absolutely
when we real.
Now extend this way of seeing out from the cathedral into the community. Assume that each designer has a different way of designing
and
a different
way of building, but
that each uses the
same underly-
ing principles. These principles are not arbitrary; they are the underlying universal principles of living form, expressed in dimensions that
and human. There
are both geodetic
communities it.
I
this
way today. I build
a building, of a
new
street.
material,
they work together.
108
no reason we cannot build
a building,
you add something
build this part of the building, you build that part.
building on one side of the
up
is
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
We
to
build a
Thirty years later someone else puts
on the other
side of the street.
And
6
Context
What
attracts
me most
the knowledge of what tracted to
what
get exactly the
I
happened
in
not their quaintness or
is
them, not age or history.
call their smile, their slightly
same
the old harmonies. distinction
about old buildings
feeling in front of a
When
comes
it
new
to spirit,
am
at-
mysterious presence.
I
building that embodies I
draw no fundamental
between old and new. But the quality
more common among buildings of the
I
past than
I
value
is
much
among the buildings
of our time.
Something
is
the matter with
many new
buildings. In an old city
like
Boston, committees are set up and regulations written to
sure
new buildings do not
give. In the past, builders
destroy the feeling their old neighbors
were able
as a
would
like.
buildings that other people buildings
would be
make
right, as
it is
still
matter of course to design It
was assumed that new
now assumed
they will be wrong.
“Contextualism” has been the design profession s recent answer to the problem. Contextualism
makes older buildings the
basis for
new
CONTEXT
109
design. Style, material,
and
size are the
Contextualism
less attention.
—
main
the dryness of the word!
of political correctness. You can’t very well be against the beauty of old neighborhoods, but
puts
new
Proportion gets
criteria.
its
method
its
is
—
a
is
form
intent to save
too narrow.
It
buildings at risk of becoming dead replicas or meaningless
“background.” In the absence of any higher standard, contextualism
may
down
drag a design
.
.
.
lot.
That
make
buildings that are about other places. Even
ing
“about”
is
references to
enough
is
its
right next door, the
new
if
the place a build-
building risks unreality.
neighbors will be unconvincing
relationships within
Many
to adjoin a
may be pretty good or it may not. Even when we want to make the city real again, we
particular building
Unreal City
happens
to the level of whatever
if it
Its
does not have
itself.
buildings that try to be contextual ignore the patterns of
Any building
their neighbors altogether.
is
as real as the next,
but
it is
play of pattern that makes a building feel “real.” S tyle, co lon scale, his-
must be part of the music of pat-
torical accuracy, craftsmanship, all tern. If there
must make
is
its
no song,
all
own music
the rest counts for nothing. Every building
in order to contribute
any sense of place to
its city.
To come and go where East Eleventh
opened
their
kind short arms.
.
.
.
There
Street, I
where West Tenth,
repeat,
was the
delicacy,
there the mystery, there the wonder, in especial, of the unquenchable intensity of the impressions received in childhood.
then once for
all,
be their intrinsic beauty,
or great; the stamp
is
indelible
Henry lames and
I
grew up,
neighborhood of Manhattan. exactly
what he means.
We
I
a
hundred years
know
often wish
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
are
made
importance, small
and never wholly fades.
our childhood because we were so
no
interest,
They
apart, in the
the place he describes;
we could
fully there.
I
same
know
return to the place of
However, authenticity
— what we want —
is
not a matter of permanence, of immutable his-
Those who
toric districts.
built
West Tenth
Street so that
were not trying to stop time. But they were not see myself reflected in
I still
the woods.
New York
their vitality; the
New
does come
tomatoes
in 1830 or 1907,
broken.
is
up
since
to believe
you
are offering
I
came
alive
are.
see myself reflected in
I
But places do lose
good
And
when James wrote, but
form of damage worse than any
you want
as
really don’t taste as
buildings that have gone
are a
York
we
lost, as
alive in that way.
York, like our wild forests,
happen
new
New
it
in
as they
used
this injury did
to.
not
our day. Most of the
played on West Tenth Street
neglect.
When you
something
better,
build new,
but
as if
it is
New York City had become doomed to build itself out of existence. In Boston, Suffolk University has built a
old red-brick neighborhood of
new
facility
row houses. The new
adjoining
structure
is
its
en-
cased in what look like several smaller buildings of the early nineteenth century. There are breaks in the roofline, changes in the brick; it is all
is
quite convincing as
you drive
but one close look
by,
tells
you
it
a ruse.
The building
faces a
commercial
street
of mixed architecture that
ranges from a two-hundred-year-old mansion by Charles Bulfinch to a cold 1960s International Style skyscraper. colder, but in a different way. “realistic.” It is like a city
The
best
The new building
word
scene on a studio
lot.
to describe
ably well proportioned, but what draws one’s attention rate trick.
three?
I
Was
that building always there?
suspect this accuracy was not
the building as unobtrusive as a into the
reason-
the elabo-
to amaze, but to
that
it
make
could fade
crowd of “real” buildings.
look just as its
meant
is
one building or two or
good toupee, so
After 1945, the obliterated center of
of
Is it
is
even
would be
it
The building
is
it
former
Warsaw was reconstructed
had before the war. Old Warsaw self. I
can understand
why
is
now a
the Poles
felt
to
lifesize replica
they had to do
CONTEXT
111
this.
Warsaw had
Perhaps
it
was
lost everything,
and the old
also a gesture to the Nazis:
Nazis were gone, along with the old
you can t destroy us! But the
streets.
I
think
hides in the Boston reproduction. Such a design the I
new
don’t
— anything new —
know how
as
it is
we do
posed to love
it;
the facade
some previous
context.
I
much
as
is
similar anger
against
some memory of it.
don’t think people love the pretend
love our surviving old buildings.
The designers of such within
for the old, or
some
the people of Warsaw feel today about their recon-
struction; but here in Boston,
facade, as
were beloved.
streets
is
meant only to
a
context, that every
created
its
we
are sup-
old neighbors.
is
a
new
building creates a
movie
set
new
of the past.
well-known architectural firm discusses one of
The building looks
the firm’s designs.
defer to
are
structures forget they are not just building
The context they have
A monograph on
Nor
explained that this side addresses a
different
from every
vista, that side
angle.
It is
responds to a
neighbor; a large sign relates to a planning board policy; an oddly
shaped spire on the top the history of the
city.
is
is
to evoke sails,
which have
to
The design
resulting
from
all this
informa-
not riotous but slightly surreal. The architect talks about har-
monizing with the neighborhood and with the history of the his building series
do with
Materials and colors change from one side of
the building to another. tion
meant
is
so contextual
it
forgets to
harmonize with
to explain
what
it
it
commentary by the
requires a running
“addresses” or what
building needs to speak.
I
it
“speaks
to.” I
but
itself. It is
of answers to other people’s questions. The building
strange conflation,
city,
is
a
such a
architect
do not think a
think a building should sing, but no,
it
should never just speak. Pattern
is
the quality that
relates to the old buildings
tells
us most deeply that a
around
it
as well as to
new
building
people and to the
world. Perhaps the most contextual thing a designer can do for a
community of
112
old buildings
is
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
to graft
an old proportioning system
right onto the
new
should remain
much more open
like to
building. But
where the design goes from there
to choice than
our committees
permit. Such a combination of freedom and discipline
now
is
the
reason an old town like Newburyport works so well. There a 1740 building and an 1840 building have similar underlying proportioning systems, although their styles,
A
Victorian bay
and even
window enhances
its
scales,
may be
very different.
eighteenth-century gambrel
house because the new addition continues the old regulating
What trim
is
—
actually a very different style
glass, less wall,
is
more
We don’t notice any
aligns with, the old proportioning system.
anomaly. The contrast of styles
A
— more
lines.
stimulating.
worthy contextual goal would be a return
to the universal crite-
rion of proportion, which goes with the territory of being a person,
not just with the territory next door.
If
we designed
that way,
would have the beginning of unity among buildings with very
And
ent styles, uses, materials.
then
we would not have
whether the next new building might be wrong for
How tempting
would be
it
was done often enough
to
make
its
to
we
differ-
worry so
location.
book of proportions.
a rule
But
in the Renaissance.
It
do not think we
I
should rigidly specify the use of ratios or systems, except, perhaps, in such cases as additions to important buildings that are already strongly proportioned. sign.
Good
proportion
The primary purpose of external
is
not the
rules should
the designer’s ability to play. In that context,
final
end of de-
be to strengthen
more information about
proportion would be very useful to designers.
A new building will not do you make such this
problem.
fill
if it
does not
come
alive,
but
how
a requirement? Guidelines often get entangled in
Some
places
but even in those cases,
I
do deserve
would rather
than on the side of deadness. life
a gap
It is
careful contextual regulation, err
on the
not the past
side of originality
we want back but
the
the buildings of the past embody.
CONTEXT
113
When Planning Is Not Enough The job
is
not
to
“plan” but
to reveal.
BENTON MACKAYE
The planners Andres Duany and
Elizabeth Plater- Zyberk have rein-
troduced concepts of town design from the time of the old way of seeing.
They have brought
for granted in
team
is
an
to awareness
earlier day.
For example, in a plan by
known), buildings are often
towns such There are
as
Newburyport, and
many
guidelines
ways of planning that were taken
and
DPZ
(as the
close together, as they were in old
vistas lead to significant buildings.
on design and
restrictions
The planners have put together valuable and
materials.
positive ideas for a
num-
ber of communities. They have created a structure for design that potentially
more
beneficent than the usual suburban
those houses dotted on two-acre
lots, office
is
approach —
buildings isolated in a sea
of pavement, gigantic shopping centers. In Gaithersburg, Maryland, outside Baltimore,
DPZ
has planned a
three-hundred-fifty-acre development called the Kentlands.
The
site
plan shows groupings, views, destinations, interesting variations in street pattern; there are
green clusters of trees, red roofs, enticing blue
ponds. The sense of community, the sense of place, leaps off the plan.
But the finished buildings themselves undo that sense. The Kentlands looks like Belmont.
The house and
based on the architecture of the eighteenth
early nineteenth centuries
came to
styles are
alive.
make
As
in
— the time when everyday design
Belmont, the houses have a
the street look as
are not harsh to look
at.
if it
had been
But something
an imitation.
114
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
bit
still
of variety; the idea
is
built over time.
The buildings
knows we
are looking at
in us
The Kentlands, Gaithersburg, Maryland cannot turn
(1990). All the codes in the
world
this street into a place.
The buildings of historical accuracy.
manner of 1830, but such design
is
the Kentlands do not concern themselves with
A
big gable faces the street in the Greek Revival
the detail on
it is
1780s Georgian.
The model
the familiar fantasy of the Colonial past.
The design
source of the Kentlands, like that of much Post-Modern design, 1720 or 1820 but 1920.
brought the
street to
Not
life.
that Colonial correctness
for
is
not
would have
The Neo-Classicism of eighteenth-century
American buildings was never
historically correct.
Those buildings
CONTEXT
115
used some Classical
detail,
Roman
— except proportion. They
architecture
and
cient patterns,
this the
but they had
modern
little else
imitations
in
common
carried
fail
with
on the an-
to do. Unlike the
designers of the Kentlands in 1990, the designers of 1790 aimed to delight the eye
and the mind and the heart through
of 1790 aimed for grace, and that
ers
is
pattern.
The design-
how they achieved the
sense of
place that eludes Kentlands.
Andres Duany seems plains,
“We have
to
acknowledge
mal
for the fact that
designers.”
when he com-
taken on an agenda to actually reform American ur-
banism, and what people notice instead
blaming us
this failure
The
is
the style of the buildings,
many architects
are trained to be subnor-
solution to this “subnormality,”
Duany
argues,
intensive design regulation through codes. But such rules can
make
the designer’s job too simple: just meet the code, don’t design. training of architects has
who
its
flaws,
can bring a building to
life.
but there are If
planning
is
The
many architects today
is
to reform
American
urbanism, then the planner must provide a framework in which
come
buildings can will
alive. “If
we succeed where
others have failed
be because we are obsessed with codes,” says Duany. The build-
ings of Kentlands only appear to be logical because they
codes. Architecture has a different logic. tions,
Kentlands
architects,
to
make room
A design
for
can
to
fails
have
its
become
failed. life
come
to
grace.
kinds in the days
alive
thing like
116
If
the careful regula-
planners, as
much
within the limits of strict rules, but only
it.
we could
is
to
that goal
as
alive.
and must recognize
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
that
many
But no code required the
devise such a code
this:
if
imbue the design with
There were restrictions of
when buildings came
way of seeing.
its
all
those
happen.
subservient to
is
for
fit
A town plan is a structure whose purpose is
The code maker must share
the code itself
If,
a place, then
the designer has a larger goal, which
old
it
it
might say some-
The process of design
be
shall
play.
The designer
shall experience great
deemed to have failed. A design. The designer shall
pleasure in the work, or the design shall be rich geometric pattern shall underlie the
not be aware of how this pattern was arrived
We
feel
welcome among
real buildings of the old styles
charm, and we want that for our
is
own buildings. But we
to the elements of the past that are
not up to
us. Victorian buildings
tury?
We
have
will
it
and what
still alive,
how
I
new things
simplicity, dignity,
back! But the Victorians were braver and
— or old
Their planners leave no says
it
or dies
power of the eighteenth cen-
things in
room
more
own journey,
new ways.
believe places like the Kentlands arise
(Duany
lives
could the Victorians have
honest than our Neo-Colonialists; they were off on their trying out
can only hold
looked ghoulish to the designers
of 1920. Those designers wondered,
abandoned the sweet
— among
We see their old beauty, simplicity, and
Georgian houses, for example.
on
at.
from
a belief in weakness.
for designers to play because they think
explicitly) that
most designers
are incompetent.
The
hollowness of the Neo-Nothing suburb reinforces society’s sense of design failure.
No amount
of zoning, increased or decreased density, structural
expression or concealment, energy efficiency, traffic control, vistas,
open
space, regulation of style-height-material-use, will bring
the sense of place.
Our towns make
back
us feel lost and insecure, but the
enduring sense of place does not come from friendly circulation patterns, festive signage, or sweet
memories.
It
comes from the gut
recognition of form and pattern. If you want to feel you are in a place,
go to the Yucatan, to Chichen
thousand
years.
Itza,
Only one memory
memory of who we
which hasn’t been occupied is
awakened
for a
in such a place, the
are.
CONTEXT
117
The Elihu Coleman homestead, Nantucket, Massachusetts (1722), rear view. The inventors of the Shingle Style recognized the harmonies among the casual addings-on and began to imitate them.
The Shingle Style
is
Style
a series of cues, not a language so
meanings and methods.
118
But
it is
fine to
,
a cluster of
When you force the designer to turn back the
clock of style two hundred years, you play.
much as a gestalt
borrow from the
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
make past.
it
hard for intuition to
That
is
what the Shingle
This Shingle Style house, built in 1882, borrows what eighteenth century, turning
all its
it
pleases
from the
elements into a free but highly ordered
composition of textures and shapes.
Style does (Vincent Scully coined the Style
was brought into being
term
in the 1880s
in the 1950s).
by
a
number of well-known
architects,
most notably H. H. Richardson; but
vernacular
way of building, perhaps
have had. The Shingle Style takes a that
and puts
it
together.
borrow elements
that
The
style
is
the little
work well within
The unwritten code of the Shingle ments that define edges and
surfaces,
most from
selective,
Tudor and medieval
it
became
quickly
visually successful this
and
however;
a
little
it is
a
we
from
careful to
a composition. Style refers primarily to ele-
and those elements may remind
us pleasantly of Colonial houses or other styles hints of
The Shingle
styles, for
we enjoy
—
there are
example. The Shingle Style
CONTEXT
119
works because
it is
relaxed about correctness and precedent, but
ways strongly organized into pattern. The code
unspoken, so
is
it
al-
does
not impede the visual process.
The Shingle houses, but
it
Style
took inspiration from the old wooden Colonial
added
a slightly sentimental poetry that the Victorians
The inventors of the Shingle
liked.
Style
took the
old, crusty, dilapi-
dated houses and looked at them from the back or the side instead of the front.
They were
interested in the sheds
and additions and
in the
implications of history and romance; and they designed rambling, free compositions.
The compositions were portion,
free,
but they were also imbued with pro-
and they were often quite
elements —
scrolls,
beautiful.
They used Colonial
multipaned windows
dentils,
at
a time
when
large-paned windows were relatively new. But the small panes were there for texture, not as devices to tually in a Colonial house; there
make people
was not the
believe they were ac-
slightest pretense
The eighteenth century had been superb
torical replication.
of his-
at find-
ing the right touch, the right detail, so the Shingle Style designers
took the Colonial elements and used them
freely;
around on houses wherever they pleased, but
in
they spread them
ways that were not
disordered.
In
its
differs
point of view and use of historical reference the Shingle Style
from the Neo-Colonial, which was an attempt
nial effect rather
than to create patterns. Somewhere in the ethos of
the Shingle Style was the message, the house
One element space.
is
a composition.
the Shingle Style doesn’t know, doesn’t address,
You don’t look through
heavy-looking, but the space itself
to create a Colo-
is
it is
inert,
a Shingle Style house;
opaque. The interior space it
it
feels
isn’t
is
exactly
carved out;
doesn’t flow, even though the plans are
pleasantly loose. In that sense the Shingle Style
is
entirely Victorian.
But the rooms have what you expect but seldom find in an eigh-
120
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
teenth-century house: play of light and shade, interesting nooks and crannies. Inside
and
out, the shingle cottages of the 1880s are designs
of delicious textures, strange blanknesses, shadowy intricacies.
Facades Sometimes building
planned
I
a building has
an exterior but no
real interior.
designed contained a garage and some
how to
get
from one room
to another,
One such
offices. After
made
I
had
sure the storage
spaces worked, designed a legal egress, and arranged the elements in a
reasonably pleasant way, there was really no chance for architecture
on the what
such a building,
inside. In
is
if
you merely express on the outside
going on inside, you will have nothing more than a box. The
client for the garage sent
my floor plans to
exterior that expressed just
When
what was
a builder,
inside
the client saw the result, he asked
for the building.
elements.
The
So
I
who drew up an
and no more.
me
to design a real facade
played with the pattern of windows and wall
result of
my
playing was an exterior that could be
taken seriously. Does that sound
artificial?
facade had a purpose, which was to
make
Was
it
wallpaper? But the
the building a place. In-
stead of being the honest expression of an interior that was architecturally nothing,
it
was the honest expression of a
relation to place
and
people.
Many empty tect
is
buildings are like that. Speculative office buildings are just
floors, stacks
going to
special
is
finish.
The chance
limited: there will not
vistas in every file
they
of them, which somebody other than the archi-
may be
to turn those spaces into
be cathedral
room. These buildings are
something
ceilings or fascinating all
around
us. Inside
nothing much, but outside they are quite able to
the world as patterns in light
relate to
and shade. The most important space
in
CONTEXT
121
such architecture ceive the city
and
walls, as Louis
On
its
Kahn
the outside,
out to the world. cal as well.
you must
between and around the buildings. One can per-
is
I
be rooms, of which the buildings are the
streets to said.
think buildings have a moral obligation to reach
Ideally, the insides
ought to be wonderful and magi-
But when you design a thousand-unit apartment house,
leave
much
of the magic to the occupants. Only in special
cases or in special parts of ordinary buildings
— does the With ping.”
I
inside
a curl of the lip,
way a
the
An
lobbies, restaurants
the opportunity for design.
some
architects call designing facades
“wrap-
agree that the practice has an element of compromise; the in-
side doesn’t live is
become
—
up
to the outside.
But a facade
is
diplomacy,
really. It
utilitarian building takes its place in the world.
eighteenth-century facade acknowledged other houses across
the street, around the corner.
It
was a
family’s gesture of welcome, but
from the world. To reach out with a harmonious
also their screen
fa$ade was part of the social contract, and
The strong composition connected The serene and
lively
form was
it
was
also a
the house to
a contribution to
its
boundary.
its
community.
neighborhood.
But the elemental patterns, the imperfection and the inspiration, also
brought the house into contact with the living world of growing forms. Through sions, the
local
its
natural proportions and geodetic-human dimen-
house was connected to the wide universe
The
shifted the
emphasis from grace to
social ges-
goal began to be to influence the observer through symbols.
As the significance of might lose the power
now meaningless, Just after
its
symbols changed over the
years, a
to influence; to later generations the
house
emblems,
often appeared hideous or foolish.
World War
I,
tion of domestic security
122
its
community.
The Victorian house ture.
as well as to
the suburban house
became
a representa-
and national honor. Patriotism was
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
associ-
ated with the
Age of Reason, so the house often became an emblem of
that age. But
did not
it
would have required ban architecture
embody
the ideals of that age. To do that
intuitive play
with pattern. Neo-Colonial subur-
almost entirely upon symbols: red brick and
relied
white trim, eagles and weathervanes, shutters, dentils, six-over-six sash.
It
was dress-up;
it
was the opposite of reason.
The twentieth-century house,
continues to em-
like the Victorian,
phasize effect, but the primary effect sought
is
normalcy. The twenti-
eth-century house does not reach out in the eighteenth-century way,
nor does
grab the viewer by the lapels in the Victorian way. The
it
house of our day does not wear a mask,
way of seeing old
openness to ones
is
way protects
own
The old
a mask: “home.”
it is
experience.
A mask used in the
that inner openness.
Haute Architecture
It
a building that
is
to
about
self-referential, it’s
very difficult to engage,
it is
me
is
and I guess
that
is
itself
and
what draws
it.
DESIGN AWARDS JUROR
An
architecture magazine features
reticians.
The
first
house
is
a pleasant
spaces and a few charming details; see nothing
evidently
I
more
am
to look
at.
I
it
But the
little
architectural theo-
building;
also has article
some
it
has
flaws.
some
And
begin to suspect
I
I
keep thinking
was meant
nice
I
can
goes on for eight pages;
supposed to appreciate aspects of this house that
apart from and above other houses.
something.
two houses by
I
set
it
must be missing
to feel this way, not quite
smart enough to understand.
The second house
is
more
interesting;
it
has nice
lines;
I
find
it
CONTEXT
123
But again
attractive.
“hoped
architect
from excessive
I
am
not getting the point, for the text says the
to avoid ‘the suppression of the actual’ that
on
reliance
visual expression at the expense of other
The suppression of
senses.”
the passwords,
it is
are a favorite
may
any good house
mask of haute
Hmmm.
the actual.
implied, one
special secrets. Well,
If
one understands
enter an architectural world of
of special secrets. Words
is full
architects.
expected that an architect’s masterpiece,
It is
comes
like his
words, will be
weird, incomprehensible, outside the mainstream. That has been the role of the artist for at least a
play
to the hilt.
it
out, they
They don’t have
may end up
serene building
hundred and
—
fifty years,
and
architects
a lot of choice. If they don’t stand
designing “background buildings.” To design a
this
is
not a goal
we hear
about. “Serene”
is
not a
word used by architects. Other designers go beyond the arcane to the deliberately chain-link in the living room.
They want
wants to imbue his building with only as excitement, and for spirit ease.
is
Being
comfort
is
spirit
spirit;
at ease,
but
we tend
means more than
soul. Buildings that don’t ill
to be exciting.
have
hostile:
Any designer
to define spirit
that.
The synonym
real spirit leave us
ill
at
however, can be a form of excitement, so dis-
often sought for
its
own
sake.
To design a hideous building on purpose shows a confusion between excitement and the feeling of being
we
from such
get
sumed I
sleep. It
think
a building
is
meant
alive.
to
The smack
awaken us from our pre-
has been typical of the art of our age that
we have become
it
affronts us.
overly accustomed to the idea that
it
the routine,
the expectation.
You must
of view assumes there can be no magic in
kill
life
124
as
it is
to be different; perhaps the worst pressure
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
to
kill
the normal. This point
normally lived.
Perhaps the greatest creative pressure on the architect
much
if art is
should have that quality of murder. You must
have any value, kill
in the face
now
is
is
to
not so
come
to
Offices,
ing its
is
Los Angeles (Eric
Owen Moss,
architect, 1990).
a bristling bunker, fending off those
mask lies
a strong
who
composition of regulating
terms with normality.
It
may be
The
little
are not in the
office build-
know. Under
lines.
that these architectural screams,
these outbursts, these intellectual effusions, express a fear that art
of architecture became normal
The haute
designers,
many
of
it
would
whom
if
the
cease to exist.
have substantial
ability, are
not providing any model that can be used in buildings not destined for celebrity.
company
There
is
nothing a designer of suburban houses or
utility
garages or schools can take from their example other than
an occasional modish device. Haute design
offers
no
leadership.
It is
an entirely introverted exercise of talent. Each building stands alone,
CONTEXT
125
each architect stands alone. There buildings and less strip mall,
is
no connection between
expensive buildings — except
where every building becomes
a sign;
these
the connection to the
and there they are
all
the same.
The Function of Structure Louis Sullivan’s 1891 Wainwright Building in early expression of the steel frame. Sullivan vertical strips, carrying
them
dows was what appeared contained
steel;
make
famous
Between each
strip
in
of win-
its
made struc-
a composition out of structural shapes.
when
and conceals structure when
is
to support the building.
is
The
ar-
it
suits the
purposes of pattern making,
it
doesn’t.
An I-beam
or an open-web
an elegant solution to a physical problem, but a joists
a
grouped the windows
purpose of the building was not to reveal
chitect reveals structure
open-web
is
column. But only half the “columns”
to be a
The only function of structure
joist is
Louis
every other one was empty. The deception
sense, because the
ture but to
straight up.
St.
unlikely to inspire
someone who
ceiling full of
doesn’t under-
stand structural engineering. Two-by-four frame construction a brilliant system, but the system
is
is
also
not architecture.
Aesthetics
I
spoke to a group of architects about intuition one morning.
about vision and about talked about selves.
I
the magic
was
“soft.”
I
talked
connect people to the world.
I
and the sense of place come from our-
had worried that they might say
intuition
126
how
how buildings
I
all this
talk
hadn’t expected the reaction
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
I
about vision and got:
they looked
sad.
They were way beyond worrying about
softness.
They were won-
dering whether there was any reason for architecture at
what we do
all.
How
just isn’t that important,” said one.
“Maybe
glum they
looked.
word
problem
in a nutshell. Archi-
tecture has lost the root meaning of the word, as
many architects have
lost faith in their art. Aesthetic: “of perception.”
To
“Aesthetic”
notes being in
a
is
that puts their
touch with where you
naturally concern yourself with
whether
it
pleases you.
To please the
how
sufficiently.
requirement to please the first,
are. If you are in
spirit.
not a
was
The nineteenth
first
frill.
To play is
is
and
ence, but design could not
all
become
individual it
knows
our
first
results.
not a diversion. Architec-
that
1830.
excelled at the brilliant in-
around.
was the age of sci-
It
scientific, so
it
was pushed into
academia and the salon, where cognoscenti admired
no reason
and
feels
not decoration.
own time,
vention, not at seeing the brilliance
is
touch, you will
used to mean “the criticism of taste” in
century, like our
remains. But there
word con-
We have put what we have thought to
and everywhere we have the
spirit is
the
But we no longer make
ture uses decoration, but architecture “Aesthetics”
a place looks
The inner judgment of each
whether a place pleases
be practicality
me
it.
And
we must have one or
there
it
the other,
science or architecture.
Before the machine age, no one had to scious of pattern, to be aesthetic.
taking a deliberate step. into
it
easily.
We
Now,
Numbness
do have
is
to
make
the choice to be con-
be in visual touch requires
today offered
all
around.
We fall
to choose to be awake, as people in the past
did not.
CONTEXT
127
7
The
Life
and Death of Modernism
The Vision of Walter Gropius: Why There Could Be No International Style
Since
my early youth I have been
acutely aware of the
chaotic ugliness of our
modern man-made environment
when compared
unity
to the
and beauty of old,
pre-
industrial towns.
— Walter gropius,
creator of the Bauhaus
Walter Gropius (1883-1969) wanted to show
world beautiful again, and he knew through a
seeing, not
style.
it
how
make
to
the built
must come through
“A ‘Bauhaus
Style,’ ”
a
way of
he wrote, “would
have been a confession of failure and a return to that devitalizing instagnating
ertia, that
combat.
.
.
.
There
is
academism which
no such thing
as
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
had
called
it
an ‘International
There was, indeed, an International
128
I
Style.
But that
into being to ” Style.’ is
only one of
the proofs that the
dream of Walter Gropius
led did not achieve
fashionable to
make fun of
Bauhaus was a
valiant,
make
it
cities,
the Bauhaus
and today
and
But the
acolytes.
part of the industrial world. Reading Gropius’s ,
not only by his brilliant grasp of the issues of
by
culture but also
its
easy and
it is
audacious attempt to bring back the old way
Scope of Total Architecture and knowing of his
trial
The movement he
promise to make the world beautiful. The
its
Bauhaus did not give us harmonious
of seeing and
failed.
his generosity, his
failure,
style,
one
is
struck
form, and indus -
depth of feeling.
At the Bauhaus, *which he directed from 1919 to 1928, Gropius out to mold the kind of person
The designer of the
ings.
future
who
set
could design harmonious build-
was not
to
be a narrow
specialist
but a
thoroughly rounded creator, the product of years of training. Whole
towns would have
to
be built in the new harmonious way in order to
reawaken their inhabitants to the old awareness of form. “There
way toward
other
prejudice stroke
new
no
progress but to start courageously and without
practical tests
by building model communities
and then systematically examining
in
their living value.”
one
The
be the beginning of an immense endeavor. Gropius
Bauhaus was
to
assumed
mountains would have
that
is
to
be moved, and he
set
out to
move them. Like his contemporary Le Corbusier, Gropius believed that the old
way of seeing sprang from acter
was a rare
character. Le Corbusier thought such char-
sensibility;
he believed in an aristocracy of
talent.
Gropius believed that most people had the necessary ability but that its
development required intensive nurturance, life
and form. The
designer, not just the
a
profound education
way of
designing,
had
in
to
change. Style represented the superficiality Gropius was trying to un-
whole purpose
do. There could not be a
Bauhaus
of the Bauhaus was not to
come up with some new fashion
Style because the
ings will be daringly simple this season”
— but
to go
—
“build-
beyond
style to
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MODERNISM
129
first
principles.
But once the new design language was accepted, there
was no controlling
it.
was a race horse,
It
required expert handling.
it
As part of Modernism, which was a philosophy of life and the International Style reached for great goals.
was refreshingly shocking;
simplicity virtue.
The Moderns’ purpose was
manner
in order to get
machine and
its
back
in
When
severity itself
it
was new,
its
was considered a
away meaningless
to cut
culture,
fuss
and
touch with fundamental truth. The
And ele-
products were expressed. Use was expressed.
mental form was expressed.
The
terrible simplicity of
Modernism was
sensational in the hands
of a Mies van der Rohe. His Farnsworth House in plate glass
and white-painted
completed
in 1951.
integrity, unity
mains
“The house
and
of pure
is
— was famous
above
all
a
spirit.”
is
—
a
box of
the minute
it
was
work of art of supreme
perfection,” said Architectural
after Mies’ subtraction
tillation
steel
Illinois
Forum. “What
re-
a concentration of pure beauty, a dis-
But there was not one operable window. Dr.
Farnsworth sued her architect on the grounds that the house was uninhabitable.
The Moderns could be sublime, but they could not be
normal. In the hands of masters, the International Style did achieve the old
but these designers were specialists in seeing buildings as com-
spirit;
and shade. The Victorian masters, amidst
positions in light holstery,
had done the same. Despite
honesty,
Modernism was an
work, and
this affirmed the belief,
Le Corbusier wrote, “The
proper functions
The
when
it
art
addresses
The
artists
The
artists
could make
itself to
is
it
in Victorian
encouraged
of our period
simplicity of the International Style
edge, but
130
Only
which had arisen
this
opin-
performing
its
the chosen few.”
made
it
much
easier to ex-
who
used
style offered true greatness to those
who
on each
Even the best designers
press elemental form. But the designer
edge.
the talk of functionalism and
elite style.
times, that only artists could design. ion.
all
their up-
side
was an ice-cold
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
abyss.
it
walked a knife
could stay on that
took an occasional tumble. The International Style was merciless to the less talented.
When
came
it
to city planning, the
Moderns made more than
misstep. In 1920 Le Corbusier proposed
what he
City: huge, sheer, flat-topped towers set in parks
ways.
He
a
called the Radiant
among
superhigh-
suggested that this would be the perfect solution to the
gnarled street patterns of old Paris. During the three decades after
World War
the heyday of the International Style, Radiant Cities
II,
Moscow
over the world, from
were built
all
and within
sight of the old streets of Paris
own
busier’s
itself.
Radiant City was the
— dramatic
Modernist apotheosis of the machine highways and elevators,
to Chicago to Brasilia,
size,
the speed of
efficiency, order, healthy greenery.
Le Cor-
designs for huge apartment dwellings, the series of
Unites d’Habitation, were strikingly beautiful in their monastic
— even
if
no one shopped
in their “streets in the sky”; so
and Detroit
Mies’s glass apartment towers in Chicago
had
the occupants
to
that
was more
model was
Green and
St.
were
— even
if
keep the curtains drawn against the sun. But
the overwhelming drabness of 1960s,
way
New
York’s
Co-op
City, built in the
what the Radiant model produced, and
typical of
a disaster for public housing, as at Chicago’s Cabrini Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe project,
blown up twenty years
after
it
was
which was deliberately
built, to the
unending delight of
Post-Modernists. Yet the International Style
though
it
and
a
life
promised more than
way
to
sapping the old
come
it
the great style of our time, even
could
give. It
to terms with the
vitality. It
principles of form.
is
way of
a
new way of
machines that seemed to be
promised contact with the eternal grand
The Moderns were
right to say that design
moral aspect, but Modernism got mired tarian
promised
seeing, functionalism,
in conflict
and the
between the
intuitive
way of
had
a
utili-
seeing,
composition. In Le Corbusier’s Towards a
New Architecture
(1923), the
photos of
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MODERNISM
131
and airplanes express the honesty of the machine. They
cars
thetic models,
moral models
But something
is
look
fresh,
— functionally pure —
wrong. Le Corbusier
s
buildings,
are aes-
for buildings.
on the same
pages,
but the cars and the planes are as antique as morning-
glory phonograph horns. For us today there
is
no high
virtue in a
buildings resemblance to a Caproni Triplane or the Aquitania, as
we do
there was for Le Corbusier, although aesthetic
—
after
all,
we
are
still
relate to the
surrounded by machines.
It is
machine not a
re-
semblance to cars and planes that makes Le Corbusier’s buildings fresh after seventy years,
it is
the dance of pattern.
Le Corbusier described the need to return to
first
principles of
form; Gropius saw that a lost way of seeing must be recovered. But
another priority interfered: the need to be “honest” about structure, use, materials. Like the Victorians before
the
them, the Moderns saw that
machine had jarred the world loose from the old way of
seeing,
but they tended not to see that the machine was not the fundamental issue.
You could no more
chine than by rejecting
solve the
problem by embracing the ma-
it.
On a hill in Lincoln, Massachusetts, when he came
America
to
over the years the house has
time and place.
in 1937
come
still
to
gleams fresh and bright. But
seem more and more
isolated in
belongs, now, to the Society for the Preservation of
It
New England Antiquities. The house cate,
the house Walter Gropius built
but in a way
it
is
beautiful
stands for the failure of
and
subtle
Modernism
and
deli-
to reintro-
duce the old way of seeing. In his writings and teachings, Gropius seemed to advocate an egalitarian simplicity.
But the house in Lincoln cannot help being suave,
sophisticated, complex.
A little extension of the roof will slide out and
stand on a pole, just because
seemed rated
132
that
on the
way
to
design.
it
was necessary,
visually necessary, or
Gropius and Breuer — Marcel Breuer
The house
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
is all
collabo-
small subtleties because
all
the
The Gropius House,
large things,
all
Lincoln, Massachusetts (Walter Gropius, architect, 1937).
the usual equipment of architecture that
sible to blur the perceptions, are gone.
makes
it
pos-
We are left with only the shape
of this window, the indentation of that wall. Whether to have the roof
overhang
six inches or twelve inches
becomes
a
major decision be-
cause there are no other decisions to be made. The house to the barest elegance.
The house
fails as
is
stripped
an example to any but the
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MODERNISM
133
most talented
designers;
if
you do not have
elegance, such a design strips
down
to nothing.
But the Gropius House does come a sort of reliquary of sacred
access to that underlying
alive.
You expect the house
Bauhaus objects because
it is
to be
of the
full
4
ancient Bauhaus furnishings. But
not
feel like a
museum
nothing of death in prisingly
The
and
it.
feels neither
it
someone has
or a house that
Gropius the
man
old nor new. left.
does
It
There
is
present in the house, sur-
is
gratifyingly strong.
and white.
interiors are multiple shades of gray, black, tan,
There are no other colors, yet the house is
one exception
is
pink, the color of reflected light.
very rich. Outside there
feels
to the color scheme: the inside of one wall of the
The
story
is
the pink was not
ing out right so Gropius asked Lionel Feininger to
mix
it.
deck
com-
It is
that
kind of house and that kind of pink.
The it is
its hill, is
primary reason
more important than
for
its
placement
the exterior;
pleasure to be taught by Gropius. up.
such a Pronouncement that
easy to assume that the outside of the house
that the is
conspicuous on
exterior,
One comes away
and shadows. One
is
it
is
has
is
the
to be seen.
more
to teach,
with a heightened sense of
all
point,
But the inside
The perceptions and
reminded of the Japanese
main
and what
a
patterns pile
colors, patterns,
sensibility for subtle
shades and shadows, but here things as well as light and darkness, ,
make
the patterns.
The Gropius House house is
is
alive
not witty.
is
not a humorless exposition of theories. The
and subtle and complicated and fun
Its
mysteries are in the relationships
to be in.
among
It is
fun.
It
the parts, the
unexpected connections, the surprising views from every room.
There
is
a particularly fine
ing out at a big tree,
framed view from the upper deck, look-
beyond which
are
meadows. From the outside
the artificiality of that unglazed frame looks arty, but from the deck itself
134
the view
is
a
little
experience in
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
how one’s
eyes see.
The house may be says,
You
self-conscious
didactic, but
also plays.
it
How do you like the way that gray relates to
“Look!
didn’t expect that
happiness on
House
and
its
view over there!”
sleeve.
Under
its
that
brown?
not afraid to wear
It is
It
its
sophisticated shell, the Gropius
innocent.
is
Gropius came to America to take over the design program vard, but he found,
somewhat
to his surprise, that he
to take over the direction of architecture in the
had
United
Har-
at
come
also
He
States.
and the other ex-Bauhaus luminaries, notably Mies and Breuer, went from one great success
to another.
before had led inevitably to that
It
began
moment
in
to
seem
as if all the steps
which Modernism was
to
triumph. Not since Abbe Suger introduced the Gothic in 1130 had a
new
style
become
And
so overwhelmingly successful.
Walter Gropius
was the International Styles Suger. His protestations of denial must have looked
like
modesty: “Every so often
growing crust so that the
off this
may become
him
behind the tag and the
that he not be
famous
celebrity,
for the
but
wrong
label
it
was
thing.
International Style did solve the problem of how to express the
The
machine Gropius
in architecture, at least as said, to express the
The problem was, and cities in
machines were
machine was not the
still is,
how
to express
life
are
in buildings
was borne
out to teach a vision, but he gave the world a the vision he offered.
human
being
me
at all
not
central problem.
no longer dazzled by the International
easier to recognize that Gropius’s worst fear
is
in 1925. But, as
and
an age of machines.
Now that we
fresh
strong urge to shake
feel a
Gropius did enjoy his
visible again.”
urgently important to
man
I
is
He
style.
out:
Style,
it is
he had
set
What remains
wrote, “I believe that every healthy
capable of conceiving form. The problem seems to
one of existence of creative
ing the key to release
ability
but more one of find-
it.”
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MODERNISM
135
Robert Venturi and the End of Modernism The
Modernism had
closest thing
an
to
voice was Siegfried
official
Giedion. In the 1960s every student of architecture read his Space
Time and
Architecture.
y
But by 1967, Giedion admitted, Modernism
— not dying, he hastened
— but unsure. “In the
was
tired
ties
a certain confusion exists in contemporary architecture ... a kind
of pause, even a kind of exhaustion.
.
.
Fatigue
.
opening the door to escapism, to
cision,
The
architects
one masterpiece create
to say
who
created
street that
came
And
alive.
Instead,
Two books by
to
produce
Modern masters
the
Modernism was meant
lives.
an eternal approach to design, but Giedion saw that itself.
of all kinds.”
superficialities
but Modernism had not been able to
themselves were at the end of their
redefine
mother of inde-
Modernism had continued
after another,
an average
the
is
Modernism came
would have
it
end of Modernism
and Contradiction
in
in Architecture (1966)
Vegas (1972, with Denise Scott that
— with
but not
a
come just another as
Post-Modern
columns
—
is
to
an end.
to
America and helped
bring about what came to be called Post-Modernism. They were
You may say
to be
a Philadelphia architect, Robert Venturi, created a
theoretical basis for the
plexity
six-
still exists. It
few exceptions style in the
— with
its
and Learning from Las
Brown and Steven
Modernism
—
in
grab bag.
its
false fronts
already passe, but
we
Izenour).
does, in
purpose.
It is
Com-
its
outer form,
Modern has
said that the style
be-
known
and cut-out Neo-Classical
are
still
in the
Post-Modern
period. During the 1970s, leadership passed to a group that did not aspire to express the principles that underlay erns, far
the old
136
from throwing out the
way of
past,
Modernism. The Mod-
had been the
seeing. In contrast to the age-old
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
last
upholders of
model of
light
and
shade, walls and space, Venturi wrote, “The Flamingo sign will be the
model
to
shock our
Modern get to
sensibilities
architecture
what was
towards a
was an attempt
and
essential
alive, at
“The contemporary movement
is
to eliminate style in order to
the center. Giedion explained,
not a
all
It is
an approach to the
life
of us.”
Venturi welcomed the symbolism of content. And, he wrote,
in the nineteenth-cen-
‘style’
tury meaning of form characterization. that slumbers unconsciously within
new architecture.”
style, its historical,
Modernism was
rigid
and narrow:
nonvisual
“Architects
can no longer afford to be intimidated by the puritanically moral lan-
guage of orthodox Modern architecture.” Modernism often was prudish and cold; Giedion, for example, could write, “To become a constituent element of a volume, the wall had all
first
to be cleansed of
A
decorative eruptions of the nineteenth century.”
might have applied a “blind” arcade to the wall noon,” but the
Modern wall was too honest
previous age
to say
“Good
for social convention.
downside of pre-Modernist conventions had been whole
downside of Modernism was blankness. Venturi “control
and spontaneity
Venturi’s message
it
among
— using
was
.
.
.
correctness
a relief to
of
and
many
called for a balance:
ease.”
architects.
It
as his illustration
would be nice
Antonio da Sangallo’s delightful
Many
of the embellishments
ernism rejected were the architectural equivalents of
—
streets
inconsistencies, surprises, “whimsy,” as Venturi called
teenth-century Palazzo Tarugi.
do?”
The
and “Thank you” and “Nice weather we’re having.” The
“Please”
to relax
after-
archaic, unoriginal usages but
still
six-
Mod-
“How do you
socially serviceable.
Some
of Venturi’s suggestions had the potential to introduce an exciting tension between intellect and intuition: symbol, history, and effect pulling against eternal pattern. Venturi broke rules that needed
some new design
breaking; he opened
some old
ones. But
when he
said that
possibilities
most design
in
and reopened our time was
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MODERNISM
137
inevitably banal, he revealed an underlying signer.
For
this
contempt
reason Venturi’s two books took
ture than they gave to
for the de-
more from
architec-
it.
In arguing against an architecture of inspired form,
and
in accept-
ing as essential the mediocrity of our age, Venturi was reviving beliefs
of the Victorian theorist John Ruskin.
“It is
now
time to reevaluate
the once-horrifying statement of John Ruskin that architecture
the
is
decoration of construction,” wrote Venturi. John Ruskin’s Seven
Lamps of Architecture was published in England in 1848, some twenty years after American architecture first began to lose touch with intuitive design.
The book was an immediate
success in the United States.
of the old way of seeing, which he
Ruskin described clearly the
loss
called “the dissolution of
ancient authority in our judgment.”
.
.
saw that medieval architecture had the his
own
chance for us
.
.
.
and
that chance rests
taining the consent, both of architects style,
and
was missing from
spirit that
His solution was dramatically simple: “But there
age.
to use
on the bare and of the
universally.” All buildings
it
He
is
a
possibility of ob-
public, to choose a
were to be Gothic; one
English and three Italian versions were to be permitted. Neo-Gothic, in various forms,
had been
in
vogue for
years;
Ruskinian Gothic
turned out to be as awkward and scary, and as occasionally charming, as
any other
variety.
Ruskin made the
most
loss of the old
respectable; for
day were
in
it
was
no way equal
to be
way of seeing
respectable
— or
understood that the designers of his
to those of the past.
What had been
lost
could only be imitated, not reclaimed: “The forms of architecture ready
known
are
good enough
us.” If inner authority
had been
al-
for us, lost,
and
for far better than
al-
any of
then outer authority must be
fol-
lowed. Ruskin saw Victorian eclecticism to be a sort of visual panic.
Any amount
— was
138
of Sacrifice and Obedience
preferable to chaos. “There
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
is
— two of the Seven Lamps
no such thing
as liberty,”
he
said.
Van Brunt, architects, 1868) deliberately “Lamp of Sacrifice,” which said to spare no expense.
Harvard’s Memorial Hall (Ware and followed John Ruskin’s It is
If
charming
(in places)
the architect
flourish, “freed
of choice which
on the
would submit
on the
outside.
to the rule of style, his
work would
from the agitation and embarrassment of that is
liberty
the cause of half the discomforts of the world
his imagination playful
walled garden,
inside but scary
and vigorous,
who would
sit
as a child’s
.
would be within
down and shudder if he were left
.
a
free in
a fenceless plain.”
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MODERNISM
139
By the time Ruskin died
in 1900, Ruskinian Gothic
was
out,
and
it
stayed out for seventy years. But today style and story are back. Both
— they do have
Ruskin and the old Ruskinian buildings
—
are being rehabilitated. Ruskin
s
their
charm
belief in consistency of style sur-
vived his version of Gothic. Planning boards and historical commissions insist
upon mono-style
now revived
a
ing
is
it,”
on ple
it,
we
shall
argue ... for architecture as shelter with symbols
Venturi wrote. Learning from Las Vegas categorized buildings
two
into
Ruskinian tenet of far greater implication: that a build-
primarily an emblem.
“Finally
on
architecture to this day. But Venturi
types, the “decorated shed,”
and the “duck,” the building
was
which was
itself as
shelter with
symbol
— Venturis exam-
a building literally in the shape of a duck.
Most buildings
Venturi considered decorated sheds. The term sounds, at
wrapping, but there
empty box is not tern. In
is
first, like
an essential difference. The facade on the
symbols on
shelter with
it
but shelter
made
into pat-
Learning from Las Vegas, the Cathedral of Amiens and the
Golden Nugget Casino trate that
In
symbols
face each other
“Amiens Cathedral
Modernism
all
literary
is
from opposite pages
to illus-
a billboard with a building behind
it.”
meaning was stripped away; embellish-
ment, even to reinforce pattern, was eliminated. Modernism was out of balance, as Venturi showed.
He demonstrated
that effect, symbol,
message, and history had their place, as did ordinariness. But, just as the
Moderns had thrown out symbol, Post-Modernism threw out
form. Architecture
now slid past
the balance point.
Giedion had already pointed out that Modernism had become weak. as the irony.
old
What made
it
easy to finish
Post-Moderns now began
off was the death of the Masters,
to call
them, with just an edge of
By 1970 the inventors of Modernism, the old
figures, the great
monuments of twentieth -century architecture, were
in 1959, Le Corbusier in 1965,
140
it
Mies and Gropius
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
dead: Wright
in 1969.
Most of the
remaining leaders, such as Marcel Breuer, Richard Neutra, Alvar Aalto,
and Louis Kahn, died soon afterward.
Modernism had looked problems of the age and ing to put civilization
had
that Neutra
set
on
a
new
was
it
and environmental
about doing something about them, course.
called his 1954
Post-Modernism said affect the state
at the gigantic social
book
It
was
in the
Modernist
try-
spirit
Survival Through Design. But
idle for architects to
presume they could
of the world. Venturi wrote, “Architects should accept
their
modest
way
for architects tp express “a true concern for society’s inverted
role.” If the
world underrated architecture, irony was the
scale of values.”
The Moderns were both moral and
moralistic, but Venturi
was
amoral: “[In Rome,] the pilgrim, religious or architectural, can walk
from church
to church.
The gambler or
architect in Las Vegas can
similarly take in a variety of casinos along the Strip.” Sheds or ducks .
.
.
symbol
is
the
bols are equal,
main
thing.
And
and “decoration
is
in the nonintuitive
world
all
sym-
cheaper.”
Venturi singled out the “Heroic and Original” for special derision.
Having cut
all
architecture
down
to the level of Las Vegas
casinos really are decorated sheds
— he advised
— whose
against trying to
make any other kind of architecture: “Why do we uphold
the symbol-
ism of the ordinary via the decorated shed over the symbolism of the heroic via the sculptural duck? Because this
is
not the time and ours
is
not the environment for heroic communication through pure architecture.” Venturi
argued that original buildings were beyond the per-
ceptions of people used to the highway view of the world: “Articulated architecture today
even off the highway our
and
is
like a
minuet
sensibilities
in a discotheque, because
remain attuned to
its
bold scale
detail.”
But driving a car brings out visual intuition, scribes in
Drawing on
as Betty
Edwards de-
the Right Side of the Brain:
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MODERNISM
141
Driving on the freeway probably induces a slightly different subject state that
we
is
similar to the drawing state. After
all,
in freeway driving
deal with visual images, keeping track of relational, spatial infor-
mation, sensing complex components of the overall tion.
Many
people find th^t they do a
sense of freedom from anxiety. ...
or
if
someone sharing
configura-
of creative thinking while
and experiencing a pleasurable
driving, often losing track of time
difficult ...
lot
traffic
Of course,
if
driving conditions are
the ride talks with us, the shift to
the alternative state doesn’t occur.
The Jonathan Stone House because
it is
not a sign; but
is
it is
applied, they are the house.
It
an ordinary building.
not a shed, because
would have
to
its
It is
not a duck,
patterns are not
be called a building “as a
building.”
As the deliberately “hybrid,” Post-Modern age began that there
to
“distorted,” “vestigial” products of the
show up on
city streets,
it
began to be
clear
would be no more Ronchamps, no Seagram Towers, no
Guggenheim Museums. Such grandeur was
out.
But also there would
be no building so charming as the whimsical Palazzo Tarugi. The architecture
was too acidly witty
tecture did not spring to
life;
to
be
friendly.
And
new
everyday archi-
Post-Modernism was even more erudite
than Modernism. Is
the heroic gesture the only
way
to express nature
and
life
building? Le Corbusier and Mies took that view. But what
in a
Mod-
ernism needed was not more inspiration but more normality. Post-
Modernism, however, did not architecture. Instead,
it
try to restore the sparkle to ordinary
brought the drabness that had increasingly
blighted ordinary architecture since 1830 to what sign.”
form;
Modernism had kept it
was not
it
called “high de-
contact with the ancient principles of
a break with but a continuation of this spirit.
architecture should be a projection of life
itself,”
Gropius had
“Good
said.
The masters of Modernism did make contact with what Giedion
142
THE OLD WAY OF SEEING
The chapel at Ronchamp, France (Le Corbusier, 1950), was Modernism at its most Heroic and Original. But there was no room in the Post-Modern vision for such a building.
called their inner “organic forces”
Modernism ample
The language sounds
— Le Corbusier’s chapel
— had the capacity
had expressed “organic
to live
at
up
Ronchamp,
to
forces,” as well.
it.
The
not Ronchamp, not the Seagram Tower, but
inflated,
but
in France, for ex-
In the past, lesser talents results in cities
such cases were
such as Urbino and
Charleston.
The Modern masters were Romantic grands
seigneurs in the
mold
of Wagner, with their capes, their mysteries, and their epigrams. But their vision
was sound
tuitive inner self, ture.
at its source.
and through
its
That vision was to express the
in-
expression to evoke the truths of na-
Their error was to believe that they alone had the key.
Venturi’s error
was
to believe that
no one had the
key. Venturi
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MODERNISM
143
punctured Modernist grandiosity: ridiculous.
And
was
was cold
elite, it
...
it
was
then he stumbled right into a Modernist mistake: he
assumed normality sumption, had
it
be
to
dull.
sought
at least
The Moderns, making life
same
the
where they could find
it,
as-
even
if
they thought that meant rejecting the everyday. Venturi welcomed dullness. “I like
boring things,” Venturi quoted
and banality were
ugliness
Andy Warhol.
common enough
in twentieth-century art,
and the Warhol deadpan was one form of the sought-for deed,
is
not the commercial strip of Route 66 almost
Venturi. “Almost
right?” question
all
Intentional
mark and
all
all,
affront. “In-
right?” wrote
delivered the
haute-design smack in the face with such perfect, diffident irony that the phrase
became
a favorite
term of the Post-Moderns. Venturi ap-
parently thought the vacant stare of the Ugly and Ordinary building
would shock and amuse, ing
is
like
pop
But unlike a painting, a build-
art.
stuck in normality, as real as a mountain or a meadow.
building
is
A boring
just a hole in the landscape.
Ordinariness. Every time Post-Modern architecture tried to get closer to normality, in Mies’s evanescent
it
got farther away from
little
life.
There was more
Barcelona Pavilion of 1929
(it
life
lasted only a
matter of months and was reconstructed in 1986) than in
all
the “of-
the-people” fa