In a more encompassing suggestion, John Ruskin proposed that we seek two things of our buildings. We want them to shelter us. And we want them to speak to us – to speak to us of whatever we find important and need to be reminded of.
13.
In reality, the architects of the Modernist movement, just like all their predecessors, wanted their houses to speak. Only not of the nineteenth century. Or of privilege and aristocratic life. Or of the Middle Ages or Ancient Rome. They wanted their houses to speak of the future, with its promise of speed and technology, democracy and science. They wanted their armchairs to evoke racing cars and planes, they wanted their lamps to evoke the power of industry and their coffee pots the dynamism of high-speed trains.
It wasn’t that they ever lost sight of the importance of arousing feelings; their argument was, instead, with the family of feelings that previous architectural styles had generated.
With his central staircase in the Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier – just like Ange-Jacques Gabriel at the Classical pavilion of Le Petit Trianon in Versailles, a few miles to the south – was trying to do something other than simply carry people to an upper floor. He was trying to prompt a state of the soul.
Despite their claims to a purely scientific and reasoned approach, the relationship of Modernist architects to their work remained at base a romantic one: they looked to architecture to support a way of life that appealed to them. Their domestic buildings were conceived as stage sets for actors in an idealised drama about contemporary existence.
Two staircases to prompt two different states of the soul:
Left: Le Petit Trianon, Versailles, 1768
Right: Villa Savoye, Poissy, 1931
A stage set for actors in an idealised drama about contemporary existence:
Advertisement for the 1927 Mercedes-Benz, set against Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s Double-house, Weissenhofsiedlung, Stuttgart, 1927
14.
So strong was the aesthetic interest of the Modernists that it routinely took precedence over considerations of efficiency. The Villa Savoye might have looked like a practically minded machine, but it was in reality an artistically motivated folly. The bare walls were handmade by artisans using costly imported Swiss mortar, they were as delicate as pieces of lace and as devoted to generating feelings as the jewel-encrusted naves of a Counter-Reformation Church.
By Modernism’s own standards, the roof of the villa was equally, and yet more ruinously, dishonest. In spite of initial protests from the Savoyes, Le Corbusier insisted – supposedly on technical and economic grounds alone – that a flat roof would be preferable to a pitched one. It would, he assured his clients, be cheaper to construct, easier to maintain and cooler in summer, and Madame Savoye would be able to do her gymnastic exercises on it without being bothered by damp vapours emanating from the ground floor. But only a week after the family moved in, the roof sprang a leak over Roger’s bedroom, letting in so much water that the boy contracted a chest infection, which turned into pneumonia, which eventually required him to spend a year recuperating in a sanatorium in Chamonix. In September 1936, six years after the villa’s official completion, Madame Savoye compressed her feelings about the performance of the flat roof into a (rain-splattered) letter: ‘It’s raining in the hall, it’s raining on the ramp, and the wall of the garage is absolutely soaked. What’s more, it’s still raining in my bathroom, which floods in bad weather, as the water comes in through the skylight.’ Le Corbusier promised that the problem would be fixed straightaway, then took the opportunity to remind his client of how enthusiastically his flat-roofed design had been received by architectural critics worldwide: ‘You should place a book on the table in the downstairs hall and ask all your visitors to inscribe their names and addresses in it. You’ll see how many fine autographs you will collect’. But this invitation to philography was of little comfort to the rheumatic Savoye family. ‘After innumerable demands on my part, you have finally accepted that this house which you built in 1929 is uninhabitable,’ admonished Madame Savoye in the autumn of 1937. ‘Your responsibility is at stake and I have no need to foot the bill. Please render it habitable immediately. I sincerely hope that I will not have to take recourse to legal action.’ Only the outbreak of the Second World War and the Savoye family’s consequent flight from Paris saved Le Corbusier from having to answer in a courtroom for the design of his largely uninhabitable, if extraordinarily beautiful, machine-for-living.
Beautiful but not rain-proof:
Rooftop, Villa Savoye, 1931
15.
If Modernist architects privately designed with beauty in mind, why did they justify their work principally in technological terms?
Fear seems to have lain at the heart of their discretion. The end of a belief in a universal standard of beauty had created a climate in which no one style could be immune from criticism. Objections to the appearance of Modernist houses, voiced by adherents of Gothic or Tyrolean architecture, could not be shrugged off without inviting accusations of high-handedness and arrogance. In aesthetics, as in democratic politics, a final arbiter had grown elusive.
Hence the attractions of a scientific language with which to ward off detractors and convince the wavering. Even the God of the Old Testament, faced with the continual querulousness of the tribes of Israel, had occasionally to ignite a piece of desert shrub to awe his audience into reverence. Technology would be the Modernists’ burning bush. To speak of technology in relation to one’s houses was to appeal – now that the influence of Christianity was waning and Classical culture was being ignored – to the most prestigious force in society, responsible for penicillin, telephones and aeroplanes. Science, then, would apparently determine the pitch of the roof.
16.
Yet, in truth, science is rarely so categorical. In 1925 the architect and designer Marcel Breuer unveiled a chair which he touted as the world’s first soberly logical solution to ‘the problem of sitting’. Every part of the B3 chair was the result, he explained, of an intensive effort to banish ‘the whimsical in favour of the rational’.
The B3’s seat and back were made of leather for durability; its offset angular shape was the inevitable answer to the needs of the human vertebrae; and its steel frame, because it was a hundred times stronger than wood, would never splinter or chip.
But Breuer’s attempt to make a scientific case for his chair could not breach an impregnable reality: while it may be necessary to resort to specific materials and forms when constructing a bridge, there is no corresponding technical need to limit one’s imagination in designing a piece of living-room furniture, which must merely support the weight of a human body – and so can be built of curved steel but also as happily of oak, bamboo, plastic or fibreglass. A chair can equally well satisfy its modest brief in the guise of a B3, a Queen Anne or a Windsor armchair. Science alone cannot tell us how our seats should look.
Even in more complex commissions, the laws of engineering seldom dictate a particular style. The Montjuïc Telecommunications Tower in Barcelona, for example, could have taken on any number of forms while still managing to transmit its signals adequately. The antenna could have been sculpted to look like a pear rather than like a javelin; the base might have been made to resemble a riding boot rather than the prow of a spacecraft. Dozens of options would have each worked well mechanically. But as its architect, Santiago Calatrava, recognised, only a very few designs would have conveyed with appropriate poetry the promises of modernity to the people of Barcelona.
17.
The incoherencies of the Modernist relationship to science return us to the confusing plethora of architectural options that the early Modernists had once hoped to eradicate. We return to the carnival of architecture. Why not carve flowers on our buildings? Why not use concrete panels imprinted with pictures of aeroplanes and insects? Why not coat a skyscraper with Islamic motifs?
If engineering cannot tell us what our houses should look like, nor in a pluralistic and non-defer
ential world can precedent or tradition, we must be free to pursue all stylistic options. We should acknowledge that the question of what is beautiful is both impossible to elucidate and shameful and even undemocratic to mention.
A chair dictated by science?
Marcel Breuer, B3 chair, 1925
Functional chairs:
Left: Queen Anne japanned armchair, c. 1710
Right: High-back Windsor armchair, 1850s
Art rather than science:
Santiago Calatrava, Montjuïc Telecommunications Tower, Barcelona, 1991
18.
However, there might be a way to surmount this state of sterile relativism with the help of John Ruskin’s provocative remark about the eloquence of architecture. The remark focuses our minds on the idea that buildings are not simply visual objects without any connection to concepts which we can analyse and then evaluate. Buildings speak – and on topics which can readily be discerned. They speak of democracy or aristocracy, openness or arrogance, welcome or threat, a sympathy for the future or a hankering for the past.
The return of choice:
Left: Herzog & de Meuron, Library of the Eberswalde Technical School, Eberswalde, 1999
Right: Jean Nouvel, proposed skyscraper, Doha, 2004
Left: Tias Eckhoff, Regent Service, Porsgrund, 1961
Right: Blue Cameo Service, Sèvres, 1778
Any object of design will give off an impression of the psychological and moral attitudes it supports. We can, for example, feel two distinct conceptions of fulfilment emanating from a plain Scandinavian crockery set on the one hand and an ornate Sèvres one on the other – an invitation to a democratic graceful sensibility in the former case, to a ceremonial and class-bound disposition in the latter.
In essence, what works of design and architecture talk to us about is the kind of life that would most appropriately unfold within and around them. They tell us of certain moods that they seek to encourage and sustain in their inhabitants. While keeping us warm and helping us in mechanical ways, they simultaneously hold out an invitation for us to be specific sorts of people. They speak of visions of happiness.
To describe a building as beautiful therefore suggests more than a mere aesthetic fondness; it implies an attraction to the particular way of life this structure is promoting through its roof, door handles, window frames, staircase and furnishings. A feeling of beauty is a sign that we have come upon a material articulation of certain of our ideas of a good life.
Similarly, buildings will strike us as offensive not because they violate a private and mysterious visual preference but because they conflict with our understanding of the rightful sense of existence – which helps to explain the seriousness and viciousness with which disputes about fitting architecture tend to unfold.
19.
The advantage of shifting the focus of discussion away from the strictly visual towards the values promoted by buildings is that we become able to handle talk about the appearance of works of architecture rather as we do wider debates about people, ideas and political agendas.
Arguments about what is beautiful emerge as no easier to resolve, but then again no harder, than disputes about what is wise or right. We can learn to defend or attack a concept of beauty in the same way we might defend or attack a legal position or an ethical stance. We can understand, and publically explain, why we believe a building to be desirable or offensive on the basis of the things it talks to us about.
The notion of buildings that speak helps us to place at the very centre of our architectural conundrums the question of the values we want to live by – rather than merely of how we want things to look.
What do we want our buildings to talk to us about?:
Left: Michael Shanly Homes, Oakington Place, Middlesex, 2005
Right: Office of Makoto Yamaguchi, Villa, Karuizawa, 2003
III. Talking Buildings
1.
If our interest in buildings and objects is indeed determined as much by what they say to us as by how they perform their material functions, it is worth elaborating on the curious process by which arrangements of stone, steel, concrete, wood and glass seem able to express themselves – and can on rare occasions leave us under the impression that they are talking to us about significant and touching things.
2.
We will, of course, run a risk if we spend extended periods analysing the meanings that emanate from practical objects. To be preoccupied with deciphering the message encoded in a light switch or a tap is to leave ourselves more than usually vulnerable to the commonsensical scorn of those who seek little from such fittings beyond a means of illuminating their bedroom or rinsing their teeth.
To inoculate ourselves against this derision, and to gain confidence in cultivating a contrary, more meditative attitude towards objects, we might profitably pay a visit to a museum of modern art. In whitewashed galleries housing collections of twentieth-century abstract sculpture, we are offered a rare perspective on how exactly three-dimensional masses can assume and convey meaning – a perspective that may in turn enable us to regard our fittings and houses in a new way.
3.
It was in the first half of the twentieth century that sculptors began eliciting equal measures of awe and opprobrium for exhibiting pieces to which it seemed hard to put a name, works that both lacked an interest in the mimetic ambitions that had dominated Western sculpture since the Ancient Greeks and, despite a certain resemblance to domestic furnishings, had no practical capacities either.
What abstract objects can say:
Henry Moore, Two Forms, 1934
Alberto Giacometti, Hour of the Traces, 1930; Jasper Morrison, ATM Table, 2003
Anthony Caro, Whispering, 1969; Mies van der Rohe, column, Barcelona Pavilion, 1929
Donald Judd, Untitled, 1989; Diener and Diener, Migros, Lucerne, 2000
Yet, notwithstanding these limitations, abstract artists argued that their sculptures were capable of articulating the greatest of themes. Many critics agreed. Herbert Read described Henry Moore’s work as a treatise on human kindness and cruelty in a world from which God had recently departed, while for David Sylvester, Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures expressed the loneliness and desire of man alienated from his authentic self in industrial society.
It may be easy to laugh at the grandiloquence of claims directed at objects which on occasion resemble giant earplugs or upturned lawnmowers. But, instead of accusing critics of reading too much into too little, we should allow abstract sculptures to demonstrate to us the range of thoughts and emotions that every kind of non-representational object can convey. The gift of the most talented sculptors has been to teach us that large ideas, for example, about intelligence or kindness, youth or serenity, can be communicated in chunks of wood and string, or in plaster and metal contraptions, as well as they can in words or in human or animal likenesses. The great abstract sculptures have succeeded in speaking to us, in their peculiar dissociated language, of the important themes of our lives.
In turn, these sculptures afford us an opportunity to focus with unaccustomed intensity on the communicative powers of all objects, including our buildings and their furnishings. Inspired by a museum visit, we may scold ourselves for our previous prosaic belief that a salad bowl is only a salad bowl, rather than, in truth, an object over which there linger faint but meaningful associations of wholeness, the feminine and the infinite. We can look at a practical entity like a desk, a column or an entire apartment building and here, too, locate abstract articulations of some of the important themes of our lives.
4.
A bright morning in the Tate Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall. On a plinth sits a marble sculpture by Barbara Hepworth, first exhibited in 1936. Although it is unclear what exactly these three stones might mean or represent – a mystery reflected in their reticent title, Two Segments and a Sphere – they nevertheless manage to arrest and reward our gaze. Their interest centres on the opposition between the ball and the semicircular wedge o
n which it rests. The ball looks unstable and energetic; we sense how keenly it wants to roll down the segment’s leading edge and bowl across the room. By contrast with this impulsiveness, the accompanying wedge conveys maturity and stability: it seems content to nurse gently from side to side, taming the recklessness of its charge. In viewing the piece, we are witness to a tender and playful relationship, rendered majestic through the primordial medium of polished white marble.
In an essay on Hepworth, the psychoanalytic critic Adrian Stokes attempted to analyse the power of this apparently simple work. He arrived at a compelling conclusion. If the sculpture touches us, he ventured, it may be because we unconsciously understand it as a family portrait. The mobility and chubby fullness of the sphere subtly suggest to us a wriggling fat-cheeked baby, while the rocking ample forms of the segment have echoes of a calm, indulgent, broad-hipped mother. We dimly apprehend in the whole a central theme of our lives. We sense a parable in stone about motherly love.
Stokes’s argument directs us to two ideas. First, that it doesn’t take much for us to interpret an object as a human or animal figure. A piece of stone can have no legs, eyes, ears or almost any of the features associated with a living thing; it need have only the merest hint of a maternal thigh or a babyish cheek and we will start to read it as a character. Thanks to this projective proclivity, we can end up as moved by a Hepworth sculpture as we are by a more literal picture of maternal tenderness, for to our inner eyes, there need be no difference between the expressive capacity of a representational painting and that of an arrangement of stones.
The Architecture of Happiness Page 4
