by Robin Boyd
Contradicting nearly everything that has gone before, Le Corbusier concluded his first book on Le Modulor with a caution: ‘Any door that offers an escape is dangerous,’ and by quoting Kahnweiler’s comment on the Cubist movement—including Le Corbusier’s architecture: ‘Every one of these artists has attempted to create works of art which have as strong an autonomous existence as possible, to produce objects whose unity is ensured by the force of their rhythm and in which the parts are subordinated to the whole. To each of these objects, fruits of their emotion, they intend by its uniqueness to guarantee complete autonomy.’ Could Le Corbusier have discovered a more devastating condemnation of Le Modulor’s pretensions to universal proportioning? How can a work of art have an autonomous existence while it is pulling its forelock to some inviolable rule of proportion? Le Corbusier makes this apparent contradiction because he sees the dimensions on his measuring stick not as an architectural scale like a footrule, but more as a musical scale on which the designer may play freely. But surely language is working some mischief here. Le Corbusier’s interpretation of playing freely on Le Modulor is to ignore it altogether, to change the key, whenever it offers no dimension applicable to a practical task in hand—for instance, in the height of an ordinary doorway. This is the traditional way with systems of architectural proportions. ‘The artist is always present beside the geometrician,’ said Viollet-le-Duc, ‘and will be able, when necessary, to bend the formulas.’ [Dictionnaire raisonne de l’architecture francaise du XIe au XVIe siecle: ‘Proportion’; ‘L’architecture n’est pas l’esclave d’un systeme hieratique de proportione, mais au contraire peut se modifier sans cesse et trouver des applications toujour nouvelles.’ (p. 534) ‘…l’artiste est toujours present a cote du geometre, et sait, au besoin, faire flechir les formules.’ (p. 549)] Now just what—one may ask in Heaven’s name—is bent geometry? It is certainly not geometry, probably it is not the best art, and it can hardly be the way to the stars.
While scientists are being led into deeper and deeper mysteries, while the basic theoretical concepts of existence are ever more in doubt, while scientific writers continually warn against over-simplification, while ‘all highroads of the intellect, all byways of theory and conjecture lead ultimately to an abyss that human ingenuity can never span’ (Lincoln Barnett), it is preposterous for artists to play with a simple formula or two from the mathematician’s primers. Many an artist-architect is a Flash Gordon at heart, but he should not worry about the cosmic value of his work. Everything he builds must be as much a part of the universal harmony as he is. The greatest architect and the meanest speculative builder involuntarily wade, alongside the vulture and leaf mould, under the ultimate law of the expanding universe. Some artists receive blinding glimpses of what they believe to be eternity. If you are not by nature the type given to receiving these messages, mathematics will not increase your capacity. If you are, translation of the message will not be strengthened but weakened by dressing it in numbers, by confusing your medium with the elementary mechanics of scientific theory.
But perhaps there is an eternal quality of beauty not discoverable by numbers or geometry and not mystical, but a self-sufficient object existing independently of the eyes of the beholder, as C. E. M. Joad proposed in Matter, Life and Value. ‘It is a real and unique factor in the universe,’ he wrote. ‘When I say that a picture or a piece of music is beautiful, I am not making a statement about any feeling that I or any other person or body of persons may have or have had…I am making an assertion about a quality or property possessed…’ This property, he explained later, is ‘the awareness of value’. At a moment of perception the artist, attended by a thrill of excitement, apprehends albeit obscurely the patterns and arrangement of the real world. Recalling their outlines as he works, he reproduces them in his medium.
If this is a correct interpretation, or if there is a single mathematical system behind all creation, and if it is possible for man eventually to discover these secrets and to translate them into buildings; if in an infinitely distant future numbers replace an artist’s perception and all buildings repose in sublime harmony, then will architects retire with their logarithms from creative practice? Unless men also are at that time drilled by numbers, the very harmony will be a challenge to some; beauty carried to satiety will goad them into revolt against the codes and numbers and they will find their own satisfaction in some disharmony or, in terms of the canon, ugliness.
But perhaps language is confusing the issue again. Are Professor Joad’s ‘patterns and arrangements of the real world’ necessarily beautiful? How many of Le Corbusier’s Cubist painter colleagues would support his search for ‘the simple harmony that moves us: beauty’? Nothing stood lower in the Cubist’s esteem than the beautiful painting with its oily, introverted composition and its eye-resting, soul-soothing centre of interest. They were not aesthetes searching for beauty. They sought a sharper perception to convey a keener experience of form; perhaps this is Joad’s ‘awareness of value’, and it may be more than beauty. ‘Modern Art’ may be beautiful to some and ugly to others, but this is irrelevant. Even those who see a painting as ‘ugly’ may find it intensely stimulating; to this extent it gives them pleasure. Provocative fascination is not, however, what modern architecture means by ‘pleasing effect’ and ‘beauty’ when it perseveres today with these terms. Architects still mean the concept of beauty established by the Greeks and maintained throughout the European classical tradition; and it is the adherence to this meaning of beauty and to beauty as an ideal which distinguishes ‘Modern Architecture’ from the revolutionary art movements of the twentieth century. Generally our architecture has sought to re-create the glory of Greece, in different terms perhaps, but essentially the same sort of glory.
There have been exceptions. Some of the early ‘scientific’ architects of Central Europe like Hannes Meyer professed no interest in creating beauty, but since they also denied architecture any claim to art and required the architect to suppress any conscious personal expression, their work is not relevant to this discussion. The recent tendency in England towards a revival of early modern architectural morality is more significant. The leaders of this movement hopefully adopted a style-name, ‘The New Brutalism’, an expression which the Swedish architect Hans Asplund coined (‘in a mildly sarcastic way’, as he recalled later) in January 1950: a new promise perhaps for the second half of the century. The style was still little more than the mildly sarcastic name when Reyner Banham examined it in the Architectural Review of December 1955. Its leaders, Alison and Peter Smithson, could then exhibit one completed building: a large school, and drawings of some unsuccessful entries in competitions. The movement also reached across the Atlantic to claim Louis Kahn’s Fine Arts Centre at Yale University. The importance of the movement was not to be found in completed works, however, but in the fact that it was the first consistent assault on the classical conception of beauty, and that it was a hot topic in English architectural circles. Banham defined a New Brutalist building as one having: ‘1, Memorability as an Image; 2, clear exhibition of structure; and 3, valuation of materials “as found”.’ These qualities exist to a degree in many modern buildings, especially in Mies van der Rohe’s work, but the degree makes all the difference, and in the case of the Smithsons it is the Nth. A rugged, heavy, over-strong look in exposed concrete and masonry characterizes their work, and a prominent little detail is the exposure of the mechanical sub-contractors’ apparatus: pipes on the ceiling and electrical conduits darting up and down the walls to pick up switches. Again, this was hardly an innovation, but the interest lay in their manner of, and reasons for, this exposure. The pipes were not shown simply on the ethical grounds of the scientific school, nor were they rather apologetically aiming to please, as was the ductwork on the ceiling of Markelius’s chamber in the United Nations Conference building. And although they looked somewhat like a delinquent youth’s pencilled additions to a street poster the pipes were not a destructive but a mildly const
ructive protest against the reigning concept of beauty. The New Brutalists were reaching back half a century to recapture something of the first excitement of the revolution, and they found a string of devoted disciples falling in behind them.
Aesthetic theory has often observed that the abstract arts have not an extensive repertoire of emotional expression. The traditional expressions of great architecture tend to convey either a great sublimity or a gentle serenity, but here in New Brutalism was a renewed promise of different expressions beyond the aesthetic limitations. The most unfortunate thing about the movement was its catch-phrase name, an only half-ironic conceit which suggested a passing ‘cult of ugliness’; little wonder that New Brutalism met with much dark misunderstanding in its own country, was brushed aside in the USA as ‘poor man’s Mies’, and has not yet appeared in Australia. The coarse, crude Anti-Featurism of the Brutalists was too much even for architectural students in the land of the Featurists.
Sir Herbert Read has pointed to the need in art for a new word or a new meaning for the old word of beauty: ‘…a Greek Aphrodite, a Byzantine Madonna, and a savage idol from New Guinea or the Ivory Coast cannot all belong to this classical concept of beauty. The latter at least, if words are to have any precise meaning, we must confess to be unbeautiful, or ugly.’ Here is the point of collapse of the idiom: to be unbeautiful in the classical concept is to be ‘ugly’. No one wishes to create more ugliness when so much already abounds; hence all good architects should aspire to nothing but beauty. Any building which does not conform to this idea is reprehensible. The external form of Saarinen’s sliced dome at MIT has been criticized on the basis of its not appearing at rest from some angles, and photographers are careful to select the viewpoints from which it appears symmetrical, avoiding the disturbing unbalance from some aspects. Australian architectural criticism is usually confined to discussions of whether a dome looks too low or a tower too high. But there is a rich world of visual stimulation, which already happens to include the savage idol and many arts of other eras and civilizations and much mature modern painting, lying between classical beauty and objectionable ugliness.
A command of the technique of architectural composition, of proportion, balance, rhythm, scale and so on, is of course essential to an architect, but the way of everyday modern architecture, as taught in most schools and practised in most streets, is not to control these elements but to be controlled by them. The student is taught not the method of driving so much as the end to which he must drive. He is taught, under the heading of balance, not the sensorial strength of the various forms of unbalance but only how to achieve even balance; under scale, not the odd power over the emotions of unfamiliar scale but only how to preserve ‘perfect scale’; under proportion, not the fascination of the unexpected which Mondrian turned to account, but only how to aim for ‘good proportion’; in the sum, how to design for familiarity.
Gropius has said in explanation of his approach to Functionalism: ‘The slogan “fitness for purpose equals beauty” is only half true. When do we call a human face beautiful? Every face is fit for purpose in its part, but only perfect proportions and colours in a well-balanced harmony deserve that title of honour: beautiful. Just the same is true of architecture. Only perfect harmony in its technical functions as well as in its proportions can result in beauty.’ To carry further this analogy with the human face: whether or not we accept Freud’s explanation of the aesthetic feeling here as an extension of sexual excitation or Ehrenenzweig’s belief that it is a trick of the subconscious to subdue sexual excitement, in any case beauty in human features cannot occur but in a sound healthy structure formed in the nature of the selected materials of bones, flesh, skin, hair and so on. Facial beauty also requires good proportions, which can only mean in this case proportions obeying a familiar rule, proportions which conform to the average features of our own ethnic division of the human race: nose neither too sharp nor too retrousse, eyes big but not bulbous, far but not too far apart, no feature too square or too round or too small or too prominent; everything just right. Thus the judges might select a Miss Universe. But conformation to ‘perfect’ proportions may lead only to a vapid prettiness, and ultimately to the demolition of all character down to the perfect mean level: a world of toothpaste models. We do not select our friends by beauty tests; the faces which mean most to most of us are often stern, rugged, noble, perhaps funny faces—but faces of character and as often as not describable as beautiful only if in affection we stretch the word’s meaning out of shape. Ugliness of features, on the other hand, is more than the absence of beauty. It requires a positive quality of repulsiveness, perhaps from physical distortion through ill-health or injury or from an expression of evil or some despicable intent.
The analogy between faces and architecture may be pressed a little further, for a positive quality of ugliness is found in building only when the original intention has been frustrated by accidents, clumsiness, mistakes, incompetence—some ill-health in the execution of the concept, or in a dissembling style or structure, or when the concept is in some way despicable, the character of a building pretending to be what it is not or attempting to exalt an unworthy cause or to prettify a grim or unpleasant function.
This last explanation of a cause of ugliness is not, of course, accepted by Featurists, eclectics, or many aesthetes. If one believes in the existence of an independent, eternal quality of beauty one usually believes that it may turn up anywhere. It may, for instance, be borrowed by a department store from a cathedral round the corner provided only that the architecture is reproduced well. A building’s ‘beauty need have no relation to its utility (though we like it today if it does)’, wrote A. S. G. Butler in 1927 during the morning of modern architecture, ‘and an architect may, therefore, possess an unhampered vehicle for the presentation of any emotional quality which he wishes to appear in his building.’ Indeed it is undeniable that the aesthetic qualities of attractiveness, repose, balance and those other pleasing properties of architecture may be transferable; but the beauty so produced—so very easily produced—is cheap. It is not repose so much as an architectural tranquillizer pill of no lasting value. Even if the architecture remains unmoved in the transition from cathedral to department store, the observer’s mind will be coloured by the change. Once he knows that the store is exploiting the other, stealing from the collection plate as it were, he can never regain his initial pleasure in the design. The knowledge of the building’s function must always, however lightly, alter the beholder’s vision, just as a rat may be pleasing to the eye, positively beautiful, a little furry friend, to an innocently fearless child but may look a loathsome plague-carrier and positively repulsive to an alarmed parent.
In all fairness to beauty it should be admitted here and now that a beautiful building can be not only enchanting but absolutely right for the occasion. But the question remains: is every occasion right for it? The vagueness of the word complicates this question; we know there can be many sorts of beauty. Nonetheless, there are times and places when any sort seems inappropriate. Francis Greenway’s Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney is beautiful to many people, but every time this famous colonial building of 1817 comes up for public discussion— should it be demolished, restored, preserved?—others state their dislike of it. To these sensitive people the barracks’ associations with the brutalities of convict existence overrule any niceties of proportion and mouldings. Indeed the obvious thought and attention given to these trivialities seems offensively incongruous. Beauty which seems out of place is not beauty at all. It is like sentiment out of place: saccharine, inane and self-destructive.
Morality is a personal, very private qualification of beauty. The effect of evil depends largely on how close the evil is to home, to oneself. Consider the remote, beautiful ugliness of Port Arthur, Tasmania. Consider a German concentration camp: Dachau, as it looked shortly after it had been cleaned and opened for public inspection. The leafy courtyard between the dark red brick buildings was a pretty green t
urning yellow under the gentle autumn sky, and visitors were politely requested by neat signs erected by the American Army not to throw their orange peel, cigarette butts or other trash on the trim new lawns. All was serene, reposeful, restful, and in good proportion. Yet the knowledge of the function of the murder offices and disposal ovens still permeated the court. No building has had a viler function than a Nazi extermination camp; the odium still attached to its architecture was surely strong enough to convince any aesthete who visited of the relevance of the known function to one’s total visual experience of a building. In the light of the recent function of this court beauty could exist only in tormented parody, and the normal elements of beautiful surroundings, the same kinds of trees which were beautiful in the open fields beyond the brick wall, were almost obscene in their inappropriateness.
Even in a healthy society, normal concepts of beauty can become in certain circumstances offensively unsuitable, as even Ruskin testily discovered while waiting in a beautified railway station. No one is in temper while waiting, he argued in Seven Lamps, and no one wants the symbol of his discomfort beautified. To be appropriate is more blessed than to be beautiful.
The principal distinct functions in the community demand of architecture a distinctive appearance. This was firmly believed by architects through the eclectic era, and to this end the nineteenth century developed a code of styles related to functions. Architects achieved a kind of visual appropriateness by means of the crudest symbolism and association with ancient stylistic periods: Gothic was for churches, impressive columns were for banks, Scottish Baronial was fitting for a clothing magnate’s mansion, and so on. The early pioneers of the twentieth century reacted violently against all such conceits and deceits and placed these practices at the head of their black-list. However, in the course of ridding architecture of the association of style, they also tossed out the principle of appropriateness of character. For nearly half a century the avant-garde stood for a character so pure and sterilized that it could be applied universally. Moreover, technical developments continuously tended to level all architectural character by leading the motive away from functional planning to structure, and from structure to mechanics. For example, in the tropical areas of north Australia during the nineteenth century comfort was provided by planning devices: the free passage of air under raised buildings, open verandas, breezeways, shaded courts: a pronounced character grew from these distinctive devices. This century has extended to the tropics its sturdier construction, better insulation and mechanical cooling, and comfort now is often accomplished within a building which might have been built in Hobart, except for the somewhat self-conscious louvred concrete sunshades. Within the foreseeable future the cost of power to operate air-conditioning may drop so low in proportion to building costs that the outer walls of a building may be reduced to the thinnest film while a purring mechanical heart produces halcyon interior conditions in Alice Springs or Marble Bar. But what of the buildings not content to be so impersonal? How can modern architects seek appropriate character for special buildings now that the direct association of functions with ancient stylistic categories is taboo? Even symbolism is now suspect: a cross placed on a factory may advertise that it is serving as a church but will not make the building more appropriate. A genuine quality of pertinence is above symbolism and more subtle than the nineteenth century’s demand that a building should ‘speak well’, as Ruskin put it: advertise by its style and character its function in society. It need not be necessary for the man in the street, before he reads the name above the doors, to know that this building is an apartment block, and that is a hotel, and the third is a sanitarium. It is not necessary for him to be able to tell by a high-pointed roof that the soulful structure across the square is a place of worship or by symbols of solidity that the pompous little edifice is a branch insurance office. These are external and Featurist kinds of appropriateness. A less frivolous approach demands that any architectural sensations should stem from the use of the building, that the occupiers should be presented with a sense of space which is attuned and sympathetic to the activity of the building and its environment and, as an artistic ideal, that the architectural character should heighten the experience of the phase of life being sheltered. If beauty were all there is to architecture, Featurism would be enough. A Featurist building can be as beautiful as one could wish, in a soothing, eye-resting, feeble sort of way. But architecture is more than this. The architect is a portraitist rather than a non-objective abstractionist. He portrays an incident in human life in the medium of its shelter, by the arrangement of the spaces and subdivisions and enclosing forms of structure, and by the nuances of balance, scale, proportion, and the effect upon them of colour, texture and the details of finish. While the forms, spaces, structure and materials may be expressed or expressive in passing, they are important to the building only in their relevance to the character formed in the idea, the motive: whether they support or confuse the issue. The motive, if it is worth anything at all, is everything in the artistic structure of the building. It is the first rule of design, taking charge, superseding all other rules, contradicting the authority of any absolute canon. The technical hints and tips on proportion, scale, balance, and so on are useful only so long as they remain in submission to the motive: the temple’s proportions are keyed to the temple’s motive; the restaurant’s proportions are keyed to the restaurant’s motive. The act of architectural creation is the statement of a particular definitive rule, or order, or discipline for the portrait in hand; the proportions which accept the discipline are ‘good proportions’ for the building, and those which do not support it, though they may be observing some private agreement with a mathematician, are ‘bad proportions’.
