“Commodity, firmness, and delight”: the ultimate synthesis
It has been generally assumed that a complete theory of architecture is always concerned essentially in some way or another with these three interrelated terms, which, in Vitruvius’s Latin text, are given as firmitas, utilitas, and venustas (i.e., structural stability, appropriate spatial accommodation, and attractive appearance). Nevertheless, a number of influential theorists after 1750 sought to make modifications to this traditional triad (1) by giving its components a radically different equilibrium (such as the primacy given by the 18th-century French architect Étienne-Louis Boullée to the effects of geometric forms in light or the claim made by Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand that the fulfillment of function was the sole essence of architectural beauty), (2) by adding ethical values (such as Ruskin’s “sacrifice” and “obedience”), or (3) by introducing new scientific concepts (such as Giedion’s “space-time”).
Furthermore, it has been argued that the traditional concept of firmitas, utilitas, and venustas ceased to have any real value after 1800, when engineers began creating structures that seemed so ostentatiously to defy the stonemasons’ laws of gravity, when scientific studies were creating more and more doubts as to the economical, sociological, psychological, acoustical, thermal, or optical determinants of appropriate spatial accommodation and when beauty was “altogether in the eye of the beholder.”
Clearly, one must be wary of attributing too much importance to the sequence, since a slight variation occurs in the writings of even the most traditional theorists. Vitruvius gives these terms in the sequence firmitas, utilitas, venustas, whereas both Alberti and, following him, the 16th-century Venetian architect and theorist Andrea Palladio reverse the order of the first two. Thus, Sir Henry Wotton’s sequence (which is normally used in English-language texts) does not, as so often stated, derive directly from the Latin text of Vitruvius but from the Italian text of Palladio’s I quattro libri dell’architettura (i.e., comodità, perpetuità, bellezza). But it does seem worth noting that venustas generally comes last, implying that firmitas and utilitas are to be regarded as essential logical prerequisites of architectural beauty.
On the other hand, the practical advantages, in academic treatises, of giving priority to venustas are evident. Jacques-François Blondel, in his nine-volume Cours d’architecture (1771–77; “Architecture Course”), used this sequence because he observed that considerations of “decoration” are almost entirely within the domain of the theory of architecture, whereas neither distribution (utilitas) nor construction (firmitas) can be explained properly without practical experience. The growing emphasis on aesthetics, combined with developments in psychology and the influence of art-historical methods, added weight to this argument, while the corresponding independence of scientific techniques of structural and spatial analysis led many teachers of architecture to consider utilitas and firmitas as totally separate academic disciplines. Important exceptions can be found to this generalization. At the end of the 19th century, Julien Guadet, in reaction against the creation of a chair of aesthetics at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts, considered it his duty, as professor of architectural theory, to devote his lectures to the study of architectural planning, and this method, which achieved prestige as a result of his keen mind and wide historical knowledge, was pursued by many later scholars. But Guadet’s approach became unfashionable, and since the 1960s the predominant methods of teaching architectural theory have ranged from a return to the synthesis of structural, spatial, and formal values espoused by Robert Venturi to the exploration of the architectural implications of general theories of linguistics advanced by Christian Norberg-Schulz.
Venustas
This Latin term for “beauty” (literally, the salient qualities possessed by the goddess Venus) clearly implied a visual quality in architecture that would arouse the emotion of love, but it is of interest to note that one of the crucial aspects of this problem was already anticipated by Alberti in the 15th century, as is made clear by his substitution of the word amoenitas (“pleasure”) for Vitruvius’s more anthropomorphic term venustas. Alberti not only avoids the erotic implications of the term venustas but, by subdividing amoenitas into pulchritudo and ornamentum, gives far more precise indications as to the type of visual satisfaction that architecture should provide. Pulchritudo, he asserts, is derived from harmonious proportions that are comparable to those that exist in music and are the essence of the pleasure created by architecture. Ornamentum, he claims, is only an “auxiliary brightness,” the quality and extent of which will depend essentially on what is appropriate and seemly. Both pulchritudo and ornamentum were thus related to function and environment in that, ideally, they were governed by a sense of decorum, and, since the etymological roots of both decoration and decorum are the same, it will be understood why, before 1750, the term decoration had in both English and French a far less superficial architectural implication than it often does today.
After the German philosopher and educator Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten had introduced the neologism aesthetics about 1750, the visual merits of all artifacts tended to be assessed more subjectively than objectively, and, in the criticism of all those sensory stimuli that, for want of a better term, critics somewhat indiscriminately lumped together as the fine arts, the visual criteria were extended to include not only beauty but also sublimity, picturesqueness, and even ugliness. Now it is clear that, once ugliness is equated with beauty, both terms (being contradictory) become virtually meaningless. But ugliness, after the mid-19th century, was not only one of the most important themes of many popular dramas and novels. Ugliness was also often considered the most appropriate architectural expression for all sorts of virtues—especially those of manliness, sincerity, and so on.
Before 1750, architects had expressed these qualities more subtly (e.g., by slight modifications of proportions or by unobtrusive ornament). In later years, when the value of proportion and ornament became highly controversial, architectural theorists tended to avoid committing themselves to any criteria that might be subsumed under the heading venustas. In the last resort, however, some concept of beauty must be essential to any theory of architecture, and, whether one considers Le Corbusier’s buildings beautiful or not, his most stabilizing contribution toward the theory of modern architecture was undoubtedly his constant reiteration of this term and his insistence on the traditional view that beauty in architecture is essentially based on harmonious proportions, mathematically conceived.
In the 20th century the main obstacle to an acceptance of Alberti’s notions of pulchritudo and ornamentum resulted from the influence of nonrepresentational sculpture after 1918, whereby ornament was no longer conceived as an enrichment of proportioned structure but as an integral, all-pervading part of each building’s totality. This ideal of the fusion between good proportions and “auxiliary brightness” was expressed by Walter Gropius in The New Architecture and the Bauhaus when he wrote in 1935:
Our ultimate goal, therefore, was the composite but inseparable work of art, the great building, in which the old dividing-line between monumental and decorative elements would have disappeared for ever.
The idea was accepted in most schools of architecture by the mid-20th century, but one may question whether it fully justified the expectations of its protagonists, once it had been exemplified and proliferated in so many urban environments. It is by no means certain that Gropius’s concept of the fundamental interdependence of architectural proportion and architectural ornament was irrevocably established by the Bauhaus theorists or that future architectural theorists need only concentrate on such minor modifications to the concept as may be required by sociological and technological developments.