Theory of architecture

Distinction between the history and theory of architecture

The distinction between the history and theory of architecture did not emerge until the mid-18th century. Indeed, the establishment of two separate academic disciplines was not even nominal until 1818, when separate professorships with these titles were established at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Even then, however, the distinction was seldom scrupulously maintained by either specialist. It is impossible to discuss meaningfully the buildings of the immediate past without discussing the ideals of those who built them, just as it is impossible to discuss the ideals of bygone architects without reference to the structures they designed. Nevertheless, since any two disciplines that are inseparably complementary can at the same time be logically distinguishable, it may be asserted that this particular distinction first became manifest in Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce (“The Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments of Greece”), written in 1758 by a French architecture student, Julien-David LeRoy. Faced with the problem of discussing Athenian buildings constructed in the time of Vitruvius, he decided to discuss them twice, by treating them separately under two different headings. Before this date, “history” was of architectural importance only as a means of justifying, by reference to classical mythology, the use of certain otherwise irrational elements, such as caryatids. Even Jacques-François Blondel, who in 1750 was probably the first architectural teacher to devote a separate section of his lecture courses to “history,” envisaged the subject mainly as an account of the literary references to architecture found in antique manuscripts—an attitude already developed by the 15th-century Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti.

The modern concept of architectural history was in fact simply part of a larger trend stimulated by the leading writers of the French Enlightenment, an 18th-century intellectual movement that developed from interrelated conceptions of reason, nature, and humans. As a result of discussing constitutional law in terms of its evolution, every branch of knowledge (especially the natural and social sciences) was eventually seen as a historical sequence. In the philosophy of architecture, as in all other kinds of philosophy, the introduction of the historical method not only facilitated the teaching of these subjects but also militated against the elaboration of theoretical speculation. Just as those charged with the responsibility of lecturing on ethics found it very much easier to lecture on the history of ethics, rather than to discuss how a person should or should not act in specific contemporary circumstances, so those who lectured on architectural theory found it easier to recite detailed accounts of what had been done in the past, rather than to recommend practical methods of dealing with current problems.

Moreover, the system of the Paris École des Beaux-Arts (which provided virtually the only organized system of architectural education at the beginning of the 19th century) was radically different from that of the prerevolutionary Académie Royale d’Architecture. Quatremère de Quincy, an Italophile archaeologist who had been trained as a sculptor, united the school of architecture with that of painting and sculpture to form a single organization, so that, although architectural students were ultimately given their own professor of theory, the whole theoretical background of their studies was assimilated to the other two fine arts by lecture courses and textbooks such as Hippolyte Taine’s Philosophie de l’art, Charles Blanc’s Grammaire des arts du dessin, and Eugène Guillaume’s Essais sur la théorie du dessin.

Similarly, whereas before 1750 the uniformity of doctrine (the basic premises of which were ostensibly unchanged since the Renaissance) allowed the professor of architecture to discuss antique and 16th-century buildings as examples of architectural theory and to ignore medieval buildings completely, the mid-19th-century controversy between “medievalists” and “classicists” (the “Battle of the Styles”) and the ensuing faith in Eclecticism turned the studies of architectural history into courses on archaeology.

Thus, the attitudes of those scholars who, during the 19th and early 20th centuries, wished to expound a theory of architecture that was neither a philosophy of art nor a history of architecture tended to become highly personal, if not idiosyncratic. By 1950 most theoretical writings concentrated almost exclusively on visual aspects of architecture, thereby identifying the theory of architecture with what, before 1750, would have been regarded as simply that aspect that Vitruvius called venustas (i.e., “beauty”). This approach did not necessarily invalidate the conclusions reached, but many valuable ideas then put forward as theories of architecture were only partial theories, in which it was taken for granted that theoretical concepts concerning construction and planning were dealt with in other texts.

Distinction between the theory of architecture and the theory of art

Before embarking on any discussion as to the nature of the philosophy of architecture, it is essential to distinguish between two mutually exclusive theories that affect the whole course of any such speculation. The first theory regards the philosophy of architecture as the application of a general philosophy of art to a particular type of art. The second, on the contrary, regards the philosophy of architecture as a separate study that, though it may well have many characteristics common to the theories of other arts, is generically distinct.

The first notion (i.e., that there exists a generic theory of art of which the theory of architecture is a specific extension) has been widely held since the mid-16th century, when the artist and writer Giorgio Vasari published in his Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori italiani… (The Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Painters, Sculptors and Architects…) his assertion that painting, sculpture, and architecture are all of common ancestry in that all depend on the ability to draw. This idea became particularly prevalent among English-speaking theorists, since the word design is used to translate both disegno (“a drawing”) and concetto (“a mental plan”). But its main influence on Western thought was due to Italophile Frenchmen, after Louis XIV had been induced to establish in Rome a French Academy modelled on Italian art academies.

As a result of the widespread influence of French culture in the 17th and 18th centuries, the concept of the beaux arts (literally “beautiful arts” but usually translated into English as “fine arts”) was accepted by Anglo-Saxon theorists as denoting a philosophical entity, to the point where it was generally forgotten that in France itself the architectural profession remained totally aloof from the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture until they were forced to amalgamate after the French Revolution.

This theory of fine art might not have been so widely adopted but for the development of aesthetics, elaborated after 1750. Thus, when academies of fine art were being established successively in Denmark, Russia, and England on the model of the French Academy in Rome, German philosophers were gradually asserting (1) that it was possible to elaborate a theory of beauty without reference to function (Zweck); (2) that any theory of beauty should be applicable to all sensory perceptions, whether visual or auditory; and (3) that the notion of beauty was only one aspect of a much larger concept of life-enhancing sensory stimuli.

The alternative theory (i.e., that a philosophy of architecture is unique and can therefore be evolved only by specific reference to the art of building) will be dealt with below with reference to the traditional triad usually cited in the formula coined, by the English theorist Sir Henry Wotton, in his book The Elements of Architecture, namely “commodity, firmness, and delight.”

Generally speaking, writers on aesthetics have been noticeably reluctant to use architectural examples in support of speculations as to the nature of their general theories, but references to buildings have been used in most “philosophies of art” ever since the German philosophers Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel first popularized the philosophical discipline. Kant, in his Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790; Critique of Judgment, 1951), distinguished between what he termed free beauty (pulchritudo vaga) and dependent beauty (pulchritudo adhaerens). He classified architecture as dependent beauty, saying that in a thing that is possible only by means of design (Absicht)—a building or even an animal—the regularity consisting in symmetry must express the unity of the intuition that accompanies the concept of purpose (Zweck), and this regularity belongs to cognition. Nevertheless, he claimed that a flower should be classified as free beauty (where the judgment of taste is “pure”) “because hardly anyone but a botanist knows what sort of thing a flower ought to be; and even he, though recognizing in the flower the reproductive organ of the plant, pays no regard to this natural purpose if he is passing judgment on the flower by taste.” What Kant’s reaction would have been to a modern plastic imitation flower is impossible to guess, but it will readily be perceived (1) why those who, in the 19th century, accepted the notion that beauty in architecture is pulchritudo adhaerens felt such antipathy toward “shams,” (2) how the distinction between “pure art” and “functional art” (Zweckkunst) became confused, and (3) why there arose a tendency to pursue definitions of “pure beauty” or “pure art” without specifically referring to the function and structure of any particular class of beautiful or artistic objects, such as buildings.

This latter tendency was reinforced when the French philosopher Victor Cousin, writing in 1835, classified the history of philosophy under three distinct headings: the true, the beautiful, and the good. The ensuing acceptance of the idea that beauty was to be studied independently of truth and goodness produced a tendency not merely to regard beauty as something added to a building (rather than conceptually inseparable from the truth and goodness of its structure and function) but to regard beauty as limited to visual and emotional qualities.

In the first half of the 20th century, philosophers grew less dogmatic about aesthetics. But its influence on theories of architecture became stronger because of the popular view that sculpture was essentially nonrepresentational. Thus, although the assertion that “aesthetically, architecture is the creation of sculpture big enough to walk about inside” was meaningful in the 20th century, it would have seemed nonsensical to any architectural theorist living before 1900, when sculpture was invariably thought of either as representational or as a carved refinement of load-bearing wood or stone.