The notion that a building is defective unless the spaces provided are adequate and appropriate for their intended usage would seem obvious. Yet the statement itself has been a source of controversy since the 1960s. The main reasons for the controversy are: first, whereas there are seldom exact statistical means of computing spatial adequacy or appropriateness, there are many building types or building elements for which one cannot even establish the optimum forms and dimensions with any confidence that they will be generally accepted. Second, edifices are frequently used for purposes other than those for which they were originally planned. Furthermore, there is some doubt as to whether “form follows function” or “function follows form,” since, although, in general, it can reasonably be assumed that an architect’s task is to construct specific spaces for the fulfillment of predetermined functions, there is plenty of historical evidence to suggest that many important social institutions have resulted from spaces already built. No better example could be found than the evolution of parliamentary systems. The British system, based on the concept of legislatures in which the sovereign’s government and the sovereign’s opposition confront each other, originated in the fact that the earliest parliaments met in the medieval palace chapel. The French system, created concurrently with the Greek and Roman revivals, was based on the concept of legislatures addressed by orators, and its environment was that of an antique theatre. In the former system the seating was designed in accordance with the liturgical requirements of a Christian church; in the latter, with the evolution of Greek drama. Neither had anything to do with preconceived notions regarding the most effective environment for parliamentary debate, yet both have had divergent influences on constitutional procedures, thereby deeply affecting the whole theory of government.

Third, the exact significance of what is meant by “adequate appropriate spaces” becomes far more complex in buildings requiring a large number of interrelated spaces than it is in single-cell buildings. The emotional effect of transitions from spacious to constricted volumes and vice versa transcends in architectural importance the statistical evaluation of floor areas; a fact which explains the attractiveness of theories that have tacitly adopted places of worship as spatial paradigms and bolstered their arguments by historical reference to temples and churches. This bias is perceptible not only in the most influential theories enunciated before 1900 (when the prototypes were either primeval, antique, or medieval) but also in the most influential ideas promulgated by such great architectural leaders of the 20th century as Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

The idealization of monumental single-cell spaces is sometimes justified, but the difficulty of evolving theories of planning by the use of historical prototypes should be emphasized. It is in this branch of architectural theory that the influences of historicism have been most insidious, precisely because they are less obvious here than in systems of construction, of proportions, and of ornamentation. Such influences persist mainly because of art-historical indifference to the essential distinction between building types, since such distinction conflicts with the chronological sequence of particular architects’ stylistic evolution, but it is for this reason that Julien Guadet’s greatest contribution to the theory of architecture may well have been his decision to evolve a history of architecture in which all buildings were classified solely in accordance with their function.

Firmitas

Two plausible reasons can be given for according logical primacy in the Vitruvian triad to firmitas. The first is the notion that architecture is essentially the “art of building.” The second is that, since the uses or functions of a building tend to change, the structures serving such functions may be considered as taking logical precedence over them. This idea was expressed with characteristic lapidary vigour by the 20th-century French architect Auguste Perret when he asserted that

architecture is the art of organizing space; but it is by construction that it expresses itself…Functions, customs, and building regulations and fashions impose conditions which are only transitory.

Some later architectural theorists have become so concerned with the rapid obsolescence of modern buildings that they have envisaged edifices that express the temporary nature of these transitory qualities and are therefore built in such a way as to enable the structures themselves to be discarded completely after a few years. On the other hand (since the economic feasibility of this technique is questionable), there are still many architects who believe in the inevitability of permanent buildings and who therefore hold views more compatible with this belief.

From the time of the Renaissance to the mid-18th century—as also before the decline of the ancient Roman Empire on which the culture of this era was modelled—little concern seems to have been given to the idea that there was any virtue in manifesting the actual structural system of a building. Alberti recommended a distinctive articulation of the skeleton frame in conformity with the antique concept of trabeation, or the post-and-lintel system (and hence the independence of the “infilling” elements, such as arches or solid walling), but the more commonly accepted notion seems to have been that, provided a trabeated system was expressed externally, the relationship of this visual expression to the actual system of construction was relatively unimportant. Theoretical pronouncements on this matter depended of course on the architectural traditions of each country. In Italy (where the traditional technique of building had, even during the Middle Ages, assumed that structure was independent of appearance and where it was common to complete a building in brick before adding its marble facades) the idea that there could be any theoretical dilemma regarding the unison between these two elements was virtually inconceivable. Palladio and his generation seem to have generally accepted the idea that, in regions where masonry was scarce, the use of stuccoed, painted, or veneered brickwork, with plastered timber beams, was architecturally as “genuine” as the use of stone, provided it was all of one colour. But in the Île-de-France region around Paris, on the contrary, the medieval traditions of French masonry construction, combined with the abundance of good freestone, caused theorists from the Renaissance to the time of the French Revolution to favour a less tenuous relationship between the external appearance of a building and the system by which it was constructed. Nevertheless, it is probably fair to say that in all European countries before the end of the 18th century, as well as in their American colonies, the only problem concerned with firmitas (other than technical problems) was the problem of the relationship between “real and apparent stability,” and, when theorists pronounced on this problem, it was usually to assert that a building should not only be structurally stable but should also appear to be so.

A violent assault upon this point of view was launched by the Gothic Revivalists, who in the mid-19th century contended that the breathtaking counterpoise of a cathedral’s flying buttresses was far more dramatically expressive of firmitas than the ponderous massiveness of its sturdy western towers. It was in this era that the term daring (which Ruskin had frequently used with reference to the paintings of the English Romantic artist J.M.W. Turner) became popular as a laudatory epithet, thereby indicating an ideal of structural expression that was to be increasingly exploited when steel and reinforced concrete permitted higher buildings with fewer and more slender supports.

But the most controversial issue concerning firmitas in the 19th century—which also arose through the influence of the Gothic Revival movement—concerned the extent to which a building should manifest its structural system and the materials used. The attraction of this particular interpretation of the concept of truthful architecture was probably due to the popularity of new attitudes toward experimental science and to the disrepute into which mythology had been cast by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. Presumably, truth was no less prized in the 17th or 18th centuries than in the 19th century (though shams may have been less rife), while hypocrisy was regarded with as much contempt. Moreover, although the 19th century was a period of growing realism in literature, it was also a period of growing expressiveness in painting and music. Whatever the reason for this change of attitude, the 19th century saw a general acceptance of the notion that buildings were “true” only insofar as their structural form and appearance corresponded to the structural systems and materials employed, and this dogma was developed by means of many elaborate biological and mechanical analogies.

This particular doctrine had a highly beneficial influence on architectural evolution during the 20th century, since it helped to demonstrate why the radical changes in building technology rendered earlier concepts of architectural form (based on load-bearing masonry construction) theoretically untenable. While it may readily be admitted that a building can express many other things besides its function and structure, failure to express the latter in some manner, however remote, must always lead to arbitrariness. This would not only be harmful to the evolution of architectural form but would inevitably result in a somewhat cynical concept of building as “pure form”—a concept that only those who regard architecture as nothing more than large-scale packaging or abstract sculpture could accept.