Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture, 1750-1950 [Second edition] 9780773567054

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION
NOTES ON THE PUBLICATION OF Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
INTRODUCTION
ROMANTICISM
1 REVOLUTIONARY ARCHITECTURE
2 THE INFLUENCE OF HISTORIOGRAPHY
3 THE INFLUENCE OF THE PICTURESQUE
REVIVALISM
4 THE AWARENESS OF STYLES
5 PRIMITIVISM AND PROGRESS
6 THE ROMAN REVIVAL
7 THE GREEK REVIVAL
8 THE RENAISSANCE REVIVAL
9 GOTHIC NATIONALISM
10 GOTHIC ECCLESIOLOGY AND SOCIAL REFORM
11 POLYCHROMY
12 ECLECTICISM
13 THE DEMAND FOR A NEW ARCHITECTURE
FUNCTIONALISM
14 THE BIOLOGICAL ANALOGY
15 THE MECHANICAL ANALOGY
16 THE GASTRONOMIC ANALOGY
17 THE LINGUISTIC ANALOGY
RATIONALISM
18 THE INFLUENCE OF CIVIL AND MILITARY ENGINEERS
19 RATIONALISM
20 NEW PLANNING PROBLEMS
THE INFLUENCE OF THE ALLIED ARTS
21 THE INFLUENCE OF LITERATURE AND CRITICISM
22 THE INFLUENCE OF INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
23 THE INFLUENCE OF PAINTING AND SCULPTURE
24 NEW CONCEPTS OF SPACE
EPILOGUE
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS
A
B
C
D
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
V
W
INDEX OF TEXT
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Z

Citation preview

h Architecture 1750-1950

by the same author

CONCRETE: THE VISION OF A NEW ARCHITECTURE ARCHITECTURAL JUDGEMENT

CHANGING IDEALS IN MODERN ARCHITECTURE 1750-1950 PETER COLLINS Second Edition

McGILL-QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY PRESS Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© Peter Collins 1965 Foreword © Kenneth Frampton 1998 Note on Publication © McGill-Queen's University Press 1998 ISBN 0-7735-1704-9 (cloth) ISBN 0-7735-1775-6 (paper) Legal deposit second quarter 1998 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec First edition published in 1965 by Faber and Faber Limited. Published simultaneously in Canada by McGill University Press. Printed in Canada on acid-free paper The Press is grateful to the McGill University School of Architecture for its sponsorship of this project. The Press also wishes to thank the Board of the McGill Associates for a grant in aid of publication. McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for its publishing program. Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Collins, Peter, 1920-1981 Changing ideals in modern architecture, 1750-1950 2nd ed. First ed. published London, Faber and Faber; and Montreal, McGill University Press, 1965. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7735-1704-9 (bound) ISBN 0-7735-1775-8 (pbk.) i. Architecture, Modern—History, i. Title. NA5oo.c6 1998 724 098-900224-1

Cover: Barclay's Bank in Pall Mall East, London, photographed from the roof of New Zealand House. The former is a steel-framed building designed by Blomfield and Driver in 1921, the latter a reinforced-concrete framed building designed by Sir Robert Matthew in 1957. Apart from the curious compositional resemblance (which is of course quite fortuitous) between the roof terrace of New Zealand House and Gondoin's Paris Medical School of 1771 (plate [xxvi]), few juxtapositions could exemplify better the subject of this book. Peter Collins 7 November 1966

Contents FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION by Kenneth Frampton

vii

NOTES ON THE PUBLICATION OF Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture by Annmarie Adams

xv

PREFACE by John Bland

xxi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xxiii

ILLUSTRATIONS

xxv

INTRODUCTION

15 ROMANTICISM

1 REVOLUTIONARY ARCHITECTURE

21

2 THE INFLUENCE OF HISTORIOGRAPHY

29

3 THE INFLUENCE OF THE PICTURESQUE

42

REVIVALISM 4 THE AWARENESS OF STYLES

61

5 PRIMITIVISM AND PROGRESS

67

6 THE ROMAN REVIVAL

70

7 THE GREEK REVIVAL

79

8 THE RENAISSANCE REVIVAL

96

9 GOTHIC NATIONALISM

100

10 GOTHIC ECCLESIOLOGY AND SOCIAL REFORM

106

11 POLYCHROMY

III

12 ECLECTICISM

117

13 THE DEMAND FOR A NEW ARCHITECTURE

128

CONTENTS FUNCTIONALISM 14 THE BIOLOGICAL ANALOGY

149

15 THE MECHANICAL ANALOGY

159

16 THE GASTRONOMIC ANALOGY

167

17 THE LINGUISTIC ANALOGY

173

RATIONALISM 18 THE INFLUENCE OF CIVIL AND MILITARY ENGINEERS

185

19 RATIONALISM

198

20 NEW PLANNING PROBLEMS

218

THE INFLUENCE OF THE ALLIED ARTS 21 THE INFLUENCE OF LITERATURE AND CRITICISM

243

22 THE INFLUENCE OF INDUSTRIAL DESIGN

265

23 THE INFLUENCE OF PAINTING AND SCULPTURE

271

24 NEW CONCEPTS OF SPACE

285

EPILOGUE

295

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

301

INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS

303

INDEX OF TEXT

305

Foreword to the Second Edition

Peter Collins's hermeneutical classic Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture of 1965 is in many respects a neglected, not to say forgotten, work, and yet even now, after so much of its substance has been elaborated by subsequent scholarship, it remains a pioneering achievement. It still provides an ideological history of the modern movement covering an extremely wide trajectory and one which is animated throughout by a sharp critical bias. Its challenging originality stems from the way in which Collins questions the fundamental role played by structural form in the evolution of modern architecture throughout the last two centuries. Collins's study is a multi-faceted exegesis of the roots of European contemporary architecture and of the ramifications that these developments have had on Western culture as a whole. He pinpoints the beginning of the new with the start of history itself as an epistemic discipline, which came with Voltaire's invention of the historical method as demonstrated in his Le Siecle de Louis XIV of 1751. He shows how this canonical break was paralleled in epistemological terms by Montesquieu's De resprit des lois (1748), Baumgarten's Aesthetica (1750), and Wincklemann's Geschichte der Kunst der Altertum's (History of Ancient Art) of 1764; works which successively inaugurated the modern discourses of sociology, aesthetics, and art history. These initiatives were soon echoed by equally foundational studies in the symbiotic fields of architecture and archaeology. These last two areas sustained each other throughout the first century of the period under consideration, leading successively to the Roman, Greek, Renaissance, and Gothic revivals in architecture between 1750 and 1860. Among the key books in this succession Collins cites J.D. Leroy's Les mines des plus beaux monuments de la Grece (1758), James Stuart and Nicholas Revett's Antiquities of Athens (1764), and Robert Adam and C.L. Clerisseau's documentation of Diocletian's Palace at Split that first appeared in 1761. A crucial corollary to this archaeological research was Marc Antoine Laugier's Essai sur rarchitecture of 1753. During the same period J.G. Soufflot documented the Greek temples in Paestum. These ruins, while patently visible, had been inexplicably ignored by ships passing down the coast of Italy during the preceding vii

FOREWORD centuries. Such seminal works inaugurated the next two centuries of French theory and practice, in an evolution that Robin Middleton would later characterize as Graeco-Gothic. Significantly, this line of development culminated in the work and thought of Collins's cultural-hero Auguste Ferret, whose career occupied the last third of Collins's first study of 1959, Concrete: The Vision of a New Architecture. Apart from its critical agenda, to which I will return, Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture took its cue from Leonardo Benovolo's Storia della archittetura moderna (1960) in that it pushed the frontier of the new back into the middle of the eighteenth century, as opposed to Nikolaus Pevsner's Pioneers of Modern Design (1936) which located the emergence of the new with the birth of the English Free Style and the realization of Phillip Webb's house for William Morris in 1859. Like Benevolo, but unlike the canonical Anglo Saxon histories of the modern movement with which we have been familiar—H.R. Hitchcock's Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration (1929), J.M. Richard's An Introduction to Modern Architecture (1940), and Arnold Whittick's European Architecture in the Twentieth Century (1950)—Collins situated the beginning of modernity around 1750, not least because this was the moment of the definitive institutional break between architecture and civil engineering as announced by the foundation of Jean-Rodolphe Perronet's Ecole des ponts et chaussees in 1747. While pursuing the Graeco-Gothic line across time, Changing Ideals nonetheless acknowledges the fundamental impact of technique on both building production and architectural form. Having analysed the various revivals that took place between 1750 and 1850, Collins turned his attention to the different "functionalist analogies" provoked by the advances of techno-science, that is to say, to the biological, mechanical, gastronomic, and linguistic analogies through which theorists sought to arrive at a new basis for the creation of architectural form. Some thirty years after its initial publication by Faber and Faber, one has the feeling that Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture was somewhat at odds with the time in which it appeared. It was not helped in this regard by Collins's habitual sense of academic restraint. Literary and analytical to a fault, he failed to recognize that his intricate architectural arguments required special care when it came to illustrations. Thus while avoiding the misconceptions that attended his first book, his second full-length work was just as anachronistically illustrated. It was not so much that the pictures were sparse, as that they were treated in an old-fashioned way as a series of plates with roman numerals, with 72 images distributed over 40 pages, as opposed to Sigfried Giedion's Space, Time and Architecture (1941) with its 458 figures generously illustrating a book of 770 pages. Giedion's publishers apparently felt that a book approximately twice the size of Collins's warranted more than six times the number of illustrations. Collin's idiosyncracies did not end with his parsimony with regard to illustrations. His academic colleagues were puzzled that such an exacting scholar should dispense with footnotes completely, while architects were put off by the viii

FOREWORD fact that most works were illustrated with a single exterior shot and with only the occasional plan, section, or interior to augment this general view. Moreover, due to the Faber and Faber house style, the typography was equally reserved, which did little to relieve the notational character of the plates. This aura of bland opacity was not helped by the jacket covers of his books, which were graphically insipid. Self-effacement as extreme as this borders on a kind of blindness that is difficult to explain. In the end one is tempted to put it down to Collins's pedantically classical, not to say conservative, disposition. It is clear from the text (and from his other books) that he believed in the timeless value of the classic spirit. It is this that sustains the relentless thrust of his critique despite his empirical interest in the evolution of technology and his acute appreciation of the way in which architects have always coped with the rapidly changing constraints of the moment in which they are called upon to act. Skeptical as to the romantic aspirations of the avant garde and hence antithetical to an overtly political reading of history, Collins was a materialist at heart, and in this regard, was intensely conscious of the impact that technology, economics, and culture-politics were capable of exerting on architecture. This is particularly evident from his appreciation of the various impulses sustaining different kinds of stylistic tropes. The motives underlying such historicizing processes are never more brilliantly revealed than in his extremely perceptive account of the social forces that shaped the formation of the Gothic Revival. After alluding to the broad effects of the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, and the founding of the Oxford Movement four years later, Collins proceeds to argue that: A decade earlier, interest in Gothic architecture had already been stimulated by an Act of Parliament which provided a million pounds to be spent building churches in London and other parts of England. Politically, the Act of 1818 was intended by the government to provide for the spiritual needs of the new working-class suburbs, whose denizens might otherwise be tempted to indulge in the distressing atheistic excesses which had recently been witnessed in France. Architecturally, it resulted in the construction of a hundred and seventy-four churches in the 'Gothic' style... From this situation, there resulted one of the most important tenets of Gothic Revivalism, and of modern architecture in general, namely the idea that architecture is an ethical art, which is primarily concerned with the expression of truth. At first this ethical viewpoint only turned men's minds towards the idea of truthful construction. But the effects of the Catholic Emancipation Act suggested also the importance of truthful planning, since the re-established Catholic worship occasioned a return to the internal arrangements for which mediaeval churches had originally been designed. It will be remembered that under the influence of the Puritans, all Anglican churches, whether new or mediaeval, had been designed as, or turned into, auditoria, which galleried pews arranged round a pulpit. ix

FOREWORD Indeed, this arrangement was adopted in most of the churches built under the act of 1818. But with the emancipation of the Catholics, the chancel again became the focal point of the church, and the altar the focal point of the chancel, whilst screens, statues, stained glass and liturgical ornaments, which for the last two centuries had merely been antiquarian curiosities, now became fundamental elements of worship in the contemporary English scene. The man most responsible for drawing his fellow-countrymen's attention to the relationship between mediaeval church planning and liturgical usage was Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, the son of Augustus Pugin, one of the leading delineators of Gothic architecture of the early nineteenth century. The elder Pugin, though he earned his living in England as a draftsman, was in fact a French nobleman exiled by the Revolution. It is thus not surprising that his son, though brought up a Protestant, should eventually have become converted to his father's ancestral religion, just as he was inspired by his father's love of Gothic forms. And so, with all the passionate enthusiasm of a convert, A.W.N. Pugin spent the rest of his short life aggressively clamouring for a return to a completely mediaeval way of life.

I have quoted from this section at length in order to show that while Collins was no Marxist, his erudition and perception enabled him to analyse the dialectic movement of an entire epoch and to show how, in this instance, a particular architecture emerged in response to the flux of social reform, liturgical change and the unprecedented appearance of an urban working class. These factors, together with Whig paranoia about the French Revolution, shaped Pugin's destiny both as a member of the Oxford Movement and as the ultimate demiurge of the Gothic Revival. At the same time, the critic in Collins made him particularly susceptible to the vicissitudes of architectural taste over time and to the fact that the arts perennially lacked a sufficiently principled basis for the establishment of a cultural consensus, especially in architecture. This aporia concerned him throughout his life, as we see from his recognition that this fundamental pedagogical dilemma led to a general lack of objectivity in the teaching of architecture. As he wrote in the chapter on gastronomic analogy, "If those who teach the arts do not believe in such standards, or if they claim that they are still searching for such standards, it is clear that whatever the merits of their instruction, they are concerned essentially with fashion, not with taste." However resistant to definition it may have been, taste for Collins entailed (as it did for Diderot) the subliminal exercise of reason and it is this recognition that caused him to turn towards the law. A decade before his premature death he took a master's degree in law at Queen's University and later published a book derived from his master's thesis wherein he attempted to apply legal criteria and methods to the critical assessment of architecture. This book, Architectural Judgement, published in 1971, was destined to be his last full-length work. x

FOREWORD Categorically opposed to the romantic impulse as it rose to the fore in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in this regard uncharitably hostile to the works of both Schinkel and Le Corbusier, Collins finally brought himself to declare his critical parti pris, while expounding upon the influence of painting and sculpture on twentieth-century architecture. To this end he wrote: At the beginning of his period (that is to say between 1920 and 1935), the technique of using abstract pictorial and sculptural devices as a means of creating novel architectural forms was exploited only by a few men who built little, and who achieved few rewards except the honour of being apotheosized as pioneers of the modern movement. By the middle of the century, however, the publicity given to their endeavors, and the popularity which their ideas excited among the new generation of students (often involving the official adoption in schools of architecture of the methods of preliminary architectural instruction invented at the Bauhaus), resulted in the technique becoming a new orthodoxy, to such an extent that only a book which aims at reviewing all the changing ideals which have occurred in architecture in the last two hundred years could dare question the fundamental value of this influence, or embark on a critical appraisal of so ingrained a contemporary phenomenon in terms of absolute worth.

If figurative abstraction, assimilated from the imitative arts, served as the primary agent to animate (but also, paradoxically, to undermine) the constitution of twentieth-century architectural from, the second equally distractive, if not destructive, impulse turned upon the overwhelming importance accorded the proliferation of parallactic space as an end in itself; what Giedion identified as the "space-time" mode of beholding in his brilliantly polemical Charles Elliot Norton lectures of 1939. As it happens, despite its seeming naturalism, selfconscious spatiality entered architectural theory relatively late, since it had to wait for its elaboration upon Giedion's mentor Heinrich Wofflin and even further upon Auguste Schmarzow, whose seminal writings at the turn of the century were virtually unknown in Anglo-Saxon circles at the time that Collins was writing his book. Be this as it may, Collins understood only too perspicaciously that the origin of this spatial fixation was Germanic due mainly to the fact that the words for "space" and "room" in German are the same—Raum. However Collins mediated the cultural import of this etymological conjunction by remarking that it was an American, namely Frank Lloyd Wright, who first demonstrated the full potential of spatial interpenetration, above all in the cantilevered, reinforced concrete mezzanine of his Unity Temple, Oak Park, of 1906. Of this achievement Collins remarks: "whereas the Rationalists, such as Violletle-Duc, could conceive only the structure of churches as providing the new archetype for a new way of building, Wright took the space; and it is this which distinguishes Wright from the other great architects of his generation (such as Ferret) as the first great architect of this century." xi

FOREWORD Despite the over-simplifying tendency of such comparisons, it is just this recognition of the autonomous continuity of tectonic culture across time, transcending, as it were, the seeming ruptures between pre-modern, modern, and post-modern, that enabled Collins to mount his exacting critique of the "spacetime" assumptions that have informed a great deal of twentieth-century production. That this concept was subject to widely divergent interpretations was evident even in Giedion's usage, for as Collins remarks: "in some passages of Space, Time and Architecture, it evidently means related to Einstein's theory of relativity, whilst in others it seems to mean only 'related to avant garde paintings of the ipio's and ipzo's'. Sometimes it is used as a synonym for 'four-dimentional,' sometimes as the equivalent of non-Euclidian geometry ... Giedion's views might be summarized by saying [that] ... the external totality of a modern building can only be appreciated as a sequence of visual impressions." Collins points out that this is exactly the converse of what happens when one encounters a Renaissance villa, which (unlike the kinetic, contrapuntal, spatiality of, say, Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye) may be comprehended from a single viewpoint due to its axiality. Despite this classical tradition of spatial immobility, the myth of progress was such as to anticipate ever more arcane multi-dimensional spatial concepts wherein, as Collins remarks, the articulation of space would seem to be indistinguishable from what must, by definition, be a fictitious depiction of post-cubistic space. Elsewhere in the same chapter he cites Einstein's own views as to the boundaries of architectural space, implying that a plaza is about the largest space that an architect can render as a whole; a necessarily restricted vision in fact that presupposes an altogether more mundane, everyday interpretation of space. Thus for Einstein, the concept space "was preceded by the psychologically simple concept of place. Place is first of all a small portion of earth's surface identifiable by name ... a sort of order of material objects and nothing else." At the end of the century this exacting critique may be recieved with more detachment than would have been possible when Changing Ideals first appeared, for clearly an ever more disjunctive neo-avant garde now tends increasingly to promote the ultimate dissolution of architecture as a coherent and ethical practice. It is this that has led certain critics, including myself, to attempt to reground architecture in the poetics of construction; that is to say, to formulate the relative autonomy of architecture in terms of its tectonic evolution over the same two hundred years that Collins addresses in this book. For Collins, the true evolutionary line lay in the rational adaptation of time-honoured models through a judicious response to unprecedented building programs set within the frame of an everchanging technology. These three vectors, what we may call typological continuity, programmatic, variation and evolving technique, are seen by Collins as the indispensable means by which a truly progressive culture of building may be sustained. In his epilogue, however, he adds a fourth vector, namely the responsibility of xii

FOREWORD critical practice to maintain a respect for the environmental context in which it comes to be realized. Thus after presenting both Auguste Ferret's rue Raynouard apartments, Paris, (1932) and Ernest Roger's Torre Velasca, Milan, (1957) as tectonic works of exceptional quality Collins proceeds to argue that: If we are to draw any lessons from the architectural history of the last two hundred years in general, it must surely be this: that among all the conflicting ideals of modern architecture, none has proved today of such importance that it can take precedence over the task of creating a humane environment. Doctrinaire arguments concerning the authenticity or otherwise of individual buildings, individual techniques and individual mannerism can never be unimportant, but they seem of secondary importance when compared with the problem as to whether or not a new building fits harmoniously into the environment into which it is set. Not that I am recommending that same indifference towards the ethical problems of architectural design which was the worst failing of the early nineteenth century; on the contrary, I consider obedience to principles to be never more urgent in an age when there are so many to seek architectural novelty for its own sake. But it is surely worth noting that, in the buildings just described the architects were able to discipline their architectural forms to harmonize with earlier forms without sacrificing any of the principles of the modern age.

This is Collins at his didactic best and it is for just such critical lucidity that his work deserves to be reissued and reinterpreted. Formulated as always with matchless eloquence, Collins turns here toward one of the most difficult challenges confronting contemporary architecture, namely, how to establish a significant reconciliation between the articulation of tectonic form and the more homogenizing plastic character that is essential to the continuity of urban form. Aside from Ferret, Mies, and in our period perhaps Norman Foster, there are precious few architects who are able to attain any kind of balance in this regard. Late modern buildings tend to be either over-articulated or under-articulated, to say nothing of the figurative, anti-urban excesses that occur when architects attempt to reduce architecture to nothing more than sculpture writ large. Perhaps this dilemma can only be solved today through a more hybrid approach to the generation of architectural form, wherein a single work may be broken down hierarchically into its more or less articulated parts, relying on the structure to express the tectonic and spatial substance of the work in depth and on the surface to sustain the continuity of the mass-form in space. Needless to say none of this even begins to address the question of how popularly accessibile the work in question is and it may be that what Rogers could achieve in the late 19505 with the Torre Velasca cannot be approached today without risking a total descent into kitsch. If one believes, as I do, that the two most critical sectors of architecture today, reside in the domain of the tectonic and the topographic, then maintaining a balance between the one-off work and its context is of the utmost importance. xiii

FOREWORD What remains uncertain is how exactly this balance should be achieved, particularly at a time when a heterotopic approach to form seems to have as much validity as any kind of received classicism. Collins was not the only critic of his generation to focus so vigorously on tectonic concerns while advocating technological innovation. It is within this context of shared critical concerns that his approach to the problems of context, accessibility, and continuity is thrown into sharpest relief. It is, for instance, difficult to imagine two more opposed writers than Reyner Banham and Peter Collins. Banham is a self-acclaimed populist who advocated a kind of hi-tech, hyper-modernity which he saw as being immediately accessible to the public at large—a polemical tendency which is already evident in his doctoral thesis, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960)—whereas Collins is a postEnlightenment rationalist who was convinced that the only way ahead lay in the pursuit of a technically advanced but nonetheless essentially orthogonal, normative architecture as had been developed in the forties and fifties by the schools of Ferret and Mies (specifically in the works of Denis Honneger on the one hand and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill on the other). Born in 1920 and 1922 respectively, it is ironic that they should end up so ideologically opposed and yet so tectonically aligned in terms of their respective heroes, with Banham advocating the geodesic immateriality of Richard Buckminster Fuller and Collins remaining equally fixated on his twin paragons of twentieth-century rationalism, Ferret and Mies. It is noticeable that neither critic had any respect for the heterogeneity of Alvar Aalto's approach to architecture—his name is absent from both of their accounts. Thus, excluding the hybrid, by definition, Banham opted for lightweight, dematerialised, unprecedented form, while Collins favoured heavyweight variations on normative building formats in reinforced concrete, steel, and glass. While neither the architects nor their champions were ever able to come to terms with the implicit challenge of inventing a modern vernacular, it is perhaps Mies, with his idea of almost nothing (beinahe nichts), who comes closest to mediating between the ergonomic novelty of Buckminster Fuller and the cult of the banal as embodied in the work of Ferret. What these otherwise totally antithetical paragons of the "new," had in common was a determination to ground their architecture in the structural order of the work, although where the one favoured tetrahedral geometry the other opted for the orthogonal. Looking back over the century and at Collin's progressive role in the evolution of contemporary architectural discourse, we may well ask ourselves if this difference was not that old opposition between the Gothic and the Classic, that unresolved difficult legacy of architecture in the West that this book does so much to elucidate. KENNETH FRAMPTON WARE PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY September 1997 xiv

Notes on the Publication of Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture1

Peter Collins, one of this century's most important architectural historians, was among the first to link architectural history and theory. As early as December 1958, "PC" (as his colleagues affectionately called him) wrote to Faber and Faber, the publishers of his first book, Concrete, that he had been "seized with the desire to write a new kind of history of modern architecture." The manuscript of Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture, which he described as "essentially a history of ideas," was completed in August 1963. In May 1965 it was published by Faber and Faber in Europe and by McGill University Press in North America. Changing Ideals was awarded the prestigious Hitchcock Medallion by the Society of Architectural Historians (Great Britain) in 1969 and, not surprisingly, since it was based on Collins' popular course in architectural history at McGill, quickly became a successful textbook, especially in North America. Kokusai Kenchiku began publishing the Japanese translation of the book in serial form in 1967 and it appeared in Spanish in 1970 and in Italian in 1973. In the meantime, Collins, a devoted francophile, searched for a suitable French publisher. Infamously difficult to please, Collins was notably happy with and proud of his longstanding relationship with the London-based Faber and Faber—the formality of a traditional British firm obviously suited his temperament. Although he became a Canadian citizen in 1962 Collins, born in Leeds, England, in 1920, had deep roots in Britain. In a biographical statement sent to Faber and Faber early in 1962, Collins wrote that he had decided to become an architect at the i. I am extremely grateful to Aurele Parisien of McGill-Queen's University Press for his comprehensive research on the publication history of Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture. Collins' personal papers, including correspondence, lecture and research notes, and postcard collection are part of the Canadian Architecture Collection, Blackader-Lauterman Library, McGill University. The quotes from his correspondence included in these notes are mostly taken from the Faber and Faber file. xv

THE PUBLICATION OF CHANGING IDEALS age of nine during an afternoon spent in Canterbury Cathedral. He was educated at the Leeds College of Art (1936-39 and 1946-48) and at Manchester University (1952-55). His studies were interrupted by seven years in the British army, during which he served as a trooper in the Yorkshire Hussars (1939-41), an Intelligence Officer in the Middle East and Italy (1941-44), and a Captain of the General Staff in the War Office (1944-45). After the war he pursued his interest in architecture through practice, first in the Fribourg office of Denis Honegger, a former pupil and chief assistant of Auguste Ferret, and subsequently on Ferret's reconstruction of Le Havre in the office of Pierre-Edouard Lambert. His life-long interest in reinforced concrete structures and French architecture seems to date from this period. The architect-based perspective so central to Changing Ideals derives from this period of intense practise. His Canadian connection can also be traced to this time, since it was in Paris that he met and in 1953 married Canadian Margaret Gardner Taylor. After Paris the Collins moved to the United States, where PC lectured at Yale University (1955-56), and then to Montreal in 1956, where he joined the faculty of the School of Architecture at McGill. Collins' love of minutia was legendary. It was one of the reasons, no doubt, that he was such a conscientious scholar. In a letter dated n March 1964 he thanked Faber and Faber for their "forebearance with my fussiness." Collins was clearly aware of his eccentricities and frequently remarked on them with self-deprecating humour. His wit was legendary. In the early 19708, for example, he created the tongue-in-cheek Department of Trivia and Ephemera, investing himself and several of his colleagues with honorary titles—PC was the "Interdisciplinary Co-ordinator." His intermittent memos ranged from picnic invitations—"Dejeuner sur 1'herbe"—to sharp satires of academic bureaucracy and university affairs, probably much to the consternation of the deans and vice-principals to whom they were sometimes addressed. In 1972, for instance, he offered to donate an annual prize to the university for the "briefest relevant non-quantitative thesis submitted for the Ph.D. degree." His students remember fondly the high standards he set for their term papers, his demand for precision in general, and his rather unusual classroom style. Collins liked students to sit in alphabetical order and expected essays to be hand-written in perfect script. His lectures were pointed, intellectually rigorous, and wellrehearsed. Not surprising, given his interest in details and sharp powers of observation, PC involved himself in every aspect of the publication of his beloved books, particularly Changing Ideals. For example, after he received the typeset "specimen pages" from Faber and Faber in January 1964 he asked the publisher to adjust the proportions of the book in order to make them more appealing to architects. "I am particularly anxious to have a book which, as regards its physical appearance, will be a source of pride (since this may well prove to be its only merit)," xvi

THE PUBLICATION OF CHANGING IDEALS he wrote. He found the 7.5" x 10" page size initially selected by the press "extraordinarily unattractive" and pointed to the proportions of the page used in the Pelican History of Art series as a handsome alternative. He agreed to settle for simply decreasing the width of the proposed size by half an inch while retaining the original margins. In February 1964 he sent off another missive to his publisher^ worrying that 33 ems was "an excessive length of line when using n point type, in the sense that it is fatiguing to read." Could they reduce it to 30 ems? With remarkable generosity and forebearance, Faber and Faber invariably accommodated their exacting author. The legibility of the book's typeface was a constant concern to Collins, long after the first appearance of Changing Ideals. Faber and Faber were sympathetic and in 1970 they decided to reprint the paperback edition of Changing Ideals in a larger typeface. Collins was delighted with this decision: "Several of my students have pleaded eyestrain as the cause of their inability to master the more involved obscurities of the text: henceforth I shall be able to distinguish more fairly between intellectual malingerers and those who really are myopic." PC's concern over the book's design also included the illustrations and the cover. He had not included any illustrations with the manuscript but Faber and Faber convinced him that the volume would sell better if illustrated and in May 1963 proposed including up to thirty-two pages of images. Collins readily agreed and hoped that these could be arranged in groups of four pages distributed evenly throughout the book. In August he inquired whether one group of five images illustrating Victorian polychromy could be printed in colour. While Faber and Faber agreed to distribute the illustrations in groups, they declined printing any in colour since this would increase the price of the book. Collins' correspondence with his publisher indicates that the book's illustrations (their number, arrangement, and relationship to the text) became increasingly important to him over time. Later in August, once he had completed the manuscript, he wrote to Faber and Faber concerning the illustrations to say that "Having carefully studied their composition, it is clear to me that it is essential that I be allowed ten such groups" of four pages rather than the eight suggested previously and that he was busily at work obtaining photographs. A letter the following February indicates that once the photographs were collected he "sketched out a possible arrangement for each page of illustrations and captions." In May 1964, once he saw the book in proof, he changed his mind about the regular spacing of the illustrations, saying that this would be "less satisfactory than spacing them so as to relate more closely to the text." He included a precise list of where each group of illustrations should appear, bearing in mind that they had to be placed in the centre of the signatures to be sewn in. Once again his publishers accommodated him and the book included seventy-two illustrations on forty pages of coated stock distributed as he instructed. xvii

THE PUBLICATION OF CHANGING IDEALS When the British and Canadian publishers began to plan a "paper-covered" edition in 1966, PC selected a reduced set of illustrations. Not surprisingly, he played an active role in the book's design, sending Faber and Faber an "alternative proposal" concerning the illustrations in July of that year. "As you will see," he explained, "I have selected them so that facing blocks will be antithetically meaningful." For the paperback edition, the size of the book was also reduced from 7" x 10" to 6" x 9" and only sixteen of the original seventy-two illustrations were included, reproduced on sixteen pages of uncoated stock grouped together at the front of the volume. Particularly surprising in retrospect—given PC's penchant for details—is that Faber and Faber neglected to revise the index to the illustrations and consequently until now all the plate numbers and references in the paperback edition of Changing Ideals have been incorrect. The present edition restores the book's original size, as well as the number and placement of the illustrations. For the book's original cover Collins envisaged a photograph "of some part of London in which buildings of several eras are juxtaposed, with post-war buildings and nineteenth century buildings next to one another." PC eventually suggested using "part of a photo taken from the 3rd floor terrace of New Zealand House, Haymarket, published in the July 1963 issue of the Architectural Review" suggesting that the theme of the photograph was "i9th century architecture viewed through zoth century architecture." In 1966 he requested a cropped version of the same photograph for the cover of the forthcoming paperback edition, but asked that the cover itself be printed "in less gloomy colours." Collins had been extremely dissatisfied with the original black-on-blue Faber and Faber cover design; in 1966 he described its illegibility as "catastrophic." "The black-letter tiding was virtually invisible against the dark blue background from a distance of more than five feet." He asked the publisher to print an explanatory note about his choice of photograph inside the cover of the paperback edition, which they neglected to do. McGill-Queen's was able to locate the photo Collins had chosen for the cover and it appears on the newly designed cover of this edition, accompanied for the first time by his explanatory paragraph. In addition to insights into the publication of Changing Ideals, Collins' correspondence underlines how clearly he saw the book as a critique of other historians' work. In his initial December 1958 proposal to Faber and Faber, he provided a lengthy analysis of both Space, Time and Architecture by Siegfried Giedion and Henry Russell Hitchcock's Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. In general, Collins disapproved of Giedion's and Hitchcock's arthistorical perspectives and articulated what he saw as the urgent need for a history of modern architecture written from the perspective of the architectural profession: xviii

THE PUBLICATION OF CHANGING IDEALS After a good deal of reflection on this matter, I have become more and more convinced that architectural developments after 1750 can only be explained effectively as a sequence of ideals. Modern architecture is essentially an ethical art, so that it is only intelligible historically in the light of the ideals of those who designed the buildings. However much the modern art critic may dislike committing himself to subjective qualitative assessments, and prefer chronological classification by means of the identification of shapes, the architectural historian must recognize the fact that goodness and badness, right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, have been the judgements which have led all worthwhile architects to employ one form rather than another, and that it is only by reference to the architects' own criteria and integrity that their buildings can be classified and assessed.

A third art historian, Nikolaus Pevsner, had a close and confusing relationship to the book. Shortly after Collins' initial submission to Faber and Faber, Pevsner visited Montreal and apparently discussed the project with Collins. In a letter to Collins upon his return to London, Pevsner indicated that he wrote to the "Fabers" in support of the book. At precisely the same time, however, Collins wrote to the publisher, to their consternation, withdrawing his proposal to write the book "after discussing the matter with Dr. Pevsner, who was recently in Montreal." Pevsner's ambiguous relationship with Changing Ideals continued after the book appeared. He reviewed Changing Ideals for The Manchester Guardian within three weeks of its publication. While on the one hand he praised the book for being "full of interesting and almost entirely unknown stuff, intelligently collected and presented," he concluded by saying he found that "the argument ... is not so convincing."2 Pevsner also seems to have pointed out some errors to Collins privately. When the paperback edition was being prepared, PC made a special request of Faber and Faber to change his reference to Ludwig II on page 89 to Ludwig I, "a minor error to which Dr. Pevsner has kindly drawn my attention." And in an intriguing, undated note to himself entitled "Changing Ideals: Future modifications," the first of six points is "Pevsner's factual errors," suggesting that the mixup over the Bavarian monarch was not the only one.3 PC was never given the opportunity to revise Changing Ideals, although as early as October 1969 he had expressed interest in expanding the book. (Always worried that the book would usurp his usefulness as a lecturer, Collins 2. This publication is particularly interesting since Collins was for some time the architectural correspondent to the Manchester Guardian. See Nikolaus Pevsner, "Architects on Architecture," Manchester Guardian Weekly (3 June 1965), 10. 3. The other numbered points are (2) to discuss "Revolutionary" at length, (3) Influence of Painting, (4) Decorative arts, (5) Add to mechanical analogy, (6) Rewrite biological analogy and add a musical analogy. xix

THE PUBLICATION OF CHANGING IDEALS continuously revised his courses, which may have led him to new ideas for the book.) His hopes for a revised version of Changing Ideals never waned. Just a year before his death, troubled that the book had gone out of print in Europe in 1977 without his knowledge, he wrote to Arthur Drexler, asking the famous American museum curator's advice on finding another publisher to produce an illustrated edition of the book. It was, after all, his magnum opus. Another great disappointment was that, despite his frequent efforts and several near successes, the long-sought-after French edition had never materialized. Hopefully this edition's return to a format closer to PC's original intentions in size, number and placement of illustrations, and statement on the choice of cover photo will bring renewed attention to a landmark publication in the history of architecture. ANNMARIE ADAMS SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE McGiLL UNIVERSITY February 1998

Preface

The changing ideals in architecture during the last two hundred years were many, varied, and at times flimsy. The old established basis of architecture was practically dissolved, and architects were more than usually victims to any ideas that appeared worthy to be guides for them. Architects, being partly artists, can be expected to be more than ordinarily sensitive to such changes, and may indeed need their stimulus more than others. For example, whether or not there have been changing ideals in, say, railway or ship design, they have certainly not been as influential as with buildings, because scientific and technical considerations have been clearly dominant and the lines of possible development limited. Because architecture is partly an art, involved with feelings, it seems inevitable that both the architect and his client are moved by ideals external to architecture and that such ideals of one sort or another continually appear and change. Yet although it is inevitable that foreign notions should act upon architectural theory from time to time, the phenomenon of the last two centuries was clearly unique, in that it not only embraced so many such notions, but that they were taken so seriously. These changing ideals, by virtue of their diversity and intensity, charted for architecture a crooked path even when they merged and grew out of one another. The important thing to note is that when such objectives are measured against established architectural customs, they become subordinate considerations which do not deflect the course of architecture so much as flavour it. Thus it now seems that, as we enter the second half of the twentieth century, the zigzags become less, and one senses a new stable body of opinion which betokens the commencement of the classic age of modern architecture. It is this new development which gives a sudden pertinence and meaning to the architectural ideas of the last two hundred years, and makes this book particularly welcome and opportune. JOHN BLAND

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Acknowledgments

First of all, I should like to acknowledge my indebtedness to Professor John Bland, Professor Jonas Lehrman and Professor C. C. Bayley for the many improvements they suggested to the manuscript, and to my wife who, with indefatigable zeal, corrected the proofs. Secondly, I should like to express my thanks for the financial assistance which enabled me to carry out the preliminary research, and which was given me by McGill University, the Canada Council, and the Royal Institute of British Architects' Henry Florence Architectural Book Scholarship. Finally, I should like to acknowledge the kindness of the editors of The Architectural Review, Progressive Architecture, The Journal of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and The Canadian Architect in allowing me to republish fragments which have already appeared in their periodicals.

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List of Illustrations 1

J. Soane: The Art Gallery Mausoleum, Dulwich (1811) National Building Record between pages 24-25 2 E. L. Boullee: Project for a cenotaph to Newton (1784) 3a E. L. Boullee: Design for a theatre (1781) }b V. Louis: Theatre at Bordeaux (1777) 43 J. N. L. Durand: Method of planning by the use of squarred paper (1802) 4b C. N. Ledoux: Plan for a 'house of pleasure' (1804) between pages 40-41 5 W. Halfpenny: A garden temple partly in the Chinese taste (1750) 6a Lord Herbert and R. Morris: Mrs. Howard's villa at Marble Hill (1721) Country Life 6b C. N. Ledoux: Madame du Barry's villa at Louveciennes (1771) Wayne Andrews 73 F. J. Belanger: Comte d'Artois' Bagatelle, Paris (1777) Wayne Andrews 7b P. Rousseau: Hotel de Salm, Paris (1786) 8a Hubert Robert: Hameau de la Reine, Versailles (1783) Wayne Andrews 8b & c J. Wyatt: Fonthill Abbey (1795) 8d R. Castell: Part of Pliny's villa garden at Tuscum (1728) pa F. Sandys: Ickworth House (1796) Country Life between pages 72-73 pb Payne Knight: The dining room at Downton Castle (1775) Country Life 9C J. Gondoin: The auditorium of the Medical School, Paris (1771) (see PL XXVI) loa C. Campbell: 'Church in the Vitruvian Style' (1717) lob T Jefferson: Virginia State Capitol (1785) Wayne Andrews ii L. von Klenze: Museum of sculpture (Glyptothek), Munich (i 816) iza The Temple by the Ilyssus as it existed in 1750 nb The Temple by the Ilyssus as reconstructed by Stuart and Revett 133 A. Roos: Lodge at Shrubland Park (1841) Country Life between pages 88-89 i3b G. G. Scott and D. Wyatt: The Foreign Office, London (1861) 14 C. Barry: The Palace of Westminster (1840) 15 A. W. N. Pugin: Scarisbrick Hall (1837) Country Life i6a W Butterfield: Keble College, Oxford (1868) Country Life XXV

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS i6b G. G. Scott: St. Pancras Hotel, London (1865) J. Maltby between pages 88-89 17 R. Perronet: Neuilly Bridge, near Paris (1768) between pages 184-185 18 Calver Cotton Mill, Curbar (1785) Eric de Mare 19 C. Barry: Lord Ellesmere's mansion (Bridgewater House) London (1849) 20 L. von Klenze: The Picture Gallery (Pinakothek) Munich (1826) between pages 200-201 21 J.G. Soufflot: Church of St. Genevieve (Pantheon) Paris (1757) 22 H. Labrouste: Library of St. Genevieve, Paris (1843) 23 E. E. Viollet-le-Duc: Illustration from Entretiens (1863) 24 E. E. Viollet-le-Duc: Illustration from Entretiens (1863) 25 V Louis: Theatre at Bordeaux (1777) between pages 232-233 26 J. Gondoin: Medical School, Paris (1771) 27 P. G. Le Moine: Grand Prix design for a medical school (1775) 28 W. K. Harrison and others: United Nations auditorium, New York (1950) 29 F. Furness: Provident Trust Building, Philadelphia (1879) Wayne Andrews between pages 248-249 303 E. Andre: Huet House, Nancy (1903) Wayne Andrews 3ob J. Hoffman: Stoclet House, Brussels (1905) Wayne Andrews 31 M. Breuer: Belfrey, St. John's monastery, Collegeville (1953) 323 E L . Wright: Detail of ornament, Coonley House, Riverside (1907) 32b T. van Doesburg: Design for a house (1922) 333 Salon, Hotel d'Evreux, Place Vendome, Paris (1750) between pages 280-281 33b L. I. Kahn: Art gallery, Yale University (1954) 343 F. L. Wright: Unity Temple, Oak Park (1904) 34b F. L. Wright: Falling Water, Bear Run, Pennsylvania (1936) Bruce Anderson 353 R. M. Hunt: Studio Apartments, New York (1856) Wayne Andrews 35b Le Corbusier: Unite d'Habitation, Marseilles (1946) Wayne Andrews 363 N. Gabo: Model for glass fountain Yale University An Gallery Collection Societe Anonyme 36b W. K. Harrison and others: United Nations secretariat, New York (1950) between pages 296-297 373 G. Howe and W. Lescaze: P.S.F.S. Building, Philadelphia (1932) 37b A. L. and V. Vesnine: Design for a Palace of Labour (1923) 383 E. Rogers and others: Torre Velasca, Milan (1957) Jan Rowan 38b G. P. Chedanne: Offices, rue Reaumur, Paris (1903) 39 A. Perret: 51-55, rue Raynouard, Paris (1928) 40 Skidmore, Owings and Merrill: Hancock Building, San Francisco (1958) Morley Baer xxvi

Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture

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Introduction

THE limits of the history of modern architecture are as difficult to define satisfactorily as the limits of any other kind of modern history, since each age has a different idea of what it means historically by 'modern'. Thus, in the seventeenth century, the architects of the early Renaissance were called 'modern' to distinguish them from the architects of Antiquity. Nowadays, modern architecture is usually considered to be the kind of architecture peculiar to the twentieth century, but all recent writers on the subject have recognized that its origins go back much further, even though they may not agree as to where exactly they begin. Some authorities (such as Nikolaus Pevsner) are content to trace the roots back to the work of William Morris in the i86os. Others (such as Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Sigfried Giedion, Vincent Scully, Hans Sedlmayr and Leonardo Benevolo) trace it back a century earlier. It would of course be simple to prove that no architectural forms or materials are ever confined to the age in which they are most popular, in the sense of having no precedent whatsoever in earlier periods. It is possible to contend that modern concrete was invented by the Romans if one is content to overlook the fact that the material was itself overlooked for fifteen hundred years before the researches of Cointereau. At the same time, it can hardly be disputed that radical changes took place in the middle of the eighteenth century which so profoundly altered subsequent theories of architecture as to make the ideals of architects differ henceforth quite markedly from what they were before. From 1750 onwards, architects were motivated by a number of notions which had previously played little or no part in the formation of their ideals, and these new notions did not simply succeed one another as an evolutionary sequence; they were to recur continually, in various combinations and with various expressions, during the whole of the following two centuries. The fondness of late eighteenth century architects for historical allusions, for analogical justifications, for asymmetrical landscaping, for brutal detailing, for oriental prototypes, and for pictorial techniques does not simply cut them off from the tradition of earlier centuries; it relates them intimately to the architects of today, and it is this which gives unity to the period 1750-1950, and allows us to treat it as a single architectural age. 15

INTRODUCTION The changes which occur in the appearance of buildings during these two centuries have been fully analysed by Henry-Russell Hitchcock, just as the sources of contemporary architecture have been fully analysed by Sigfried Giedion, and since the books of both these authors are standard texts (which may eventually be elaborated by additional evidence, but which will always remain classic expositions of their subjects), it might seem pretentious to suggest that a third approach can contribute to a full understanding of the period. Yet works of the type just mentioned inevitably possess one inherent limitation in that they are concerned essentially with the evolution of forms, rather than with the changes in those ideals which produced them, and this tends to minimize one of the most important factors in architectural design, namely the motives which dictate the character of an architect's work. 'Forms', wrote Philip Johnson in his review of Reyner Banham's Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, 'beget more forms, whereas ideas barely have influence on them'. But forms do not beget more forms by a mechanical evolutionary process. It is precisely the idea of what forms may most appropriately be selected which creates the architecture of a particular age. Architectural historians are quite right in emphasizing the importance of architecture as an end product; in concerning themselves mainly with what a building looks Like, how it is constructed and how efficiently it fulfils its purpose. But the architects who created such buildings were obliged to be equally concerned with more philosophical problems, such as why anyone should choose one form, material or system rather than another. An architect does not arrive at his finished product solely by a sequence of rationalizations, like a scientist, or through the v/orkings of the Zeitgeist. Nor does he reach them by uninhibited intuition, like a musician or a painter. He thinks of forms intuitively, and then tries to justify them rationally; a dialectical process governed by what we may call his theory of architecture, which can only be studied in philosophical and ethical terms. The type of history he needs is thus what Cesar Daly, a century ago, called 'a philosophical history of architecture'; a history which will attempt 'not to pass in review a list of the executed works and technical improvements effected since the end of the eighteenth century, but to set in relief the evolution and revolution in architectural thoughts and architectural sentiments which have succeeded one another in this period, and have left in their train so many hesitations and doctrinal uncertainties in architects' minds, that the efficacious criticism of buildings becomes virtually impossible, through lack of definite principles mutually acceptable to artists, critics and the general public'. 'It is not knowing what people did but understanding what they thought that is the proper definition of the historian's task', wrote R. G. Collingwood in his Idea of History y and this book is similarly intended to be a history of thoughts about architecture, rather than a history of architecture itself. It is concerned more with ideas than with buildings, and its intention is to convey an idea of what architects 16

INTRODUCTION have been trying to achieve since the modern age started, rather than to analyse stylistically all the buildings they built, and which in any case have now become so numerous as to be archaeologically unclassifiable. Unlike the more orthodox kind of history specifically devoted to modern architecture, it does not exclude from consideration those nineteenth century ideals which are now unfashionable. On the contrary, it asks the reader to decide for himself what modern ideas are valid, and what aspects of nineteenth century theory have been unjustifiably neglected or condemned. In this way, an attempt has been made to lead the way towards an architectural philosophy evolved in the spirit of true eclecticism. 'An eclectic', wrote Diderot in 1755, 'is a philosopher who tramples underfoot prejudice, tradition, seniority, universal consent, authority, and everything which subjugates mass opinion; who dares to think for himself, go back to the clearest general principles, examine them, discuss them, and accept nothing except on the evidence of his own experience and reason; and who, from all the philosophies which he has analysed without respect to persons, and without partiality, makes a philosophy of his own, peculiar to himself.'

17

B

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Part One ROMANTICISM

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I

Revolutionary Architecture

I

n the mid-nineteenth century, the general opinion regarding the nature of architectural development could probably best be summarized by a quotation from The Course and Current of Architecture, written by Samuel Muggins, a Liverpool architect, and published in 1863. In a chapter entitled 'The Style of the Future', he wrote: 'To me, the whole history of the rise and mutations of styles conspires to show the folly of hankering after a new style. Every style of whose origin we have any knowledge has arisen not from an act of the will, or someone setting about the invention of a new style, but spontaneously, out of circumstances, brought on by some great political, intellectual or religious revolutions'. There were however other architects, of more radical temper, who made precisely the opposite deductions from these same lessons of the past. They agreed that great intellectual and political revolutions had in fact occurred; and they agreed that as a result of such intellectually revolutionary works as the Encyclopedie, or the political revolutions in America and France, there was every reason why great changes should occur in architecture. But these changes, like those which had occurred in thought, politics and the mechanical arts would not, according to them, be the automatic result of natural forces, but would be brought about by the will of individual men. The architecture of the end of the eighteenth century is distinguished by the work of four such architects: John Soane, E. L. Boullee, C. N. Ledoux and J. N. L. Durand, whose attitudes were unmistakably revolutionary rather than evolutionary, and whose aim was not to maintain tradition by applying and reinterpreting old principles in the light of changing conditions, but to re-evaluate the very principles themselves. They did not have a large following, nor were their principles systematically pursued for a long period; indeed, the architectural shapes by which their ideals found expression were soon abandoned, and were not to attain popularity again for another hundred years. But these architects can with justice be regarded as pioneers of modern architecture, for whilst the vast gulf of Revivalism separates their architecture from the architecture of Le Corbusier and 21

ROMANTICISM the Bauhaus, it can fairly be claimed that it had no precedent, and was literally the architecture of a new age. Before studying the new ideals these men propagated, it may be as well to reach some conclusions as to what is meant by 'traditional principles', such as those against which they reacted. If we take, for example, the most traditional definition of good architecture, namely Vitruvius's utilitas, firmitas, venustas, it is clear that none of these three essential constituents of good architecture can ever be rejected entirely, since obviously commodious planning, sound construction and pleasing appearance can never be replaced by anything else. It follows therefore that revolutionary architecture can only be based on notions added to these three, on unusual emphases given to one or two of these three at the expense of the third, or on changes in the meaning attached to the idea of architectural beauty. As will be shown eventually, the only notion added to the Vitruvian trinity was the idea that 'space' is a positive architectural quality, and that it possessed as much, if not more architectural interest than the structure by which it was confined. Other revolutionary theories, especially in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were based either on unusual emphases on the notion of firmitas (whereby great value was attached to the exhibition of structural honesty, which led at times to a striving for exaggerated structural virtuosity for its own sake) or on unusual emphases on the notion of utilitas (whereby the plans of buildings were regarded as of prime importance and the 'functional' expression of a programme was taken as the principal criterion of good architectural design). But a great deal of revolutionary theorizing was based on new interpretations given to the notion of architectural beauty, and since these theories were particularly prevalent at the beginning of the period under discussion, it is with them that the first few chapters will be mainly concerned. Soane's ideas will be discussed first, because although he was not born until 1753 (and was thus younger than Ledoux and Boullee by seventeen and twenty-five years respectively), he made use of several aesthetic devices which had already appeared in England at the very beginning of the eighteenth century in the work of John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor. Neither of these two architects (who worked in partnership) could be described as modern, for both were popularly employed by typical members of the late Stuart and early Georgian aristocracy, and both designed in an architectural idiom that was close enough to contemporary work in Europe to be called Baroque. Yet perhaps because neither of them was properly trained, perhaps because both of them were English, perhaps because Vanbrugh was more a writer than an architect, their designs had a somewhat eccentric flavour which was to characterize many buildings of the new age. First we find in their work a character which some may call eclecticism, but which it would be far better to describe as 'indifferentism'; that is to say, they were quite happy to design in any style, whether Classical or Gothic, without considering that amy matter of principle was involved. Secondly, we find (in Hawksmoor's 22

R E V O L U T I O N A R Y ARCHITECTURE work in particular) what John Summerson has described as a 'morbid passion for archaeology'. Thirdly, we find a deliberate search for sculptural and picturesque effects; a technique particularly admired by Soane, who asserted that Vanbrugh's inventiveness had no equal in England, and that 'the young architect, by studying the picturesque effects of his works, will learn to avoid the dull monotony of minor artists and be led to think for himself and acquire a taste of his own'. Lastly, we find in both Hawksmoor's and Vanbrugh's work a delight in achieving novel compositions by mixing Classical elements into eccentric combinations, or by reversing the normal tectonic relationship of Classical motifs; devices which correspond to some extent to what, with reference to sixteenth century architecture, is sometimes called Mannerism, but which were here far more radical in that they produced virtually a new architectural vocabulary of sculptural forms. Soane took over many of Vanbrugh's and Hawksmoor's notions, just as he took over many of their compositional techniques. He designed churches indifferently in the Gothic or Classical 'styles'; his taste for archaeology led him to design part of the Bank of England like the temple of Vesta at Tivoli and to build his own house as a large museum; and he considered that a building could only be beautiful if it formed 'an entire whole from whatever point it is viewed, like a group of sculpture'. In addition, his designs also displayed two qualities found in the contemporary work of Boullee, Ledoux and their followers: namely, a lugubrious fondness for blank walls and blocked windows, and an equally lugubrious Piranesian fondness for sarcophagi, the latter forming the inspiration for some of his pediments, as for example on the Bank of England roof. Yet it will be perceived that although Soane's ideals were certainly not Classical, in that they were very different from those we generally associate with the Classicism of, say, Inigo Jones or Fra^ois Mansart, they were revolutionary only in a negative sense, since although he rejected the disciplined use of antique tectonic elements, he did not substitute any positive body of principles in their place. Nevertheless, there is a modernity in his very perversity, as we may see by comparing George Godwin's assessment of Soane, written in 1855, with John Summerson's assessment of Le Corbusier, written a century later. 'Soane supported the doctrine of predominant novelty', wrote Godwin, 'and his details were produced by very simple means; they usually consisted in the reverse of the ordinary'. Of Le Corbusier, Summerson wrote: 'For to him, the obvious solution of a problem, however charming, cannot possibly be the right solution; a building by Le Corbusier is a ruthless dismemberment of the building programme and a reconstruction on a plane where the unexpected always, unfailingly, happens'. We thus see that although the forms are different, the technique used is very much the same. Similar parallels can be made between the works of Le Corbusier and those of Boullee or Ledoux, and have been so made at considerable length by Emil Kaufman. Here the evidence is far more telling, since not only do the forms resemble one another very closely, but the correspondence of doctrines is attested 23

ROMANTICISM by documentary sources. For example, in Towards a New Architecture (1927), Le Corbusier deliberately defined architecture not in Vitruvian terms (i.e. as good planning, sound construction and pleasing appearance) but in terms of the sculptural effects of light and shade. 'Architecture', he wrote, 'is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light. Thus cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders or pyramids are the great primary forms which light reveals to advantage; they are not only beautiful forms, but the most beautiful forms'. Now this is almost an exact, though unconscious, paraphrase of Roullee's definition of architecture, contained in a manuscript that was written in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, though not fully published until 1953. 'Shall I,' Boullee asks, 'like Vitruvius, define architecture as the art of building? No, for this would be to confuse causes and effects. The effects of architecture are caused by light', and he goes on to claim that the first principles of architecture are to be discerned in symmetrical solids, such as cubes, pyramids, and, most of all, spheres, which are, in his view, the only perfect architectural shapes which can be devised. It is possible that some of Boullee's aesthetic ideas may have been derived from contemporary philosophers such as Lord Kames, for in the latter's Elements of Criticism (1762) a globe is described as the most pleasing of figures, since it exhibits the maximum variety conjoined to the greatest uniformity, whilst simplicity is praised because 'it permits a single and more telling stroke upon the mind, and because the mind in elevated mood descends only with reluctance to minute ornaments'. But Boullee nevertheless expounded an architectural aesthetic which was revolutionary in its most real sense, for he boasted his scorn of the ancient masters, and sought instead, by the study of nature, to enlarge his thoughts on an art which he considered 'still at its dawn'. He disdained to limit his imagination to what was constructable or commodious, and some of his projects for great spherical buildings, such as his cenotaph to Newton, or his completely impracticable opera house, not only had little relevance to utilitas, but could not have been constructed with the materials or techniques available at the time. Ledoux was a disciple of Boullee, and like him, exploited the dramatic effects of cubic and spherical masses. Like him also, he displayed a fondness for blank walls and a dislike of traditional fenestration patterns which has characterized modern architecture in more recent years, and which caused even Frank Lloyd Wright to remark: 'Often I used to gloat over the beautiful buildings I could build if only it were unnecessary to cut windows in them'. He also showed a predilection for what J. F. Blondel called 'male simplicity', an idea which Ledoux may well have learnt directly from Blondel when he attended his school of architecture in the rue de la Harpe. Ledoux's most revolutionary designs are to be found in his book entitled: Architecture considered with respect to Art, Customs and Legislation (1804), a series of projects intended to constitute an ideal city, and comprising all sorts of Utopian 24

J. Soane: The Art Gallery Mausoleum, Dulwich (1811) REVOLUTIONARY ARCHITECTURE Illustrating the simplification of the Classical Orders in terms of abstract sculpture I

E. L. Boullee: Project for a cenotaph to Newton (1784) R E V O L U T I O N A R Y ARCHITECTURE Illustrating the new emphasis on arbitrary, simple and grandiose compositional forms II

E. L. Boullee: Design for a theatre (1781)

V. Louis: Theatre at Bordeaux (1777) REVOLUTIONARY ARCHITECTURE Illustrating the formalism of Boullee's compositions, by comparing the different ways 'revolutionary' and 'evolutionary' architects approached the same problem, (see also Plate XXV)

III

J. N. L. Durand: Method of planning by the use of squared paper (1802)

C. N. Ledoux: Plan for a 'house of pleasure' (1804)

REVOLUTIONARY ARCHITECTURE Illustrating the new tendency to plan buildings geometrically or symbolically without close reference to functional requirements

IV

REVOLUTIONARY ARCHITECTURE buildings, including various temples to abstract virtues (such as a Maison art historians could recognize and classify as a 'paradigm'. On the contrary, they produced works deliberately intended to be banal, if one uses the word in its strict etymological sense as meaning 'common to all' the buildings around them. But it might not be a bad thing if more facades in our cities were as banal as these, for as Perret once remarked: 'He who, without betraying the modern conditions of a programme, or 299

EPILOGUE the use of modern materials, produces a work which seems to have always existed, which, in a word, is banal, can rest satisfied. Astonishment and excitement are shocks which do not endure; they are but contingent and anecdotic sentiments. The true aim of art is to lead us dialectically from satisfaction to satisfaction, until it surpasses mere admiration to reach delight in its purest form'.

300

Bibliographical Note

In addition to the sources of information alluded to in the text, special acknowledgement must be made for information provided by the following recent publications: ABRAMS, M. H. BERTRAND, L. CANAT, R. CROW, W. B. GUST, L. HIPPLE, W. J. LANSON, R. LEVIN, H. LOVEJOY, A. O. MALAKIS, E. MORRISON, H. NEEDHAM, H. A. NORDENSKIOLD, E.

PANOFSKY, E. RUSSELL, E. S. SANDYS, J. E. SEZNEC, J. SMITH, W. H. WELLEK, R. WOODGER, J. H.

The Mirror and the Lamp La Fin du Classicisme et le Retour a 1'Antique L'Hellenisme des Romantiques The Principles of Morphology History of the Society of Dilettanti The Beautiful, the Sublime and the Picturesque in i8th Century British Aesthetic Theory Le Gout du Moyen Age en France The Broken Column Essays in the History of Ideas French Travellers in Greece, 1770-1820 Louis Sullivan Le Developpement de I'Esthdtique Sociologique en France et en Angleterre au ige Siecle The History of Biology Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art Form and Function A History of Classical Scholarship Essais sur Diderot et VAntiquite Architecture in English Fiction A History of Modern Criticism, 1750-1950 Biological Principles

301

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Index of Illustrations

Andre, E.: Huet House, Nancy, XXX Athens: Temple by the Ilyssus, xn Barry, C.: Bridgewater House, London, xix Palace of Westminster, XIV Belanger, F. J.: Bagatelle, vii Bordeaux: Theatre, in, xxv Boullee, E. L.: Design for a cenotaph, n Design for a theatre, in Breuer, M.: St. John's Monastery, Collegeville, XXXI

Brussels: Stoclet House, xxx Butterfield, W.: Keble College, Oxford, xvi Campbell, C.: Design for a church, X Castell, R.: Pliny's villa at Tuscum, vm Chedanne, G. P.: Offices, Paris, xxxvin Collegeville: St. John's Monastery, xxxi Curbar: Calver Cotton Mill, xvin

Klenze, L. von: Glyptothek, Munichj XI Pinakothek, Munich, XX Knight, P.: Downton Castle, ix Labrouste, H.: Library of St. Genevieve, Paris, XXII

Le Corbusier: Unite d'Habitation, Marseilles, xxxv Ledoux, C. N.: Design for a 'House of Pleasure', IV

Villa at Louveciennes, vi Le Moine, P. G.: Design for a medical school, xxvn London: Bridgewater House, xix Foreign Office, xm Palace of Westminster, xrv St. Pancras Hotel, xvi Louis, V: Theatre, Bordeaux, in, xxv Marseilles: Unite d'Habitation, xxxv Milan: Torre Velasca, xxxvni Munich: Glyptothek, XI Pinakothek, xx

Doesburg, T. van: Design for a house, xxxii Downton Castle, ix Dulwich: Art Gallery, i Durand, J. N. L.: Method of planning, IV Falling Water, Bear Run, Pennsylvania, xxxiv Fonthill Abbey, vm Furness, F.: Provident Trust Building, Philadelphia, XXIX Gabo, N.: Model for a glass fountain, xxxvi Gondoin, J.: Medical School, Paris, ix, xxvi Halfpenny, W.: Garden temple, v Harrison, W.: United Nations Building, New York, xxvni, xxxvi Herbert, Lord: Marble Hill, VI Hoffmann, J.: Stoclet House, Brussels, xxx Howe & Lescaze: P.S.F.S. Building, Philadelphia, XXXVII Hunt, R. M.: Studio Apartments, New York, xxxv Ickworth House, ix Jefferson, T.: Virginia State Capitol, x Kahn, L. I.: Yale University Art Gallery, xxxni

Nancy: Huct House, xxx New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, XXXIII

New York: Studio Apartments, xxxv United Nations Building, xxvni, xxxvi Oak Park: Unity Temple, xxxiv Oxford: Keble College, xvi Paris: Apartment building, rue Raynouard, xxxix Bagatelle, vn Hotel d'Evreux, xxxni H6tel de Salm, vn Library of St. Genevieve, xxii Medical School, ix, xxvi Neuilly Bridge, xvn Offices, rue Reaumur, xxxvin Pantheon (St. Genevieve), xxi Ferret, A.: Apartment building, Paris, xxxix Perronet, R.: Neuilly Bridge, xvil Philadelphia: P.S.F.S. Building, xxxyii Provident Trust Building, xxrx Pugin, A. W. N.: Scarisbrick Hall, XV

303

INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS Richmond: Virginia State Capitol, x Riverside: Coonley House, xxxn Robert, H.: Hameau, Versailles, vm Rogers, E.: Torre Velasca, Milan, xxxvm Roos, A.: Lodge at Shrubland Park, XHI Rousseau, P.: Hotel de Salm, Paris, vii Sandys, F.: Ickworth House, IX San Francisco, Hancock Building, XL Scarisbrick Hall, xy Scott, G. G.: Foreign Office, London, xni St. Pancras Hotel, xvi Shrubland Park: Lodge, XHI

304

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill: Hancock Building, XL Soane, J.: Dulwich Art Gallery, I Soufflot, J. G.: St. Genevieve, Paris, xxi Versailles: Hameau de la Reine, vm Vesnine, A. L. & V.: Design for a Palace of Labour, xxxvn Viollet-le-Duc, E. E.: Designs, XXIH, xxiv Wright, F. L.: Coonley House, Riverside, xxxn Falling Water, Bear Run, xxxiv Unity Temple, Oak Park, xxxiv Wyatt, D.: Foreign Office, London, xm Wyatt, J.: Fonthill Abbey, vill

Index of Text

Abercrombie, Lascelles, 180 Aberdeen, Earl of, 78, 86-7, 90 Abraham, Pol, 164 Academy of Architecture (French), 63, 91, 97, 168-9, i?4. 185, i»7> 199, 201, 209, 216, 223, 226 Action architecture, 245, 247 Adam, Robert, 53, 64, 73, 75-6, 265 Addison, Joseph, 44-5, 50, 167 Aeroplanes, 165 Aesthetics, 43-8, 256, 280-1 Aitchison, George, 126 Alemben, Jean d', 72 Alison, Archibald, 46, 50, 167, 170, 218, 254 Allsopp, Bruce, 173 Analogies, 145-6, 149-82, 269 Anonymous architecture, 162, 250 Anti-art, 252, 277-8 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 276 Archaeological exactitude, 90, 103-4, 124> M3 Architectonics, 265 Architectural Review, 263 Architecturesque, The, 125, 273 Ardant, P. J., 194-6, 201, 233 Arnold, Matthew, 251 Art Nouveau, 137-8, 262, 266-7, 29^, 299 'Art pour 1'art', no, 275 Association of ideas, 45, 48, 233 Athens: Parthenon, 91-3, 139, 160, 163, 165, 283 Atkinson, Fello, 274 Automobiles, 165—6 Avant-garde, 262, 275-6 Baltard, L. P., 230-1 Banham, Reyner, 226, 248, 253, 271, 279, 282 Barry, Charles, 99, 101-2, 237 E. M., 216 Bartholemew, Alfred, 112, 190, 212 Barton, J. E., 165 Basic design, 269, 281 Batteux, Charles, 174 'Battle of the styles', 121-2 Baudelaire, Charles, 155, 258 Baudot, Anatole de, 164, 209, 283 Bauhaus, 215, 247, 268-71, 281-2, 284, 290 Baumgarten, A. G., 45 Beauvoir, Simone de, 251 Beaux-Arts: see Paris Beckford, William, 49

Beecham, Thomas, 171 Behrendt, Kurt, 267 Belidor, B. F. de, 187 Bell, Clive, 272 Bentham, Samuel, 231 Berlage, H. P., 287 Berlin: Brandenburg Gate, 84, 86 Biological analogy, 132, 135, 149-58 Blair, Hugh, 64 Blomfield, Arthur, 145 Blondel, Francois, 185, 200 Jacques-Francois, 63, 65, 77, 81, 92, 97, 130, 142, 163, 170, 174, 181, 188, 192, 194, 200, 218-19, 231, 255-6, 285 Jean-Francois, 98, 266 Boas, George, 275 Boccioni, Umberto, 273 Boffrand, Germain, 174, 185, 266-7 Boileau, Nicholas, 198 Borgnis, J. A., 202, 223 Boullee, E. L., 24, 84, 181, 192, 274 Breuer, Marcel, 248, 269 Bridgeman, P. W., 166 Bridges, 185-7 Brillat-Savarin, Anselme, 167-8, 172 Brise-soleil, 137 Brown, Theodore, 268-9 Brussels: Art Nouveau houses, 266, 299 Brutalism, 217, 247, 251-2 Bruyere, Louis, 228 Buffalo, N.Y.: Guaranty Building, 115 Larkin Building, 286 Buffon, G. L. L., 149-51 Builder, The, 102, 104, 119, 120, 124, 126, 128132, 136, 139, 175, 198, 246-7 Building-types, 219-35 Built-in furniture, 136 Burchard, John, 243, 288 Burges, William, 175, 247 Burke, Edmund, 47 Bush-Brown, Albert, 243, 288 Butler, E. M., 84 Butterfield, William, 114, 245

Cambridge: Downing College, 86, 91, 93 Camden Society, 109, 117 Campbell, Colen, 63, 77 Castell, Robert, 50 V 305

INDEX Cast iron, 75, 196-7, 214, 235 Catholic emancipation, 106 Caumont, Arcisse de, 103 Caylus, Comte de, 71 Cezanne, Paul, 274 Chabannes, Marquis de, 236 Chambers, William, 34, 47, 64-5, 81, 222 Chandigarh, 283 Chatham: School of Military Engineering, 193 Chedanne, G. P., 297 Chenier, Andr6, 133 Chicago, 111.: Robie House, 280 Chinese influences, 34, 53, 142 Choisy, Auguste, 205, 208, 286 Chronological classification, 104 Classical archaeology, 72, 92 Classical Rationalism, 199-208 Clerisseau, Louis, 73-4, 77 Cockerell, C. R., 138 Cole, Henry, 190 Coleridge, S. T., 152 Collages, 275 Collingwopd, R. G., 16, 173, 256, 289 Comparative history, 132 Composition, 155, 179, 225-7 Consistency, 209, 250 Constant-Dufeux, S. C., 140, 285 Constructivism, 273, 281-2 Cordemoy, Chanoine de, 54 Cousin, Victor, 118, 244, 275 Cresy, Edward, 190 Criticism, 244, 247, 254-64 Croce, Benedetto, 169, 173, 248, 256 Cubism, 278-9 Cuvier, Georges, 151-2, 154 Dada, 276-8 Daly, Cisar, 99, no, 113, 120-1, 124, 128-30, 132-5, 140, 143, 156, 175, 177, 190, 198, 204, 221, 223-4, 229,

234,

258,

26l, 275

Darwin, Charles, 152-4 De Stijl, 267-8, 279-82 Deutscher Werkbund, 265, 283 Diderot, Denis, 17, 72, 244, 255, 257-8 Dilettanti, Society of, 69, 71, 77, 87 Donaldson, T. L., 92, 119, 128, 131, 177, 189, 286 Duchamp, Marcel, 277 Dumont, G. P. M., 80, 192 Durand, J. N. L., 25, 130, 179, 192, 221, 233 Dynamic architecture, 215, 282

Esprit Nouveau, 276 Etchells, Frederick, 165-6, 218, 278 Evolution, 31, 143, 149-53. 209. 25° Exhibition architecture, 287 Exoticism, 34 Expressionism, 25, 281, 296 Faustian architecture, 292 Ftoelon, F. de Salignac de la Mothe-, 180 Fenestration patterns, 24, 91 Fergusson, James, 89, 92, 99, 102, 104, 125, 129-31, 138-40, 142, 144, 152, 163, 167, 176, 178, 189-91, 198, 217, 234, 257 Ferro-Vitreous Art, 138 Flat arches, 201-2, 208 Fletcher, Banister, 132 Fonthill abbey, 49 Formalism, 78, 226 Form and function, 150-1, 155 Form and structure, 155, 214 Fowke, Francis, 190 Functipnalism, 26, 109, 123, 129-30, Part III passim, 218, 225, 231, 233, 298 Furness, Frank, 246 Furniture design, 246, 265-70 Futurism, 143, 282 Garbett, E. L., 210, 233 Gamier, Charles, 112 Gastronomy, 167-72 Gaudi, Antonio, 260, 282 Gaunt, William, 277 Gauthey, E. L., 188 Gerard, Alexander, 48, 218 Gerardin, R. L.: see Ermenonville Giedion, Sigfried, 16, 141, 156, 196, 266, 279, 287-93 Gilpin, John, 70 Godwin, George, 23 Goethe, J. W. von, 80, 84, 150,152, 227 Goguet, A. Y. de, 32, 90, 100, 150 Gondoin, Jacques, 75, 221 Gothic novels, 38-9, 106 Gothic Rationalism, 201, 208-17 Grammar of design, 179-80 Gray, Thomas, 31, 64, 256 Greece, early visitors to, 79-80 Greek refinements, 92 Greek Revival, 79^95, 280 Greenough, Horatio, 125, 160, 163, 285 Gropius, Walter, 35, 127, 162, 234, 250-2, 268270, 274, 288, 292, 296 Guadet, Julien, 142,179, 195, 207-8, 223, 228-9 281 Gwilt, Joseph, 46, 93

Eastlake, Charles, 101, 103, 212 Ecclesiologist, The, 109 Eclecticism, 17, 104, 118-23, *29> I4°, J76, 209 Ecole des Beaux-Arts: see Paris Edwards, Trystan, 179 Hansen, Theophilus, 112 Hautecoeur, Louis, 276-7 Einstein, Albert, 288-9 Hawksmoor, Nicholas, 22, 76 Electricity, 238 Hazlitt, William, 37, 257 Elementarism, 273, 281-2 Heating and ventilation, 235-9 Elgin marbles, 87 Hegel, G. W. F., 286 Elmes, James, 65, 93, 142, 175 Herculaneum, 74 Encyclopedic, 32-3, 257 Hermann, Wolfgang, 28, 200 Engineering, 125, 134, 139, 276 Environmental design, 157-8, 166, 181, 234-5, Hire, Philippe de la, 187 Hitchcock, H. R., 16, 247, 279 251, 284 Hirtorff, C. J., 112 Ermenonville, Vicomte d', 39, 52, 55, 65, 285 306

INDEX Hoffmann, Josef, 266 Hogarth, William, 159 Hope, Thomas, 85-6,119, 128 Horace, 174, 257 Horn, F. W. von, 128 Horta, Victor, 299 Hosking, William, 177 Hospitals, 222, 229, 231-2 Huggins, Samuel, 21 Hughes, John, 37 Hugo, Victor, 132, 244 Humboldt, Alexander von, 153-4 Hurd, Richard, 37 Indifferentism, 117, 177 Industrial design, 265-70, 276, 283 Inman, W. S., 237 Inventors, 134-5 Jackson, T. G., 272 Jacobs, Jane, 235 Japanese influences, 35 Jardin anglais, 49-56, 287 Jefferson, Thomas, 77, 93 Jobard, J. B., 129, 138 Johnson, Philip, 16 Samuel, 37, 178 Jones, Owen, 124, 179 Jordy, W. H., 297 Kahn, L. I., 139, 238-9, 293 Kallman, G. M., 297 Kames, Lord, 24, 70, 150 Kandinsky, Vasili, 272-3, 282 Kant, Immanuel, 265 Kerr, Robert, 95, 117, 125, 143, 145, 224, 245, 259-60, 273 Klenze, Leo von, 89, 93,112, 221 Knight, Payne, 52, 54, 56, 77, 80, 87, 89, 118, 255

Loudon, J. C., 42, 49, 56, 57, 78, 218-19 Luckhardt, Hans, 278 Lyttelton, Lord, 38 Macaulay, T. B., 140 Machine-made ornament, 126 Maillart, Robert, 207 Malewitsch, Kasimir, 279, 281 Marinetti, F. T., 282 Marmontel, J. F., 72, 74 Marseilles: Unite d'habitation, 283, Mechanical analogy, 133-5, 159-66, 229, 276 Mechanical services, 235-9 Mediaeval studies, 36 Mendelsohn, Eric, 266, 282 Merimee, Prosper, 162 Metallurgic architecture, 135-8 Metz: Ecole du Genie, 193-4 Mezieres: Ecole du Genie, 185 Milan: Torre Velasca, 296-7 Military engineering, 187 Milne-Edwards, Henri, 152, 156 Mitford, William, 88, 218 Modernism, 15, 40, 275 Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo, 282, 289, 291 Mondriaan, Piet, 273, 279 'Monkey' styles, 130, 142, 160 Montesquieu, Baron de, 36, 55, 57, 67-8, 100, 150 Montherlant, H. M. de, 252 Moore, Henry, 169 Morris, Robert, 51 William, no, 265 Muthesius, Hermann, 265 Neo-plasticism, 279 Nervi, P. L., 191 Nicholson, Peter, 204 Nicole, Nicholas, 98 Nimes: Maison Carree, 74, 77 Non-representational art, 272—3 Novelty, 53, 130, 171, 244, 246-7

Laborde, Vicomte de, 224 Labrouste, Henri, 140, 192, 204, 206, 222 Lamarck, J. B. P. A. de Monet, 150, 152-3 Oak Park, 111.: Unity Temple, 286 Lamennais, H. F. R. de, 213 Organic architecture, 135, 149-50, 156, 213-14, 251 Landscape design, 49-56 Originality, 130, 246-7, 253 Laugier, M. A., 54, 95, 97, 200-1, 223 Le Corbusier, 24, 159, 164-6, 216, 218, 222, Ornament, 25, 116, 124-7, 181, 203, 272, 274 230. 235. 247, 249-50, 260-1, 273-4, 276-9, Oud, J. J. P., 273-4, 282 Oxford Movement, 108 283-4, 289-90, 296, 299 Ledoux, C. N., 24, 43, 81, 181 Oxford: Museum, 103, 115, 144 Ozenfant, Amedee, 283 Leeds: Marshall's Flax Mill, 144, 234 Leroy, J. D., 47, 79, 81-2, 92, 97, 141 Paestum, 79-81, 139 Liberty, 140 Linguistic analogy, 173-82 Painting, influence of, 49, 56, 70, 202-3, 207, Linnaeus (Linne) Carl von, 149 226, 249, 258, 267, 271-84, 291 Palmyra, 27 Living architecture, 118, 155-6, 276 Parallax, 27, 292-3 Llewelyn-Davies, Lord, 229, 253 Locomotives, 134, 163-4 Paris: Ecole des Beaux-Arts, 123, 140-1, 145, London: Bank of England, 23, 236 193, 202-4, 225-9 British Museum, 144, 234 Ecole des Fonts et Chauss£es, 185, 205 Crystal Palace, 138,144 Ecole Polytechnique, 140, 192-3, 221 Foreign Office, 121 Eiffel tower, 197 Law Courts, 104, 144 'Le Parisien' offices, 297 Palace of Westminster, 101, 237-8 Pavilion Suisse, 283 Reform Club, 99, 237 Ferret's buildings, 239, 296-300 Loos, Adolf, 127 Ste. Clothilde, 209 307

INDEX Paris: Ste. Genevieve (Pantheon), 188-9, 199200, 203

UNESCO secretariat, 269 Parsons, Eliza, 38-9 Patte, Pierre, 230-2 Periodicals, architectural, 261-3 Perkins, Holmes, 298 Perret, Auguste, 163, 172, 178, 207, 214-16, 239. 267. 283, 287, 293, 296-300 Perronet, Rodolphe, 186, 189, 192 Petit, J. L., 122-3, I?8) 209 Pevsner, Nikolaus, 62,197,295-7 Peyre, Henri, 248-54 Philhellenism, 88 Photography, 231, 235, 250, 262 Piacenza: St. Augustine, 97-8 Picasso, Pablo, 279, 290, 292 Pickett, W. V., 129, 135-8, 205 Picton, James, 131 Picturesqueness, 39, 49-58 Pilotis, 215-16 Planche, Gustave, 124 Plasticity, 136, 282 Point supports, 188-9, 2Z5 Poissy: Villa Savoie, 289-91 Polychromy, 111-16, 262 Poyet, Bernard, 230-1 Poynter, Ambrose, 135 Price, Uvedale, 53, 58, 244 Primitivism, 32, 67-9, 94-5, 139, 253 Prisons, 230-1 Prix de Rome, 203-4, 219-22, 225 Programme, architectural, 219, 227-9 Progress, 33, 67-9, 139-40, 144 Proportions, Classical, 47-8, 200, 206 Pugin, A. W. N., loo, 102, 107-8, 211-13 Pure form, 265, 272, 278 Purism, 279

Romanticism, 39, Part I passim, 170 Ronchamp: Notre-Dame du Haut, 166, 273,283 Rondelet, J. B., 188, 203-4 Rousseau, J. J., 52, 67-8, 249, 252 Pierre, 76 Royal Academy (British), 226 Royal Institute of British Architects, 144-5, 206 Rudolph, Paul, 287-8 Ruins, cult of, 27, 66, 71 Ruskin, John, 100, 107, 109, 113-15, 124, 126, 155, 210, 217, 227, 248, 258-9, 271 Russell, J. S., 191

Saint-Hilaire, Geoffrey, 151 Saintsbury, George, 256 Sant'Elia, Antonio, 282 Schinkel, Friedrich, 88-9, 91 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 101, 162, 256 Schleiden, Jacob, 151 Schuyler, Montgomery, 175-6, 191-2, 265 Scott, Geoffrey, 157, 248 George Gilbert, 104. 121-3, M4~5> J78, 217, 245 Giles Gilbert, 249 Walter, 57 Scully, Vincent, 28, 260 Sculpture, influence of, 23, 207, 271-84 Seddon, J. P., 143 Semper, Gottfried, 112, 124 Shelley, P. B., 181 Ship-building analogy, 135, 139, 160-2, 164 Significant form, 272-3, 276 Simplicity, 90, 194 Sincerity, 248-54 Singer, Charles, 153 Skeleton frames, 115, 195-6 Smith, Charlotte, 38-9, 57 Soane, John, 23, 52, 222 Social reform, 109-10, 229-30 Soufflot, J. G., 28, 80, 97, 189, 199 Queen Anne Revival, 98, 122-3, '?8 Quincy, Quatremere de, 174 Space, architectural, 26, 285-93 Space-time, 287-93 Spencer, Herbert, 151, 155 Radcliffe, Ann, 38-9 Rationalism, 99, too, 108, 113, 130, 142, 155, Spengler, Oswald, 272, 292 Spontaneity, 250 170, Part IV passim, 256, 258, 283, 286-7 Ratisbon: Walhalla, 89, 144 Standardization, 165, 169, 230-1, 233-4, 2^3 Raumgestaltung, 286 Steegman, John, 168 Regional architecture, 178 Steel structures, 115, 196-7 Stewart, Dugald, 67 Reid, D. B., 237-8 Repton, Humphry, 55, 57-8, 103, 130, 211 Straub, Hans, 185 Revivalism, 61, 70-110, 175, 269, 296-9 Strawberry Hill, 57 Revolutionary architecture, 21-8, 143 Street, G. E., 104, 113-14, 117, 217, 224 Revue Generate de 1'Architecture: see Daly Strength of materials, 187-9 r r Structural coloration, 113-14 Reynaud, Leonce, 140-1, 176, 188-9, 93> 96, Stuart, James, 64, 85, 94 202, 204-5, 209, 212, 215-16, 223, 236 Style, 62-6 Reynolds, Joshua, 78 Styling, 116, 166, 227, 270 Richards, J. ML, 62,178-9, 248,263 Sublimity, 48 Richmond, Va.: State Capitol, 77 Sullivan, Louis, 115-16, 155-6 Rickman, Thomas, 103 Summerson, John, 23, 43, 114, 178, 208, 213, Rietveld, Gerrit, 267-9 245, 277, 281, 292, 298 Robert, Hubert, 51 Suprematism, 281-2 Robison, John, 188, 210, 216 Surprise, 53, 276 Rococo, 266-7 Sylvester, Charles, 232 Rodzhenko, Alexander, 278 Symbolic compositions, 25, 282 Rogers, Ernesto, 296-7 Rohe, L. Mies van der, 42, 207-8,215, 279, 287, Symbolic ornament, 127 Symmetry, 54-6, 235 292 308

INDEX Taste, 46, 167-9 Taut, Bruno, 284 Telford, Thomas, 186 Theatres, 230-2, 234, 236-7 Theory of architecture, 141, 253, 296 Thermo-ventilation, 238 Tite, William, 121, 190 Toynbee, Arnold, 145 Truthful expression, 107 Ugliness, 244-8 Vanbrugh, John, 22 Vantongerloo, George, 273, 279 Vaudoyer, A. T. L., 223 Velde, Henry van de, 266-7 Ventilation, 232, 237-8 Vernacular architecture, 122-3, 177, 210, 253 Vico, G. B., 45 Vicq d'Azyr, Felix, 151, 154 Villas, 42-3 Viollet-le-Duc, E. E., 92, 100,22 131-3, 155, 162164, 199, 209-10, 212-15, 3) 248j 250, 286

Voltaire, 31-4, 36, 88 Walpole, Horace, 34, 38-9, 52 Ware, Isaac, 51 Warton, Joseph, 255 Watt, James, 236 Wiebeking, C. F., 204 Wilkins, William, 86, 117 Willis, Rev. R., 213 Winckelmann, J. J., 72, 83-4, 150 Wolfflin, Heinrich, 286, 291 Wood, Robert, 27, 73 Wordsworth, William, 178, 181, 251, 255 Wright, F. L., 24, 35, 115-16, 151-2, 156, 17°, 227, 248, 250, 280, 286, 292 Wyatt, Digby, 122 James, 85 Young, Edward, 151 Zen Buddhism, 288, 293 Zevi, Bruno, 125 Zurko, Edward de, 159

McGILL UNIVERSITY

INTER-DEPARTMENTAL MEMORANDUM

TO: Bland/Lemoyne/Shine

DATE: 7th July 1972

°°S*" °f Trivia and Ephemera (Legal Linguistics Division) SUBJECT' Audi Alteram partem FROM:

Yesterday, I noticed,above the west door of your addition to the Faculty of Law, a large engraved notice in latin saying "listen to the other side". I therefore went round to the east side of the building, but heard nothing at all. Do you think there is something wrong with the mechanical services of the building?

Interdisciplinary Coordinator

c. Administrative Assistant, Faculty of Law, cc. Build^""* anH Grounds, flTVMlndl. Buildings and Professor Leslie Doelle, Profe 4c. &c. 4^.

Peter Collins, 1920-1981