The Evolution of Modern Architecture On the Origin of Styles
Chapter Five: From Many Styles to One
1.0 Introduction
Selection, modification and combination of architectural elements remain the basic operations of the design process. This is true whether the current language of architecture is diverse, offering many possible stylistic options or whether it is reasonably homogenous with a single distinct stylistic template. These are the different contexts within which these same operations take place. While the architect’s goal remains the same: the coherent translation of the form of an institution into the form of a building, the means of achieving it must vary from period to period depending on the current state of the language of architecture. Obviously if there are a lot of equally valid stylistic options around at the time, - many answers to the same problems -the selection criteria used by the architect will be quite different to that used in the context of a dominant and all-pervasive style. It might be that in the former, all the architect can do is to select the ‘best’ option based on the compositional possibilities of the style and/or its historical associations with the given building program. Where there is a dominant style, the issue is different. The formal characteristics of the building (Classicism, for instance), are, to a large extent already decided. The available architectural language at this point automatically ensures uniformity of expression. What it doesn’t do is ensure that this building will be different enough from any other building. For that reason one can suggest that in this situation design emphasis shifts to the issue of combination of the typical elements of the style. It is only with this operation that the architect can clearly differentiate one building from the next. Selection (of which typical elements to use), is of course still involved but the possibilities are inherently limited by the finite repertoire of forms made available in a classical style. (Theoretically, this finite repertoire can generate an infinite number of different statements). This chapter deals with the architects’ attempts to handle these kinds of issues on a project by project basis and, particularly in the context of the fragmented state of architecture in the mid to late 19th century. While the discussions so far emphasize the state of the language at the time and the means of manipulating it, the underlying issue is of course the need to produce buildings which ‘work’ in the most pragmatic sense of providing spatial arrangements which accord with the needs of defined building programs; programs which arise out of the needs of specific institutions. When all is said and done, this is ground level for architecture and it is the crucial point at which the creativity of the individual architect is called into play. First though we must compare this with the ideal ‘classical’ situation when many questions about the final form of the design are already answered before the architect draws a line.
2.0 Design by Precedent
Once a style has been selected the typological rules of that style come into play. These are historically-derived compositional rules that have been built up over long periods of time by the interaction of the many architects who have used the style. Indeed, the style, as a set of conventions on the selection and combination of forms, is the inevitable mark of the collaboration of many individuals over time. Once established, the creativity of architects becomes engaged in developing or elaborating on this given formula. Ordained by history and constrained by precedent this unique resource of learned experience is of inestimable value in the design of future buildings. The main points about the Design by Precedent method can be outlined as follows: Many of the elements and compositional rules of the style and therefore much of the design process itself are standardized and define typical, (certainly not specific) ways of putting a building together to ensure a coherent end product. There is the possibility of creative freedom for the architect, but it is freedom within limits. To some extent the combination of the elements and the typical forms of the style (its vocabulary), together with the distribution of spaces and volumes are predetermined by the compositional rules of the style – its grammar. For instance, as mentioned above, classical planning defined a tripartite division of the plan with the spaces arranged symmetrically along an axis. The appropriate columnar order would be selected based on associations with the building type. (The particular character of each columnar order, whether ‘male’ or ‘female’ or its associations with particular building types had been established since the Renaissance). Building mass and elevational issues would be handled by using proportional dimensions derived from the relationship between the column type and the required actual size of the building. Vertical division of the elevations, pediments, domes, window types, entrance porches, aedicules, details, masonry scale, type and cut could all be specified from catalogues based on the initial selection. This was a true triumph of System. The functions of the building program would be adjusted in size and shape and (to some extent) functional relationship to fit into this preordained pattern. This is not unique to the classical tradition. Buildings are never just diagrams of their functions. All buildings are compromises involving as they do a trade-off between the needs of the program and the technical and architectural possibilities available to the architect at the time. However, the compositional strictures imposed by the Classical method usually but not always tended to privilege form or architectural coherence at the expense of function. The formalist design method could sometimes produce some serious compromises in the pragmatic planning of the building, its convenience or functionality. However (as usual), it was the skill of the individual architect that defined the success of the building in resolving all these issue – formal and functional - into a coherent whole. Within the limits of the Classical rules therefore it was still possible to alleviate many of the problems inherent to the style. The standard elements, their combinatory possibilities and the ability to adjust their proportions to suit various volume sizes could solve most of the architectural problems and project types the architect was likely to meet, at least up to the 19th century. Up to a point therefore, this design process of variations on a strong Classical theme actually worked. Its inherent familiarity of image and its clear-cut visible order tended to outweigh any problems of inflexibility or functional inconvenience the style might have. As with all styles, however Classicism involves a (temporary) consensus between architects about what works and what does not work in the design of buildings. What holds that consensus together is the continuity of the environment in which architectural design takes place. If that environment persists in time, then the experiences upon which the consensus is built will be maintained. If the environment changes dramatically, as it did in the 19th century, then the consensus will collapse since it will no longer reflect the experience of architects in the design of new kinds of buildings. It is only at critical points like this when the rules of the style no longer seem to work, that the style will be seen for what it is: a temporary and essentially accidental or arbitrary model of experience. The imposition of the historically-derived and (relative to the program), arbitrary planning patterns of Classicism created contradictions and inconveniences at a much more fundamental level of the design process. By using predetermined forms and compositional patterns, Design by Precedent was already compromised as a method before any functional planning takes place. So too the volumetric distribution of spaces was established, not on the basis of practical or semantic needs but on the basis of forms or compositional rules arbitrarily selected from a historical or typological catalogue, whether some version of Classical or Vernacular/Gothic. Design by Precedent could and did work as a practical design method for building types typical of architecture from the Renaissance till the beginning of the 19th century. In other words, over time the method had become well-adapted to the kind of tasks it had to handle. By the 19th century however, many those tasks had changed in type, scale and complexity and well beyond the limits of this design method. Spread out over a longer time-scale no doubt architecture would have learned to deal with these new design problems within the limits of its traditional forms and methods without the need to introduce a radically new architecture. However, the extreme nature of the crisis stemmed from the fact that the rate of change of 19th century society had speeded up considerably. The reason was the ‘accidental’ occurrence of the Industrial Revolution which triggered very rapid changes across society in a very short period of time. It was simply impossible to adapt traditional forms and the use of precedent to these new circumstances in the time available. The environment had changed too rapidly for the ‘architectural species’ to deal with and yet maintain its internal coherence. In its attempt to adapt to radically new circumstances architecture effectively split itself into a large number of different forms of behaviour, each being a unique and inevitably futile attempt to match architectural form to the convulsive demands of its changed environment.
3.0 The Problem of Choice
While in one sense the wide range of styles available in the middle of the 19th century seemed to offer a diversity of solutions and possibilities for architects; a kind of stylistic freedom perhaps, it also posed an equivalent set of problems. The most obvious of these being that it created a fundamental ambiguity in the design process. Why choose one style as against another? There was nothing inherently more valid about any of them since they could all offer equally credible solutions to the same architectural problems. Indeed the ‘Great Debate’ between Classicists and Gothicists revolved around a futile attempt to justify the superior validity of one or the other and thus resolve the ‘agony of choice’ in the design process. Faced with these problems one can imagine architects of the 19th century might try out different approaches to resolve the ‘problem of choice’. 3.1Choosing a Style for a Particular Project While from an academic point of view, discussions about the relative merits of one style or another, futile though they were in the short term, did at least attempt to clarify what would be required of an appropriate ‘style for the age’. But discussions as such could never really resolve this issue, only architectural practice could do that, in the sense of what worked and what didn’t in the experience of a large number of architects and the continuous exchange of that experience between them. The problem was of course that the emergence of ‘the answer’ in the form of a new architecture would take time to occur. In the meantime, individual architects on the 19th century had to come up with immediate answers to the issue of which style to use for which projects. The enormous increase in the numbers of buildings and building types required by the new industrial economy magnified the problem many times over. On a daily basis therefore practicing architects might be faced with the same question: what criteria could one use in selecting a style for a particular project? This was by no means an academic issue since the choice of a particular style would define the start point for the project, its formal and technical characteristics and compositional possibilities. Coupled with readily available pattern books of plan types and catalogues of details, style selection to a large extent predicted what the design would be like even down to the decorative details before a single line had been drawn. This was clearly a valuable design resource and establishing a rule-of-thumb for easily making such decisions was obviously important in economic terms. What options did architects have in the selection of appropriate styles? They might make their selection based on the following criteria: continually select the same style, for personal or ideological reasons. This approach avoided the problem (of choice) but limited the architect’s design options since no style of the 19th century was spatially or semantically adequate for all possible purposes. This is because they were, in a sense, just fragments of past dominant styles. The pragmatic advantage of a continuing commitment to a single style was clearly that it established a considerable amount of learned experience about the formal possibilities of one particular style. This was essentially an individual approach to the problem. However, one can also note examples of selection based on ideological principles in the preference for Gothic Revival as a British national style based purely on the Anglican and Roman Catholic religious beliefs of some establishment figures and their architects. The commitment to a single style no matter what, could not overcome the fundamental problem of 19th century architecture, namely that there would always be equally valid alternative styles whose very existence negated the inevitability of any particular one. It is also possible to suggest that the continual infusion of new industrial or commercial building types into architecture in the 19th century continually threatened to overcome the all-purpose validity or appropriateness of any one style and particularly those deeply associated with historical or religious themes. After all, the religious justification for the Gothic Revival might well provoke a clash of associations when used to materialize the form of an industrial, commercial or other profane building types. Such buildings were built of course, and some were successful works of architecture, but they could never avoid the problem that there was nothing inherent in the style itself which would give it preferred status. It would always just be a matter of personal taste.
4.0 Eclecticism
In the context of 19th century architecture, eclecticism was an obvious way out of the problem of having too many equally valid styles to choose from. If none of them could claim absolute validity as the ‘natural’ style of the age, and if, in a sense they were all just fragments of a theoretically complete architecture one could quite pragmatically select forms at will from this great catalogue of parts. The determinant in this case would be the building program itself with its own very specific requirements and a unique context not all of which could be successfully met by using the forms of only one style. The final building would therefore display a mixture of characteristics each of which had been selected to perform a particular role in shaping the building in a particular location. For example, the plan-type used might be drawn from the repertoire of one style based on its capacity to ‘naturally’ absorb different sizes and types of space required by the program and the exigencies of the site. The details of wall and window types and string courses could be selected to bring an external order to the loose arrangement of volumes generated by the plan, and so on. This and many other permutations allowed the architect to fully customize buildings while incorporating semantic associations from historical styles. By recognizing the essentially conventional nature of styles architects could break out of the trap laid for them by history and focus their energies on the nature of the building program and the physical context in which the building would exist. This was not a rejection of history in any sense, since the historical styles provided a vast resource of knowledge about how to put a building together and provided a clear commonly-understood and ready-made public meaning for new buildings. In the hands of competent and informed architects, eclecticism could solve many of the problems of the day. In the hands of others, eclecticism led to an unforeseen and sometimes ridiculous clash of expectations in the final form of the building. Ultimately, the problem was that eclecticism relied on the competence or otherwise of individual architects since there was (as yet) no overall formula for the coherent design of a building without reference to one historical style or other. However, in the free exchange of forms from whatever source and in its focus on the requirements of the building program, eclecticism at one level pointed in the direction of the Modern Movement by implying (in practice at least) that there could be a set of all-purpose forms which could be assembled to handle the design of any building. So too the eclectic concern with the specific nature of the building program as such suggested an admittedly embryonic functionalist approach to the design of buildings. At another level this free exchange of non-canonical forms between many architects over time would finally produce a set of ‘characterless’ forms which could be combined to suit any purpose. Eclecticism can be regarded as a transitional stage between historicist forms and that of the as yet unforeseen new architecture.
5.0 Design by Association
Here we had another approach to the problem of design in the 19th century. We could select a style based on its supposed historical associations with the building type in question and the institution to be designed. In other words, the choice of style would not appear to be arbitrary, but would, in some sense be justified by the nature of the project. By consensus it provided a rule for selection which, no matter how apparently subjective, limited the number of options and thus the possibilities of failure in making an appropriate choice of style for the occasion. With this method architects would use a ‘concept association’ process to select the appropriate style for a given project. Above all, there had to be some kind of relationship between the style selected and the building type required. This approach required that the semantic links between the proposed style, the type of institution and its associated building type be common knowledge at least among the cognoscenti. That is that people would make the necessary connections and thus justify the initial choice. This was not too much of a problem since classical education and the numerous studies of the allegorical associations of certain forms with certain meanings which had been built up since the Renaissance provided many such connections, some obvious, some obscure. For instance one could make a case for the association between a particular building type and one or other of the Classical Orders. The same Renaissance inspired studies provided guidance on the selection of forms which had male-female associations or religious or profane associations. In other words it had all been pretty much worked out. More obvious connections could be drawn between, say, government buildings such as town halls and the Greek concept of democracy and of course between religious buildings and the use of Gothic. All that this approach needed was enough styles or varieties around to cover the full range of building types that were likely to be dealt with. By the middle of the century there were certainly enough sub-styles of Classicism plus Neo-Gothic and regional variations of both to provide a numerically adequate repertoire of forms. Again, up to the middle of the century the number of building types which an architect would meet would not be too large or varied in type or outside the range that had been seen in the past. However, the introduction of new or unprecedented building types would stretch the Design by Association method well beyond its limits to the point where the historical connection between the style chosen and the function of the building would be, at best tenuous or, at worst ridiculous.
6.0 Design by Association
With this approach the aim was to provide a predictable method of selecting an appropriate style for a particular project or building type. The method assumes an adequate knowledge of architectural and cultural history on the part of the designer that allows them to make (or create) the connection between project type and some historical source or other. If not, a quick search through the numerous style catalogues and pattern books would suffice. At its simplest the architect constructs a chain of associations between the design project and the appropriate style. Its really a bit like a ‘word association’ test with the links being visual rather than textual. The following examples of Design by Association provide an admittedly humorous version of the process but are based on the characteristics of real buildings built in the 19th century. They give a clear idea of the kind of design thinking that must have taken place to achieve the final form of the building:
a) An ‘Islamic’ Carpet Factory
Step 1. Architect gets commission to design a factory for producing carpets.
Step 2.Architect has to decide what style this factory will be given its ‘subject matter’. Step 3.Architect starts with the idea of ‘carpets’ and pursues the following chain of association: Carpets, Turkish, Middle East, flying carpets, Alladin, Bagdad, Islamic art, Islamic art in Europe, Moorish civilization, Islamic Moorish architectural style……………….
Step 4.Architect does research on typical elements and forms of Moorish architecture. Step 5.Architect designs project which results in a 19th century industrial building looking like a Moorish castle!
b)‘Florentine Palazzo’ Bank
Step 1.Architect gets commission to design a bank.
Step 2.Architect has to decide what style this bank will be.
Step 3.Architect starts with the idea of ‘bank’ and pursues the following chain of association: Bank, banking halls, origins, the Medici, Florence, the Florentine Renaissance, Early Renaissance architecture…………………..
Step 4.Architect does research on the forms of Florentine Renaissance architecture. Step 5.Architect designs building which results in a 19th century commercial bank looking like a 15th century Renaissance palazzo!
One other slightly different example of the same process will suffice. Two German children accompanied by their parents are visiting Istanbul in the 19th century. They come to the Hagia Sophia Mosque. The building prompts the children to ask: “Why has that building got four chimneys?” A story like this makes it understandable why the city of Potsdam has a 19th century power station in the form of a mosque. What better way to integrate the stark forms of the station’s chimneys into a recognizable stylistic frame than to cast them in the role of minarets? The point of all of this was of course to ensure that there was some connection or justification for the form of the building (no matter how tenuous). However, as shown above, the interesting feature about chains of association (whether textual or visual) is that they can sometimes lead to unpredictable or exotic end results. To some extent the effects of this on architecture were limited because excluding personal idiosyncrasies, most of the architects of the time were similar in their social class and the classical bias of their education. So too in their professional role they would be very familiar with the numerous style handbooks, typological studies, catalogues of decorative and ornamental motifs and the substantial works on allegorical meanings and iconography. This would narrow the range of likely associations that they would make from any given building type and thus maintain some degree of coherence in the urban environment.
7.0 Integrity in the Choice of Style
Faced with the stylistic chaos of the 19th century, the design methods described above had the major advantage that they automatically reduced the number of potential design choices that an architect had to make to a reasonable number. What is equally significant is that to some extent, these methods were based on the idea that the building project itself – its function - would define the architectural forms used to produce the building. This is not quite a reversal of previous formalist attitudes since function had always played a major part in the shaping of buildings, albeit within the tight framework of Classical composition, nor can it be seen as a functionalist approach since the form of buildings remain dictated by historical precedent. What it does show is that the uncertainty amongst architects caused by the disintegration of the stylistic repertoire and the impact of new building types had led some to the conclusion that the only certain and stable factor in the whole design equation was the nature of the building program itself. If it was possible to get things wrong either in the choice of appropriate style or in the formulation of the shape of the building in terms of an available style, then at least the functional needs of the building and the measurable factors of site, finance and technology could be well defined; particularly important given the unprecedented building types coming on stream. However, it is worth noting that even here in the midst of these uncertainties architects still sought some degree of integrity in their choice of style. Theoretically one could of course have taken the position that the style selected for a particular project did not matter, that there was no necessary relationship between style and building type. This somewhat media-driven late 20th century attitude that splits image and function, was not conceivable in the 19th century where there still remained that lingering Renaissance concept of a unified and harmonious cosmos. Things had to be connected to each other in some way. There had to be a demonstrable relationship between them for it was only in this way that each of them could be ascribed a definite meaning - by deriving it from their relationship to all other things. In an integrated cosmos, isolated entities could have no such meaning. As previously discussed, decoration also provided a means – maybe the primary means of integrating the visual environment and while some elements of the whole might not themselves be beautiful because of their utilitarian nature, their integration with everything else through decoration gave them significance in the ensuing harmony. If we substitute the term ‘function’ for the term ‘style’ in this context, we have the basis for the origins of functionalism where there must be a definite relation between form and function. Of course, at the collective level one need not see this search for integrity in the design of buildings as a moral issue although in some individual cases such as the Arts and Crafts (and later, Modernism) it was portrayed as such. It can equally well be seen as a purely pragmatic attempt to resolve the ambiguity of design in a chaotic environment. Since the certainties of Classical precedent had withered away leaving the ambiguity of (almost) unlimited choice in the formation of buildings, there developed a need for an unshakable platform upon which one could establish a ‘decidable’ design method. The vagaries of the 19th century design environment had forced architects to fall back on certain core aspects of their craft – the economics of design which stem from the effort-and-return consequences of the design process. Yet Classicism, eclecticism and design by association all share this concern with the economics of design which, as suggested above, requires at least the definition of a clear start point from which the design can develop and some rules to govern that development. With Classicism, that possibility was very obviously there in the Graeco-Roman vocabulary of forms and in the grammar of compositional methods which came with them. But what happens when all of that linguistic certainty has gone? The answer seems to be that all that is left is the program and the function of the building. Everything else becomes fluid. This resort to function may also be understood as an effect of the flood of new or more complex building types which appeared in the 19th century. With limited linguistic means at their disposal, the problem of authentically representing these new programs became a paramount function of the design process.
8.0 The Constraints of Technology
The formal character of any style is to a large extent defined by building technology which constrains its expressive possibilities. The forms and compositional rules of a style thus develop within the technical limits of materials and structural techniques available to architects at any given time. Architects are therefore constrained in at least two senses: by the historically-determined rules governing the use of the style and in the immediate sense of what is technically and structurally possible in the design of a given building. Constraints however do not determine what should be done in any given situation, but rather what cannot be done. In other words, there is still an area of freedom and creative possibilities within the limits imposed by technology. The problem is, however, that these are in fact limits imposed by a previous era of building technology. The style is imprinted with the memory of the technology used during the period when it was first established. For example, the inherent spanning capacity of stone or brick load-bearing walls and trabeated construction would automatically limit the spatial flexibility of a building. So too, the dimensions and proportions of window and door openings in its external wall which define the public character of the building will be also be constrained. The possible combinations of elements, formal rules and the expressive capacity of the style will thus be determined at the point of its emergence. Once established by cumulative practice and the exchange of experience by architects, the style has in effect ‘locked in’ the technology of the time which defined its initial character and is, to a large extent resistant to further change. While the style can still be used to make many individual building statements, its value as a cumulative design resource of learned routines is dependent on the stability of its basic rules and is, necessarily closed to further developments; developments such as new structural possibilities which would negate or disrupt the rules which give it value as a design routine in the first place. In other words, the style cannot keep incorporating new structural possibilities; it cannot keep changing its rules without losing its identity and predictive value. The economics of design require that finite number of elements and combinations of those elements can generate a theoretically infinite number of different buildings. The problem is that this only works if the environment of building types which it was designed to meet and which is built into the structural possibilities of the style also remains stable. In this case, the pragmatics of design can still function; the form of the building can be made to match the form of the building program. Architects can still produce buildings which ‘work’ because those buildings are not outside the spatial or organizational range of the style’s structural possibilities. From this point of view, there is neither the need nor the desire to automatically incorporate new building technologies into the repertoire. What happens though when, as in the 19th century the environment throws up building types which lie outside that structurally-determined range? Buildings such as office towers, factories, warehouses, hotels, railway stations, exhibition buildings or mass housing? Not coincidental to the Industrial Revolution, building technology was producing the technical means to resolve the structural issues involved in designing such large scale buildings. From cast iron to steel to reinforced concrete building technology had advanced to the point where it could clearly provide technical solutions to these new problems. The question was whether architects would use these new structural possibilities. The answer was, surprisingly that they did. Perhaps not so surprisingly since architects, mediocre or brilliant sought answers to the new kinds of problems with which they were faced. Pragmatism as usual triumphed and in the process brought about a new architectural era.
9.0 The Limits of 19th Century Design
Given the circumstances, design techniques and developments outlined above we can summarize the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the development of 19th century architecture by noting its specific impact on architecture and the collective response to this by architects: Generally there was a dramatic increase in the number of new buildings built, the rate of building and, equally important: the number of new building types required. For architects this meant having to come up with design solutions more quickly. For this reason and others, there was an involuntary shift from the contemplative artistic approach to architecture that had been the traditional approach of the architect towards the more focused and analytical approach of the designer. In order to cope with increasing demands for production, architectural management, practice and thus the design process had to be rationalized. In other words, one can suggest that there was a shift from the architect as artist to the architect as designer. Increasing pressure to stretch the capacity of existing architectural styles to handle increasing numbers and types of buildings. Up to the beginning of the 19th century the kind of buildings that architecture dealt with had been fairly predictable in terms of number and type. While the numbers of buildings to be built might vary to some extent due to economic expansions and recessions, the kinds of building type remained fairly standard. In most cases these building types had been around since at least Renaissance times. For instance, banks, palaces, houses, theatres, churches and so on. These could all be represented using fairly standard combinations of Classical architectural forms with only very occasional sorties into stylistic exotica. Indeed many of solutions to these design problems had also been catalogued in large compendia of typological studies. Theoretically at least, most of the possible permutations had been worked out. Design in these conditions could almost be reduced to checking the catalogue. However, with the Industrial Revolution, a whole new range of building types emerged some of which have been listed above. How could existing styles be stretched to handle these really new kinds of problems? In many cases, the standard combinations of form would not work for new building types or they would produced incongruous solutions. This and the vast numbers of buildings that had to be built quickly as populations and cities expanded more rapidly pushed Classicism, its variants and the numerous other more marginal styles to their representational breaking point. They simply could not adapt their historically-derived forms or compositional rules to adequately represent the wholly new environments emerging in the 19th century.
10.0 Un-Precedented Design Problems
What happens when there is no possibility of Design by Precedent? What happens when building types or programs are too new, too radically different, in other words – too unprecedented in character, to be represented by traditional forms (classical, vernacular, gothic or other historical styles?). What for instance is the appropriate style for a factory or very large office building such as those built in Chicago in the 1880s? Was an Islamic-styled factory an appropriate solution to the problem of designing factories? Was a Venetian Gothic or Egyptian form a suitable solution to the design of commercial buildings? Was Neo-Gothic a suitable association for a new Museum of Natural History or even more so, for a new building for the Mother of Parliaments? The problem was not only a superficial matter of appearance. Equally, existing styles had built-in rules of composition which demanded certain kinds of spatial organization and articulation when designing buildings in that style. In many cases it was simply not possible to respond pragmatically to the spatial requirements of the new building types while maintaining the spatial template and integrity of the style. The solutions arrived at through Design by Association and the strictures applied in Design by Precedent and the desperate resort to increasing decoration to solve some of the problems generated by the use of these techniques were obviously, in some cases grotesquely inappropriate. The situation for architecture, like the nature of the new building types themselves, was ‘without precedent’. With increasing pressures to produce buildings and an increasing divergence between the stylistic means and the functional/semantic ends, architecture seemed to be in a race to come up with a comprehensive behavioural formula – a radical adaptation – to solve these problems before the whole semantic edifice collapsed. The architectural problems which stemmed from a rapidly changing social, technical and economic environment would be that the semantic/historical associations between new, more complex or massively scaled-up building types and available stylistic means were becoming increasingly tenuous, incongruous and sometimes even ludicrous. Simultaneously, the compositional rules which governed the use of certain styles were in effect being exploded by the scale and complexity of new building tasks. A whole new spatial and functional apparatus was emerging for the most pragmatic of reasons out of what was essentially a set of Renaissance spatial and decorative forms.
11.0 Resolving Contradictions in Architecture.
The late 19th century saw the impact of mutually-exclusive demands on architecture as the exigencies of new functions clashed with the semantic requirements of historical precedent. If architecture is the information that informs buildings, then that information no longer corresponded with the new socio-technical reality that had emerged out of the Industrial Revolution. The result was the futile attempts to contain a whole new set of functions in the ruins of past architectures. Yet in this clash of demands and in the struggle to resolve these contradictions lay the seeds of a new architecture. It is useful at this point to re-state the fundamental contradiction in the architecture of this time. As mentioned before, this coincides with the usual demand in architecture for both freedom and order, unity and diversity, a capacity to handle the particular and general requirements of representing the institution in the form of a building. However, the peculiar circumstances of the 19th century produced a conflict where the simple difference between these demands (say, freedom and order) had become an opposition. They had become irreconcilable. Essentially therefore, the contradiction was between these two requirements: The need to pragmatically respond to the functional requirements of building programs unrestricted by arbitrary historical precedents. (Equivalent to the need to express the ‘particular and different’ aspects of buildings). The need to simultaneously provide a valid and coherent symbolic order for the building which would be universally accepted. (This can be seen when matched against many other buildings as the general and similar’ function of architecture). These two demands are not of course automatically contradictory. They can be considered as contradictions only in the sense that 19th century architecture prevented them from happening simultaneously. At other times and in other architectures, this kind of problem would not arise. Ideally of course these operations would be handled by a single architecture whose compositional rules would be flexible enough to allow a pragmatic response to program. That is to allow buildings to be different to one another while displaying a single unified image which semantically linked the buildings. The most pragmatic way to resolve this contradiction seemed to involve splitting architecture into two distinct systems (the pragmatic and the symbolic) that could function reasonably independently of each other. This suggestion is not quite as arbitrary as it might seem. Systems (whether biological or cultural) adapt under environmental pressure and part of this adaptation is to specialize certain functions to cope with different demands. Certain aspects of the system are articulated to handle different kinds of problems. In the case of 19th century architecture, the massive practical impact of trying to handle new, scaled up or more complex building types required an involuntary distortion and finally dissolution of the compositional rules of prevailing styles. Under typological pressures these rules were bent, expanded and articulated to cope with the demands of new building types until their fragile logic had been destroyed while their vocabulary of historically-derived forms remained; a great assemblage of richly articulated elements. This was the residue of the great styles when impacted by extreme typological demands. These could now be used in the most pragmatic and arbitrary way throughout many buildings. This paraphernalia of styles became mere decoration when the rules – the syntax - which governed their legitimate use and arrangement were dissolved by practical circumstances.
12.0 The Splitting of the System
What we find therefore as the century draws to a close is indeed an increasing split between the logic and arrangement of the functional spaces of buildings and that of the façade and its stylistic articulations and motifs. Function does indeed begin to emerge as a determining force in the shaping of buildings, but not in a wave of uncontrolled pragmatism. There is still a humanistic refusal to allow the uncontrolled forces of production: (trade, engineering, machine-inspired forms and by implication, ‘chaos’) to shape the visual world. To some extent therefore that world is still contained by a semblance of stylistic authority though the compositional rules have necessarily been made much more flexible if not ignored altogether. In a real sense stylistic motifs have simply become decorative codes which link or differentiate buildings of similar or different functions while the volumes and overall shape is a direct functional response to program. Apart from a few excesses, therefore, what we see as we get to the beginning of the 20th century is: A less rhetorical use of stylistic characteristics which become more a matter of details. Style at this point almost fades to surface decoration or coding. The articulation of the overall form of the building is now functionally or pragmatically-generated including the necessities of structure which now expresses itself more forcefully as a key determinant of the shape and size of spaces. As a vast new repertoire of building scales and building types are forcefully imposed on the remnants of historical styles while their degree of control over the architectural end result becomes less evident. It is also worth considering that the lessening of the integrity or sanctity of different styles under enormous practical and typological pressures opens up the possibility of a more general eclecticism in architecture. More fundamentally (as in the Moderns of 17th century France), the concept of style itself is taken to be a matter of convention, to be stretched, compressed and combined as needs be. This more casual approach to issues of styles clearly suggests that they can be combined at will. Eclecticism, as we saw above, can also be derived from the idea that if one style cannot handle all situations then ‘all’ styles can be used handle single complex situations. Again this requires that when the historical ‘spell’ of the styles is broken, their forms can be used in the most pragmatic way. The impact of new architectural programs on existing forms and styles means that by the turn of the century there was an increasing fluidity of spatial and stylistic options and their possible combinations. The weakening of stylistic identities leads to a ‘stripped down’ approach to the design of buildings where the typical forms of styles are reduced to their most essential material and spatial aspects. When the characteristics of particular styles have been neutralized, only the basic elements remain, with an echo perhaps of their historical character. Gradually stripped of their particular stylistic character, neutralized architectural forms from different styles are now regarded as the ‘essential elements and volumes’ of, not just any particular style, but of architecture itself. They become increasingly ‘characterless’. Architects as a group now communicate and exchange these most basic elements and volumes across a wide range of new building types. Continuous combination in unique projects and modification allow the elements to be articulated as general or typical elements of a new style. The historical styles used in the 19th century were essentially based on load-bearing construction techniques. This single fact influenced the design of almost everything about these styles: intercolumnation sizes, solid to void ratios, proportional systems, window and door sizes, the use of the arch, the massing of the volumes required to achieve large span sizes or many floors and so on. In other words, the structural possibilities of pre-industrial technology where inevitably built into the character of historical styles. With the invention and use of reinforced concrete and steel in the 19th century which could now allow the full expression of larger or more complex spaces, the whole pretence about stylistic subtleties or architectural integrity simply collapsed. What was deemed necessary in a pragmatic sense was now technically possible. Both the new programs and the new structural necessities exploded the constrained space of architectural styles from the inside. We can also look at this period, not as only as a splitting of the architectural system, but rather as a fusion of the Gothic-inspired vernacular tradition (free in its composition of spaces) with the Classical tradition of a three-dimensional grid of space. In other words, the fusion of the free plan and the grid, or, in more philosophical terms: the ideal combination of freedom and order; plurality and unity; the particular and the general. The decoration of buildings is lessened not because of some new architectural morality, but simply as a result of the increasing flexibility and fluidity of the whole architectural situation. Quite simply decoration is no longer needed when the primary elements of the building can now be flexed and manipulated to suit any pragmatic or symbolic need. The reason for this is that the compositional rules of various historical styles had been rendered obsolete by the demands of new programs and the possibilities of new structural systems. Anything (almost) was possible. Decoration had always been used as a remedial device when the primary forms could not express the difference or the similarity of the building from other buildings or its inherent institutional/programmatic complexity.
13.0 Mechanisms of Change
The various developments outlined above show how a number of different social, economic and technical factors brought about the dissolution of the historic styles as templates for the production of new building programs. Any sufficient explanation of how the styles of the 19th century were transformed into the radical new form of the Modern movement must point directly to the mechanisms and the actions which allowed these various factors to be translated into architectural form. In the simplest of terms, what processes were involved in the change from the historical styles of the 19th century to the White Architecture of the 1920s and more generally of course of how architectural form changes over time? The fundamental evolutionary mechanism that brings about change in architecture is that of the communication and exchange between the experience of many architects. In the case of the transition towards Modernism, one can summarize the basic conditions within which this mechanism operated as follows: The requirement for much larger, more complicated or unusual buildings right across society required ever greater modifications of existing architectural forms which are then exchanged with other architects who are dealing with the same untypical building programs. The result, across the network is the production and exchange of a mass of increasingly untypical formal relationships or compositions as architects try to represent the new programs with ‘stretched’ versions of conventional forms. The compositional rules which govern the use of styles are to some extent elastic. In other words, they can be used to design different kinds of buildings. But, as mentioned above, these rules were derived from pre-industrial conditions and the smaller or simpler scale of buildings that existed during that time. A style acts as a memory, a repository of the building types and experiences of a particular period that were translated into architectural form. As such, they have a built-in limit to their flexibility derived from their origins at that particular period. This ‘elastic limit’ became severely challenged during the typological and scale explosion of the 19th century. There is a point at which the elements of the style and their combination in buildings simply cannot be stretched further (to cope with, say, greater complexity) without destroying the logic or integrity of the style, and thus rendering it a mere assemblage or aggregate of elements. The demands of 19th century conditions simply went beyond the ‘elastic limit’ of what was currently possible in stylistic terms. If, as it did, the social and technical conditions continue to change – producing ever new architectural programs, then it was only a matter of time before the whole network was filled with new and unprecedented architectural forms. Over time and through continuous communication and exchange between many architects, these diverse solutions were finally integrated into a whole new and more fundamental architectural style. In this case the style would be called the Modern Movement. Inevitably the Industrial Revolution comes to be finally represented by revolutionary architectural forms. These represent the new programs and building types required by new social and technical requirements. In this way, architecture does indeed represent its environment. The important thing in all this is that these unconventional architectural effects were the result of the most conventional of architectural processes. Architects did not have to do anything unusual in order to produce major stylistic differences such as destroying the validity of historical styles or even ‘inventing’ new styles. One can frame this concept in the following way: The same architectural processes in different environmental conditions will produce different end results.
14.0 Conclusion
The ‘different conditions’ during the 19th century were the massive surge of different building types and the technical and spatial requirements demanded by new social and industrial forces. The new architecture is a result of the utterly practical consequences of trying to design functionally-adequate buildings in these conditions with a limited or inadequate formal language, namely the historical styles. By the end of the 19th century the vast majority of architects were faced with that kind of problem, of forcibly adapting these pre-industrial forms to solve ‘modern’ problems. These are problems which occur program by program, building by building and architect by architect. A whole new style is born, not by some heroic single gesture, but over time, by a myriad individual attempts to solve practical design problems. The collapse of the historical styles and the final emergence of Modern architecture is the cumulative result of the most mundane intentions: to produce workable buildings under very difficult circumstances. The new style which finally arises out of the wreckage of historical styles can be considered to be a massive system-wide adaptation towards achieving effectiveness in design. In many histories of this period the concept of ‘functionalism’ is treated as a new and inspiring perception in architecture (as usual created by an avant garde) which leads to the rejection of historicism by architects and the seemly spontaneous birth of the Modern Movement. None of this is true. The concept of ‘functionalism’ simply represents what architects actually do, namely stretching existing forms to suit new purposes. Its ideological significance at different times reflects the ‘state of the language’. If a classical architecture becomes overly uniform and rigid and the architect is prevented from freely combining forms to suit certain conditions, then there is a corresponding call for ‘functionalism’ as an antidote to these conditions. Architects of the time did not reject the historical styles nor seek to destroy their validity. On the contrary, they sought to maintain them. As the only available set of architectural forms at their disposal, all their efforts were directed to preserving their effectiveness. In the face of massive typological (building type) pressures in the 19th century, effectiveness meant that these forms must be continuously adapted with increasingly radical distortions in order to retain their usefulness There comes a point where these numerous adaptations lead to the complete typological severance of the ‘original’ and new styles. In biological terms this is exactly how a new species emerges: out of the cumulative effect of many small adaptations to an antecedent species. Ultimately a species, like an architectural style is simply a snapshot of an evolving process. The Modern architecture which emerged from the matrix of 19th century adaptations is therefore not a consciously motivated drive towards an abstract and ideal state, but rather the inadvertent and unforeseen result of an attempt to save the accumulated experience of historical forms. Architecture changed in order to stay the same.
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