A Landscape of Architecture, History and Fiction

Jonathan Hill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317528579
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Architecture can be analogous to a history, a fiction, and a landscape. We expect a history or a novel to be written in words, but they can also be cast in concrete or seeded in soil. The catalyst to this tradition was the simultaneous and interdependent emergence in the eighteenth century of new art forms: the picturesque landscape, the analytical history, and the English novel. Each of them instigated a creative and questioning response to empiricism's detailed investigation of subjective experience and the natural world, and together they stimulated a design practice and lyrical environmentalism that profoundly influenced subsequent centuries.

Associating the changing natural world with journeys in self-understanding, and the design process with a visual and spatial autobiography, this book describes journeys between London and the North Sea in successive centuries, analysing an enduring and evolving tradition from the picturesque and romanticism to modernism. Creative architects have often looked to the past to understand the present and imagine the future. Twenty-first-century architects need to appreciate the shock of the old as well as the shock of the new.

1 A hellish cloud and a sublime sea

DOI: 10.4324/9781315723648-2

A ‘Hellish and dismall Cloud of SEA-COALE’ blankets London, complained John Evelyn in 1661.¹ Coals then had sulphur levels twice that of ones used centuries later. On combustion, sulphur oxidised to introduce sulphur dioxide into the air and a secondary oxidation created sulphuric acid.² Fog, coal smoke and industrial fumes turned the sky into a darkly odorous smog, blackening buildings, corroding metals, killing plants, lodging in lungs, and making streets and squares unbearable. A new building had a shadow of soot even before the end of its construction.

Evelyn's Fumifugium_ Or, The Inconveniencie of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated, 1661, was the first book to consider the city's polluted atmosphere as a whole, as well as the first to recognise mitigation and adaptation as responses to human-induced – anthropogenic – climate change, three centuries before these principles were widely accepted. Opening with a dedication to King Charles II, Evelyn conceived Fumifugium in response to a ‘pernicious Accident’ in the royal palace of Whitehall. A ‘presumptuous Smoake… did so invade the Court’ that ‘Men could hardly discern one another’ in the same room.³

Evelyn distinguishes between London's agreeable setting and the ruinous effects of its polluted atmosphere. A keen admirer of Francis Bacon – the father figure of empiricism – Evelyn advocates modern science but also acknowledges the medical tradition of ancient Greece, which considers health and disease holistically and the interdependence of the body, soul and environment. Recalling the principle that the air – the breath – is ‘the Vehicle of the Soul, as well as that of the Earth’, he recounts Hippocratic opinion that the character of a people depends upon the air they inhale.⁴ Convinced that London's atmosphere is unhealthy, he notes the comparative clarity of the sky on Sunday when industries are idle, and mistakenly assumes that domestic fires contribute little pollution. Offering a ‘Remedy’ for the ‘Nuisance’, he proposes a number of practical and poetic measures, including the relocation of coal-burning trades, butchers and burials to the east of the city so that the prevailing westerly winds would carry the smoke away from London and the rivers and ground-water would be unsullied.⁵ Prisons are also to be removed, indicating that his purpose is moral as well as medical.⁶

Emphasising the allegorical and poetic as well as practical significance of his treatise, Evelyn proposes that the edges of London are to be forested with trees and planted with fragrant shrubs so that wood could replace coal as the principal fuel and the whole city would be sweetly perfumed.⁷ Noting Evelyn's detailed attention to aesthetics, climate, natural history, horticulture and human experience, Mark Laird writes that ‘he reflected on how gardens gratify all five senses through tinctures, redolent scents, delight of touch, fruit gusto, and warbling birds and echoes’.⁸ Evelyn's remedy – a perfumed botanical garden – would have implied good health due to the known medicinal properties of certain plants and also promoted associations with Heaven and the Garden of Eden.⁹ Carolyn Merchant acknowledges that ‘The Recovery of Eden story is the mainstream narrative of Western culture. It is perhaps the most important mythology humans have developed to make sense of their relationship to the earth.’¹⁰

John Evelyn, Fumifugium_ or The Inconveniencie of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated, 1661. Frontispiece. Courtesy of the British Library.

In a publication such as Sylva Sylvarum_ Or A Natural History, in Ten Centuries, 1627, Bacon set the tone for investigations later in the seventeenth century, promoting reasoned analysis of the natural world. Bacon's advice that the philosopher required a garden – as well as a library and a laboratory – influenced Evelyn's enduring fascination for horticulture and led him to cultivate an analogy between the domestic and urban scales. Recording seasonal and yearly changes, he avidly tended his garden at Sayes Court, Deptford, which included an arbour and medicinal plants, like his proposition for London. The need for a ‘Remedy’ was most apparent in winter, when cold stagnant weather prevented the dispersal of pollutants, leading Evelyn to observe ‘the havock which a rude season has made in my poor Gardens’.¹¹

Mark Jenner notes that contemporary imagery equated the monarch with the illuminating sun and the interregnum – between the execution of Charles I in 1649 and accession of Charles II in 1660 – as ‘the obscuring cloud’.¹² Recalling Hippocrates and an Old Testament verse, and associating the sun with a clear sky, Evelyn eulogises ‘our Illustrious CHARLES, who is the very Breath of our Nostrils, in whose health all our happiness resides’.¹³ In January 1662, at the King's request, Evelyn prepared a parliamentary bill but there was no public demand for a reduction in urban pollution and the legislation progressed no further.¹⁴

Fumifugium concentrates on London's atmosphere but Evelyn also derides its misshapen houses, narrow streets, uneven paving and irregular drainage.¹⁵ Returning to these concerns after the Great Fire of 1666, he once again called for the removal of odorous trades and industries. Proposing that the city should be rebuilt in a manner inspired by Rome with broad streets and regular frontages, Evelyn's regard for classical architecture depended on its grounding in scientific and geometric principles that, he believed, assured its beauty, and recalled Hippocrates’ influence on Renaissance architects who emphasised the health benefits of gentle air movement in contrast to the narrow lanes and stagnant air of a medieval city. But the Great Fire's only significant consequence was that sturdier brick construction replaced timber. Property rights and the economic intricacies of London's industries, as well as popular identification of a fire with a home, undermined Evelyn's proposals to transform London's material form and immaterial air.

Extending a metaphor that he explored in Fumifugium, Evelyn considered the sun to be an appropriate emblem for the intellectual enlightenment of the Royal Society, which was founded in 1660 after Christopher Wren's inaugural lecture and received a royal charter two years later with the purpose to advance scientific knowledge through empirical investigation. The Royal Society was first accommodated in Gresham's College in the heart of the city, where Wren was Professor of Astronomy, and after the Great Fire moved to Arundel House just to the west. Evelyn was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1661, as was John Locke seven years later.

Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century and extending into the subsequent century, the Enlightenment – the natural light of reason – was founded on the assumption that humanity and nature are subject to the same laws of divine reason, can be understood by reason and progress by reason. Derived from empeiria, the ancient Greek term for experience, the principal British contribution to Enlightenment theory was empiricism, which promoted reason but made it specific rather than generic. Empirical investigation was applied extensively, notably to the natural world and the operations of the mind.

William Kent, Elysian Fields, Stowe, c.1735. The bust of John Locke in the Temple of British Worthies. Photograph, Jonathan Hill.

In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690, Locke describes diverse beliefs to emphasise that ideas and values are provisional not universal, and indicates that his travels enabled him to reach this conclusion. Countering the Platonist and Cartesian traditions in which knowledge is acquired by the mind alone, Locke states that personality and morality develop through a dialogue between the environment, senses and mind. Dismissing the search for ultimate truth, he accepts that there are limits to what we can know and argues that conclusions must be in proportion to the evidence: ‘Our business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our conduct.’¹⁶ A model of empirical education – a person learning through experience in a measured and reasonable manner – is at the heart of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which Locke confirms in A Letter Concerning Toleration, 1689, and Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 1693. The Lockean self is self-controlled, punctual, industrious and drawn to self-improvement and socially acceptable pleasures.¹⁷ The personal liberty and responsible behaviour that Locke conjoins in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding mirror the political freedoms of a citizen in a civil society that he describes in Two Treatises of Government, 1690.

Offering an evocative metaphor, Locke states that the mind begins as a ‘white Paper’, an empty cabinet, which experience furnishes with understanding.¹⁸ To explain this metaphor, he distinguishes between the simple ideas of sensations, over which the mind has no control, and complex ideas, which the mind creates by selecting and combining simple ideas. Memory and judgement allow complex ideas to develop and for one to be associated with another, but Locke also values the continuing return to the simple ideas of sensations as a necessary means to affirm, adjust or deny complex ideas. Valuing all the senses, he gives special attention to vision, associating it with illumination and understanding.¹⁹ The assumption that ideas and opinions must be developed and tested through experience is fundamental to empiricism and its influence on landscape and architecture.

As morality and standards of behaviour are acquired not innate, an extensive association of ideas can foster good judgement and nourish a responsible mind. Wishing not to deny creativity but to contain it, Locke assumes that understanding grounded in experience is more likely to resist the inappropriate association of ideas, which, he concludes, result from shock more often than habit and may lead to unfortunate consequences such as unhappiness or even madness.²⁰ In a famous reference to Socrates awake and asleep, Locke even acknowledges that one person may have different mental states and more than one personality: ‘If the same Socrates waking and sleeping do not partake of the same consciousness, Socrates waking and sleeping is not the same Person.’^21...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A hellish cloud and a sublime sea
• 2 Architecture in ruins
• 3 The history man
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index