Primitive

Original Matters in Architecture

Jo Odgers, Flora Samuel, Adam Sharr, Jo Odgers, Flora Samuel, Adam Sharr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134172443
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This innovative edited collection charts the rise, fall and possible futures of the word primitive.

The word primitive is fundamental to the discipline of architecture in the west, providing a convenient starting point for the many myths of architecture's origins. Since the almost legendary 1970s conference on the Primitive, with the advent of post-modernism and, in particular, post-colonialism, the word has fallen from favour in many disciplines. Despite this, architects continue to use the word to mythologize and reify the practice of simplicity.

Primitive includes contributions from some of today's leading architectural commentators including Dalibor Vesely, Adrian Forty, David Leatherbarrow, Richard Weston and Richard Coyne. Structured around five sections, Negotiating Origins; Urban Myths; Questioning Colonial Constructs; Making Marks; and Primitive Futures, the essays highlight the problematic nature of ideas of the primitive, engage with contemporary debate in the field of post colonialism and respond to a burgeoning interest in the non-expert architecture.

This now controversial subject remains, for better or worse, intrinsic to the very structure of Modernism and deeply embedded in architectural theory. Considering a broad range of approaches, this book provides a rounded past, present and future of the word primitive in the architectural sphere.

Part 1
Original matters

Chapter 1
Primitive

The word and concept

Adrian Forty

There is a difference between the way that the ‘primitive’ is customarily talked about in architecture, and the way it has been used in other disciplines, where the word is usually quarantined by warnings and disclaimers of all kinds. ‘Primitive’ is not a politically correct term; it is condescending, it tends to denigrate who or what is described by it, and implies an assumption of superiority in whoever uses it. For good reason, then, when people talk about the primitive in anthropology or in art (the two disciplines where it has had most currency), they generally try to make it safe by placing all sorts of protective barriers around it, disclaimers, apologies, scare quotes, long explanatory footnotes, and so on, to show that they are only too well aware of its shortcomings, even if they nonetheless go on to use it for want of anything better.¹

Curiously, none of these scruples seems to have touched architecture. All the circumspection with which the ‘primitive’ is treated elsewhere seems to be ignored when it comes to architecture, where people appear quite untroubled by the political and cultural objections to the word. It is as if all the anxiety that has grown up around the ‘primitive’ over the last century has entirely passed architecture by, as if architects and architectural critics had failed entirely to notice that there was anything contentious about the term.

Could this indifference be put down to ignorance, to the insularity of architects? Possibly, but another explanation might be that the ‘primitive’ – at least as a concept if not as a word, and I shall come to that distinction later – is so fundamental to our discipline, and has been part of it for so long, that it does not occur to us to make excuses for it. We have come to accept the primitive as so necessary to our whole way of thinking about architecture that to suggest that it needs to be accompanied by a disclaimer seems so absurd as not to be worth considering. For as long as there has been architecture, it has been justified, and sustained by reference to primitive building – Joseph Rykwert spelt out this tradition in his book On Adam’s House in Paradise (1972), and left us in no doubt of its importance in architectural thought. From Vitruvius’s time onwards, if not from earlier, the classical system of the orders was justified by reference to ‘primitive’ building; subsequent theories of architecture – Semper’s theory of ‘dressing’, and early twentieth-century modernism – have in turn been legitimized by references to primitive building. If architects seem to be unconcerned by all the reservations that accompany the use of the primitive in other disciplines, it is at least partly because the primitive has been part of architecture for so long as to make any excuses for it seem superfluous. Indeed, one might say that the Greek origins of the word ‘architecture’, from arkhe, meaning a beginning that remains as the hidden essence of a thing, implies that the beginnings of building constitute the discipline, and has given architects grounds for being so much at home with the primitive.

If we look at another not-so-distant field, painting, the situation is very different. Although the classical theory of art had its stories of the mythological origins of painting, it never relied upon these in order to find its justification. Indeed the kind of art known as primitive – that is to say either Neolithic art, or African, Oceanic or North American Indian art – was unknown to the art theorists of the classical tradition, and was completely unlike anything that they might have conceived. It formed no part of the discourse of art, and when these new sorts of art were discovered, in the nineteenth century, they were quickly turned to subvert and overthrow the classical tradition of art. Not so in architecture, where the primitive hut, as described by Vitruvius and his successors, was the point of reference for architecture; and when explorers discovered the buildings of distant and previously unknown societies, in the Americas and South Pacific, the resemblance of these structures to the Vitruvian hut only served to confirm the classical tradition of architecture. The primitive hut of antiquity, and actual huts inhabited by savages in far-away places, become in architecture one and the same thing. All this helps to explain why writers on architecture feel thoroughly at home with the primitive and seem able to discuss it without the slightest self-consciousness, whereas writers on art have had extraordinary difficulty with the primitive, and their accounts of what it is are full of contorted qualifications as well as apologies for using the term at all.² Yet, even if I understand why architects use ‘primitive’ with so little thought for its connotations, I cannot help being surprised at their unconcern.

Let us turn now to look at the history of the word. As it is used now, ‘primitive’ exists among a whole constellation of words – ‘savage’, ‘barbarian’, ‘exotic’, ‘aboriginal’, ‘backward’, ‘uncivilized’, ‘naive’, ‘instinctive’, ‘authentic’, ‘archaic’, ‘native’, ‘tribal’, ‘erotic’, ‘traditional’, ‘outsider’ – to give but a few. Extended to its architectural usage, we would have to add ‘vernacular’, ‘anonymous’, ‘non-pedigree’, ‘spontaneous’ and ‘indigenous’.³ Although nowadays, ‘primitive’ overlaps with all of these, this convergence only came about in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Until the late eighteenth century, ‘primitive’ had no other meaning than ‘at the origins’, or ‘original’, as, for example, in ‘primitive Christianity’. None of the connotations of tribal or native societies, of savages, or of the exotic, applies when we come across the word in the eighteenth century. It is only in the nineteenth century, particularly as a result of social Darwinism, when African, Oceanic and North American Indian societies started to be seen as the precursors of western civilization that they came to be described as ‘primitive’, on account of their supposed position at the early stages of human social development.

This fact, that ‘primitive’ in eighteenth-century parlance means nothing more than ‘original’ is quite significant when we come to its architectural usage. When, for example, Sir John Soane talked about ‘the primitive model’, or ‘the progressive state of primitive buildings’ in his lectures, he meant nothing more than the original buildings of mankind, and it is not likely that he was implying any connection between these and the structures put up by the indigenous peoples of the South Pacific, Africa or the Americas. It was not until later in the nineteenth century that the meaning of the word primitive would be extended to include those.

To continue with architecture’s use of the word ‘primitive’, we come to a surprise, which is that although notions of the ‘primitive building’ go back to the very origins of architecture, the huts, tents and cabins to which Vitruvius and his successors refer were not described by them as primitive. Neither in Vitruvius, nor in the writers of the Renaissance, nor in those of the seventeenth century or the first half of the eighteenth century, does the word ‘primitive’ ever occur. Even Laugier, whose ‘rustic hut’ was so important to his theory of architecture, did not describe either this or the man who first discovered it as ‘primitive’ – though the word has crept into Wolfgang and Anni Herrmann’s English translation; where Laugier wrote ‘l’homme dans sa première origine’, this has become ‘man in his primitive state’.⁴ The first instance of the word ‘primitive’ applied to buildings that I have found, in any language, is in the title of the first plate in William Chambers’s Treatise on Civil Architecture of 1759, which is headed ‘The Primitive Buildings etc’. There is no mention of ‘primitive’ in Chambers’s text in either the first (1759) or the second (1768) editions of the book, though, interestingly, in the third, 1791 edition, in which the text was expanded, he does use the word, writing ‘That the primitive hut was of a conic figure it is reasonable to conjecture’.⁵ By ‘primitive’, it is clear that he simply meant ‘original’.

Nineteenth-century architectural writers who used ‘primitive’ stick to this sense of the word. Even when advancing an alternative theory of architecture, they still, like the classical theorists, resorted to a story of origins; and so for example, when Semper develops his concept of architecture as based in the conjunction of man’s impulse to enclose and to decorate, and the development of craft techniques, he postulates a ‘primitive’ builder. In The Four Elements of Architecture, although his purpose was to reject the old theory of the transmutation of materials as the basis of Greek architecture, nonetheless, he writes, ‘I see myself forced to go back to the primitive conditions of human society in order to come to that which I actually propose to set forth’.⁶ The same is true when he writes about the movable tent as the ‘most primitive mode’ of roof covering.⁷ When, however, in Der Stil he distinguished between Hellenic and pre-Hellenic art, the word he uses for the latter is ‘barbaric’.⁸ Clearly, Semper is important because he proposed an archetypal primitive building, the Caribbean hut, as the basis of his theory of architecture – but his use of the word ‘primitive’ was restricted to the sense of ‘original’.

The transformation of the primitive into a word that has force really only occurred in the early twentieth century – and here the outstanding exponent must be Adolf Loos. Loos’s 1908 essay ‘Ornament and Crime’ draws upon a notion of the primitive that is far from Semper’s primitive builders or those of the neoclassical theorists. The argument of Loos’s essay hinges on evolutionism, on the superiority of the civilized West over the uncivilized, cannibalistic and heavily decorated Papuan: ‘Primitive men had to differentiate themselves by various colours, modern man needs his clothes as a mask’.⁹ Loos turns the primitive into something that is both atavistic, exotic, but also threatening, and this transformation Loos owed to what had been happening in the visual arts, where the discovery of non-western art, and its take-up by the avant-garde, became a way of destabilizing the conventions of art. Loos, of course, turned on its head the avant-garde’s use of the primitive, so that rather than being a model to emulate, it became a warning against cultural degeneracy. From Loos’s time onwards, the primitive, whether it is taken up positively as a model to follow, or negatively, as by Loos, has had the possibility of an exotic, and sometimes erotic charge: it is dangerous and exciting; it leads to outside the world of the familiar, to a destination unknown. All these characteristics were to be investigated by Freud, by the surrealists and by anthropologists; but before we look at the purposes of the primitive, let us look at another matter, the question of where is the primitive?

Is the primitive nearby, or is it far away? This question, the location of the primitive, of where do you find it, is particularly relevant to architecture. When Vitruvius describes the origin of building, he starts with the usual speculations about living in caves, making shelters out of leaves, or building, like swallows, out of mud and wattle, and how then, observing the efforts of others, men went on to make improvements, and to produce better kinds of hut. All this is entirely speculative and mythical, as it is in every other account of the origins of architecture. Vitruvius then goes on to say that if you go over to Gaul, or Spain, or to Portugal, you can find there buildings just like these mythical original buildings, and concludes: ‘Thus by these examples we can infer concerning the ancient invention of buildings, reasoning that they were similar’.¹⁰ This circularity is a pattern that architectural writers follow over and over again – they start off with an account of the mythical origins of buildings, and then go on to add, ‘if you go to such-and-such a place, you will find buildings just like I’ve described, so of course my theory must be right’. Semper does it with his Caribbean hut; and we see exactly the same thing happening with Le Corbusier, another enthusiast for the primitive. In Une Maison un Palais his account of the origins of architecture starts off with speculative archaeological reconstructions of the primitive dwellings: places of worship in the desert, Mesopotamian buildings, but then switches to Brittany, and then finally to the Landes in south-west France. In other words, he takes us from entirely speculative and placeless structures, to ones that are wholly specific and that you can go and see for yourself. Le Corbusier’s description of the fishermen’s shacks in the Landes is a perfect example of how the near-at-hand becomes construed as primitive. Built on sand dunes, under the pine woods, these shacks are the homes of the fishermen who constructed them. They are remote from civilization – they are on an isolated spit of land that the railway does not reach, and as the land does not belong to them, they are simply tolerated guests, without any rights – they build only the simplest shelters out of whatever materials are available. The results, says Le Corbusier, are intuitive and spontaneous, giving them a human and lyrical quality: ‘The fisherman, why shouldn’t he be a poet too – the savage after all is a fine one’.¹¹ He describes the features of these houses – each has a covered porch for sitting under, and a fig tree for shade; and because high tides would wash away the soil of the vegetable garden, they are surrounded with a fence constructed with ‘une sagacité nègre’. Although basic, these shacks have all the attributes necessary to great architecture, and all they need to become great architecture is a more up-to-date interpretation. While Le Corbusier does not actually call them ‘primitive’, his discussion of the shacks includes a whole range of other primitivist terms: ‘spontaneous’, ‘unconscious’, ‘intuitive’, ‘savage’ and ‘Negro’.

The fishermen’s shacks of the Landes were not the only places where Le Corbusier found the primitive in the modern world. He also found it in the favellas of Rio de Janeiro, which he contrasted favourably with the over-civilized architecture of the city.¹² Siegfried Giedion later followed him, locating the primitive in shanty towns: ‘We realize that often shantytowns contain within themselves vestiges of the last balanced civilization – the last civilization in which man was in equipoise’.¹³

There are two things to be said about this procedure, so familiar to architectural thought, of locating the primitive in the here and now, in the familiar – a couple of things that might help us better to understand the particular, quite specific way in which architecture has grasped the ‘primitive’. If we ask at a more speculative, philosophical level, ‘where is the primitive?’, it is not easily answered. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss spent a good deal of time wondering about this question, about what divides the ‘primitive’ from the ‘civilized’, for without a satisfactory answer to this, the anthropologist’s whole métier is in doubt.¹⁴ The conclusion Lévi-Strauss came to in Tristes Tropiques was that the primitive is, and can only be an imagined ideal. The purpose of studying savages, he writes, is to create a theoretical model of society, so that we may succeed – and here he goes on to quote Rousseau – in distinguishing between

what is primordial and what is artificial in man’s present nature, and in obtaining a good knowledge of a state which no longer exists, which has perhaps never existed, and which will probably never exist in the future, but of which it is nevertheless necessary to have a sound conception in order to pass judgement on our present state.

Lévi-Strauss continues in his own words, ‘Natural man did not precede society, nor is he outside it’.¹⁵ The primitive, therefore, is purely an ideal, necessary to conceive of in order to think about society, but not to be confused with any actual state, whether historical or present.

Returning to architecture we can see that, all the way from Vitruvius to Le Corbusier, people have started off by thinking of the primitive state in these ideal terms, as something that never existed and probably never will exist, but then feel compelled to go and find a real, actual equivalent. As a result, the ideal keeps on collapsing into the real – and as soon as this happens, and it becomes an actually existing local example, it loses much of its force as a means of thinking about architecture. Some architectural theorists, aware of this problem, managed to circumvent it – Quatremère de Quincy, for example, refuse...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustration credits
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1: Original matters
• Part 2: Negotiating origins
• Part 3: Questioning colonial constructs
• Part 4: Urban myths
• Part 5: Making marks
• Part 6: Primitive futures?
• Select bibliography