Architecture, Liberty and Civic Order

Architectural Theories from Vitruvius to Jefferson and Beyond

Carroll William Westfall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317178989
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

This book brings to light central topics that are neglected in current histories and theories of architecture and urbanism. These include the role of imitation in earlier centuries and its potential role in present practice; the necessary relationship between architecture, urbanism and the rural districts; and their counterpart in the civil order that builds and uses what is built. The narrative traces two models for the practice of architecture. One follows the ancient model in which the architect renders his service to serve the interests of others; it survives and is dominant in modernism. The other, first formulated in the fifteenth century by Leon Battista Alberti, has the architect use his talent in coordination with others to contribute to the common good of a republican civil order that seeks to protect its own liberty and that of its citizens. Palladio practiced this way, and so did Thomas Jefferson when he founded a uniquely American architecture, the counterpart to the nation's founding. This narrative gives particular emphasis to the contrasting developments in architecture on the opposite sides of the English Channel. The book presents the value for clients and architects today and in the future of drawing on history and tradition. It stresses the importance, indeed, the urgency, of restoring traditional practices so that we can build just, beautiful, and sustainable cities and rural districts that will once again assist citizens in living not only abundantly but also well as they pursue their happiness.

1

Imitation in General

We must begin with imitation. In the full body of the classical tradition everyone understands that it is the method used to make a building, painting, or sculpture, but now it needs to be explained. “One way of interpreting the critical relevance of the ancient and Renaissance fixation on imitation is to see it as the equivalent in those times to the modern critic’s and historian’s fixation on influence.”¹ Another historian called influence an “astrological metaphor.”² Influence is so deeply entrenched in the culture of architecture that the profession’s accrediting board requires students to know the influences that they must obey as they shape their works.³

Imitation is the most natural and effective way people learn to do and to make things. Aristotle called it one of humankind’s “advantages over the lower animals.” The human person “is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation. And it is also natural for all to delight in works of imitation” (Poetics 1448b, trans. Bywater here and below). Ever since people began pondering their human nature and its relationship to the cosmic natural world they recognized imitation as their most valuable tool for knowing, doing, and making. It remained a fixture in theories of art and architecture down to the cusp of the modern era when it began to face challenges from other methods that explained how to know, to do, and to make. Gradually architects began disparagingly to identify imitating with copying, and a century or so ago both imitating and copying were shown the door and barred from the shrine to creativity and the obeisance to the Zeitgeist that Modernism was erecting.⁴

The culture of architecture interviewed a diverse range of potential replacements for imitation, and by the end of the nineteenth century the canonic narrative of the history of architecture had hired one: the influences of the Zeitgeist that G.W.F. Hegel had formulated. The influences were the stars in the many editions of a book that has always been immensely popular among English readers ever since it first appeared in 1896. Colloquially called simply “Fletcher,” it is A History of Architecture for the Student, Craftsman, and Amateur being a Comparative View of the Historical Styles from the Earliest Period.⁵ David Watkin has noted that it put Hegelianism “in conveniently potted form at the feet of the twentieth-century architectural student.”⁶ An image that first appeared in its 1901 edition carried the story so well the narrative could be ignored. It portrays “THE TREE OF ARCHITECTURE” with each of the sequential styles of architecture rising to the top with the six “influences” portrayed as maidens clothed in ancient robes intertwined in the tree’s roots: Geography, Geology, Climate, Religion, Social, and History.⁷

1.1 Sir Banister Fletcher, “The Tree of Architecture”

Source: Banister Fletcher, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method, 8th edn (New York: Scribner, 1928), courtesy of the RIBA. Image provided by the University of Notre Dame’s Architecture Library.

Influences will not help us build beautiful buildings that are the visible counterpart to the good purposes that they serve in the civil order. Imitation will, and it has done so ever since the ancient Greeks used imitating nature to serve the enduring, human quest for the beautiful in things made, the good in things done, and the true in things known.

The word imitate (and imitating and imitation) comes with a host of relatives: image, mimic, mime, copy, counterfeit, facsimile, replica, replication, reproduction, transcription, likeness, and so on. The core meaning is to make something new based on a model but different from it, a meaning distinct from copy which is to reproduce or replicate a model. People learn by imitating, not by copying, although copying may precede imitating. “Show me how to do that and let me try”—to pronounce a foreign word, to play the French horn, to cook, to drive, to detail a building’s cavity wall, to draw a classical columnar order. First copy or do as I do or as the canonic model demonstrates, and when you have mastered that by understanding the principles that are involved, innovate in order to possess the act as your own. Dullards stop at copying; the able move on to imitating and thereby making an original example of the thing.

The copying of models teaches us how to make new versions of old models but only when using them to imitate their source in nature. In this way imitating allows us to make new things that serve us now. Consider speech: copying teaches us the mechanics of speech involving vocabulary, syntax, grammar, and pronunciation, and models teach us how to make various forms or genre of the types of speech such as poetry, prayer, prose, narrative, panegyric, political oratory, and so on. Thorough mastery of those mechanics and media allow us to reach into the nature of the rules and principles of speech and its genre so that we can make speech our own. The result can range from a civil servant’s recitation of bureaucratic rules to the skillful distillation of insight and wisdom found in the 273 words Abraham Lincoln uttered in Gettysburg.

Two italicized terms in those last sentences, types and principles, play important roles in imitation. The word type refers to the most generalized similarities in things that allow us to group together various examples that we identify with one another. A song is not a speech; songs and speeches use words, but they are different types of things. Similarly, a speech is not a city, a city is not a building, a building is not a sculpture, and no sane person would mistake any of those for another. But each of these has different characteristics that allow us to establish finer categories or genre within the type: hymns, operatic arias, national anthems, dance music, and symphonic songs without words. Examples of these different genres use the principles unique to the type, in this case song, governed by the rules of the various genres to produce examples of hymns, arias, and so on. That is, different types of things are generated by different principles whose rules are capable of producing a variety of examples that are both like one another (they are typical) and different from one another in the same way (they are characteristic of certain genres). Imitation involves using those principles to make unique and characteristic examples of things, whether songs or anything else. When the principles that belong to the type are honored we will know it is a song, a speech, a city, a building, or a sculpture, and we will enjoy what style that is unique to it.

We find the word character a handy way to refer to the specific qualities that are intermediary between the generality of the type and the example’s unique specificity. On one level all songs sound alike in their contrast to traffic noise. On another level all hymns and arias sound alike because they have the characteristics of hymns and arias, but yet no two hymns or arias sound alike because each one has its own manner or style, whether it is that of a composer, a performer, or both. To make a hymn or an aria the composer must follow the rules for hymns and arias while honoring the principles of song, and so must the person giving a unique performance of it.

This differentiation between the typical, the characteristic, and the unique provides the nexus running from the principles that are imitated through the rules that define the character to the inventions that produce the style or manner that is unique to every example. When we hear another person speak or we hear a song or we see and use a building we establish our knowledge of it and a rapport with it by discerning its type, character, and style based on our experience with other examples of things said, sung, or built. We will have more to say about type, character, and style in Chapter 9.

This sequence leads not to a copy but to a representation of the type of thing being imitated. The word representation is a useful, general term that covers the various meanings that imitation carried among the ancients. These meanings embraced a varying cluster of ideas about how to extract the best example of an action or thing by imitating a model. The doctrines of imitation that Plato and Aristotle forged had the greatest longevity. Although neither philosopher discussed how it applied to architecture it is important to review what they said about imitation. The greatest interest for us is where the maker of something finds the type to imitate.

Plato’s familiar doctrine made the heavens the ultimate source of the ideas, or types, that the maker of things imitates whether they are shoes or civil justice. One familiar example occurs in the image of the good city in his conclusion to The Republic: “… [P]erhaps there is a pattern of it laid up in heaven for him who wishes to contemplate it and so beholding to constitute himself its citizen” (592b). But it was, and is, difficult to bring that city down to earth.

Aristotle’s ideas about imitation are less familiar but offer greater and longer service. He began with the examination of things that nature and men had made in order to discover what the various individual examples had in common with one another. Doing so required going beyond knowledge of their appearance or physical qualities to discover what they possessed by virtue of their nature as exemplified in their types and the principles of their making. The physical qualities that they revealed were of two sorts, active and passive, terms that Jan Biołostocki introduced. The active kinds were disclosed by empirical investigation and reason and concerned the means nature used in producing them. The passive ones were the properties that presented themselves to the senses.⁸ Aristotle’s imitating did not produce an inferior copy of an idea of a thing, as Plato’s did, but an improved representation of the thing, one that was perhaps even superior to nature’s production. “Greek thought,” Erwin Panofsky stated, “was thoroughly familiar with the notion that the artist’s relation to nature is not only that of an obedient copyist but also that of an independent rival, who by his creative ability freely improves on her necessary imperfections.”⁹

The improvements are always made for a good reason. Aristotle explains one of them in his Poetics. It points to a fundamental property of the classical tradition in which an imitation that makes a representation always carries moral content. He presents several comparisons between tragedy, the highest form of drama, and painting, which gives pleasure by representing the moral content of actions or persons (1448a). “[T]he first essential, the life and soul, so to speak, of Tragedy is the Plot; and that the Character come second—compare the parallel in painting, where the most beautiful colors laid on without order will not give one the same pleasure as a simple black-and-white sketch of a portrait” (1450a). Aristotle is not justifying unalloyed realism. On the contrary, good portrait painters “reproduce the distinctive features of a man, and at the same time, without losing the likeness, make him handsomer than he is” (1454b).

A second reason for making improvements is found in a much-cited story that Cicero and others tell. It also makes the point that imitation requires judgment. Zeuxis, one of Greece’s recognized master painters, was asked in Croton to paint Helen of Troy. To do so he selected five young women from among several in the city and fused them into a whole, “He chose five because he did not think all the qualities which he sought to combine in a portrayal of beauty could be found in one person, because in no single case has Nature made anything perfect and finished in every part.”¹⁰ Zeuxis exercised judgment in making the selection and composing the whole. Elsewhere Cicero explained more about judgment. “The criterion of truth arose indeed from the senses, yet was not in the senses: the judge of things was, they [i.e., “some Platonists”] held, the mind. … The thing they call the Idea, a name already given it by Plato; we can correctly term it form (speciem).”¹¹ Here Cicero quite masterfully fuses Plato and Aristotle and finds the content of the truth in cognition, not in mere visibility.

A painting’s representation can be compared to the things present elsewhere than in it. Zeuxis the painter made a representation based on the five women serving as models. When a person looks at Zeuxis’ painting of Helen he sees the identifiable characteristics of maidens, perhaps even particular maidens. Perhaps the maiden’s parents were proud when they recognized their daughters in the painting. Painting, an art of representation, is easily recognized as an imitative art, but in the twentieth century the avant-garde painters abandoned imitation and representation and began making things that lacked a counterpart external to the painting. Paintings that could be called realist or naturalistic or objective were joined by those that are called abstract, nonrepresentational, and subjective.

Architecture did not attract a commentary by ancient authors about its role for imitation with the clarity we found in Aristotle or Cicero. The first comprehensive treatise on architecture appeared in the last years of the first century BC. Its author, Vi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Imitation in General
• 2 Vitruvius
• 3 Alberti on the Art of Building
• 4 Alberti, Architect and Urbanist
• 5 Vitruvianism and Palladio
• 6 Events in the Classical Tradition on the Continent
• 7 The Classical Tradition’s Fate West of the Channel
• 8 Jefferson, Architect, and the Classical Tradition
• 9 Imitation and Architecture’s Restoration
• 10 The Beautiful and Good City
• Bibliography
• Index