The Architecture of Luxury

Annette Condello

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317044765
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Over the past century, luxury has been increasingly celebrated in the sense that it is no longer a privilege (or attitude) of the European elite or America's leisure class. It has become more ubiquitous and now, practically everyone can experience luxury, even luxury in architecture. Focusing on various contexts within Western Europe, Latin America and the United States, this book traces the myths and application of luxury within architecture, interiors and designed landscapes. Spanning from antiquity to the modern era, it sets out six historical categories of luxury - Sybaritic, Lucullan, architectural excess, rustic, neoEuropean and modern - and relates these to the built and unbuilt environment, taking different cultural contexts and historical periods into consideration. It studies some of the ethical questions raised by the nature of luxury in architecture and discusses whether architectural luxury is an unqualified benefit or something which should only be present within strict limits. The author argues how the ideas of permissible and impermissible luxury have informed architecture and how these notions of ethical approval have changed from one context to another. Providing voluptuous settings for the nobles and the leisure class, luxury took the form of not only grand palaces, but also follies, country and suburban houses, private or public entertainment venues and ornate skyscrapers with fast lifts. The Architecture of Luxury proposes that in Western societies the growth of the leisure classes and their desire for various settings for pleasure resulted in a constantly increasing level of 'luxury' sought within everyday architecture.

1

Sybaris as a Marker of Luxury

1.1 Sybaris, 2000. © Used by permission of Mimmo Jodice

Sybaris means ‘luxury, voluptuousness’. It is more probable that the place received its name from the richness or fatness of its soil and the consequent luxuriance of its vegetation. The fertility of the country would naturally incline its inhabitants to luxury, so the Sybarite would acquire the reputation that properly belonged to one’s land.

Francis A Wood¹

In architecture, luxury was derived from Sybaris. The place was synonymous with luxury. Curiously, ‘Plato had coined the word “Sybarite” as a proverbial term meaning a person that lived in luxury’² and it applies still today. Established as a Greek colony at the end of the eighth century BC in Magna Graecia (Great Greece), ancient Sybaris was positioned on the Ionian coast, now Calabria in southern Italy.³Part of the colony was founded by rich Doric traders who migrated from the region of Achaia in the Greek Peloponnese islands.⁴ The migration was the outcome of increased population density, drought and, increasingly, the limited availability of agricultural land in the Peloponnese.⁵ Then both the Sybaris plain and the polis were positioned between the Crati and Sybaris Rivers.⁶ Sybaris grew rich and powerful because of the fertile plain on which it stood, compared to the islands of the Peloponnese.

Sybaris’ empire only lasted about two hundred years and yet what is fascinating is that the myths of the place and her citizens have survived up until today. This is relevant to architecture since they have been recreated, visually, and in built form. Apparently other Greeks destroyed the city in 510 BC.⁷ This is the extent of what is factually known about Sybaris. Some 100 years after the city’s destruction, the first historical accounts of Sybaris appeared. Although intended as factual histories, these accounts were inevitably tempered by myths. Myths about Sybaris’ luxury and its representation in architecture, particularly in visual imagery, are more interesting than what little is known of the reality of the city. The former are useful as foundational myths in a manner prefiguring thoughts on rustic follies, or places of pleasure, designed landscapes and skyscrapers. When Diodorus Siculus and Strabo recorded Sybaris’ geography, the myths began to reveal Sybaris as a ‘city of excess’ because of the excessive characteristics of the citizens, such as gluttony. The destruction of the city provided an impetus for thinking about why the city was destroyed given the moralising of subsequent commentators who construed a certain type of behavior that characterised the residents of Sybaris. The myths, strictly speaking, exaggerate the luxury-loving Sybarites and these are relevant because they reveal stories about the city of excess. Before discussing the myths in detail, it is important to reveal other facts and the reality of ancient Sybaris by the evidence of the architectural remains.

According to Diodorus Siculus (ca. 90–30 BC), Sybaris’ prosperity was based on trade in oil, wine and wheat. Its trade links with the Orient permitted luxury goods, for example costly clothing, to flow in from Asia Minor (now Turkey) to Greater Greece. Classicist Thomas James Dunbabin noted, ‘Sybaris was the entrepot for Milesian goods en route to Etruria’.⁸ The revenue from these goods enabled the Sybarites to construct buildings with decorative ornaments and fine furnishings, perhaps to a certain extent unparalleled by rival Greek colonies. This revenue might account for why the Sybarites rather than, for instance, the Syracusans from Sicily, came to be associated with luxurious practices, no less so than their culinary habits. The Sybarites maintained amicable relations with their counterparts in Persia, facilitating the dispersal of decorative architectural ornament east and west. Some critics construed the Sybarites as luxury-loving people because of their ornamental refinement and physical extent of the region. Sybaris was not just another Greek polis, but it was a remarkably different polis because the Sybarites were very rich Greeks. Sybaris was presumably not designed as a pleasurable city. It became pleasurable by the importation of foreign luxury styles from ancient Persia.

Strabo (ca. 64 BC-AD 24) indicates the fortuitous geography of Sybaris. Noting, ‘[i]n early times this city was so superior in its good fortune that it ruled over four tribes in the neighbourhood [and] had twenty-five subject cities’,⁹ he then wrote: ‘the physical extent of the city was fifty stades or over 5.7 miles … .’ The size of Sybaris encompassed the extent of its other colonies, which ‘were strategically located with reference to their value as depots in the overland trade routes that Sybaris developed and on which her economy mainly rested’.¹⁰ The size of the polis was not necessarily an indication of wealth or the basis for its luxury since other cities and their colonies were equally large. Strabo would have reflected on the ‘physical extent’ of Sybaris as considerable in relation to the size of the city and therefore associated it with luxury and excess, including the behavior of its citizens.

The archaeologist Marianne Kleinbrink has evaluated the historical evidence of the search for Sybaris in this century but she remains skeptical of the preceding Classical sources as regards to their descriptions of excess and luxury (goods).¹¹Citing Ampolo’s view of Sybaris, Kleinbrink believes many stories of excess do not just describe the luxury of the houses in the city ‘but focus on the wickedness and spoiled ways of its inhabitants’.¹² The mythical city illustrates the condemnation of its inhabitants through the notion of ‘Sybarite’ luxury in the public realm. It confirms that this condemnation was the outcome of retrospective moralising through the ancient lore of luxurious indulgences. The Sybarites’ excess was architectural and their turpitudinal lifestyle at festivals was as well – by being gluttonous, overly sexualised and so forth.

Partly a myth and partly a reality, the evidence of ancient Sybaris’ architectural remains in Calabria suggests that some Sybarites led an excessively luxurious lifestyle because of the amount of refined personal objects found in their establishments and nearby colonies, such as the ‘smiling’ terra cotta statuette. Visiting the place, it was remarkable to find out that approximately 90 per cent of the archaeological site is currently buried beneath the earth. Yet what the archaeologists have uncovered are: a Greco-Roman theatre, marketplace, agora, temple, sanctuary, bathhouses (Figure 1.2) and stables for horses. The major monuments in Sybaris were constructed and decorated in stone, mainly limestone. The roofs of those monuments and also the minor dwellings were made of various timbers and covered with terra cotta tiles.

According to available evidence, the architecture of the wealthy Sybarites in this region used sumptuous building materials to construct and transform these places into pleasurable spaces. One partly excavated house exemplifies mosaics made of stones applied to the surfaces in the bathing area. Fragments of the ancient architectural remains (and various other personal objects) at present, exhibited in the Museo Archeologico di Sibaritide, suggest that the materials used in constructing the colony were sumptuous by Sybaritican architectural standards. The ‘sofa’ column capital, otherwise known as the ‘anta’ capital, for example, from the Stombi site is ornamental relative to other historical or modern standards of taste. The volute motif, distinctive in the Sybaritic capital, is closely associated with the East (Figure 1.3).¹³ Originally, the limestone ‘sofa’ capital would have had two volute motifs, which was used to decorate Sybaris’ villas and public constructions.¹⁴ Perhaps the style of the elegant capital with its single volute motif exhibited at the museum resembles a Persian artefact, as the Sybarites traded with Asia Minor. Sybaritic materials are sumptuous and they include mosaics, ornate motifs and limestone.

1.2 Stone mosaic of the excavated bathhouse, Sybaris. Photo: A. Condello, 2005

1.3 Remnant of the ‘Sofa’ capital from a house in ancient Sybaris. Photo: C. Vernon, 2005

Franco Liguori’s fundamental commentary on Sybaris: tra storia e leggenda (Sybaris: Between History and Legend, 2004), considers the place as a ‘city of excess’, largely because of myths spread about it, particularly its residents’ supposed propensity for eating and drinking. Sybaris’ wealth was based on its ‘agriculture’ and ‘commerce that created money – a well-constructed city – with roads, bridges, aqueducts, storehouses, wine-cellars, covered roads and canals’.¹⁵ Alluding only to the architecture of the place, he provides no explanation of the broader urban context – except for mention of the chaotic organisation of ‘Archaic Sybaris’ (1995), illustrated by Simone Porcile. At first, the illustration shows Sybaris as a kind of utopia given its apparent self-sufficiency, location and encircling wall. Looking more closely, however, Porcile shows Athenian-type houses positioned in a disorderly manner. A city illustrated in this way is just as significant as a city illustrated in an orderly manner: it has impacted other myths about excess in the New World, such as the sixteenth-century myth and map of Manoa, described in Chapter 5.

The presence or absence of a city grid led some to draw conclusions about the Sybaris’ wealth in that, generally speaking, the grid allows for assessments of size, especially the growth of the city. Liguori asserts Sybaris as ‘the first Western city that was organised in a modern manner’,¹⁶ planned on a grid. Conventionally, Priene is thought to be the first city organised in this manner.¹⁷ There is confusion as to whether or not the polis was laid out upon a grid or not. A report about the remains of excavated houses indicates they are aligned with the street grid of Sybaris’,¹⁸and Porcile’s hypothetical perspective gives the impression that the main polis of Sybaris was also planned along a grid because there are two other later Greek and Roman settlements (Thurii and Copia) that were constructed on top of ruins in a grid-like manner.¹⁹ Others confirm the Sybarites themselves established colonies such as Paestum, near Pompeii,²⁰ both founded on a larger grid. The size of the city, its buildings and the living spaces they contained led to the excessive habits of the Sybarites like eating and drinking in a brazen manner, and effectively the city imploded because of its considerable growth. The myths of Sybaris demonstrate the citizen’s indulgence in luxury and soon fascination with its destruction arose.

According to most accounts, the Sybarites were ‘sybaritic’, meaning they were excessive in their behavior, and this is a criticism from ancient times. Sybaris was ‘renowned for its wealth and for the excesses that led to its ruin’.²¹ Herein, excess relates to the behavior and living habits of the Sybarites: they were considered to be conspicuous, greedy and slothful individuals. Excess relates also to the size of buildings and the quality of materials used in construction. Commercial competition led to architectural excess since some of the Sybarites required extra places for pleasure, such as the bathhouses, and so there were constructions that extended outside the main part of the city.²² Arguably, too much conspicuous architectural display led to their ruin.

There could be another factor that contributed to the city’s fall, at least for some. Prior to its fall the city was ‘ruled by a tyrant Telys, who gained power by [encouraging] discontented elements [to rise up] against the aristocracy’.²³ This event might relate to the city acquiring a reputation for excessive luxury because of the increase in the number of aristocratic establishments. The agora was identified, by one author, as the starting point of the city’s destruction when the goddess Hera was spotted at Sybaris’ marketplace.²⁴ Impulsively, Hera was ‘spewing bile to signify her wrath against the impious Sybarites; blood flowed in her temple, and the Crotoniates declared war on Sybaris’.²⁵ Here the characterisation of the Sybarites as ‘impious’ links immorality with luxurious behavior. Imminent threats to the city occurred once again in Sybaris, particularly in ‘the years immediately followin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Sybaris as a Marker of Luxury
• 2 Lucullan Luxury
• 3 Architectural Excess
• 4 Luxurious Spaces and the Rustic
• 5 NeoEuropean Luxury
• 6 The Dispersal of Modern Luxury
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index