Experiencing Architecture in the Nineteenth Century

Buildings and Society in the Modern Age

Edward Gillin, H. Horatio Joyce

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350045958
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

Bringing together fourteen original essays, this collection opens up new perspectives on the architectural history of the nineteenth century by examining the buildings of the period through the lens of 'experience'. With a focus on the experience of the ordinary building user – rather than simply on the intentions of the designer – the book shows that new and important insights can be brought to our understanding of Victorian architecture. The chapters present a range of ideas and new research – some examining individual building case studies (from grand hotels and clubhouses in New York to the parliament buildings of Westminster), and others exploring conceptual questions about the nature of architectural experience, whether sensory or otherwise. Yet they share the premise that the idea of the 'experience of architecture' took on a new and particular significance with the rise of industrial modernity, and they examine what contemporary people – both architects and non-architects – understood by this idea. The insights in this volume extend beyond the study of Victorian architecture. Together they suggest how 'experience' might be used as a framework to produce a more convincingly historical account of the artefacts of architectural history.

PART ONE

Defining experience

CHAPTER ONE

Architecture and experience:

Regimes of materiality in the nineteenth century

William Whyte

When writing about architecture and experience we seem to be discussing two concepts, but in fact find ourselves engaging with at least three. In the first place we have architecture, ostensibly solid and substantial, yet also protean and intensely problematic. ‘Few questions are more frequently asked, and few have hitherto been more difficult to answer satisfactorily, than the enquiry, “What is architecture?,”’ observed James Fergusson in his Illustrated Handbook of Architecture in 1859: and if that was true then, little has changed now.¹ Experience turns out to be an equally intractable concept. ‘There is’, claimed the philosopher Shadworth Hodgson in 1882, ‘no larger word than Experience. … It is in this alone that both the material and the verification of all our enquiries and all our theorising, are found.’² As he went on to write four volumes, and numerous other essays, on the nature, function, and definition of experience, he knew whereof he spoke, and his caution should be a warning to anyone who uses the word ‘experience’ unthinkingly.³ And then we come to the relationship between the perplexing categories of ‘architecture and experience’, a linkage which presumes agency, a sense that architecture is somehow constituted by experience and experience somehow shaped by architecture; an interrelationship, in other words, which implies that both are somehow affected by the other, and that exploring each will tell us something about both.

The fact that this volume is focused on a discrete period only makes these entangled themes all the more apparently intractable. We assume that architecture in the nineteenth century was distinct and different: the product, as a popular introduction to the subject puts it, of ‘unprecedented social, intellectual and technological change’.⁴ It has also been suggested that people experienced the world differently then.⁵ But even these claims rest on the untested assumption that we already understand what architecture and experience actually were.⁶ Moreover, there remains the question of whether there was something particular – and particularly nineteenth century – about the relationship between architecture (whatever that was) and experience (whatever that amounted to). Is there, we are forced to ask, a way of precisely delineating what architecture was, how experience was understood, and how both these complex concepts interacted?

Well, I am a historian. And for historians, the answer is always back to the texts. So let’s begin with a text. Let’s begin, in fact, with a text published just after the end of the nineteenth century. A text that is intimately concerned with recreating the experience of a lost, nineteenth-century past. A text, in other words, that is seeking to do very much what the chapters of this volume are all about. Let’s begin with Proust, with Du Côté de chez Swann, the first volume in his epic À la recherche du temps perdu, first published in 1913. This is a book – or, rather, a series of books – saturated in architectural experience and in the experience of architecture. From the very start, buildings are as much characters in the story as the people who inhabit them. As David Anton Spurr observes, in one of the most interesting reflections on the subject, architecture ‘runs parallel to and indeed intersects with what … is in effect the search for the ground of his own being’.⁷ So central was this architectural imagination, indeed, that Proust famously compared the whole work of À la recherche du temps perdu to a cathedral, and even contemplated giving the various parts of the books subheadings derived from cathedral architecture, so that one might be called the porch, the other the nave, yet another the windows.⁸

Looking for buildings in Proust is thus an endless and endlessly rewarding process. They are everywhere. But, to begin with, I want to concentrate on one particular place: the church at Combray. ‘It is a building which takes up pages of description: from the old porch at the entrance – ‘black, pocked like a skimming ladle, ... uneven and deeply hollowed at the edges’ – to the tapestries; from the golden cross to the high steeple.’ And Proust’s description is not merely antiquarian or simply decorative. It is also, in a sense, metaphysical, with the architecture facilitating experience – an experience of profound, central importance to the author. The church was, he writes, ‘something entirely different from the rest of the town: an edifice occupying a space with, so to speak, four dimensions – the fourth being Time – extending over the centuries’. It was a building, he later observes, ‘distinguished … from all other buildings by a sort of thoughtfulness that was infused into it’. It was a building with a steeple ‘whose slopes of stone … approached each other as they rose like hands meeting in prayer’ and which ‘gave all the occupations, all the hours, all the viewpoints of the town their shape, their crown, their consecration’.⁹

Quite a church, then; quite a building. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that Proust’s reflections on the church at Combray contain within them many of the key themes which anyone working on nineteenth-century architectural history has of necessity to confront. There is the sense of architecture as a repository of time; the sense of buildings as a sort of vehicle for communication; the sense that the built environment was not passive, but active – that is, not static but rather infused with transformative energy. These, I suspect, were indeed distinctively nineteenth-century experiences of architecture.

For the moment, however, I want to make a far more facile point. I simply wish to attend to the very fact of Proust’s reflections. It’s important to do this: important to see that Proust was doing this, and important, too, to see that he was part of a continuous tradition of reflection on these themes that ran throughout the nineteenth century. Proust, as we know, was strongly influenced by the writer and social critic John Ruskin. He translated Ruskin and learnt much from him.¹⁰ Although he would also go on to criticize him, Proust found, in the words of one critic, that Ruskin ‘endowed him with precisely the insights into art and life for which he was looking’.¹¹ For Ruskin, of course, the experience of architecture was transformative: he himself experienced buildings as a sort of epiphany, with the cathedral at Amiens, for example, described as a place where it seemed impossible ‘for imagination and mathematics together, to do anything nobler or stronger’.¹² This was, needless to say, a description which was to shape Proust’s own account of the church at Balbec later in the Lost Time sequence.¹³

Nor, of course, was Ruskin the first to explore the impact of architecture in the nineteenth century. He drew on an older tradition, not least that of the English associational psychologists and romantic writers like Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle.¹⁴ Moreover, although he seems to have been unaware of Kant, Goethe, and other German-language authorities, he was nevertheless part of a broader, pan-European intellectual movement which explored these themes and which stretched back to the late eighteenth century.¹⁵ It was a tradition summed up in Arthur Schopenhauer’s claim that

architecture affects us not only mathematically but dynamically and that what speaks to us through it is not mere form and symmetry, but rather those fundamental forces of nature, those primary Ideas, those lowest grades of the will’s objectivity.¹⁶

This was, obviously, intended as a critique of Kant, whose account of architectural experience stressed disinterested, objective appreciation rather than active, emotional engagement; and, as such, it marked a sharp break with Enlightenment thinking. But Schopenhauer’s ringing phrases represent more than just a spat among the philosophers: they spoke to, and for, a major tradition in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century thought, the belief that the experience of architecture was important and was worth studying in and of itself.

The later nineteenth century, especially in Germany, would also, of course, see a renewed interest in experience (both objective and subjective) and, most interestingly from our perspective, in the experience of architecture.¹⁷ Drawing on – and also, following Schopenhauer by critiquing – Kant, the founders of what would become known as Einfühlung (or Empathy) Theory produced a series of staggeringly successful and hugely influential studies exploring just that.¹⁸ From the 1870s onwards, indeed, the nature of architectural experience became a central question for historians, philosophers, and pioneers in the new subject of psychology. Indeed, the first psychological laboratory, established by Wilhelm Wundt in 1879, concentrated almost exclusively in its first years on precisely these subjects.¹⁹

It was the search for experience, and the empathy theory this promoted, which would create modern art history.²⁰ It was, in particular, this approach which shaped the work of figures like Heinrich Wölfflin, the founder of German architectural history and, in many respects, the originator of all that we are doing in this volume. ‘As an art historian I am a disciple of Heinrich Wölfflin,’ wrote Sigfried Giedion.²¹ The same was as true of Erwin Panofsky and Nikolaus Pevsner as it was of Giedieon and Ernst Gombrich and dozens of others: the founding fathers of our discipline.²²

Empathy theory also provides the underpinning for the revival of phenomenology at the end of the nineteenth century. It is especially important for understanding Edmund Husserl, who would become such a pivotal figure for the subject, whether by virtue of his own writings, or his role as Martin Heidegger’s teacher, or his influence on and provocation of so many of the leading figures of twentieth-century phenomenological theory, from philosophers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty to architectural historians like Christian Norberg-Schulz. All of them took architecture deadly seriously; all of them took experience equally seriously. All of them were engaged in the same process as Edmund Husserl and those who helped to shape his approach. They all followed his injunction: ‘auf die “Sachen selbst” zurückgehen’, ‘back to things themselves’.²³

Proust, then, was just one voice among many urging the importance of objects, things, and in writing about the experience of architecture. That seems to me an important point: a reminder that this project is not merely the product of contemporary concerns, but grows organically out of questions that nineteenth-century writers were themselves asking. Indeed, there are two respects in which this nineteenth-century debate about buildings and the experience of buildings seems to me to be helpful: firstly, because it can help clarify our own questions about the nature and function of architecture, dealing with some very serious problems with what has become known as the material turn; and, secondly, because this nineteenth-century debate reveals a somewhat different understanding of architecture from our own: a difference which threatens to make our analysis of the nineteenth century profoundly anachronistic.

Husserl’s call – the call to return to things, ‘auf die “Sachen selbst” zurückgehen’ – is, of course, one that we ourselves have heard repeated again and again in the last decade or so. We are operating after the linguistic turn: a turn that offered much, but also threatened to dissolve everything – everything including buildings, bodies, and the embodied experience of things – into discourse. Against this has been set the ‘material turn’: a turn towards things, or back to things – a material turn which has grown out of dissatisfaction with predominantly linguistic and discursive modes of analysis. The historian Ruth Harris spoke for many other historians – and for anthropologists and archaeologists – when, in 1999, she wrote of her ‘growing unease with the totalistic way the “linguistic turn” reduced all human experience to language’.²⁴ The solution for her was a turn towards the body and then the history of emotions.²⁵ For others, it was a new emphasis on space and a ‘spatial turn’.²⁶ Yet in all these cases material reality was called in to supplement or supplant linguistic abstraction.²⁷

This new focus on things was articulated in several different ways. Indeed, there is a sense in which there has been not so much one material turn as many material turns. To some extent, this was the natural outcome of various different disciplines converging on the same subject. Hence, for example, the very real contrasts in approach exhibited in Dan Hicks’ and Mary Beaudry’s marvellous Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, published in 2010, show just how distinct anthropologists, archaeologists, and science and technology specialists actually are in the ways that they work. The ‘key texts’, as Hicks and Beaudry observe, ‘are read through disciplinary traditions, and their reception diverges as particular disciplinary methods are put into practice.’²⁸ Still more important than this disciplinary distinction, however, is the fact that the material turn draws on a range of sources; there is no one key text or established canon of literature. Instead, there is a multiplicity of different possibilities and, as interest in the material grows greater, so the range of possible influences expands in turn.

A move away from purely linguistic analysis has enabled scholars to rediscover authors like Georges Bataille, for example, whose conception of spectacular architecture – of buildings which ‘speak to the multitude, or silence them’ – has been brilliantly explored by Denis Hollier.²⁹ It has also encouraged an engagement with other literatures influenced by psychoanalytic theory, not least the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose architectural insights have been explored very fruitfully,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of figures and tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• PART ONE Defining experience
• PART TWO Producing experience
• PART THREE Designing experience
• PART FOUR Audiences and experience
• PART FIVE Epilogue
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright