I want to offer here my personal architectural style, which I am now too old to ever see built. Many years ago I chose to study architecture not so much to become an architect but because I did not want to focus exclusively on the arts or the sciences or the humanities, and architecture offered a blend of all three. I was ignorant, I had no architectural vision of my own. That took fifty years to develop, during which time I did other things. Anyway, here is [a first rough cut of] its story.
Among architects, the matter of style is a vexed one. The Italian Renaissance famously reverted to a Classical style, supplanting the Gothic that had evolved over the thousand years since the fall of Rome. The battle for hearts and minds reached England in the seventeenth century when the rebuilding of St Paul's Cathedral was begun after the Great Fire of London, intense argument erupting between the Gothic-minded clerics and their Classical revivalist architect Sir Christopher Wren. He won the day but the argument re-ignited two hundred years later when Victorian Britain returned to a love of Gothic. But both were on the way out. The arts and crafts movement brought first a conscious copying of local rural practices, what is known as vernacular architecture, followed by the fluid and naturalistic Art Nouveau.
Meanwhile the Christian Orthodox and Islamic styles had also evolved from the Roman in other directions. Save for the lack of sophistication in the vernacular, all these movements were distinguished principally by their style of decoration.
But a new aesthetic was also growing out of the industrialization of civilization. It endorsed the complete lack of decoration inherent in low-cost mass production, declaring "less is more". It received spiritual infusion from the abstract simplicity of traditional Japanese house design and especially Zen Buddhist monasteries. This Modernism rose steadily until through the mid-twentieth century it first swept aside Art Deco, the last of the overtly decorative styles, before condensing itself into the International Style of monumentally monotonous shoeboxes. Some defined it as a lack of style and decoration. Others, more perceptive, pointed to the excruciatingly self-conscious care taken over surface finishes and smoothing over the inevitable wrinkles left by the imperfect manufacturing machine; "less is more" was never more than an aspiration.
My interest in architecture was kindled at school when I stubbornly refused to specialise in the arts or sciences for my A levels, an attitude which even my very progressive school resisted and is only now beginning to enter the mainstream. With some reluctance, I was allowed to study art alongside my maths and science. What to do next? By now I even had some inkling of the Humanities, having practised Transcendental Meditation under the aegis of an enlightened biology teacher and consequently begun to discover the Eastern philosophical tradition. Holism was becoming trendy among the way-out intelligentsia. My immediate family background lay in Art and Design. The latter would keep me a holistic foot in all three camps, I felt, but nobody then taught Design in its own right and few employers had even heard of it. The nearest I could get was Architecture, so off I went to University.
And there, gazing at the disparate variety of images in the history of architecture textbooks, I was introduced to an unhappy dilemma that would plague me, by coincidence for exactly half century. As an architect, what could I adopt as my own natural style?
Did I instinctively look back to the warm glow of the past, the immediacy of the present or the vibrancy of the future? The opposing forces of decoration and cleanliness, mass and light, humanity and monumentalism, cost and durability, opulence and homeliness all tugged at me with equal appeal of beauty and repelled with equal horror of overindulgence. So much of modernism looked brutal, inhuman and sterile in the nude but beautiful when placed among trees. I could not find my direction and flunked two successive attempts to become an architect. There was little call in the twentieth century for Byzantine churches or Art Nouveau libraries. After ten years of heartache and dithering I was forced to forge a new career elsewhere.
Like any other design discipline, indeed perhaps more so than any other, good architecture is all about drawing an uncompromising passion from a welter of underlying compromises. The IT engineer and technical author who retired forty years after his abortive flirtation with had spent much of his life learning to like compromises. Postmodernism had by then struggled but in all honesty failed to find any settled rationale or lasting identity. Fantasy artists let loose on epic film franchises such as Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings had consciously compressed the problem of architectural style into a few short months of intense and stunningly sophisticated creativity. And finally, technologies that I had played a minuscule part in bringing into being were freeing up the manufacturing process from its eternal mass production of identical clones. CAD-CAM was bringing automation full circle and freedom of line was on the way back.
Historically, architectural compromises can be clearly seen in the Regency and Art Deco styles. In a bid to reduce labour costs, Regency reduced classicism to its bare bones, to delicate and tasteful embellishment of what was structurally an industrial office block. Art Deco did little more than expand the Regency repertoire of decorative elements to an eclectic mix of past and future, setting ancient Egyptian motifs jostling alongside the streamlined aeroplane. On the city street, the monumentalism of the tower block must be leavened by a ground floor exterior on a busy human scale if it is not to create a dreary and windswept wasteland around itself. Design, scale, placement and density of street furniture are as crucial as the surrounding buildings to a tolerable cityscape. The windscape is as key as the play of light to a successful hard landscape. The organic curves and fractal textures of nature are essential foils to the clinical blankness of the concrete wall and tinted plate glass, whether embodied in the architecture itself or in natural planting alongside.
Vitruvius defined the three virtues of good architecture as commodity, firmness and delight. Le Corbusier remarked that "a house is a machine for living". Besides good engineering, what ties these together is the human scale. One of the most shattering disappointments to me back in the 1970s was the utter failure of modernist architects to live up to their rhetoric about the human scale. Bleak, windswept, unforgiving concrete landscapes broken only by a scattering of litter were the norm. Graffiti immeasurably improved the concrete corridor, whether indoors or out. These were not places where you felt inspired by majesty or humanity, they were places which depressed the sensitive, broke the vulnerable, left no quarter for rest or litter bins, where the strongminded blanked their consciousness during their hurried collar-turned-up transit. Towering above them were the giant concrete pillboxes, the Gods of "less makes you free" (or was that "Work is more"?). Somewhere in all that purgatory were doors leading in to homes, offices, perhaps a theatre or a museum. Some were quite nice inside. But they were only for the Chosen Few, as far as the architect was concerned the rest of us were the Damned.
And of course humanity is about more than just scale and wind. It is about modulation, detail, texture and visual interest, warm and sympathetic lighting, a sight to refresh weary eyes not brutalize them with sandblasted reference to rusticated fortresses. That goes for the interior as well as the exterior, not all those pillboxes were any better when you went in. Blank as prisons with invisible bars, their acres of unopenable plate glass froze you in winter and baked you in summer. And humanity is about more still. Toilets should not stifle, corridors should speak their passage, lifts be a pleasure not an ordeal. Living in a glass fishtank, cheap blinds a miserable excuse for privacy. These are not things that hundreds of people should be condemned to for the sake of an architect's worship of the shoe box. A famous architect had just built us a new History Faculty library. It was a glasshouse, south-facing wall and roof in one continuous sweep. Both the books and their readers baked on summer afternoons and chilled damp on winter mornings; anything less than disastrous for either of them it was not. Yet, because it was shaped like a child's cubist sculpture of a book, it had won a prestige prize. Humbug!
If we were set an essay criticising some trendy building or other, if it was close enough I took the highly unusual step for a student of actually visiting the building we were criticising and talking to any passing residents. I wrote about the problems I found. "Normally I would mark this very low" said one, "The critics have had universal praise for [this famous development]. But in this instance your observations are unarguably factual, I have given you a good mark." The unspoken "But please don't do it again" hung heavy in the air.
But I am being unfair to modernism. It was not all International shoeboxes. Le Corbusier pioneered the flat-roofed concrete-and-glass "machine for living" aesthetic. His most iconic early works, such as the Villa Savoye, were created on a human scale for individual clients. Spaces may expand into the landscape but are themselves tailored for convenience and intimacy. Frank Lloyd Wright was another founding father of modernism, popularising the aesthetic of flat rooves and large areas of glass. Yet he was rooted in the arts and crafts movement and the human scale. He chose the local brick over concrete. His Falling Waters is one of the movement's great icons, yet it is smaller than it looks to an eye accustomed to overscale Lego. The flat rooves and ceilings are low, the spaces intimate and friendly, the brick walls warm and homely. The lily pads of his Johnson's Wax office were inspired by nature and made it a pleasant place to work. Shame about the blank exterior though, those bricks go on just too long without a break, without interest; not even Wright got everything right.
Finally, in my sixties, all these influences have come together in my mind, creating a vision of the architecture I can now never realise, a might-have-been body of work which in practice never could have been because I was not ready. Now I am, and it is too late. Never mind, I shall do my best to communicate it to any who might care.
So, what are the elements of this conceived style? I fear I shall ramble more than ever in the telling, for it will pour out as it may with little attention to order.
First must come a rationale, a philosophical and cultural backdrop giving cohesion to what would otherwise be mere personal arbitrariness. Above all, it is a human conception, seeking to express and nurture the positive in human experience - peace of mind, an easy heart, warmth of emotion, beauty of vision. Yet it must be flexible. It may be required to compromise severely with hard reality, to stand back from its context and cost little. On the other hand it should be capable of supporting dense Baroque celebrations of organic complexity, of providing its own context should the need arise. It may be called upon to satisfy a demand for proportion and rhythm, or for organic flow and imprecision. Always, monumentality must be subject to the human scale at close quarters. The design elements are not confined to the building mass but must perforce flow to a greater or lesser extent into the surrounding landscape (and perhaps sometimes vice versa), with both made and living elements in the mix. It is not an architecture of built form so much as of inhabited space.
How is this blueprint for Utopia to be impressed upon us? The first step is its repertoire of formal elements, serving both structural and aesthetic - which is to say psychological - needs. The wall, of course, is essential to the British psyche. Take a close look at King's College Chapel in Cambridge if you do not believe me. Where to the French the Gothic style was a framework defining space and light, a Crystal Palace in stone, to the Englishman it was a way of piercing walls and decorating ceilings. Look at the spandrels between the bays of the chapel and you will see the walls asserting themselves. Look at the contemporary late European Gothic and you will see a riot of carving swung across the gap. The four-centred arch of perpendicular Gothic becomes a language common to both visions. Look too at the famous leaves of Southwell Minster (where my parents married) and its Chapter House, where it is only the smallest of conventional details that separate the built stone from the organic growth of foliage. The step to Art Nouveau is minimal, little more than a reprofiling and freeing up of the mouldings along the columns and arches. Now return to Regency and Art Deco. The artful placement of decoration on the walls, creating an elegance born of rhythmic division and subtle embellishment, runs throughout. Celtic knots offer a wonderfully rich transitional language. Or, if your bent turns entirely from the organic to the abstract, Islamic architecture provides a rich tradition of the arched and decorated wall, creating spaces of cool delight in which to contemplate higher things. The temptation to integrate depictions of three-dimensional crystalline polyhedra would be irresistible to me. However I personally would not cover every last patch of wall in religious inscriptions.
For the most part all is restrained, elegance is seldom allowed to give way wholly to abundance. Whether of masonry, concrete, wood, glass or even tapestry, the wall must serve to fix the decorative motifs in their orbits. Which fixation brings us to proportion. Whether dictated by squares and circles, vesica piscis, golden mean, Corb's modulor or an organic mass born of line and function matters little. What does matter is that the elegance and discipline of language are there.
And so - modulation through the organically flexible three- and four-centred arches, interest through images, ornament and variation, the whole placed harmoniously through a system of proportion or growth and given depth through its cultural references. A balance of homely enclosure and spatial vision appropriate to use - an exhibition pavilion and a home for the disabled are not the same space! Warm lighting - no blue-white LEDs, no "permanent supplementary artificial daylight" without the warmth of incandescent sun or candle in the mix.
Well, it's a start. Perhaps.
Updated 6 May 2021