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The Humanities through the Arts (2015)

CHAPTER 6: ARCHITECTURE
F. DAVID MARTIN AND LEE A. JACOBUS

Buildings constantly assault us. Our only temporary escape is to the increasingly less accessible
wilderness. We can close the novel, shut off the music, refuse to go to a play or dance, sleep through a
movie, shut our eyes to a painting or a sculpture. But we cannot escape from buildings for very long, even
in the wilderness. Fortunately, however, sometimes buildings are works of art—that is, architecture. They
draw us to them rather than push us away or make us ignore them. They make our living space more
livable. Architecture is the shaping of buildings and space.

CENTERED SPACE
Painters do not command real three-dimensional space: They feign it. Sculptors can mold out into
space, but generally they do not enfold an enclosed or inner space for our movement. The holes in the
sculpture by Henry Moore, for example, are to be walked around, not into, whereas our passage through
the inner spaces of architecture is one of the conditions under which its solids and voids have their effect.
In a sense, architecture is a great hollowed-out sculpture that we perceive by moving about both outside
and inside. Space is the material of the architect, the primeval cutter, who carves apart an inner space
from an outer space in such a way that both spaces become more fully perceptible and interesting.
Inner and outer space come together on the earth to form a centered and illuminated context or
clearing. Centered space is the arrangement of things around some paramount thing — the place at which
the other things seem to converge. Sometimes this center is a natural site, such as a great mountain, river,
canyon, or forest. Sometimes the center is a natural site enhanced by a human-made structure. Centered
space is centripetal, insisting upon drawing us in. There is an in-rush that is difficult to escape, that
overwhelms and makes us acquiescent. We perceive space not as a receptacle containing things but rather
as a context energized by the positioned interrelationships of things. Centered space has a pulling power
that, even in our most harassed moments, we cannot escape feeling. In such places as the piazza before St.
Peter’s (Figure 1), we walk slowly and speak softly. We find ourselves in the presence of a power be
yond our control. We feel the sublimity of space, but, at the same time, the centeredness beckons and
welcomes us.

Figure 1: Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Piazza in front of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.
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FOUR NECESSITIES OF ARCHITECTURE

Architecture is a peculiarly public art because buildings generally have a social function, and
many buildings require public funds. More than other artists, architects must consider the public. If they
do not, few of their plans are likely to materialize. Thus architects must be psychologists, sociologists,
economists, businesspeople, politicians, and courtiers. They must also be engineers, for they must be able
to design structurally stable buildings. And then they need luck. Even as famous an architect as Frank
Lloyd Wright could not prevent the destruction, for economic reasons, of one of his masterpieces — the
Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Architects have to take into account four basic and closely interrelated
necessities: technical requirements, function, spatial relationships, and revelatory requirements. To
succeed, their structures must adjust to these necessities. As for what time will do to their creations, they
can only hope and prepare with foresight. Wright’s hotel withstood earthquakes, but ultimately every
building is peculiarly susceptible to economic demands and the whims of future taste.

Technical Requirements of Architecture

Of the four necessities, the technical requirements of a building are the most obvious. Buildings
must stand and withstand. Architects must know the materials and their potentialities, how to put the
materials together, and how the materials will work on a particular site. Stilt construction, for instance,
will not withstand earthquakes — and so architects are engineers. But they are something more as well —
artists. In solving their technical problems, they must also make their forms revelatory. Their buildings
must illuminate something significant that we would otherwise fail to perceive. Consider, for example,
the relationship between the engineering requirements and artistic qualities of the Parthenon (447–432
BCE) (Figure 2). The engineering was superb, but unfortunately the building was almost destroyed in
1687, when it was being used as an ammunition dump by the Turks and was hit by a shell from a
Venetian gun. Basically the technique used was post-and-lintel (or post-and-beam) construction. Set on a
base, or stylobate, columns (verticals: the posts) support the entablature (horizontals: the lintel), which, in
turn, supports the pediment (the triangular structure) and roof.

Figure 2: Parthenon (447–432 BCE), Athens, Greece

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Functional Requirements of Architecture

Architects must not only make their buildings stand but also
usually stand them in such a way that they reveal their function or
use. One contemporary school of architects even claims that form
must follow function. If the form succeeds in this, that is all the form
should do. In any case, a form that disguises the function of a
building seems to irritate almost everyone.
If form follows function in the sense that the form stands “for” the
function of its building, then conventional forms or structures are
often sufficient. No one is likely to mistake Chartres Cathedral for an
office building. We have seen the conventional structures of too
many churches and office buildings to be mistaken about this. Nor
are we likely to mistake the Seagram Building (Figure 3) for a
church. We recognize the functions of these buildings because they
are in the conventional shapes that such buildings so often possess.
Study one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s last and most famous Figure 3: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and
Philip Johnson, architects, the Seagram
works, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City Building, New York City. 1954–1958.
(Figures 4), constructed in 1957–1959 but designed in 1943.

Figure 4: Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Wright wrote,
Here for the first time architecture appears plastic, one floor flowing into another
(more like sculpture) instead of the usual superimposition of stratified layers cutting and
butting into each other by way of post-and-beam construction. The whole building, cast
in concrete, is more like an egg shell — in form a great simplicity — rather than like a
crisscross structure. The light concrete fl esh is rendered strong enough everywhere to do
its work by embedded fi laments of steel either separate or in mesh. The structural
calculations are thus those of cantilever and continuity rather than the post and beam. The
net result of such construction is a greater repose, the atmosphere of the quiet unbroken
wave: no meeting of the eye with abrupt changes of form.
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The term cantilever refers to a structural principle in architecture in which one end of a horizontal
form is fixed — usually in a wall — while the other end juts out over space. Steel beam construction
makes such forms possible; many modern buildings, like the Guggenheim Museum, have forms
extending fluidly into space.

Spatial Requirements of Architecture

Wright solved his technical problems (such as cantilevering) and his functional problems
(efficient and commodious exhibition of works of art) with considerable success. Moreover, the building
reveals itself as a museum. What else could it be? Yet perhaps Wright was not completely successful in
relating the museum to the surrounding buildings in a spatially satisfactory way. This, in turn, detracts
from some of the “rightness” of the building. In any case, the technical, functional, and spatial necessities
are obviously interdependent. If a building is going to be artistically meaningful — if it is to be
architecture — it must satisfy all four necessities: technical requirements, functional fitness, spatial
relationships, and content. Otherwise, its form will fail to be a form-content. There is, of course, the
question of the degree of success in satisfying each of the four necessities. Despite the apparent problem
of its siting, Wright’s museum is so successful otherwise that it would be strange indeed to describe it as
just a building, something less than architecture.

Revelatory Requirements of Architecture

The function or use of a building is an essential part of the subject matter of that building, what
the architect interprets or gives insight into by means of its form. The function of the Seagram Building
(Figure 3) is to house offices. The form of that building reveals that function. But does this function
exhaust the subject matter of this building? Is only function revealed? Would we, perhaps, be closer to the
truth by claiming that involved with this office function are values closely associated with, but
nevertheless distinguishable from, this function? That somehow other values, besides functional ones, are
interpreted in architecture? That values of the architect’s society somehow impose themselves, and the
architect must be sensitive to them? We think that even if architects criticize or react against the values of
their time, they must take account of them. Otherwise, their buildings would stand for little more than
projections of their personal idiosyncrasies.
We are claiming that the essential values of contemporary society are a part of all artists’ subject
matter, part of what they must interpret in their work, and this— because of the public character of
architecture—is especially so with architects. The way architects (and artists generally) are influenced by
the values of their society has been given many explanations. According to art historian Walter Abell, the
state of mind of a society influences architects directly. Historical and social circumstances generate
psychosocial tensions and latent imagery in the minds of the members of a culture. Architects, among the
most sensitive members of a society, release this tension by condensing this imagery in their art. The
psyche of the artist, explained by Abell by means of psychoanalytic theory and social psychology, creates
the basic forms of art; but this psyche is controlled by the state of mind of the artist’s society, which, in
turn, is controlled by the historical and social circumstances of which it is a part.
Art is a symbolical projection of collective psychic tensions. . . . Within the
organism of a culture, the artist functions as a kind of preconsciousness, providing a zone
of infiltration through which the obscure stirrings of collective intuition can emerge into
collective consciousness. The artist is the personal transformer within whose sensitivity a
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collective psychic charge, latent in society, condenses into a cultural image. He is in short
the dreamer . . . of the collective dream.
Whatever the explanation of the architect’s relationship to society, the forms of architecture
reflect and interpret some of the fundamental values of the society of the architect. Yet, even as these
forms are settling, society changes. Not only do the forms of architecture preserve the past more carefully
than do most things, for most architects build buildings to last, but these structures also inform about the
values of the artists’ society. Architects did the forming, of course, but from beginning to end that
forming, insofar as it succeeded artistically, brought forth something of their society’s values. Thus
architectural forms are weighted with the past — a past that is more public than private. The past is
preserved in the forms as part of the content of architecture.