It was doubtless the difference in educational methods that prompted Le Corbusier to state:
The engineer, inspired by the law of economy and led by mathematical calculation, puts us in accord with the laws of the universe. He achieves harmony. The architect, by his arrangement of forms, achieves an order which is a pure creation of his spirit…it is then that we experience beauty.
Yet some 80 years previously the English critic James Fergusson had felt obliged to qualify, with a comparable distinction, his enthusiasm for the new architecture of the Crystal Palace, by observing that “it has not a sufficient amount of decoration about its parts to take it entirely out of the category of first-class engineering and to make it entirely an object of fine art.” The distinction between architecture and “mere building” was stated by Nikolaus Pevsner in the opening paragraph of his Outline of European Architecture (1942): “a bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture…the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal.” Whatever the justification for such assertions, it must nevertheless be recognized that neither of these authors suggests that aesthetic appeal or art are synonyms for superfluity. Although adjustment in proportions or refinement of profiles may increase the thickness of short-span structural members beyond the structural analytical minima, this does not necessarily imply any radical decrease in real economy but simply indicates a concept of economy that takes into account the assembly and amenity of spatial enclosures and admits that there is value in environmental harmony. It is thus as misleading to imply (as Fergusson implied) that architecture is civil engineering plus ornament as it is to imply (as Le Corbusier did) that the status of the two professions is to be distinguished by the relative superiority of beauty over harmony.
Baxter, George: the Crystal PalaceThe Crystal Palace, oleograph by George Baxter.Photos.com/Jupiterimages
It is important to insist that the theory of architecture is concerned primarily with the attainment of certain environmental ideals rather than with their cost; for these two problems are philosophically distinct, as is clear if one considers such a concept as, for example, that of standardization. The financial saving made by standardizing rolled-steel sections or by casting concrete in reusable formwork is so obvious that it requires no elaboration with respect to Vitruvius’s demand for oeconomia. But such standardization also fulfills Vitruvius’s concurrent demand for order, arrangement, eurythmy, symmetry, and propriety.
The Place Vendôme in Paris is adorned with over 100 identical pilasters and half columns, all carved with the same Corinthian capitals under the supervision of a member of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. Whether or not the resultant uniformity was or still is both pleasing and desirable is certainly open to discussion, but it will be perceived that any argument about architectural standardization must primarily be a question of value, rather than of cost, and it is with values that architectural theory has always been predominantly concerned. “Commodity, firmness, and delight”: the ultimate synthesis
It has been generally assumed that a complete theory of architecture is always concerned essentially in some way or another with these three interrelated terms, which, in Vitruvius’s Latin text, are given as firmitas, utilitas, and venustas (i.e., structural stability, appropriate spatial accommodation, and attractive appearance). Nevertheless, a number of influential theorists after 1750 sought to make modifications to this traditional triad (1) by giving its components a radically different equilibrium (such as the primacy given by the 18th-century French architect Étienne-Louis Boullée to the effects of geometric forms in light or the claim made by Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand that the fulfillment of function was the sole essence of architectural beauty), (2) by adding ethical values (such as Ruskin’s “sacrifice” and “obedience”), or (3) by introducing new scientific concepts (such as Giedion’s “space-time”).
Furthermore, it has been argued that the traditional concept of firmitas, utilitas, and venustas ceased to have any real value after 1800, when engineers began creating structures that seemed so ostentatiously to defy the stonemasons’ laws of gravity, when scientific studies were creating more and more doubts as to the economical, sociological, psychological, acoustical, thermal, or optical determinants of appropriate spatial accommodation and when beauty was “altogether in the eye of the beholder.”
Clearly, one must be wary of attributing too much importance to the sequence, since a slight variation occurs in the writings of even the most traditional theorists. Vitruvius gives these terms in the sequence firmitas, utilitas, venustas, whereas both Alberti and, following him, the 16th-century Venetian architect and theorist Andrea Palladio reverse the order of the first two. Thus, Sir Henry Wotton’s sequence (which is normally used in English-language texts) does not, as so often stated, derive directly from the Latin text of Vitruvius but from the Italian text of Palladio’s I quattro libri dell’architettura (i.e., comodità, perpetuità, bellezza). But it does seem worth noting that venustas generally comes last, implying that firmitas and utilitas are to be regarded as essential logical prerequisites of architectural beauty.
On the other hand, the practical advantages, in academic treatises, of giving priority to venustas are evident. Jacques-François Blondel, in his nine-volume Cours d’architecture (1771–77; “Architecture Course”), used this sequence because he observed that considerations of “decoration” are almost entirely within the domain of the theory of architecture, whereas neither distribution (utilitas) nor construction (firmitas) can be explained properly without practical experience. The growing emphasis on aesthetics, combined with developments in psychology and the influence of art-historical methods, added weight to this argument, while the corresponding independence of scientific techniques of structural and spatial analysis led many teachers of architecture to consider utilitas and firmitas as totally separate academic disciplines. Important exceptions can be found to this generalization. At the end of the 19th century, Julien Guadet, in reaction against the creation of a chair of aesthetics at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts, considered it his duty, as professor of architectural theory, to devote his lectures to the study of architectural planning, and this method, which achieved prestige as a result of his keen mind and wide historical knowledge, was pursued by many later scholars. But Guadet’s approach became unfashionable, and since the 1960s the predominant methods of teaching architectural theory have ranged from a return to the synthesis of structural, spatial, and formal values espoused by Robert Venturi to the exploration of the architectural implications of general theories of linguistics advanced by Christian Norberg-Schulz. Venustas
This Latin term for “beauty” (literally, the salient qualities possessed by the goddess Venus) clearly implied a visual quality in architecture that would arouse the emotion of love, but it is of interest to note that one of the crucial aspects of this problem was already anticipated by Alberti in the 15th century, as is made clear by his substitution of the word amoenitas (“pleasure”) for Vitruvius’s more anthropomorphic term venustas. Alberti not only avoids the erotic implications of the term venustas but, by subdividing amoenitas into pulchritudo and ornamentum, gives far more precise indications as to the type of visual satisfaction that architecture should provide. Pulchritudo, he asserts, is derived from harmonious proportions that are comparable to those that exist in music and are the essence of the pleasure created by architecture. Ornamentum, he claims, is only an “auxiliary brightness,” the quality and extent of which will depend essentially on what is appropriate and seemly. Both pulchritudo and ornamentum were thus related to function and environment in that, ideally, they were governed by a sense of decorum, and, since the etymological roots of both decoration and decorum are the same, it will be understood why, before 1750, the term decoration had in both English and French a far less superficial architectural implication than it often does today.