Architecture as Form in Civilisation
By PROFESSOR W. R. LETHABY
Towns and Civilisation are two words for nearly one thing; the City is the manifestation of the spirit and its population is the larger body it builds for its soul. To build cities and live in them properly is the great business of large associations of men. The outward and the made must always be exact pictures of the mind and the makers. Not only is this so at any given stage, but it is so all the more in a going concern, for the outward is always reacting again on the inward, so that the concrete becomes a mould for the spiritual. Man builds towns so that the towns shall build his sons. As the old Greek said, “The city teaches the man.”
William Morris says somewhere that the religions of antiquity were the worshipping of cities. It may seem strange this idea of city worship, but it explains much in the history of art, and we need something of similar sort even now: this and other worships besides and beyond. Before the recognition of the universal and the national we require a much deepened sense of the civic. Here comes before the Beyond. Almost the greatest question of the time is the one of finding wells for the refreshment of our vitality—the inducing of national spirit, town spirit, and home spirit. Such spirit is a very subtle essence, and yet it dwells in houses and cities are its reservoirs. In the Army it has always been recognised that the foundation of the whole vast violent business is spirit. The children of war are wiser than the children of peace. As an example take this scrap from the experience of a new soldier: “The private is taught from the beginning that the first duty of a soldier is obedience, the second cleanliness, and the third may be gathered from this short dialogue between a drill sergeant and a squad of recruits:
“What is the third duty of a soldier?” asks the sergeant. “Honesty, sobriety, and self-respect,” we reply. “And what is self-respect?” “Keeping your buttons bright.”
We know that Jerusalem was a sacred city, and so was Athens too in its way. So indeed were all the cities of antiquity, each in its proper status. In the later classical age every one had its impersonation of sculptured image—the Tyche of the City. Fragments of a figure of Silchester were found in the Basilica of the old British town; an image which stood for the genius of the place. London and York were also sacred in those Roman days, and the figure on our pennies is a similar Roman imagination for the whole country, Britannia. A fine inscription from Ephesus in the Central Hall of the British Museum is a delightful example of the forms and ceremonies observed by the proud cities of antiquity—the ritual prescribed for their worship in fact. This marble slab, about 7 feet by 3½ feet, bears in large clear lettering the copy of a letter addressed by Antoninus Pius to the Magistrates and People of Ephesus c. A.D. 140. The emperor approved that the people of Pergamon had written letters to Ephesus correctly addressed with the prescribed titles (First and Greatest Metropolis of Asia, or the like). He thinks that the People of Smyrna had accidentally omitted this from a decree about joint sacrifice, but they will behave correctly in future provided that the Ephesians use the approved titles in writing to Smyrna (pre-eminent in beauty or the like). This is indeed politeness on a high plane.
One of the ways in which civic spirit, pride, and love must be refounded is in the sense of historical continuity. Such a sense of regional reverence is being cultivated in France on a definitely psychological basis, and those alert Americans have already begun to work the ground of their antiquities. A publication of a local historical society, issued as far back as 1900, contains an account of what they in America call “An Old Ipswich House.” It begins with some words which I must quote: “The extraordinary production and large circulation of the historical novel is but one of the consequences of the remarkable growth of patriotic societies in this country in the last few years. One of the most admirable results of the movement is the widespread interest in the establishment of local historical societies in the old towns of New England. [Older towns of Old England, please note and copy.] These societies have a very fascinating work before them in the collection of local records, the preservation of old buildings, in the marking of historic sites. This soil is fertile and delving therein bears rich fruit of interest, love for the community, heightened civic feeling, encouragement of local improvement, and a care for the future of the town. In not a few places the local society has taken some old house for its headquarters, adorning it with attractive historical collections. Such a collection is that of the Bostonian Society, to which the city long ago gave the use of the Old State House.” What might our English towns still do in this way! Or is it to be that for authentic touch with antiquity we shall soon have to go to America? In passing may I commend this idea to those who have the destruction of the old Dean’s House at Wolverhampton in their mind or at least their power?
Germany has long consciously cultivated this field for spirit production, and I remember an official tract on the psychological value of Ancient Monuments in promoting national consciousness. It is in Denmark, however, that an effort to promote national spirit has been most systematically based on a common knowledge of national traditions, arts, and music, and spread by means of their admirable “Folk Schools.”
Monumental history is a stirring, vital thing: it can be touched. In every town every child-citizen should know the story and antiquities of that place. This has always been the way until now. “What mean these stones?” the children say, and we answer, “I don’t know.” The history that can be seen is a strong and stimulating soul-food, entirely different from vague and wearying written history.
The historical starting-post is only one of many ways of approach to fine forms of civilisation; we must not wait on the order of our going, but go at once and from every point at once. Much is being thought and said about Housing and Town Planning; they are both of the greatest possible importance, but they are not all. We need at least a third to go with them—that is a general cleaning, tidying, and smartening movement, an effort to improve all our public and social arts, from music to cooking and games. We must control and tax advertisements to some order, bring pressure on the railway companies to sweep the microbes out of their stations, and we must whitewash our own backyards. The danger is to think of housing and planning as technical matters for experts. It may almost be feared that current talk of town planning and garden cities may harden with a jargon-like political formulæ. Our arts and customs are indexes and pictures of our inner life. Fine bridges, clean, smiling streets, liberal public buildings are not merely shapes and nothing more. They are essential to our sense of order, brightness, and efficiency, to our pride, confidence, and content. A sore protesting slapped-in-the-face feeling cannot be good for the temper and digestion. A civilised life cannot be lived in undisciplined towns.
More and more we become the victims of our words and live frightened by names. Such a name is Architecture. In its mystery vague and vain pretensions may be shrouded, in its shadows hide many minor superstitions about correct design, the right style, true proportions. High priests arise who are supposed to know subtle doctrines and can point the way to æsthetic safety. And yet all the time there are the streets, Edgware Road and Euston Road, Oxford Street and Holborn; there again are our cities, Leeds and Liverpool, Bristol and Plymouth. Surely these potent and indeed blatant facts might raise doubts as to the dogmas. The mystification about “architecture” has isolated the intimate building art from the common interest and understanding of ordinary men. To talk with a believing architect on his theories is almost as hopeless as to chaff a cardinal. All the ancient arts of men are subject to the diseases of pedantry and punditry—music, painting, poetry all suffer from isolation.
Architecture is human skill and feeling shown in the great necessary activity of building. It must be a living, progressive structural art, always readjusting itself to changing conditions of time and place. If it is true it must ever be new. This, however, not with a willed novelty, which is as bad as or worse than trivial antiquarianism, but by response to force majeure. The vivid interest and awe with which men look on a ship or an engine, an old cottage or a haystack, come from the sense of their reality. They were shaped so by a higher power than whim, by a higher aim than snobbery. So must it again be with our buildings: they must be founded fast on the rock of necessity.
Wordy claims are often made for “Architecture” that it is a “Fine Art,” and chief of all the arts. These two claims are indeed incompatible and contradictory. Any mastership in architecture depends on its universality and its service. It is only chief in the sense that he who serves is the greatest. But the “Fine Arts” are by definition free from conditions of human need, and architecture was specially ruled out from among them by Aristotle. Even so, this idea of fine art unconditioned and free for delight was a heresy of the Hellenistic decline. To Plato and the great masters even the “musical” arts were to be not only healthy but health-giving; they were to be foods for the soul and not æsthetic raptures and intoxications.
On the other side of the account it may be objected that bare utility and convenience are not enough to form a base for a noble architecture. Of course they are not if “bare utility” is interpreted in a mean and skimping and profiteering way. All work of man bears the stamp of the spirit with which it was done, but this stamp is not necessarily “ornament.” The unadorned indeed can never stand as low as that which is falsely adorned in borrowed, brazen bedizenments. High utility and liberal convenience for noble life are enough for architecture. We confuse ourselves with these unreal and destructive oppositions between the serviceable and the æsthetic, between science and art. Consider any of the great forms of life activity—seamanship, farming, housekeeping—can anyone say where utility ends and style, order, clearness, precision begin? Up to a point, and indeed a long way on, “style” is a utility. We have to begin again and look on architecture as an art of service from the communal point of view. The faces of buildings which are turned outwards towards the world are obviously of interest to the public, and all citizens have a property in them. The spectator is in fact part owner. No man builds to himself alone. Let the proprietor do as he likes inside his building, for we need not call on him. Bad plays need not be seen, books need not be read, but nothing but blindness or the numbing of our faculty of observation can protect us from buildings in the street. It is to be feared that we are learning to protect ourselves by the habit of not observing, that is by sacrificing a faculty. General interest and intelligent appreciation of public arts are a necessity of civilisation. Civic alertness, honest pride, or firm protest are not matters of taste for a few; they are essential activities of the urban mind. In cities buildings take the place of fields, trees, and hedgerows. Buildings are an artificial form of nature. We have a right to consideration and some politeness in buildings. We claim protection from having our faces slapped when we venture into the street. Our cities do not wholly belong to profit-lords, railway companies, and advertisers.
Architecture, however “properly understood,” not only concerns the man in the street, it comes home to all householders and households. While our eyes have been strained on the vacuity of correct style, the weightier matters of construction and efficiency have necessarily been neglected. We need grates which will warm, floors which may readily be cleaned, and ceilings which do not crack. These and such as these are the terms of the modern architectural problem, and in satisfying them we should find the proper “style” for to-day. Architecture is a current speech, it is not an art of classical quotation. As it is it is as much burdened by its tags of rhetoric as Chinese literature. It has become a dead language. The house of the future will be designed as a ship is designed, as an organism which has to function properly in all its parts. Does this not concern everyone, not only as economy and comfort, but in the mind? Our houses must be made to fit us like garments and to be larger projections of ourselves. A whole row of ambiguous words, such as design, ornament, style, proportion, have come between us and the immediately given data of architecture. Design is not abstract power exercised by a genius, it is simply the arranging how work shall be well done. The more necessary the work and the more obvious, simple, and sound is the foresight the better the design. It is not a question of captivating paper patterns, it is a question of buildings which will work. Architecture is a pragmatical art. To design in the Classic, Gothic, or Renaissance styles is as absurd as to sculpture in the manner of Praxiteles, paint “like” Holbein, or write sham Shakespeare. We do not really need a waxwork art by Wardour Street professionals. We require an active art of building which will take its “style” for granted, as does naval architecture. Modern building must shake itself free from its own withered and cast-off skins.
It is commonly supposed, and architects themselves in older days believed it, that an architect’s business was to be an expert in style. Why he should be so was never explained, except, perhaps, by Philibert de l’Orme. According to this authority the Temple of Jerusalem was built in the Classical style, and this work was designed in heaven; therefore this was the only true or revealed style. An excellent argument; modern practitioners have kept up a “battle of the styles” without any such basis for their logic, or rather their eloquence. But what is or was a style? It is a museum name for a phase of past art. As a means of classifying what is dead and done the style labels are quite useful. It has, however, to be kept in mind that these styles, while they lived and moved, were processes which began, continued, and passed into something else. They were only phases like those of the changing moon. That which now professes to be designed in a style, or, as the still more disgusting slang runs, to be “period work,” has not the essence of life. It is, therefore, not actually of the style which it simulates but is only in the “style” of the style.
Indeed, the essence of all the old arts was in their vitality, their response to the natural conditions and the psychology of their times. The better we seem to reproduce their dead images the more we are unlike their soul-selves. There is little more reason for an architect to pretend to work in a style than there is for a chemist. Architects are properly arrangers and directors of certain classes of structures. I would like to say that they were building engineers, were it not that our engineers have failed so shamefully in hiring themselves out for any form of exploitation and in showing no care for orderliness and decency. All the past of architecture, as of engineering and shipbuilding, belongs to us, of course, as race experience, but only as far as the same is true in all fields of science and literature.
The “Orders” of architecture are names for particular forms of ancient Greek temple building. Style-names apply to all past fashions of buildings, Orders only to three—Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. The names are useful as history, but that is all. Now that these Orders have become shop advertisements, even the would-be correct may be more ready to give them up.
Style in a modern and universal sense is equivalent rather to “stylish” than to a style; it interpenetrates the whole texture of a work; it is clearness, effectiveness, mastery, often it is simplification. We have to conceive of it in the building art as we do in literature or athletics. “The style is the man”—yes, and it is also the thing itself. It is an informing spirit, the spirit of form, it is not a varnish. We have become so accustomed to architecture looking “dressy” that we have forgotten the logic of clothes and bury buildings good enough in themselves under outgrown rags. It has been a true instinct which calls sham architectural features “dressings.”
Another word which the architecturally superstitious whisper with great awe is proportion. In dealing with such a limited field as the “Orders,” old scholars examined existing examples by measuring them very carefully to find out their proportions; but, if we had them, Greek chairs and tables might be measured in exactly the same way. No general rule of the Greeks has ever been found out by these measurings, and if it had it would prove nothing for us. Proportion, of course, rests properly on function, material, and size. There maybe a perfect proportion, for instance, for a certain class of ships, but that will only be discovered experimentally, and not by measuring Greek galleys.
I wish I could find some leverage of argument to bring a sense of citizen responsibility for form in life into the minds and hearts of all, but right and reason are hardy enough. We may, perhaps, hope more in a sense of international rivalry in the works and evidences of life. Civilisation is an Olympic contest in the arts and sciences, a sort of international Eisteddfod. It is admitted that we must have literature and we must have music: we must also have building skill, and we have to aim at inducing a flowing tide in all the things of civilisation. Of words and arguments I am rather hopeless. One thing only I would ask of every benevolent reader: that he would take notice of what he sees in the streets. Do not pass by in a contemplative dream, or suppose that it is an architectural mystery, but look and judge. Is it tidy, is it civilised, are these fit works for a proud nation? Look at Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus, and that terrible junction of Tottenham Court Road with Oxford Street. Play a new game of seeing London. We need a movement in the common mind, a longing to mitigate the vulgarity and anarchy of our streets, and the smothering of the frontages with vile advertisements, a desire to clean the streets better, to gather up littered paper, to renew blistered plaster. Some order must be brought into the arrangement of the untidy festoons of telegraph and telephone wires hitched up to chimneys and parapets. These are the architectural works which are needed as a beginning and a basis. The idea of beauty, daily-bread beauty, not style pretences, must be brought back into our life. Every town should set up an advisory committee on its betterment. We must try to bring back the idea of town personality and town worship; we must set up ceremonies and even rituals to bring out a spirit of pride and emulation. If we can only stir up general interest all will yet go well or at least better. By exalting our towns we should make a platform for ourselves. As it is what can great money fortunes buy beyond swine comfort and titles? Man is more than a stomach moving about on legs. A mistake of modern education has been to train for appreciation of the past rather than for present production. Such merely critical learning comes at last to be actually sterilising. As production fails, so even appreciation decays. Full understanding depends on the power to do. Therefore, leaving the things of the past, press forward to produce, to be, to live. Remember Lot’s wife. There is much talk of patriotism, but patriotism requires a ground on which to subsist; it must be based on love of home, love of city, and love of country. Let nothing deceive us, civilisation produces form, and where noble form is attained there is civilisation. Life is a process, a flow of being, and where there is this vital activity music, drama, and the arts are necessarily thrown off. Living art comes on a tide of creative intelligence.