Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

In David Fincher’s film of the novel the point is driven home quickly and effectively by having the nameless character, played by Ed Norton, look round the apartment and, before our eyes, the furniture materializes, a piece at a time, complete with its catalogue description, so we can see that everything in the room has been valued, selected, and paid for. The point to be made here is that the furniture goes beyond being functional, and is described in each of these examples precisely because it does go beyond the functional. A chair in a film is never just a chair, it is an insight into character. Likewise, in a novel if a chair is described, it is always more than a place to sit. Of course the character has chairs in his apartment. If no mention were made of it then we would take it for granted. The character in Fight Club is morbidly self-aware, and asks himself a question that sane people do not ask themselves, but which advertisers and novelists ask of others all the time: ‘What kind of dining set defines me as a person?’ The question is not absurd, but it is not usually asked in this way of oneself. It sounds neurotic, certainly, but it isn’t nonsensical. The sort of dining set that defines a president or an emperor is different from the mass-produced dining set that defines an insurance clerk as a person. But the questions that the insurance clerk would ask would normally tend to be either more practical or more vague: ‘Will it fit in my apartment? Would I be happy to have this furniture around? Does it feel right?’ If I am an emperor then the question is less concerned with a personal taste, and is more like: ‘how do I demonstrate through my furniture that I’m no insurance clerk?’ And the answer is: by having a table that is more extravagant than an insurance clerk could think of having. It may not work any better as a table, but in addition to working as a table it will impress and intimidate. One can imagine the chairman of a multinational company aspiring to own a table that had once belonged to Napoleon, and being prepared to spend a large sum of money on it if it became available. And one can imagine him thinking it money well spent.

Making gestures

Extravagance is not the only way to find gestural qualities in things, and enhance their status. An ascetic philosopher would aim for a table that was pointedly less extravagant than the norm, and its purpose would be to show high-mindedness rather than low status as such. A democratic president would need to show on different occasions both imperial grandeur (when entertaining visiting heads of state) and absolute ordinariness (showing a rapport with voters). We might feel ashamed if our head of state lived in an apartment with inexpensive catalogue furniture, but in another mood might resent the extravagant costs involved in furnishing high-status accommodation from the public purse. The architectural setting has a part to play in putting in place a sense of how it would be appropriate to behave, and in indicating the status and aspirations of its inhabitant. It can be simply a personal matter, if we don’t care what anyone thinks, and decorate to suit ourselves, or can be very public theatre, broadcast around the whole world.