Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

Buildings, as I have said, are often very expensive. The person or committee that commissions a building will always want to be assured that its money is being spent wisely, in order to bring about what is intended. If a school commissions a swimming pool then it will be disappointed, and will undoubtedly sue, if the building that results from the commission cannot in fact be used as for swimming. If a plutocrat commissions a frivolous eye-catcher for a hill in his garden, then the architect will have failed if the building is solemnly monumental. How does the architect persuade the client that the design fits the bill? Usually by explaining what it is going to be like, by using illustrations or models, so that the building can be imagined in its setting. At this stage the design can be modified without great expenditure. The main alternative is to build the design, and modify the building if needs be, but to do this is for most of us ruinously extravagant. It is what Ludwig II of Bavaria did at his small and highly ornamental palace, Linderhof, in the foothills of the Alps, but his name has never been a byword for prudence, and his accountants eventually had him certified as insane. Often a building cannot be the way we would like it to be, perhaps because our neighbours will not allow it, or perhaps for some more fundamental reason, such as the limited strength of materials or the intransigent way in which gravity lets us down. In persuading the client that the building is as closely suitable for its purpose as can reasonably be expected, the architect has three main techniques of persuasion.

Reason

The first is reasoned argument. A design cannot develop solely by way of reasoning — there is always at some point a creative leap in the process, except perhaps in a very traditional society when we might decide that now is the moment to have a house like every other house we know. Even then, the appeal isn’t really to reasoning as to the repetition of experience. Reasoning, in the strict sense of moving from agreed premises to necessary conclusions, is never the only way of thinking involved in finding a design, but it is necessary if one is to assess the merits of a given design. It should be possible to frame an argument that shows why a design is good, and this will amount to a demonstration that the design will do what it is supposed to do. In buildings where technical matters predominate, this might well be the main form of persuasion used in winning approval for the design. However buildings are often complex, and have many factors working on them that interfere with one another. For example if I make some windows larger in order to let in more light or open up a view, then the building might let out more heat, and it could be necessary to install a more powerful heater. This actually happened at the house that Gerrit Rietveld designed for Mrs Schröder in Utrecht (Figure 9). The central heating system here was normally used for heating industrial space. It cost as much as a typical Utrecht house of the day, and made the cost of the whole house about twice that of an ordinary house of its size. The decision to install the heater must have been the result of reasoning, because it has no other obvious appeal. Given the novel form of the house, its unusual degree of openness to the outside, and the consequent loss of heat, the decision to install the heater was undoubtedly rational. However it is equally clear that the overall form of the building was not devised by way of reason alone — otherwise one might have decided on smaller windows and have had a house that was less costly both to build and to run.