Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

Buildings can carry in them cultural memories of the architecture of the past, and when there has been a need to give a sense of decorum or authority to a building, one of the ways that has been used most frequently in Western culture is to make the building in a way that recalls aspects of the architecture of the past, often the ancient past. Because there has been continuity in this enterprise, it is possible for a building like Monticello, that was built in a remote spot, with knowledge gained from a limited number of books, to resonate with a whole tradition of buildings going back to ancient times. Each time that architecture’s classical language has been revived, different aspects of it have come to the fore as being its crucial aspects, and so it has been reinterpreted in a great many different ways and come to mean many different things — some of them completely incompatible with one another. For example, Albert Speer made use of a version of classicism for the Nazis’ projects for Berlin, and we see that version of classicism as looking totalitarian and oppressive, but Jefferson’s classicism at the University of Virginia looks benign and expressive of freedom and optimism. The classicism of ancient Greece is often presented as emblematic of democracy, as the idea of democracy was invented in Athens; but when it was used by the Roman state it was expressive of a different kind of order, and became something like a multinational company’s ‘corporate identity’ programme. There are sometimes claims that classical architecture has escaped the vagaries of time and culture, and represents a set of forms that has eternal validity. This is a mistake, because although the forms have remained more or less the same their meaning has shifted dramatically over the centuries, so that what it meant to build in a classical manner in the 5th century BC is vastly different from what it meant in the 3rd century AD, and different again in the 16th century. We always see buildings against a background of buildings that we have seen before, and this influences what it is that we feel about the buildings — indeed it means that we notice different aspects of the buildings. The forms of the buildings might remain more or less the same, but we would see them as different architecture from age to age, from culture to culture, and even perhaps from person to person, depending on what our experiences have been, and what it is that we know.

Chapter 3 How buildings become great

Some buildings are special