Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

The artistic vision seems to be that the Métro is a sensuous dreamworld, and it certainly has an air of being set apart from normal life as we know it above pavement level. A journey on the Métro is framed as a descent to the underworld, from which we return like Orpheus. That does not stop it being a practical transport system, but the practicality is not what the architecture expresses, whereas by contrast Norman Foster’s design for the Bilbao subway system makes it as rational as possible, trying to conserve the passengers’ sense of direction on approaching the underground platforms, by having very direct links from the pavement, turning few corners on the way. By contrast the Paris Métro has labyrinthine passages that connect its lines, and the traveller is certainly in limbo, which further enhances the associations with the unconscious and perhaps accounts for the fact that it keeps playing a role in Parisian narratives, from Zazie dans le Métro by Raymond Queneau (1959), to Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Le Fabuleux déstin d’Amélie Poulain (2001).

Back to basics

For the avant-garde architects of Guimard’s generation, nature was the usual starting point. In Glasgow Charles Rennie Mackintosh produced intense flower drawings and landscapes, while his architectural work made use of sinuous lines and geometric figures. In Chicago Frank Lloyd Wright developed his ‘prairie house’ type, with wide overhanging eaves, that was supposed to echo the wide flat horizons of the prairies, though the buildings themselves were in the Chicago suburbs. In Barcelona Antoni Gaudí developed his own highly idiosyncratic way of dealing with buildings, studying bones and beehives along the way. The most ambitious of his buildings was the church of the Sagrada Familia, with its strange stalagmite towers, which he left incomplete at his death (Figure 22). They were all trying to reinvent architecture from first principles, and to find a new way of doing things that responded to new ways of living, and new ways of building. Stylistically they are quite different from one another, and it does not help to understand them by saying that the work should all be called by the same name (Art Nouveau, or whatever) but what they had in common was that they were designing individualistically, and evidently striving for originality. Previous generations of designers had habitually appealed to some idea of ‘correctness’ to give their work authority. The buildings would look like the admired models from the past, which would be refreshed with individual creative thought, but always working within an established framework of decorum. Even radical change could be authorized by appealing to precedents, if the architect looked to the distant rather than the recent past for the buildings that would be held up as exemplary. In Florence at the beginning of the 15th century, at the start of the Renaissance, the architecture that was all around was medieval in character, and adventurous architects such as Alberti and Brunelleschi brought about change by focusing attention on Roman architecture. In the mid-18th century, when Baroque architecture was at its most sumptuous and exuberant, there was a call for a return to simplicity and the expression of fundamental constructional principles. That appeal was made in the first instance by Marc-Antoine Laugier, a priest attached to the chapel at Versailles, which was more Baroque and excessive in its decoration than anywhere else on Earth. In 1753 he published an essay in which he imagined a primitive hut, made out of trees that were still growing in the ground, as the origin of monumental architecture. As the century progressed, and archaeological excavations produced better knowledge of the monuments of ancient Greece, it became possible to make an appeal for the revival of Greek taste in the name of turning towards purity and simple elegance. And then again in the 19th century, when classical architecture was normal, and other styles were used for exotic special occasions, Gothic architecture was revived, especially by Pugin who presented it as a truly Christian architecture, uncontaminated by association with a pagan past (Figure 5). In each of these examples a change in current taste and practice was brought about by making an appeal to the architecture of the distant past, and by making a break with the architecture of the immediate past.