Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

Architects who see their building through to construction must take an interest in the processes of building, and often it is that process of building that finds expression in the finished work. There would be an attempt for example to make bricks do the things that are particularly characteristic of brick, by making walls and arches, while steel would be asked to do the things that are particularly characteristic of steel, such as making grid-like frames. A building with a steel frame will usually need walls and windows in order to make it useful, and it is possible to make the walls cover the steel frame and hide it from view, which can make the building look solid. However an architect can make it a point of principle, as Mies did, to arrange the solid parts of the wall in such a way as to make it apparent that the steel frame is holding the building up, while the walls are just acting as non-structural screens. In becoming absorbed in the expression of such niceties of construction, it is possible to design fine buildings that are admired by other architects, but which look to the uninitiated very much like unexceptional industrial work. Even the Seagram Building, with its commanding reputation and its understated monumentality, has never been promoted as a tourist sight, except among architects. In fact the idea of ‘expression’ here is less straightforward than at first it seems, because the grid of evenly placed verticals and horizontals is not the whole story of the construction. A building also needs cross-bracing in it, to stop the whole structure collapsing sideways in strong winds (and winds are much stronger on the twentieth floor than they are at ground level). Mies did not let these diagonal bracings show, but others have done (for example, Skidmore Owings and Merrill at the John Hancock Tower in Chicago). Also it is problematic to expose steel columns in a tall building, because the structure needs to withstand fire better than steel does by itself. Therefore the steel columns in Mies’s buildings sometimes had to be cased in protective material, like concrete. In order to express the structure, he then cased the column in steel, making it look as if the building were held up by larger steel columns. The point to be made here is this: even when an architect decides that a building will express its own construction that does not mean that the process of design takes care of itself. There are many decisions to be made, which are often matters of judgement that could change the building’s appearance. Why, for example, does one express the fact that the structure needed to resist gravity, but not that it needed to resist wind? Why not express the fact that columns are protected to make the building safe in case of fire? The occupants of the building might find that very reassuring. The answer surely is deeply traditional. The Western tradition has for over two and a half thousand years found particular value in buildings with columns, and they have been seen as the basis of a building’s aesthetic effects. Monumental buildings had large columns. High-status buildings had finely wrought columns, made of good materials. The Greek word for column is stylos, which is the root of the English word ‘style’. The row of columns around a Greek temple is called the peristyle. A building without columns is called ‘astylar’, without style.

Tradition and novelty