Who Put the “Ism” in Classicism?
A Theory of Authority
By John E. Hancock
Whether our purview is two decades, two centuries, or two millennia, it is difficult to tell whether the presence of the classical as an idea in architectural thought is a continuous or a recurring one. From within, its authority and continuity seem unbroken, while from without it tends to seem more periodic. But to ask such questions about its duration is already to ask about its ground of authority, and requires first some shared understanding as to what we mean by the classical. Moreover, any such inquiry should be able to distinguish the classical as an attitude, from the visual forms of the classical language with which it may or may not always be associated. To illuminate these issues I will refer to the most theoretically rigorous and coherent formulation of classical principles – seventeenth century French literary theory – as a benchmark. As a conclusion I will discuss illustrative examples of architectural designs of the past twenty-five years which might clarify for us the ways in which, or the degree to which, any form of classicalness may be desirable or authentic in our contemporary world.
It is easy to suspect that much use of the term classical in architectural writing during the past few decades has been mostly a matter of convenience. Especially in the early 1980’s it seemed to have a certain comfortable vagueness about it which many commentators found useful when faced with the embarrassing diversity of current work. The term worked in so many contexts because it generally called up clear enough images of axial symmetry, columns with tops and bottoms of some kind, relatively sedate proportions and an occasional pedimented roof, even though all of these could equally well be present in very non-classical designs!
Recently, the more specifically classical strains in architectural theory and design have attained new specificity and rigor. Practitioners of the classical are now mainly those with a seriousness of intent and an allegiance to the rigor of the formal tradition, albeit while accepting that within the broad world of architectural practice they are a marginal though dedicated elite. With the latest shift in architectural trends, the classical again seems comfortably secure in its own sense of timelessness, that internal view of its ultimate durability, and able to pursue its interests and virtues without irony and without compromise.
But despite this recent consolidation, and despite a certain obviousness about what constitutes classical architectural practice today, the concept of classicalness in general is far from clear in broader theoretical terms. If we want to say that the Portland Building,
FIGURE 1: The Pantheon, Rome, 120 A.D.
the Altes Museum and the Roman Pantheon (FIGURE 1) are all classical buildings, then the loosely-arranged connotations which we hold in our minds, are probably more or less sufficient. Upon looking further into what could really be meant by aspects of classicalness, we find that the implications begin to diverge, forming themselves into three interlocking but distinguishable clusters of meaning probably best represented by the terms classic, classicism and classicist. For example, we would need to ask whether Schinkel was a classicist; whether his works, therefore, conformed to classicism (or to neo-classicism); and whether the Altes Museum is necessarily, therefore, a classic work. Do all of these conditions need to be simultaneously true? And what do we say of his Gothic Revival projects? What of the Villa Savoye? Is it a classical building? A classic? Was Le Corbusier a classicist? What of Philip Johnson’s (or even Minoru Yamasaki’s) works of the 1960’s? Though these latter portray the apparently obvious attributes of classicism, like symmetry and refinement, surely they are not classics? 1
Another way of clarifying these three groups of meanings, besides piling up such vague and unanswerable questions, is to distinguish whether the concept of the classical is best defined in contradistinction to other concepts of quality and duration like fashionable, populist or cyclical; in contradistinction to other formal styles or object groups like medieval, mannerist, baroque or vernacular; or in contradistinction to other theories of artistic creation like romantic or expressionistic. To enable more illuminating interpretations of all sorts of classical works (including recent ones), and their qualities and intentions, distinctions are required whereby the terminology of the classical may become more subtle and precise. In fact, there is considerable etymological and literary evidence for the three general sets of connotations to which I have alluded.
The first of these, classic, is closely related to the oldest Latin root, classicus, pertaining to a process of classification into groups by some sort of rank, or especially to the highest rank or quality, particularly as that quality was later identified by its durability as a useful standard of excellence. By a classic we therefore mean an exemplar whose distinction is proven by a long-standing consensus of esteem. The term is necessarily judgmental and temporal having to do with both the assigning of value and the passage of time, principally the endurance of such value over time. The Maison Carré and Chartres Cathedral are both classics in this sense, and we speak of the classics in literature, or classical music, to invoke that relationship of value and time. The classics are the body of permanently esteemed work in a field. Such work is often, but not by any means necessarily, from classical antiquity or possessing the outward appearance of so-called classicism.
The second of these sets of connotations seems most closely related to an early nineteenth century neologism most appropriately rendered by the German Klassizismus. Part of the new art-historical interest in style, this concept was an attempt to describe in stylistic terms the artistic forms of the ancient Greeks and Romans. It was soon particularly associated with those artists and architects who, in a self-conscious and style-conscious sense, and with great archaeological exactitude, imitated them. Classicism is therefore a category of characteristic attributes derived from association with a particular historical period, and it became (especially as neoclassicism, to which the German form most closely corresponds) the doctrine of the renewed pursuit of those attributes. The term is essentially formal and stylistic in that it concerns either the physical description of objects, or their categorization into groups, or the efforts to make new works which conform to such categories. Most of our obvious images of the classical (especially the orders, and archaeologically verifiable proportions and details) are attributes of classicism in this sense. As a design method permeated first by formal and stylistic concerns, it does not inherently or necessarily produce classic works, although of course it may; and it is not necessarily undertaken through the inner motivating sensibility or the attitude of a classicist, although, of course, it may be. “With the latest shift in architectural trends, the classical again seems comfortably secure in its own sense of timelessness, that internal view of its ultimate durability, and able to pursue its interests and virtues without irony and without compromise.”
Before going on to define the classicist (in a sense distinct from merely someone who practices stylistic classicism) it is important to emphasize the historical context in which the term classicism was invented. I also hope to justify why it is important to make something of an issue, at least for the moment, out of the suffix “ism.” In consulting etymological dictionaries of both French and English, one discovers that before 1790, “ism” was applied only to words with specifically religious or strongly doctrinal meanings: Paganism goes back to 1443, Atheism to 1587, Naturalism and Skepticism appear in the mid-seventeenth century but with reference only to religious debates.2 In many cases “isms” were regarded almost as sinister cults. Thus when, during the half-century following the French Revolution, a whole flurry of new “ism “ words were unleashed, one can only conclude the following: first, that a strong doctrine or belief system of almost religious intensity would have been implied; secondly, that such a doctrine would have inevitably had a strongly promotional emphasis, a necessity in the face of rapidly-expanding options or choices; and thirdly, that there was likely some relationship between the explosion of new “isms”
FIGURE 2: Palace of Versailles, garden facade detail.
and the sense of collapse of traditional religious and political authority in Europe after 1789.3 In the arts, the most prominent terms of this dilemma were the Schlegel brothers’ coining and distinguishing of romanticism versus classicism.4 Thereafter, European intellectual history increasingly revolved around such doctrines, consolidated more and more as doctrinal, stylistic and adversarial.
This opening of choices among doctrines was precisely parallel, through those decades around 1800, with the growing influence of archaeology upon architectural design. We know how that became the battle of the styles – a hardening of doctrines amidst the proliferation of choices among them, and how that also paralleled the fundamental changes in the nature of larger cultural and political authority. Since 1850 of course, classicism has taken on its more general meanings, along with the growing (and softening) uses of the suffix “ism” in the English language. Thus, we might be free to think of it now as indicating something other than a rigid and competitive dogma, as perhaps merely a condition, a state of possessing certain characteristics, much as we might refer to, say, rheumatism, astigmatism, alcoholism or other conditions (though not necessarily all pathological ones!). If we consider the suffix “ist,” however, we find that an important new possibility arises: that although there are Communists, Methodists, and Pessimists who are defined by their adherence to a certain doctrine (their “ism”), there are also pianists, pharmacists and archivists who, in no need of choosing an ultimate, doctrinal authority, instead can be seen simply to practice a certain skill or technique-that is, a way of thinking and working.
To get as close as possible to the workings of architectural classicists in this sense, it would be most instructive to look at the French classical period of the late seventeenth through the middle eighteenth centuries, when the issue of general cultural and political authority was clearly not yet an open question, and when certain attitudes we call classical were thus operating with a naturalness and pervasiveness probably unequalled outside of antiquity itself. Inside a world where its doctrinal basis, the ground of its authority, was not questioned, classical practice could operate freely in the realm of skill and technique and thus could achieve unequalled polish and coherence as a mode of thought. This has been my reasoning for advancing French theory, instead of more traditional benchmarks like Alberti.
This third cluster of meanings is the most complicated to define, partly because its disentanglement from classicism has to be made somewhat artificial for the sake of argument. But in France, something we would have to call classical thinking pre-dated even the invention of the term classicisme by at least two centuries.5 And by distinguishing the definition of classical thought from that of classical objects or classical technique (ists) from classical doctrine (ism) we can also better explain how, strictly speaking, there can be one without the other.
The form which this thinking took in France prior to the invention of classicisme in the early nineteenth century, and as seen in the architectural works of the Mansarts or Gabriel, for example, is best revealed through contemporary French literary theory, between which and architecture there was in fact important mutual influence.6 In the spirit of the French literary concept of le classique, the third cluster of meanings pertains to a sensibility cultivated through a seasoned maturity and confident self restraint. This attitude, in the words of Henri Peyre, inclines towards decorum, endurance, order, clarity, serenity, simplicity and the dissimulation of effort.7 It must be emphasized that these are attitudinal and procedural characteristics more than formal ones. This was made clear by the fact that they were to pervade not only works of literature and art, but that living life itself was to manifest the same kind of technical perfection: polished, carefully considered, an exacting intellectual undertaking carried out with infinite finesse, well-tempered nobility and an uncompromising and devastating reasonableness.” 8
Nicolas Boileau is regarded as having been the primary expositor of these classical ideas in literature.9 In his L’Art PoZátique of 1674 he also included the quality of verisimilitude,10 meaning an evident plausibility derived through reason and common sense, and essential to the social and moral purpose of art. The classicist is thus defined by an attitude toward decorum and tradition, toward cultural and technical authority, toward the nature of the creative process and toward the role of the artist in relation to a social constituency. For Boileau, beyond consideration of formal characteristics of the work of art, beyond even the artist’s thought processes in its conception and execution, were respect for the discourse in the field (through the reasoned criticism of peers) and appreciation by a public audience (with a consciousness already attuned to the same general values, authorities, precedents and sensibilities).
But Boileau’s image of the classical, which he both codified and exemplified in L’Art Poétique, was canonized by the more doctrinal and hyper-intellectual minds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into the rigid, rule-bound formalism which eventually acquired the name of classicism at precisely the moment it came, quite understandably, under attack. The roles of inspiration, emotion and nature, for example, which had been accounted for in the seventeenth century synthesis that Boileau had described, by then had been discounted.11 And the idea of reason — the ultimate value in the mind of the true classicist went from common sense (le bon sens) as verified by the situation and by consensus, to the intellectual abstractions of eighteenth century rationalism which are, of course, far more romantic than classic. 12
Nevertheless the original seventeenth century literary definition of le classique was carried over into architectural theory and practice, both in its time and well into the following century. In architectural terms this attitude can be organized around five points,
FIGURE 3: Orléans Wing at the Chateau at Blois, by François Mansart, 1635-38. Elevation detail.
developed from a reading of Peyre, Boileau, Brunetière, and others.13 An architectural classicist, in this sense, would manifest concern for the following five ideals:
First, theory, meaning the intellectual process of deducing principles from the critical study of examples of esteemed excellence, both ancient and contemporary. The classical is assessed and justified intellectually since it is not merely emotional. It is validated through reasoned discourse since it is not merely idiosyncratic and it is evaluated critically since it is not merely to be archaeologically verified. This accounts for the method of didactic criticism in Blondel’s Cours d’Architecture by which architectural merits and faults may be assessed. 14 Such theorizing is what moves and molds the reasoned consensus of authority and value over time. Prior works can be both assimilated and rigorously criticized, according to evolving rational principles.
Secondly, order, meaning the clear geometric disposition of the natural or visual structure expressed through regularized, proportionally interrelated repetitive elements. The classical can be justified structurally since it presents a coherent and reasonable organizational and compositional system which, at its most rigorously consistent, would also constitute its physical means of support. Thus the classical attitude’s frequent preference for the formal language of classicism, since not only did it originate as a system of actual structural order, but it also remains today as the most complete, finely-tuned, expressive and culturally durable of such systems.
Thirdly, perfection, meaning an ideal which is approached through evolutionary rather than revolutionary change. The classical can be justified enduringly since it disdains the ephemerality and easy excitement of fashion, seeking instead to connect itself to, and endure within, the longest possible temporal context. It discriminates and defers to those standards that seem as if they will endure. This explains how such an attitude has produced the major share of classic works, even though we now also recognize as classics the benchmark works of non-classical periods, like Chartres Cathedral for the Gothic, or the Villa Savoye for romantic modernism. But though the latter is unquestionably a classic, that it fails in classical terms is evident from Le Corbusier’s own substantial abandonment of its visual and technical vocabulary the year after its construction. 15
Fourthly, continuity, meaning a respect for the traditional past of place and context, of building type and of the enduring techniques and principles of the discipline as a whole. The classical can be justified historically since (although it disdains mimicry and mere stylistic conformance) it adapts precedents respectfully and knowledgeably, yet creatively and critically, in light of changing situations. This accounts for the powerful evolutionary traditions in French architecture between 1500 and 1790, despite the waves of fashion engulfing Italy and Germany during this period. judgments of propriety and decorum, essential and central to classical thinking, are based in the continuities of place, type and discipline brought into carefully reasoned equilibrium with the specific aspects of a design situation.
Fifth and finally, appreciation, meaning the capacity of the work to be enjoyed on many levels of taste despite, or should we say because of its high and conscious standards of quality, perfection, harmony, detail and resolution. The classical can be justified publicly since it relies for its validation neither on knowledge of the individual artist’s private expressive intentions, nor on esoteric constructs, techniques or speculations within the field. Being broad and durable, the horizon of environmental experience on which the designer draws is also known and shared by the public at large. From the vague but widespread sense that classical buildings are beautiful, to the most esoteric discriminations of moldings and proportions, there is room for, and an invitation to, appreciation at all levels. Like classical music, it rewards repeated encounters, and many different degrees of attentiveness or prior knowledge. It was a commonplace in classical literary theory that the purpose of art was to give pleasure to the reader and this was folly intertwined with any other moral or social purpose the work might serve.
Of course, it will be realized that to talk intelligently about this frame of mind in modern English requires using the term classicism, but it is perhaps only safe to do so in full recognition of the differences between classicism as a way of thinking and classicism as a category of objects. For Mansart and Gabriel, as for our fullest understanding of them, I would suggest that it was the nature of the creative act of design, and a sense of the breadth, duration and authority of the cultural and artistic contexts in which they were working (at least as much as the visual attributes of the language employed) which might best be regarded as classical. That the French architects exemplified classical thought as much as they did the classical language could be illustrated by numerous examples. Critical of superimposed orders (as found in the Colosseum or the Palazzo Rucellai), they reasoned that a single dominant order should surmount a strong base, better to portray its inherent sacredness and to give its designated Vitruvian character coherently to the building as a whole. On the garden front at Versailles, a vividly embellished Ionic order can thus unequivocally set the tone for the Sun King and his court (FIGURE 2). This technique contrasts with the Palais du Luxembourg, designed by Salomon de Brosse a half-century earlier, but characterizes nearly all subsequent French classical work. 16
The French architects also realized that the orders were, in their essence, a vocabulary of structural frames, not just a decorative grid to be laid across wall surfaces as they were so often used by the Italians. In sympathy with already durable French principles (derived from generations of experience with carpentry framing and structural masonry) the orders were articulated as open frames with vertical continuities and large French windows, thereby minimizing the wall surface (FIGURE 3). Thus the columns and entablatures themselves approach the reality of physical as well as visual structure. Masonry techniques, having been developed with an astonishing virtuosity over generations of French practice, were to present themselves directly, the Italian convention of painted stucco being anathema.17 Yet the high roof, an equally French tradition rational for the climate, was jettisoned in the interests of harmony, restraint and elegance
Emmanuel Héré de Corny, in the Place Stanislas at Nancy (FIGURE 4), varied only incrementally the essential truths established at Versailles and at Jules Hardouin Mansart’s Place Vôndome, despite the passage of the better part of a century. To a classicist, such continuity of form and principle does nothing to diminish appreciation of Héré‘s achievement. On the contrary, it reveals his commitment to durable ideals that had already been, in the main, perfected but were yet open to infinite refinement. Such principled continuity draws the appreciative eye to the nuances, the elegant spatial transitions and gradations of character, the flourishes and embellishments that evoke Nancy’s especially festive exuberance.
FIGURE 4: Place Stanislas, Nancy, France, by Emmanuel Héré de Corny, 1751-75. Façade of the Hôtel de Ville.
Classical reasoning also meant situational specificity; thus the character of each space at Nancy is tuned to its function, whether civic, mercantile, residential or royal. Even the Petite Trianon at Versailles, widely regarded as a paradigm of classical perfection, has four distinctly varied elevations in response to its site and orientation, functions, access and other constraints. Yet each is composed harmoniously within itself and with the others resolving with the utmost decorum both classical idealism and its specific tasks.
It could be argued that these French architects were, because of a rigorously theoretical approach and a confidently critical relationship with both their historical precedents and the cultural and physical specifics of their design situations, more free as designers than either the avant garde (who, like the early Le Corbusier and other modernists, were artificially constrained by an excessive self-consciousness about the Zeitgeist) or the archaeologists (who, like James Stuart and other revivalists, were excessively constrained by the artificially reconstituted authority of the ancients). The measure of their talent was in the use of their freedom to solve specific, situated and often difficult problems well, and to evince in the results decorum, sensible reasoning and the dissimulation of effort. Le classique was thus mainly a sensibility, a way of thinking, much as described by Kenyon Cox in 1911 as “the disinterested search for perfection; it is the love of clearness and reasonableness and self-control; it is, above all, the love of permanence and of continuity. It asks of a work of art not that it shall be novel or effective, but that it shall be fine and noble.” 18
Of course such a benchmark version of architectural classicism raises the fundamental question as to whether it is possible to still produce, or to think, in this way under present conditions and even whether it is appropriate or authentic to do so. Of what value is such self-restraint and traditional continuity in our fast-paced, media-driven society? Of what value is such reasoned technical and compositional maturity in our fashion-conscious architectural star system? Of what value are order, serenity, and simplicity in our jaded culture? Who has resources for the painstaking care and demanding subtleties of such design either to conceive and produce it, or to appreciate it fully? And most fundamentally, what semblance of authority could be invoked to stand behind, to be claimed as a ground, for all the kinds of theoretical justifications described in these five points? Does any consensual discourse exist either in the design fields or the general culture?
Judgment, reason and continuity in all definitions of the classical inevitably rely on solid authority or criteria of some kind. Comparing ourselves to the seventeenth century French, we see, with some considerable relief I am sure, a major discrepancy between what was then an obvious, pervasive and natural cultural authority (crystallized in the absolutist state of Louis XIV) and the fragmentary and artificial semblances of authority which we might be able to discern in our present situation. After all, it is clear that the rise of le classique in France coincided precisely and importantly with the period of consolidation of the French monarchy. With its uniquely absolutist orientation, it is hardly a cultural or political climate to which most of us would choose to return. This contrast in the nature and type of operative authority is the basic issue we confront in trying to come to terms with the cultural significance that more recent versions of the classical might have.
Yet we were already on our way to this disjuncture by the early nineteenth century. The invention of classicism by name coincided exactly with, indeed was caused by, the fresh realization that the only authorities from then on would be fragmented and artificial. Thus when it was named as a doctrine (an “ism”), classical authority was only one of the available stylistic and cultural orientations. It therefore changed from a still-living authority to a revived and hyper-rigid one, from a critically-evolving sensibility to a formulaic one, from a way of thinking to a style. This is why we have the application of the prefix “neo” (revival, renewal) at the same time we have the application of the suffix “Ism,” and why there are so many “neo-classicisms.“19 This is also why St. Pancras Church in London (FIGURE 5), for example, is based not on carefully reasoned criticism of various, wholly-assimilated, esteemed precedents, with criteria derived from the long-term continuity of the classic sensibility, but instead on exact, uncritical, archaeologically faithful adherence to a particular ancient monument (the Erechtheum) simply chosen from among many. In order to constitute itself as a doctrine in a newly relativistic age, it needed to grasp a ready-made body of authority, obligingly provided by the concurrent proliferation of archaeological data.
Thus from early neo-classicism we have much to learn, among our own present neo-classicisms, about how the sense of authority works fragmentary and artificial though it may seem at times, and about what to kind of classical design it is able to sustain. To conclude, and in light of the issues I have raised, I will describe three basic approaches to the classical in recent design work. One approach plays the classical language straight, asserting that the language itself is validated for our age, as much as for any other, by its durability. Here, from within as it were, the tradition seems not to be in another revival, but rather never to have died; its elegance, refinement and world of gracious and powerful associations is claimed to be as relevant to our time as to any other. With the second approach, the works suggest to us ways of referring allusively to the classical language without using the forms literally, or claiming any absolute durability. Sometimes thinness and ephemerality are even virtues; and the success of this allusive genre in the commercial vernacular over the past decade indicates a resonance with our cultural values. Conversely, a third approach reaches for the classical virtues of perfection, harmony and order, and seeks ways to connect convincingly to a classical timelessness, but without employing any recognizable allusion to the language. Here we turn to a certain strain in modernity that eschewed the twentieth century’s more trivial avant-garde fashions, and that came to fruition in the late works of Le Corbusier and even more so in the work of Louis 1. Kahn. 20
The first approach is exemplified in the works of Allan Greenberg. In his designs for the Diplomatic Reception Rooms at the U. S. State Department 21 we find he has advanced his skill with the classical language to quite a remarkable degree, well beyond the tentative thinness and meager budgets of earlier works like the Manchester Connecticut Courthouse,22 and probably far beyond what even an educated clientele is likely to discern. There is a powerful sense that the whole of the classical tradition is at his disposal for
FIGURE 5: St. Pancras Church, London, by W. and H. W. Inwood, 1818-22. View of the Caryatid Portico.
critical elaboration and extension. With similar grandeur and self-assurance, his design for a farmhouse in Connecticut confidently transcends the provinciality of its colonial precedent by playing out a witty, regularized version of Mount Vernon’s irregular fenestration through the window placements on its front facade, and by invoking a more erudite and powerfully baroque sense in its interior detailing. A clear hierarchy of ornamental devices is used to differentiate various doors, axes and rooms within the center-hall plan. As at the State Department, there is a depth and integrity in the use of the language, and hence the confidence to vary it knowingly for witty or refining effects, as when the wallpaper slides in to help make the china cabinet, or when cornice modillions sit at 45-degree angles to help turn corners.
But such convincing works as these notwithstanding, how do we read the claims of orthodox classicism as a group against the background of our fragmented, pluralistic cultural world? Why do we tend to find this approach associated with conspicuous consumption? Does it depend on wealth and position for its authority much as it did in the seventeenth century? Isn’t our cultural world, saturated with Hollywood and advertising, pop culture and MTV, utterly and irretrievably at odds with the venerable, serious, timeless themes that a classical architecture wishes to advance? Is such architecture thus left stranded as but another fragment in our collaged existence, its ultimate message left as an ironic juxtaposition and its ground of authority, no matter with what consummate finesse it is executed, fragmentary as well as ostentatious? Because of their overwhelming rarity in our time, do new classical works now tend to mean mainly these things, before and beneath any of the other messages or virtues the language might normally convey? Has the classical now lost its authentic cultural ground, that authority which could make it speak to us of anything beyond merely its own formal logic? These dilemmas were largely avoided by the kind of classical architecture which became the mainstay of postmodern design practice throughout the1980’s.23 This style received its greatest impetus from the rise to prominence of Michael Graves, whose Portland Building and SUNAR furniture showrooms of 1979 to 1981 were widely publicized. These works clearly referred to the classical language, although stopped far short of using it straight. There were allusions, in varying degrees of literalness, to Schinkel, Ledoux, Pompeiian villas or Palladio, but the whole was managed with a sufficient mix of cubist painting and intuitive artistry so that it could emerge as vividly Gravesian. 24
Graves emphasizes classicism’s capacity to create strong spatial order clearly defining room, passage, sequence and hierarchy. The SUNAR showrooms were usually placed in awkward, given configurations inside existing buildings, and their spatial arrangements needed somehow to be resolved with the greatest amount of grace and clarity. In the first New York Showroom of 1979, a pair of tetrastyles marked thresholds of passage, while a slanted floor grid shifted the axis from the entry to the main display space. The columns presented the traditional foot, body and head but exaggerated the heavy earthbound foot and the ethereal head. Indeed, the common denominator of all Graves’ interiors is the allegorical representation of earth and sky, with humanity, nature and architecture in between. Hence the tetrastyle is also a garden pergola, having only an open frame on top. In the Chicago Showroom of the same year, the hierarchies of orders marched through with an extremely clear message about the directing and subdividing of space. Cross-axes were denoted by tetrastyles over green marble flooring. Side aisles were marked off from a nave by smaller orders set in under square arches, in turn under cornice up-lights which washed the metaphorical sky. No doubt, Graves did more than any other recent architect to bring back an allusive form of classicism for space-defining elements, to rediscover the symbolic and emotional capacities of color, and to suggest that architecture and interior design ought to again have an allegorical, narrative content.
When they were designed, it was interesting and important that the SUNAR showrooms were polemical about the need to re-enrich the blank abstractions of most ubiquitous, commonplace modernism. It was a delight that these forms presented their colorful imagery and quirky proportions as vividly as they did; the physical ephemerality of the gypsum-board surfaces from which they were made was not really of concern (Graves’ belief in the primacy of surface was evident not only in his writings, where he discussed the architectonic capacities of paint, but also in his characteristic method of plan drawing with only hollow outlines of the poché.)25 Yet strictly speaking the classical is by nature not ephemeral and not polemical, and certainly not thinly artificial. The postmodern approach to classicism nevertheless helps reveal our present dilemma: how can we act, classically, in a world where superficiality and the consumption of fashions are inherent in the operation of culture, where artificiality and ephemerality are as ubiquitous as bland modernity?
Greenberg’s courthouse seems to have grappled, even heroically, with this problem in that although it was in a renovated supermarket, we were still reminded of the venerable traditions of human justice. But with most orthodox classicism such reminders seemed only fragmentary, merely awash in the sea of thin, superficial images that saturate our cultural existence. In a parallel way, when emanating from less able hands than Graves’, the images of postmodern classicism, though ubiquitous, seem only artificial. For all their allusions to classical imagery, they seem now merely to contribute to the thinness and superficiality of our cultural landscape.
The last of the three recent approaches shows us that it is possible to place one’s work convincingly into a classical sense of duration without using any allusions at all to the language itself. This is possible from our present view because our environmental, perceptual and historical horizons now include vast amounts of modern architecture (some of it even good!) and modern experience (some of it even beneficial!) so that any reasoned view towards such an ideal of duration would need to take both into account.
Louis 1. Kahn was trained under Paul Cret at the University of Pennsylvania in the full traditions of the academic classicism of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. By coming to terms with modernism as well, however, Kahn evolved a synthesis of discipline and abstraction, of continuity and vision, of tradition and modernity. One of Kahn’s later works, the Phillips Exeter Academy Library in Exeter, New Hampshire, may suffice as an example (FlGURE 6)26 What is perhaps most striking about Kahn’s late works is their almost self-evident timelessness, their position somehow beyond style or fashion, their capacity to connect “Thus from early neo-classicism we have much to learn, among our own present neoclassicisms, about how the sense of authority works, fragmentary and artificial though it may seem at times, and about what kind of classical design it is able to sustain.” convincingly across time through only generalized and qualitative allusions to the whole memory of architectural history at once. But if we examine what contributes to that sense of timelessness, we discover a correspondence to the characteristics of the classical attitude which I have enumerated. If in postmodernism we observed the style without the attitude, then in Kahn we find the attitude without the style.
The Exeter Library presents itself first in reference to the brick and wood-trimmed Georgian buildings of the academy campus of which it forms a continuing part. It abstracts and generalizes that language, however, so it can refer to Roman or medieval equally well. Yet, it is not merely a scraped off version of historical styles either, like so much everyday contextual design, because it confidently brings to our attention its own absorbing content, the dramatic standing of the thick brick walls, the slow opening of their arcuated structure from bottom to top, and the precise insertion of the smooth wood panels at the study-carrel windows (FIGURE 7). The building began, as often in Kahn’s work, with his intuited idea of the fundamental origin and meaning of the institution, in this case a person alone with a book, in the light. The thick-walled perimeter is thus lined with exquisitely crafted white oak carrels, each with an individual window. Kahn’s search for institutional. origins led him far beyond Carnegie classicism, or Richardsonian Romanesque, or functional modernism, in search of a language of maximum temporal resonance, as well as of physical endurance.
The grand inner space is a generalization about monumentality and order which also nevertheless presents its own decisive content: about the purity of the circle, the admission of light, the perfection and durability of material craftsmanship, in addition to other readings about unity and time and institutions, and the possibility of enduring cultural, human values (FIGURE 8). The obvious purity of its form invites further readings about knowledge, truth and the potential of their persistence even beyond the philosophical, cultural and aesthetic upheavals of the modern era, which it acknowledges through its abstractness.
Returning to my five points of classical thinking, we can see that first, through a theoretical synthesis of the modern and the pre-modern, Kahn has acknowledged that modern experience is now also a part of the time-scale to which, if we are classicists, we would want to attach our work. Technology and spatial abstraction are a part of the experience of the world today, part of our horizon for the interpretation of any work; their potentialities can, through critical reasoning, be selectively adapted. Secondly, through his stated ideals of “symmetry, radiance, integrity and wholeness,” Kahn created a structural and compositional order which is presented with maximum clarity, simplicity, permanence, gravity and dissimulated effort. And his attentiveness to the craft of building, to resolving and vivifying the details of construction, down to the air diffusers, is exemplary. Thirdly, through his concern for quality and refinement of form, material and detail, and the full resolution of the purity of geometric space (as well as the deliberate evolution of his own formal ideas from one building to the next), he was clearly about the classical ideal of evolutionary perfection. Fourthly, through his search for the essences of institutions, and the generality of his forms, Kahn made powerful statements about the continuity of the cultural values his architecture embodies. With its strong spatial echoes of the Pantheon, or a Romanesque cathedral, or innumerable other works from all periods that have sought to purify and ennoble their culture’s ideals, Exeter locates its claims to authority beyond individual styles, doctrines, ages, powers or institutions. And finally, by giving the building’s subject matter such diagrammatic clarity, and its spaces and materials such tactile and sensual finesse, Kahn has opened it for rewarding appreciation on many levels of taste, yet also with almost complete assent and sustained interest among the highest levels of the discipline’s critical discourse.
But despite all the classicist’s sensibility which we can attribute to Kahn, what have we lost by the absence of the actual vocabulary of ancient columns and entablatures? Is Kahn’s work any less classical for their absence? Any less engaging? Are his elegance and precision of fit and finish, his resolution of details and finishes, any more or less demanding of appreciation than the ancient molding profiles and proportional systems? Do they carry less important messages about the building, about architecture, about the institution or about how we ought to live? If John Summerson is correct that when it comes to truly discriminating the nuances of the classical language, “the modern eye must often confess itself defeated,“27 then there must be both a reason why (perhaps that modernity has intervened and come to constitute our world), and some consequence for those who would still design with it (and the levels and reasons upon which they can expect it to be appreciated).
Yet it would be presumptuous for me to offer final answers. My purpose has been only to lay out the terms of the questions about the classical both as a general theory and for our time. In theory, what matters most is our ability to disentangle a classical attitude from the forms of the classical style, and to see the roles of duration and authority in defining classicalness. In our time, we have seen three kinds of classicalness, each at least moderately convincing about the discipline and the authority which generates its priorities and decisions. Whatever their relative merits or influence, we can most deeply understand them by judging carefully what kind of authority stands behind the work. Is it fragmentary or artificial, and from what ultimate source does its power come? From the pure internal logic of the classical formal system itself? From claims to power or economic ostentation? From the poetic, if ephemeral, vision of an intuitive artist? From the consumption of artificial images by popular culture? Or from an idealized vision about the fundamental unity of human institutions?
Whichever the case, there seems reason to hope that recent classicisms are not just stylistic, but rather that they offer directions for the rebuilding of a working, if fragmentary, consensus about the value and authority of theory, order, perfection, continuity and appreciation in architectural design and discourse.
Figures
FIGURE 6: Phillips Exeter Academy Library, Exeter, New Hampshire, by, Louis I. Kahn, 1969, exterior
FIGURE 7: Phillips Exeter Academy Library, study carrel.
FIGURE 8: Phillips Exeter Academy Library, central space.
Notes
1. Johnson’s Sheldon Art Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska, of 1963, or Yamasaki’s Northwestern National Life Insurance Headquarters in Minneapolis, of the same year (or for that matter, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York), illustrate the popular efforts during those years to make modern architecture more beautiful and culturally legitimate by draping it in allusions to classical decorum and elegance-an effort now seen to have been as vacuous as it was ephemeral.
2. Paul Imbs, Tresor de la Langue Française, 1977, Volume 5, pages 893, 895-96. Le Grand Robert de la Langue Française (Paris: Le Robert,1985), Volume 2, page 647. Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), Volume 2, pages 466-69.
3. In 1837 Thomas Carlyle described this phenomenon in The French Revolution (New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1847), Volume 11, Book vii, Chapter 1, page 316: “...Catholicism, Classicism, Sentimentalism, Cannibalism: all isms that make up Man in France, are rushing and roaring in that gulf….”
4. Arthur 0. Lovejoy, “Romantic in Early German Romanticism” in Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1948), pages 188-191. Lovejoy describes how the whole concept of romanticism as such was invented ‘in the early 1790’s by Friedrich Schlegel and his circle only as a hypothetical foil to their understanding of the classic art which they revered. Ironically, they were drawn to embrace what they had initially proposed as monstrous! For the debate in France, and its connections to the Schlegels, see Edmond Eggli, Le Débat Romantique en France, 1813-1830 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1933).
5. Ferdinand Brunetière, Histoire de la Littérature Française Classique (Paris: Delgrave, 1921-24). His definitions of le classique appear on pp. 355-57; but despite his obvious fondness for “isme” words throughout the text (at least 32 others such as heroisme and gallicanisme), the word classicisme is used only once, on page 376 of volume 1, where he comments on the futile classicisme of Ronsard’s Françiade in which Ronsard has falsely assumed that it is more important to follow the forms of antiquity that its methods and ideals.
6. For example, Nicolas Boileau in L’Art Poétique (Paris: Hachette, 1888), written in 1674, lavished special praise on the work of François Mansart, as did Voltaire when he mentioned architectural examples. And when architect Germain Boffrand published his Livre d’Architecture in 1745, the text was based on, as he put it, “principles tirées de l’Art Poétiqudede Horace.”
7. Henri Peyre, Qu’est-ce que le Classicisme? (Paris: Droz, 1933), especially the chapter entitled “The Ideal of Art.” For another discussion of these values see René Bray, La Formation de la Doctrine Classique en France (Paris: Hachette, 1927).
8. A point emphasized by H. Caudwell, Introduction to French Classicism (London: Macmillan, 1931), p. 239-43, and other authors who have described that untranslatable French conception of the “honnôte homme.”
9. Boileau, op. cit. Boileau is available in translation as The Art of Poetry, edited by Albert S. Cook (New York: G. E. Stechert & Co., 1926).
10. For an ‘interesting discussion of Blondel’s adaptation ‘in architecture of the literary concept of verisimilitude in relation to truth, see Marc Grignon, “Pozzo, Blondel, and the Structure of the Supplement:’ in Assemblage 2 (February, 1987), pages 103-109.
11. For a discussion of this phenomenon, quite analogous to the late eighteenth and nineteenth century phenomenon of neo-classicism in architecture, see Gordon Pocock, Boileau and the Nature of Neo-Classicism (Cambridge: University Press, 1980), pages 1-3. Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), page 292, cites Henri Peyre as having claimed that in English the term classicism can be taken to refer to an exaggerated rule-boundedness and formalism, far beyond anything deducible from Greek or Roman forms, while classicisme can not be so employed in French (in Peyre’s Le Classicisme Française (New York: Editions de la Maison Française, 1942).
12. Jeanne Haight, The Concept of Reason in French Classical Literature, 1635-1690 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), especially Chapter 3, “Reason as Norm,” ‘in which the author distinguishes three variations in the meaning of reason during this period: raison-verité (constant and immutable, an ideal), raison-prudence-necessité (accommodating to imperfect circumstances), and raison raisonnement (historically contingent, evolving, empirical and consensual).
13. The author is indebted to the teaching and archival notes of Professor Peter Collins, who presented a series of distinguished lectures on the classical in architecture at McGill University and at the University of Cincinnati during the years just prior to his death in 1981, and who held the French classical tradition, down through Auguste Perret, ‘in particularly high esteem.
14. Jacques-François Blondel, Cours d’Architecture, ou Traité de la Décoration, Distribution, et Construction des Bâtiments, edited by M. Patte, 9 volumes, Paris, 1771-77. 15. The Pavilion Suisse, at the City University of Paris, of 1930, for which Le Corbusier dramatically revised his visual and tectonic vocabulary, following the realization that the white stucco aesthetic of the 1920’s was physically, if not also aesthetically, ephemeral.
16. In literature this change would correspond to Boileau’s advocacy, based on his reading of Horace, of the “distinction des genres” whereby each type of subject should have its own particular mode of expression. In urging this idea, Boileau was critical of early seventeenth century dramatists like Cornielle.
17. Also anathema, it is clear, were Italian designers, even the most distinguished. Witness the fate of Bernini at the Louvre.
18. Kenyon Cox, The Classic Point of View (New York: Scribners, 1911).
19. Neo-classicism, from our historical perspective, clearly lacks the kind of stylistic coherence that can be attributed to, say, baroque or even Romanesque. This illustrates the phenomenon that I am describing, a proliferation of fragmentary authorities, just as there was a proliferation of archaeological models, reports and interpretations.
20. William J. R. Curtis elaborates this point in his “Modern Transformations of Classicism,” Architectural Review, August 1984, pages 39-47.
21. Architectural Record, October 1985, pages 152-161; including George L. Hersey’s essay, “Allan Greenberg and the Classical Game.”
22. David Cast, “Good, Ordinary, Classical Modern,” Progressive Architecture, October 1981, pages 80-83.
23. Paul Goldberger, “In Perpetuum,” Architectural Record/Record Houses, Mid-April 1986, pages 110-12, 172-73.
24. For the New York SUNAR Showroom, see Martin Filler, “Grand Allusions,” Progressive Architecture, June 1979, pages 86-89. For the Chicago Showroom, see Martin Filler, “Better and Better,” Progressive Architecture, September 1979, pages 148-53.
25. Michael Graves, “The Value of Color,” Architectural Record, June 1980, page 95.
26. For Louis Kahn’s Library at Exeter, see Architectural Review, June 1974, pages 330-42, including a critical essay by William Jordy.
27. John Summerson, The Classical Language of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1963), page 11. All photographs by author John E. Hancock is a professor of architecture at the University of Cincinnati, where he teaches architectural history, theory and design.