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Art, Tradition, and Architecture

Abstract

Most historical causes emerge from mistakes that men make about the world, that is why those historians who were independently prepared to take subjectivity into account make so many mistakes about causes. Perceptions vary in predictable ways with time, and social status; that is why individual sets of minds lend themselves to sociological inquiry. But perceptions vary also with temperament, with unconscious conflicts, with disharmonies among the public sources of perception. An individual incorporates the shapes of his culture, his craft, and his family, but his character is a unique mixture of conformity. He is not a receptacle for external influences, not always an effect but often a cause.

Keywords: cause, thing-free, perception, functionalism,

Introduction

A tradition may be a fanciful mask for sordid motives, but it may also be a repository for precious craft, wisdom and an authentic defense of threatened standards. The historian needs a more and entirely different kind of light from psychology than this. He needs theories that will permit him to construct an explanation of all conduct and motives, rational and irrational, intelligent or realistic, and he needs those theories because he renders psychological verdicts much of the time, deriving them quite unsatisfactorily from common sense, and from bold, rationalistic interests. The historian uses psychoanalysis as a way of seeing. If history teaches anything, it is that the unexpected is to be expected. The nonrational component in human experience is quite simple and pervasive. Each historical world generates historical causes of its own, even though each of these worlds initially emerges to satisfy some elemental urge. The variety of causes for their life’s work is not of their own creating, it is an overwhelming fact of their existence. Most men do not make their world, they find it. Most of what they think, feel, perceive, and do is no more than unreflective reenactment of social habits, and cultural stereotypes. The innovator is indebted to materials that the past has provided for him. Man, without culture is not merely deficient, he is unthinkable. His very language, including the formulas with which he rejects the past, is anchored in the collective atmosphere into which he is born. Sigmund Freud said there are only two sciences: psychology, pure and applied, and natural science. Sociology, the study of human behavior of people in society was nothing more than applied psychology. The historian lives in the world of the middle range and the middle size. He is in the position of the architect who makes do with Newtonian gravity or Euclidean geometry, since the language of quantum physics and modern mathematics apply to worlds either much larger or much smaller in which he piles his trade.

Talent and Tradition

Modern artists found inspiration a highly problematic endowment. Many artists saw it as the source of their originality. And that originality defines their personal talent, their relation to the tradition. Some of the most self-assertive of modern architects have acknowledged their public’s share in the making of architectural art and sculpture. Paul Rudolph has said, “sculpture is never architecture and architecture is never sculpture.” There has to be a balance. Buildings have to be of three qualities: durability, convenience and beauty. These do not add up to an architect’s license for aesthetic willfulness, but if an architect has a distinctive forceful talent, it would offer a persuasive argument that his private vision has played a significant part in his public performance.

In architectural perception there exists a tension between surface and depth perception. Architects pay little attention to the coherent things shaped around them. They may dissect them into arbitrary fragments and region them into irrational forms to suit their unconscious urge for symbolization. In other words, architectural perception tends to be not only Gestalt-free, but also thing-free. We observe this thing-free model better in primitive or irrational types of architecture which also demonstrate the Gestalt-free modes of perception. We see how in some primitive architecture the unconscious symbolism hidden in the building’s form may distort the realistic appearance of the outlines. Real things impress us in buildings by their constancy. They appear to be the same in spite of their many varying aspects of geometrical shapes.

Mass Production and the International Style

Architecture responds to social pressures in the most conspicuous memorials to its engagement with the world. Nor do private dwellings every wholly escape the public dimension. Many seekers after shelter restrict their fantasies to domestic memories of their childhood and are satisfied with duplicating the tastes of their parents. If architects really wanted to develop a genuine historically valid form of expression, they would have to revolutionize the visual education of the young and at the same time make intensive studies of mass production in housing. Overloading and false romanticism in place of good proportions and practical simplicity have for all purposes became the tendency of our age. Mass production had proved beneficial in combining the highest quality of raw material, and labor with low prices, to treat houses as industrial products would have to employ technology in the service of cultural ends. The road to the future lay in the intelligent application of prefabrication and standardization. The noisy debate between Expressionists and Rationalists, between adversaries and advocates of the machine, between champions of the solitary genius and those of anonymous designers, between ancients and moderns was in fact anything but the clear combat that the spectacle of public discord makes it appear.

Architecture has been complicated by the proliferation of the glass cages and concrete prisons that have come to dominate the office districts in the name of the International style. The most celebrated designers of our time have given the public not what it wants but what they have been grimly confident it ought to want. Looking at the cities, the universities, the suburbs built in our century we can hardly dismiss this posture as mere pose. It is true that the architect with a new sense of space, a new grasp of material, a new perception of form needs more than the scale model to test his ideas. The innovator must offend reigning taste. The modernist slogan, functionalism, which is associated with Gropius has obscured its essential flexibility. Dogmatism in fact was its enemy. Construction of a livable space was its overriding consideration. Functionalism includes comfort, intimacy, and aesthetic satisfaction. The beautiful is always truthful. To be expressive and flexible with spaces, to deploy materials candidly, was only half of the architect’s assignment. The aesthetic, though inseparable from the useful, could not properly be reduced to it. The liberation of architecture from ornament, the emphasis on its structural functions, and the concentration on concise and economic solutions, represent the purely material side of that formalizing process on which the practical value of the new architecture depends. The aesthetic satisfaction of the human soul is just as important as the material. Both find their counterpart in that unity which is life itself.

Before modernism, symbols and signs were common cultural property. Everyone knew the meaning of art as constituting a moment of frozen history, insolently refusing to age while generations who know the way to decorative designs owe nothing to familiar shapes but discussing the possibilities of synesthesia, which playfully experimenting with color and taste of sounds, or the sound of colors and letters served to emancipate art from anecdotes, from resemblances as from natural appearances and declared that all art aspire towards the condition of music, as it were the character for abstract art rejecting the sentiment of romanticism. They were searching for the purity in art, and for universal principles of beauty not being mere sensations. They thought of Cubism for taking a step toward abstraction. Artists had them see the possibility of doing art without the natural aspect of form, using straight lines placed in rectangular positions. The adage became ‘modern art is for modern man.’

The Search for Order and Clarity

Those rhythmic and relentless rectangles of Cubism may speak for search of order and clarity amidst the chaos of modernity. Then the cultivated men gradually turned away from the natural and headed towards the abstract life. This made the public aware of the possibilities of pure plastic art and to demonstrate its relationship to, and its effect on, modern life in accord with the spirit of modern times. The task of plastic art was to bring clarity into the world, a matter that is of great importance to humanity. It is the task of art to express a clear vision of reality. This made the artist appear as a liberator by freeing mankind from subjectivity, from confusion and from the oppression of time. The world then is caught in a struggle between antagonistic forces, chaos, disequilibrium, confusion battling order, balance and clarity. Art and life illuminate each other, they reveal their laws according to which a real and living balance is created towards clarity and purity. Pure intuition contains a psychological component. The art of architecture exerts itself in a true space, one in which we walk and which the activity of our bodies occupies.

A building is not a collection of surfaces, but an assemblage of parts in which length, width and depth agree with one another in a certain fashion and constitute an entirely new solid that comprises an internal volume and an external mass. The architectural masses are determined by the relationship of the parts to each other, and the parts to the whole. A building moreover is rarely a single mass. It is rather a combination of secondary masses and principal masses. This treatment of space attains and extraordinary degree of power, variety, and virtuosity. The space that presses evenly on a continuous mass is as immobile as that of mass itself. But the space that penetrates the voids of the mass, and is invaded by the proliferation of its reliefs, is mobile. This architecture of movement assumes the qualities of wind, of flame, and of light; it moves within a fluid space. The architecture of stable masses defines a massive space. Mass offers the double and simultaneous aspect of internal mass and external mass, and that the relation of one to the other is a matter of peculiar interest to the study of form in space. Exterior volumes and their profiles interpose a new and entirely human element upon the horizon of natural forms, to which their conformity or harmony, when most carefully calculated, always adds something unexpected.

The unique privilege of architecture among all the arts is not that of surrounding as it were, guaranteeing a convenient void, but of constructing an interior world that measures space and light according to the laws of geometrical, mechanical, and optical theory which is necessary implicit in the natural order, but to which nature itself contributes nothing. Light not only illuminates the internal mass but collaborates with the architecture to give it its needed form. Light itself is a form, since the rays streaming forth at predetermined points are compressed, attenuated, or stretched in order to pick out variously unified and accented members of the building, for the purpose either of tranquilizing it or of giving it vivacity. Light is form.

Abstract Building Design and Misuse of Materials

Peasant architecture was swept away and replaced by a sophisticated one. Industrial revolution’s design for mass consumption improved dexterity. This explains the phenomenon of the collapse of aesthetic values, it also explains why it is that the most forward-pointing work so often came from outsiders. The reason why it came from engineers is that the century was one of materialism and of science and technology. The progress was made at the expense of aesthetic sensibility of the kind that would have granted acceptance to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. The Crystal Palace met with success, but so also did the horrors of decorative art displayed in it. Nowadays, architects consider their buildings to be liberated from the local and specific demands that had shaped architecture in the past. They are directed to design buildings of simplified geometric form in the abstract, deriving its form from the symbolic sheathing of the building frame. The nature of the architectural product changed completely, and the result was a characteristic building type that used far more energy than the buildings it succeeded. This change of building design is widely accepted.

The materials of buildings changed from natural material to synthetic ones, with an increase in the amount of energy needed to produce them. The form developed from an effort to speed design and construction by making as many components as typical as possible. Architects depended on mechanical cooling to compensate for the heat gain on the outside from the sun, and on the inside from artificial lighting and body heat. Moreover, curtain walls have far weaker performance in resisting heat loss during the winter. Mies van der Rohe’s project for an all glass tall building became the holy grail for our generation of architects, even though the performance of glass as a material developed to double glazing with various coatings. The partially mirrored glass that reflects radiant heat and the sun’s heat away from the building while still allowing vision is more energy consumptive than clear glass. Misuse and overuse of materials to perform specific functions are unacceptable aesthetically as they are economically. The extensive use of plastics and synthetics in place of natural materials has also increased energy use. Today, vinyl and vinyl asbestos are the predominantly available replacement, but they tend to break down suddenly under extended ultraviolet light or sheer passage of time. Architects and engineers are now talking of total energy systems for buildings.

Conclusion

In the pursuit on the part of the historian to explain what made something happen, but is reluctant to theorize about it, he is not likely to take his instances from art, but to draw his classic examples from portentous catastrophes. Historians who have offered explanations of their causes have never commanded general assent. The arts follow civilization and spring from all its customs. Most artists are convinced that art expresses the worlds in which it was made; their argument employs openly or covertly the language of cause. It understands art to be an effect. To assign the dimensions of breadth and depth to art is only the beginning of wisdom. Each sort of human activity has its characteristic cluster and hierarchy of causes. Yet, while the distribution of causes varies in expected ways, each event contains types of causes in combinations that we can surmise but not wholly determine in advance. Art enjoys so special a status in historical analysis. And even in those rare instances in which causes prove to be principally of one sort, the kind of which the historian is likely to find by, rather than preceding, investigation. Cause is a conjurer, concealing tricks in its capacious bag that even the experienced cannot wholly anticipate. Private motives and responses can never provide the explanation of an event because an event never wholly corresponds to individual intentions, or even to the sum of their conflicts. The historic event is a compromised formation, psychological cause can provide only part of the impetus resulting in what we see. There is a cause for everything, but we do not know it. To know, to understand is happiness.

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[wagihyoussef]

Post-Academic Architecture

Abstract

The perfection of architecture is displaced from the present to the past, and is dissolved in philosophical science. Architects are convinced their philological and analytical ability found problems to resolve only in the architecture of the past, often changeable with changes of taste, but nevertheless kept constant its aspiration toward universal aesthetic values. But to extricate themselves from the double yoke of classic architecture, historians sought afar, discovering folk works from the Far East. If it is true that current buildings are the present-day interpretation of the past, then present day architecture is the basis of all history of architecture. However, it is essential not to confuse architecture with the viewer's taste, because aesthetics cannot create systems of knowledge, such as logic, but can only supply models for judgment. These models are symbols conceived as works of art reduced to their simplest expression (belonging to representations of line, surface and volume), which depend on perceptions that are related to the sphere of thought and symbolic sympathy that assume external form as symbols of its existence.

Keywords: cultural stereotypes, false romanticism, sincerity, true beauty, formlessness, irrationality

Introduction

Since civilization is but the individual writ large, all civilization constructs a precarious order imposed on seething disorder beneath. One is compelled to be alert, not merely to what humans perceive but also to what they do not perceive. The springs of action that are invisible are often more consequential than those that parade their power. Psychology is not the sole property of the private world where its authority is obviously commanding its forms on an essential part of the entire world from which historical causes emerge. It is active in culture and craft. Therefore, all history must be in significant measure psychohistory, in cause and effect, so that all historical explanation must include psychological elements. Most psycho-historians confine themselves to psychobiography. History is only the anatomy of unreason.  But to restrict psychohistory to psychopathology is to turn back from a supreme opportunity.  Human beings want to plunge into the past to grasp all existence with both hands. They need histories incorporating hopes and frustrations, anxieties and fantasies, obsession and regression, not segregating them. They need to know about the history of culture, its technology and its social structure, its play and its art.

Private motives and responses can never provide the explanation of an event because an event never wholly corresponds to the sum of individual intentions. There are many kinds of conservatism each of them enshrined behind the sheltering wall of habit and jealously guard against attack. In our modern world, industrialized, specialized and professionalized servants have become masters, which is to say, effects have become causes. Most men do not make their world, they find it.  Most of what they think, feel, perceive, and do is no more than the unreflective reenactment of social habits and cultural stereotypes.  The most innovative among them is indebted to materials that the past has provided for him.  There is a cause for everything, but we may not always know it.

The Modernist Movement

The modernist movement was not a mistake, but its origins lie in grand misreading.  The call for sincerity and originality was commonplace in nineteenth century art and architecture to foster a tradition of originality. Difficulties arose only when it became necessary to embody originality and not eccentricity in design.  In our 21st century critics have seen the artist's emancipation from nature as indispensable in our modern sensibility, and turning our back on imitation; thus, participating in the making of modernism’s meaning of simplicity to the way subjects are comprehended and depicted, and not ceaselessly depicting the past, but in the spectacle fashionable life.

Modernity lies here in the ephemeral, the fugitive, and the contingent.  The architect must learn to look and forget what schools have drilled into him.  The years of Walter Gropius and Piet Mondrian span decades in which exhilaration with the new did combat with regret for the old, by designs that are utopian, striving for clarity, and calling for a psychology which recognizes that mechanism as part of normal predictable behavior. We are enveloped and soaked in the atmosphere of the marveling, but we do not see it.  The heroism of modern life will disclose itself to the open-eyed architect who sets up house in the heart of the multitude and contribute his bit to that immense dictionary of modern life. The architect marvels at the eternal beauty and the astonishing harmony of life in the nations. To the modern artist pure art is to create a suggestive magic containing at the same time the object and the subject, the world external to the artist.

Architecture responds to social pressures in the most visible way.  Many seekers after shelter are admittedly undemanding as aesthetic illiterates. They restrict their fantasies to domestic memories of their childhood and are satisfied with duplicating the tastes of their parents.  The previous decade saw an impassioned struggle for the soul of German design, and the German in return admired the English way of designing their domestic environment. As a result, overloading and false romanticism replaced good proportions and practical simplicity, and have, for all purposes, become the tendency of our 21st. century architecture while the road to the future lay in the intelligent application of prefabrication and standardization.

Art and Nature

The debate between expressionists and rationalists, between adversaries and advocates of the machine, between champions of the solitary genius, between ancients and moderns in fact was often a civil war in the soul of the designer. The rise of the machine and the emergence of mass production had raised complex problems to which only the simpleminded would offer a simple solution. For instance, the development from the genius of the Renaissance to the Baroque style is characterized by an increase of movement expressed, for instance, in the change from a circular to an elongated shape, from a square to a rectangle with a sense of direction, as well as the use of convergent and divergent shapes composed of curved contours and surfaces.

The relation of art to nature has always been problematic; Picasso has asked if anyone has ever seen a natural work of art. Nature and art, being two different things, cannot be the same thing. Art has always enjoyed a factitious immortality. Before the advent of modernism, symbols and signs were common cultural property, yet even in those days art constituted a moment of frozen history, refusing to age, while realistic art intimated its distance from nature to all who would look. All art aspires towards the condition of music. Art is the path of ascension, away from matter. To take this path in art makes it necessary for the artist to eschew the portrayal of motion and activity.

In fact, art has become incomprehensible.  It has been thought of as a means of interpreting the nature of life to human eyes. Now, what we are supposed to find in the art of the past no longer makes sense to us.  Art had fallen into the danger of losing form by trying to become a mechanically corrected reproduction of nature.  What we now call the sense of form is the capacity to furnish visible objects with properties, such as clarity, unity, harmony, and balance. Now form began to suffer disturbance, created by civilization, and man’s natural sense of form is threatened. The formal devices used are submerged in the statement of the effect. Good form does not show. It is seen to dissolve into content to conform to the beholder's way of perceiving things, and finding himself concerned with shapes.  Is it a device for escaping from the compelling call of art?  What we need is interpretation capable of opening the eyes to the messages transmitted by form rather than shapes and ultimate reality.  Perceiving means finding form in its structure.  In this way it expresses harmony, dominance, contrast and similarity, movement and rest, equilibrium and so forth.  Form is the representation of an object to make it pleasurable. Form is an indispensable prerequisite for the perceptual characterization of the content.

Order and Complexity

Order governs the relations among the parts of an entity. It derives from the overall theme to which the behavior of all parts must conform.  Without order, the organs of the human body would work at loggerheads with each other, and the various functions and strivings of the mind would fight each other chaotically, and our senses could not function.  The visible shape of an object must be clearly organized if we are to recognize, remember, and compare it with others.  If the mind is unable to perceive and create order, man would not survive. Irrational shapes need not be disorderly. On the contrary, the rectangle of the golden section conveys to most observers the satisfying impression of being just right, balanced and harmonious.  In architecture, many shapes and relations are rational while in painting rationality is an exception.

Complexity is the multiplicity of the relationships among the parts of a complex. Order and complexity are antagonistic. When one increases the complexity of an object, order will be harder to achieve. Order and complexity, however, cannot exist without each other. Complexity without order produces confusion, and order without complexity produces boredom. Order is needed, however, to cope with both the inner and outer world. Great designs combine high order with high complexity. In consequence, these produce different interpretations of nature. The historian is accustomed to distinguishing these seemingly opposing attitudes as the Classic and the Romantic. Landscape offers an escape from all-encompassing order. The highly defined irrationality of the Japanese garden presents a supreme universal order into which man can fit himself by sensing it and letting it emanate from himself. Rules and classifications are applicable, but they deal only with balance and structural similarities, not with exact measurement. These clearly man-made objects do not express the mastery of man over nature. This is a manifest confirmation of what the eye senses everywhere without being able to prove it. The highly rational garden pattern in the French tradition proclaims man's triumph over nature upon which he has imposed his own kind of order, subjecting nature to quantitative rules and classifications.

The physical world, although magnificently organized by the law of nature, is supposed to present no such lawfulness to the eyes. The appearance of the world is shapeless, brought about by mental operations remote from the primary experience of perception, by memory, and perhaps by thinking. It is this that divides men into artistic natures and purely intellectual abstract natures. Visual organization that we experience in the world is determined by the nature of images impinging on the eyes. Since what we see as reality depends on what we expect to see, the effect of illusion is obtained when an image matches the preconceptions of the observer. Since the visual world, in and of itself, is taken to be shapeless some non-perceptual power must be doing the job of separating one object from the next, discovering similarities and differences, inferring generalities from individual instances, and establishing the character of any peculiar species or thing. Accordingly, we are supposed to own the world as we see it since we have the capacity of detaching ourselves from the reality of what we see dispersed in infinite complexity. Cassirer, for instance, speaks of the need to deliver the contents of sensory or intuitive experience from isolation in which they originally occur.

Architecture also belongs to tradition that is necessary to follow, not to imitate, because detachment from tradition would mean to fall back on crude natural capacity, and to imitate would mean to renounce the originality of genius. Architecture should be imagined according to peculiar original ideas of the human spirit. Negative appreciation for classical reason of Gothic architecture is not wholly abandoned. Architects substituted the beautiful works of antiquity, from which blind imitation tried to take the external forms, without the spirit which animates. Characteristic beauty is the root of beauty, but from the root one passes to the fruit of true beauty, which is the dominating essence of form, to the beauty of the mind, itself. For beauty to become a concept, universalized, and no longer individual, produces not only absolute beauty, but is also able to break its uniformity with diversity of expression. In consequence, the aim of architecture is to manifest the truth under the form of sensible representation.  The aim of architecture is the expression of a general idea by means of forms, inorganic nature of masses proportioned and disposed according to the laws of geometry and mechanics. Its material forms can symbolize a mind, not contain it.  The mind asks for more ideal forms, less material, a vaster field of representation, richer and more varied materials, an expression more lively and profound. Nature itself becomes more spiritualized, everywhere presenting a reflection of thought, an echo of feeling.

From Formlessness to Form

Architecture achieved the stature of true art only during two periods, the Greek and the Romanesque.  The essence of architecture would thus be a progress from the formless to the formed.  The formless, that is the material of art, is the original practical demand for enclosed and covered space.  Form is not a pre-existing fact that must be impressed on the material. Sensible form has no existence outside the material, and it is the most coherent expression possible of the original practical need. The Greek stone temple has its origins in a wooden structure and is the highest architectural expression of those formal elements that originally expressed the practical requirements of wood construction. The Gothic displayed marvels of structural ability but is not a coherent development and does not fulfill a functional requirement. The Romanesque style with its enclosed spaces covered by vaults is much superior to it.  Here the shell is unified, there is no question of a vault punctuated by supports but a vault that rises from the very ground through the solid walls. Typically, the Romanesque style abandons columns for piers – These piers are pieces of wall left between interstices and their most perfect expression is the clustered pier because it is a direct continuation of the ribbed vault. The Romanesque style is echoed in Brunelleschi's and Michelangelo's domes, the latter completely frees itself of all ties with materiality to become pure form.

There is a need for unity of structure and decoration and the possibilities inherent in the new methods of construction for the use of space, as the dimension of feverish life of the machine age, to have beauty.  It is a call to not confuse utilitarianism with what is an awareness of a historical actuality. Architecture is a matter of surfaces, masses and voids, so it is necessary to spatial conventions that determine the value of each element in relation to a preconceived image of space. The empirical data governing execution must be reduced to a system, reducing a factual situation to an abstract scheme and obscuring its historical awareness and ascendancy to intellectualism, to bridge the abyss between reality and ideality, not separated from morality, politics and religion, besides the ethical and social.  Thus, the need for a history of a new architecture becomes apparent in terms of discoveries in structural methods of the development of form, and social change.

Conclusion

Modern architecture has been the object of tremendous ideological movement.  Crystal Palace built in London and the Eiffel Tower in Paris are important affirmations of constructional honesty and seriousness in comparison with the eclectic and incoherent combining of historical styles that are usual in public buildings. Function enters the realm of art by way of visual expression. Adolf loos asserted that architecture should be counted among the arts only to the minor extent to which it is concerned with tombs and monuments since the contamination of art and material purpose "profanes the highest". He was preceded by Schopenhauer who remarked that architecture, to the extent to which it fulfills practical purposes, cannot be called an art. This is because when architecture serves utility, it serves the will, that is, material needs rather than pure cognition. Separation of expression is evident in discussions of symbolism in architecture. Palladio, for instance, recommended that our temples be made round because a circle is the most proper figure to show unity, infinite essence, and uniformity.

The perfection of architecture is displaced from the present to the past, and is dissolved in philosophical science, because architects are convinced their philological and analytical ability found problems to resolve only in the architecture of the past, often changeable with changes of taste, but nevertheless kept constant its aspiration toward universal aesthetic values. But to extricate themselves from the double yoke of classic architecture, historians sought afar, discovering folk works from the Far East. If it is true that current buildings are the present-day interpretation of the past, then present day architecture is the basis of all history of architecture.  However, it is essential not to confuse architecture with the viewer's taste, because aesthetics cannot create systems of knowledge, such as logic, but can only supply models for judgment.  These models are symbols conceived as works of art reduced to their simplest expression (belonging to representations of line, surface and volume), which depend on perceptions that are related to the sphere of thought and symbolic sympathy, that assumes external form as symbols of its existence.

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