The Growth of Architecture

Progress, Volume XII, Issue 8, 1 April 1917, Page 928

The Growth of Architecture

By HALSEY RICARDO, F.R.1.8.A., in “ Architecture”

On nearly the last page of that amazingly able little book by Professor Lethaby on architecture—a book that all interested in architecture ought to possess and study with close attentionthere is this pregnant statement: "No art that is only one man deep is worth much; it should be a thousand men deep." It has been much the —especially from the time of the Early Italian Renaissance onwards — accentuate the names of the architects of the famous masterpieces, and to regard them the architects —as the sole creators and originators of their works. 1 do not mean that they regarded themselves, or that we regard them, as independent of tradition and experience; but that we look upon such men as Brunclleschi, Braniaute, Peruzzi, Michael Angelo, Sir Christopher Wren, and so forth, as creative ends in themselves, as independent phenomena who individually affected and controlled the tendency of their time. But from another point of view we may look upon them as resultants rather than causes; the environment has produced them, they have not constructed the environment. Samuel Butlerthe author of "Erewhon"puts it aphoristically in this way: An egg is not the means by which a hen contrives to produce another bird; the hen is the contrivance by which an egg enables itself to produce another egg. The stream of life which is the cardinal thing—is immortal, and the various mortal shapes in which it manifests itself to our eyes are the outward sign of its current, and owe their characteristics to the actual composition of the stream at that moment of their appearance, its structure being the synthesis of effective individual influences resolved into a kind of general quality and direction. To come to our own particular tributary of this stream, we may take the building instinct in mankind as immortal — is to say, as co-existent Avith mankind itself. Its manifestation at any particular period of the Avorld's history depends upon the ideals prevalent at that time, and the structural resources —in the matter of technical abilities and materials —of the builders. The dominant factor determining these manifestations is the main stream of life carrying the aspirations and voicing the ideal of the nation, the constructional instinct being secondary and tributary to the greater stream. With the egg the simple ideal is, no doubt, the preservation of the endless chord of life, without attempting much control over the intermediate

phenomena which serve as carriers. It deplores celibacy naturally, and resists violent endeavours at crossings; species are, comparatively, fixed, and hybridization is only permissible Avithin defined limits. Subject to these conditions, the hen may do Avhat she likes, and mate with Avhom she pleases—it is her egg that is the justification of her existence.

With a nation the issues are more involved. The chord of life consists of many strands, closely and loosely interAvoven, and beside it are many supple-

mentary and contributary threads, running parallel, running crossways, obstructing, blending, confusing, or accentuating the main issues of life. "Sports" occur: "throw-backs" to some predominant or persistent strand in the main cablediversions into new or reactionary channels —accelerations and slackening of speed; the seeming tangle now clearing itself and again shrouding itself indecipherably. It has its nodes, its pulsations; at times it is lyrical in its outcry, at others solemn in its vibration, mysterious in its silence. It voices the passions, the hopes, of a thousand hearts, for it is the pulse of the nation and the nation's ideal is in its utterance. This history of the world is shown by its art, with a faithfulness that no other record can approach—for it is not consciously a record, and has no side to take in politics or in government, beyond ministering to their requirements. By their skill in engineering—especially hydraulic engineering— Mesopotamia was a fruitful and verdant land; they had mathematics enough to be land surveyors and astronomers, and in a country where the nights are clear, and a considerable portion of life is carried on beneath the starry splendour of the firmament, astrology takes a prominent place, in religion and in the details of daily life. But their art shows them to have been a cruel people, yet with a great capacity of suffering born stolidly and without resistance. With the Egyptians it was otherwise. The bulk of the population were -devoted agriculturists. They hated war, and had no delight in the pomp and circumstance of military display. The Arab delight in the horse of war — as witness the Book of Job spelt misery and physical pain to them, as evidence of their conscription and servitudeand in their pictures of animal life the horse appears rarely as a beast of burden or traction. But with the animal life about them the Egyptians show an exceptional sympathy. Think what it means to have acquired the ability to draw those hieroglyphics, to have seized upon and reduced the vital characteristics of bird and beast to such simple formulae, and yet so instinct with the individuality and power of the thing represented. In mediaeval times the constitution of society

Avas quite different ; instead of one vast empire regulated by an oligarchy of aristocracy, under the direction of a field marshal, Ave get a feudal system of government, side by side with independent communes. Cities were virtually republics in the Thirteenth or Fourteenth Centuries, and life Avas fiercely competitive, full of expansion—and the enthusiasm folloAving it —engendered by the new forces and sentiments in peoples hitherto quasinomad, and predatory rather than gregarious, outside the tribal connections. Their architecture Avas the architecture of equipoise architecture of the mason in excelsis and of the craftsman, as a builder, whether he Avorked in stone, timber, or metal. Different from the decadent Roman architecture, the early mediaevali.e. to

the middle of the Fourteenth Century integral in all its features. Columns and pilasters Avere not applied for effect, or to mask the facts of construction; they sprang from the constructional

necessities of the case. And while the Romans (under the empire) could afford to be lavish both with their materials and their labour, the builders during the Middle Ages had to be as sparing and resourceful, on both these particulars, as their ambitions would permit. Roman art was the outcome of the Roman idealhis outlook and point of view upon life. This is the main point. His materials and methods of workmanship were of only secondary importance. Relying on his cement to achieve his daring constructions, he often had to build in stone countries, where the lime was weak and stone was hard to quarry—he raised basilicas, barracks and palaces undiscouraged, built bridges, aqueducts, and viaducts on the same grandiose scale as he was accustomed to in the Campagna round Rome. Their modulus of construction was imperial, the mediaeval modulus was civic, almost parochial. The Roman had no internal insurrections to consider; his contest was against the far-off barbarian. The citizen, from the Eleventh Century onwards, had to fear, besides party quarrels, the encroachment of the barons and feudal superiors; t"he passage, if not the invasion, of alien kings; to defend themselves against organized bands of brigands, and to extinguish any attempt at competition from a neighbouring city. But for the churchwhich was common to all the peoples in Europe—architecture would have become petty, jealous and sullen. It fostered the element of romance, it kept the crafts together under its aegis, and gave them their opportunity to develop. The same spirit that was ready to abandon all immediate earthly gain, in undertaking to wrest the Holy Sepulchre from the grasp of the Infidel, produced the churches of Chartres, Amiens and Beauvais. Even the military architecture was a product of the. church's encouragement of religious enthusiasm. . Kings as well as great lords hastened to Palestine to grapple with the Saracen and drive him from the land. There they encountered an architecture that was as old as Nebuchadnezzar, and, what was far more exasperating, appeared virtually impregnable. There was much to be learned from these methods of offence and defence, and when the warriors returned to their own homes they built castles like Chateau Gaillard, Pierrefonds, and our many English castles, all embodying the contrivances they had contended with so exhaustingly in the eastern lands. In the Assyrian room at the British Museum one sees pictures of the storming of towns, with all the apparatus of siege and defence—of Avails, moats, drawbridge, machicolations, battlements and loopholes for the archers. All the crafts Averc concerned in building the cathedral, the monastery, the castle, and the town hallthe mason, the decorator, the carpenter, the glazier, and the metal-Avorker. The monastery had many functions: besides attending to the Avelfare of its OAvn inmates it AA r as a hospital for the sick, a school for the craftsmen, the repository of learning, of medical lore; a library, a storehouse, and a hotel. Doubtless there Avere master minds amongst these workers, in each branch of their labours; but until avcll into the Fourteenth Century the various craftsmen Avorked as one gang,

Avith the support of the community behind them and for their encouragement. The popular enthusiasm ' Avas great: they helped the oxen to drag the stone and timber; they taxed not only their oavu luxuries, but their necessities, to defray the expenditure; they criticized and appreciated each adventurous innovation; they applauded the growing dexterity of the craftsmen, they played up to him in the requirements of their own homes. The specialist began to emerge. From the masons came the sculptor and the image-maker; carving—which once was the exuberance of fine mason's craft—became a specialty, and independent of the guild of masons. The illuminator and decorator became the painter, and he emerged from the group of associated workers; he and the sculptors became tradesmen, working on their own, taking orders from all and sundry, making articles irrespective of their place and destination. The carpenters made their distinctions, the finer hands became joiners and carvers, and they got the painters to put the last touches to their handiwork. The nietal-Avorkers earlier in the day began to differentiate: the blacksmith from the whitesmith the worker in iron from the worker in gold and silver, the forge from the muffle. The goldsmith, dealing Avith enamels, Avas an illuminator as well as modeller in his Avay, and the goldsmith's shop became the school from which, in later times, both painter and sculptor originated, and from Avhere they got their training. The glazier, with his tinctures, rivalled the heraldry of dress and shield, and he drew apart also, to supply his Avares to whom should call for them. He did a considerable trade overseas and in foreign parts. So did the tombmakers, with their images in marble and alabaster, the craft organization Avas gradually splitting up. The standard of technical achievement, always rising had reached such a point that it was impossible for an "all-round" man to distinguish himself unless he specialized in some particular branch of his craft, and devoted all his power and technique to giving it some individualistic excellence. The name of the craftsman —an —begins to appear, and he cultivates his special faculties to justify his reputation. His oavu craft is to him paramount; he is careless of his contributory function, and he pushes the capabilities of his material to the extreme of its endurance. His sculptured figures are not part of a reverent chorale, they are each solo singers, almost like the nightingale—requiring the hush of night to be fully appreciated. The revival of learning followed on as an easy consequence Avith these experimenters in the possibilities of technique in their craft; they not only tried after the utmost that could be done with their material, they looked back into the past ages, to see what had been done, and were surprised at the consummate excellence of the ancients. The mastery of the Greek workman, of the Roman architect, as avcll as the Avriters of story and . philosophy stood confessed. Greek literature, hitherto unknown, opened out vista upon vista of acute reasoned learning and of impassioned poetry. The fall of Constantinople helped the movement by precipitating upon Europe the collected stores of Greek manuscripts there and in Asia Minor. Greek

gems circulated profusely, and full of the uncritical admiration of whatever belonged to classic times, the grounds of Home and its environs were ransacked to discover what statuary had escaped the destructive fury of Goth and Christian, and what lessons in architecture and detail the perverted and ruined buildings could yield to these ardent revivalists. Their admiration was uncritical, their knowledge of the past was small, and they fell upon their treasure trove with undiscriminating appetite. They took it as it stood, without enquiry as to its genesis or understanding it. Roman architecture was a composite affair engineering construction veneered with Greek architectural upholstery. When the Italians in the Fifteenth Century attempted to revive the magnificence of classical architecture, they met the problem in the converse way to the ancients. The architecture of Rome was a grandiose massing of concrete structure, poured and moulded into and over forms, like so much viscid lava, which eventually hardened into a homogeneous monolith, requiring for appearance sake to be faced with stone or marble or metal. This was the material backbone of Roman architecture, and it had the advantage that it could be made of quite simple accessible materials and by quite unskilled labour. It was this facility of execution, as well as the surpassing strength of the construction, that enabled the Roman architects to conceive and execute their vast projects. Every facility was pressed upon them; all the space they could desire was given to them. They had the command of unlimited supplies of labour, the cement lay actually beneath their feet, and the aggregate for their concrete Avas readily procurable. They had not the fear of contractor before their eyes. Under such conditions grew the monuments of Rome in the imperial days. They were vastly different in the days of Papal Rome. It is true that by the end of the Fifteenth Century, Popes, Cardinals, and some few princes had accumulated enormous wealth, and were spending huge sums in the building of palaces, strongholds, and churches; yet such expenditure bore no comparison to the outlay of the Roman emperors. Neither wore materials or labour camparable either. Stone and marble were hard to come by even when you plundered the ruins of their casings— and they cost a good deal to work. The cores of their work were expensive bricks laid in mortar, and the walls were slow to rise. They were dependent very largely on skilled labour and the traditional methods of construction that had grown up from the time when the Northmen had attempted to vault the narroAv aisles with stones no larger than a man could carry up the ladder of the scaffolding. The Roman knew little about the properties of the arch: his semicircular heads to his openings, and his concrete domes and vaults, had little lateral thrust, even during construction, and might be credited with- none when the concrete had fully set. The mediaeval builder knew a great deal about the arch, and had a kind of fearful joy in bending it to his uses and outwitting its mischief by means of his abutments. Like the gun and the steel-clad warship, he developed the destructive and

resistant properties of both to such an extent that at Beauvais you have a slender cage of stone, capped with a stone roof, held in place by a forest of sentinel buttresses, quivering under the stress of their duty, like so much stone carpentry. "With him an arch was never quiet, and the Italian workman knew its destructive propensities, counteracting some of them with his iron tie-rods near the springing. Again, the use of wood, the profusion of carpentry in the roofs, would have seemed criminally wasteful in the eyes of the Classic workman. His use of wood was for temporary purposes— centering, for scaffolding, pontoon work and military bridges, stockades, and the apparatus of war. He covered his concrete roofs with bronze tiles or mosaic where the buildings were of size and importance, and with low-pitched light tiles on a few squared rafters for ordinary occasions. But the mediaeval builder treated carpentry with the ingenuity of an income-tax assessor. No subterfuges, no invasions, had any real chance of escape. If the timber wasn't large enough, it was scarfed — ingenious tenons bifr into the sides of the sturdy baulks, unfeeling tie-beams grasped the feet of the would-be truant rafters, and detective collar beams Avell nigh throttled them. Wind braces added to the complexity of the construction, till a cathedral roof seemed, from the inside, to be an extravagantly dense forest, an emporium of useful timbers wasted in the unnecessary task of upholding a steep-pitched lead roof. Something of this tradition pervaded the Italian carpenter's mind, though for the most part he contented himself with the simple king-post roof,- covered with tiles laid to a moderately low pitch. This, then, was the artisan's training when a man like Brunelleschi, for instance, had to depend upon his services at the building of the cupola at Florence; and it was this training, this hand knowledge of his craft and his material, that is the life and the grip of the Renaissance.