Architecture, Language, and Representation

Abstract

Over the last decade, the history of architecture has undergone a belated transformation, in which questions and methods long since adopted by the history of art have been taken up and themselves further expanded and transformed when applied to architecture's related but different set of concerns. The two books under review, each by a leading American architectural histor ian, adopt unselfconscious methodological stances rather than positioning themselves in relation to these recent historiographical tendencies. While they therefore leave unanswered some questions which could be asked, they also present internally coherent and compel ling arguments that should not be ignored and that offer fruitful challenges to a 'new' architectural history. Joseph Rykwert, emeritus Professor of architecture and art history at the University of Pennsylvania, has written a series of monographs over the last 40 years on aspects of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment European architectural theory. He has had an ongoing interest in the roots of modernist thinking and practice in eighteenth-century precedents, and in the legacy of this modernist tradition for the present day. The Judicious Eye: Architecture against the Other Arts unites these concerns. At once a detailed history and a present-oriented polemic, the book presents a history of the abandonment of the public realm by both architects and artists since the eighteenth century. This tendency, which Rykwert considers highly regrettable, has been caused by the separation of architecture from the other arts. That separation has itself both stemmed from and resulted in the subservience of architecture to commer cial interests and the exclusive dedication of the other visual arts to avant-garde anti-institutional posturing. Behind Rykwert's account lies a lost world in which the man-made environment was made meaningful and digni fied through a natural integration of the visual arts, though he gives only brief glimpses of precisely how this integration operated and what its significance was. One of these glimpses comes at the beginning of the book, where he is tracing the rise of a generic, repeatable, technologically enhanced set of interior decoration motifs in the work of the Adams brothers in the 1760s and 1770s. To point up the superficiality of the Adams' use of 'grotesque' motifs for wall decoration, he offers an account of the use of grottesche in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the ceiling paintings of Raphael, Michelangelo, and their baroque successors. Seen as justified because rooted in particular antique examples of wall paintings in underground spaces, grot tesche also 'allowed artists ... to play with levels of rea lity as well as of reference: painted vignettes could in turn be framed in stucco relief, or yet in painted imitation of cameo and embossing, and might be enclosed in an over all relief-and-fresco composition'. It is the richness of meaning in combination with the formal articulation of large public spaces that Rykwert finds so important in this 'architectural' form of painting and sculpture: 'formal elaboration is nourished by an iconographic complexity' (pp. 21-3). A deep and complex understanding of classi cal antiquity and a nuanced application of its lessons also form part of Rykwert's lost world. Over seven dense and erudite chapters, Rykwert pro vides an account, beginning in the mid-eighteenth century and ending in the 1950s, of the gradual loss of a world in which the arts achieved the kind of meaningful integration that properly dignified the public sphere. Despite the invo cation of that 'public sphere' in the preface and con clusion, this is far from a sociological study. Rykwert gives the reader a fairly straightforward art historical over view, focusing on specific examples of individual archi tects, artists, movements, and the occasional theorist or figure from outside the visual arts, wide ranging, but all securely within the canon of 'advanced' European and North American art and architecture (with brief forays into the Latin American arts.) But in place of a history of pro gress, he offers a history of loss and failure. The loosening of the continuous natural bond to the classical past, which begins with Goethe and Herder's historical relati vism and the rediscovery of the Gothic, is the beginning of this development. It fosters an artificiality in the relation ship of both artists and architects to the past that leads to the disintegration of other natural bonds especially