Structural Imperative and the Origin of New Form ROBERT MARK AND DAVID P. BILLING TON Contemporary writing on architecture, following art history, tends to focus on formal analysis where visual ideas dominate the discussion of the origin and meaning of style. Technology is rarely touched upon; and structure, although generally understood as necessary, is hardly seen as a legitimate giver of form, even for large-scale building.1 This modern point of view must be understood, at least partly, as a reaction to the ideas of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814—79), self-trained architect, restorer, archaeologist, and theorist. Mainly on the basis of his extensive practical experience with the restoration of medieval monuments, Viollet-le-Duc compiled a ten-volume encyclopedia, Dic tionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle (1854— 68), that remains even today probably the single most important pub lished work on medieval building technology (fig. 1). He also inferred from this experience that many of the principal stylistic elements of the Gothic were originally derived from the demands of the construc tion process or the laws governing structural forces. Furthermore, he argued, since these laws apply to all building at all times, innovation in visual form springs from appropriate response to structural de mands in terms of the materials of construction.2 In this light, he then Mr. Mark is professor in the School of Architecture and the Department of Civil Engineering, and Mr. Billington is professor in the Department of Civil Engineering, at Princeton University. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support for these studies provided by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., Foundation. ’The need for structure, however, would not seem to be universally accepted. In the award-winning text by Alberto Perez-Gomez, Architecture and the Crisis ofModern Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), the late-18th-century architects Etienne-Louis Boullee and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux are especially lauded just because their unbuildable “architec tural intentions . . . did not lit into the new, essentially prosaic world of industrial society” (p. 161). For writers like Perez-G6mez, the process of creative design is only hindered by considering technology. 2Viollet-le-Duc’s polemical Entretiens sur !architecture, originally published in Paris in 1863 (vol. 1) and 1872 (vol. 2), was translated into English by Henry Van Brunt as© 1989 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X789/3002-0001$01.00 300 Fig. 1.—High Gothic construction as illustrated in Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire by his drawing of a portion of the nave of Amiens Cathedral. 302 Robert Mark and David P. Billington attempted to demonstrate through new designs how the recently in troduced metals of his own age might be used to develop a modern style of building. And although Viollet-le-Duc’s designs may not have been persuasive in themselves, his writings on structural rationalism, which led Sir John Summerson to characterize him as “the last great theorist in the world of architecture,” affected a whole generation of architects.* 3 He has been credited even with seeding the idea of the metal-framed American skyscraper.4 Rather than searching for elegant structure, many 20th-century designers found a more appealing basis for visual form in merely taking up the notion of a “machine aesthetic,” often unrelated to machines but used, for example, to justify adopting Cubist forms in architecture—as when photographs of cylindrical reinforced-concrete grain elevators served as models for new styles of urban dwelling. Indeed, the onset of this new formalism can be marked, in 1923, with the publication of Vers une Architecture by the influential Swiss architect Le Corbusier. According to Le Corbusier, the engineer alone could never create beauty; it is only the architect “who by his arrangement of forms realizes an order which is pure creation of the spirit.”5 And, as Summerson makes clear in his eccentric yet clever set of essays designed primarily to dispose once and for all of Viollet-le-Duc’s the ories, “[While Viollet-le-Duc’s] disciplined, daring, economical, ingen ious designs [lack] style, . . . Le Corbusier’s...
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Jan 1, 1990
Elizabeth Welles 
Open Access