Translator's note
Roger Scruton — philosopher, critic, novelist, with academic posts at Cambridge, London, and Boston, and the author of more than twenty books. Among his works one may name Art and Imagination, The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979), and The Aesthetic Understanding (1983). The new one- and ten-volume Routledge philosophical dictionaries refer repeatedly to Scruton's writings in their articles on art and aesthetics.
The present article is taken from What Is Architecture?, edited by Andrew Ballantine, Routledge 2002. It first appeared in 1994 under the title 'The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism.'
Scruton's thesis here is that aesthetic instruction is necessary, but that modern architecture has perverted it. He believes in the necessity of harmonising public taste, and on that ground considers the duty of the majority of architects to be in step with public taste, abstaining from the temptations of creativity. In his view, the connectedness of architecture across cities and its historical continuity leaves no room for fresh 'showing-off'; the great art of architecture is the making of orders that help the ordinary architect to build the works of daily life in continuity with what has been built before.
Rather than addressing masterpieces or famous single-buildings, he is interested in the 'public realm' in which single-buildings should dissolve. He even seems not to grant the single-building the title of architecture; for him, architecture is what governs the whole environment, and its effect is shown in the experience of a lifetime, not in a brief observation.
Throughout the article, he often uses builder in place of architect; we have not wished to render this as 'سازنده' (sazandeh, contractor), which in our society's present sense has no kinship with the architect or the work of architecture. He says most architects are ordinary men or 'lesser mortals,' and that architecture has no need of the work of genius.
Scruton uses discipline often, which we have rendered as 'آموزه' (instruction) — a word in which the sense of order is also implicit; and order, which for Scruton is the highest expression of architectural art, as 'نظام' (order). He refers in many places to moulding, which we call 'ابزارگیری': the mould is the wooden or metal pattern in whose edge the inverse of the continuous relief, to be cast as decorative trim on a plaster or cement surface, has been cut.
Inquiry, taste, and aesthetic instruction
Inquiry and the effort to lay down rules of taste on objective foundations have often been the enemy of aesthetic judgement. The insistence of those entrusted with the task of justifying this misplaced effort turns the children against them — the rebellious child who has stood against the tyranny of one law accepts the counsel of no other; rather than accepting some other instruction (the previous one having become unbearable), he prefers a lawless aesthetic. Yet, more than at any other time, he feels the need for that very instruction.
This story is no novelty, and the human's lot has been not to learn from it until he has knocked his head against the rock. All the same, let us strive to learn this lesson, without which the debates of modern architecture are useless.
Aesthetic and our social nature
Taste and aesthetic preference are formed within our minds; but this within-mind activity comes into the field of debate beyond the mind, and takes on the standing and the structure of a reasonable preference. Aesthetic instruction is therefore both possible and necessary. Modern architecture's failure has come from a misunderstanding of this very instruction, and from a tendency to discard the true instructions of the eye and the heart in favour of the false instructions of the intellect.
Our social nature compels us to try to arrive at some harmony in our tastes. Although that effort may not lead to a particular set of principles, it is a shared striving toward a workable solution. In architecture, the role of aesthetic values is that we strive to make a world in which we and others may feel ourselves at home. It is for this reason that we attach importance to aesthetic values, and that our life in places where these values have been trampled and effaced becomes a calamity.
The estrangement of man in the modern city has many causes other than architecture; yet who can deny that modern architecture, by stubbornly imposing forms, volumes, and proportions out of step with our aesthetic habits, and by standing arrogantly against the wisdom and achievement of the earlier traditions, has played a great part in producing this estrangement?
Postmodernism: a reaction against modernist prohibitions
Stiffness, moralising justifications, and a sanctimonious bigotry — for all their repulsiveness — were not modernism's chief fault. Modernism's striving toward instruction was its only commendable quality; but that instruction was about the wrong things. It demanded that we be honest with function, with social standing, with materials, and with political principles. It demanded that we be 'children of our time,' and on the other hand pressed architecture into the service of those degrading experiments in renovating human life that have driven our civilisation toward such calamity.
Postmodernism is a reaction against the prohibitions of modernism. It takes the classical and Gothic details forbidden by its strict father into 'play,' and from the last meaningless remnants makes things. This is not the recovery of history but its collapse. Modernism bought for itself the curse of history; postmodernism wishes neither anyone's curse nor to curse anyone. The details with which it plays are not the ornaments it imagines them to be — their meaning lies in the order embodied in them, and to use them without belief in that order is to squander the achievement of centuries.
Eleven fundamental principles
I wish here to bring forward and stand by some of the principles that expressed the instruction of the nineteenth-century architect, and which I have defended elsewhere. I therefore propose eleven fundamental principles.
1. Architecture is a human gesture in a human world, and like any human gesture is judged by its meaning.
2. The principle of 'the priority of appearance' rules the human world. Shame is meaningful; the blood that is its cause is not. So that you may know how to build, you must first know appearances.
3. Architecture is useful, on condition that it is not exhausted in usefulness. Human aims change from age to age, decade to decade, year to year. Buildings should be capable of adapting to these changes. If they cannot change their use — from store to garage to church to apartment block — they must yield their place to other buildings that can.
4. Architecture plays a major role in the making of the 'public realm': the place where we gather with others. Its meaning and mood embody and present a 'civic experience,' and a building should be judged by the expectations born of that experience.
5. Architecture must respect the requirements that human nature imposes on it. These requirements are of two kinds — animal and human. In the animal dimension we move and live in upright posture, and are vulnerable to harm. In the human dimension we realise our education, our trade, and our politics. The architecture around us can affirm or deny the reality and the standing of these human concerns.
6. Man's first need is for values, and for an ethic in which all share his values. The public realm must prescribe and preserve a public ethic, or a shared striving toward it.
7. Our attention is upon appearances. I see things, but I also understand their meaning; and meaning can fill experience. Self-finding finds calm and rest there.
8. The aesthetic of daily life is a continual process of fitting the appearances of things to the values of the people who make them and view them.
9. The beauty of a beautiful object is not for its relation to this or that desire. We are pleased by it because it brings to mind the abundance of human life, that we may rise above desire to the rank of contentment. In other words, it accompanies us on our spiritual journey.
10. Therefore, every serious architecture must meet the needs of taste. It must offer a public language of form, by which people can criticise and evaluate their buildings, agree on right and wrong appearances, and so build a public realm reflecting their social nature.
11. Aesthetic understanding cannot, in any removable way, be separated from our life.
Eleven derived principles: the way of practice
I now wish, on the foundation of my eleven theoretical principles, to arrive at eleven derived principles which will serve as the basis of a guidebook for daily work.
1. The problem of architecture is the problem of styles, not the problem of art. It bears no resemblance to the problem Wagner faced in making Tristan, or to the one Manet and Courbet wrestled with when they tried to show the modern world as it really was. These artistic problems, with which geniuses dealt, called for upheaval, overthrow, and the denying or rebuilding of traditional structures. Precisely for that reason, the style-making adventures arising from them must not give an excuse to those 'lesser mortals' whose duty is only to ornament and to humanise the world.
2. Architecture's problem is the problem of those 'lesser mortals' — of which the majority of architects are to be counted. The claim of 'creativity' borrowed from the great victories of modern art is not only self-conceit, but a public threat against which we must, as a matter of principle, lay down a law.
3. The first constant is scale. To establish a simple ordinary relation with a building, one should be able to take it in without strain, without a feeling of inferiority or terror. Under particular conditions we receive grandeur from monolithic mountainous buildings (such as the pyramids of Egypt), or from extremely tall ones (Gothic cathedrals, the towers of Manhattan); but these buildings cannot be the model of the ordinary builder, in the conditions of daily life.
4. Buildings must therefore have faces, so that, as we stand before them, they too stand before us. Aesthetic attention is concentrated in faces. Modernism not only destroyed the old principles of scale, but also took away the very notion of a building's face. The modernist building has neither direction, nor a tendency to distinction, nor a starting-point toward its bound.
5. For this reason, the first principles of composition concern the order of façades. But to realise these principles, we must free ourselves from the rule of the plan. The 'modernist' architect does not as a matter of principle take it as his duty to study the appearances of the world; he has been placed in front of a drawing-board and told to draw a plan. The result is a 'horizontal style' — a style or non-style obtained from the composition of two-dimensional layers.
6. Composition is made up of details, and the principles of details and the emphasis on line and form, as variables, are understood as the geometry one has learnt. Words such as 'form,' 'proportion,' 'order,' and 'harmony' can be applied to a building only when the building is composed of meaningful parts. The work of every builder must rest on a guidebook: a notebook of details, made available the moment they are needed.
7. All architectural orders have made such a guidebook for themselves — even when, instead of being recorded on paper, they sit in the mind and the hand of the makers. They place at our disposal the connectable parts, the rules of composition, and the dictionary of form.
8. The art of composition is effective when it rests on repeatable principles — those that meet our need for rhythm, similarity, and symmetry. Invention and life-giving are not gifts granted to every architect in every era. The value of the classical tradition has crystallised in the theory of orders, which has placed beauty within the daily-work instruction, and put the discoveries of true artists within the reach of ordinary men.
9. As the orders clearly show, the true instruction of architecture rests more on the vertical than on the horizontal line. The art of design is the art of vertical accumulation: setting one thing on top of another, so that an order is made which can extend itself rhythmically on every side.
10. To attain a façade with vertical order, one must put light, shadow, and climate into service, divide the wall surface, and emphasise the openings. In other words, one must use the techniques of moulding. The abolition of mouldings was a visual catastrophe, the effects of which can be clearly seen in the modern American city. The real ugliness was not the skyscraper itself, but the stripping of the skyscraper of all those lines, shadows, and meandering signs that were the source of its life and vivacity.
11. The instruction of an upright builder, regardless of the shape of the land on which he works, and without injuring the order of his surrounding environment, is the power of perceiving, drawing, comparing, and criticising details, and then composing those details into ordered, harmonious forms.
An instruction, not a style
These twenty-two principles do not themselves constitute a style; they only determine the structure of a style. But of course architectural instruction is among the most serious of the first-world's instructions, and the classical and Gothic guidebooks, like any other instruction, must be acquired before they are used. The question is what structure that instruction should have.
I think that the aspiring architect should enter the world and put his eyes to work; he should read the great architectural treatises and learn to see with the eyes of others; he should learn to draw the shadows that the lines, the mouldings and the ornaments of a complete vertical section throw upon a quarantined order. Then perhaps he is ready for his first project: drawing the façade between two existing buildings in such a way that no one can keep from looking at it.
But such an instruction calls for intellectual effort and spiritual humility, and in the schools of architecture, everything is taught except these two.
