An apology for picturesque architecture.

We must generate a sense of the picturesque for the delight of the public while making buildings that enhance the live of their inhabitants.

It has to be admitted: since we started designing buildings from the inside out, we have found it difficult to do the outsides.

For A.W.N. Pugin, who was one of the well-springs of this approach to architecture, the problem was not very difficult: 'An architect should exhibit his skill by turning the difficulties which occur in raising an elevation from a convenient plan into so many picturesque beauties.'[1]

But for Pugin (who had served in his youth as an assistant to Jeffry Wyatville, that master of the picturesque, in his Gothic additions to Windsor Castle) there was no embarrassment -- as there is to us -- about the use of the word picturesque. Nor was it difficult for him to define beauty. He believed in 'propriety': that in his mythical Catholic medieval world ordained that 'every person should be lodged as becomes his station and dignity'.[2] The concept of propriety could be applied to the form, detail and materials of buildings. Each part of a building should conveniently serve its function, whether that be to throw off water or to enclose a great hall for, 'Christian architecture requires a reasonable purpose for the introduction of the smallest detail'.[3] Each should be made in appropriate materials, proportioned to enhance the effect of the whole building on the observer, with smaller and more finely wrought parts in places that could be touched, and parts becoming more heavily cut as they ascend.

While Pugin's arguments for propriety in creating buildings based on function became part of the body of theory that informed the functionalism of the early Modern Movement, his dictum that buildings should have picturesque qualities was forgotten or ignored in embarrassment. The word has several connotations in English, perhaps the most common of which is charming or gemutlich. This survives as a derivation from late eighteenth-century theories of people like Archibald Alison, who in his Essays on the Principles of Taste (1790) suggested that 'so long as a picture or a building aroused an agreeable train of thought, it must be beautiful'.[4]

For Pugin, beauty had a moral essence. For Alison and his school (against which Pugin was preaching) it was merely a matter of convention and received taste. But picturesque has another and simpler meaning: the property of evoking memorable images. This is characteristic of all architecture from the earliest

times. The Modern Movement at its most reductive could not escape from the necessity of making its buildings look like something but what? Even Gropius at his most sachlich, when writing a memorandum to the Bauhaus masters in 1922 which urged that 'Today's architect has forfeited his right to exist' had to turn to the engineer 'unhampered by aesthetics and historical inhibitions [who] has arrived at clear and organic forms'.[5] In the same document, he praised 'young architects ... beginning to face up to the phenomena of industry and the machine. They try to design what I would call the 'useless' machine (works of Picasso, Braque, Ozenfant, Jeanneret, the new Russian and Hungarian schools, Schlemmer, Muche, Klee etc.)'.[6] A year later Jeanneret himself was singing the praises of 'Our engineers [who] produce architecture, for they employ a mathematical calculation which derives from natural law, and their works give us the feeling of HARMONY'.[7] Corbusier's compilation of grain silos, steamships, aeroplanes, automobiles is an explicit attempt to replace a received set of associational images of past styles with another derived from twentieth-century technology. We all know what happened to that approach when it fell into the hands of lesser talents with a poverty-stricken understanding of history.

Since the 1970s, there have been numerous attempts to replace or enrich the thin visual fare offered by arid bureaucratic Modernism. There have, broadly, been two approaches. In one camp are the wallpaper merchants, those who impose appearance on a building, no matter what it contains. On the other side are those who broadly continue to follow Pugin's dictum that the external appearance of a building should be derived from its internal arrangements.

At first, it seemed that the exterior decorators were winning hands down. PoMo had a system, invented by Charles Jencks which provided replicable models (courtesy Michael Graves and others); it proved to be remarkably acceptable to the developers of the Thatcher-Reagan era in which private greed and indifference to public values were raised to being the only acceptable creed.

A minor sect of this, prince Charlesism, can now be seen as one of the many instances of a local crisis in British culture. Monarchy and people face decline in the nation's cohesion, relative wealth and influence by steadfastly looking backwards to a golden past as they are propelled into the alarming and unpredictable future by implacable forces partly unleashed by Thatcher herself. The results of the exterior decorators' work can now be seen all over the world, and they have proved as reductive and generative of anomie as the bureaucratic Modernism they sought to replace.

So how fares the other camp, those who believe that buildings should be generated by a sensitive understanding of human need, and that the project of Modernism (as it first emerged from the Gothic revival, fresh with the belief that architecture has a moral purpose) still has relevance? Not too well in public esteem, it must be admitted.

The fault lies partly with the architects themselves, for they descend from a strand of Modernism which rejected the nineteenth-century's emphasis on external appearance. And against the posturings of PoMo, many were quite naturally reluctant to be seen to be making apparently irrelevant aesthetic gestures. Herman Hertzberger, for instance, made a wonderful, humane re-analysis of the nature of the organisation of the modern office at Centraal Beheer, but for all the human delights of its interior, the outside is pretty grim and uninviting.

Yet there have been successes. Utzon's Sidney Opera House may be severely compromised, but it has provided an image that identifies a city and with which the citizens are happy. The Pompidou Centre in Paris, with its shining progression of escalators, is a similar 'instance. So is Behnisch's Bundestag in Bonn (AR March 1993) which, with its elegant transparency, suggests how a modern democracy can show its face. Piano's Kansai airport (to be shown in the next AR) and Foster's Stansted (AR May 1991) show how a modern function can be given figure and yet relate to ancient rituals of rites of travel. In the best sense of the term, all these are picturesque -- and the quality is achieved without in the least compromising essential interior discipline.

These, and a good many other example, give hope that at last proper architects (as opposed to exterior decorators) are coming to grips with what David Harvey has called the 'condition of postmodernity': when space and time are compressed by electronic communications; when sand cultures are collaged in a way that (unless we are very careful) can make life disorientated and meaningless.

Nearly 20 years ago, before he invented the religion of PoMo, Charles Jencks understood the issue with great clarity. 'We must go back to a point where architects took responsibility for rhetoric, for how their buildings communicated intentionally, how "decorum" and bienseance were consciously achieved'.[8]

In the postmodern world, we must be eclectic. We cannot avoid the condition so aptly described by Jean-Francois Lyotard 'Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to Reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and "retro" clothes in Hong Kong'.[9] But this does not mean that we have to renounce all values. We must accept the dual responsibility of making buildings work to enhance the lives of their inhabitants and to generate a sense of the picturesque for the delight of the general public. In accepting responsibility for the latter, we must understand that there cannot be just one style: the squalid failure of PoMo has shown us that, as did the catastrophe of bureaucratic Modernism earlier.

A proper understanding of the essential picturesque aspect of architecture must today include perceptions of context, history (of which Modernism is a part), local culture, the potential of technology -- and faith that the future can be better. As Harvey says, 'it becomes possible to launch a counter-attack of narrative against the image, of ethics against aesthetics, of a project of Becoming rather than Being, and to search for unity within difference'.[10]

1 Pugin, A.W.N., The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture. London, 1841, Reprint Academy Editions, London, 1973, p72.

2 Ibid, p70.

3 Ibid, p19

4 Hussey, Christopher The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View. Frank Cass & Co, London, Second edition, 1967, p 15

5 Gropius, Walter 'The Viability of the Bauhaus Idea'. February 3 1922. Translated in Wingless, Hans M., The Bauhaus, MIT Press, Cambridge Mass. and London 1976, p52

6 Ibid, p51

7 Le Corbusier Towards a New Architecture. The Architectural Press, London, 1946, p19. Translation of Vers une Architecture, 1923 by Frederick Etchells.

8 Jencks, Charles The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. Academy Editions, London, 1977, p101

9 Quoted in Harvey, David The Condition of Postmodernity. Blackwell, Oxford (UK) and Cambridge (US), 1990, p87

10 Ibid, p359