Part 1

BALBUS

TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW

_For the Contents of the Series see the end of the Book_

BALBUS OR THE FUTURE OF ARCHITECTURE

BY CHRISTIAN BARMAN

London: KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., Ltd. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.

_The same Author has also written_:

_THE DANGER TO SAINT PAUL’S_ _THE BRIDGE: A CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY OF BUILDING_ _SIR JOHN VANBRUGH_ _THE ‘RULES’ OF JAMES GIBBS_

_Printed in Great Britain by_ MACKAYS LTD., CHATHAM

BALBUS

It is often maintained that there is a similarity between architecture and dress in that both are applied as a covering, the one to the individual human body, the other to the body politic. But there is one thing that those who point to this similarity are not always careful to bear in mind, namely that it is precisely in their relation to this human content that the arts of architecture and dress differ most widely. The bodies of adult men and women are distinguished from one another only by a few small variations of colour and proportion. Of so little consequence are these departures from the universal norm that fashion experts are freely permitted to disregard their effect, and usually content themselves with saying that “trousers are worn narrower” and that “gowns are of pastel shades of mousseline and chiffon.” Having, in such observations as these, momentarily exhausted the subject of sartorial growth, they can do nothing but await the next measurement, the next material, that its guiding spirits may decree. What would they say, however, if they were asked to discuss the toilet of a greyhound, a turkey-cock or a hippopotamus, and compare it with the vesture appropriate to human beings? Would not the historian of clothes become deeply embarrassed at such an enlargement of his field of vision, at the sudden appearance of such a multiplicity of forms? Yet the scope and variety of his subject would still be as nothing beside the scope of architectural history, and the variety of the architectural forms that it is the task of this history to register, and anatomize, and trace back severally to their origin. For while the origin of sartorial form is to be discerned in the fixed and unchanging outline of the human body, the origin of architectural form must be looked for in the infinite diversity of the social organism and in the sweeping and rapid changes into which this organism is for ever being thrown. Of all architectural movements there is none, therefore, so irresistible in its progress or so expansive in its effect as that which owes its existence to a social movement. In the construction of the first circular cathedral window on the one hand, and Sir William Chambers’ experiments in Oriental design on the other, we have two typical events in the history of architectural form whose influence upon the course of this history has been far less profound than that, let us say, of the publication of Rousseau’s _Emile_ or the repeal of the laws forbidding the exportation of machinery. Had not the very fact of Balbus building become an index to the social condition of the commonwealth? Thus any change in the state of society may accelerate building or retard it, and may likewise alter the whole subject or content of a particular province of building; while events of a purely architectural origin and significance most often leave a record that is only skin-deep.

But whether the movement be deep or shallow, local or enlarged, the historian has to consider it with just the same degree of care. While we expect him to give no part of his subject more than its due, on the other hand we insist that the ancillary and the fleeting shall be recorded side by side with the chief and lasting things. We do not, however, usually ask this of the prophet, and even were we to do so he would not be able to satisfy us without incurring intolerable risks. For the progress of an art is like the dual movement of the sea, which is actuated by wind and tide in mysterious combination; and between these two forces there is this great difference, that the one will, after some little study, make itself known in advance, but none but an ill-guided or a mendacious prophet would attempt to foretell the other. Tide and current are important enough when we have to construct a picture of past and present movement, but in our anticipation of the future they are our only guides. In architecture as in dress the position of the prophet is the same: he cannot safely predict any new forms save those that are moulded by the human entity these forms invest. The shrewdest observer of fashion would be at a loss to give the precise length for the masculine waistcoat of five years hence. Tell him, however, that about that time there will be a large demand for reefer suits from the New Forest ponies, and he will describe the design of these suits with considerable accuracy. And in architecture no less we must content ourselves with seizing upon social movements already at work, and may form our estimate of future growth only by projecting these movements into the architectural plane, and there working out their architectural equivalent.

There are some, unfortunately, among prophets and historians alike who remain wholly or partly blind to this important truth, and who claim that an occasional gust of wind is all that ever disturbs the architectural waters upon which they keep observation. According to them, there has been no movement of greater consequence than are the ripples on a stagnant pool, nor do they encourage us to expect any such movement in the future. Architecture and dress are treated exactly alike by these imperfect observers, and the favourite topics of sartorial conversation invariably reappear when architecture becomes the subject of their talk. These topics are dimension and material, and it may be worth while to consider for a moment in what manner they are sometimes able to intrude into what would appear to be a serious discussion of architectural form.

Everybody has heard it said at one time or another that the skyscraper is the building of to-morrow, and will soon lord it over the streets of every great city. Such a prophecy is about as likely to be fulfilled as a prophecy concerning the length of a garment. The size of a building is a matter by no means devoid of interest, but there is very little to help us in making a forecast of that size, and very little point in attempting it. Yet whole buildings have been erected on the strength of such a forecast. It is not surprising that such buildings have afterwards involved their owners in heavy pecuniary losses, losses far heavier, indeed, than would ever be sustained by a racehorse backer working on a similar method. Nor is there even the semblance of a reason why size should be dignified with the name of style, and a change of size be spoken of as though it were tantamount to the creation of a new formal entity. A tall building might be continued upwards until it reached the stars, and still we should be unable to describe it as a new architectural expression, an innovation in the domain of artistic form. The Edgware Road might, for that matter, have its architectural configuration carried on as far as Newcastle in the shape in which it runs into Oxford Street, but we should not thereby be entitled to hold it up as the latest thing in street design. The topless towers of Ilium were something new in the size of towers only, and not in tower design properly speaking, just as the endless street of Edgware would be a new thing in the size of streets only, and not in street design. The same confusion lurks in the statement that certain industrial structures put up to store large quantities of water, coal, grain and similar commodities exhibit the modern spirit more strikingly than any other kind of building. What, one may reasonably ask, is the difference between a coal-scuttle and a coal store, between a bucket of water and a tank of water, between a bottle of beer and a vat of beer? No doubt it is a novel experience to come upon a coal-scuttle fifty feet high, its bottom shaped like a cloud-burst, or a bin of barley large enough to hold two thousand tons. But is not the difference the same as the difference between the short street and the long street, between the four-storey building and the forty-storey building? We once more observe a difference of size merely; it is the shilling against the pound, the seven horse-power car against the seventy horse-power one. We have chosen to make these things larger than we have hitherto deemed it convenient to have them, and who shall say what size we may make them to-morrow?

Beside this deluded belief in the importance of dimension we may often observe an equally fruitless concentration on material. The architectural forms of the future, we are told, will be determined by the new material of which it appears likely that this architecture may be built. One could just as reasonably say that an orchestral performance is determined by such sounds as a haphazard collection of instruments is likely of its own accord to emit. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In the present state of civilization the notes played by the musicians upon their instruments are determined by the composer’s score; the engine of a car is determined by the work that will be required of it; the knowledge and skill of our doctors are determined by the enactments of the General Medical Council; and the materials used in building are determined by the kind of building that the architect is asked to put up. In another age these things may have been slightly otherwise, but here and now they usually conform to this rule. In another age the materials with which you built, like the horse you rode, the cheese you ate, the doctor who attended you in sickness, were no doubt conditioned by your exact situation upon the earth’s surface, but to-day they are not so conditioned. To-day the industrial order of society has achieved all but the completest liberty to manufacture such materials as it may think suitable, and to carry these materials to whatever place may be chosen for their employment. A modern building may draw its substance from the clayfields of France, Spain and Belgium, the forests of Finland and Canada, the tar-impregnated rocks of Switzerland, the granite-quarries of Ireland and Sweden, and yet betray in not a single line that it is anything but English in descent and urban in quality. At no time in history has form been dependent upon material, though it may have been influenced by it to a greater or lesser degree, and in our own age the autonomy of form is more firmly established than it has been in any other age of which we are aware. It is hardly necessary to add that to try and foretell the future acceptance of a material would be even more futile and more hazardous than the attempt to foretell the future acceptance of a dimension. If we cannot determine the size that will be given to the buildings of to-morrow, we know at any rate what is the range of possible sizes from which a choice will have to be made. The range of possible materials, however, may be fixed with no more accuracy or finality than the range of possible propulsive strengths of our future explosives, or the range of ether movements susceptible of being perceived or recorded by man. The progress of modern invention shows no sign of becoming retarded as yet, and only when its end draws within sight is there a likelihood that we may be able to foretell its next and ultimate stage, and lay down the limits of its achievement.

But if we are unable to discover what will be the size of the buildings of to-morrow, and of what materials these buildings will be constructed, we may console ourselves with the thought that the whole field of architecture proper remains open for us to explore at will. We have, for example, but to regard with some care those social movements which are likely to suscitate a similar movement in architecture, and the course of this architectural movement will gradually become disclosed to us. Two such social movements will here be selected and their immediate architectural consequences followed out. The first of these is the emancipation of modern woman, which has produced a new type of building in which the strongest architectural impulse of the past and the highest architectural excellence of the past are both conspicuously absent. The other is the determined fight that is to-day being put up in order to prevent the complete paralysis of street traffic in the great towns of Europe, and, more particularly, of the United States of America. The effect of this struggle is to substitute for the old impulse and the old excellence a new impulse and a new excellence, both of an inferior order, but of considerable interest nevertheless.

The question may arise whether architectural creation can be the result of more than one kind of human impulse. Do not all buildings erected by man, it may be asked, owe their origin to the same unchanging desire, though the fruits of that desire may be many and various? The answer is that there are, indeed, two distinct forces at work, two separate impulses which, though most often acting in combination, yet are neither similar in nature nor of equal importance. We have only to look from Westminster Abbey to the Cenotaph in Whitehall to realize that these two buildings are distinguished by a profound difference of meaning and of intention. Let us take the greatest possible difference and reduce it to its simplest aspect. It is (we may say) the business of the architect to design buildings. But he may set up round about his buildings a number of lesser objects such as bridges, parapets, columns, fountains, and others suchlike. How do these two kinds of structure compare? Are they different in size only, and would the Cenotaph, if it were enlarged to the size of Westminster Abbey, become a work of architecture commensurable with the Abbey? Of course, it would not, for the simple reason that the Abbey has an _inside_. Now, it is not by chance that the words _outer_ and _inner_ have become, in all languages, the recognized metaphorical equivalents of _body_ and _soul_. The usage is one that has occasionally been condemned by students of the logic of language, but it rests upon a perfectly sound foundation in that it appeals to an experience of universal validity, an experience which, let it be noted, is derived from architecture, and from architecture alone. A building is the only thing that you may both look into and look out of, both extraspect and introspect, and having learnt from the art of building thus to regard the human mind from two sides, as it were, we should at all times be careful to distinguish this dual aspect in buildings also. Now, in whatever manner we may describe these two views and the difference between them, this much is certain: that the greatest and most enduring qualities in architecture are those that reside in the design and arrangement of the internal spaces of a building, of those enclosing forms that are, in the last resort, the only justification of that building.

The idea is familiar to the architect, if not perhaps in the very words I have used, but he has not shown himself eager to let the layman into the secret. How many of us have not been puzzled by the mysterious significance attaching to the word _plan_, and the still more mysterious aspect of the thing itself? What is there in a plan (for something there must be) that gives it this supremacy among all the possible representations of a building? A building worthy of the name of great architecture, so a simple answer might run, is invariably composed of a succession of spaces or cells. In this it resembles the human body, which is made up of just such a series――the cranial, thoracic and abdominal cavities, as we call them――with, in addition, the mechanical attachments of the limbs. And in buildings, as in the human body, the first essentials of beauty are to be found in the shape, disposition, and junction of this sequence of cells. These are the important facts about a building that are more fully revealed in a plan than in any other kind of drawing. We now know why an architect always hastens to record his ideas in the form of a plan――provided, of course, that his subject is indeed an arrangement of inhabitable cells. Sir Edwin Lutyens did not begin by sketching out the _plan_ of his Cenotaph, but he cannot have found anything except a plan of much use in recording his ideas for his great war memorials at Verdun and Arras, a multicellular disposition, each of them, of great richness and delicacy.

_A pair of internal casts, illustrating the development of the architectural cell group. Above, a one-room dwelling-house. Below, a typical small house of the Regency period. The first floor has been removed, but the elliptical staircase-well with its lantern-light is shown complete. The front is double-bayed and the vestibule has a vaulted ceiling._

[Illustration]

Let us consider for a moment how this disposition has in the course of time come about and how it has attained to its present complexity. There follows, upon cave and tent, the one-roomed cottage, so distant in spirit from the modern house, and yet persisting everywhere beside it. Under its single roof the tenants sleep, cook, eat; the very farmyard animals were once admitted to its shelter, as the camel and donkey are to-day admitted to the Egyptian fellah’s hut. One by one, however, this rudimentary dwelling puts forth cells as need sharpens and opportunity comes: the cattle are expelled to one side, the kitchen hearth to another, the beds to a third; cellar, larder, toolhouse follow. New cells have fastened themselves to the older ones; the house has become an organized collocation of parts; in it are found the elements of a plan. But, though organized, it remains haphazard in arrangement, what one of Jane Austen’s characters derisively calls “a scrambling collection of low single rooms, with as many roofs as windows.” Its growth is piecemeal and experimental, undirected, almost blind. It does not, however, remain so for ever, for man is an animal that learns by all that it does. In time these same elements, once scattered, will be measured and composed together into a house by the prescient mind of one who will henceforth be known as an architect. A greater coherence, a greater orderliness, is gradually but surely acquired, and from the growing power of large and orderly planning there spring the ultimate achievements of architecture that are the pride of our race. Town hall, palace, theatre, church, all these proceed from this same skill in the fashioning of cells and in the gathering of them into a reasoned whole, into a plan.

_A typical church of the Italian mid-Renaissance with one large and four smaller domes. This diagram and those on p. 19 represent not the exterior of the building but the interior space, its walls and ceilings removed, and regarded from outside as a solid, on the same principle as that which governs the design of the celestial globe._

[Illustration]

To fashion, to gather; but at whose command? It is not for the architect to decide what cells there shall be; cells of what size, dedicated to what purpose, combined in what numbers. The architect is a servant only, and these things are the business of his master. It is when the master fails to attend to them that we get a building without a content, without a soul: a building that is admitted to the realm of architecture only on sufferance, since there is nothing to give its cells any particular shape, or to suggest or enforce any particular disposition of these cells. This is the typical building of to-day and to-morrow, and among the various agencies that have helped to bring it forth the freedom of modern woman is certainly the first, and is probably the most important also. There are, in addition, several causes of social instability that affect architecture in one way or another, and each of them helps to render modern building more uncertain, more indeterminate, or, as a biologist might say, more clearly lacking in morphological differentiation. On the formal side also (as contrasted with the functional) two lesser influences may be noted in passing. One is that astonishing manifestation of anti-æsthetic enthusiasm which has continued in more than one guise ever since the beginning of civilized society, but which to-day gains an added strength in that it has its source in the very stronghold of art itself. It is to be feared that Marinetti’s advice to use the altar of art as a spittoon has not been altogether neglected by architects, though their fellow artists may have taken it rather more deeply to heart. The other external influence is more subtle but no less active. It has been pointed out that only in a plan can the chief virtues of great architecture be adequately represented. It is a significant fact that the chief vehicle of architectural information to-day, the most popular means of recording architectural excellence, is the photograph, not the plan, of which it is the direct opposite. The photograph expresses all that the plan leaves unsaid; it ignores all save a small remnant of the major qualities registered in the plan, and this remnant it twists and falsifies to a degree which renders its testimony worse than valueless. We have still to be shown the photograph that, representing the interior of a room, will convey a modicum of reliable information concerning the shape of that room. For in looking at a room through a photograph we are, be it remembered, looking at it through a small hole in a box. These two factors then have, in so far as they enter into contact with architectural form, been clearly disruptive in their effect, but the influence which must next engage our attention is an incomparably deeper one.