Notes on Meaning, Culture and Symbol | ARCH 2401, Study notes of Architecture

Download Notes on Meaning, Culture and Symbol | ARCH 2401 and more Study notes Architecture in PDF only on Docsity! Car of the. Che dee nitaning, culture, and symbol There is no doubt whatever ahout the influence of architecture and sLructure upon human character and action. We make oux buildings and afterwards they make us. They regulate the course of our lives. WINSTON CHURCHILL  ; know that archizecrure maztets very much to me, but I have & no desire to claim that it can save the world. Great architec- i. ture is not bread on the table, and ir is not justice in the courtroom. Ir affects the quality of life, yes, and often with an astonishing degree of power, But it docs not heal the sick, teach the ignorant, or in and of itself sustain life. Ar its best, it can help to heal and to teach by creating a comfortable and uplifting environment for these things ro take place in. This is bur one of the ways in which architecture, though it may not sustain life, can give the already sustained lite meaning. When we talk about how architecture matters, ic is important to understand that the way in which it mattcrs—beyond, of course, the obvious fact of shelter is the same way in which any kind of arr matters: it makes life better. Paradoxically, it is often che most mundane architecture that means the most to us—the roof over our heads, the random buildings chat protect us from the rain and give us places to work and shop and sleep and be entectained. Buildings like these—the vernacular, the standard architccrural language—are not the fo- cus of this book, bur I will discuss them because I reject the view that a clear line can be drawn between serious architecture and ordinary buildings. “A bicycle shed is a building, Lincoln Cathe- 2 Meaning, Cidteere, ane Symbol dral is architecture,” wrote che art historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, bur what of ic? Both are buildings, both are architecture. Lincola Cathedral is a vastly more complex and profound work of archi- tecture than the bicycle shed, and it was created with more noble aspirations. But each structure has something to say about the culture that built it, each structure is of ar least some interest visually, and each structure evokes certain feelings and emotions. There is much moze to say abour a great cathedral than about a generic shed, but each helps shape our environment. And the companions of the bicycle shed, rhe vernacular commercial and residential architecture of the mall and the highway strip and the suburban own of today, have a much greater impact on where we live than a distant cathedral. Such buildings are not masterpieces, and woe to the politically correct critic wha says they are. Yet we ignore them ar our peril. McDonald's restaurants? Las Vegas casinos? Mobile homes and suburban tract houses and strip malls and shopping centets and office parks? They can be banal or they can be joyful and witey, but they are rarely transcendent, Yet they tell us much about who we are and. about the places we want ro make. And often they work well, galling as chis is for most architecture critics to admit. Much of the built world in the United States is ugly, but then again, most of nineteenth-century London seemed ugly to Lon- doners, too. ‘Ihe artlessness of most of our built environment today probably reveals as much about us as the design of Paris ar Rome revealed abour the cultures that built those cities. Whar is certain. is that it is impossible to think seriously about architec ture today and not think about the built environment as a whole. Meaning, Culrure, and Symbol + times, from Jorn Utzon's Sydney Opera House to Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Muscum Bilbao, is a product of engineers as much as of architects; without firmness, there will be no delight, All three elements of architecture are essential, So architecture is art and it is not art; ic is art and it is some- thing more, or less, as the case may be. This is its paradox and its glory, and always has been: art and not art, at once. Architecture is not like a painting or a novel or a poem; its role is to provide shelter, and its reality in the physical world makes it unlike anything clse that we commonly place in the realm of art. Unlike a symphony, a building must fulfill a certain practical Function. giving usa place to work, or to live, or ta shop or to worship or to be encertained—and it must stand up. Bur a building is not at all like other things that we placc in the realm of the practical but that may have aesthetic aspirations, sitch as an airplane, an auto- tmobile, or a cooking pot. For we expect a work of architecture, when it succeeds in its acsthetic aims, to be capable of creating a more profound set of feelings than a well-designed toaster. Sir John Soanc’s Museum, the atchitect’s extraordinary town- house in London—and one of the greatest works by an architccr whe was one of the most brilliant and original design, forces to have come out of Georgian London—contains a room that can make this clear, It was Soane’s brealcfast room, and it is fairly small, with a round table set under a low dome thar is not a real dome but a canopy, supported by narrow columns at four cor- ners. Where the canopy meets the corners, Soane placed small, round mirrors, so that the occupants of the brealfasc table can see one another without loaking directly at each othen“*lhe 8 Meaning, Culture, and Symbol yellowish walls arc lined with bookcases and paintings, and natu- fal light tumbles in softly beside the canopy, indirectly, from above. Soane liked to create rooms within rooms and spaces thar connect in unusual ways with other spaces, and in the break- fast room you can see that he is doing it nor just as the carly- nincteenth-century’s version of razzle-dazzle but to provide a kind of psychic comfort. The dome is protecting, bu it is nat quite enclosing, a reminder that while we may feel uncommuni- cative and vulnerable early in the morning, we need to move out of that stage into the world. The breakfast room functions as a kind of halfway house, cozy in a way that other, more formal spaces tend not to be, and soft in the way it introduces us to the day. It is a room of great beauty and serenity, perfectly bal- anced between openness and enclosure, between public and pri- vate. The British architecture critic Jan Nairn was exaggerating only somewhat when he called the breakfast room “probably the deepest penetration of space and uf man’s position in space, and hence in the world, chat any architect has ever cteared,” In the breakfast room, Soane used architecture to fulfill a routine function and create a powerful, almost transcendent ex- perience at the same time. For me there are other buildings, too, that achieve the extraordinary as they fulfill a function thar, in and of itself, is perfectly ordinary. In 1929, when Mies van der Rohe was asked to create a small pavilion to represent Germany at the world exposition in Barcelona, he produced a sublime composition of glass, marble, steel, and concrete, arranged to appear almost as if the elements were flat planes Hoaring in space. The white, flat roof and the walls of green marble with stainless Meaning, Culture, and Symbol 9  Sir John Soanc, breakfast room, Sir John Soane’s Museum, London steel columns in front of them combine to have immense sensual power, a tiny exhibit pavilion in which you feel an entire world of continuous, floating space, and one of the first modern buildings anywhere to convey a sense of richness and luxury amid great restraint—a building that in some ways has more in comman, at least spiritually, with the spare classical architecture of Japan. The Great Workroom of the Johnson Wax Administration _ designed by Frank Lloyd Weight Building in Racine, Wisconsi 10 Meaning, Culsure, and Symbad Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona Pavilion and finished a decade fater, in 1939, had an even more mundane purpose, which was to house clerical employees. Wright created an enormous, altogether spectacular room of light and swirling curves under a translucent ceiling, The room was lined in brick with clerestory windows of translucent Pyrex nubes, and its struc ture was supported on a forest of slender, tapering columns, each of which was topped by a huge, round disc, like a lily pad of concrete floating in the translucent ceiling. The space looks, even now, like a futurist fantasy; it must have been altogether as- tonishing in the 19308, While Wright’s specially designed typ- ing chairs and steel worktables wore less than functional and the room, though awash in natural light, allowed no views to the exterior— this was Frank Lloyd Wright's world you were in, and nor for an instant would he let you forget it—the Johnson Wax building still gave typists a modern cathedral, an ennobling place, in which to work, Meaning, Culture, and Symbol  Frank Lloyd Wrightc, Great Workroomn, Johnson Wax headquarters, Racine, Wisconsin Another example, quite different, but worth discussing in more detail, since it is perhaps the building where, at least in che United States, architecrural form and symbol come together with a more serene grace than in any other: the original campus of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, by Thomas Jefferson. Designed when Jefferson was seventy-four, the “academical vil- lage.” as he liked to call it, consists of twe parallel rows af five classical houses, called pavilions, connected by low, colonnaded walkways, which face each other across a wide, magnificendy proportioned grassy lawn. At the head of the lawn, presiding over the entire composition, is the Rotunda, a domed structure he based on the Pantheon in Rome. i Each pavilion is designed according to a different classical 12, Meaning, Culinrs, and Symbul motif, so that together they constitute a virtual education in classical architecture: the directness and simplicity of the Doric order, the richness of the Corinthian, can here be compared in what amounts to a Jeffersonian fugue of classical variations. As Jefferson conceived it, the Rotunda served as the library, which was a splendid piece of symbolism, for it curned the form used to honor the ancient gods into a temple of the book and then gave that temple pride of place in the composition. There are other kinds of symbolisma, too: the pavilions, with their grear stylistic range, stand as a kind of beginning of the American tendency to pick and choose from history, shaping the styles of the past to our own purposes. And the pavilions (which originally housed the faculty) and the students’ rooms set he- hind, connected by colonnaded walkways, meant that the uni- versity lived together as a community. The whale place is a lesson, not just in the didactic sense of the classical orders, but in a thousand subtler ways as well. Ulei- mately the University of Virginia is an essay in balance—balance between che buile world and the natural one, between the indi- vidual and the community, between past and present, berween order and freedom. There is order to the buildings, freedom to the Jawn itself—but as the buildings order and define and enclose the great open space, so does the space make the buildings sen- sual and rich, Neither the buildings nor the lawn would have any meaning without rhe other, and the dialogue they enter into isa sublime composition. The lawn is terraced, so that it steps down gradually as it moves away from the Rotunda, adding a whole other rhyehm to Measing, Cultsre, and Symbol v3  is not surprising, of course, not only because Americans have always had a certain conflict with modetnism--we want to be seen as advanced, indead as the most advanced culture there is, but at the same time we have always been most comfortable keeping one foot in the past, like Jefferson seeking to move forward by adopting and reinventing what has come before, not by breaking with tradirion. For many Americans, before Septem- ber xz, Colonial Williamsburg probably felt like a more natural symbol of the country than did a very tall hox of glass and steel. The risks of breaking with history were clear in the saga sur- rounding another important icon, the work of architecture that is probably the first modernist civic monument to achieve any degree of iconic status in the United Stares: the Vietnam Vet- crans Memorial in Washington, 10.C., by Maya Lin, completed in 1981. This is also worth discussing in detail, since it is an cxtraor- dinary story, and not only because Lin was a twenty-one-year-old student when she designed it. When the jury of an architectural competition selected Lin’s design—a pair of twa-hundred-foot- long black granite walls that join to fort a V which embraces a gently sloping plor of ground-- what troubled many people was not Lin's age but her reliance on abstraction. Where were the statues, where were the traditional symbols? The fact that Lin proposed to give the memorial a sense of immediacy and connec tion to the dead by carving the names of all 57,692 Americans who were killed in Vietnam from 1963 to 1973 into the granite did not seem, to some people, sufficient to remove it from what they considered the realm of cold, impersonal abstraction. ‘The project went ahead only after a compromise led to the addition 18 Meaning, Culture, und Symbol of a statue of soldiers and a fagpole at some distance from the wall, But once the memorial was built, it turned our to be Lin's original design—the wall of names—rhat possesses the real emo- tional power, not the mawkish, lireralizing elements added for fear the wall would not speak clearly enough. The latter have turned out to be superfluous to the original design, which ap- pears to speak, more clearly Lo yrear numbers of people than any other abstract worl: in the United States today, By tradicional measures the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is not architecture at all-—it has no roof, no doors, no interior. It docs not pretend to be a building. Bur it employs the techniques of architecture to what can only be called the highest and most noble civic purpose, and does so more successfully than almost anything else built in our age. Indeed, it stands, quite simply, as the most important evidence the late ewentieth century pro- duced thar design can still serve as a unifying social force, At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, monumentality creates a truc public realm, public not only in the sense of ownership bur also in that of intellectual and emotional connection. ‘The me- morial is public, people fecl, because it is about them, and its physical form touches their souls. This memorial has the power to move people of startlingly differene backgrounds and political views, and. it performs this difficult task of making common experience when sacicty seems infinitely fragmented. This work of architecture provides common ground. The wide V shapc of the wall is subtly s wall points toward the Washington Monument, the other to the I g ited: one arm of the Lincoln Memorial, tying the memorial—and by implication the Meaning, Culture, and Symbol 19  Maya Lin, Viewam Veterans Memorial, Washington, D.C. uagedy of Vietnam—to the landmarks of official Washington, and hence to the epic of our history. ‘he memorial is not con- spicuous from afar, since ic does nor tise much above ground level at all: it may be one of the few grear architectural works anywhere whose approach is marked only by directional signs, not by a glimpse of the thing itself. You approach through the Mall, the monumental axial green space of Washington, which recedes into the background as the wall becames visible, just a sliver ar first, and then larger, [t is nor huge, and at the beginning, where ir is just a thin slice of granite connected to the ground, it seems tiny, As you walk beside it and che ground descends, the wall grows in height; morc and mare names of the dead appear, chronologically listed, until suddenly the wall begins to loom large and there is a sensc that you have gone deeper into the abyss of war as you descend further into the ground and. Washington itself disappears. ‘I'hen, as you turn the corner at the center of the memorial, you begin to move slowly back upward again, toward the light, the sun, and the city—and you realize that, metaphorically at least, you have undergone a Passage toward redemption. Literal honor to the dead through the presence of their names; metaphorical representation of the war as a descenz from which the nation rose again; symbolic canncctions to the larger world. What more could we ask? ‘I'here is beauty here, and room for each of us to think our own thoughts, and the brilliance of a design thar reminds us at every moment that plivae loss and public tragedy are irrevocably joined. Meaning, Culture, and Symbol 23  scioiey Monuments as powerful, as subule, and as successful at appealing to a wide range of people as the Vicrnam Veterans Memorial are tare in any period. All buildings have some symbalic meaning, however, even if itis more conventional and more common than the symbolism of a great memorial, and the question worth asking is how effectively does a piece of architecture catry our its syinbolic role—-how well does it communicate whatever message it may have that goes beyand the purely functional, beyond even the aesthetic appeal of its physical form? Frank Lloyd Wright, for all his determination to reinvent the form of the single-family house, was passionately devoted to the very traditional idea of the house as a symbol of the nuclear family, and almost all of his houses had large fireplaces, either as the dominant elements of the nm living space or set off in inglenooks of their own, all ro emphasize the connection between home and hearth. (Wtighe liked ta present himself as a radical outsider, but he was less interested in changing society than in changing architecture, and he tended to believe that the best way ro keep the American agrarian, family tradition strong was to house it in new architec- tural form created specifically for the American continent rather than transported from elsewhere. Ir was a case of radical art for a more conservative end than Wright wanted people to believe.) Think, fora moment, about another of the mast common building types, the bank, Once, most American hanks tended to be serious, classically inspired buildings, civic presences sym- bolizing both the stature of the bank ina community and protec- dion for the hoard of cash within, Who would doube thar their money is safer in a limestone temple or an Italian Renaissance 72. Meaning, Culture, one Symbol palazzo than ina storefront? Traditional architectural style served a powerful symbolic purpose here, in the same way it always has in religious buildings. Today, banks are vast national or international corporate en- terprises, not local ancs, and most cash exists electronically. How do you create an architectural expression for the protection of blips on a computer scrcen? Surely not by building a replica of a Greek temple on Main Street. And cash itself now is generally dispensed not from a bank vault but from an ATM, a vending machine device that demands no architectural expression at all, save for a wall onto which it can be installed. I mention all of this not to say what banks should or should not look like, and certainly not to deny that there is still grear symbolic power present in some of the fine ald banks that pre- vious generations have handed down to us, bur to underscore how social and cechnological change affects architectural mean- ing. A grand and sumptuous classical bank may still give pleasure as a monumental artifact, but that is about all; customers in it today are not likely to feel the sense of protection that the build- ing was intended to give, largely because they no longer need or seek such protection in an age of electronic banking. We may even feel a greater sense of emotion in experiencing the glory of an old bank as @ piece of monumental architecture than pre- vious generations did in experiencing it as a place of safety and security—but chat is beside the point. Even if we find the old bank cxhilarating. it has a different meaning as a work of archi- tecture now than before, (And it often has a very different func- tion, too. In New York, several of the city’s fincst ald banks have Metning, Culture, and Symbol 23  lark; shadows induce a sense of sacred fear and the finest otna- ment in a place of worship is a flame. Palace planning should reflect degrees of distance berwcen the ruler and his subjects. ‘The house is like a small city, and the city a large house. Nature delights in the measure and the mean, and so should the archi- tect. Beauty has the power to disarm the raging barbatian; there Is no greater security against violence and injury than beauty and dignity.” : Alberti may have erred on the side of carneseness, not to say naiveté, in his confidence that architectural beauty could protect a civilization—his Machiavellian pragmatism seems to have been limited to the process of making buildings, not to their effects. Still, | am not sure there has ever been a more elegant and concise set of architectural directions. Alherti’s writing inspired numer- ous other odes to classicism, most famously the Four Books of Archivecrare, by Andrea Palladio, the great sixteenth-century builder of Italian country villas. Palladio presented his own work as evidence of his theoretical idcas, thus beginning the practice of architects writing books in which they attempt to articulate idcal ways of building and then show their own buildings, presumably as a demonstration of these ideal notions. Palladio’s treatise was as important as his buildings in establishing him as a central figure in Western. archirecture and in giving us the adjective “Palfadian” to artach to a cercain kind of symmetrical, classically inspired villa, generally with a pedimented temple front. : The notion that there is aright way to build--morally and eth- ically, chat is, not structurally—is teally the basis of most architec- tural theory thar has followed. In England, A. W.N, Pugiti'in the 28 Meaning, Culture, and Symbol 18308 and 1840s argued that Gothic, not classical, architecture was the road to civic good, social virtue, and, most important, god- liness. For Pugin, an intense Roman Catholic, Gothic was the only true religious architecture, period. He worked with Charles Barry, the architect of the Houses of Parliament, and designed most of the interiors and much of the architectural detail in Parliament, but beyond working on this building and designing a few of his own, Pugin played a major role as a theorist in creat- ing the Gothic Revival. Ir is no exaggeration to say that the close connection between the Gothic style and churches that still exists today is due in large part to forces Pugin helped set in mo- tion. (Say “church,” and ix is highly likely chat something at least loosely resembling Gothic architocture will come into your he Seven Lamps of Architecture and. The Stones af Venice, surcly the mind.) Pugin was aided by John Ruskin, whose fang treatise most ambitious architectural writing since Palladio, extended the argument beyond architecture's influence over what we might call the external morality of society into the idea thar there is also a morality within a steucuure itself, Ruskin said that Gothic archi- tecture, by virtue of the fact that it was honest, clear, and direct in its use of structure and materials, had a whole other kind of motality to it, beyond thar conferred by its traditions and its close connection to the church. Nature, Ruskin thought, provided the proper model for building. “An architect should live as little in our cities as a painter,” Ruskin wrote. “Send him to our hills, and fet him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.” To Ruskin, not only structure but every mate- rial used in building had its own integrity, which dictated how it Meaning, Culmre, and Symbol 25  should be properly used, a notion thar would come to be par- ticularly important to modernist architects, He disliked surface decoration and argued for plain, workaday buildings for ordinary Purposes, and he believed that real architecrure—which is to say Gothic-siyle architccture—should be reserved for noble, civic, or sacred purpose, Most buildings, of course, were not designed to demonstrate theories, and in the late nineteenth century, many architects who designed Gothic-style buildings did so because they wete the fashion, and that was enough. The concept that there was some sort of moral integrity to “honest” structure did not hold water with most architects, and all kinds of buildings were produced in all kinds of styles, many of the bese of them having nothing whatsoever to do with these ideas. Decoration, harmonious pto- pottions, comfortable scale were all notions that were only acca- sionally connected to structural honesty, but ro many architects, they meant a lot more. The architect and critic Ressell Seurgis wrote that the typical public building was designed w be “a box with a pretty inside, pur into another box with a pretty outside,” and never mind any rational connection between, the nwo. Suill, Ruskin’s writing had considerable influence, It led directly to what became known as the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain, fed by William Mortis, which called for a revival of ctaftsman- ship, something it saw as closely connected to the principles of honesty and directness chat Ruskin believed gave buildings in- tegrity. Ruskin’s nation chat there is such a thing as a building itself being moral or inherently honest was picked up by Eugéne- Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, a French theorist who carried:#t still 30 Meaning, Culture. and Symbol further and argued that architecture had an obligation to be rational. Viollet-le-Duc, too, was taken by Gothic architecture and saw honesty rather than mystery in it. His case for structural rationality set our the beginning tenets of what would become the underlying argument of almost cvery modern architect, Some, like the Viennese architect Adolf Loos, whose most famous essay was called “Ornament and Crime,” took Viollet-le- Due’ theory to the next level and put the issue of morality back on the table, Decoration was nor only misyuided and old- fashioned, Loos said, it was immoral, and he argued for an aus- tere architecture as the only form of design suitable to the mod- crn age. ‘The great French-Swiss architect Le Corbusicr, in o- wards a New Architectureand When the Cathedrals Were White, as well as che Tralian futurist Antonio Sant’Tlia and the German architect Walter Gropius, saw che machine as the great inspira- tion of the age and urged architects to follow it, not by mak- ing their designs literally machinelike, but by giving them the directness and lack of extraneous elements that characterized machines. They were not troubled by the fact that the notion that a building had an. obligation to be direct and clear in its sttucture—to reveal itself, sa to speak, rather chan to hide itself behind the clutter of decoration—had actually cmerged out of the architeceural theory of Gothicists like Ruskin and Viollec-te- Duc and was not in and of itself an argument for designing buildings that would not fook like anything that had come be- fore. But it became one, as modernists uscd these notions to crcate a rationale for rejecting history and designing as if with gftied Giedion would attempt to give all of this a clean slate. Meaning, Culture, and Syabal 31  further justification in his epic work Space, Time and Architec- ture: The Growth of a New Tradition, published ia r941, which argued that a cool, austere, somewhat abstract modernism was the culmination of che history of Western architecture. To Gie- dion, the architectural past was, quite literally, prologue, and he saw architectural history as a straight line pointing inevitably toward the modernist architecture of the twentieth cenmury, Curiously, Frank Lloyd Wright, who would ultimately be identified more with his claims that the flowing, open, horizon- tal space of his “Praitie Houscs” and other buildings represented the cxpression of a quintessentially Amcrican impulse, also made similar arguinents about the machine, and even before the Euro- peans did. In a temarkable leceure called “The Art and Craft of the Machine,” delivered at Jane Addams's Hull House in Chi- cago in 1901, Wright talked abour Gutenberg, the inventor of movable type, and made the extraordinary observation that the printed hook was, ina sense, che first machine and that its arrival profoundly changed architecture. It was fot the printing press itself thar Weight was calling a machine, it was the book. [Je owed, and acknowledged, a cermin debt in this point, of course, to Victor Hugo, who made a somewhat similar observation in The Hunchback af Notre Dame, but Wright’s way of expressing this point was very much his own. Before Printed books; Wright said “all the intellectual forces of the people converged to one point—architeceure, Down to the fifteenth century the chief reg- ister of humanity is architecture.” Wright referred to the most important pieces of architecture as “great granite books” and said that “down to the time of Gutenberg architecture is che priticipal 32, Meaning, Culture, and Symbol writing —the universal writing of humanity.” Bue with the arrival of printing, Wright said, “Human thought discovers a mode of perpetuating itself still more simple and easy. Architecture is dethroned. Gutenberg’s letters of lead are about to supersede Orpheus’s letters of stone. The book is about to kill the edifice,” he concluded, here reworking Hugo’s phrase literally. Wright's theory ignores the oral wadition of Jiterature, which allowed words to hecome part of cultural history even before che invention of the printing press, Like almost everything Wright wrote, this lecture is wildly overstated, full of Whitmanesque hyperbole. Buz for all of that, it remains an astonishing observac tion, for in a way it is the heginning of the modern connection between media and architecture. Wright was acting on the pre- sumption that architecture was a form of communication, a radical thought indeed for 1901—architecture as media. “The Art and Craft of the Machine,” then, can be viewed as an early example—pethaps she early example—of the notion of architec: ture as media, which today, when we think of almost everything in terms of its implications for information technology, is as- tonishing, Wright was viewing architecture as a system by which the culture preserved and extended itsel{—in fact, as the primary system by which the culture did this, since Wright saw art and. sculpture as subsidiary to architecture, as merely tools in its arse~ nal of communication. Sometimes buildings literally did tell stories (the iconogtaphy of the Gothic cathedrals is the most potent example), although J imagine Wright was thinking nor only in such literal terms but also about the architectural expe- rieuce itself, as well as about the notion that the creation of Meaning, Culeure, and Symbol 33  medicine or high finance or baseball. You don't have to be able to conduct Mass to design a Catholic church or be able to direct Hamlet wo design a theater, but if you have no interest whatsoever in the act of worship or the art of the theater, something impor- tant is likely to be lost, You don’t need to be Derek Jeter to design a baseball park, but ifyou do nor understand the gamc and know what it is like to sit for nine innings in what A. Bardett Giamatri, the former Yale president turned baseball commissioner, once called “that simulaccum of a city... a green expanse, complete and coherent, shimmering,” then you will not be able to design a baseball park as it should be. This is much more than a matter of providiag commodity in the Vitcuvian sensc, much more than making sure that 2 building functions well on a practical level. Architecture exists to enable other things, and it is enriched by its intimate connection to those other things. To study school buildings is, in part, co study education; to study hospitals is, in part, to study medicine. The tie hetween architecture and the things it contains makes architecture different from anything else, Nothing else, you could say, is about everything. Sul, architecture is are, and as T will argue im the rest of this book, in the final analysis we cannot not view it through an aesthetic lens. But of course architecture also is not art. Karsten Harries proposed what he called the ethical approach to archirec- ture in response to this paradox and as the alternative to the temptation to view architecture purely as acsthetics. An ethical approach to architecture, he said, should sow us our place in the world and, Harrics wrote, paraphrasing an idea put forth a gen- eration earlier by Sigftied Giedion, “should speak to us.of how 38 Meaning, Cuitisre, and Symbol we are to live in the contemporary world.” Such archivecture is invariably public, not private, and as such, it makes a statement about the importance of community; it is common ground, and it inspires us. “Architecture has an ethical function in that it calls us our of the everyday, recalls us Lo the valucs presiding over our lives as members of a society; it beckons us toward a better life, a hit closer to the ideal,” Harries wrote, “One task of architecture is co preserve at least a piece of utopia, and inevitably such a piece leaves and should leave a sting, awaken utopian longings, fill us with dreams of another and berter world.” Tike Harries’s notion of an ethical architecture, since it seems to say impliciely that even though architecture is an acstheric ex- perience, it is nor in the same category as art and music. Rather, it is a way of praviding something we absolutely need, and not a luxury that we can afford to give up in the face of stress and difficulty. Indeed, you could argue that an ethical architecture is more essential, not fess essential, in times of difficulty, that il can rise to its greatest potential and be a symbol of what we want and what we aspire Lo, as so fow other things can. It is not for nothing that Abraham Lincoln insisted that the building of the great dome of the Capital continue during the Civil War, even though Manpower was scarce and money scarcer siill; he knew that the rising dome was 3 symbol of the nation coming together and that no words could have the same effect on the psyche of the country thar the physical reality of this building could. Lincoln knew, I suspect, thar even the most eloquent words would not he present and in front of us all the time, the way the building would be. And. Lincoln knew also thar there was value in making new Meaning, Cielrure, and Symbol 39  symbols as well as in preserving older ones and that building the dome was a way of affirming a belief in the future. I is hard to think of a more ethical approach tu architecture than that, We build, in the end, because we believe in a firrure— nothing shows commitment to the future like architecture. And we build well because we believe in a better future, because we believe that thete are lew prearer gifts we can give the generations that will follow us than great works of architecture, both as a symbol of our aspirations of community and as a symbol of our belief not only in the power of imagination but in the ability of society to continuc to create anew, The case for architecture, if we are going to call it chat, doesn’t rest solely on the experience of being in remarkable and wonderful buildings—those places that, as Lewis Mumford once put it, “take your breath away with the experience of seeing forma and space joyfully mastered.” But those arc the great moments of architccnire, those moments that take the breath away; and they are rhe most important ones, the ones thar make civilization. They are our cathedrals, both fiter- ally and figuratively, the works of architecture that add to’ our culture the way that works by Beethoven or Picasso add to our culture. To strive to make more of them is in its way an ethical as well as an aesthetic goal, because ic is a sign chat we believe our greatest places are still to he made and our greatest times are still ta come. 40 Meaning, Culsuve, and Symbol challenge and comfort L would rather slop in the nave of Chartres Cathedral with, the ncarest john two blocks down the street than in a Harvard house with back- to-back bathrooms. PITILIP JOHNSON