Aesthetics Vs. Meaning Part V: The Architect in Architecture
Global Movements in Architecture
With the arrival of the colonial age, global movements also started arising. Many claim Baroque to be a first truly global movement, but its transplantation on other continents like South and North America was merely the work of the colonial masters.
It was the Eclecticism of the 19th century that truly declared the directionless character of modern architecture. Proud proclamation of the incorporation of whatever elements that struck the fancy of the particular architect, the loss of meaning in architecture could not have so evident. Eclecticism did not just incorporate different idioms of different cultures; it also incorporated the new building materials. The organic nature of curved lines and figures was abandoned in favor of straight lines and geometrical figures. Ornamentation was also not favored.
Art Nouveau was another international movement that was self-conscious of bringing something ‘new’ to architectural history. The urge to create something new was becoming the primary urge in architecture. However, Art Nouveau was also a reaction to the eclecticism of the 19th century and brought back curved lines and natural decoration in architecture.
But it can be safely said that there was only one great architect, one great artist, Antoni Gaudi who practiced this organicism in architecture completely. We know Art Nouveau through Gaudi’s work which uses aedicules and fractals in the building. Structural components play a function as well as embellish the building. But Gaudi was one architect who never became a tradition and seldom could any other artist pursue what he started.
This was inevitable. Once the meaning in architecture is lost and once the sense of the sacred is gone and once the national, racial and regional characteristics are also stripped away one by one, any accidental arrival upon the meaningful way of creating architecture is bound to be buried into sands once the artist who rediscovered it is dead. The same happened with Gaudi. His line is rarely followed in modern architecture.
Modernism arrives with full force in the Expressionist school of architecture where ‘stories and experiences of the World Wars’ are ‘incorporated into the body of architecture’. Architecture, which was a sacred means of communication in ancient times, becomes an ideological tool in modern times. The personal story of the individual architect becomes more important than architecture itself.
The arrival of Art Deco means that for the first time reinforced concrete along with glass and steel architecture is not only accepted as an industrial era necessity but also celebrated as a tool of ‘new aesthetics’. We are supposed to believe that reinforced concrete can be beautiful.
It, however, retains the need for ornamentation or decoration and is vainly decorative like the Chrysler Building or the Empire State Building in New York. Architecture has not been brutalized completely yet.
By the 1940s, even this ornamentation and decoration is abandoned in favor of straight lines, flat surfaces, and the inhuman cubist blocks and chunks of naked concrete. This was called the International Style of Architecture. For something to be truly international, all regional characteristics have to be stripped away. What remains is the rigidity and brutality of industrial-era architecture. Architects like Le Corbusier ‘celebrate concrete’ in all its naked brutality. His buildings look like solid blocks of concrete, with nothing organic relieving the inhumanity of the structure.
Ever since the arrival of Art Nouveau the style had become the primary marker of difference and distinction with meaning and symbolism long having been lost. Various movements like Critical Regionalism, Postmodernism, and Deconstructivism are more ideas than buildings. They are the result of the idiosyncrasies of individual minds. Postmodernist and deconstructivist ideas that destroyed painting, poetry, drama, and literature also destroyed architecture to great extent.
Deconstructivist buildings look like nothing more than a heap of unorganized junk thrown away, or pieces of a previously coherent structure strewn all over without care. In some words, these buildings convey ‘controlled chaos’. In other words, they are the result of the architect’s whim and result of his confused and deconstructed mind.
Brutalist architecture does not even attempt to hide what it does. It does not just expose the brutal aspects of architecture to the public eye but reinforces them. It reinforces ideas of concrete building materials and exposed structural elements. Thus bricks are not plastered over; concrete is not painted over. Geometrical shapes are all you can see in the patterns and the colors are also sepia or monochrome with hardly any different colors relieving the scene.
The Soviet Union with its ‘art for utility’s sake’ argument favored this kind of architecture. Many of these buildings still pay testimony to that past. A lot of socialist countries like India also built many buildings in this vein.
The Aura of the Individual Architect
In the modern era, particularly in the late 19th century and in the 20th century, architects became law in themselves. There was no longer any spiritual tradition in place to guide them. There was no particular meaning that they wanted to convey. Architecture like much else became a matter of individual whim and fantasy.
Whatever the architect fancied in his whim started taking shape in the form of his building. Since there were no spiritual traditions to guide them in meaning; no cultural glue to bind different architects in one architectural idiom; and no more defining national or regional characteristics to bring their creations together, every architect became an island in himself and started creating strange buildings.
Some of the most iconic buildings of modern times are often no more than the representation of the idiosyncrasy of the architect that built it. In a traditional society, such idiosyncratic elements would be negligible and more often than not condemned.
In a Hindu temple, these are minimal. For example in some temples like the Ramappa Temple in Warangal, we see more importance given to the Naga Kanyas which adorn the area beneath the cornice. But this is an exception and in most cases idiosyncrasies are condemned and the artist is recommended to conform to the philosophical principles of his culture and civilization, trying to create a piece of architecture that conveyed Hindu philosophy most potently.
But in modern architecture idiosyncrasies were celebrated and even required as a necessity. Ayn Rand, building upon this intellectual climate, made a whimsical, introvert, anti-social and idiosyncratic architect as her hero. Atlas Shrugged is the Bible of many modern architects, not for its instruction on architecture, which is negligible, but for its celebration of whimsicality and idiosyncrasy.
As the art of photography developed and aerial photography became a thing with panoramic shots becoming more common than before, the architects began to see their buildings from a distance, gradually becoming more and more conscious of how ‘they looked’ from afar. Architects in a traditional school were also concerned about how their creations looked, but never exclusively so. Like in a Mughal tomb or a Renaissance Palace, in modern architecture the building often became what it looked.
The discipline of photography reverse impacted the individual architects who started to think exclusively in terms of how their buildings looked from afar. Frank Gehry created buildings that often look like different colored tin shards thrown together like the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, California. Sometimes they seem to defy gravity as the Dancing House of Prague. Sometimes they look horribly like a particular object, like the Day Complex Venice, California which looks exactly like binoculars. Sometimes it is all glass and steel rims like the IAC Building, New York.
Norman Foster’s now-iconic building in London called The Gerkin looks exactly like the Gherkin. That much is an achievement, but why does it look like a gherkin, if one asks, then there is no answer. Renzo Piano’s building, The Shard looks exactly like a shard but why does it look like once again goes unanswered. Rem Koolhas made the Television Headquarters in Beijing look like a Mobius Strip for no evident purpose.
On the other hand, there is a very specific and definite reason why a Latina Nagara shikhara in the Hindu temple looks like that.
If Le Corbusier’s buildings looked like brutal blocks of concrete, then those who revolted against such architecture, like Oscar Niemeyer, purposefully introduced curves in their buildings even where they have no structural or functional place like at Oscar Niemeyer Museum at Curitiba, Brazil.
Zaha Hadid who was hailed as the ‘queen of the curve’ for ‘liberating architectural geometry’ in her works curved everything for just the sake of it. Why rigid geometrical designs of cubes and rectangles were introduced in architecture and what was the need for another movement to go to the other extreme of curves is a question students of architecture schools are too afraid to ask.
Strange is the New ‘Beautiful’
Lev Tolstoy in the iconic first sentence of Anna Karenina says: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Similarly, there are only a certain number of ways in which a meaningful and functional building can be created, but infinite ways in which meaningless inanities arising out of individual whims, personal idiosyncrasies and ideological fashions can give rise to a building. These buildings and these architects are prized for their ‘different’ take and meaningless ‘innovation’. The search for difference becomes the search for strange.
Just like a Mughal tomb or a Persian cenotaph, the modern building is built purely for the aesthetic effect. There is no meaning in all these buildings. Though the architects claim the highest of meanings for these buildings there is no objective criterion by which they can be judged. They ‘have to be looked with the architect’s eye’ which simply means that the building does not give itself to any traditional symbolism or meaning and has its own logic which is better not questioned, for ‘true art cannot be judged’.
These buildings are what they look like: just beautiful pieces of architecture. Their material aspect cannot be more emphasized. There is a certain voyeurism about them. The looks are so highly prized that every other function takes second or no priority.
The beauty of the Hindu temple or the pagan temple in Greece lies in its wonderful quality of using the most concrete of mediums to convey the most abstract and most spiritual ideas. The architects of the Hindu temple in India created canons of iconography, sculpture, and architecture which made sure that the highest of truths were conveyed through a concrete medium like architecture.
In modern architecture, this spiritual communication breaks down completely. For a medium to be called communicative, just like a language, a huge number of people have to agree upon shared symbols and common metaphors. In a traditional piece of architecture, this is exactly so. Everyone in ancient India who visited a temple knew what a certain Hasta Mudra meant to convey, and what the Nataraja pose meant to convey. In modern architecture, nobody apart from the architect himself can truly ‘understand’ what he means to say, which is another way of saying that there is no meaning in modern architecture anymore.
And while the Humayun’s Tomb or the Florence Cathedral is doubtlessly and wonderfully beautiful, the modern building does not even fulfill our aesthetic desire. With the help of the University System, art critics, humanities professors, and architecture schools the very definition of aesthetics has been stood on its head. Strange is the new Beautiful. And Ugly can be strange too. Until it is strange, nobody cares. Even ugly is accepted in the name of ‘innovation’.
A beautiful building now is something that is completely strange and completely whimsical based on whims and fantasies and idiosyncrasies of the individual architect. The only criterion to judge is the criterion invented by the very same architect who created the building. Such a system of criticism is fool proof of any criticism. For if there is no objective criterion to judge a building the only criterion left to judge is the criterion of the architect.
In a classic case of inverting the meaning, the modern architecture has managed to call ugly as beautiful, and in a system where objective criticism of art and architecture is no longer possible, where no spiritual system exists anymore to impart meaning to the building, and where no ethnic, cultural or national culture exists to guide the style of the architect, every building is a beautiful building, no matter how ugly it looks to us, and no matter how impractical it is for use.
And it all happened with two momentous changes in the Western tradition of architecture:
The elimination of the sense of sacred and the obliteration of the spiritual meaning from architecture by Christianity.
The introduction of the individual architect, who devoid of the urge to dedicate buildings in the service of spiritual meaning and to the agency of the cosmic architect, started on the search for the ever new and ever strange, without giving any thought to the meaning of architecture.
References
Sekules, Veronica. Medieval Art – Oxford History of Art. Oxford University Press, 2001.
Nixey, Catherine. The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. Pan Macmillan, 2018.
Seznec, Jean. The Survival of the Pagan Gods – The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art. Princeton University Press, 1995.
Murray, Peter. The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance – World of Art Series. Thames & Hudson. 1969.
Authored by Pankaj Saxena. Published by IndicaToday.