Architectural Composition

 
In literature at least, there is a keen interest in compositional ability, not for its own sake, (I don't think,) but because it helps in the transmission of meaning. There is a common misconception these days about grammar. People think that it's a separate set of knowledge about linguistic structure. People assume that it has no real function and so it it no longer taught in schools as part of language education. It is assumed that we already know what phrases mean without having to parse them. The effect of this has been a degradation in literary skills, especially in the media. We are not presented with a language that is engaging. Instead, blandness has crept in and it appears that we are losing the ability to probe and express deeper thoughts. A similar thing has happened in architecture where the details that make up the language of western architecture are no longer considered as critical.

The resultant physical environment designed by the graduates of modernist architectural schools has a banality that matches the blandness of thoughts expressed by modern language.

The idea that a building design is the art of composing from known components seems largely forgotten. Half of Vitruvius' theories is about arrangment. The rest deals with motives and placement. Because the tendency from the middle nineteenth century onwards was for architecture to veer towards the plastic arts, by habit, people now regard sculpture as the art most closely related to architecture. This, I feel, at least for myself, to be an error.

Architecture is as much a compositional art as are literature and music, at least in its intent and expressive potential, because like literature and music, architecture is a 'live' art, that is, life is infused by it and through it. Sculpture is pure form made for form's sake. Architecture made in this manner has a comic effect, like those examples of houses carved like mushrooms. Rudolf Steiner's phantasmagoric imaginings comes to mind. In composing architecture so that it is like a poem or a sonata, what is needed? It needs the means to create legibility.

I have found that prose cannot be appreciated fully unless the sentences are parsed in the reading. Music is much enhanced by a loving knowledge of its strutural realities. Architecture has construction details as the juxtapositions of unavoidable formal elements. The floor, columns, walls and roof move in and out and up and down in an architect's mind. He can't begin to build until these things get placed and fixed. How? It remains a dilemma until everything fits. There are powerful emotional tensions until the project is completed. A building project is a political as well as a technical event. In this sense, the distinguishing factor between the competence of a construction and the brilliance of architecture is surely eloquence.

 
Bevagna, 10 12 2007