Nikolaus Pevsner begins his seminal An Outline of European Architecture (1943) with a famous assertion. It is meant to be insightful, clarifying, while also gobsmackingly obvious:
A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture. Nearly everything that encloses space on a scale sufficient for a human being to move in is a building; the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal.
He goes on to evaluate and judge the "spatial expression" of hundreds of "pieces of architecture." While he notes their uses, he never judges their success as places for work, sleep, worship, learning, eating, storage or any other use.
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A simple reading of this division seems innocent enough. Surely the designers of Lincoln Cathedral were very educated, perhaps famous in their day, and spent an enormous amount of time creating such an important building. A simple bicycle shed, put up in an afternoon by nobody-in-particular, simply cannot compete in achievement. A studied, complex design is superior to an offhand, simple design, right? An exceptional, more beautiful building, one that catches the eye and plays with it, so to speak, is a better building than a common building put up without much attention paid to its looks, right? And somewhere between the two is a hard and fast line between architecture and mere building.
So what's to argue? (you know already that I'm setting up an artful-misreading straw man here).
Much that ails modern architecture is packed into Pevsner's simple division, including the primacy of aesthetic achievement, a hierarchy of laudable goals, and assumptions about the nature of design itself, even the assertion of a difference in kind, not degree, among designers and mere builders. It assumes that aesthetic expression is difficult, while usefulness is easy. It assumes that aesthetics are more important than usefulness. It assumes that our enjoyment of a building is impossible in isolation, but only by comparison with other creations and experiences.
The reevaluation of these divisions and assumptions is essential to a new architecture that is beautiful and useful to the people who use and appreciate it. While this world benefits from erudite academics such as Pevsner--and I wish there were more of him, for he has contributed greatly to our understanding of architecture through his publications and insights--academic perspectives should not drive practice.
Curiously, a few paragraphs later Pevsner argues that our modern age thinks of "functional soundness" as "indispensable for aesthetic enjoyment." If the function of Lincoln Cathedral is to teach and enjoy the Christian faith, what enjoyment could the average bicycle-riding atheist find in it?
On this point I agree with Pevsner wholeheartedly, though his book argues the opposite by evaluating and judging each piece of architecture for its "spatial expression" rather than any practical or useful matter. Assessments of buildings rarely mention what they were used for, beyond being a church or an administrative building. What went on in an 12th century church? And did it work well? Did the employees of the administrator find the building easy to work in, or a hell-hole?
The original usefulness of Lincoln Cathedral, I would say, is integrated with its particular beauty. The experience of a 12th-century Christian visiting the cathedral was worlds more powerful, meaningful, and beautiful than the modern experience of a tourist stopping by before lunch.
He never comments on the functional soundness of the buildings he studies--perhaps he assumes that successful aesthetics are not possible without successful usefulness: that if it looks good, it must work well. Anyone who has owned an Italian car knows this is simply not the case.
In this regard, I would argue that Lincoln Cathedral has evolved from architectural triumph to failure--it no longer inspires the awe of the faithful, but rather the admiration of the tourist, or the curiosity of the historian.
if usefulness and aesthetics truly go hand-in-hand, as Pesvner suggests, then the critique of good architecture would ask whether the building serves its purpose as perfectly as it catches and entertains the eye. Large, complex failures are still failures. But small and simple successes are successes. On this scale, the average bicycle shed, made competently by a craftsman-builder, if it houses a bicycle safely, out of the weather, and is easy to access, is more successfully useful in 2021 than Lincoln Cathedral.
If this seems a perversion of logic on the level of Aristophanes' The Clouds, it is. But no more bent than the idea we must live in art with little consideration to the living.
When the discipline of experience design matures, it will integrate into architectural and engineering practice. At this point, we will reach a heterarchy of design in which all objects and buildings are evaluated by how well they accomplish their purpose in human life, the good/glorious/creative aesthetics a consequence or result of the real work, and not the real work itself.
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A bicycle shed can be supremely beautiful in its own right, made with no aesthetic or design intent, just due to the practiced hands of craftsmanship, from traditional design, not a product of language or theory. This is a quietly unassuming beauty, not greater but no lesser than the sublimity of a cathedral. I say that the sublimity of a cathedral is not achieved by the conscious design efforts of the educated people in control, but in spite of these efforts.
Consider a non-hierarchical appreciation of the bicycle shed and Lincoln Cathedral in which both are considered in terms of their relative success in achieving their goals. The bicycle shed would be successful if it keeps a bike or bike secure, dry, and easy to access. The cathedral would be successful if devotees of its religion come away closer to their god and their god's ideals.
So-- did Lincoln Cathedral encourage and support genuine Christian faith in England from the time of its construction? Or did it merely impress, scare, fascinate on the basis of more worldly concerns such as the projection of the power, wealth and influence of the Catholic Church?
Both the cathedral and the shed require competence, insight, subtlety and empathy to be successful. By common opinion, a successful shed is a much lesser achievement than a successful cathedral. But here we are at the hierarchy again. I would rather argue it takes less time and effort, not a lesser skillset, to create a successful shed.
The mere commission of a cathedral means nothing -- it is not our best and brightest who are asked to design our most prominent structures, but our best connected. You don't need talent to be successful, you need clients; and they choose based on personal connection, status and other factors aside from actual talent. The success of the connected then in turn defines taste and talent in aesthetics. If it's big and cost a lot, it must be good. Critics, given enough time, can argue any detail of any building is the best ever; but the experience of great aesthetics cannot be captured in words, or experiences prescribed.
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Is it that good architecture is expressive, or that it should be expressive? Pevsner's primary criterion poses more questions than it answers. I've taught high-school level literary interpretation by introducing students to a stop sign. We would fill en entire class teasing out all the sign has to say -- from its tone, use of capital letters, shape of the sign, use of color, all towards teasing out the full range of how the sign communicates, and our assumptions and interpretations of it, in what most would consider a most simple, clear and useful traffic direction. It's in the imperative voice. Who is speaking? Why? How do you obey? How is it clear you don't have to STOP permanently? The point is that we carry so much in us already, that the line between what an author says and how we understand it, is rarely clear. And so with literature and buildings--we get as much out of them as we put in. In great literature and great buildings, the more we put in, the more we can get out. But are we getting what the designer put in? If so, then Lincoln Cathedral would still encourage us to be good Christians. Or perhaps to fear the Catholic Church's power and influence. But no. We now love Lincoln Cathedral because it is so aesthetically expressive...
This is how cultural revolutions happen. The recent destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas and Palmyra come to mind, not just the fit of self-destruction in China in the 70's. The meaning of old art shifts and changes with time and loses all its original power and purpose and beauty gaining a negative expression that we can no longer abide. It's not just communists and Islamic extremists who perform this kind of cultural murder. We all do it to varying degrees. The denigration of the well-made bicycle shed as a lesser or insignificant accomplishment compared to any cathedral or large public building, no matter how ugly or offensive, is part of this focus on expression as paramount in architecture.
Why couldn't the Islamists simply ignore Palmyra? Were the ruins still speaking to them, or were they imposing some kind of offense on the ruins, that the ruins never were intended to express spatially.
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Do the bicycle sheds we build need to remind us of how humble and insignificant they are in comparison to cathedral builders? When we put our bikes away, and a neighbor compliments how nice our Shed is, do we need to reply with a nervous titter, "Well, thank you, but it's not Lincoln Cathedral or anything." I've done this a million times, verbally and to myself, when complimented on my furniture. And the reverse is socially ridiculous. Imagine Frank Gehry replying to a compliment on the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao with "Thanks, but it's not a bicycle shed."
I imagine a world in which architecture grows away from academic status towards real-life accomplishment, in which academics comment, record observe and enlighten, but do not influence or direct the success of our designed environments, rather the human being who lives, works or visits the building or architecture is the first and last authority on its success.
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