Architecture and Geography

I

FOR most of us it is difficult to realize that other people think differently from the way we do. I do not refer merely to differences of opinion on the same subject, but to real differences of thought and of ways of thought. For an educated Hindu or Chinese gentleman undoubtedly thinks about many things in quite a different way from what we do, and his thinking appears to him, I have no doubt, quite as sane, normal, and inevitable as ours does to us.

This is the reason why much of the highest literature, art, and music of these peoples is to us incomprehensible. We may admire it, only to find that we are admiring the wrong qualities in it, the qualities in which it approaches European art, not those for which the Hindu critic values it. We admire, for instance, Japanese prints, and they are indeed very admirable; but to the Japanese connoisseur they are contemptible.

Even in Europe it is difficult for us to-day to understand classic Greek and Roman art. We can write learnedly about it, and at great length, but if we know enough we realize that between us and the classic mind there hangs a veil.

It is possible to present a case for an international or cosmopolitan science: the atoms behave very much the same in Japan as they do in America, and the Japanese scientist adapts himself easily to the European scientific way of thought. Yet, even here, we should probably beware of imagining that there is only one way of scientific thought, and that our way. Modern European science is, after all, changing some of its ways of thought even now. Perhaps we can look at the Universe differently.

But it is certain that there can be no such thing as a real cosmopolitan or international art unless, indeed, we are prepared to destroy all arts save our own and to call the ruins cosmopolitan. Art, literature, and music remain obstinately local; they rise from our way of life, and that has been moulded by climate and geographical position.

It. is one of the sad things in modern civilization that to the no doubt beneficent spread of European sanitation, medicine, and physical science we have added the less beneficent spread of European art. The Chinese, poor creatures, are ignorant of the true laws of perspective and must learn to draw properly! Chinese art has just as much perspective as the artist requires, and its exquisite line will not be improved by any addition of picture planes or vanishing points. What is right in Paris may be quite wrong in Peiping. Art, like life, is local.

When Mr. Gandhi visited London the reporters laughed at him for continuing to wear a loincloth. But who remembered to laugh at Lord Willingdon when he appeared, beneath an Indian sun, in tall hat, frock coat, and gray-striped trousers? I do not condemn the Viceroy’s costume; it may have been politically necessary; it. was right in London, but by all the rules of common sense it was as wrong in Delhi as was Mr. Gandhi’s loincloth in London. Both gentlemen were, of course, giving political demonstrations; both were geographically wrong, and both were also artistically wrong.

II

Architecture has been particularly the victim of efforts to delocalize it. There is something broad and cultured about a universal and cosmopolitan architecture, something suggesting travel and acquaintance with the great cities of Europe. But this is all wrong, since architecture, owing to its close contact with our lives, is peculiarly and intimately governed by climate.

The Eskimo igloo is, I am told, a very snug home within the Polar Circle. It would be not merely uncomfortable but impossible at the equator. It would indeed rapidly change into a cold bath, refreshing as an incident but undesirable as a dwelling, as undesirable as a Californian bungalow at the Pole.

To take a less extreme example, that square, sensible, comfortable, and comely dwelling which our forefathers of the eighteenth century built and lived in, the Georgian brick house, would be nearly uninhabitable in central India; it would be too hot and airless. But the Indian house of colonnades and courts would be impossible to heat in a northern winter. The architecture grows from the climate.

On a hot day the cat lies stretched out to meet the sun, on a cold one she curls up tightly and uses her excellent system of central heating and insulated walls. Unfortunately we cannot uncurl our houses in summer and curl them up in winter. In a hot climate we stretch them out, in a cold one we make them tight and compact; and this is architecture.

Unfortunately, to many people, the architecture is the various ornamental trimmings which may be added to the building. These constitute ‘styles,’ and must be kept ‘correct.’

I was once in a house which, for sentimental reasons, was built in the Moorish ‘style.’ It was very well done, with horseshoe arches, Alhambra capitals, and a little fountain in the central hall. It was very romantic, and, of course, it was not a Moorish house at all. It was, and had to be, a Canadian house in Moorish clothes; they sat as comfortably as most fancy dress does, and the house, to northern eyes, looked like a Turkishbath establishment.

Yet it was generally regarded as a house in the ‘Moorish style’ by people who ignored the building as architecture and applied that ill-used word to the ornamental trimmings.

We must not make this mistake. Corinthian capitals, pediments, columns, and entablatures are trimmings. So are pointed arches, tracery windows, and carved grotesques. They have their place; they are useful, often delightful, and despite our modern purists they are humanly necessary; but, alone, they are not architecture. We shall rather give that word to the manipulation of materials to form shelters — shelters not for the body alone, but for the mind; shelters in which we can live dignified and pleasant lives and which will aid us in filling our places in the community efficiently and well. The shelters will need trimmings, but these rise best from the nature of the materials and from the traditions of our lives; we need not worry very much whether they follow exactly any known ‘style of architecture.’

What exactly do we mean when we speak of a ‘style of architecture’? When we say that a house is in the ‘Gothic’ style, do we mean that it has strong walls for defense, no baths or drains, and rushes on the floor instead of carpets? We do not. We mean that it is a modern house, complete with too many bathrooms and a garage in place of a nursery, ingeniously trimmed with littie bits copied from fourteenth-century manors and parish churches.

Styles in architecture are historic facts. Their details can be found in numerous textbooks, and easily — all too easily — copied by any intelligent draftsman. The business of the architect is to provide a house good for living in and in which a good life can be lived. What historic style the details resemble — whether, indeed, they resemble any historic style — is, comparatively, unimportant.

But I am afraid that most people think a church ‘Gothic’ if it has pointed arches here and there, or a bank ‘classic’ if it looks like a Roman temple.

III

We will, then, regard architecture as the art of erecting shelters in which we live and conduct our activities. These shelters must help us to live healthily, economically of effort and of money, and pleasantly. They shelter our businesses, our religion, our politics, and our crime. They add reverence to our religion, efficiency to our business, dignity to our politics, and they should discourage our crime.

We live in a climate, hot or cold, dry or damp, and the first thing that we have to do is to make our buildings suited to the climate; the next is to make them suited to their object. I put them in this order deliberately. The best Canadian hospital would be of very little use as a hospital in Central Africa. It would be a bad hospital there. Climate comes first, for it controls the use.

When we have produced a building suitable for the climate and for its use, we will, being human, begin to add something to it. A little decoration will make the building more worthy, a scrap of carving or an inscription will add interest. If it is a building in which great public functions will be celebrated a great deal of ornament may be necessary.

In the greatest schools of architecture this ornament grew slowly from the materials, the purpose, the traditions of the culture, and the imagination of the artist. So the ancient Greeks developed a whole series of decorative details and a great school of sculpture so perfectly adapted to the buildings of which they form a part that to-day we are apt to look upon these details as constituting the architecture.

The Romans, a businesslike but somewhat philistine people, borrowed these Greek details lock, stock, and barrel, and, with the aid of Greek hirelings, applied them to their own splendid engineering architecture, greatly to its detriment. The great architecture of the Roman baths lies in the disposition and proportion of the halls and in their magnificent construction, not in their gilt Corinthian capitals. Not until Byzantine times was this alien ornament brought into sympathy with the building. The crown of classic architecture is Santa Sophia at Constantinople, not the Baths of Caracalla or the Colosseum.

After the breakup of the Roman Empire, Western Europe was left to herself, without books or authorities and with only a dim recollection of Roman greatness. She was compelled to develop an architecture of her own. Classic architecture, developed in the sunny climate of the Mediterranean, was one of colonnades, verandahs, courts, and large, dimly lighted domes. Shade and coolness were essential. The house was a courtyard, and, as our summer holiday makers say, the people ‘practically lived in the gallery.’ But the north was colder, wetter, and darker. This demanded a more compact house, thicker walls, more provision for heating, and larger windows. Out of these climatic needs came Gothic architecture, and out of the abounding spirit of its builders came a system of ornament which, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, rose to heights of beauty unrivaled in the world.

Of course other influences went to form the mediæval cathedrals. The French cathedral was a city building; like all city buildings on limited sites, it is high and compact, as is the skyscraper. The English cathedral, descended from the Benedictine abbey, was a country building standing in its close; like all country buildings, it is low and spreading.

But no southern building could endure the great window spaces of Beauvais Cathedral or of Hardwick Hall. The blaze and heat would be unendurable.

For this reason Gothic buildings were never really comfortable in the south. Milan or Orvieto cathedrals are not really Gothic; the famous Venetian Gothic is an architectural frippery. It is easily understandable that when, in the fourteenth century, Italy became prosperous, the minds of her people traveled back to the glories of the Roman Empire and in an ecstasy of historic patriotism produced the Renaissance.

We cannot deny a certain suitability in this revival. The courtyard plan of the Italian palazzo, the great dome of St. Peter’s, are in the old Italian tradition, and the classical details with which they are decorated were developments of the Italian people. But these revived classic forms no longer rose from the feeling of the craftsman, as had the decorations of the mediaeval churches; they were the products of scholarship. Architecture was, in fact, becoming a learned profession.

As an architecture of kings and courts, the Renaissance spread all over Europe. The old Gothic art was vulgar, and this learned and cultured Italian art imposed itself everywhere on a learned generation. Everywhere the new Italian details were grafted on to the old climatic needs of building. Architecture became a matter of such scholarly considerations as symmetry, dignity, proportion, scale, and correctness.

Europe was entering upon its search for knowledge, and architecture, too, had to become learned. Vitruvius, a minor Roman officer of engineers, became the accepted authority, and after reading some of the treatises on architecture of the Italian masters one gets the impression that they really believed that, by careful adherence to the rules and by a sedulous use of the best models, a perfect architecture could be produced, perfect now and forever, perfect from Greenland to India.

As often happens, the men were a great deal better than their system, and the buildings were vastly superior to the theory. But, as a result, architecture became more and more concerned with the trimmings, while mere practical questions of construction and use were relegated to the base mechanic arts, unworthy of a scholar or a gentleman. A great eighteenth-century house had to be stately; what we should to-day regard as intolerable inconvenience was not merely tolerated, it was probably not felt. Yet Marlborough refused to live at Blenheim, the stately home provided by a grateful nation; he preferred a little square brick house.

IV

Europe was becoming more scientific. The desire for exact and tested knowledge began to dominate our culture, and this tendency culminated in the nineteenth century. The great classical archaeologists of England and Germany — Stuart, Cockerell, Pennethorne, Dörpfeld, Dürm — dissected the buildings of Greek antiquity stone by stone, measuring their curves and mouldings to the hundredth part of an inch. Never was knowledge more accurate. Parthenons sprang up from Regensburg to Nashville; all Europe and America dreamt of a perfect architecture following these perfect models of Hellenic antiquity, perfect for every time and place.

But these cultured gentlemen forgot that a Greek colonnade is after all a verandah, a sunshade. They did not realize that the Parthenon was originally painted in bright hard reds, blues, and greens which only a Mediterranean sun could subdue, and that every line of the architecture was intended for color. Such color would be impossibly garish in the dimmer light of the north; lacking it, the buildings are only skeletons, duly clanking their scholarly fetters. The Lincoln Monument and the Temple of the Scottish Rite at Washington have a spectral dignity, ghosts of Pericles and Mausolos still haunting the cities of the New World.

An art condemned to the constant repetition of perfect forms is dead; when a thing is perfect it is dead, it cannot grow.

Greater variety of corpses could, however, be obtained by having more models — not only Greek, but Roman, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, French, English, Spanish, Georgian, Queen Anne, Colonial, Mission. Europe and America ran riot in ‘period’ architecture, and, when we have run through all our periods, what have we but an ill-formed mess? Richardson, indeed, tried to found a national American style, but he based it upon the twelfth-century architecture of Southern France. America is not Southern France, nor twelfth-century, and Richardsonian Romanesque died. The English architects, indeed, produced a domestic architecture based upon a simple traditional structure and a close study of the English way of life. It was, like all good architecture, local. It was purely domestic, and English public buildings continued to be on the whole messy.

In America the calm stately copybook architecture of the Chicago Exposition led to a revival of the Greek revival, which had died in Europe nearly a century before. A stately colonnade is necessary to a public building, and we buy our railroad tickets in the central hall of a Roman bath, unconscious that the steel roof of the adjoining concourse is far finer and more real architecture than the pseudo-Roman trimmings of the great hall.

V

America is still suffering from the Monumental Building. She has shown that a new and fresh architecture can be produced from commerce, but — those monuments!

Public buildings — museums, art galleries, and the like — are presented by public-spirited donors, who desire that their names shall be preserved, and they must be monumental. They are vast, utilitarian tombstones. A great row of Ionic columns leads to a dignified and symmetrical interior, usually of cold gray marble. Practical considerations seem to be almost ignored to allow of a symmetrical plan with lots of corridors. (If only the collections were symmetrical! But they are not.) I hardly know of one museum or art gallery in which there is not some great central hall or grand staircase, useless for the purposes of the building, devoted to the display of its own old-fashioned graces.

Architecture is the provision of shelters for our activities. Go into one of our picture galleries, to admire and study its masterpieces. The floor is of polished marble or hardwood, so hard that a short walk through the galleries leaves one’s feet aching. The only seats are fixed settees in the middle of the rooms, and rare at that, upholstered with that combination of luxury and discomfort found to perfection in hotel lounges. They are intended, I believe, to discourage loungers.

The gallery itself is usually too big and always very much overlighted. Color is killed by a bright light. The ancient Greeks knew that, when they painted their buildings in garish blues and reds to withstand a southern sun. We ignore it when we look at a delicately colored landscape by a brilliant top light. Watch a real landscape some clear summer evening while the sun is setting. There comes a moment of the dusk when the colors suddenly sing out in brilliancy far greater than ever they showed at noonday. A meadow shows a brighter green on a dull wet day, not only because the day is wet, but because it is dull.

A well-known art critic has advocated the provision of roller skates for our art-gallery visitors. They could thus combine culture and exercise, and the floors are evidently designed as rinks.

The familiar gallery headache is probably due to hard floors, overlighting, and lack of seats on which to rest while looking at the exhibits. It should be possible to sit quietly in front of a great picture for half an hour. A short time ago, visiting a monumental picture gallery, I was struck by the great beauty of a portrait. I went over to it, looked at it, became conscious that my feet were very tired, and — went away. There was not a seat in the room.

Picture galleries should be places in which to enjoy pictures; the floors should be soft enough to walk upon, and there should be plenty of comfortable chairs. The galleries should be suited to the size and character of the pictures; the light should be bright or dim to suit their color. (Much of the rather blatant color of some modern art is a gallant attempt to fight gallery lighting.) But perhaps these things would interfere with the empty dignity of the late Mr. So-and-so’s tombstone.

Broad, sweeping marble staircases are all too common; they are slippery, dangerous, and, in use, very undignified. Like the galleries, they look best when empty.

I have attended a reception at which the receiving personage stood at the head of a lofty flight of marble steps, twenty feet broad. Most of the guests, being elderly, inclined to the right side of the stair, where they could have the aid of a handrail. The personage, greeting his guests, found himself imperceptibly inclined to his left, and presently the reception resolved itself into a string of people scrambling up one side of a twenty-foot monumental stair. Possible remedies: first, a carpet up the middle; second, a handrail on each side of the carpet; third, and best, no monumental stair at all, but elevators and small stairs where required, with short, easy flights and seats at the landings.

I would further suggest a close time for colonnades over ten feet high.

Such are the fruits of a cosmopolitan architecture which ignores country, climate, and geographical position.

Contrast this pretentious absurdity with the Quebec farmhouse, compact and easily heated; the patio house of Mexico, spreading and airy; the manygabled manor of England or France; the wooden houses of old New England, with their central chimney; the verandah houses of the sunny South, all suited to their place and their climate. Is it any wonder that to many of us these are truer architecture than the most monumental picture gallery?

VI

In recent times a school of modernistic architecture has appeared which prides itself upon being ‘functional.’ It professes to be founded solely upon the practical use of modern materials to fulfill modern needs. These are noble principles; they are, of course, the principles of all great architecture. The new architecture is justified as a revolt against ‘period ’ and ‘monumental’ architecture. Unfortunately the modernists, being enthusiastically cosmopolitan, are quite ungeographical.

The typical ‘modern’ house has thin coacrete walls, flat roofs, and from outside the appearance of being made of a number of boxes of various sizes. It has very large plate-glass windows, innumerable mechanical gadgets, and no ornament whatever. Decoration is by flat washes of color.

In themselves there is nothing wrong with these characteristics. They result in a house very suitable for a warm temperate climate, with no great extremes, abundant and competent service, and owners sufficiently sophisticated to like extreme severity. The form was, in fact, developed in Central Europe; it is quite unsuited to Northern America, with its extremes of climate and little service.

Thin concrete walls may give admirable insulation tests in the laboratory; in practice they do not retain heat as do thick ones. The old thick-walled houses, once heated, remained warm for quite a time; the new thin-walled ones go cold very quickly. Large plate-glass windows admit heat in summer and cold in winter. They are very heavy, and a special electric motor has to be installed in the basement to open and close them. Such devices are expensive, and, like all gadgets, are great fun when new and never in order when old. The large plain polished surfaces are easily marked, and show it. One fingerprint on a large plate-glass window cries out for the cleaner. Now it is well to be clean, but there are impossibilities. We cannot spend all our time cleaning, or afford the services of a gang of ex-naval men with polishing rags and bottles. Yet this is what the modern house needs.

Roofs are very climatic. The flat roof, usually thick, is in common use in all tropical countries. Being thick, it keeps out the heat; being flat, it provides a convenient and safe promenade or openair bedroom. The flat roof is also a good snow roof: it holds a blanket of snow in winter and so keeps the house warm; but it is a bad rain roof.

The steep-pitched roof has been generally used in wet, temperate climates. It was developed quite independently in Europe and in Japan, a proof that it has great qualities in a temperate climate where frosts and thaws alternate in winter, rain and sun in summer. The pitched roof is also a good snow roof if uninterrupted by gables, dormer windows, or similar obstructions. The many-gabled, many-dormered roofs of a French chateau are the products of a mild, wet climate and will not do in a snowy winter.

This modern architecture is apparently going through a phase of exhibitionism and of revolt not uncommon in young things. But it will learn — learn that too great severity defeats itself, that gadgets get out of order and are not worth repairing, that place and climate must be respected, and that a cosmopolitan architecture is not only impossible but very dull.

So at present we seem to have three architectures — the ‘monumental,’ a cosmopolitan art based upon scholarship; the ‘period,’ based upon a sentimental love of a romantic past; and the ‘modern,’ based upon a carefully unsentimental practicality. At present all alike agree to ignore locality. Classic colonnades, Tudor half-timber manors, Francois premier châteaux, and concrete boxes spring up from Montreal to New Orleans regardless of differences of climate and tradition. History is bad to copy from, but it is accumulated experience. It tells us that every good architecture has been local — the product of local needs, local materials, and local climate. Our present age is not so widely different from other ages as some would like to imagine. A few telephones and aeroplanes are not going to change human nature, and for us, as for our forefathers, our locality will remain the moulding feature of our lives and ol our architecture.