-

WORLD OF ART
The Classical Language of Architecture
John Sun1merson. 139 illustrations
Sir John Summerson's brief account of el sical architecture
has every right to be called a classic itself, nd for this
edition it has been completely redesigned and the number
of illustrations more than doubled. Few b oks can have
had such an enthusiastic reaction from th Iearned and
at the same time added so much to the la man's pleasure
in his surroundings. For to appreciate the classical style,
its variety and its strength, its wit and its ccasional
eccentricity, demands instruction. The a hor, one of the
foremost of English architectural historia s, takes us easily
from the great originals of Greece and R
recapitulations and innovations of the Re
the explosive rhetoric of the Baroque an
statements ofNeo-classicism; thence tot
eclecticism of the Victorians and Edward
to the 'stripped N eo-classicism' of some

me to the
aissance,
the grave
e exuberant
ans and, finally,
f the moderns -

every age using the classicallanguage to r ake its own

statement.
Thames and Hudson
Revised and enlarged edition

ISBN 0-500-20177-3
On rht cnvcr:
Courty;lrd of rh~,. Duel!

l':lb\'l'. Urhino. l,horo

.~.-w-

~ 0:

1/

Sir John Summerson is

among thc;: g eatest of.English architecturJ! historians.
Curator of Sir ohn Soane's Muselll11 from 1945 until his
rerircment in 1 84, he had been Slade l'rofessor of Fine
Art at both Ox rd and Cambridge and had lectured on rhe
history ofarchit cture at Birkbeck College, London. He died
111 1992. Of his many books, the best k nown are probably
Cc<'IXilll L id<>ll and Archirccturc i11 Britaiu I5}0-I8JO,
both standard works.

~
ORLD OFART
This famous series
rovid es rhc widest available
rangc ofilustrated books o n art in ali its aspects.
lf you ould like to recei ve a complete list
o titlcs in print p lease write to:
THAMES A NO HUDSON

30 l3lo msbury Strcct, London wc r B JQP

In t e United States please write ro:
TH AMES ANO H UDSON INC.

soo Fifth vcnuc, New York , New York 1o 1 1 o

Printcd in Singapore

John Summerson

. - f-,-.- .;.., '

~~

JULJl
~

~uJ~
_;;_..

c;:L

)r-~

1,_..

,__j

~
~;~-~

-.~ 1

:~

THE CLASSICAL
LANGUAGE
OF ARCHITECTURE

".J

,~~-3 k~~r ''~

~
..

~
.. . :

-.-

~~

l(

i )J

.r--:

139 illustrations

.,
..

...

'

Dori'"
parti

-Imiict
porti
.VI!l

.vrr.

Tofc411<1
parti

.vr.

Corlnif1
prri

..

,..

'-

l'rapottiont
lia~onf.tl

'Proporlionr
~U4dral4

JL

________

.----- _

lX

_,

-propotliont

Jmpu
altrr

l'ropor
JUfttbiptl

l'ropottion t

()!f(

tbpla

tit~S'

Utttq

L.

-- -~

Thames and Hudson

Contents

Fro11ti5piece:
I Thc orders of archicecture. With chis
woodcuc of 1540, Sebastian o Serii o
incroduced his creacise on 'che five ways of
building'. The Tuscan, Doric, lonic and
Corinchian orders had been named by
Vitruvius. Alberti had named the Composite.
Serlio was the first to exhibit the five orders
as a closed series to which no additions were
admissible.
Any copy of this book issued by thc publisher ~s
~ p~perback is sold subject to the condition th~t it
sh~ll not by way of trade or ocherwisc bc km,
resold, hired out or o therwise circul:tted without
the publishtr's prior conscnt in any form of

Preface

r The Essentials of Classicism

The Grammar o Antiquity

19

3 Sixteenth-Centu y Linguistics
4 The Rhetoric of he Baroque

s The Light of Re

son - and of Archaeology

binding or covcr orher rh:~n that in whic:h it is

published ~nd without ~ similar condition
including thcs<: words being imposc.:-d on
~ subscquent purch~scr.

6 Classical into M dern

ro6

1 <J63 Sir John Summerson

and the 13ritish !3roadc~sting Corporation
This edition 1980Thames ~nd Hudson Ltd. London
R.eprintcd 1996

Glossary

122

AII Rights Reserved. No parc of chis public:ttion

m~y be reproduced or tr~nsmitted in ~ny form or
by any n1t!ans. dectronic or nu:chanical, including
photoco py, recording or any other information

Notes on the Li rature of Classical

Architecture

135

Sources of Illust ations

140

srorage and retricv:tl system, wirhout prior

pcrmission in \Vriting fron1 the publisher.

!SUN 0 - )00-20 1 77-3

l'rinted ~nd bound in Singapore by C.S. Graphics

Index

CHAPTER FIVE

The Light of Reason, - and of Archaeo logy

The use of the classical language of architecture has implied, at ali
times when it has risen to high eloquence, a certain philosophy. You
cannot us.e the orders lovingly unless you love them; and you cannot
love them without persuading yourself that they embody some
absolute principle of truth or beauty. Belief in the fundamental
authority of the orders bas taken various forms, the simplest being in
these terms: Rome was the greatest; Rome knew best. The sheer
veneration of Rome is the clue to much in our civilization. It is a
veneration we cannot easily share ourselves because we know too
much about Rome and do not always like what we know; and also
because we know far more than has ever been known before of other
civilizations which ministered to the successes which Rome achieved.
But to understand the mind of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries we
must, in this respect, be simple. There is a beautiful story told by
Burckhardt of an occasion in r485 , when it was announced that the
corpse of a Roman lady, in perfect preservation, had been discovered
in an ancient sarcophagus. The corpse was taken to the Palazzo clei
Conservatori and as the news spread people thro nged to see this
marvel. The Roman lady, her mouth and eyes half open, the colour
still in her cheeks, was 'more beautiful', says a contemporary, 'than
can be said or written and were it said or written, it would not be
believed by those who had not seen her'. Of course, the thing was a
fake. But the emotion was not. If the lady was Roman, people knew
she must be beautiful beyond anything that any living person had
ever seen.
That touching and unreasoning faith in Roman excellence belongs
mostly to the fifteenth century. It comes back with incredible force in
some of the paintings of Mantegna in which sena tors, consuls, lictors
and centurions stand ready to re-enact their parts within an ambience
of superb and glittering monuments.
But the simplicity of that faith made it vulnerable. If it inspired
action, it also challenged enquiry and criticism; and cri ticism, w hile
89

23

93

knowing and accepting the fact that Rome was best and greatest,
demanded to know w h y? Why was Rome the fount of ali goodness in
architecture? O ne answer was, because ali educated people
everywhere agreed on the incomparable beauty of Roman
architecture; but that merely begged the question. Another answer
was that it enshrined certain mathematical rules to which ali beauty
was accountable; but that was not easy to prove. A third answer- and
a much more profound one - was that Roman architecture has
descended, through the Greeks, from the most primitive epoch of
human history and was thus possessed of a sort of natural rightness,
was, indeed, almost a work of nature. Vitruvius was invoked to
support this view. H e taught that the Doric order developed from a
timber prototype and from this it was argued that the original temples
had had tree-trunks for columns and w ere thus derived from the
primitive forests. A curio us aliusion to this belief occurs in some of the
columns in the cloisters of S. Ambrogio, Milan, designed by
Bramante, where the shafts o f the stone columns ha ve the stumps of
sawn- offbranches carved on them .
But this question of 'why?' did not realiy worry anybody very
much till the seventeenth cent ury, and then it was not in Italy but in
France that the questioners appeared. It was natural, I suppose, that a
critica! spirit should emerge not in the homeland of classical
architecture, ltaly, but in a country where it had been absorbed and
adapted and where it displaced the most intellectual of ali medieval
building traditions. Anyway, it was in France, about the middle ofthe
seventeenth century, that questions began tobe asked about the true
nature of the orders and the w ay they should be used in modern
buildings. The 'natural rightness' of the orders was accepted and the
first concern ofFrench critics was to ensure their purity and integrity.
The new call to order carne in a series of books. First, there was the
famous Parallele, the Parallel of the Ancient Architecture with the
Modern, by Roland Freart, which contains a minute comparison of
the orders as found in antiquity and as interpreted by the theorists
from Serlio onwards. Freart pleads for rigorous selective purity. Then
carne the leading architect of the Lo uvre, Claude Perrault, with his
beautiful and searchingly annotated edition ofVitruvius; likewise his
treatise on the orders- the treatise from which 1 ha ve borrowed plate
4 as being perhaps the most elegant of aU engraved presentations of
the orders. And then, in 1706, followed a more remarkable book than

90

any ofthese, a bo by a French abbe, the Abbe Cordemoy. O n the

face of it, Cordem y's Nouveau Traite, his New Treatise on the whole of
Architecture, seems to be just another critica! review of the orders,
tending in the sa
direction as his predecessors. But it is far more
than that. Cordem y wants not only to libera te the orders from every
kind of distortion nd affectation; he wants to get rid of the w hole
business of using t e orders ornamentally, to get rid of what he calls,
rather effectively, 'architecture in relief: pilasters, half columns,
three-quarter col ns, attached columns, ornamental pediments,
pedestals, attic sto eys, the lot. His approach is a sort of Primitive
Methodism, stri ping away all the elabo rate linguistics of
architecture, all th mystery and drama, ali the brilliant play of the
Italian m asters, a d making the orders speak their own original
functionallanguag - no more, no less.
This approach as alr very fine and much in line with French
thought of the per od; it was all very rational (which, of course, was
the point); howev , it did not really work even in theory because the
orders themselves, s fo und in Rome, are by no m eans primitive, by
no means function l but, on the contrary, highly stylized. And it was
left for another F nch abbe, the Jesuit Laugier, nearly fifty years
later, to announce a theory which really did upset the architectural
apple- cart and shifi the basis of architectural thought for a century to
come. Perhaps m re than a century; because I am not sure that
he may notjustly called the first modern architectural philosopher.
Now, the estab shed hypothesis of all architectural theorists was
that architecture h d originated w hen primitive man built himself a
primitive hut. Fro the hut he went on to the temple and, refining
continually on the emple formula, he invented the timber version of
the Doric and then copied it in stone. The other orders followed. That
was the theory a everybody accepted it. But what nobody had
done wasto think t ali con cretely abou t the primitive hut; and this is
what Laugier did. He visualized it. He visualized it as a structure
consisting of upri ht posts, cross beams and a pitched roof- much
what you see in e allegorical frontispiece to his book. This, he
declared, was the ltimate image of architectural truth, 'the model'
(to use his own words) 'upon which all the magnificences of
architecture have een imagined' .
Here, for the fi st time, the basis of authority of the orders was
undermined - dis aced by something else, by an image ofcheir own
91

91

95

hypothetical prototype, which is a functi nal, a rational prototype.

Not that Laugier wanted to banish the ders; on the contrary, he
believed that further orders might well b invented. But he wanted
architects to use them with the same sens of constructional truth as
the posts and beams in the primitive hut. e agreed with Cordemoy
that ali 'architecture in relief' must go, but e went further in wanting
even walls to go. For Laugier, the ideal bu lding consisted entirely of
columns - columns carrying beams, carry ng a roof
This may, on the face of it, seem mild y funny; though to us in
the late-twentieth century, surrbunded by brand-new buildings
consisting of reinforced-concrete colum s with nothing but glass
diaphragms between them, it should no seem fun ny so much as
grandly prophetic. Anyway, in 1753, no ar itect could have proposed
anything so crazy as the abolition of wall . But Laugier was not an
architect; he was a philosopher and he was ealing in abstractions. H e
knew, of course, that walis could not be an would not be abolished,
but he was establishing a principle of arc itectural beauty and that
principle, he believed, had been revealed to im as quite necessarily an
affair of columns. And it is not at ali diffic It to be with him in this.
Look. A single column is just, well, a point n a plan; or rather, a very
small circle on a plan - it gives you the module of an order but
nothing more. But two columns give you at once an intercolumniation, therefore a rhythm, and here, with the module,
you ha ve the germ of a whole building. T e principle is as logically
valid today as it was two hundred and thir y years ago.
But what effect did Laugier's book, his sai sur l' Architecture, ha ve
in 1753? In France it was devoured; in ngland and in Germany
translations appeared within two years. It
s discussed and attacked,
digested or rejected ali over Europe. In actu 1building, I think it is fair
to say that any fresh, innovating work a er about 1755 is certain
either to be coloured by Laugier's view or to show a positive
rejection of them. The building which em dies his principles in the
most spectacular degree is the Pantheon in P ris. The Pantheon is now
no longer a church but it was begun s one, dedicated to St
Genevieve. The architect was Jacques-Ger in Souffl.ot. Souffiot was
not exactly a disciple of Laugier's but his o n ideas on architectural
principles ran close to Laugier's and were pr bably inflected by them.
lf you look at the exterior of the Pantheon, ou may, 1 am afraid, be
rather baffied by the fact that, contrary to everything Laugier
92

advocated, it consists almost entirely of wall. But if you look carefully

you wili see grey oblong patches in the walls; and these are filled-in
windows; Souffiot's intention, in fact, was more window than wall
but his factor of safety proved too low: the windows had to be
blocked. The interior is more to the point, though here again,
unintended masonry had to be introduced to assure stability. Stiii,
Souffiot's intention is perfectly clear and you feei it today the moment
you enter that brittle and coldly exquisite building. He was trying to 96
build a church in which the order, expressed only in the round, only
in independent, cylindrical shafts, not only looked very beautiful bu t
actually did the whole work of carrying the roof. He very nearly
succeeded.
Now this is a very long way from another church I described
earlier - Palladio's Redentore in Veni ce, where 1 made a special point 40
of the articulation of the orders. lf Palladio made a virtue of
articulation, Souffiot made it quintessential. To put these two
churches side by side is to see exactly the difference in ideals between
the mid-sixteenth century and the mid-eighteenth. Palladio was
trying, above ali things, tobe truly Roman. Souffiot was trying tobe
something altogether more philosophical - trying to reach the truth
behind Rome, the combined structural and aesthetic truth which the
orders, in their origin, could be supposed to have embodied.
The Pantheon is the first major building which can be called neoclassical - 'neo-classical' being the expression which has come to be
used for architecture which, on the one hand, tends towards the
rational simplification advocated by Cordemoy and Laugier and, on
the other hand, seeks co present the orders with the utmost
antiquarian fidelity. Reason and archaeology are the two complementary elements which make neo-classicism and which
differentiate it from the Baroque. Or do they? Once again 1 must
warn you against giving too exact a meaning to these labels.Just think
back to one of the major Baroque works 1 described in the previous
chapter- Bernini's Piazza in front of St Peter's. W hat, you may say, 79 , 8o
could possibly be truer to Laugier's ideal than those giant crescents
consisting wholly of independent columns, innocent of ali modelling
and enrichment. Yes, indeed. As so often happens, the expression of a
new ideal had involuntarily presented itself, on one particular
occasion, fully fledged, long before it occurred to anybody to
formulate the new ideal in words.
93

33

Something of this sort happened also in English architecture even

earlier and in a peculiarly striking way. Look at plate 45 - Inigo
Jones's church ofSt Paul, Covent Garden. It was built in 163 r, but ifit
is not pure neo-classicism I do not know what is. It is a study in the
primitive, based on Vitruvius's description of the Tuscan. That fine,
spreading roof, those massive wide-spaced columns are almost pure
archaeology, and about as basically structural as you can get- in fact,
weli on the way to the primitive hut. A hundred years !ater, but still
weli before Laugier's formulation ofthe new theory, the English were
acknowledging Jones's leadership in this direction, one perhaps
somewhat over-enthusiastic critic of 1734 describing the Covent
Garden church as 'without a rival, one of the most perfect pieces of
architecture that the art of man can produce'. If one is in sympathy
with the neo-classical ideal one can see what he meant. And this was
written only a year or two after Lord Burlington had paid his respects
to Vitruvian archaeology by building the Assembly Rooms at York,
a perfect reconstruction of the 'Oecus Aegyptius' or Egyptian Hali, a
Vitruvian model iliustrated from Paliadio's woodcut.
Ido not suppose that Laugier had heard of either of these buildings,
but Souffi.ot obviously knew something of English architecture
because he took St Paul's dome as his model for the dome of the
Pantheon. You can judge for yourself whether you think the
imitation an entire success. To my mind, the narrower intercolumniation of the Pantheon and the elimination of the solid piers
in every fourth bay result in a loss of gravity: the Pantheon dome spins
rather too airily over the rectangles of the cross-shaped structure
below. Souffi.ot, no doubt, thought he was purifying Wren's designgetting rid of what Cordemoy would have called 'architecture in
relief' and seizing only the essentials.
. The actual impact of Laugier on English architecture is another
story and an important one. The English already had, as we havejust
seen, a strong tradition of architectural puritanism, appearing first in
Inigo Jones, cropping up again and again, even sometimes in Wren
and Hawksmoor, and implicit in the English eighteenth-century
addiction to Palladio. But perhaps the very fact that the English had
this rather puritanical attitude to architecture made them reluctant to
go ali the way with Laugier. Besides, the English were, under the skin,
incurably romantic; and if the rationalism of Laugier pulled in one
direction, the wildly irrational inventions of the great architect94

etcher, Giambat( ta Piranesi, pulled in another. The imagination of

Piranesi was irre stihie. Look at plate 97, one of Piranesi's famous
prison scenes- ac vernous perspective ofRoman arches, chipped and
scarred, dripping with horror, and rusticated more wildly than
anything at Man ua. An architect could hardly, you would think,
have both Laugier and Piranesi for his heroes.
And yet that s very much what some English architects did:
George Dance, f, r instance, whose Newgate Prison is obviously in 98
the mood ofPira si but some of whose other works are just as clearly
influenced by La ier. The establishment, on the whole, was against
Laugier. Sir Willi m Chambers, the author of the one great English
eighteenth-centu
treatise on architecture, objected both to the
thesis of the pri itive hut and to the sweeping elimination of
everything excep colull!ns in the round. And yet in the plate in
Chambers's boo where he illustrates the development of the Doric 94
order are two ve ions of the primitive hut which must surely ha ve
been sketched aft r a reading of Laugier.
Whatever the ctual effect of Laugier's thought in England, the
idea ofprimitivis , ofsearching back to the true, untainted sources of
architectural bea ty, certainly prevailed in England, and it had two
ma in results. On of these was the Greek Revival. The other was the
peculiar, idiosync atic primitivism of Sir John Soane.
The Greek Re iva! is something in which England played a very
special part. Tii the middle of the eighteenth century Greek
architecture was mething of a mystery. Everybody knew that the " .. _,
Romans had got heir architecture from the Greeks and if it was.'a
question oflooki g for 'untainted sources' Greece was obviously t}1e
", .-.
place to look. But nobody ever went to Greece. It was a long way o.ff;
it was part ofthe ttoman Empire and neither an easy nor a safe pl~ce'l .
for the Western t aveller. However, in 1751 two Englishmen,James<:
Stuart and Nicho as Revett, set out for Athens; they carne back three
years !ater and i 1762 the first volume of their book, containing
accurate measure drawings of Greek buildings, was published. A
Frenchman, Le R y, forestalled them with a more pictorial book in
1758, but Stuart nd Revett became the acknowledged authorities.
When people s w, for the first time, accurate representa tions of the
Parthenon and th Theseion- the major examples ofthe Greek Doric 100
order of the age o Peri des- what did they think of them? W ere they
coarser and crude than Roman Doric, because earlier in date; or were
95

101

103

they purer because nearer the source? It ali dep nded on what one was
looking for. Some saw them as one thing, so e as another. You see,
Greek Doric is squatter and more m assive th n the Roman. On the
other hand its profiles are more tense and s tie. Some latitude of
interpretation was inevitable. The first Greek oric buildings built in
England were built more o r less as curiosities, xotic souvenirs, in the
form of temples and porches on gentlemen's estates. But about the
turn of the century the conv;-:tion that the Gr ek Doric - and Greek
Ionic and Greek Corinthian - were in ali way purer and better than
their Roman coum erparts had won the day, d the Greek Revival
proper had started. There were now not five rders to choose from
but eight: the five Roman orders established 1 ng ago by Serlio, and
the three Greek orders which could be extra ted from Stuart and
Revett. The Revivalists, of course, confined t m selves to these.
The Greek Revival, which started in England, eventually
manifested itself ali over Europe and quickly pread to America. It
lasted for about thirty years and I do not t ink anybody would
consider it o ne of the m ore glorious episodes i architectural history.
The Greek orders always remained curiosties - specmens brought
out of a museum. Since the Greeks had nev r evolved the darng
mechanics of style which the Romans had d ne, since the Greeks
never used the arch o r the vault or built huge ulti-storey buildings,
the revived Greek elements tended to be use as cumbersome and
cosdy appendages to modern buildings of oth rwse rather negative
character. Look at the photograph of the High School at Edinburgh
by Thomas Hamilton, built in 1825- cerrainly most spectacular and
persuasive Greek Doric performance, beauti lly sited on Calton
Hill. But I really believe that if aii this architec ure were taken away
the Hgh School as a functoning building wou still be there, and it
would get agreat deal more light. Much the sa e could be said ofthe
British Museum . Of course, I know this is no qute fair. 'Useless'
porticos and 'useless' colonnades are perfectly legitimare means of
architectural expresson, but when they beco e a sort of cultural
luggage carried by buildings which they screen, over and adorn, but
do not really control, a very dead dead-end has been reached.
Now Sir John Soane, who had one of th most original and
explorati ve minds of the period that saw the reek Revival, never
committed himself to anything of this kind. H always designed his
buildings from inside out. H e knew his Greek rders very w ell. He
96

kne.;,._, his Roman orders even better. He knew his Italians. He had a
keen appreciation ofLaugier. And knowing ali this he was able to go
to the root of the matter and make his own statements as to the
fundamentals of architecture. Laugier's primitivism - the idea of
going back to prehistoric beginnings - certainly appealed to him but
he was prepared to go much Jfurther than Laugier in actually
eliminating aii the conventional orders from his practice and
inventing a 'primitive' order ofhis own. You can see it at his Dulwich
Art Gallery, which still stands, and of which a drawing, from the
Soane Museum, is illustrated in plate ro8. Soane's 'orde r ' here is
nothing but a brick pier or a brick strip with a stone necking and a
stone projection over it, which is a token comice. He did not share
Laugier's hostility to pilasters. Soane's critics made fun of this order
by calling it his 'Breotian' o rder. There is not a single conventional
column or even a conventional moulding in sight. Everything has
been abstracted and then rendered back in Soane's own personal
interpretation. It is all very original and seems to point to a new
freedom for architecture. It seems so to us, but it did not to the
generation that followed . When he died, his style died with him and
nobody was sorry. The Greek Revival was dying too. Laugier and his
ideas were forgotten. It might seem that the story of the classical
language of architecture was finished.
But it was not. Whe ther the story of that language ever was or ever
will be finished 1do not know. What I ha ve defined as the essentials of
classicism penetrated the stylistic chaos of the nine teenth century and
became the vital factors n the architectural revolution of the
twentieth- the revolution that gave us the architecture we use today .

97

95
92

93

95, 96 The perfect building, con sisting of an organization of single load-bearing

columns, was attempted , though noe quice achieved, in che interior o f thc
Pantheon , Paris, begun in 1756; it is the first great m onume nt of neo-classicism .

9'

The l ight of reason

Attempcs co guide archiceccural

choughc along racionallines
come wich chc Age of
Enligh cenme nc . 91 The
fro ncispiecc o f Laugier's Essai
Sllri'A rchitccture, 1753 , shows
thc 'rustic cabin ' of p ri mitive
man, 'thc model upon which
ali the m agnificcnces of
archiceccurc ha ve been
imagincd'. 92, 93 Two carlier
ali usions to chc idea of
a rchiccccurc's primitive o rig ins:
a diagram by Philibert de
l'Orme, 1576, an d a 'rustic'
column by Bramante in the
cloister of S. Am brogio,
Milan. 94 A plate fro m Sir
Will iam Chambers's T reatise o f
1759 shows the hypochctical
cvolucion of chc Doric ordcr
from the primitive h uc.

'

~
,:1,.,...,.././;.,.,.

T'---;
'

,..__ .

.f

..

:;:::. r~

. :.,.-,. .. , :... ....

~

94

98 Old Newgate Gaol,

London, by George Dance,
1769; the language of
ruscication and che dark
vision of Piranesi are
introduced into a building
conceived as a symbo l as well
as a punitive stronghold. 99
In the County Hali , London,
by Ralph Knott, 19 1 r, the
spirit ofPiranesi gives
monumentality and p restige
to the seat of an
administrative body.
97

The light of imagination

The Age ofReason was also, paradoxically, the Age oflmagination. 97 Piranesi's
Prison Scenes, published about 1744, derive from the Baroque theatre but are also
profoundly architectural- romantic studies in rustication. T he orders are absent
but the raw masonry arches are stil! evoca ti ve of Rome.
IOO

99

Greece reborn
l tlcl

1~2

In the middle of thc eightccnth ccntury the quest of the m rim~rnrc>

investigation of Greek monumcnts. Considcred at first
Roman, their fo rmal sophistication and greater ' urity'
admitted. 100 Reasonably accurate detpils of thc
1784. 101 By r825, the date ofThomas Hamilton's Hi
Doric temples of thc Acropolis had become favouritc
public buildings in England and Scotland.

102 , 103 For the 45- foot high columns of the British Museum, begun in 1844,
Sir Robert Smirke availed himselfofthe published researches ofthe So cicty
of Dilettanti in Asia Minor. His lonic ca pitals are those of the temple of
Athene Polias at Priene.

/ci i

10]

:,

..

104

105

Antique simplicity
Simple geometric silhouetres and archaeological purity of deta1l go together in the
great monuments of late neo-classicism. 104 Schinkel's Altes Museum in Berlin.
1824-28, presents a fa<;ade in the form of an open colonnade of n ineteen bays,
unmodulated except where the closing piers step quietly into place. The solid
mass of the central hali rises behind in telling contrast. 105 Somewhat analogous in
disposition are the ma in elements of St George's Hali, Liverpool, begun by
Harvey Lonsdale Elmes in 1838.

104

CHAPTER S!X

Classical into Modern

91

During the first half of the twentieth cen ury the architectural habits
ofthe world completely changed. Within that period, and at the heart
of the process of change, we can now crac , as a matter ofhistory, the
workings of what we conventionally caii the Modern Movement in
architecture. The Movement had its begi nings in the decade before
1914. It reached its highest pitch of inn vating vigour in the late
twenties and, after World War II, expl ded like a delayed action
bomb, filling the huge vacuum the war ears had created. lts effects
spread and spread until by now there is no corner of the industrialized
world in which the thin, high, glossy locks, the perspectives of
concrete posts and the punched window atterns are not typical and
familiar.
Such is the architectural revolution
our century - the most
radical and universal in world history. In t e course of it, questions of
architectural form ha ve tended to recede, iving place to questions of
tcchnology and industrialization, large cale planning and massproduction for social needs, questions of building rather than
architecture. Where, in ali this, is the 'lan uage' of architecture? For
the answer we must go to the histori sources of the Modern
Movement, which we shall discover in th thought and performance
of the personalities who determined its co rse. W e shall ha ve to look
ata series offoreshadowings ofthe Moder , emerging in consecutive
traditions stretching back to the eighteen h century and the 'age of
enlightenment'.
You will remember that earlier 1 tou hed on the architectural
philosophy of the Abbe Laugier, the man who set before the world
the image of the primitive but or 'rustic c in' as the ultima te source
of ali architectural beauty. This image was ather quaint- it consisted
simply of four tree- trunks with branches et across them for beams
and more branches for rafters; and it had no walls. As a building ofthis
kind would be quite useless to anybody, ho ever primitive, it may be
assumed that it never existed except in La gier's imagination. It had
106

no more archaeological sanction than Rousseau's Noble Savage (who

carne on the literary scene a few years !ater) had anthropological
sanction. It was, in fact, a symbolic dia gram; and the meaning of it
was tha t behind Rome, behind Greece, there was a principle which
was, as it were, pure essence of architecture.
T here were implications here which 1 do not think Laugier himself
realized and which took a very long time indeed to unfold. If the
primitive hut was 'pure' architecture, did that mean that it was a one
hundred per cent efficient solution of a specific problem of shelter?
Obviously not. Or did it mean that 'pure' architecture was limited to
columns, beams and rafters? That does seem to have been in Laugier's
mind and to that extent his primitive hut was simply a reduction to
the lowest possible terms of the classical temple form- an expression
still well within the class_ical language of architecture. On the other
hand it contained the germ of the rational (the column merely a
cylindrical post, the pediment merely a built-up triangle); it
contained, in fact, the germ of an architecture from which ali
decorative and plastic expressions were removed and which (once the
tree- trunks were given a bit of polish) was strictly an affair of solid
geometry. But it was still architecture.
Such an architecture did come into being - or very nearly towards the end of the eighteenth century. It mostly had rather
Utopian implications and one ofits most astonishing manifestations is
in the ideal city conceived, designed, never executed, but published,
in I 805, by the French architect Ledoux. This is a dream city for a
dream society and contains some projects as surprising in their
purpose as their form. Plate I 07 is o ne of them. It is a centre for the
sexual instruction of adolescents- a very high- minded affair, let me
say - with an elaborate programme which need not concern us here.
But look at the geometry of it, a complex but harmonious disposition
of solids in beauti fu] relation to the landscape. Irresistibly o ne is
reminded of the definition of architecture which Le Corb usier wrote
in 1921: 'the play of volumes, disposed with masterly and superb
exactitude beneath the light'. Le Corbusier also projected an ideal
city, his Viile Radieuse, and it is not surprising that in the 1920s an
architectural scholar thought it worth writing a book drawing an
analogy between the two Utopias - Ledoux's and Le Corbusier's.
This is not to say that Le Corbusier was influenced by Ledoux. So far
as 1 know he was not.

Ledoux's passion for seeing buildings as aggregates of simple

geometrica] shapes was shared by some others ofhis time and a little
!ater: the German, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, for instance. In his Altes
Museum at Berlin the shapes are very simple but enormously
effective. They consist mainly of a rectangular mass, o ne of whose
sides is a transparent screen of columns. These are seen against an inner
wall, but behind this wall rises, in the middle, the cubie form of the
central hali of the Museum. A simple but very powerful threedimensional combination indeed, beside which the British Museum,
for al! the splendour of its colonn:ides, cuts a rather poor figure. For
the British Museum is ali colonnade - there is not a single architectural clue to the building behind it, which, so far as the onlooker
from outside is concemed, might almost as well not be there.
Now, although 1 have underlined the importance of pure solid
104
geometry in the Ledoux design and in Schinkel's Museum, it will not
ha ve esca ped you that in both of them architectural orders are present:
in the Ledoux design as a Greek portico at one end of the building
controlling its main lines and echoed at the other end by a
semicircular colonnade; in the Museum, as a spectacular and
beautifully detailed colonnade which has great formal importance in
the whole design. The language of classical architecture is still very
much alive and the orders are stiU not only present but in control.
Although we may seem, here, to be on the threshold of Modern
architecture, that threshold was to take a long time to cross. Most of
the nineteenth and part of the twentieth centuries stood between.
The nineteenth century was very much concerned - overconcerned we may think - with the historical styles. Classical
buildings were continually being built but they always looked back,
not merely to Greece and Rome but to nearly every succeeding phase
of classical development, using the past as one glorious quarry of
63 ideas. C. R. Cockerell, in his New Ashmolean building at Oxford,
which we looked at earlier, wove into his design ornaments from
Greek temples, a columnar arrangement from the Roman triumphal
arch, a comice from Vignola and other elements from sources as far
apart as Florentine Mannerism and Nicholas Hawksmoor. Similarly,
114
Charles Garnier's Paris Opera House, built twenty years later than.che
81 Ashmolean, contains a basic idea by Bramante, the Louvre colonnade
- into which is intruded a subsidiary order on Michelangelo's
68 Ca pitoline prnei ple - together with some parts of the earlier Louvre
108

and a Roman atti storey. Classical designers were, so to speak,

circling round the hievements of the past looking for things which
could be done agai in a different way or in different combinations.
Meanwhile, the lively and progressive thought of the age of
Laugier took wh t we may think a rather odd turning. To
Frenchmen, howev r classically minded, it was never quite possible to
ignore the fact that ome of the most daring, powerful and ingenious
buildings ever buil were the medieval cathedrals standing on their
own soil. The Fr nch never had quite the nostalgic, parochial
reverence for Got ic which the English had; they admired it as
engineering. And a miring it thus- for the structural economy and
completeness repr ented by a vaulted church - it was perhaps
inevitable that they should transfer the idea of a rational architecture
from an interese in assical antiquity to an interese in the Middle Ages.
Anyway, the grea est French theorist of the nineteeenth century,
Eugene Viollet-le- uc, spent most of his life elucidating Gothic
architecture as aco pletely rational way ofbuilding and then issuing,
in his lectures, a ch llenge to the modern world to create a modern
architecture out of ron and glass, as well as timber and masonry - an
architecture just a economica!, as rational, as the Gothic. Hjs
challenge was met n various ways. The experimental Art Nouveau
of the 1890s con tai s severa! attempted answers to the problems he
posed. But none o chem really worked; they were far-fetched and
smelt too much oft e studio. The real answers were to come, after ali,
not from an ingen ous and really rather precarious philosophy of
Gothic, but from t e classical tradition which ali Europe had shared
with antiquity for
long.
The story of
at is stiU called the 'Modern Movement' in
architecture has bee written severa! times and is likely tobe rewritten
many times more. Here, my only business with that complex and
involved piece of istory is to show how and to what extent the
classicallanguage hich has been the subject ofthis book entered into
it, what effect it ha and how much of that effect remains. The most
direct way of doin this will be to go straight to the work oftwo great
pioneers of the fir t generation: the German, Peter Behrens, who
was born in 1868; a d the Frenchman, Au guste Perret, born in r 87 3.
Peter Behrens, w o started as a painter, was one ofthe leaders ofthe
German arts and rafts movement of the early 1900s. The great
electrica! combine, A.E.G., appointed him their architect and artistic
109

116

adviser, and in 1908 commissioned him to design a turbine erection

hali for their factory in Berlin. Behrens as faced here with the
problem of designing a building for a strict y industrial purpose, but
at the same time giving it the 'prestige' cha eter which the company
expected of their architect. It was typical o German thought at this
rime that Behrens should look back to Ger an neo-classicism and the
age of Schinkel, whose Berlin Museum e were considering just
now. The Turbine Hal! is really a neo-class cal building dcsigncd on
the lines of a temple but with ali the stylistic igns and symbols left out
or changed. You may remember. that Si J ohn Soane was doing
something like this more than a hundred ye rs earlier. And in a sense
Behrens in 1908 was not much more a vanced than Soane (at
Dulwich) in 18r 1. Except for this: Soane wa working out his style in
traditional and (so far as he could see) unc anging materials; while
Behrens had to accept the challenge of st uctural steel, a material
which, if its economic dictatorship was not ccepted, would soon put
architects out of business. So in the T bine Hali the classical
colonnade is represented by those unmodul ted verticals on the flank
ofthe building which are in f~ct steel stanch ons. The temple portico
has shrunk into one great window area, un er a 'pediment' which is
not triangular but multangular to suit the str cture ofthe roofbehind
it. At the corners are plain wall surfaces with horizontallines on them
which seem tobe a vestigial kind of rustica an. None of this would
'tel!' in quite the splendid way it does ifBeh ens had not adopted the
device of 'battering' - that is to say leaning in- his solid wall in the
same leaning plane as the windows along the side. To what extent this
device is purely aesthetic 1do not know but gives relief and shadow
at the eaves ofthe roofinjust the place whe e in a temple we should
ha ve the relief and shadow of the comice.
Behrens's Turbine Hali is a great perfor ance but not a kind of
performance that could be repeated very oft n. The challenge of steel
had to be more directly and economically et, and it was Walter
Gropius, a pupi! ofBeh rens, who took the n xt step, moving a good
deal further from the neo-classical model bu without losing aesthetic
integrity or, indeed, the sense of classical or er and symmetry. The
pre-First World War industrial buildings ofGropius as well as those
of Behrens are key monuments of the Mod rn Movement.
Now turn from Behrens and his pupi! Gr pius to the Frenchman,
Auguste Perret. Here was an entirely ditferen kind of designer. Perret
IIO

had no need, or desire, to look back to the neo-classicism of the early

nineteenth century; as a Frenchman he had in his bones, so to speak,
the still living tradition of classical design fostered by the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts, that school of design whose most obviously representative building is, 1 suppose, the Paris Opera House. I think if you
glance again at the Opera, a,nd then at Perret's Naval Construction
Depot, you will see a certain connection. The latter is ali in reinforced
concrete, totally without enrichment. But it is thought out in terms of
'orders'- a major order starting from the ground and running up to
som ething rather like an architrave and comice; and the ghost of a
secondary order whose entablature belongsjust above the heads ofthe
first-floor windows. There is almost as much 'relief' and almost as
much variety of rhythm in this building as in the Opera House. On ly
there are no mouldings and there is no carving.
In those buildings by two masters of the Modern Movement we
have two statements regarding the possible interpretation of the
classicallanguage in terms of steel (Behrens) and reinforced concrete
(Perret). Buildings such as these claimed in their day a new freedom,
unrelated to specific orders and yet stiU closely related to the rhythms
and general disposition of classical architecture. There was no reason
at all why this kind of diagrammatic classicism should not prevail
indefinitely as the medium for new constructions- indeed, plenty of
buildings are still being built very clase in expression to Perret's work
of the 1920s. But it happened otherwise, chiefly through the creative
genius of one man, Le Corbusier, the most inventive mind in the
architecture of our time and also, in a curious way, one of the most
classical minds.
Le Corbusier was born in 1887. In 1908- 09 he was for a short time
in Perret's office in Paris; in 1910-II he spent a few months in Germany with Behrens. His first house, built in Switzerland during World
War I, showed the influence of these masters, especially ofPerret. After
the war he turned to painting and was involved, along with Amedee
Ozenfant, in a movement they called Purism, whose aim was to bring
a mathematical discipline to bear on what they saw as the imminent
disintegration of Cubism. In 1920 Le Corbusier started writing about architecture. His collected articles were made up into a book,
published in 1923, the famous Vers une Architecture, Towards an
Architecture, probably the most widely circulated and influential
architectural book of our time.
III

117

Now, one way ofputting Le Corbusier's architectural achievement

in a nutshell would be to say that he comp1etely reversed modern
architecture as he found it- he turned it upside- down. He found men
like Behrens and Perret subduing the chaos of empirica! engineering
and industrial building by disciplining it into a classically designed
framework. Le Corbusier threw away chis framework and Jet the
industrial forms speak their own, often bizarre, language; but he
exercised a more formidable and effective control than the token
orders of Behrens and Perret could do by the application of what he
has called 'traces regulateurs', li nes of control. In doing this, Le
Corbusier was reassuming a kind of control which had never been
entirely forgotten but which belongs essentially to the Renaissance
and was fundamental to the work both of Alberti and of Palladio.
At the base ofthis kind of control is the conviction that harmonious
relationships in architecture can be secured only ifthe shapes of rooms
and the openings in walls and indeed al! elements in a building are
made to conform with certain ratios which are related continuously
to al! other ratios in the building. To what extem rational systems of
this kind do produce effects which eye and mind can consciously
apprehend I am extremely doubtful. I have a feeling that the real
point of such systems is simply that their users (who are mostly their
autho rs) need them; that there are types of extremely fertile,
inventive minds which need the tough inexorable discipline of such
systems to correct and at the same time stimulate invention. And the
fate ofthese systems seems, on the w hole, to confirm this; they rarely
survive their authors and users and the next man of fertile genius
invents his own. That, however, in no way diminishes their
importance.
In the first cha pter I said that 'the aim of classical architecture bas
always been to achieve a demonstra bie harmony of parts'. Perhaps the
word 'demonstrable' should not have been quite so closely linked
with 'always'. Nevertheless a demonstrable harmony - one which
results from a specific code to which reference can be made - is
something which conforms absolutely with the nature of classicism
and !ies very close to the use of the orders which are in themselves
demonstrations of harmonious composition. For Le Corbusier the
demonstration of the harmonious was always extremely important.
Even his first Perret-style house of 1916 he published with the ~traces
regulateurs' ruled across the elevations. The Purist manifesta ran in
112

....

:.:::~

~iiC:::':LJ:__..-J~---!.o..
...,:...
: ::....:L-------1::~ ~)~\

Le Corbusier's
diagram to illustratc
his concept of the
'Modulor'.

106

..
=

.
...
. :.:

the same direction

the 'traces are dealt with - if rather
superficially- in a ch pter of Vers une Architecture. But it was not till
the early years ofWo ld War II that Le Corbusier created the system
which he used in all hi !ater work - th e system w hich he bas called the
'Modular'. 'Modular is a word ma de out of module (that is to say, . 106
unit of measurement) nd section d' or, or golden section: that is to sa y,
the division of a line s that the larger part is to the wh ole line as the
smaller part to the Iar er. T he Modular is a system of space-notation
based on this geome rica! absolute and constituting a 'gamut' of
dimensions. A middle phase ofthe gamut relates to the dimensions of
the human body; th other phases extend it to the minutiae of
precision instruments n the one hand and to the scale of vast townplanning enterprises n the other.
Le C orbusier mad enormous claims for the Modular as a system
which, if widely ado ted, could sol ve many of the standardization
problems of industry nd promote harmony throughout our whole
physical environment into the bargain. Perhaps it could; but the fact is
that, since its publicat n in 1950, interese in it has rather receded and I
am inclined to think hat, in this case as in so many others, the real
importance of the thi g was as parc of its author's mental furniture,
enabling him to emb k on projects as wildly original, for instan ce, as
his chapel at Roncha p - a building so free inform as tobe practically
abstract sculpture - ways secure in his complete grasp of rational
procedure.
113

So much for the penetration of the classical essence into the

Modern Movement. It is now time to ans er the question: 'What has
happened to the language?' The generali accepted view is that the
Modern Movement killed it, and that is ot far wrong. One of the
most earnestly held beliefs ofthe Modernis s, formulated in Vienna in
the lush nineties, was that ali ornament wa vicious. The architecture
of the new age would cast it aside; buil ings of the future would
appeal to the eye through the harmonio s disposition of whatever
was necessary for their construction and fu ction- that and no more.
This ruthless discipline was immensely im ortant at the time and is
still one of the aspects of the Movemen which cannot easily be
shrugged off as an obsolete puritanical d. But it did have one
devastating side-effect. This was the clama e it inflicted on the image
of modern architecture in the public min . If, in the beginning, the
m ass of people regarded modern architectu e as bleak and uninteresting, it was painful to discover that, as the p oducts multiplied, people
regarded chem as even more bleak and less i teresting and, as the years
passed, about as attractive as a gorgon's hea . The humane intentions
ofthe Movement touched nobody's heart. o ali except an informed
few, architecture communicated nothing ut boredom.
Now, in the I 98os, it has becom e the fash on to declare the Modern
Movement dead. As a serious statement t s is arguable, but it is an
interesting idea - perha ps the first really in piring new idea sin ce the
Movemen t was born. It is, anyway, liber ting. It means that there
m ay be, once again, some point in discussi g architecturallanguage,
in trying to define the nature and value of o nament and entering into
the whole question of architecture as a v hicle of social meaning.
From such speculations the classical lang age of architecture will
never be far absent. The understanding of it will surely remain one of
the most patent elements in architectural t ought.

I14

10 7

10/1

- i.

Modern Simplicity

Simplicity of form, seen as an

aspect of primitive nobility,
pointed very speedily
towards architectural
radicalism. 107 The naked
geometry ofLedoux's
' O ikema' in his ideal city of
c. 1785 is revolutionary,
though he still makes
obeisance to archaeology in
the porticos. 108 Sir John
Soane's personal style
dispenses with the
grammatical expression of
antiquity but p rovides
'primitive' equivalents in the
shape of plain brick pilasterstrips and grooved surfaces,
seen here in the Dulwich Art
Gallery, 1811, with the
founder's mausoleum. 109
Soane's halls at the Bank of
England were almost the last
word in the reduction of
classical concepts to sheer
combination ofligh t, surfaces
and space: the Colonial
Office, 18 18.

-~--

...::.]

J/0
J/l

Il/

Neo-classicism
life. The sto rms of nineteenth-century romanticism
it and the style emerged with ali its old Jiceralness
twentHltn-cennuv America. 110 In Munich, Leo von Klenze
n.u'"' l~>IJ'l d i L , an uncompro rnising ly Grecian urban co mposition
and museums of painting and sculpture. The
begun in 1816. III In France, H enri Labrouste gave a
in his Library ofS te Genevieve, 1840-50. The building has
n,,, <IJtru ' ' of the classical language are used to render the building
symbolic of its function; within the sto nc shell, the
handled with Pompeian elegance. IU Thc Lincoln
structure IS m
by H enry Bacon, shows neo-classicism still unexhausced
Memorial,
in 19 17 .
nt>;rr,,v,n a

II 7

'

.i
'j

The Beaux-Arts tradition

1

/lj

The Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the dominant centre of architectural cducation in

Europe from r8r9 to 1914, promoted an architectural philosophy which spread
across the world. This was the philosoph y of the plan . The horizontal trace of a
building was held to be not only the clue to its efficient performance but the
generator of its total artistic effect. 113 Thc plan of Charles Garnier's Opera
House, Paris, is not only well contrived but makes a beautiful pattern on pa per.
114 The externa! expression ofthe Opera is eclectic within the boundarics of
Europe's classical tradition: the pavilions of Lescot's Louvre, thc Louvre
colonnade and Michelangelo's Capitoline Palaces are laid under tribute; ornament
is lavish, lush, inventive. liS Joseph Poelaert's Pal ace ofJustice in Brussels,
1866-83, rises from a plan hardly less accomplished than Garnier's but thc exterior
expression is a mountain of arrogant and outrageous anomalics - a curious
characterization, surely, of the building's purpose.

19

C lassical into m dern

116

118
119

117

lnnovating ma sters of the twentieth century ha ve carne to terms in one way or

another with the classical language, though the terms have invariably meant
rigorous exclusion of the orders and their conventional attributes. With the
disappearance of the orders, the story of the classical language, as we ha ve- defined
it, ends. II6 T he AEG Turbine Erection Hali, Berlin, an innovating building of
1908 by Peter Behrens, stil! reftects the temple image, with pediments, colonnades
and rustication in paraphrase. II7 Augustc Perrct's Naval Construction Depot,
1929, uses the devicc of major and subsidiary orders, though the 'orders' are never
expressed, only implied in the pattern.
1 20

..c::...;_- '-"._

-----..--::.,.
-.... ~

Glossary

A R A E OSTY LE .

ABA cus.

The top part of any capital; as it were a

the ca pita! to bear the beam (architrave) (pl. r 2

ABU TM ENT.

The p!ant o f which a highJy

decorates thc capitals of the Corinthian and Co

I N T ERCOLUMNIATION.

The lowest of the three primary divisions of the

The word is loosely applied to any moulding round a
door or window and such m ouldings do, in fact, most frequently borrow
the profile of the architrave in the strict sense (pl. r 24).

ARCHITRA VE .

slab placed on top of

The solid mass from which an arch

A CANT HUS.

See

version

ENTABLA TU RE.

ARCHITRAVE-CORN I CE.
ARCH I VOLT.
ASTRAGAL.

An en.~ablature from w hi ch the frieze is elidcd.

An architrave moulding when it follo ws the line of an arch.

A small moulding of circular profile (pl.

ATTIC B ASE.

See

124).

BASE.

A storey placed over the main entablature of a building and

in strictly architectural relation to it (as e.g. in some triumphal arches).

ATTIC STOREY.

(of a column). There an;: three m ain varieties. 1, The Attic base, the
commonest, which is found with ali o rde rs except th e Tuscan; it consists
of two cori separated by a scoti a and fi llets. 2, The Tuscan ba se, consisting
simply of a torus and fillet. J, A type consisting oftwo scotiae separated b y
two astragals with a torus above and a torus below. This, with variations
o f it, is applicable to the Ionic, Corinthian and Composite (pl. 125).

BASE
120

Natural acanthus leaf

B EAD -A ND - REEL.

See

ENR I CHMENTS.

The mouldings between the corona (q.v.) and che fr ieze

(q.v.) in any entablature (pl. 1 24).

BED MOULDINGS.
121

Stylized acanthus

122

Aedicule

Small pedestals (originally

without) at the excremities and apex of a peorrne111

ACROTERIA.

usually oftwo
AMPHIPROSTYLE.

See

123 Bukranium

TEMPLE.

Equva!ent to P ILA STER but mostly

where the anta capital is different from that of the
it. A porcico is said to be in antis when the end
the columns (see pl. I 32).

ANTA.

122

Ca rved representations of ox skulls, often found in the m etopes

of the Doric frieze.

B UKRA NIA.

123

(of a column). Each ofthe five orders as its appropriate capital.

Those of the Tuscan and (Roman) Doric ar much alike, consisting
mainly of aba cus, ovolo and, further down, 1 astragal; the Doric has
mo re multiplicity of small mouldings than e Tuscan. The Ionic is
distinguished by volutes. These are the coiled e ds of an element inserted
berween the abacus and the ovolo. Sometim s, however, the volutes
spring separately from the ovolo. The Corinthia capital is decorated with
two ranks of acanthus leaves, while fern-like ste s reach out to the corners
of the abacus. The Composite capital combin Corinthian leaves wirh
Ionic volures.

CAPIT A L

Female figures supporting an ema lature. The most famous

example is at the Erectheum, Athens, wher Vitruvius improbably
supposed the figures ro represent Carian captive hen ce the generic name.

CAR Y ATI DES.

cA v ETT o.

A hollow moulding, whose profile is u ually a quarter of a ci rele

(pl. [ 25).

l
1

11 11

Thisorder, which combines

the Corinthian, is nor described by Vitruvius a
after his time. It was first identified by Alberti (c.
Serlio as rhe fifth and most elaborate of the fi ve

eaturesof the Joni cwith

d was probably evolved
450) and first figured by
rders.

A bracket in rhe form of an S-shaped ser Il, with one end broader
than the orher. A console has many applicati ns, either vertical (e.g.
against a wall ro carry a bust) or horizonral as rhe visible part of a
canrilever supporring a gallery). Keysrones of arc es are ofren modelled as
consoles.

fillet ------ ~~i1i5~m~~~~~r

~~fi!~l:::!~~sa~====
li!
fascia - - - - - cyma r~v.ve~rs~a==============~
fasc ia

Architrave

=
_ _ _____ __________

r!~,7~al

w~~

colum n shaft

torus
SCOtia
torus
cyma reversa
astrag al
cyma rect a

__J

cOLOSSAL ORDER.

COMPOSITE ORDER .

Frieze

flutin 9

Any order whose columns xtend from the ground

through severa! sroreys.

Comice

n nn

cyma reversa - -- -

astragal (btad rul)___..

J-astragal

--rBase

-plinth
fascia
cavetto

CONSOLE.

This order was an Atheni n invenrion of the srh

cenrury B C but in early examples is only differe iared from rhe Ionic by
its leaf-enfurled capital. Even Vitruvius, in rhe 1 t century A o, described
only rhe capital ' because the Corinrhian order has ot separate rules for the
cornices and other ornaments' . However, in la er Rofllan practice the
C orinthian enrablature crysrallized as someth g qulre distinct. The
original design of the capital is attributed by ' itruvius to the sculptor
Callimachus who, he says, was inspired by the ight of a basket of toys
placed, with a stone slab for protection (the ab cus), on the grave of a
Corinthian gir! and around which wild aca1 thus had grown. The
Corinrhian order, as employed from the r6th ce tury onwards, is based
on Roman examples, notably the temples of V spasian and Castor and
Pollux in rhe Forum .

C OJUNTHIAN O RDER .

1 24

dado or die

cavett o
astrag al

Pedestal

torus

plinth

124, 125 The Corinthian order: entablature and base

The uppermost of the three primary divisions of the

(q.v.). The word is loosely applied to almost any
horizontal moulding forming a main decorative feature, especially to a
moulding ar the junction of walls and ceiling in a ro om. Such mouldings
do, traditionally, follow the profiles of cornices in the strict sense (pl. 124).

CORNICE.

ENTABLATURE

125

The parr of a comice forming a sudden projection over the bedmoulding (q.v.).

coR o N A.

A moulding which is concave in its upper part and convex

below (pl. 124).

CYMA RECT A.

A moulding which is convex in its upper part and con ca ve

below (pl. 124).

cv MA REVERS A.

DECASTYLE.

See

practice the Roma1 Doric nearly always has a base, the Greek never. As
full knowledge an appreciation of th e Greek order was only regained
in the late 18rh c ntury, its appearance in the modern world before
c. x8oo is rare.
E CH INUS

(pJ.

I26).

EGG-ANO - OART.

Se

Se

OVOLO.

ENRICHMENTS.

PORTICO.

Small closely spaced blocks forming one of the members of a

comice in the Ionic, Corinthian, Composite and, more rardy, Doric
orders (pl. 124).

DENTILS.

DIASTYLE.

See

INTERCOLUMNIATION.

OIPTERAL.

See

TEMPLE.

DISTYLE IN

ANTIS.

A disposition comprising two columns between

pilasters or antae.
DOOECASTYLE.

See

127 Enrichmenrs: egg-a d-dart,

bead-and-reel, warer- le f

~
IiM~

Ce cain standard cypes of carved enrichmenc are

appropriate to cert in standard profiles. Thus, the ovolo is enriched with
egg-and-dart, the cy a reversa with water-/eaf, the bead or ascragal wich
bead-and-reel. Fort cyma recea, less frequently enriched, laurelleaves or
honey-suckle are a propriate. In other elements of the ordcr there is a
wide margin of ch ice in enrichment.
,

ENRICHMENTS.
PORTICO.
Cvm Kectn

Flscia

Murulc

M tule

\ii

Ovolo

The hole assemblage ofparts supported by the column .

The three primary ivisions are ARCHITRAVE , FRIEZE and CORNICE. Of
these, only the arc trave and comice are subdivided.

ENTABLATURE.

mm
Tleilia

Trrn,r

MclOpt

lJlJD.

Gutue

r:z6 The Doric o rder

Abocus
Echinus
Cavcuo
Neck
Astng>l

' li!JIJ.l{.(h

11 1111 III
The Greek Doric and Roman Doric both have, ultimately,
a Greek origin but they developed in different ways. They have in
common (1) the presence of triglyphs in the frieze, with mutules and
guttae on the soffic ofthe corona and (z) the face thac the capital consists of
little more than an abacus supported by a moulding or mouldings. The
Greek order has no base, nor is a base prescribed by Vitruvius though in

ooruc ORDER.

!26

The swellin of a column. All classical columns are broader ac the

base than at che capi aL The diminution ofcen begins one- third ofthe way
up che column and hereafter takes the form of a curve whose setting-out
is prescribed in vari

ENTASIS.

EUSTYLE.

See

INTER

OLUMN IATION.

A plain hori ntal band. A common form ofarchitrave consiscs of

two or three fascia each slighdy oversailing che one below and perhaps
separated from it b a narrow moulding (pl. 124).

FASCIA.

A narrow hor zontal strip separating the larger curved mouldings in

a comice or base (p . 124).

FILLET.

Vertical ch nels, of rounded section, cut in the shafts of columns.

Never found in the Tuscan and optional in the other orders. Somctimes
the lower flutings re filled with solid cylindrical pieces; they are then
described as cabled tings.

FL UTI N G .

127

The middle ofthe three primary di

essence the frieze is a plain horizontal
shelving comice above and the architrave
divided into fasciae) below. But the
triglyphs; while in the Ionic, Corinthian and
is often appropriated to figme-sculpture (pl.

ofthe ENTA BLATURE. In

between the elaborately
ch may or may not be
frieze usually contains
posite orders the frieze

FRIEZE.

G u TT A E.

Small conical pieces carved on the

under each triglyph in the Doric order. They "'" ''""'""" represent wooden
pegs and thus originare, as does the triglyph, the timber prototypes of
the Doric (pl. 126).

HEXASTYLE.
1 M PosT.

See

PORTICO.

The moulding of a pier at the

order. Often left plain but sometimes decorated with bukrania, trophies
or other ornaments (pl. 126).
An ornament in the comice of the Corinthian and Composite
orders. A modilion is a diminutive CONSOLE or scrolled brackct and the
modilions in a comice give the appearance ofsupporting the corona. They
are spaced so as to allow a square sinking in the soffit between each pair
(pl. 124).

MODILION.

M O ou LE.

The relative sizes of ali parts of an order are traditionally given in

Modules, a Module being half the diameter of the column just above its
moulded base. The Module is divided into thirty minutes. Sometimes the
diameter itself is called the Module, in which case it contains sixty
minutes.

A square block carved on the soffit of the corona in the Doric

order immediately over ea~h triglyph (pl. 126). See TRICLYPH.

MUTULE.

OCTASTYLE.

See

PORTICO.

An order is the total assemblage ofparts comprising the column and

its appropriate entablature. The primary divisions ofthe column are base,
shaft and capital. The primary divisions of the entablature are architrave,
frieze and comice. A pedestal under the column is not an essential part of
the order but appropriate pedestals are given by the theorists from Serlio
onwards.

ORDER.

A convex moulding whose profile is usually a quarter of a ci rele

(pl. I 24).

ovo LO.

128 lntercolumniation

The name given by the French (motif Pal/adio) to the

combination of arch and columns conspicuously illustrated in Palladio's

PALLADIAN MOTIF.

The distance, measured diameters, between two

columns. The types named by Vitruvius, with
ratios !ater assigned to
them, are as follows: Pycnostyle, I~ D; Systyle, 2 ; Eustyle, 2-! D; Diastyle,
are found in che Doric
3 D; Araeostyle, 4 D. Other interco

order where spacing is necessarily controlled by che triglyph-metope

rhythm in the frieze. Euscyle intercolumniatio is the most common.

INTE RCOL UMNIAT ION .

I ON IC ORDER. This order,

which originated in
of the 6th century B c, is discinguished in Ro
characteristics: 1 , the voluted capital; z , the
comice. Vitruvius gives a minute description

METOPE.

128

The square space between two trigly

129 Palladian

motif

Minor about the middle

in the frieze ofthe Doric

129

Basilica at Vicenza. In principle the arrangement consists of an opening

where an arch stands over columns whose entablatures are the lintels of
narrower side openings (sec VENETIAN WINDOW). In Palladio's Basilica
this triple opening is framed in the bays formed by a superior order and it
is to this system that the term 'Palladian Motif should be confined.
PEDESTAL.

A substructure under a column (pl.

125).

See

ORDER.

The triangular space created by the sloping eaves and

horizontal comice line of a gabled temple or other classical building. T he
word appears to be an alteration of periment, the word used in r6thcentury English accounts and perhaps deriving from French parement,
facing. Pediments do not always express the end of a roofbut are often
used ornamentally, even on a large scale. On a m iniature scale they
commonly surmount door and window openings. There are many
variecies and distorcions ofthe pediment, e.g. the pediment with a curved
(segmenta!) instead of pointed top, and the 'broken pediment' whose
sloping sides are returned before reaching the apex (pl. 131).

PEOIMENT.

PERIPTERAL.
PERISTYLE.

See

thickening of a wall
the wall.
PILLAR.

A word

PLINTH.

The square

a column whose entablature carries over to

use which has no specific meaning in the
unde r the base of a column or pedestal (pl.

A struct
classical building is

PODIUM.

usually massive, providing a platform on which a

Acroteria

TEMPLE.

Portico

A continuous colonnade surrounding a temple or court.

131

130

125 ) .

Octastyle portico

Peristyle

The solids between door, window or other openings. Piers are

invariably part of the carrying structure of a building. They may or may
not be combined or overlaid with pilasters, half columns, three-quarcer
columns, etc.

building. Porticos
froncal columns,
(ro) and Dodecast
pilasters or antae

under shelter. The word is usually applied to

before the entrance to a temple or similar
this kind are described according to the number of

Tetrastyle (4), Hexastyle (6), Octastyle (8), Decastyle

Where there are only two columns between
expression used is Distyle in Antis.
(12) .

PIER.

PROSTYLE.

See

TEM

PSEUDOPERIPTERAL

The representation in relief of a column against a wall. The

pilaster is sometimes considered as the visible part of a square column built
into the wall. Pilasters are necessarily ornamental. They have a quasistructural function, however, when acting as responds, i.e. as the

PILASTER.

130

PYCNOSTYLE.

See

Usually the
emphasized by

QUOINS.

angles ofbuildings, especially when these are

13 l

Masonry (or an imitation thereo Dwhere the joints between

the stones are deliberately emphasized by sinki gs or where the stones are
left rough or worked in such a way as to affor a striking textura! effect.

Rus T 1 cA TI o N .

A hollow moulding, most often seen b tween the tori in bases of

columns (pl. 125).

SCOTIA.

SHAFT.

That part of a column which is between the base and the capital.

The under- side ofany architectural cle ln ent, e.g. a corona, or an

architrave where it does not rest on columns.

SOFFIT .

STYLOBATE .
SYSTYLE .

The ste ps under a portico or colon ade (pl. 131).

See

INTERCOLUMNIATION.

The narrow projecting banci between chitrave and frieze in the

Doric order (pl. 126) .

TAENIA.

The disposition ofcolumns around te [l.ples has given rise ro the

following nomenclature . Prostyle: a temple w h a portico in front only;
Amphiprostyle: with porticos at front and rea ; Peripteral: with porticos
connected by open colonnades along the si es; Pseudoperipteral: with
porticos connected only by pilasters or colurr ns in relief; Dipteral: with
po rti cos connected by double ranges of <plumns along the si des;
Pseudodipteral: w ith the same arrangement a regards spacing, but the
inner ranges of columns omitted.

TEMPLE.

136 Dipteral temple

.
.....
.._-

135 Peripteral temple

138 Pscudodipteral temple

137 Pscudoperipteral temple

TETRASTYLE.

132 Temple with columns

in antis

......

le
133 Prostyle temple
132

134 Amphiprostylc
temple

See

PORTICO.

A moulding ofsemicircular profile used in the bases ofcolumn s

(pl. 125).

TORUS.

A feature of the frieze of the Doric order, consisting of a vertical

element with two sunk vertical channels and two half-channels at the
edges. The triglyph is related to the mutule above and to the guttae below.
The whole system is a paraphrase in masonry of features dcriving from
timber construction (pl. I 26) .

T R 1 GL Y P H.

133

TUSCAN ORDER. This order derives from an ancient type of Etruscan

temple and, as Vitruvius describes it, is of primitive character with wide
spaces between the columns, necessarily involving timber beams. The
r6th-century theorists regarded it as proto-Doric and the crudest and
most massive ofthe five orders.

139 Venetian w indow

VENETIAN WI NDOW. A triple opening in which the wider central opening

is closed by an arch while the side openings have lintels. Not
characteristically Venetian but used by Bramante and Raphael, !ater by
Scamozzi, and adopted by Inigo Jones. In English r8th-century practice it
was common. A variant in which an o uter relieving arch, concentric with
the inner arch, extends over al! three openin gs, was derived by Lord
Burlington from a drawing by Palladio and used in severa! ofhis works
and after him by English architects till far into the 19th century.
VOLUTE. Sec CAPITAL.
voussoiR. A block of stone, or other material, which is one of a series
constituting an arch.
WATER- LEAF. Sec ENRICHMENTS.

134

Notes on the L terature of Classical Architecture

Classical architectu
precedents and, ther
indebtedness to anei
been to a great e
therefore, take pre
architecture. Next t
greatest consequen
which invariably r
following lists are hi
representative treati

e has always, even in ancient times, depended on

fore, o n written treatises. Vitruvius himself declared his
nt authors and the classicism of the modern world has
ent depe'ndent on Vitruvius. Editions of his wo rk,
edence in any review of the litera ture of classical
Vitruvius, the treatises of r6th-century Italy are of the
; they are followed by the treatises of other nations
fer back both to Vitruvius and to the Italians. T hc
hly selective and include only the best-known and most
es of the ma in European countries.

Vitruvius
Vitruvi us w ro te his treatise, De Architectura, in the first quarter of the rst
century AD. He wa the only Roman w riter on architecture whose work
survived to be copi d and recopied through the Middle Ages. T hc oldest
existing manuscript sin the British Museum (Har!. 2767); it belongs to the
8th century and w s probably written at Ja rrow . There are sixtcen !ater
medieval manuscri cs in various European libraries. The first printed text
appeared in Rome a out 1486. The next editions were those ofFra Giocondo
(Florence, 1522) an Philander (Rome, 1544). Of great importance were the
illustrated translati s by Cesariano (Como, 1521) and Daniele Barbaro
(Venice, 1567; wit illustrations by Palladio). From the r6th century
onwards there are ranslations, paraphrases and commentaries in nearly
ever y European la1 guage. A good modern text translation is that by
Frank Granger fo r he Loeb Classical Library (Heinemann, 193 r; 2nd ed.
1944- 56. 2 vols).
Italian Treatises
LEO N BATTISTA AL ERTI (I404-I472),DeReAedificatoria. Presented inMS.
to Pope Nicholas V, 1452. First printed (in Latin) in Florence, 1485. T he
fi rst Italian transl tion appeared in. Venice in r 546 and the first illustrated
edition in 1550. French translation by Jean Martin followed in 1553. In
England, Giaco o Leoni's translation (Ten Books on A rchitecture)
appeared in 1726. A reduced facsimile ofthis (with in troduction and notcs
by J. Rykwert)
s published in 195 5.
Alberti's trea ti e, although making exhaustive use of Vitruvius, is a
great original wo k setting fo rth the principles of architecture in thc light
ofthe author's o n philosophy and of his analysis ofRoman buildings. It
profoundly influ nced ali subsequent Italian theo ry.

13 5

SEBAST IAN O SERLIO (1475-1552), published n his lifetime SiX books of

architcccure, ali richly illustrated. In 1566, the fi se fi ve were assembled as a
single creacise, though noe in che order they we e wriccen. The subjects of
these fi ve are (with original publication date ): 1, Geometry (1 545); 2,
Perspective (1545); 3, Antiquities (1537); 4, The rders (1540); 5, Churches
(r 54 7). A sixth book ca !led Libro Estraordinar , containing designs for
arches and gateways, was published in 1551 and republished in 1566. Two
posthumous books (7 and 8) made up fro
Serlio's drawings were
published with the others at Frankfurc in 1575 he firsc, and only, English
edicion was published in 161 r.
Serlio's work is both a texcbook and treasur of designs. It became the
standard authority on architecture and the
st popular source-book
throughout Europe in the !ater 16th and 17th ce turies, Serlio's versions of
the five orders being at the root ofmost exposit ons outside Icaly, till they
were superseded by Vignola and Palladio.

GIACOMO BAROZZI DA VIGNOLA (1507-1573), ego/a de/li Cinque Ordini

d' Architettura, 1562. A set of fine engravings on copper of versions of the
five o rders, based on Roman examples and wi h reference to Vitruvius.
More refined and scholarly than Serlio. No tex - only introduction and
notes, but che book includes a number of Vig ola's own designs. Many
!ater edicions, moscly Italian and French. First nglish edition in 1669.
ANDREA PALLADIO (1508-1580), I Quattro Libn deii'Architettura, Venice,
1570. The four books deal respeccively wich: 1, The Orders, 2, Domestic
Bui/dings (including Palladio's own palaces and villas), 3, Public Buildings
(mostly Roman, but including Palladio's Ba ilica at Vicenza) and 4,
Temples (Roma n). Palladio's orders are as r fined as Vignola's. His
illuscrations of Roman anciquities are a great a vance on Serlio's- they
were, in face, not superscded as records till Desg detz's work of 1682. The
inclusion ofPalladio's own designs resulted in h recognition throughout
Europe, but especially in England, as the great st modern interpreter of
classical architeccure. English editions, 1663, 17 5, 1736 and 1738.
VINCENZO SCAMOZZ1 (1552-1616), De//' !dea d 1/'Architettura Universale,
Venicc, 1615 . A massive work, owing much to Palladio, but designed to
promote a pure, academic classicism which bel ngs in spirit to the 18th
century ra ther than to che 17th.
French T reatises
PHILIBERT DE L'ORME (c. 1510-1570), Architectu , Paris, 1567. A work of
great originality, combining chought derivin from medieval French
cradition with sensitive and schola rly observatio of Roman architecture.

136

ROLAND FREART (d. 1676), Para/lele de I'Architecture Antique et de la Moderne,

Paris, 1650. A decailed critica! review by a scholar, of ali the escablished
versions of che orders, ancienc and modem. English edicion by John
Ev elyn, 1664.
CL AUDE PERRA u LT (1613-1688), Ordonnances des Cinq Especes de Colonne,
Paris, 1676. A critica! dis5ertation on the orders wich Perraulc's own
preferred versions. Perrault's translation of Vicruvius (Paris , 1684), with
copious commentary, ranks as a treatise of major imporcance.
G.L. DE CORDEMOY (1651-1722), Nouveau Traiti de Toute l'Architecture,
1706. Ostensibly concerned moscly with the orders but actually a
revolutionary 'anti-Baroque' sta tement demanding a new puricy of
conception in design.
M.A. LAUGIER (1713-1769), Essai sur l'Architecture, Paris, 1753 Deriving
mainly from Cordemoy. Laugier carries the latter 's racionalism to
extremes.
The above are only a few of the many French treatises. A type of great
importance in the 18th and 19th cencuries was that incroduced by FRAN.YO IS
BLONDEL (1679-1719), who published his Academy lectures as Cours
d' Architecture (Paris 1675). Other treatises based o n lecture courses but
encyclo paedic in character are those of A.C. o'AVI LER (Paris, 1691) and
JACQUES FRAN.yOis BLONDEL (Paris, 1771-1777). Thc Lefons of J.N.L.
DUR ANO (Paris, 18or-r8o5 and !ater) reflect the severe rationalism deriving
from Laugier.
German and Flemish Treatises
HANS BLUM, Quinque Columnarum exacta descriptio atque delineatio, Zurich,
r 550. An exposition ofthe.orders based on Serlio, often republished. First
English edition, 1608.

VR ED EMA N DE VRIES (r 527-1604), Architectura, Antwerp, I 577 (many !ater

eds.). The orders, based on Serlio but elaborated and enriched.
WEN DEL .DIETTER LI N (c. r 550-1599), Architectura, Nurembcrg, 1594-1598.
Extravaganzas on che orders.
English T reati ses
JOHN SHUTE (d. 1563), The First a11d ChiejGrou11des of Architecture, London,
1563 (Facsimile, with introd. by L. Weaver, 1912). The orders, after
Serlio, with variations.

JAM ES GIBBS (1682-1754), R ulesfor Drawing the Severa/ Parts of Architecture,

London, 1732. An admirably clear textbook rather than a treatise.
137

ISAAC WARE (d. 1766), The Complete Body of Architecture, London, 1756. An
encyclopaedic work representative of the Palladian movement.

E. KAUFMANN, Ar hitecture in the Age ofReasort, Harvard University Press,

1955; Oxford U iversity P ress, 1955

SIR WILLIAM CHAMBERS (1723-1796), A Treatise on Civil Architecture,

London, 1759. Republished in 1791 as A Treatise on the Decorative Part of
Civil Architecture and again in 1825 (ed. Joseph Gwilt). A historical and
critica! work of great refinement.

H.R. HITCHCOCK, Architecture: 1gth and zoth centuries (Pclican History of

Art). Penguin B oks, 1958.

1. JOED ICKE, AH story of-Modem Architecturc (trans. J.C. Palmes), Architectural Prcss, I 9 9

Modern Historical Works in English

Thc quotation fr01

For the architecture of the ancient world:

T he Life of Sir Edw

11

Lutyens on p. 27 is from CHRISTOPHER HussEY,

Lutyens (1950), p. 133.

A. w . LAWRENCE, Greek Architecture (Pelican History of Art). Penguin

Books, 1957.
o.s . ROBERTSON, Handbook of Greek a11d Ro1na11 Architecture, Cambridge
University Press, 1929. 2nd ed., I 943.
ILE.M. WHEELER, Roman Art and Architecture, Thames and Hudson, 1964.
A. flOETHIUS and J.B. WARD - l'ERKINS, Etruscan a11d Roman Architecture
(Pelican History of Art). Penguin Books, 1970.

For the history of architecture since the Renaissance:

N. PEVSNER, An Outline of Etropean Architecture, Penguin Books, 7th ed.,
1963. The post-Renaissance chapters give an admirable general
perspective, while the bibliography includes important foreign books not
listed here .
L.H. HEYDENHEICH and W. LOTZ, Architecture i11 Jtaly 140o-1600 (Pe!ican
H istory of Art) . Penguin Books, 1974.
H.

WITTKOWER, Architectural Principles in the Age of Hu111anism, Warburg

Inst. , Univ. of London, 1949. Tiran ti, 2nd ed., 1952.

R. WITTKOWER, Art and Architecture in Jtaly 1600-1750 (Pelican History of

Arc). Penguin Books, 1958.
A. BL uNT, Art and Architecture in France, 1500-1700 (Pelican History of Art).
Penguin Books, 1953
ALAN BHAHAM, Architecture of the French Enlightemnent, Thames and
Hudson, 1980.

J. SUMMERSON, Architecture in Britain, I5J0-18JO (Pelican History of Art).

Penguin Books, 1953. 4th ed., 1963.
139