Architecture
The art you can't escape
Description
Architecture is the art that nobody opts out of. We can choose not to listen to a symphony, not to read a novel, not to walk into a museum. We cannot choose not to be in buildings. The shape of a city, the height of a ceiling, the width of a corridor, the ratio of window to wall — these are aesthetic decisions that affect everyone who lives in or passes through them, whether or not they ever think about architecture as such. The unavoidability is part of what makes the art form's history different from the others.
It is also the art form most entangled with money, politics, and engineering. A painting can be made by one person on a small canvas. A building requires a client with a budget, a site, a regulatory regime, structural engineers, contractors, and a process that takes years. The architect is always working inside constraints that other artists can mostly ignore. The constraints are not incidental to the work. They are part of what architecture is. A building that pretends it has no constraints is usually a worse building, not a freer one.
The history of the discipline has cycled between periods that prized continuity with tradition and periods that defined themselves by breaking from it. The twentieth century was largely a break century, with consequences for the cities most people now live in. The current period is unsettled, with the profession negotiating between starchitect-driven landmark commissions, climate-driven retrofitting, housing pressure, and the unresolved question of what an honest contemporary public building looks like. None of these tensions has a clean resolution.
The question we're asking: what architecture is for, and how the modern break still shapes how we build.
What we'll see: the classical tradition, the modernist break, the postmodern reaction, and the present mess.
Table of contents
01The classical tradition
The classical tradition in Western architecture starts with the Greek temples of the sixth and fifth centuries BC, which standardised the relationships between column, capital, and entablature into the orders — Doric, Ionic, Corinthian — that the next two thousand years of European building would refer back to. The Romans absorbed the orders, added the arch and the dome as structural systems the Greeks had used sparingly, and built at scales that the Greeks had not attempted. The Pantheon in Rome, completed in 126 AD, is still one of the most striking buildings in the world, and the dome was not surpassed in size for over a millennium.
Vitruvius, a Roman architect of the first century BC, wrote the only architectural treatise to survive from antiquity. The Ten Books on Architecture covers materials, construction techniques, the orders, the planning of cities, and the qualities a building should aim for — firmness, commodity, and delight, in the standard English translation. Vitruvius was not original on most of these subjects. The treatise mattered because it was the only continuous account from antiquity that the Renaissance had to work with, and it became, almost by default, the foundational text of European architectural theory.
02The modernist break
The modernist break in architecture, more or less complete by the 1930s, was driven by a combination of new materials, new social conditions, and a new ideology about what buildings were for. The materials were steel, reinforced concrete, and large sheets of plate glass, which made it possible to build in ways the masonry-based classical tradition simply could not. The social conditions were the rapid urbanisation of the early twentieth century and the housing crisis it produced. The ideology was that architecture should serve the actual needs of contemporary life, honestly and without ornament, and that the historical styles were a kind of dishonest costume.
Le Corbusier in France was the most influential of the early modernist polemicists. His 1923 book Vers une architecture argued that a house should be a machine for living in, and that the elements of contemporary design — the steamship, the automobile, the airplane pointed the way to what serious architecture should look like. His Villa Savoye outside Paris, completed in 1931, demonstrated the principles in physical form: the building lifted on slender columns, the free plan, the long horizontal windows, the roof garden, the white walls without ornament. The five points of a new architecture, as he called them, defined what a generation of architects would try to do.
03The postmodern reaction
The reaction had two main components, and they did not entirely agree with each other. One was theoretical and architectural — the postmodernism associated with Robert Venturi and a few others, which argued that architecture had been wrong to abandon ornament, historical reference, and complexity. Venturi's 1966 book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and the 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas, written with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, argued that the commercial vernacular of American strip development had something to teach serious architecture, and that the modernist insistence on purity had been missing the point.
The other component was less polemical and more grounded. Jane Jacobs's 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities was a sustained attack on the urban planning orthodoxies of the modernist period, particularly the slum-clearance projects and the highway-driven city remodelling of postwar America. Jacobs argued that good cities depended on dense, mixed-use, walkable streets with continuous activity, and that the modernist programme of separating functions and providing open space was producing dead environments. The book changed how planners thought about cities, even if it took decades for the change to show up in what got built.
04Starchitecture and the present
The current period in architecture is dominated, at the high-profile end, by the figure of the starchitect a small number of internationally famous architects whose names appear on cultural buildings, museums, concert halls, and high-end commercial work in cities around the world. Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Jean Nouvel, Bjarke Ingels these architects produce a recognisable kind of object, often technically remarkable, often sculptural, often expensive. The Bilbao Guggenheim by Gehry in 1997 is the canonical example of how a single building can transform a city's tourist economy.
The starchitect model has produced some genuinely striking buildings and some that have not aged well. It has also distorted the discipline's attention. Most architecture is not landmark cultural buildings. It is housing, schools, hospitals, infrastructure, and the routine commercial buildings that make up the bulk of the built environment. The architects working on these buildings are less famous and less often discussed, even though their work has more cumulative effect on how cities feel than any number of museums.
05Conclusion
Architecture is in a position where the tools have never been more powerful, the engineering has never been more capable, and the public conversation about what buildings should be is unusually thin. The discipline can build almost anything. It is less clear about what it should be building, and the institutions that used to provide a shared answer are weaker than they were. The starchitect circuit fills part of the void with spectacle. The everyday work of building cities mostly proceeds on its own terms.