The Classical Language of Architecture

Author: John Summerson
Year: 1963
Source type: book
Raw file: raw/books/summerson-1963-classical-language-architecture.md

Summary

Six BBC radio talks (1963) that expound classical architecture as a language — with a grammar (the five orders), a syntax (deployment, intercolumniation, the arch–order conjunction), and a rhetoric (Baroque persuasion). Summerson traces the language from its Roman sources and Renaissance codification (Serlio's canonization of the orders) through Mannerist revolt (Giulio Romano, Michelangelo), Baroque rhetoric (Bernini, the Louvre, Vanbrugh), eighteenth-century rationalism (Cordemoy, Laugier's primitive hut) and neo-classicism, to its hidden continuation in the Modern Movement (Behrens, Perret, Le Corbusier). The book's central claim is that the classical tradition is best understood not as a style but as a living grammatical discipline, and that "an exact understanding of what we so vaguely and airily call modern can only come through an understanding of its classical parentage."

Key Claims

• Classical architecture is a language: it has a vocabulary (the orders and their parts), a grammar (rules of combination and deployment) and a rhetoric (the Baroque's persuasive grandiloquence); Christopher Wren's "Latin of architecture" analogy is "almost exact."
• Classicism resists definition by "essence"; its one durable aim has been "a demonstrable harmony of parts" achieved through proportion — but proportion alone does not make a building classical: some vestigial allusion to the antique orders is always required.
• The five orders are a Renaissance invention: Vitruvius described three (plus the Tuscan) without canonical status; Alberti added the Composite from observation; it was Serlio (1537) who staged the five orders "as categorical in the grammar of architecture as... the four conjugations of verbs in the grammar of the Latin language."
• The orders are not a "child's box of bricks" but "grammatical expressions imposing a formidable discipline but a discipline within which personal sensibility always has a certain play — a discipline, moreover, which can sometimes be burst asunder by a flight of poetic genius."
• The Doric entablature's elements (triglyphs, mutules, guttae) are a petrified timber prototype — a crystallization directly parallel to how words fossilize in language.
• Roman innovation was to deploy the structurally redundant orders as controls on arcuated, multi-storey buildings (the Colosseum): the orders "make their buildings expressive, they make them speak"; the Renaissance achievement was not imitation of Roman buildings but "the re-establishment of the grammar of antiquity as a universal discipline."
• Intercolumniation "sets the 'tempo' of a building" — the five Vitruvian spacings (pycnostyle to araeostyle) function as musical tempos (systyle "allegro", eustyle "andante").
• Great classical architecture requires both understanding of rule and defiance of rule; Lutyens "loved, obeyed and defied the orders all at the same time" — copying is fatal ("You can't copy it. To be right you have to take it and design it"), yet the orders are "unalterable as plant forms."
• Mannerism is "not a style. It is the 'mood' of an age"; Giulio Romano's rusticated instability at the Palazzo del Tè is "an arrogant protest against rules and — yes, it is poetry"; Michelangelo broke with Vitruvian authority altogether (Vasari: "he broke the bonds and chains of a way of working that had become habitual by common usage") and invented the two-order (giant + subsidiary) control of multi-storey façades.
• Baroque is "nearly always rhetorical, in the sense of grandiloquent, contrived, persuasive oratory" — Bernini's colonnades, the Louvre east front and Blenheim use the language "to overcome our resistance and persuade us into the truth of what they have to tell us."
• Eighteenth-century French rationalism (Fréart, Perrault, Cordemoy, Laugier) undermined the authority of the orders: Cordemoy demanded the abolition of "architecture in relief" (pilasters, attached columns, ornamental pediments); Laugier's primitive hut displaced the basis of architectural truth from Rome to a functional prototype, making Laugier possibly "the first modern architectural philosopher" and grandly prophesying the column-and-diaphragm architecture of the twentieth century.
• "Reason and archaeology are the two complementary elements which make Neo-classicism"; but the Greek Revival ended in failure when revived orders became "a sort of cultural luggage carried by buildings which they screen, cover and adorn but do not really control" — "a very dead dead-end."
• The Modern Movement is the classical language's continuation by other means: Behrens's AEG turbine hall is a temple in paraphrase (steel stanchions as colonnade); Perret's concrete depot thinks in "orders" without expressing them; Le Corbusier discarded the token framework but re-assumed Renaissance control through the tracés régulateurs and the Modulor.
• Proportional systems matter less as perceptible harmonies than as psychological necessities for their inventors: "their users (who are mostly their authors) need them"; such systems "rarely survive their authors."
• Classicism's last legacy to modern architecture is "rational procedure controlling — and inciting — invention."

Connections

Concepts: architectural-language, classical-orders, primitive-hut, proportion, tradition, modernism, architectural-ornament, semiotics, beauty, utopia
Authors: summerson-john, le-corbusier (ch. 6 treats him at length: Purism, Vers une architecture, tracés régulateurs, Modulor, Ronchamp)
Debates: ornament-vs-purity (Cordemoy/Laugier as the eighteenth-century ancestors of the purity position), tradition-vs-innovation (rule and defiance as twin factors; the Lutyens letters), genius-vs-bureaucracy (the classical canon as shared grammar against pure individual invention)
Related source notes: summerson-1942-bread-butter-architecture (the same author's other face: the everyday salaried architect vs. the classical canon), venturi-1977-learning-from-las-vegas (the later, postmodern re-reading of "language" in architecture), harries-1997-ethical-function-of-architecture (ornament and the post-classical predicament)

Direct Quotes

"I shall be talking about architecture as a language and all I want to assume at the moment is that you do recognize the Latin of architecture when you hear – that is, see – it." (ch. 1)

"the aim of classical architecture has always been to achieve a demonstrable harmony of parts" (ch. 1)

"It is much better to think of them as grammatical expressions imposing a formidable discipline but a discipline within which personal sensibility always has a certain play – a discipline, moreover, which can sometimes be burst asunder by a flight of poetic genius." (ch. 1)

"They are representations of temple architecture carved, as it were, in relief on a building which is not a temple, which is multi-storeyed and is built as a system of arches and vaults." (ch. 2, on the Colosseum)

"The great achievement of the Renaissance was not the strict imitation of Roman buildings (that was left for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) but the re-establishment of the grammar of antiquity as a universal discipline." (ch. 2)

"You can't copy it. To be right you have to take it and design it. . . . If you tackle it in this way, the Order belongs to you, and every stroke, being mentally handled, must become endowed with such poetry and artistry as God has given you." (ch. 2, quoting Lutyens's 1903 letter to Herbert Baker)

"You cannot play originality with the Orders. They have to be so well digested that there is nothing but essence left. When right they are curiously lovely – unalterable as plant forms." (ch. 2, quoting Lutyens)

"He loved, obeyed and defied the orders all at the same time. If the understanding of rule is one basic factor in the creation of great classical buildings the defiance of rule is the other." (ch. 2, on Lutyens)

"Mannerism is not a style. It is the 'mood' of an age and all sorts of very different things happened while that mood prevailed." (ch. 4)

"It is an arrogant protest against rules and – yes, it is poetry" (ch. 3, on Giulio Romano's Palazzo del Tè)

"'he broke the bonds and chains of a way of working that had become habitual by common usage'" (ch. 3, quoting Vasari on Michelangelo)

"Baroque is nearly always rhetorical, in the sense of grandiloquent, contrived, persuasive oratory" (ch. 4)

"These buildings use the classical language of architecture with force and drama in order to overcome our resistance and persuade us into the truth of what they have to tell us – whether it is about the invincible glory of British arms, the paramount magnificence of Louis XIV, or the universal embrace of the Roman Church." (ch. 4)

"This approach was all very fine and much in line with French thought of the period; it was all very rational (which, of course, was the point) but it did not really work even in theory because the orders themselves, as found in Rome, are by no means primitive, by no means functional but, on the contrary, highly stylized." (ch. 5, on Cordemoy)

"'the model' (to use his own words) 'upon which all the magnificences of architecture have been imagined'" (ch. 5, quoting Laugier on the primitive hut)

"I am not sure that Laugier may not justly be called the first modern architectural philosopher." (ch. 5)

"Reason and archaeology are the two complementary elements which make Neo-classicism and which differentiate it from the Baroque." (ch. 5)

"but when they become a sort of cultural luggage carried by buildings which they screen, cover and adorn but do not really control a very dead dead-end has been reached." (ch. 5, on the Greek Revival's "useless" colonnades)

"an exact understanding of what we so vaguely and airily call modern can only come through an understanding of its classical parentage" (ch. 6)

"I have a feeling that the real point of such systems is simply that their users (who are mostly their authors) need them; that there are types of extremely fertile, inventive mind which need the tough inexorable discipline of such systems to correct and at the same time stimulate invention." (ch. 6)

"'Rational procedure'. That is perhaps the last, and certainly not the least legacy of classicism to the architecture of our own time: rational procedure controlling – and inciting – invention." (ch. 6)

Open Questions

• Is Summerson's "architecture as language" a mere pedagogic analogy, or does it anticipate — and how does it differ from — the structuralist/semiotic readings of architecture (Saussure, Barthes, Eco, Jencks's enigmatic signifier) that followed in the later 1960s and 1970s? (architectural-language)
• Can the two Summersons be reconciled: the 1942 advocate of the anonymous salaried "bread-and-butter" architect and the 1963 celebrant of the classical canon and its poetic geniuses? Both, perhaps, share a suspicion of pure individual invention — the orders discipline the genius just as the office disciplines the designer.
• Summerson declared the architectural revolution of the twentieth century "complete" and "spent" as early as 1963, with questions of form receding before technology and planning. What does this premature obituary tell us about periodization — and about which questions of form in fact returned (postmodernism, parametricism, iconicity)?
• If proportional systems "rarely survive their authors" yet remain necessary to fertile minds, is the Modulor's fate a general law of architectural rationalism — and does parametricism escape it?
• Summerson notes the neo-classical ideal appeared "fully fledged" in Bernini's colonnades before Laugier formulated it. Can a stylistic ideal be practised before it is theorized — and what does that imply for how architectural language changes?