Balbus; or, the future of architecture

by Christian Augustus Barman

The question may arise whether architectural creation can be the result of more than one kind of human impulse. Do not all buildings erected by man, it may be asked, owe their origin to the same unchanging desire, though the fruits of that desire may be many and various? The answer is that there are, indeed, two distinct forces at work, two separate impulses which, though most often acting in combination, yet are neither similar in nature nor of equal importance. We have only to look from Westminster Abbey to the Cenotaph in Whitehall to realize that these two buildings are distinguished by a profound difference of meaning and of intention. Let us take the greatest possible difference and reduce it to its simplest aspect. It is (we may say) the business of the architect to design buildings. But he may set up round about his buildings a number of lesser objects such as bridges, parapets, columns, fountains, and others suchlike. How do these two kinds of structure compare? Are they different in size only, and would the Cenotaph, if it were enlarged to the size of Westminster Abbey, become a work of architecture commensurable with the Abbey? Of course, it would not, for the simple reason that the Abbey has an inside. Now, it is not by chance that the words outer and inner have become, in all languages, the recognized metaphorical equivalents of body and soul. The usage is one that has occasionally been condemned by students of the logic of language, but it rests upon a perfectly sound foundation in that it appeals to an experience of universal validity, an experience which, let it be noted, is derived from architecture, and from architecture alone. A building is the only thing that you may both look into and look out of, both extraspect and introspect, and having learnt from the art of building thus to regard the human mind from two sides, as it were, we should at all times be careful to distinguish this dual aspect in buildings also. Now, in whatever manner we may describe these two views and the difference between them, this much is certain: that the greatest and most enduring qualities in architecture are those that reside in the design and arrangement of the internal spaces of a building, of those enclosing forms that are, in the last resort, the only justification of that building.

The idea is familiar to the architect, if not perhaps in the very words I have used, but he has not shown himself eager to let the layman into the secret. How many of us have not been puzzled by the mysterious significance attaching to the word plan, and the still more mysterious aspect of the thing itself? What is there in a plan (for something there must be) that gives it this supremacy among all the possible representations of a building? A building worthy of the name of great architecture, so a simple answer might run, is invariably composed of a succession of spaces or cells. In this it resembles the human body, which is made up of just such a series—the cranial, thoracic and abdominal cavities, as we call them—with, in addition, the mechanical attachments of the limbs. And in buildings, as in the human body, the first essentials of beauty are to be found in the shape, disposition, and junction of this sequence of cells. These are the important facts about a building that are more fully revealed in a plan than in any other kind of drawing. We now know why an architect always hastens to record his ideas in the form of a plan—provided, of course, that his subject is indeed an arrangement of inhabitable cells. Sir Edwin Lutyens did not begin by sketching out the plan of his Cenotaph, but he cannot have found anything except a plan of much use in recording his ideas for his great war memorials at Verdun and Arras, a multicellular disposition, each of them, of great richness and delicacy.

A pair of internal casts, illustrating the development of the architectural cell group. Above, a one-room dwelling-house. Below, a typical small house of the Regency period. The first floor has been removed, but the elliptical staircase-well with its lantern-light is shown complete. The front is double-bayed and the vestibule has a vaulted ceiling.

Let us consider for a moment how this disposition has in the course of time come about and how it has attained to its present complexity. There follows, upon cave and tent, the one-roomed cottage, so distant in spirit from the modern house, and yet persisting everywhere beside it. Under its single roof the tenants sleep, cook, eat; the very farmyard animals were once admitted to its shelter, as the camel and donkey are to-day admitted to the Egyptian fellah’s hut. One by one, however, this rudimentary dwelling puts forth cells as need sharpens and opportunity comes: the cattle are expelled to one side, the kitchen hearth to another, the beds to a third; cellar, larder, toolhouse follow. New cells have fastened themselves to the older ones; the house has become an organized collocation of parts; in it are found the elements of a plan. But, though organized, it remains haphazard in arrangement, what one of Jane Austen’s characters derisively calls “a scrambling collection of low single rooms, with as many roofs as windows.” Its growth is piecemeal and experimental, undirected, almost blind. It does not, however, remain so for ever, for man is an animal that learns by all that it does. In time these same elements, once scattered, will be measured and composed together into a house by the prescient mind of one who will henceforth be known as an architect. A greater coherence, a greater orderliness, is gradually but surely acquired, and from the growing power of large and orderly planning there spring the ultimate achievements of architecture that are the pride of our race. Town hall, palace, theatre, church, all these proceed from this same skill in the fashioning of cells and in the gathering of them into a reasoned whole, into a plan.

A typical church of the Italian mid-Renaissance with one large and four smaller domes. This diagram and those on [p. 19] represent not the exterior of the building but the interior space, its walls and ceilings removed, and regarded from outside as a solid, on the same principle as that which governs the design of the celestial globe.