Architecture, sculpture, and natural form

A few years ago I took a day-trip to Brighton with my friend M. The sky was glaucous and overcast, as is proper to that town, and as I imagine the sky to be at Balbec; the brute gulls seemed to fly without moving. We marvelled at the collapsed West Pier, and strolled the shingles at length, clutching newly-purchased books—I had admired a Dali-illustrated Don Quixote, but it was too dear, and I'd plumped instead for a copy of Zukofsky's "A". At that time M was reading Giedion's classic Space, Time and Architecture. We sat on the beach overlooking the Palace Pier, and watched a couple of sapphites toss pebbles into the irrefragable spume. He asked me, Which is the highest art-form? My reply was immediate: Literature, then architecture. I could not perfectly explain this answer—both of these art forms, I said, have something of the mysticable about them. I coined the word in the heat of the moment, and it still seems appropriate to me. They can be mysticated, made mystical. M smiled indulgently, perhaps sensing there was a germ of truth in my unusual language. For whatever reason, I also said that it was a mistake to confuse, as so many did, architecture with sculpture—that a work of architecture is something categorically more than a large, elaborate sculpture.

At the present moment I am in a better position to explain both points, and their interrelation. What distinguishes both literature and architecture from other art-forms is that they hold something back, that they do not present themselves to a man all at once. Painting and sculpture are clearly more immediate, in that they are taken in at one glance, or in a few glances in rapid succession. Music exists over time, and so does not present itself at once—but nonetheless, like painting and sculpture, it presents itself. The listener is acted upon, even if, like a good Kantian, he is busy finding patterns among the notes.

A text, on the other hand, does not present itself: it is self-contained, a whole, and to be appreciated it requires the brain to decipher huge numbers of symbols and to assimilate gradually a complete body. The text, in a real sense, resists the eye, and does not easily give up its riches. A building, too, holds back: to appreciate it one must not only glance at its façade, and not only walk around the sides and back, but enter into it, to explore its internal structure, and as with a text, to build up gradually a sense of the whole. In this sense, it is categorically different from a sculpture; one might say that its text-like properties—recurrent themes, relations of part to whole, and most importantly, a semantics—are emergent at a certain level of three-dimensional complexity. A building, like a text, requires a sort of participation.

My aesthetics are naturally geared towards the self-contained, the whole and the hidden. These are the constituents of the sublime and the mystical—by which I really mean, they are my substitute for a self-contained, whole and hidden God, an Ein Sof. Literature and architecture display these God-like qualities: and so they are for me the highest art-forms. They are not for enjoyment or entertainment, but for quasi-religious contemplation.

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Attempts to make architecture like sculpture alarm me—they seem to stem from a deep metaphysical confusion. Chris Miller compared the two forms on these very pages, though of course I do not wish to scold him. Again, take this statement from Bernard Rudofsky's classic manifesto of 1964, Architecture Without Architects:

Great builders draw no line between sculpture and architecture. With them, sculpture is not "commissioned" as an afterthought or budgetary dole.

This is not a fair example, I concede: Rudofsky is talking about the sculpture which is integrated into a building, and so becomes part of its architecture. In fact, I would quite agree with him. But there are more worrying manifestations. Back in 2001, Peter Wollen wrote a rather impressionistic piece on Situationism for the New Left Review, in which he discussed the Danish artist Asger Jorn and his 1948 essay, 'What is Ornament?'. Jorn, a founding Situationist and also an appallingly sloppy painter, had a quaint view of art:

For Jorn, the pairing of European versus oriental ran together with other pairings, such as classical versus spontaneous, idealist versus materialist, Apollonian versus Dionysiac, with Jorn supporting the second term throughout—oriental, materialist, spontaneous, Dionysiac, and so on.

Further, for Jorn:

the nature of art is not to imitate the external forms of nature (naturalism) but to create natural art. Natural sculpture which is true to its material will be identical to nature’s forms without seeking to imitate.

Jorn thus compares a minaret to a horsetail, and a totem-pole to a chestnut branch; the non-Western forms are seen as more organic, more rooted in the natural world. But as Wollen observes, 'Architecture and sculpture. . . here seem to be treated as if they were more or less the same thing.' Later, in the context of Gaudi and King Ludwig, Wollen develops the thought: ’Perhaps the main point is that all these buildings seem to meld sculpture with architecture, and to be works of the untrammelled imagination rather than of controlling reason.' Again, this time of Constant Nieuwenhuis' New Babylon, 'The plastic models were also designed to be both architectural and sculptural, to work as aesthetic objects in their own right, as well as intimations of future constructions.'

Minaret and horsetail: similar?

There is the sense here that non-Western architecture is more like sculpture, and thus more like nature—the contrast is between a formal, Apollonian architecture and a free, Dionysian sculpture. The Situationist desire—not a thousand miles from Rudofsky here—was to return to these natural and harmonious, sculptural forms, to 'de-Westernize' architecture. The problem with this desire is that it presupposes that the only difference between architecture and sculpture is morphological, and one of degree—a view that I have argued against above.

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Jorn's notions about natural forms are part of a strong Romantic heritage, going back to the nineteenth century. In 1856, Western appropriation of Oriental graphic forms crystallised in Owen Jones' monumental folio volume, The Grammar of Ornament. The preface to this work contains a series of universal precepts about the shape of ornamental designs. First is the clear subordination of ornament to architecture—decoration to structure:

The Decorative Arts arise from, and should properly be attendant upon, Architecture.

In line with this is the 5th proposition, that 'Construction should be decorated. Decoration should never be purposely constructed', to which the subtitle is a reiteration of Keats, 'That which is beautiful is true; that which is true must be beautiful'. Second is a classic statement of Hegelian historicism:

Architecture is the material expression of the wants, the faculties, and the sentiments, of the age in which it is created.

More interesting is Jones' conception of beauty, from the 6th proposition: 'Beauty of form is produced by lines growing out one from the other in gradual undulations'. This naturalistic conception is expanded in propositions 11-13:


Jones, like Jorn, sees 'Oriental practice' as being in accordance with 'Natural law'. Ruskin wrote about the Gothic, rather than the Oriental—the two were commonly associated in contrast to 'rationalist' classicism—but like Jones he thought in terms of natural forms. Kenneth Clark summarises Ruskin's view that 'beauty of form is revealed in organisms which have developed perfectly according to their laws of growth, and so give, in his own words, 'the appearance of felicitous fulfilment of function'.' One of Ruskin's seven 'lamps' or principles of architecture is Honesty, and he criticises vaults that look like leaves but carry stress differently—constant reference is made to the natural world and its objects as perfect expressions of function in form.

In Abstraktion und Einfühlung (1907), the historicism and naturalism of Jones would become further theoretised by Wilhelm Worringer, also under the influence of Nietzsche's revival of the distinction between 'Apollonian' and 'Dionysian' art, the West and the East. This essay contrasted Western classicism, with its calm Einfühlung (empathy) to the world, to Gothic and Oriental styles of architecture, which display a fearful and fluid abstraction of form—he notes, for instance, the transformation of the geometric classical column into the more curvilinear piers of a Gothic church. Worringer, developing his dichotomies of West/East, civilised/primitive, and formal/spontaneous, supported the second term of each balance just as much as the first, and in doing so provided some justification for the primitivising tendencies of Modernist art. Architectural forms in his work become sculptural forms—purely morphological expressions of emotion. This is the tradition acquired by Jorn, whose painting represents the last and worst throes of Modernist primitivism, Abstract Expressionism.

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I repeat myself: if, like Jorn and his predecessors, we reduce our notion of architecture to mere sculpture, mere shape, we significantly limit the possibilities of its form. We need not be Corbusierian rationalists to disagree with Jorn, and to suggest that it can do more. Architecture, unlike sculpture, has function—Ruskin still understood this, Worringer less so, and Jorn not at all—and it has a narrative, albeit an open one. It is this function and narrative which provide its semantic dimension; we come to a building as to a text, not just the figuration of shape (as with sculpture), but the intimation of a God—self-contained, whole and hidden from immediate view.