The Art of Architecture Part 1

The Art of Architecture.

by Anonymous.

INTRODUCTION

John Gwynn, generally accepted as the author of _The Art of Architecture_ (1742), is best known to students of English literature as one of the founders of the Royal Academy and as a friend of Samuel Johnson, who undertook in 1759 to win the Blackfriars Bridge commission for Gwynn with a series of three letters in the _Daily Gazeteer_[1].

To architectural historians Gwynn is best known as the architect whose proposals for regularizing the street plans of London and Westminster (in _London and Westminster Improved_, 1766) were prophetic both of the plan which eventually emerged from the land speculation and building boom of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and of the prominence subsequently given to city-planning.[2] But like Dr. Johnson, Gwynn looked as much to the past as he antic.i.p.ated the future. This is almost inevitable since he too spans the years which saw the last expressions of humanist principles of art and the first struggles to find new bases for aesthetic judgments. Although the date of Gwynn's birth is unknown, he must have been almost an exact contemporary of Dr. Johnson, for he also began his literary career in the 1730's, gained public recognition in the 1750's, a.s.sociated with members of the Literary Club in the 1760's, and died slightly over a year after Johnson, probably on 27 February 1786.

Their careers exhibit two more instructive parallels. Both began as amateurs, possessed of no specific training, and ended as self-supporting "professionals," able to exercise their skills on demand and fully conscious of the qualifications needed for membership within their professions.[3] Second, both began with the hope of "fixing" the rules of their arts, but ended by disavowing the intention or by implicitly contradicting it. Johnson records his disillusionment with one such attempt in the "Preface" to his _Dictionary_ (1755).

Gwynn's continuing interest in the attempt is evident in his early proposals for establishing an art academy (_An Essay on Design_, 1749) and in his serving as a representative of the architectural profession in the founding of the Royal Academy. However his efforts late in his career to accommodate his early principles to the needs of a nation in the midst of an economic and a building boom reveal a considerable shift from his dogmatic support of the rules of art in _The Art of Architecture_.

The poem is significant in a number of ways. It is the work of a young, inexperienced architect, with literary ambitions, who has learned most of what he knows about the principles of his art from published sources--treatises, pattern books, and measured drawings--rather than in an architect's studio or in a master mason's stone-cutting yard.

Take, for example, one of his lists of architects worthy of study: "With _M----s, F----ft, G----s, L----i, W----e_,/ Let ADMIRALTY, or CUSTOM-HOUSE compare" (p. 18). Four of these architects published treatises or translations of treatises which Gwynn certainly knew: Robert Morris, _Lectures on Architecture_, 1734-36[4]; James Gibbs, _Rules for Drawing the Several Parts of Architecture_, 1733; James Leoni, translations of Palladio, 1715-16, and of Alberti, 1726; Isaac Ware, translation of Palladio, 1737. The other architect referred to is Henry Flitcroft. The poem is, secondly, an unusually clear expression of the architectural principles--and dilemmas--of a man who is sensitive to changes in taste and in artistic practice, but unaware of the causes of the changes, and probably incapable of grasping their significance. This is precisely what makes _The Art of Architecture_ a valuable doc.u.ment in the history of eighteenth-century criticism. The poem provides a brief but rather full summary of the major precepts of humanist architectural theory accepted in the first half of the century, and introduces an important English innovation. At the same time it reveals the pa.s.sionate desperation of a man confident in his rules of art but powerless to impose them upon a society enamored of novelty. Gwynn never gave up his youthful ambition of improving English building, but he did give up the positiveness evident in this poem.

Gwynn's general critical bias is readily identifiable because it is consistent with that of many conventionally trained architects of the 1720's and 1730's, and with that of most propagandists for English Palladianism. Like the Earl of Burlington, William Kent, Colin Campbell, Morris, Ware, and Alexander Pope, Gwynn venerated Inigo Jones as England's Palladio, as the architect who showed how Palladio's rules could be naturalized for the English climate (pp. 14, 25). Similarly orthodox is his opinion of the fanciful baroque architecture of Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor, both of whom are held up as perpetrators of tasteless, licentious innovation (pp. 14, 26). The more chaste baroque architects--Sir Christopher Wren, Gibbs, and Thomas Archer--Gwynn generally admires, although he recognizes occasional flaws in the works of Gibbs and Archer (pp. 14, 29). In remarking on his other "villain" architects, Gwynn reveals his political preferences and some acquaintance with current scandals. At least two of them were aligned with the court party. Thomas Ripley, a one-time carpenter who was one of Pope's targets of satire, erected Houghton for Robert Walpole in accordance with designs by Campbell (pp. 15, 17).[5] Edward Oakley dedicated his _Magazine of Architecture_, _Perspective and Sculpture_ (1730) to Walpole, but received no posts such as those which Ripley, Hawksmoor, Vanbrugh, or John James enjoyed under the Walpole administration (p. 28). Two more architects whom he mentions, besides Gibbs, Vanbrugh, and Ripley, were employed on the notorious projects of the Duke of Chandos--John James and Andrew Shepherd (pp. 10, 23).[6]

Gwynn's taste and principles were those of an educated elite to which he did not belong--conventional in their moral and aesthetic implications, and conservative in their political ones.

But the significance of _The Art of Architecture_ is not merely as evidence of contemporary att.i.tudes toward Hawksmoor or James, Chapman or Banks. It is rather what Gwynn believes they indicate: the failure to establish in England a building practice firmly based upon a body of principles which architects and men of letters in the first half of the eighteenth century had wanted to believe inviolable. The Palladian revival had helped to subvert the medieval crafts tradition in building (which had been vigorous through the seventeenth century) and had contributed to subst.i.tuting for the pomp and flamboyance of the baroque a taste for regularity in outline, clear relationship of parts, and a relative simplicity of surface and ornament. Accompanying it was an unprecedented deluge of publications, all of which helped to create a greater popular consciousness of humanist architectural principles than had previously existed. Yet the revival was proving ineffectual, and perhaps the clearest evidence is in Gwynn's attack on Kent: "See the old GOTHS, in _K----_'s Designs survive;/ And Modern FOOLS, to imitate his strive" (p. 26). Kent edited the drawings of the English Palladio for the Earl of Burlington (_The Designs of Inigo Jones, With Some Additional Designs_, 1727); but at Esher Place, Surrey (ca. 1730), and again in Merlin's Cave, erected at Richmond Park for Queen Caroline (1735), he "antic.i.p.ate[d] by twenty years the rococo Gothic of the 1750's."[7] The latter design was even published with some by Jones two years after _The Art of Architecture_ in John Vardy's _Some Designs of Mr. Inigo Jones and Mr. William Kent_ (1744). Clearly Vitruvius's rule of _decor_ had not restrained even the publicists of Palladianism.

Humanist architectural theory was losing its authority even as it was being widely disseminated; it was also, as was only half clear to Gwynn, becoming increasingly unintelligible. Wealthy patrons of the art looked more and more upon exact knowledge of it as unbefitting the learning of a gentleman. Archaeological studies of antiquities, instead of helping to fix the rules of proportion, were contributing to aesthetic relativity by demonstrating the disparity between ancient practice and Vitruvius's rules. Claude Perrault attempted to resolve these disparities by a system of mathematical averages, but the result of his empirical method is only to subst.i.tute one source of relativity for another.[8] By the 1740's what Rudolf Wittkower has called the "break-away from the laws of harmonic proportion"[9] was well under way, and it represented but a part of the collapse of the several systems of arithmetic and geometric proportion which had dominated humanist theory. Developments in the history of thought made this collapse inevitable. The old aesthetics were based upon correspondences between divine and human artifacts. Thus in designing a building the architect emulated the Divine Architect who "ordered all things in measure and number and weight" (Wisdom 11:20). The geometric forms and the systems of mathematical and harmonic proportions of a building answered to those of the cosmos; likewise the aesthetic attributes of the cosmos--with their attendant moral ones--such as symmetry, uniformity, regularity, and fitness had their correspondences in architecture. Such a.s.sumptions provided immutable bases for the rules external to the individual work of art, but the breakdown of a.n.a.logical reasoning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries necessarily undermined such philosophical-theological foundations. The new epistemology, further, shifted attention from the external world--the previous source of the rules--to the mind perceiving it.

By the 1740's consciousness was growing of threats against the ethical and aesthetic values of Renaissance humanism (best expressed in Pope's _Dunciad in Four Books_), and of the consequent need for new sources of authority for the rules of art. One highly eccentric quest for authority was published just a year before _The Art of Architecture_: John Wood's _The Origins of Building_; or, _The Plagiarism of the Heathens Detected_ (1741). Wood reconstructs the history of architecture to make it conform to Old Testament chronology. Thus he attributes the major tenets of Vitruvius's architectural theory to various patriarchs and ancient Jewish heroes, or, when he finds any justification for doing so, directly to G.o.d. Gwynn's attempt to b.u.t.tress the rules is far more mundane. He seeks support from contemporary philosophy; for example, he introduces the epistemological and ethical systems of Shaftesbury to account for some principles of decorum, but without perceiving the subjectivity he was imposing on them. He rationalizes some of Vitruvius's a.n.a.logies between natural and architectural forms. But even more clearly indicative of the futility of his effort are his appeals to authority. He implores such aristocratic patrons as Pembroke, Chesterfield, and Burlington to "Be to my _Muse_ a Friend; a.s.sist my Cause;/Be Friend to _Science_, fix'd on _Nature's_ Laws" (p. 30). Perhaps most important, however, is the authority of Horace himself, who provides the model for the poem.

Although neocla.s.sical critics generally accepted the reality of correspondences between architectural and literary criticism, Gwynn did not find the _Ars Poetica_ an entirely manageable model.[10] Horace's figures of the mad painter and the mad poet which frame the poem at either end serve Gwynn well, for his imitations of them as the mad painter and the mad architect emphasize the personal, social, and artistic consequences of attempting to build without rules, talent, or even a clear need to build. But within the poem, allusions to Horace are often much more elusive. He usually succeeds best in keeping close to Horace when citing the most general principles. Thus Horace's attack on bombast and timidity ("professus grandia turget;/serpit humi tutus nimium timidusque procellae," 11. 27-28) occasions an attack on misunderstood magnificence and on stodginess:

Others affect _Magnificence_ alone; And rise in large enormous Heaps of Stone; Swell the huge _Dome_, and _Turrets_ bid to rise, And Towers on Towers; attract the Gazer's Eyes.

Some dare not leave the old, the beaten Way, To search new Methods, or in Science stray ...

(p. 8.)

Similarly clear are Gwynn's adaptations of such commonplaces as the need to subordinate parts to the whole (p. 8) or for consistency of style (p. 15). Again, Horace asks whether a good poem is the product of nature or art--of native talent or of training--and denies that either is adequate alone (11. 408-418). Gwynn raises the same question about the architect, although in the first person, and answers,

If _Art_, or _Nature_, form'd me what I am; If one or both, a.s.sisted in the Plan, It is beyond, my utmost Power to say: Whether I _Art_, or _Nature_' s Laws obey.

(p. 31.)

Since such ambivalence as this is not appropriate to his purpose, he, unlike Horace, begins almost immediately to stress a course of study that will result in mastery of the rules.

This last rhetorical tactic points to one serious problem which Horace poses for Gwynn--that of a.s.suming an appropriate stance for defending the rules. The tone of Horace's epistle to the Pisos is familiar without being condescending. He writes as an experienced poet and critic to fellow writers, delivering his p.r.o.nouncements freely and confidently, but without dogmatism. Gwynn is neither an equal writing to equals nor an experienced architect, confident of his qualifications to instruct the world. At one moment he acknowledges the "Judgment's Height" of the addressee (p. 28), the next he holds himself up as possessing a skill worthy of emulation, and proceeds to deliver a lesson in the tone of a schoolmaster: "Those Things which seem of little Consequence,/ And slight and trivial ..." (p. 32). Horace's wit, his reliance upon his audience to grasp the implications of his many examples, and his avoidance of positiveness subvert Gwynn's purpose, as he reveals frequently in contradictory outbursts and in shifts in tone. Yet in one important pa.s.sage Horace provides him with a stance and a theme which help him prop up the rules. After discussing pardonable faults (11. 347-365) Horace addresses Piso's elder son, compliments him for his wisdom and training, and _reminds him_ of the activities in which mediocrity may be tolerated. This serves as a contrast to poetry: "mediocribus esse poetis/ non homines, non di, non concessere columnae" (11. 372-373). For once Horace is almost uncompromising enough for Gwynn's purposes. He adopts a similarly magisterial tone, but reorders Horace's materials so that the emphasis is more fully on this principle:

But yet, _my Lord_, this _one_ important Truth, This Law of _Science_, which we teach our Youth Even THIS, no Mediocrity admit, _Rules_, _Nature_, _Reason_, _all_ must jointly fit: A _Painter_ may RAPHAEL'S Judgment want, And yet, we some Abilities will grant: ...

In BUILDING, there's no _Laws_ of human Kind, Admit a _Medium_; to the Artist's Mind, _All_ must be perfect, or 'tis understood, Excessive _Ill_,----or else sublimely _Good_.

(pp. 29-30.)

Especially significant here is his insistence that the "Law of _Science_" will "no Mediocrity admit," for Horace discusses poetic practice rather than the rules which aid it. Secondly, the belabored inference drawn from the principle in the final couplet has no precedent at all in Horace. Gwynn has made every effort to place the rules outside the realm of human eccentricity and to give them the stature of "_Nature's_ Laws."

Considering that the tenets of humanist architectural theory are traditionally cla.s.sified very differently from those of literary criticism, as Gwynn acknowledges in his "Preface" (p. iii), he manages to accommodate them surprisingly well to the organization of the _Ars Poetica_. A good example is his treatment of Horace's discussion of the transitoriness of language, as of all things, and the necessary dominance of the rules of usage (11. 46-72). The most obvious parallel is the inevitable ruin of the pompous buildings which men erect (p. 11).

But he develops none of the botanical a.n.a.logies which Horace used to ill.u.s.trate the rhythms of life and death (11. 60-69), for his purpose is to emphasize instead the parallel between _usus_ and the architectural concept of "use." Horace insists, "multa renascentur quae iam cecidere, cadentque/ quae nunc sunt in honore vocabula, si volet usus" (11. 70-71). Gwynn elaborates on this:

But Use has rais'd the _Greek_ and _Roman_ Rules, And banish'd GOTHICK Practice from the Schools.

Use is the Judge, the Law, the Rule of Things, Whence ARTS arose, and whence the SCIENCE springs.

(p. 11)[11]

Horace and Gwynn both think of "use" operating as a kind of historical necessity causing the resurrection of a rule or a form. Gwynn adds to this the concept, drawn from Vitruvius and his commentators, that the rules of architecture prescribe forms which satisfy particular uses and reflect directly the strengths and limitations of building materials and techniques. These are the major premises of Gwynn's a.s.sertion that "on _Nature's_ perfect Plan,/ I form my SYSTEM" (p. 31). To b.u.t.tress this confidence in rules he develops the parallels between Horace's history of poetry (11. 73-98) and the history of architecture.

Cecrops, the first king of Athens, is to architectural practice what Homer is to heroic poetry. Daedalus is to the theory of architecture what Archilochus is to the meter of dramatic poetry (pp. 11-12). The emphasis on the giving and systematizing of rules, although without precedent in Horace, reflects the same preoccupation with the authority of origins as John Wood's _Origins of Building_, Pope's _Essay on Criticism_, or even Locke's _Two Treatises on Government_ for that matter.

Horace provides less precise correspondences for one of the most important rules. Vitruvius's rule of _decor_ (_De Architectura_, I, ii, 5) is only generally parallel to the rules governing decorum of language, characterization, and genre. Gwynn nevertheless introduces all of its major implications. It dictates the observing of clear correspondences between a building's form and its use, inhabitant, and site (or "situation," to use the eighteenth-century term). It is based upon the notion that architectural styles have recognizable social, ethical, religious, and aesthetic attributes. The attributes, which evoke predictable psychological responses, express the _uses_ which the styles were created to satisfy and the cultures in which they were developed. One brief pa.s.sage beginning "If to adapt your Fabrick, you would choose,/ To suit the _Builder's_ Genius, or his Use" (pp. 15-16) effectively summarizes the primary dictates of _decor_. The architect has to choose forms and ornaments having attributes in common with the social station and character traits of the builder of a residence,[12]

with the deity to whom a temple is dedicated, with a building's function, or with the landscape in which it is placed. Thus, for example, the heavy, plain Tuscan order is appropriate for "A _little_ Structure; built for Use alone," the "gaiety" of the middle Ionic order for a country villa, and the "delicacy" of the Corinthian order for an elegant church or palace (p. 25). An architect's skill is most often measured in the poem by his adherence to _decor_.

One violator of _decor_ serves as a focus in an important pa.s.sage wherein Gwynn tries to integrate Vitruvius and Horace while making a transition to one of his central concerns, the peculiarly English reinterpretation of decorum of situation. In discussing the difficulty of treating traditional subjects in novel ways, Horace compares an erring "scriptor cyclicus olim" with Homer, summarizes some general principles, and then turns to a consideration of how to win public applause (11. 119-178). Gwynn is more suspicious of originality than Horace (p. 17), and uses Ripley as an example of one who erred in trying to avoid customary forms. Ripley's Custom House (1718) and Admiralty building (1723-26) become the equivalent of the Cyclic poet's bad verse, while Morris, Flitcroft, Gibbs, Leoni, and Ware become the modern Homers of architecture (p. 18). Gwynn ends the verse paragraph with Horace's theme of suiting the parts to the whole. With Ripley's performance as a background Gwynn turns to architecture's most fundamental rules:

CRITICKS, attend the Rules which I impart; They are at least; _instructive_ to the Art: Mark how _Convenience_, _Strength_, and _Beauty_ join: With these let _Harmony of Parts_ combine.

(p. 18.)

These lines may be construed as the architect's equivalent of Horace's advice for winning applause. But in fact the entire verse paragraph which these lines introduce is simply a paraphrase of Vitruvius (I, iii, 2. Cf. Wotton's remark, "_Wel-building_ hath three Conditions, _Commodity_, _Firmnesse_, and _Delight_").[13] The leap which follows the introduction of these three principles has no precedent in Horace, but it does in Vitruvius, whose _De Architectura_ is notorious for its eccentric organization and abrupt transitions. Immediately following this pa.s.sage in Vitruvius is his chapter on the "salubrity of sites"

(I, iv).

It is ironical that where Gwynn is closest to Vitruvius in one respect he departs most radically from him in another. Vitruvius's attention is almost exclusively on the physical requirements of sites for maintaining men's health and comfort; Gwynn's is on the requirements for maintaining men's psychological well-being. His conceptions of decorum of situation begin with Vitruvius and the Renaissance demands that a site be healthy, that it permit efficient transportation, and that, if possible, it provide raw materials for building, rich lands for crops and pastures, and natural beauty conducive to ease and contemplation. Gwynn emphasizes this last point, building upon perceptions of nature nourished on Thomson's _Seasons_, and upon a psychology drawn largely from the Earl of Shaftesbury (pp. 19-22).

In his earlier _Essay on Harmony_. _As it relates chiefly to Situation in Building_ he quotes Shaftesbury on the t.i.tle page, acknowledges his debt to Thomson, and quotes long pa.s.sages from _The Seasons_ to ill.u.s.trate various rural "situations."[14] In _The Art of Architecture_ he follows Morris's example in writing his own verse in language imitative of Thomson's (except for one direct quotation, "From the _moist Meadow_; to the _brown-brow'd Hill_"). The verbal precision of his poetic epithets, and the a.n.a.lysis of perception which they imply, help to distinguish the sensory, aesthetic, and emotional effects of a wide variety of disparate experiences, and thus make possible the identification of those attributes that guide an architect in choosing a _mode_ appropriate to a site. The perfect fitting of a building to its site, as of the parts to a whole, will result in what Gwynn calls "Ideal Harmony," for it "ariseth from such Numbers, Parts, or Proportions, which may be resolved in the Mind, and ranged together in Order, by Contemplation."[15]

For Gwynn such harmony still has quite clear religious and moral implications, although he does not, like Morris, attribute to it a specifically religious function. Yet since the rules are supposedly based upon natural laws, violations of them betray a failure to appreciate divine harmony, the highest object of human contemplation.

This accounts for the indignation Gwynn reveals in attacking mad architects and patrons at the end of the poem, even if it also reveals his obtuseness in failing to perceive the causes of his outrage.

But, then, Gwynn was no Alexander Pope, either as a poet or as a thinker.[16]

The Ohio State University

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1. Both James Boswell and Sir John Hawkins briefly discuss Johnson's relations with Gwynn in their biographies of Johnson. The fullest accounts of Gwynn's life and professional activities are those in the _DNB_ and in H. M. Colvin, _Biographical Dictionary of English Architects_, 1660-1830 (London, 1954), pp. 254-256. Both attribute the poem to him. I am much indebted throughout this introduction to Colvin for information on the architects mentioned in the poem.

2. For an estimate of the significance of Gwynn's perceptions see chapter nine of John Summerson's _Georgian London_, rev. ed.

(Harmondsworth, 1962). His perceptiveness was recognized by the early nineteenth century. Gregg International published a facsimile reprint of _London and Westminster Improved_ in 1969.