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Roman architecture often reduced the Greek orders to mere ornament applied to arcuated structures.
The Lombard chapel piled up ornament on the purist structure of the Florentine model.
In the nineteenth century a building was made a structure to receive an envelope of surface ornament.
To be authentically modern was to strip categorically from structure all ornament.
Few readers would find anything remarkable about the prominent use of structure and ornament in such statements, which resemble actual passages of innumerable modern writings on architecture. These two words seem to describe unproblematically only what is physically there; "structure/ornament" appears to embody the very nature of much built reality. We do not in general question, or even feel that it is necessary to question, what structure and ornament actually signify, or to ask why they so typically appear as an oppositional pair. Nor do we often seriously reflect on the historical origin of the pair (which is generally grossly misdated) or study the implications of that origination. In the absence of such critical analysis, we fail to realize how pervasive and compelling a figuration of architecture the structure/ornament pair is, and that it determines in massive ways much of how we think and write about many aspects of architecture and its history, and even to a large extent how we build. To initiate such an analysis is the primary aim of this essay, which is intended not to resolve issues attending specific historical sites but rather to excavate and closely scrutinize certain assumptions and problematics that pervade and frame structure/ornament, and thereby to put to critical questioning the seemingly transparent nature of much recent and current architectural discourse.
St-Eustache as Structure/Ornament Paradigm
Architectural history today frequently seeks to interpret buildings as objects shaped by and expressive of their social meanings and historical contexts. The function of a building is consequently understood as primarily representational and often as actively engaged in defining the social world of which it is a part. It would be both unexceptional and commendable to decide that the best way to grasp the realities of, for instance, a fifteenth-century Florentine church is to chart the competing economic, political, religious, and cultural forces that brought it into being and to interpret it as a material expression of the ascending wealth and status of the mercantile class during the period.
This alliance of contextualism and soft semiotics has been marshaled primarily as a reaction against the formalism that generally dominated architectural discourse from the late 1800s through the middle of the twentieth century and that coincided with modernism and its distrust of history. Since the embrace of social history around 1970, formalism and the internal history of architecture have been either rejected as elitist (or worse) or, more benignly, regarded as having discharged their necessary but narrow task so that we can now progress to a richer understanding of architecture in its full multidisciplinary complexity. In the efforts to anchor architectural form in its historical context, form itself has become self-evident and the procedures of formal analysis often tend to be taken as a given.
That a critical inquiry into the interpretive problematics of the properly architectural has been deemed irrelevant by many architectural historians is largely because the current revisionism has tended to restrict itself to questioning the scholarship of the earlier part of the twentieth century. Formalism is rebuffed because it is associated with an ahistorical approach, not because its procedures are inherently flawed insofar as strictly formal questions are concerned. The properly architectural is narrowly identified with the formal, and the latter is understood to be well understood.(1)
Modern strategies of formal analysis originated, however, not in the heyday of modernist formalism but far earlier in the historically attentive writings of nineteenth-century theorists. The Romantics and their contemporaries created a two-part model for interpreting architecture: buildings were located in the newly created, self-contained historicity of the evolution of architectural form, and simultaneously they were understood to be historically determined and contextually expressive objects. Architecture had its own immanent history, but this history was coordinated with social, economic, and cultural history. It was in the service of this dual project - not the prim, solitary demands of formalism - that new ways of conceiving and describing architectural form were devised. When, in the years around 1900, the historical part of this enterprise was suppressed, many buildings continued to be apprehended and described (if not comprehended) in fundamentally the same way as they had been for nearly a century. With the recent reemergence of history, many of the identical descriptions, with all their formal-historical baggage, are again being repeated, having tacitly if nonreflectively been granted apodictic status; prominent among these is the structure/ornament model.
The emergence in the nineteenth century of this immensely potent mode of architectural description and its ongoing reiteration through the present day can be illustrated in a brief survey of the descriptive history of one building, the church of St-Eustache in Paris [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. In the first volume of the Dictionnaire raisonne de l'architecture francaise (1854), Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc wrote:
They wanted to apply the forms of ancient Roman architecture, which they knew badly, to the construction system of Gothic churches, which they scorned without understanding. As a result of this indecisive inspiration the large church of Saint-Eustache in Paris was begun and completed, a monument that is badly conceived, badly built, a confused heap of debris borrowed from all over, incoherent and without harmony, a sort of Gothic skeleton draped in Roman rags sewn together like the pieces of a harlequin's costume.(2)
Viollet-le-Duc's words are perhaps the most evocative rendering of a new visual and descriptive paradigm that configures St-Eustache as a building morphologically divided between its "skeleton," or structure, and its "rags," or ornament. Before the early nineteenth century such a two-part perception - even more, such a building - had been unimaginable.
When St-Eustache was constructed (1532-1640) and for some time thereafter observers were not much interested in allocating it a stylistic tag. Instead they saw (and esteemed) a monument notable for the abundance of its spatial and material traits: the great quantity and variety of its sculptural decoration, the great number of its piers and chapels, the great height of its vaults, and the unquantifiable spaciousness and richness of the building as a whole.(3) This was a superlative St-Eustache, which was seen, somatically experienced, and textually figured by the comparative grammatical framework whereby "big, bigger, biggest" or "some, more, most" equals "good, better, best."(4)
This "superlative" discourse was eventually displaced by the classical mode that emerged in France in the middle of the seventeenth century. The new discourse, which sought to separate the materiality of architecture from the idea it represents and to dissolve it into language, was highly theorized in its procedures as concerned both the creation and the apprehension of architecture. One interpretive gesture, however, was left free of theoretical elaboration, for it seemed self-evident: deciding to which of two possible manners, Gothic or classical, a building belonged.(5) This most apparently stable (because most reflexively deployed) gesture, this first casual glance, which effortlessly sees morphological traits that reveal the style of a building, proved imprecise and mercurial in the writings on St-Eustache. Everyone looking at the architecture of Paris "knew" that Notre-Dame and the Ste-Chapelle were Gothic, that St-Sulpice and the facade of St-Gervais were classical, but no such fundamental consensus was arrived at for St-Eustache. For some observers the building was Gothic,(6) for others it was classical or "modern,"(7) while for a third group it was both.(8) St-Eustache deflected the classical gaze and became an odd, unknowable building, inaccessible to the rational grasp of normal architectural discourse.
The confusion now caused by St-Eustache can be seen in Marc-Antoine Laugier's Observations sur l'architecture (1765). When he first writes about the building Laugier tells us:
The interior of this church is quite remarkable. The person who built it was strongly attached to Gothic architecture, and had a few feeble notions about Greek architecture. In this building he wanted to present some examples of the Greek orders. The result is those little columns hoisted up on excessively elongated pedestals, and which can be recognized by their bases, capitals, and fluting as belonging to antique architecture. This church marks an epoch in that it is only half Gothic, and, being like certain bordering provinces where opposing habits and languages intermingle, it signals the moment when Gothic architecture was about to die and Greek architecture was beginning to be reborn.(9)
In this partly Gothic St-Eustache, Laugier identifies classicizing columns that reveal themselves to his empirical scanning by their bases, capitals, and fluting. Although he describes only these isolated classical traits and does not indicate what about the building is precisely Gothic, at first reading his text seems to reveal a cognitively lucid, stylistically meaningful St-Eustache. But the building configured here is precarious, for its degree of Gothichess shifts as the text unfolds. First the church is strongly Gothic as the architect has merely a "feeble notion" of the "Greek" style, then it is half Gothic, and finally it is dying Gothic.
I would not insist on these distinctions, which follow a certain chronological logic and at least consistently describe the building as partially Gothic, were it not for a subsequent passage in Observations where a different St-Eustache appears, one that is entirely Gothic:
In our churches the vault is the principal object. It is there that the Gothic architect deploys his most brilliant resources. . . . In all the churches that we have built since the Renaissance of Greek architecture the vault is heavy and massive. . . . If one enters Saint-Eustache, there is nothing more elegant than the vault of this church. . . . If one enters Saint-Sulpice, there is nothing more insipid than that naked barrel vault.(10)
Now St-Eustache (diametrically opposed to the "insipid" classical St-Sulpice) is regarded as a characteristic specimen of Gothic architecture, a style that declares itself by the morphological feature of its distinctive vaulting. This abrupt visual realignment is accompanied by a historical repositioning of the building: from that moment when Greek architecture was first beginning to be born the church is pushed back to the time before this Renaissance. Is the St-Eustache of Observations Gothic and classical or purely Gothic? The text as a whole describes an elusive and changeable structure, a shifting, flickering architectural mirage where visuality is refracted and the most basic of epistemological assumptions called into doubt.
The nineteenth century brought St-Eustache to heel; architectural critics of the time, such as Viollet-le-Duc, now looked at and configured the building with a new architectural gaze, one that continued to search for style-revealing traits yet divided that recognition between the structure of a building on the one hand and its ornament on the other. It was just this possibility that the previous episteme was unable to entertain, and we should be careful not to endow a false immanent prescience on those classical texts that claimed St-Eustache was both Gothic and antique.(11) That the forms of a single monument could be composed of material traits from two distinct styles, with one category of traits coalescing into a building's physical structure and another into its ornament, was unthinkable and indeed was never stated.(12) Also, despite the fact that many eighteenth-century theorists (including Laugier) admired Gothic architecture or, more specifically, Gothic methods of construction, that admiration was limited to isolated motifs such as slender columnar supports, or to such resulting spatial effects as lightness and openness; it was not transposed to the recognition of a comprehensive tangible Gothic structure or skeleton in the sense that Viollet-le-Duc would imagine, either in Gothic monuments or, more to the point, in St-Eustache.(13)
It is only in the nineteenth century that a bipartite set of discursive spaces is produced, which all material architectural traits are seen to inhabit, variously and unambiguously, either as part of "structure" or of "ornament." In place of the oscillating, unstable St-Eustache that randomly proffered isolated details to the frustrated investigations of the classical gaze, a building of crystalline certainty emerges. Its morphology is no longer the object of uncertainty and, in fact, becomes a nonissue. The "structure/ornament" description seems to explicate and encompass the entire monument, apparently solving the mystery of the style of St-Eustache.
In the twentieth century this St-Eustache (either in its metaphorical guise of a clothed skeleton or its apparently literal one of an ornamented structure) is reiterated with the hallucinatory regularity of a mantra: "Saint-Eustache is a church with a skeleton of the Gothic type, overlaid with Renaissance adornment" (1910); "on a medieval structure there is Renaissance clothing" (1923); "the task of the church-builder . . . was to clothe a medieval skeleton in Renaissance flesh" (1926); "this new clothing covers an entirely Gothic framework of pointed arches and flying buttresses" (1944); "the medieval structure of this church is ornamented to the point of absurdity with elements in the Italian style" (1947); "this Gothic structure is . . . clothed in Renaissance forms" (1953); "to this medieval structure was unfortunately added decoration in the Italian mode" (1958); "evidence of the Renaissance style . . . is limited to ornament applied to the Gothic piers" (1978); "the whole church was submitted to the principle according to which Renaissance ornament was applied to the Gothic structure" (1984); "an Italianising ornamentation was applied to a Gothic structure" (1987); "only the decoration is representative of the Renaissance. . . . The structure is still entirely Gothic" (1989); "Saint-Eustache . . . is entirely Gothic in structure, although its decoration uses a classical vocabulary" (1997).(14) Furthermore, in the 1980s at least four authors cited Viollet-le-Duc's Dictionnaire description, allowing his words (which are irresistibly quotable) to corroborate or proxy for their own perception of the building.(15)
A St-Eustache is thereby produced that is virtually identical among the great majority of twentieth-century texts; a disarmingly simple building has taken root in contemporary scholarship with the tenacity of truth. How do we account for the strange success of this Gothic structure/Renaissance ornament St-Eustache, both as a construction in itself and as a phenomenon that continuously solicits duplication from the nineteenth century to the present day?
This question is not unique to St-Eustache, which is far from being the only premodern building that continues to be understood as divided between a structure that represents one style and its ornament another. Much of the architecture of sixteenth-century France and of Renaissance Europe outside Italy in general has been similarly configured by this binary concept. One author at the cutting edge of the antiformalist reappraisal of architectural interpretation describes a style of sixteenth-century Spain as "a hybrid local concoction of ornamental motifs applied without regard to the structure of the building," while another identified with formalist readings writes that in Germany "during most of the sixteenth century the Renaissance was simply a system of ornament . . . applied to Late Gothic structures."(16)
Nor does Italian Renaissance architecture necessarily escape the structure/ornament model. The Portinari Chapel at S. Eustorgio in Milan, for example, "represents . . . the transposition of the Sagrestia Vecchia of S. Lorenzo into the formal idiom of Milan. . . . The interior with its polychromatic blurring of the structure . . . and its prolific ornament . . . is far removed from the structural austerity of the Sagrestia Vecchia."(17) The Portinari Chapel differs from its transalpine colleagues mainly in that its blurred Florentine structure and its blurring Lombard ornament represent two regional variants of a single style, not two distinct period styles; yet like them it finds no place on the canonical Florence-RomeVenice axis and consequently is a building that formalism has perceived as marginal.
Moreover, since the early nineteenth century the history of architecture in general has become littered with more buildings that are, topographically speaking, marginal or peripheral and, temporally speaking, early, transitional, or late than buildings that have apparently achieved stasis at the central, high, or classical point of their style. In a great many of these cases the structure/ornament opposition is invoked as the buildings are described as formally cleft between two different period styles, different regional styles, or different phases of a single style.(18) Thus, onto the "Romanesque structure" of Bayeux Cathedral has been "grafted a heterogeneous collection of borrowings from early 13th-century Ile-de-France and English Gothic,"(19) and of the architecture of fifteenthcentury France it has been said, "Never . . . has Western architecture come closer to the luxuriant ornament of the East and to its fanciful profusion, which seems without purpose, and is certainly unrelated to the structure."(20)
Non-Italian Renaissance, non-Florentine quattrocento, French thirteenth-century architecture outside the Ile-de-France, and late Gothic architecture: it is precisely such fields, which were apparently misunderstood or entirely overlooked by formalists, where scholars have been particularly eager to follow the recent historical (re)turn in architectural interpretation. In the current climate a respectable argument can be made that the architecture of Renaissance Germany is not a lesser version of the Italian, not a marginal reflection of the center, but a historically legitimate phenomenon deserving of critical attention on its own terms. Similarly, a thirteenth-century cathedral that displays an early Gothic or Romanesque structure need no longer be disdained as provincially retardataire but can be interpreted as a declaration of regional identity, as responsive to the particular qualities of local building materials and masonry traditions, as having a contextually specific iconographic meaning or liturgical function, and so forth.
What present scholarship does not recognize, however, let alone encourage critical speculation about, is that such plunges into history often remain securely tethered to the peculiar revenantlike presence of the structure/ornament description. It is precisely this issue, and questions surrounding it, that I want to consider - that is, why nineteenth-century Romantics, early twentieth-century formalists, and contemporary contextualists are so frequently in agreement about the fundamental (structure/ornament) character of buildings about which they are otherwise in apparent disagreement.
The case of St-Eustache in modern architectural discourse is well suited to an inquiry into the problemafics of structure/ornament as a descriptive pair used to figure historical architecture. French nineteenth-century theorists were very much in the vanguard of the movement that created the new strategies for thinking about buildings. They wrote for the most part about their national architecture, two main periods of interest being precisely those relevant to St-Eustache: the Gothic and the newly defined field of the French Renaissance. Thus, virtually from the moment the structure/ornament St-Eustache was created, this identically configured building appeared in the texts of writers who comprehended it in quite different historical terms depending on whether, like Viollet-le-Duc, they understood the French Gothic to be the exemplary national mode of architecture or instead assigned this role to the French Renaissance, as did many of the Romantics. Furthermore, St-Eustache is a very large monument prominently located in the center of Paris, so that even when the French Renaissance (or, more typically, the church architecture of sixteenth-century France) has been the subject of little scholarly interest, it is a building that is difficult to ignore. Anyone writing about the history of Parisian architecture, or of Renaissance or classical architecture in France, or about the end of the Gothic has been more or less obliged to include St-Eustache, cumulatively providing ample material for my analysis.
I do not propose to begin by critically dismantling the structure/ornament pair, for although it is a truism that any attempt to describe an object will be a fundamentally interpretive and historically contingent act, by its very nature open to rigorous reexamination, at the same time another often overlooked factor needs to be considered. That is, any description of an object, in this case an architectural object, does more than demonstrate that a building has been seen in a particular historically specific way: it also produces a textual figuration or figure of the building. Such a figural building, whatever may be its relationship to the physical building it is seeking to represent, has its own discrete existence. It is a cultural artifact of value worth studying in its own right. A figural building is valuable in part because it has a certain utility. This utility is not restricted to the ability of the figure to convey knowledge of a building but is also specifically textual or literary in nature. Consequently, I temporarily want to leave the structure/ornament St-Eustache intact and begin by undertaking this more positive line of inquiry and consider what useful function this figural building might possess.
Structure/Ornament and the Critical History of Architecture
When I say that the modern structure/ornament St-Eustache is a figurative building I mean this literally. The binary structure of the concept is just that: a figurative structure or construction that is metaphorically composed of two closed and distinctly separate spaces. Onto the apparently neutral surfaces and into the apparently empty spaces of this figurative structure a variety of observations can be placed. Structure/ornament is a figuratively conceived heuristic device that provides architectural historians with spaces to be filled, a structure to be embellished.
One useful consequence is that the structure/ornament St-Eustache is a wonderfully genial building that makes itself available to a range of critical assessments. There is no predetermined correspondence between the structure/ornament building and what is said about it - what is placed in or on it - and the figured building confirms its own validity as it remains stable from the early nineteenth century onward, despite its shifting critical fortunes. For instance, Marius Vachon (1910) describes the church architecture of sixteenth-century France in a manner antithetical in judgment to Viollet-le-Duc's harsh characterization: "on a skeleton that is entirely Gothic, with traditional architectural schemas, they toss, in a charming caprice of the imagination, a Renaissance garment and adornment."(21) And he writes of St-Eustache:
As a whole, Saint-Eustache is a church with a skeleton of the Gothic type, overlaid with Renaissance adornment. Of the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages it has the boldness and majesty of construction; of the civic monuments of the sixteenth century it has the fantasy, the grace and the elegance of sculptural ornamentation. And nothing more luxurious, more delicate or more refined can be imagined.(22)
An imposing Gothic structure replaces Viollet-le-Duc's corrupted skeleton, elegant sculptural fantasy replaces Roman rags, and an architect of charming sensibility replaces Violletle-Duc's depraved rag and bone picker scavenging in the debris of the past.(23) Each author is in agreement about the essentially binary nature of the building and has so configured it, but in applying a different rhetorical veneer to its two separate parts is able to persuade us that St-Eustache is either a miserable or fine work of architecture.
Moreover, in each text the persuasive rhetorical veneer applied to the structure/ornament St-Eustache performs a narrative as well as critical function. The highly charged language that compellingly characterizes the church serves as a supplement to the narrative logic that organizes the story of the encounter of Gothic and Renaissance styles in sixteenth-century France. In the Dictionnaire Viollet-le-Duc tells a sad story of the decline, perversion, and eventual suppression of the French national mode as the seductive foreign forms of Roman architecture are insinuated into a weakened Gothic system. Vachon's La Renaissance francaise, to the contrary, narrates a positive encounter as a fertile medieval tradition nourishes and is in turn enriched by new architectural forms.(24) Each plot verifies the assessment of the structure/ornament St-Eustache; by the same token, the bipartite building affirms the validity of the plot as the descriptive terms that embellish it serve to sustain the historical story in which the building is a passing moment.
That the structure/ornament St-Eustache can accommodate (house and shelter) a variety of historicized scenarios is crucial to its tenacious success, for in modern architectural discourse narratives of the history of architecture - the historicity of the history of architecture - often constitute the ground for critical evaluation of architectural form. That is, in stating that the modern St-Eustache can accommodate different critical assessments, what I am really saying is that it can accommodate different dramatizations of the Gothic-meets-Renaissance story. These alternatives can include stories that contradict Viollet-le-Duc's, even those that also subject the building to a negative aesthetic appraisal.(25) Anthony Blunt, for example, writes:
It is to be expected that Gothic tendencies should survive longer in ecclesiastical architecture than in secular, and this is amply borne out by St Eustache. . . . This Gothic structure is, however, clothed in Renaissance forms. . . . the Italian impression depends only on the use of classical pilasters instead of Gothic. The orders are, it is true, used in a way to horrify any classically trained architect. In some piers, for instance, the four main faces are decorated with Corinthian pilasters, the height of which is perhaps twenty times their breadth, and the corners of the piers are filled by three columns standing one on top of the other, all of somewhat bastard design [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED].(26)
The architectural hero of Blunt's Art and Architecture in France 1500-1700 is Viollet-le-Duc's despised antihero, the French classical ideal. Blunt charts the fortunes of classicism in a narrative of emergence, development, and triumph, in which the sixteenth century is a period of origin and progress rather than finale and decline. The Gothic, no longer cast in the role of Viollet-le-Duc's tragic victim, becomes an annoying, if historically expected malingerer unwilling to recognize that its time is up.(27)
All this is apparent in the description of St-Eustache, where superannuated Gothic "tendencies" are juxtaposed with badly proportioned and bastardized classical orders and where Blunt is easily detected in his textual persona of a horrified "classically trained architect." Blunt uses a historical narrative of progress to posit both the Gothic and St-Eustache as problematic, not because Gothic equals bad architecture, but because in the sixteenth century Gothic equals the past, what he calls "the old," and is therefore resistant to progress, that is, to the future, to "the new" of classicism. Resistance is, however, manifest also in the badly conceived and poorly executed...
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