Roger Scruton: “Architecture and Aesthetic Education”

well good evening I'm Walter sterling the Dean of st. John's College Santa Fe as most of you know I welcome all of you this evening to our annual steiner lecture a part of the deans lecture and concert series which is open to the santa fe community as well as to our campus community this year we are especially pleased to offer the steiner lecture as part of our conference on liberal education which is itself part of our year-long celebration of the 50th anniversary of the santa fe campus of st. john's the steiner lecture honors the memory of andrew steiner an alumnus of the college class of 1963 the Andrew Steiner visiting scholar fund has the purpose of bringing to our campuses people of distinction with fresh perspectives on the work done at the college our former dean eva brand who offered to talk for us this afternoon introduced the first steiner lecture in 1992 on our annapolis campus I was grateful to be present for that first lecture and for miss brands eloquent introduction I knew Andrew who was a classmate and friend of my father and I spent many hours at his home as a child he loved st. John's College where his time as a student had opened up for him the expansive horizons of an intelligent reflective artful and humane life I recall him fondly as a man of gentle wit good humor curiosity generosity and warm affection for family and friends he was a loving family man and a successful businessman but one who clung to the sense that the best of life involved the grace of intellect art imagination and conversation all to be shared with others there can be no better tribute to the high purposes of a liberal education than such a life and our College continues to be grateful to his friends and family foreign dowing the steiner lecture in his honor my colleague and a tutor at the college Michael Gallagher will now introduce our lecturer it is with great pleasure and with even greater appreciation that I introduce our steiner lecturer dr. Roger Scruton dr. Scouten comes to us with a PhD in philosophy from Cambridge University a couple of honorary doctorates in education as a barrister at the ends of court London and a long teaching career he has authored over 40 books a body of work that is impressively interdisciplinary I've not yet had time to read all of these books but I would like to mention one of my favorites entitled death devoted heart sex and the sacred and vogner's Tristan and Isolde this astonishing book through musical and philosophical analysis allowed me to appreciate the beauty and depth of vogner's opera like never before it did so by showing me the possibility of a metaphysical pleasure that one can take in seeing our contingency as individuals and what it would mean to be able to overcome that contingency it also showed me how music can explain the condition of man to himself and how he might be able to embrace that condition if only he were brought up in a different way I expect the doctor students thoughts on architecture will be no less meaningful and penetrating for me at st. John's we don't read much if anything about architecture what comes to mind is only Schopenhauer's discussion of it which we read in the music tutorial Schopenhauer claims that the aim of architecture is to quote elucidate the objectification of the will at the lowest rate of its visibility where it shows itself as the dumb striving of the mass devoid of knowledge and conforming to law perhaps dr. Scouten will in some indirect way challenge that claim what mr. stern will directly speak about as we know from the brief description of his talk is the importance of architecture for a humane education one that will allow us to settle down I find this idea intriguing and wonder if a humane education is for dr. Scruton the same as a liberal education or is it rather than being liberally educated makes it possible for us to treat others humanely for I must admit that I find unsettling the notion that the goal of liberal education is settling down so I'm very excited to hear what he has to say please join me in welcoming Roger Scruton thank you Michael Gerber for that kind introduction I'm very honored to be asked to give this lecture and I'm grateful to the in sterling and to San John's College it's my first visit here and I must say it is the most impressive institution and if it's surprising that it's lasted 50 years it's only because such a thing must arouse intense opposition among the semi educated but nevertheless it's it's obviously going strong and I I wish it another thousand years I've chose to talk about architecture for the reason that Michael has already hinted at that when people study liberal arts syllabus at least as I know it they tend to concentrate on on the written word sometimes they branch out into music they have the example of the quadrivium the meet the medieval curriculum which which emphasized music as part of it but the visual tends to be overlooked and in particular that aspect of the visual which is part of all of our education the way in which we as social social beings try to fit our environment to ourselves and ourselves to our environment and that's what I'm going to be talking about today so I'll begin from a definition of madness the mad person wants a total solution even when especially when there is no problem and if you think about it it's obvious that all the most influential people in our time have been mad Lenin Hitler Stalin Mao just look back at they're not just at what are their deeds but at their writings and you'll find unmistakable elements of paranoia but it's true too in architecture Gropius who founded the Bauhaus look Corbusier especially the architectural guru of the interwar years right down to the starchitects as they're called today like liebe skinned and Richard Rogers and I'll give you an example here the corbusier's plan for Paris there it is there's a solution but the question is what was the problem oh here is the problem normal natural human beings in a beautiful humane environment clearly unacceptable now as you know Lu cabooses plan was never put into action although he put a great deal of pressure on the mayor of Paris to put it into action he was finally able during the war when he was architectural advisor to the Vichy government to impose it on the citizens of Algiers by overruling the the mayor of Algiers but he never got much of it built but what did happen is some while sure in a minute is that a first attempt to putting into practice into practice now this brings me to the topic of humane education what should it be obviously we must learn not to be mad this is the hardest thing because it's this is the most tempting solution to to life a madman doesn't have to communicate with others he communicates only with himself there's no limit to his schemes all he needs is the means to take over the world sometimes people withhold those means but other times or other too often they provide them so a madman so to overcome this madness the first thing to do is that we must understand boundaries there are thing there are boundaries in our in conduct in thought in feeling in relations beyond which we should not go or at which we must ask at least permission to go and humility consists in the knowledge of these boundaries we try to adapt behavior and our way of life to the fabric of the actual and you saw a little bit of that fabric in that with that old boy on his bicycle in Paris and in literature too this is what we learn we learn to sympathize with with other forms of life with other people with other thoughts and we learn not to play God professor Rick's made a very useful distinction yesterday between identifying with someone and sympathizing with them he complained that his students only responded to a work of literature when they could say oh yes I identify with that but of course identifying with something means transgressing the boundary it means going across from the your your realm into the realm of the other and to a certain extent extinguishing him real sympathy means maintaining the boundaries while also recognizing the validity of what's belong beyond them and in literature this means understanding things like the right word the right and the right phrase the right way to express a feeling or to engage with another person and this is shown in in dialogue the great writers are those who can manage dialogue and in architecture it's shown to some extent in the with the with the experience of the right texture producing the texture of the city or the texture of your room and texture of your house and this is the little bit of Paris that did suffer from from local boosie's mad scheme it was put it's not his scheme but it's the same idea Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers managed to get permission from the mayor of Paris who had been forced into this by President Pompidou because this was to be a monument to pimpy pompidou's presidency and a very appropriate one to which is the Sante Pompidou in Paris which is supposed to be a kind of Palace devoted to the Arts this is where you come to see exhibitions to hear excruciatingly modern music and so on and of course it has its defenders but that none of them live in that part of Paris so now this brings me to a little piece of philosophy already ever brand in her excellent talks this afternoon touched on some of these questions in our ordinary reasoning and thinking about things we distinguish means and ends and of course there are problems that we need to solve you know it's not just that madmen have the idea of problems we do try and solve our problems and especially in the realm of architecture we build things for a use as this College was built and so we do make use of instrumental reasoning but we can reason instrumentally reason as to what is the appropriate thing to perform a certain function and so on without creating an entirely instrumentalized world in a world in which there everything has a function of fits together like a machine but nobody could is clear as to why you should bother to set the machine in motion what are you trying to achieve by it now at a certain stage architects worried about this it with the birth of the modern modern architectural materials and modern ways of building and in particular Louis Sullivan the great architect in himself who is his work everybody knows from Chicago he argued that that in architecture function is all-important and that form follows function so you've got to get the function right and then the form will shape itself around the function and be beautiful for that very reason but actually that is the opposite of the truth in my view its function that follows form and I want to give you one two examples about this in a minute but just to make a general philosophical point the means that we need to achieve an end are discovered but what about the end how do you get knowledge of the ends of what you really are trying to achieve this is surely part of what education is supposed to be giving us a sense that some things are worth pursuing other things not a sense that when having achieved those things that are worth pursuing we have arrived at a goal which cast credit not only on us but on the whole process which came which led to this this conclusion and ends are very difficult things to teach that is they're not so much discovered as revealed they're revealed in art they're revealed in religion and they're revealed in our personal lives and in the whole realm of intimacy and love which each of us tries to create for himself but unfortunately when we concentrate purely on function we create a world without ends the purely functionalist City and that is what Rogers and piano celebrating that work that I just showed you this thing it's it's a world in which even art is a machine here is just to illustrate the point it's a I show you the distinction between means and ends in London there are two buildings in the foreground and three crammed together in the background the three in the background are clearly devoted to a function harboring as many office workers in a state as near to suicide as possible for as long as possible they have it the function is clear but there's nothing to them apart from that function and the result of course is total ugliness they they're a blight on the city on the left hand side is the Bank of England built for a function but actually with all kinds of other things going in it on in it now but built in particular with an eye to the street a long colonnade on the street which keeps the atmosphere of the city in place the texture of the city without destroying it on the right is the old Stock Exchange building another classical building neither of these can be demolished because they are obviously national monuments and very beautiful interestingly the stock exchange building no longer harbours the stock exchange there's a rather wonderful restaurant inside offices and other functions and the thing is moving on all the time and it's a very good illustration of the fact that in this case function follows form there is the beautiful form and people try to find functions to fit it that the buildings in the background when their function is ended they will have to be demolished at huge financial and also an environmental cost here is another example this is the transformer station in Islington I'm sorry about the stop sign I couldn't remove that but this was built as an electricity stamp transformer station and a really wonderful piece of architecture Innis in a street fitting into the atmosphere of the street it now contains shops restaurants and offices again people decided to keep it and of course it being there has led huge queue added huge kudos to the businesses inside you have a who flourish partly because of the attractiveness of the building where they are right so that's very obvious and it brings me to the question of aesthetic judgment what is it what is it that we do when we judge these things some as good and some as bad and and try and make choices this is one of the great questions of philosophy to which I have devoted much of my largely futile life are in futile because I'd never be able to persuade people that there is such a thing as aesthetic judgment even though it seems obvious to me but in the 18th century people when people first began to take an interest in this they made a distinction between the beautiful and the sublime they said that there are these there is an an aspect of the human condition which causes us to make these judgments of things and say that we like this we don't like that we want to be with this we don't want to be with that and so on but they weren't all the same kind of judgment sometimes people judge things as beautiful when they are serene and welcoming and comforting sometimes when they're frightened and wild like a an open desert or a storm at sea we can't call them beautiful but we still will find them aesthetically appealing and we call them sublime but and that's probably a perfectly reasonable distinction but there are a lot of other distinctions too we call things dainty elegant or dumpy and and squat you know all sorts of things all sorts of words come to mind when we make these aesthetic judgments which we use to justify our choices and they all in the end come down to a single set of ideas but some things are right and some things are wrong some things fit and some things don't fit and that's obvious from that from the example of London isn't it the buildings in the in the background they don't fit either to each other or to the city the one that buildings in the foot in the foreground do seem to fit and they seem to fit to each other so there's a city right now trying to understand this was something it has been a huge philosophical problem over the years and this is the only bit of philosophy I'll I'll impose on you but the the greatest philosopher of aesthetics was Immanuel Kant who argued that although these government these judgments are in some sense subject if they say they depend upon our responses to things the way we feel about them we are nevertheless compelled to seek agreement we are seat suitors for agreement we want others to share our judgments and when they don't and when they impose their judgments on us without constant consultation we are we can be offended more than offended we might actually want to impose our view upon theirs it's one reason why we have such complicated legislation about zoning and town planning and so on so aesthetic judgments are judgments to be shared we've if we think that this is not true they know that we can all live in our own subjective views it's partly because we're thinking only and some narrow area you know where perhaps we disagree about paintings or about music you like pop music and I like classical and so on and who's gonna settle the argument that's true that in there in certain areas it's very difficult to come to agreement but there are areas in which agreement is absolutely essential and those are the areas where all of us are making judgments it's what I call the aesthetics of everyday life and here's an illustration of it children already make these judgments the human being almost jumps from the womb with an aesthetic agenda and his mother responds to it and he to the mother likewise and here you see in the faces of those two children what Vic and shine would call the natural expression of aesthetic judgment they're trying to get it right they're trying to fit those plates and cups and bowls onto the table so it looks right and that's that's all part of arranging it for a ceremonial occasion and they're arranging it primarily for others you can see the role of the aesthetic judgment is not just in in expressing the individual taste of each of those little girls it's in preparing the whole table for a community and that's one of the things that people tend to forget about aesthetic judgment that it is essentially outward directed towards other people and it's why aesthetic education matters it doesn't not because it matters to you though it does but it because it matters to all of us and what matters here of course is is the way in which we make forms the way in which we compose things will actually get things fitting together the form of ever of the form of things is understood because we can understand the relation between the part and the whole between the the crockery on the table and the shape at the table between the colors of each dish and the colors of its neighbors and so on the part whole idea is absolutely fundamental to our way of arranging things and in everyday life we build in this way towards some kind of please as when we lay a table like those two girls or when we furnish a room and we do this that by creating forms but these forms become apparent only through the the light the shade and moldings this is something I'm going to go onto in a second shadows and moldings create a kind of grammar of form and this this is this grammar irritates things that we find elsewhere in our love of beauty and of art in every area of aesthetic judgment we look for some kind of regularity convention rule guided nests in a Buhl's us to judge and those little girls you know they have a mathematical sense of how things should be arranged on each side of the table and where the object should go and they're putting things together according to a grammar that they've learned partly through being taught and partly instinctively here is an example of a form without grammar this is Edmonton library an architectural masterpiece of recent years well you see fluid forms which have no obvious part-whole relation to each other they are simply wrapped together and dumped in the street this this is a very famous example of a deviant grammar this is Michelangelo Michelangelo staircase in the Laurentian library where he uses all the forms of Baroque architecture or what Mannerist architecture and uses them in completely eccentric ways you will see the the columns that are embedded in the wall standing on consoles as those little rounded things that stick out of the wall as though they didn't need to be held up by anything in particular and the staircase flows all over the place but nevertheless it has an extraordinary atmosphere of both serenity and energy and people used to teach architecture so that so so that this basic relation of parts to whole and part to part was part of the discipline this is what aesthetic education was for architects in the nineteenth century this this drawing comes from a textbook used at the Pratt School in New York which shows obviously components of a task and column and how they how they fit together how the cornice how the architrave fits on the Capitol and so on but drawn in such a way that the student also learns how the light falls on it and where the shadows are cast and part of the education was to learn to draw those shadows and there's hardly an architecture today I think who could actually draw the shadow on a Corinthian capital in the middle of the day this is a this is something requires you know three three months of learning but it is essential to knowing how the parts fit together and and this is one reason why moldings matter this is just a very simple example of a door surround you will see these all over architecture in America right up until about 1950 and you can probably still get from the timber merchants these kind of moldings if you want to put them around the door and it is the right way to put things around a door cause it creates a proper edge and the edge is not created by the wood it's created by the shadows and that's something and those shadows have to be themselves sculpted in this way there they come there they are as it were created by the coming together of parts just so to illustrate they said this is an a gothic molding obviously where you see exactly why how the gothic architects use this in order to articulate their buildings and make them glow with a sort of inner life but that life comes of course from the the lights that falls on them and here's another example a very ordinary example this is a wall that on the left-hand side I'm pointing to which is some in Prague and the wall of the garden of a palace where you see what would otherwise be a huge and rather ugly expanse tamed by molding by the cornice along the top and a string course down the middle and a tiny little lamp sticking out at one place and a little door at another all of this gives it a sense of of being a composition and not just a block and this was carried over the the its familiar to all of you from Manhattan all of you who've been to Manhattan where the architecture that was used to build that city in the 19th century was entirely influenced by what architects learned in school then which was exactly composing things in that way no no it's no serious architect would say that this was done correctly and of course the absurd fire regulations have made it rather hideous in one respect but even so you can learn to block out the fire escapes and still see those those rather gay and and elaborate Corinthian columns holding up irrelevant cornices all over the bottom of Manhattan interesting enough although of course these that these are very rough-and-ready things they are they do illustrate the difference that is made by a bit of aesthetic education the difference being that these buildings are now protected and not only are they protected but they have a different function just about every 10 years they can change use because as I said before a function follows form once you have a beautiful form people fit their life into it and although this form as I say it's very ordinary in many ways there's hardly a person living in Manhattan who wouldn't like to live in one of these this rather contrast this is an example from zaha hadid most famous British architect of Araki origins who who could creates form without that composition of part and part this is obviously never been built designed at a computer and designed really in the spirit of a motorcar it doesn't stand up if it wants to fly it has an unsettled character now if you imagined a whole city built like that you would realize that not only would the architecture be unsettled but there people would be too and here's an example of seriously unsettled architecture which is the MIT building in in in Cambridge Massachusetts built by Frank Gehry which sort of speaks for itself it is it is an extremely interesting building of course nobody can deny that it's interesting it's very eye-catching but the architect is now obviously suffering a very expensive lawsuit because it turns out to be unusable leaks at every joint and so on here is another example from Norman Foster the City Hall in London a kind of great blob of jelly thrown down by a giant child which and which has landed in the middle of the City of London which has carefully is it carefully designed so that nothing could possibly sit next to it it is there to exclude humanity and exclude residents from any space within vicinity what there you are there it is and again of course you can't imagine the function changing it contains civils well civil servants who turn up there every day I assume right now why do we why have we had this sort of imposition of all these extravagant forms and why have we lost that old education in architecture were we right to have that old education should we have held on to it oh and are these new forms really to be preferred on a more appropriate to the times in which we live well one of the arguments that's constantly made in this area is the argument from genius and originality the argument that that in all artistic endeavors originality is necessary it's the cynic were known but without it you're not really engaged in serious artistic activity at all and this means that that only the genius can really take part in it this idea again has its origins in the 18th century was very influential in the philosophy of Kant that art is the realm where where genius is sovereign and without genius somehow you haven't entitled yourself to enter that domain and that might be true that in in many areas genius is required but there's an argument put forward very eloquently by TS Eliot in his famous essay on tradition and the individual talent to the effect that although this is absolutely true that that the that the original talent must be there otherwise the tradition will die so master tradition be there that is it's that that provides the context within which genius can be observed and within which originality can be practiced just doing something that hasn't been done before when it shows no understanding of what has been done before and what has been intended by what have been done before it's not originality it's it's it's merely unpredictability and there's a kind of fake originality that arises when people make no effort either to understand or to fit in to what already exists and simply do something which is their own thing so real originality is founded on respect for tradition and an attempt to adapt to that tradition and to adapt the tradition to yourself and that's the real contrast you see between the Michelangelo staircase I showed you a Norman Foster's blob of jelly and I think this is where it's education really matters aesthetic education is about embracing that tradition understanding it and defining your own efforts in terms of it and if it's fine to make a cult of genius as our ancestors did in the 18th and 19th century but they never intended by that cult to sweep away that the inheritance of the of the arts that they had so much enjoyed on the country they wanted to make an original contribution for that inheritance and you see especially in the art of music in the 19th century the way in which the tonal tradition already in existence for a thousand years was not cast aside but adapted and and taken to its limits now again there's another point to be made which is perhaps more important for the case of architecture which is that it's a mistake anyway to transfer this idea to architecture and the mistake is precisely that architecture is a practical art it has to fill it's there to fulfill functions we all need it to be done and all of us take part in it ok most of you are no good at it but all of you have probably built a cup a garden shed or put up a shelf if all you've all offended you're you're a roommate but by something or other and had to and had to realize that you didn't yet know you know so architecture is just the the largest scale of that ordinary practical activity which you saw exemplified by those two school girls so it's something that we all do and we know that we're not all geniuses so it must be therefore that there is a right way to do it which is accessible to people who are not geniuses and that's the majority of architects and I think this is one reason again why Manhattan looks ok is because not know nobody with an ID with the impression of his own genius got round to touching it until Frank Lloyd Wright came along with the Guggenheim Museum now there are there are geniuses in architecture of course like Michelangelo and in particular favorite of mine borrow Meany yeah Italian Baroque architecture I just show you two of his his cupola from Rome this is the cupola son Carlo Quattro Fontane needed the smallest Church in Rome but in which he's managed to concentrate every single detail with every single liturgical significance into a space about the size of that screen there and here is his great cupola from Santiago de la serpiente but now you see there a very good illustration of why moldings are necessary there's a building with absolutely sharp edges where every geometrical relation is is dramatized but it's only possible isn't it because of the shadows that cling to every parallel line and he knew that of course and that was what he had been taught - here's another example is this original this is some you know a popular diversion in a place where there aren't many and of course that this is like anybody can say you know it's never been done before to put an upside down house and make it work so I've done it and interesting enough you only know this is an upside-down house because it's built according to the classical principles so is to say this is well you know there's an inch it's an interesting paradox that here is a house that although it's a joke it wouldn't have been perceived in the way that the architect wanted if the architect hadn't studied how to do a real house so these examples show I think that the need in architecture in generally the need for rules and patterns without the sense of detail we can't learn how to compose things we compose things by assembling parts but we don't only assemble the parts of the building to make a bill we also learn to fit a building into its setting this is something which is very familiar to people in Santa Fe because of course you have zoning laws and and architectural regulations which are designed to make buildings fit into this landscape and to fit next to each other if possible and you know with the right colors and shapes and Heights and so on so this is where a unique part of the United States where people clearly have perceived the need for this and acted on it but it's not it's not just because it looks nice it's because that's a way of perpetuating the idea of settlement when we settle down in a home of our own it's very rare that we do it on our own and if we did do it always on our own the human race would die out and rightly so so when we settle down we settle down to share a home and if usually to to create new human beings to share it with us too and I think it is that this deep idea of settlement connected with the whole reproductive cycle of the other human species is one that is embodied in our traditional classical and vernacular forms these are there because they're they're part of sharing our environment we build in a in the way that our neighbors would like in a way that our neighbors could fit to in this kind of side-by-side relation but at a certain stage largely under the influence of the madman Corbusier people started thinking in another way in terms of a kind of horizontal horizontal lines which stretch forever and they rose our kind of tyranny of the horizontal it's very easy to build horizontally if you using reinforced concrete and steel girders and so on and this became the norm and here on the left-hand side and not very good picture I'm afraid this is a street in New York there you see fairly normal P of modern rubbish in the horizontal style there isn't it's hardly a vertical line in it or everybody or if there is it doesn't mean anything compared with quite a lot of verticals which harmonize on the right-hand side when I was when my family was in Manchester the family from which I came originally they were working-class family who lived in slums like this this is a Birmingham which at one of those such which has escaped the health and safety regulations and this is still standing there you see a long Terrace of houses on a nice curve entirely composed out of vertical parts and and okay it needs a bit of gentrification but it looks ok but over most of the United Kingdom in a certain stage people try started tearing these things down and replacing them with the horizontal style this is Tower Hamlets in London long streets in the air there are a few sort of vertical struts but basically all the movement is from left to right and here is it is with on the street who so you know people in the street just dust bins and they needless to say this is a great problem estate is that has the highest concentration of crime in all of London and you should contrast it with it the ordinary old-fashioned street like this which is all built side to side but in each house manifests a vertical order of its own there's no that there are completely different heights the windows are at different heights nothing really is the same from at one house to another but as you can see it's a perfectly relaxed and harmonious composition and the proof of it is of course that all the people out in the street enjoying it and I think this is a lesson that people are beginning to learn that you don't build horizontally you build vertically of course you have need the whole anta lines too but you must learn that way of standing one thing or another which is talked sounding one thing on another which is taught by the classical orders that I Ellis trated earlier so some general remarks about settlement we all need to settle down and culture as part of this we want to perpetuate the voices that have already settled the land before us that's one reason why we read great books and we we encounter beauty every day but it's one that we need to learn to bring to our side we need to to use our sense of beauty so that our settlements are indeed communal things things that we share from where we are at home from which we don't particularly want to to move an inner genuine settlement we are making up we're in a position to make a gift of the both of the buildings that we make and our life in those buildings a gift to the stranger as well as to the friend and I think in that way aesthetic education is part of responding to the deep needs of the species especially the need to fit in and the classical vernacular I've really been defending it is not a style it's a grammar it's like tonality and music has a history but it involves reaching out for permanent permanence there were geniuses Palladio McNichol Angelo and so on and they were very important because they made the little parts that the rest of us use whenever we're building our own little garden shed but once the grammar is in place it is learning and transferable and it's tied to no specific use like those Manhattan lofts and I think those lofts and all those ordinary buildings I've been showing you illustrate the priority of aesthetic values once things look right we find the way of putting them to a use it's they've got to look right first of all and then everything else will fit in and that's what makes an adaptable city but of course we human beings you know we don't just compose the things around us in this way we also want to be composed especially when dead I think all of us want to leave this life in a fairly orderly way and be remembered as something it's not a particularly chaotic example of the of human existence that's why you will find that funeral parlors even in this very modern building will tend again to to take on board these these classical principles you know moldings shadows and there is classical lettering and so on okay it's not it exactly as it might have been but it's something that people will be immediately attracted to if they're looking for somewhere to dispose of their bodies here but by contrast is a funeral parlor that failed and you can see exactly why it's not just that puce color of supermarket color for the signs it's also this is composed out of Bauhaus details those Pilate that hold up the the canopy above the door the window shapes the metal framed windows and so on and the flat roof and it's a very interesting example of how to do everything wrong okay so I think I might just yes okay just the final points that so architecture stands up it doesn't flow but we are seeing increasingly the triumph of the gas-station style gas stations were one of the great tragedies for the architectural tradition that we inherited because they are all on the horizontal horizontal canopies and they have to have huge billboards to attract the cars in and so on everything about them is a challenge and I think this a challenge that's never been risen to proportion however we means measuring things and measuring means parts and and all the things that I've shown you that I regard as acceptable are composed rather than molded the building of zaha hadid I showed you is a molded form as was that library from Edmonton much more we notice things like edges and close parallels and corners and the play of light because they are what makes make buildings stand before us and stand in a serene way but we seem to have lost the art of doing that and replaced it with what I call the the kitchen utensil style and I think we can understand a lot of what's happened in modern design if we look back at kitchen utensils here's the kettle that your grandfather had on on the open hearth in her farmhouse right something like this and the first thing you notice about it is that it's composed isn't it composed from from meaningful parts the handle it's been turned the and it's held up on on brackets which have ornamental details again the lid likewise has been turned and has a kind of molded effect with shadows everywhere and so on and it's got a string course around the middle it's a it's like a little than a small-scale version of what a classical architect would produce but it there's a history here at a certain stage this kind of design took over where people wanted a fluidity and a simplicity which seemed to be more in a more in accordance with the lifestyle of the forward-looking American housewife it wasn't granny's kettle this was the the the upwardly mobile mobile life's a wife's kettle and it was soon replaced by this which is the mistress's kettle there's no permanent relationship behind this but nevertheless there's a a total fluidity of form and we at a certain stage there arose the count of the hairdryer this idea that you take completely plastic forms and shape them together fitting them so they they mold into each other without any details at all and all you can do is put silly images on them like that and this seems to be as far as the education of the architect goes these days and I've concluded with an example this is Slough bus station the architect doesn't even have a human name so that this this example of obviously an out of place kitchen appliance is not unusual it's and you'll find it now you've now I've drawn your attention to it you'll be seeing it everywhere and the great question is what do we do with this rubbish it's not it's never going to try and change its use even as a bus station it doesn't work it'll have to be pulled down and thrown away but then the question is what do you throw it into you know the landfill sites are filling up but beyond our capacity to replace them the only thing I think of is a a properly classically designed dustbin so that's that's all I have to say thank you we're gonna take some questions now good evening sir thank you for your talk um it strikes me that we might have diverging views on on some of the elements present tonight and let me quote two things from the traditions that you've mentioned first in eighteenth-century England we have this definition of beauty which is diversity in uniformity and then in can't we have the idea that arts rules are given by nature now I agree with you that there is absolutely no way originality genius can happen without rules that is for certain however must they always be traditions rules and if that's the case is tradition not an enclosed sort of total legal realm to which we adapt a total solution if you will that we would be mad to follow if we follow your definition of madness and as an example I would like to quote two architects 20th century that you've not named which I think illustrate my point very well Gaudi in Barcelona and Frank Lloyd Wright right who's in both cases their works were influenced by nature yet answered to the settled and social nature of humanity as well but questioned the tradition in important ways so knowledge of the tradition is important but it's not sufficient to account for beauty right well it's a very good complex question and what I would say in response obviously you're coming from the philosophical angle the first thing I would say is that rules in architecture you could put it in cancer and say they're given by Nature a better way is to say that they are the byproducts of successful solutions the classical style is not a body of rules laid down a priori it's something it's the if you write the resume a of inherited knowledge so it doesn't rot it doesn't work like a convention and it doesn't constrain like a convention it can be adapted and and pushed in new directions and I think that was is exactly what what was happening at a certain stage Frank Lloyd Wright is a very good example of some of the principles I've been talking about who because he was somebody who who was utterly clear about the need for close parallels and the need for shadows and so on and the need for for forms with which people felt at home and so on it's it's a very eccentric architecture however you have to you can't imagine a city built by Frank Lloyd Wright you can imagine expensive houses for extremely wealthy people in the countryside which is what he was most adept at and I think you know Gaudi of course it's a very interesting example too but he is again someone who's he arose out of the native gothic and and baroque traditions of Spain and did his own thing and it fitted in what what my argument is not that such geniuses should be forbidden or even controlled provided you know there's there's some kind of overall conception of what they're doing but that we should provide an education for people who are not geniuses that is the great difficulty in architecture that most buildings are built by people are not geniuses and can't be entitled to take that kind of that kind of step so and that's where we need a greater respect for these these traditional forms and traditional ways of building I'd haven't got a chairman so so don't blame me if if I if I ignore you it's the general principle that microphones don't work yes thank you thank you doctor scrutiny I enjoyed your lecture quite a lot in your talk you valorize sharp edges and right angles and moldings and such and you you also briefly give a nod to the local pueblo style which which I'm not a local this is my first encounter with the Pueblo style and I'm really quite fascinated with it but but it has a near come your total lack of sharp edges and and right angles and moldings and I wonder if you see or can see a logic or a grammar in in that tradition one which is very different from the classical tradition yes there is and people have tried to maintain it in Santa Fe it's a it's a grammar for a small village really it's not a grammar for a great town and it's everything everything is handed over to the interior or to the windows you know as they articulate exterior of the of the building but it of course it's some it's not it's not that everything has to be done according to the things that I was pointing out I was simply pointing out those things that that have traditionally been taught and which have enabled architects to build in all sorts of places according to whatever the functional need is I'm just hoping to I want you to I would like you to say more about the connection between beauty and settling and specifically I'm wondering if there is any sense in which you think that beauty might be or should be unsettling yeah this is a this is one reason why those 18th century philosophers distinguished the beautiful and the sublime they didn't necessarily put it in quite this that way but they they recognized that there are things which we find intensely moving and important in the way that that beautiful things are which are nevertheless unsettling so they those are the sublime things that as it would point out to us that we're not really at home in the world and like this the great storm at sea the the huge mountain and so on and unlike wise in in art there I think that the there was tragedy as well as as well as the ordinary narrative forms of art and tragedy has essentially disturbing quality so it's absolutely true that our aesthetic sense isn't only devoted to the idea of settling down but what I would say is this that that if we don't settle down nothing else really comes across to us it's only through being settled down that we can be unsettled and that the sense of beauty is a fundamental element in the in the gestures the gestures that are required to settle down it's it's a way in which we adjust the appearances of things so that I and my neighbors can share them you know beauty is all about appearances and appearances really matter if you create appearances which nobody feels comfortable with then they're going to move on so that so that is one of the functions of the sense of beauty in my view the static census is wider than the sense of beauty and the sense of beauty itself depends upon that deeper thing that distinction between right and wrong that we make when assembling appearances for ourselves where are we with the microphone is thank you dr. Crandon this was great tonight I guess the one question I had with and looking at all that all the modern buildings contemporary buildings that you pointed out to us the thing that was most powerful to me in a way was their shapes obviously and the things you were pointing out but but also their monumentality and I'm just wondering whether there's something in a way more egregious about what in in what you're pointing out when the buildings are monumental as opposed to when there's a kind of smallness and and the most recent example of a kind of David versus Goliath battle between two modern buildings was was the MoMA dismantling of that small was the American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan and and needless to say that small museum suddenly had all these supporters even though that was also a very contemporary modern building maybe it had more verticality I don't know but I'm just curious whether there's something about the monumentality versus smallness you all right I didn't say another thing about scale and of course I should have done the gentleman who asked me about the Pueblo style here was obviously referring to the something that makes sense only in this sort of kind of miniature these miniature forms in in a landscape which absorbs them if you put a great concrete block on one of the hills here I imagine that all the residents of Santa Fe would feel exactly like you would like people do like the New Yorkers felt about demolition of that museum the yeah scales again I would say this that scales have to be composed you have to build up to those huge things out of parts which are independently significant this is something you see very beautifully achieved in the Chrysler Building in New York that that's a building which stands very high very high for its time but it stands on the street and it's entirely composed out of meaningful architectural parts which are echoed all the way up the building and also in the interior and it's a as it were a respectable citizen of the street and it's scale becomes horrifying when it has no detail to two illustrative way it's composed when you were showing the pictures of the the verticality and the examples of that especially the row of houses in the slums of London I really it really brought up for me an association with really the uprightness of the human form and I was just wondering if that's something that informs classical style as you understand it and if so can we generalize some kind of aesthetic principles from the human form itself right well that's a good point it goes back to the point that the gentleman raised at the beginning you can generalize in aesthetics but only up to a point only because you know the you can say these principles have shown themselves to be acceptable and these are the solutions that we've adopted and we can adapt them to new areas and so on it doesn't follow there couldn't be a completely different way of building say elsewhere in another climate or with a different kind of people and it's interesting the traditional Japanese architecture is more horizontal than vertical things slide of course they're made of paper and because of the earthquake problem and all the rest completely different problems were being confronted although Japanese temples are organized vertically like other sacred buildings but it's true that that the classical architects that I've been referring to did begin their training by drawing the human figure and it was accepted from the Greeks I'm was inserted by a Vitruvius that the you understand the column by understanding the way that people stand that this is the translation into stone of the of the standing figure and it should have the elasticity and the readiness of the human body and that's something that you do see once you once you get used to it how did we get from there to here in other words following your examples of the Bank of England and the old stock exchange the only thing they have on calm and obviously is money but when did or how did architects morph from artists into commerce into con artists they tricked people into thinking this is pretty good stuff well there's always a motive for faking something if there's money attached to the thing you know going back to the buildings in London those huge blocks of completely unmodulated concrete there was a lot of money involved in building those and if you've got planning permission to put up a building that high would you could walk away for it from it as a millionaire and invest your proceeds in the nice little cottage in the country that you'd always wanted you know and that's how London got destroyed and one of the things that the Prince of Wales has been very concerned with is how to create a new kind of architectural education so that architects don't even propose such things you know so that they come up with a scheme which is designed to fit in with the city to express its its dignity and so on and obviously that is the way forward through education but money gets in the way and if you reward uneducated things you get uneducated buildings you know there's two people in the front here I just wanted to ask how does form follow function when the existing structures change their use what it doesn't that's what I'm trying to say that function follows form once the form is there as in that example I showed you a member of the Islington transformer station the form is there and perfected and people love it and you know the local council said that's got a stay and the functions follow it they are adapted into it so the shops have to be fitted inside that form and the restaurants and so on and they're incredibly popular they thought the shops and the restaurants it's just a nice place to be and we shouldn't be this isn't it's just an example of illustrating of the fact that that that we we adapt our means to our ends which is how it should be and not our ends to our means are you saying that the niceness the appeal is really the form and then the function yeah just seeks an attractive venue and fits itself to it well it doesn't seem to be a fit between form and function in that in that scheme really no it's of course it's not what I am saying is that that what Louis Sullivan said that function follows the form follows function is the opposite of the truth right that you don't get a nice form by simply revealing or following the function as piano and Rogers that pretend they're doing in the central Pompidou you the form is something that you understand completely independently yeah so I'm I'm glad that mr. Krinkie asked that because I'm also confused about why you're saying what you're saying about form and function because it seems to me that the examples of postmodern architecture that you showed us are examples of form completely taking over any thought of function so it becomes all about form and not about function and not about dwelling or not not about being in the building but about being far away from it looking at it whereas you know the examples you pointed to in London the stock exchange and those those seem to me to be the the the beauty of the form comes from a certain deep thinking about the function the original function the deep thinking is actually about form its its thinking about how forms are understood by human beings they're understood in terms of their parts and how those parts fit together the postmodern things that you were referring to don't have proper parts and the form is arbitrary as a result we don't see the thing at the former's as it were growing out of the construction it's simply imposed and those things are of course designed on a computer they're not designed by somebody who's looked at something and drawn it and seen how it would fit into something else that's a that's the whole thing I have in mind the word form maybe it's not a word that I would naturally use but it's there because Louie Sullivan made that remark and I was just trying to say that that remark is the opposite of the truth um mr. Scruton can I ask you to say more about architecture and death or settling down and and that because you I remember you you talked a lot or you dwelled on the the fact that the funeral homes fail or succeed based on based on the the aesthetics of how how people died they don't want to and as and and would be remembered as living a chaotic life and that seems to me some and which is very interesting for me because when I ask people my age or people young people who live in cities and they prefer to even though they prefer to live in cities when they're young they I ask them what are you gonna do when you get older or when you retire they I find most of them saying they want to go live in the country where they where they have have nice homes with the gardens going going back to back to nature that's what I hear them say and I was wondering about this relation between what is it about the latter part of your life the latter part of your life that's close to death and what what could settling down mean for for a person a person about to end one's life or I just want to know more about that okay the funeral funeral funerary architecture is extremely has been extremely important in the history of architecture obviously when most the normal situation of people when they approach death is to become serious and to will some permanent record of themselves and their relatives likewise you don't build a monument out of plastic or you know the monument is there to perpetuate some thing okay you know it's going to decay eventually but many of the architectural paradigms that we have are originated as monuments and likewise as churches or whatever places where the dead are honored or even present so that the death is a very important asset for buildings there's something which which you know if a building can accommodate the dead it's achieved something that all buildings in there are as it were designed for namely permanence and I think of course modern attitudes to death are changing and young people don't think about these things and you know there's an intervening period where people want to go to the country perhaps and settle down and that's a that is perhaps not as healthy as it should be people the Reap one reason why our towns are so disorganized and why they lose their centers where they don't have a a centripetal movement towards the center where real life occurs is because people don't reproduce enough in them you know a town should be full of children as they as they used to be in Italy in my youth you know and their children give sense to the residence of everybody else and when people are buried in that society they're taken out of the town thank you for your lecture I was curious I was curious at one point in the talk you alluded to the fact that when you had the girls arranging the plates properly on the table you alluded to the fact that it might also be natural that this kind of mathematize looking things might be natural but most of your talk was about education and how to maybe rectify something so I'm wondering if you could elaborate on the natural quality of it well yes we have many natural capacities which only become fulfilled when educated you know it's natural in us to learn language but to learn it properly we've got to be educated music likewise is natural to us but it also requires education to come to fruition and yeah I took that example those girls because it's so obvious that they're they don't have yet any aesthetic principles nor have they ever considered these questions they probably don't have the idea of beauty and all that but they do have it the sense of right and wrong how it should be and how it shouldn't be and that's that's that's where we begin and it's also where we end do we gradually take in to that sense you know the sense of the rightness and wrongness all that we want to build in to our shared environment would you please comment on the concept of form following function as a necessity utilizing the Las Vegas Strip as an example which in my view at least listening to your talk is the exact example where form does follow function where it is necessary and where as a result the end result is implosion yes well you won't be surprised to learn that I've devoted quite a bit of my life to avoiding the Las Vegas Strip so I don't really have any authority to talk about it but I'm sure you're right one thing that I was struck by in your talk was your use of a lot of ethical terms to help us think through that as that equalities things like a sense of community of friendship of regard for others of decorum of of dignity of humility and I think it's interesting the ways in which aesthetic categories help us reflect on ethical categories but I I also don't think it's the case that there's a one-to-one relationship between the tooth of things that are aesthetically pleasing are always right good and just but they sometimes are maybe the categories help us think about one another so I I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the ways in which aesthetic categories and in art and architecture around us help us think through ethical issues as well and that those areas of overlap well yes this is um one of the great questions of philosophy what the relation between aesthetic and moral values is you can't get far with exploring the aesthetic value of something without falling into the arena of ethics you're bound to be raising questions about the in the case of architecture about the humanity of the environment that it creates about you you attribute to it qualities of say of restfulness or the opposite it is challenging in some way it's energizing all these all these words automatically come into our mind when you try to explain what it is that you like or dislike about a building and in making those using those words many of the metaphors you're making connections between the building and the rest of your life how you as it were receive the the may burns felt the the the world of life in which in which you live and the same is true of course of literature and music in all the arts when if you want to get beyond the first the first observations about how a poet uses a certain word as to why he should put that word there you're straight away in the middle of of a state of mind which calls upon you to evaluate it is is it is it sincere is it is he is he having himself on etc what to what extent should I or should I not sympathize with this particular presentation of this of the poet's ego so you know I think in every area the aesthetic judgment begins with a sense of how things impact on me how I receive them through the senses or through the the unfolding of a drama and so on but as soon as I reflect on this I recognize that the impact itself has a moral meaning for me sure all right hello related to I guess that question is how and why do aesthetics judgments change and then I guess to follow it up would be when should it well aesthetic aesthetic judgments don't all change if you mean the people's tastes are always changing there are huge movements of taste of course in the history of culture but there are also the permanent monuments which are always given attributed as significance even if that significance isn't quite the same from generation to generation like like the poems of Homer of canned the things that you read in the great books program they're there because they have stood the test of time and and I think we we there are things in our nature which are permanent and are addressed by those works of art they address what is what those aspects of us which couldn't change without everything else changing now of course perhaps everything else could change too maybe the Internet has made everything else change or something you know people come up with all kinds of views like that and in the everyday aesthetics the statics of architecture clothes decoration and so on things change much more quickly because of course they change with the changes in everyday life they are very much on the surface of everyday life and that's why this problem has arisen the problem I have been talking about the problem of how you should educate the architect because we've lived through a period of rapid change under the impulse of forces which are not aesthetic mostly economic or or simply the effect of the madman you know and that so we we that raises the question for the first time it wasn't ever raised before this question of how an architect should be educated it's just obvious you look at the examples and you move on from them thanks so much I I have to say that I when I look at buildings like the ones that you showed the modern architecture I feel kind of like a crazy person myself because I'm like this is terrible why did you let this be built and so now I know I'm not alone I appreciate that a lot so I want it I want to I guess my question is so you showed a lot of classical architecture in Victorian architecture and then some of the examples of like the blobs and the you know kind of horrific jumbles which were like usually considered modern architecture what do you think about like for example the Public Library in Chicago which which is a post postmodern architecture that takes the moldings and and shadows that you talk about it has verticality but then it actually makes a pastiche of those yeah and ironically just to describe this this Public Library has a roof that has moldings that look like seashells but they're enormous they're just like hundreds of feet tall and so it's a pastiche on these like classical moldings so I just wondered just your your aesthetic judgment on kind of that that that uh that branch of postmodern architecture thanks a lot well my gut reaction is that is that facetiousness should never be accepted and it shouldn't be accepted in things which pretend to permanence like public buildings public buildings should not be facetious they should be dignified and especially a library which represents for us everything that's most serious in our inheritance but maybe over the years people will get used to it III think that moment in architectural history when post this took all the classical details and put them in the wrong places I think that was has gone you know it was there partly because people realized architects had realized that modernism was not popular so and people wanted these details so they decided to put these details in but but as it were as a in an abusive way so just to show their contempt for the ordinary person in the street thank you and thank you what you say provokes a kind of line of questioning which begins with a quizzical thought what any genius want to live in or settle in a something that a genius architect had provided for him and the line also fans out if what you say is true what I think it is then it would be very characteristic of a philosopher if he ever built a building or if he described in his works untreated architecture in one case I think of Descartes with the metaphor of flattening everything and replacing it may be the first liqueur musee but then I want to ask you what you think of Icahn Stein the building he did in Vienna right that's really two questions there are there are examples of geniuses who have built houses in which they have lived paying Frank Lloyd Wright was one of them look how busy I'd never managed to live in anything he built nor is anybody else as far as I know Mies van der Rohe are likewise vacant Stein's sister for whom he built that house never managed to live in it it became the Embassy of an Eastern Bloc communist country but actually everything that I've said in this lecture is something that Vic and Stein would have agreed with he didn't like the classical idiom but he was totally of the view that there was such a thing as an architectural education to do with getting things right and fitting things together and getting parallels to to match and creating shadows and so on so he was he was the kind of clean modernist whom a classicist would admire probably but you know his his his building his house in Vienna stands - classical art the architectural tradition as the Tractatus stands - the philosophical tradition was a dead end I I'm over here alright I'd like to revisit the idea of monumentality and the way that you describe say the the blob in London dominates the space around it and whether that might be an attempt to force people to enter the feeling of being somewhere else it might be an attempt to have a difference in illuminating experience but whether that might be an ignorance of the possibility of encountering the other with sensible boundaries in a more congruous City well the explanation of the blob in London is complex it's it was the architect Norman Foster never justifies anything he does he only insists that it should be done and should be noticeable and you know many people like what he does that particular thing I don't know why it was built as it was but it you know it's its appearance speaks for itself I think one should contrast it with the sort of big the large buildings that were you know from the past which stand out and seemed to elbow everything away from them and the great problem that people felt they created what the most important example is some Peter's in Rome or when Madonna had really finished working on well he didn't never finished very got that facade really in place and my clowns have done his dome it was so huge but the city around about it was dwarfed nobody knew quite what to do about it but that they it had to be joined in it had to be somehow brought down and modulated into the into the tonality of the surroundings City so Bernini was asked to build that colonnade is one of the great architectural achievements which totally integrated simply into the city of Rome and would still do so work not for the fact that most Cellini opened the that great street in front of it hi um thank you for your lecture you talk briefly about art being something that reveals the beautiful or the sublime and I guess I'm assuming that we're thinking of architecture as being a type of art that can do that and I'm wondering if we can talk briefly about the relationship between function and beauty then and what role if any the fulfilment of a function plays in the expression of the beautiful and then I guess if functional types of art like architecture would then be fundamentally different than others in their ability to reveal beauty well this is very a complex issue often we find purely functional objects beautiful but usually we do so when their function has been lost you know people collect old tools and often put them up on their wall things that were were made purely for a function and were never regarded as beautiful by the people who made them but you know nevertheless strike they strike us as beautiful because there is as it were the memory of a function in them and that memory is translated into aesthetic values it's as though that the ghosts of people past is still present in the object and that is very characteristic of the aesthetic attitude generally we we see as it were haunting things the the people who can no longer use them and I think so functional objects often acquire a beauty by losing their function doesn't mean that they don't have the beauty when they have the function there are those objects which which are beautiful because they are so functional or whose beauty is so tied up with their function that you couldn't separate them aeroplanes being the obvious example I've struggled for years with my little sketchbooks design a classical airplane it's never worked something about the moldings that gets in the way of the hydrodynamics or the aerodynamics on ya Nietzsche said that the categories of the aesthetic are learned categories and not a priori and that beauty and the sublime were historically learned and that there could be other categories we could learn that were aesthetic judgments that we developed in traditions and in fact he proposed the interesting and the boring as aesthetic categories and the French turned that into the avant-garde and the avant-garde defined the interesting as the new or the different and often that was a rejection or at least a comment on the past forms of beauty and then it became comments on past you attempts to be interesting and most of the buildings you used to illustrate ugliness were ones that the architects intended to be interesting knowingly not beautiful just like your thoughts well you want me to talk about the whole of aesthetics rather than these this particular question that I'm raising it is true that that the values that come or rather than yeah the aesthetic values that we are tempted to articulate indefinitely many and they change from time to time place to place and of course any critic can get away with saying it's interesting and there are lot of things that are interesting to look at crucifixions and so on and which which one would want to say should not be looked at only painted crucifixions but the roman games were a spectacle in which people took a strong visual interest and we nowadays would say that they should not even have occurred and that the interest was was wrong because it was an interest you know you should turn away as soon Paul would say but at the same time we know that the aesthetic frame of mind that frame of mind is which we try to appreciate what a thing is for us in our experience and as it presents itself to us that frame of mind is indispensable to us and when we take up that frame of mind all our other values are active in in both propelling our interest and withholding it you know so and all that nature is saying is that he Nietzsche lives in a world where the things that that are objects of aesthetic interest are rather different you know and he he wants to to emphasize those things that he thought the Greeks emphasized you know the the the cruel aspect of things that the the terrorized terrifying aspects of things that essentially the the sacred sacrifice which would have you know which he would was always in the back of his mind as that as there as the root of the of the aesthetic way of life hang on this somebody goes we can working forever I think yeah it's getting like the last movement of Haydn's farewell symphony anyway yeah so just one more question okay so how many of the problems that are caused by nongenius architecture due to a lack of skill and how many of these problems are due to being sort of forced to channel a grammar of power economic scientific and how would you sort of empower architects to take more control over their work I don't know I would round them up though and terrorize them and by forcing them to sit through this lecture and they wouldn't be the same again thank you okay

Channel: St. John's College

Views: 36,535

Rating: 4.9241195 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: FJrCn-y16Vs

Length: 97min 48sec (5868 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 01 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Love Scruton. Here's a great interview with him: https://sites.google.com/site/raysawhill/home/interviews/roger-scruton