ARTS

Architecture

Poetry amid graceless prose

David Watkin refutes criticisms of Quinlan Terry's Downing College Library Ihave been taken to task by Piloti in Pri- vate Eye for praising in The Spectator the new library at Downing College, Cam- bridge (`Forget the will to shock', 11 December). The library was designed by Quinlan Terry to harmonise with the early 19th-century Greek Revival buildings in the college by William Wilkins. Amazingly, Piloti awards the library his 'Hugh Casson Medal for the worst new building of 1993'. This is particularly distressing because, according to long-established rumour, Piloti is none other than my old friend and former Cambridge pupil, Gavin Stamp.

Since, with such tutelage, Dr Stamp was properly brought up, he did not complain in Private Eye that a modern classical build- ing was inherently wrong because it was a 'pastiche', 'falsified history', or was 'not true to the spirit of its age'. But he did crit- icise Terry's library because of the abrupt conjunction between the rich cornice of the Doric portico and the simpler cornice of the flanking elevations; because the first- floor sash windows enter a zone that would have been occupied by the entablature, had that been extended to the flanking eleva- tions; because the pediment is crowned with three 'spindly . . . out of scale' acrote- ria, lacking in its source, the Portico of Augustus in Athens; and because, on one facade, Terry 'has plonked, for no apparent reason', a version of the Choragic Monu- ment of Thrasyllus in Athens.

I am unclear how far all the members of the educated public who form The Specta- tor's readership are familiar with the detailed language of the classical orders, columns, architraves, acroteria, and so on, and how far, therefore, they spend much time worrying about the particular issues raised by Downing. But perhaps they would agree that it is wonderful that Terry has put up a building that allows such a learned debate to be carried on at all, regardless of which side they eventually take.

One of the most lamentable features of modern architecture was that its deliber- ately offensive rejection of the grammar of traditional architectural language, in detail as well as in proportion, removed it from the language of civilised critical debate.

Who could say, for example, in considering some high-rise block, whether a particular run of grey concrete would be better taller or shorter? The return to classical grammar in recent buildings by architects such as Terry, Simpson, Adam, Porphyrios, and Bicknell, has made it possible once more to have a rational discussion about modern architectural design.

For that reason, Piloti's criticisms are to be welcomed as a return to an age of civilised dialogue about the niceties of the classical language which the Modern Movement thought it had abolished for ever. However, Piloti's censure seems, iron- ically, to be rooted in the 18th-century rationalism, encapsulated by Laugier's cel- ebrated Essai sur l'architecture (1753), from which emerged, eventually, the doctrinal rhetoric of the Modern Movement. According to this doctrine, architecture should be judged by the moral criteria of truthfulness: it is, indeed, a substitute reli- gion of which we speak. Thus, because Greek architecture is erroneously seen as a trabeated system of post and lintel con- struction, its elements should not, it is argued, be used decoratively but as an expression of its inner structure.

There are, however, many Greek Revival buildings of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, including at least one by Wilkins himself, in which the portico is differently, or more richly, treated than the building to which it is attached. The criticisms levelled at Downing Library ignore that architec- ture is an art, that it is fiction, not truth, and that, above all, the classical language is poetry not prose.

This is most noticeable in Piloti's reveal- ing complaint that the library facade inspired by the Choragic Monument of Thrasyllus was added 'for no apparent rea- son'. The reason was, of course, that, like all the details of classical architecture, it is a delight to the eye, though it also conve- niently contains a service staircase.

I have just completed a book on the architectural thinking of Sir John Soane who, having designed great buildings such as the Bank of England, then indulged in a thorough course of reading of the rational- ist theory of the 18th-century Enlighten- ment. This was in preparation for the lectures which he delivered as Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy from 1806. Studying the impact of these Enlight- enment doctrines on Soane made clear to me the truth of what I had long felt, that the narrow neo-classical theories of Laugi- er would, if pursued, make classical archi- tecture impossible. For example, seduced by the mechanistic doctrines of the ratio- nalists, Soane went so far as to condemn his own buildings, such as his Princes Street vestibule at the Bank, for using the orders decoratively.

The Gothic Revivalist, Pugin, fell into the same trap when, seeing architecture as coterminous with truth, he criticised St Paul's Cathedral on the grounds that, with an inner and an outer dome separated by a brick cone, Wren had told a lie because 'one half of it was built to conceal the other'.

Piloti, as we noted, criticised Quinlan Terry's pediment for sporting acroteria, free-standing palmette ornaments, which, to my mind, are of a stunningly luxuriant beauty. Piloti implied that these had no business to be there because the portico was 'meant to be modelled on the so-called Portico of Augustus' which lacked them. This dry, academic complaint, worthy of a Blondel, has a conceptual basis which is ultimately hostile to the survival of the clas- sical language. Modernism thought it had killed classicism, or at least reduced it to a collection of labelled exhibits in a museum which you could admire from a distance provided you did not handle them, use them, or make them your own.

Piloti is also worried that I could refer in the same breath to both Quinlan Terry and to the great 19th-century classical architect, C. R. Cockerell. In fact, because of the

Enlightenment myth about Greek architec- ture, Cockerell's own masterpiece, the Branch Bank of England at Liverpool (1844), was criticised in a leading journal in 1849. Here, the Piloti of the day stated that Cockerell 'applies to it the Doric order illogically and quite contrary to its nature, when he introduces it — as he has done as mere decoration in fenestrated fronts, consequently essentially different in their general physiognomy from anything in ancient Greek architecture'. This, he com- plained, is 'architectural rhetoric without architectural logic; for, being attached to the wall, the columns serve no real pur- pose'. But Cockerell was simply following Greek practice. His anonymous critic was evidently unaware of Cockerell's discovery that the interior of the temple of Apollo at Bassae boasted a picturesque colonnade of non-functional half-columns which were simply the rounded terminations of spur walls.

The placing of an ambitious Doric porti- co in carved stone in the middle of modem Cambridge makes a different statement from the one it would have made a century and a half ago. Today, its triumphant poet- ry and dynamism offer a rebuke to the graceless prose, alternately grim and bizarre, of other modern buildings in Cam- bridge. The Fellows of Downing are to be congratulated in the bold stand they have taken: they should read The Spectator, not Private Eye.