Response to Architecture
Smooth and Rough. By Adrian Stokes. Illustrated. (Faber. ►cs.) ONE of the pleasures of reading Mr. Stokes's writings on art has always been in the discovery of a poet's sensitivity to the textures and—one might almost say—the "soul" of the various building stones of Italy. Florence must be seen with an adjustment of all the senses by anyone who has read the passage in The Quattro Cento in which he rechristens the pietra serena of the palaces " pietra niorta." In these early books the approach to stone and building was aesthetic, but in his new book he is concerned with the psychological and neurotic states which may control our responses to architecture. Textures—the smooth and the rough—are now taken as symbols, and vary in their symbolism throughout the book. Mr. Stokes is not concerned with the " thing-in-itself " at all, and even readers who will find themselves unable to go all the way with him in his fearless subjectivity must recognise a fine example of that kind of drt criticism which is only too rare today, when the main purpose of art-history is to clear up the muddle of the centuries and discover the facts. In his seventy pages of richly sculptural prose Mr. Stokes gives us no facts, but there is enough thought to have occupied a lesser writer for a book five times its length.
The essay owes something to musical form. The first section is an autobiographical statement of the themes of " home," "loss"
and " rebirth." The second section is a treatment of the themes in terms of psycho:Dialysis, and the third is a recapitulation of the themes in relation to architecture ; in our responses to architecture we may find a rebirth in " the return of the mourned mother in all her calm beauty and magnificence "—this is the main theory of the book. Mr. Stokes's personification of architecture belongs to a tradition going back to the creation of the orders of Greek architecture as abstractions of the human form ; humanistic writers have always enjoyed playing with the idea of this equation. Mr. Stokes takes to its extreme Geoffrey Scott's dictum " that we both transcribe ourselves into terms of architecture and architecture into terms of ourselves." The liberty Scott thus gave himself to emotiona- lise his responses was only taken advantage of in his discussion of the Baroque. Mr. Stokes rightly sees that the apparently calm forms of the best classical architecture do, in fact, have a potency of feeling which can release an emotion in us as intense as that released by any other architectural form. In Art and Science Mr. Stokes has already written brilliantly on the darstellende Geometric of Alberti and Piero della Francesca, which was their means of expressing the emotions of poetry. Here he finds his mother-image magnificently exemplified in the " capacious, sober, firm " facade of Albail's Sant'Andrea at Mantua.
It would not be difficult to criticise this theory as so personal an application to architecture of modern psycho-analytical know- ledge as to be relevapt only to the state of its author's mind. The essay may be read by some as a work of art, full of the flashing intuitions of poetry and demanding poetic licence. But after a second reading a reader may find that he has been forced into a slight readjustment of his conception of architecture ; some drowsy lees in the depths of his unconscious have been touched and his responses to architecture will be permanently affected.
In the last few pages of the essay " rough and smooth " become symbols of the " tool "and the " machine." The machine, he says, has almost destroyed the possibility of an architecture of various planes and textures7-the very things which have given it its maternal character. Mr. Stokes ends tantalisingly by barely stating the proposition that psycho-analytic knowledge is the basis for a new humanism which will embrace both the tool and the machine. Perhaps A,. Stokes intends to write a further essay to explore this theme. In the meantime Smooth and Rough, with its concentrated and potent sentences, finely provides material for the
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