I am profoundly in agreement with Philip Bess’ critique of modernism and hyper modernism, and I am sympathetic to the aspirations of the smaller plan that he outlines. Hence, one or two glosses.
1. Human beings, says Clifford Geertz in a famous image, are animals suspended in webs of significance they themselves have spun. [1] ‘Culture’ is the name for those webs. It is what we make of the world, materially, intellectually and spiritually. These dimensions cannot be separated: the Word is necessarily flesh. In constructing the world materially we interpret it, set values on it. To talk of values is to talk of a culture’s self-understanding, its account of its priorities. The everyday world, the built environment, rituals, symbols, ideals and practices all rest on these values. At the end of his discussion of cultural imperialism John Tomlinson remarks that the failure of modernity is a specifically cultural one, namely the inability to decide what people should value, believe in, and what sense they ought to make of their everyday lives.[2]
This inability has manifold roots, not all of them pathological: how do we articulate shared value commitments in a multi cultural society – especially when we think of religion as a centrally integrating force? We see how the temple in India, the mosque in Muslim parts of the world, the cathedral in regions with a long Christian heritage, provided a clear statement of meaning which most of the population could sign up to. But today, if we seek to honour the commitments of (say) Hindu, Muslim and Christian communities living cheek by jowl we can end up with Disneyland. And Tomlinson is not quite right, because the decision is made for us: what human beings live for, our politicians and developers tell us, is first, to keep the wheels of the global economy turning, so more and more retail and business space, and second to enjoy ourselves – so the proliferation of cafe space and the conversion of every post industrial waterway into a recreational area full of nice restaurants. Human beings, our contemporary western built environment tells us, are pleasure seeking rational utility maximizers, hopefully well heeled.
The vapidity of this account is marked. Come the millennium Britain’s New Labour government had no earthly clue how to mark it symbolically: they put up a Ferris wheel near the seat of local government which Margaret Thatcher had destroyed, and a temporary exhibition centre. Where there is no vision the people perish… One of the crucial things that is missing is any account of the common good which, in medieval Europe, meant partly a shared vision of the human end, and partly an understanding, derived from Scripture and Stoicism, that the earth was a common treasury for all. Without a vision of the common good we cannot build well.
If we are thinking of Christian buildings in this new dispensation (Bess fn1) then my sense is that they will in the first place offer meditative reflection space, anchored not just in the city but in access to the natural world.
2. Classical humanism, I agree, gave us some wonderful places, emerging from a strong ethic of civic virtue and an aesthetic which prioritised human scale. But it emerged from a slave society and its dignitas was always that of an imposed order. ‘All architecture represents the power of its makers and their aspirations to legitimate authority’. Thinking of both the ancient world and medieval Europe I think I would say, ‘their assumption of legitimate authority’. Periclean Athens was some kind of exception (it still depended on slavery) but for both the Hellenistic cities and throughout medieval Europe power meant brute force and big money – first from land rents and then, as the centuries passed, from finance and trade.
Were there exceptions to this? The most beautiful towns I know, in terms of built form, are the market towns of southern France, of Tuscany and Umbria and of parts of England. I don’t think they come out of classical humanism but they did understand the idea of the common good and build accordingly.
Spello, Umbria, Italy
Genolhac, Cevennes, France
Sometimes these towns were in hoc to the local seigneur, but not always, and when they were they increasingly freed themselves. One could not say the power structure was bottom up, but it was diffuse, sometimes vested in councils, and changed over time. Built form instantiated this difference. By and large it consists of narrow streets, which would have been densely packed, opening out at some point to a piazza or square. The purpose of the towns was clear: they served the rural hinterland and so the market place was central. But this was not ‘retail’ but, as well as a place of exchange, a social space, a political space and, usually, a religious space as well. All trades lived alongside one another – butchers, bakers and candle stick makers alongside the wealthier merchants. I don’t want to romanticise: this space was also class divided and it was vulnerable to changing patterns in trade, transport and industrial process. People also fought over these spaces, but at their best they created places where human beings could really feel at home. To my mind (who is this who darkens counsel with words without knowledge?) the buildings which constitute the town, represent the vernacular raised to a higher power, which is to say, built solidly and not jerry built, as so many older buildings were. Shakespeare came from one of these places, made his fortune in the one great city in the land – and then retired there.
Many of the aspirations of the compact city look to these towns. What threatens them is inflated rents and land prices which force the poor out of the centre where they lived for millennia and turns the town centres into elite enclaves.
3. I agree with Philip Bess’ critique of modernism but we have to ask how we got there. From the 5th century BC, getting on for a thousand years, there was classical modernism; then in Europe there was the ‘dark ages’ when, according to Jaques le Goff, people lost the memory of how to build the arch; from the 11thc for four hundred years there were the developments we call collectively ‘gothic’, and then a return to classical humanism; and then a swing back to gothic. The question of modernism, I take it, was – given that we now live in a quite different social, political , economic and technological world, how do we build to respond to that? We know the answer they came up with, and lots of us don’t like it (and it was an answer in literature, music, painting and dance as well, of course). But the question was not wrong. The modernists looked at what the 19thc had done and said – is that the best we can do? Repetition – and not very good repetition at that? Is the priority of classical humanism our lodestar (as Roger Scruton thought, for instance). How do we build beautifully in the neo liberal order, where money is our metaphysic? This was Christopher Alexander’s question. The Pattern Language, I suggest, is analogous to Wittgenstein’s Investigations, a brilliant work book, a goad to thought, which offers us no blueprint. It comes out of a religious, Taoist, vision which also speaks very strongly to a Thomist metaphysic of grace. So what do we do? I am very sympathetic to the small scale vision Philp Bess’ students outline, especially their integration of green space. The only question I have comes from some developments in the UK. Leon Krier’s Poundbury, a development south of the ancient town of Dorchester, has sought to mix classes, integrate light industrial and residential areas, respect human scale, provide a walkable environment but….what has emerged is Toytown.: A melange of different styles (a hall which even quotes Knossos) does duty for the ingrained difference of the old town.
Market square Poundbury. Dorset UK
Sorry to rattle an ancient sabre, but in the old town – form followed function. Dorchester’s function as an agricultural market town is long gone. What remains are the high water mark of that significance – coaching inns which now cater for tourists, places for agricultural exchange which become a theatre, a cinema, a small shopping precinct. But it is that past which marks the town, which makes it not simply a backwater, but a homely and nourishing place to be.
In the UK ‘the need for more homes’ is a drum which all political parties have beaten for more than a century. From the 30s to the 60s what were built were often brutalist charmless estates, many tower blocks, many two storey walk ups. From the 90s onwards developers (and it is now developer, not council, led) increasingly give us Poundbury-lite, houses with no roots in the local area, which derive from a cartoon film, and which do not meet real housing need but line the developers’ pockets (every third house represents 100% profit).
Sherford, South Devon UK.
Derek Walker, in overall charge of the early development of Milton Keynes, a new town built to meet a projected huge population growth, wrote:
‘Meanness of scale has become apparent; the quality of generosity is not there. Dimensions have become tighter; bay windows have disappeared; the paper thinness of current detailing, and the lack of surface modelling have led to an architecture of cosmetics where colour and ultimately blanket landscape form a camouflage…Mass housing requires a Messiah not a Minister to thread us through the eye of the blind needle. APPLICATIONS PLEASE.’[1]
Like Walker, I have no access to the architectural Messiah but ‘God’, the beginning and end of all things, is unceasing gift, ‘grace’,and because this is the case there are echoes and analogies of grace in that which is not God, our world, including in the built environment. A precondition for building those echoes and analogies seems to me to be the emergence of a culture in common; the prioritisation of beauty, justice and order, set within a democratic process. In theological terms this is about the realisation of grace, but it is also about the realisation of the common good because human beings need justice, beauty and order to thrive. This is not an argument for architectural or stylistic uniformity, the adoption of something like Le Corbusier’s modulor. On the contrary, I believe the maintenance of vernaculars is crucial. It is an argument, rather, for much more reflection on just what it is we want to build and what kind of criteria we apply in doing so. Well insulated, weatherproof, durable, certainly, but also buildings which respect human proportion, which seek to be beautiful, and which respect the priority of the common treasury. Where we have buildings which are beautiful, and environments which are just, we have echoes and analogies of grace. We can do this when, somehow or other, we have shouldered Mammon out of the way, or at least redeemed money’s meaning and function. The ecological question is whether we have time to do it.
Tim Gorringe is Emeritus Professor of Theological Studies, University of Exeter; and author of A Theology of the Built Environment.
NOTES:
[1] C.Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, London: Fontana 1993 p.5
[2] J.Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism ,London: Continuum 1991 p.169
[3] Derek Walker The Architecture and Planning of Milton Keynes (London: Architectural Press 1982). 41
I am profoundly in agreement with Philip Bess’ critique of modernism and hyper modernism, and I am sympathetic to the aspirations of the smaller plan that he outlines. Hence, one or two glosses.
1. Human beings, says Clifford Geertz in a famous image, are animals suspended in webs of significance they themselves have spun. [1] ‘Culture’ is the name for those webs. It is what we make of the world, materially, intellectually and spiritually. These dimensions cannot be separated: the Word is necessarily flesh. In constructing the world materially we interpret it, set values on it. To talk of values is to talk of a culture’s self-understanding, its account of its priorities. The everyday world, the built environment, rituals, symbols, ideals and practices all rest on these values. At the end of his discussion of cultural imperialism John Tomlinson remarks that the failure of modernity is a specifically cultural one, namely the inability to decide what people should value, believe in, and what sense they ought to make of their everyday lives.[2]
This inability has manifold roots, not all of them pathological: how do we articulate shared value commitments in a multi cultural society – especially when we think of religion as a centrally integrating force? We see how the temple in India, the mosque in Muslim parts of the world, the cathedral in regions with a long Christian heritage, provided a clear statement of meaning which most of the population could sign up to. But today, if we seek to honour the commitments of (say) Hindu, Muslim and Christian communities living cheek by jowl we can end up with Disneyland. And Tomlinson is not quite right, because the decision is made for us: what human beings live for, our politicians and developers tell us, is first, to keep the wheels of the global economy turning, so more and more retail and business space, and second to enjoy ourselves – so the proliferation of cafe space and the conversion of every post industrial waterway into a recreational area full of nice restaurants. Human beings, our contemporary western built environment tells us, are pleasure seeking rational utility maximizers, hopefully well heeled.
The vapidity of this account is marked. Come the millennium Britain’s New Labour government had no earthly clue how to mark it symbolically: they put up a Ferris wheel near the seat of local government which Margaret Thatcher had destroyed, and a temporary exhibition centre. Where there is no vision the people perish... One of the crucial things that is missing is any account of the common good which, in medieval Europe, meant partly a shared vision of the human end, and partly an understanding, derived from Scripture and Stoicism, that the earth was a common treasury for all. Without a vision of the common good we cannot build well.
If we are thinking of Christian buildings in this new dispensation (Bess fn1) then my sense is that they will in the first place offer meditative reflection space, anchored not just in the city but in access to the natural world.
2. Classical humanism, I agree, gave us some wonderful places, emerging from a strong ethic of civic virtue and an aesthetic which prioritised human scale. But it emerged from a slave society and its dignitas was always that of an imposed order. ‘All architecture represents the power of its makers and their aspirations to legitimate authority’. Thinking of both the ancient world and medieval Europe I think I would say, ‘their assumption of legitimate authority’. Periclean Athens was some kind of exception (it still depended on slavery) but for both the Hellenistic cities and throughout medieval Europe power meant brute force and big money – first from land rents and then, as the centuries passed, from finance and trade.
Were there exceptions to this? The most beautiful towns I know, in terms of built form, are the market towns of southern France, of Tuscany and Umbria and of parts of England. I don’t think they come out of classical humanism but they did understand the idea of the common good and build accordingly.
Spello, Umbria, Italy
Genolhac, Cevennes, France
Sometimes these towns were in hoc to the local seigneur, but not always, and when they were they increasingly freed themselves. One could not say the power structure was bottom up, but it was diffuse, sometimes vested in councils, and changed over time. Built form instantiated this difference. By and large it consists of narrow streets, which would have been densely packed, opening out at some point to a piazza or square. The purpose of the towns was clear: they served the rural hinterland and so the market place was central. But this was not ‘retail’ but, as well as a place of exchange, a social space, a political space and, usually, a religious space as well. All trades lived alongside one another – butchers, bakers and candle stick makers alongside the wealthier merchants. I don’t want to romanticise: this space was also class divided and it was vulnerable to changing patterns in trade, transport and industrial process. People also fought over these spaces, but at their best they created places where human beings could really feel at home. To my mind (who is this who darkens counsel with words without knowledge?) the buildings which constitute the town, represent the vernacular raised to a higher power, which is to say, built solidly and not jerry built, as so many older buildings were. Shakespeare came from one of these places, made his fortune in the one great city in the land – and then retired there.
Many of the aspirations of the compact city look to these towns. What threatens them is inflated rents and land prices which force the poor out of the centre where they lived for millennia and turns the town centres into elite enclaves.
3. I agree with Philip Bess’ critique of modernism but we have to ask how we got there. From the 5th century BC, getting on for a thousand years, there was classical modernism; then in Europe there was the ‘dark ages’ when, according to Jaques le Goff, people lost the memory of how to build the arch; from the 11thc for four hundred years there were the developments we call collectively ‘gothic’, and then a return to classical humanism; and then a swing back to gothic. The question of modernism, I take it, was – given that we now live in a quite different social, political , economic and technological world, how do we build to respond to that? We know the answer they came up with, and lots of us don’t like it (and it was an answer in literature, music, painting and dance as well, of course). But the question was not wrong. The modernists looked at what the 19thc had done and said – is that the best we can do? Repetition – and not very good repetition at that? Is the priority of classical humanism our lodestar (as Roger Scruton thought, for instance). How do we build beautifully in the neo liberal order, where money is our metaphysic? This was Christopher Alexander’s question. The Pattern Language, I suggest, is analogous to Wittgenstein’s Investigations, a brilliant work book, a goad to thought, which offers us no blueprint. It comes out of a religious, Taoist, vision which also speaks very strongly to a Thomist metaphysic of grace. So what do we do? I am very sympathetic to the small scale vision Philp Bess’ students outline, especially their integration of green space. The only question I have comes from some developments in the UK. Leon Krier’s Poundbury, a development south of the ancient town of Dorchester, has sought to mix classes, integrate light industrial and residential areas, respect human scale, provide a walkable environment but....what has emerged is Toytown.: A melange of different styles (a hall which even quotes Knossos) does duty for the ingrained difference of the old town.
Market square Poundbury. Dorset UK
Sorry to rattle an ancient sabre, but in the old town – form followed function. Dorchester’s function as an agricultural market town is long gone. What remains are the high water mark of that significance – coaching inns which now cater for tourists, places for agricultural exchange which become a theatre, a cinema, a small shopping precinct. But it is that past which marks the town, which makes it not simply a backwater, but a homely and nourishing place to be.
In the UK ‘the need for more homes’ is a drum which all political parties have beaten for more than a century. From the 30s to the 60s what were built were often brutalist charmless estates, many tower blocks, many two storey walk ups. From the 90s onwards developers (and it is now developer, not council, led) increasingly give us Poundbury-lite, houses with no roots in the local area, which derive from a cartoon film, and which do not meet real housing need but line the developers’ pockets (every third house represents 100% profit).
Sherford, South Devon UK.
Derek Walker, in overall charge of the early development of Milton Keynes, a new town built to meet a projected huge population growth, wrote:
‘Meanness of scale has become apparent; the quality of generosity is not there. Dimensions have become tighter; bay windows have disappeared; the paper thinness of current detailing, and the lack of surface modelling have led to an architecture of cosmetics where colour and ultimately blanket landscape form a camouflage…Mass housing requires a Messiah not a Minister to thread us through the eye of the blind needle. APPLICATIONS PLEASE.’[1]
Like Walker, I have no access to the architectural Messiah but ‘God’, the beginning and end of all things, is unceasing gift, ‘grace’,and because this is the case there are echoes and analogies of grace in that which is not God, our world, including in the built environment. A precondition for building those echoes and analogies seems to me to be the emergence of a culture in common; the prioritisation of beauty, justice and order, set within a democratic process. In theological terms this is about the realisation of grace, but it is also about the realisation of the common good because human beings need justice, beauty and order to thrive. This is not an argument for architectural or stylistic uniformity, the adoption of something like Le Corbusier’s modulor. On the contrary, I believe the maintenance of vernaculars is crucial. It is an argument, rather, for much more reflection on just what it is we want to build and what kind of criteria we apply in doing so. Well insulated, weatherproof, durable, certainly, but also buildings which respect human proportion, which seek to be beautiful, and which respect the priority of the common treasury. Where we have buildings which are beautiful, and environments which are just, we have echoes and analogies of grace. We can do this when, somehow or other, we have shouldered Mammon out of the way, or at least redeemed money’s meaning and function. The ecological question is whether we have time to do it.
Tim Gorringe is Emeritus Professor of Theological Studies, University of Exeter; and author of A Theology of the Built Environment.
NOTES:
[1] C.Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, London: Fontana 1993 p.5
[2] J.Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism ,London: Continuum 1991 p.169
[3] Derek Walker The Architecture and Planning of Milton Keynes (London: Architectural Press 1982). 41
-->