Jaap Dawson
FAITH AND BELIEF IN ARCHITECTURE

In 1926, after studying architecture in Delft for three years, Hans van der Laan left without completing his degree.  A year later he had become a monk.  Did he conclude he was more at home in a world of faith and belief than in a world devoted to scientific enquiry?  No.  Whatever his personal reasons were for exchanging a technical institute for a monastery, Van der Laan detected in Delft an attitude toward architecture which belonged more to belief than to scientific discovery.  What he sought in architecture were intrinsic laws, derived from human perception.  What he found in Delft were apologies for styles, grounded in associations and belief. (1)  Van der Laan’s life illustrates a cultural phenomenon which has received attention only in recent years:  the role which faith and belief play in institutes that train professional architects.

Belief in the spirit of the age

Most students and architects in the Netherlands are familiar with a newspaper version of the history of architecture and styles taught in Delft since the beginning of the twentieth century.  They would have heard of the war between the torchbearers for the Modern Movement and the defenders of styles growing through tradition.  They may have savoured the high drama during lectures in the mid-1980s when well-known architects decried the evils of Post-Modernism.  They would doubtless have read articles about a crisis in architecture, the search for proper design methods, and the belief that scientific analysis would lead to an objectively valuable building.  And none of them could have missed the array of articles which judged the quality of new buildings according to whether or not they embodied the spirit of the age.

The spirit of the age is a religious image, whether Hegel meant it to be or not.  It is a religious image because we relate to it as to an Other.  We don’t control the spirit of the age; rather, it motivates and moulds us.  A crisis in architecture is necessarily a crisis in meaning, in belief, for professional architects.  A war between canonical styles in architecture has all the trappings of a war between Catholics and Protestants, between secular materialists and fundamentalists of other colours, between capitalists and communists.  Even the view that architecture can and should be limited to a systematic analysis which will lead to efficiency, optimal use, and perhaps recycling, embodies an attitude of belief.

Growing numbers of scholars and practising architects have begun to call a spade a spade.  They have demonstrated the role which belief, world view, and ideology have played in institutes which train architects.  Brent Brolen presents us with a host of Modern Movement buildings which ignore the culture, the wishes, and the meaning of the people they were designed for. (2)  “We were blinded by the horrid Germanic concept of the zeitgeist,” recalls Vincent Scully, “whereby ‘our time,’ through some peculiarly and probably magical mechanism of its own, absolutely forbade us to do certain things—and in architecture and urbanism almost everything worth doing.” (3)  David Watkin repeatedly reminds architects and historians that the whole history of architecture is filled with revivals, and that historians such as Pevsner chose to ignore architects who did not build in the Modern style. (4)  By extracting passages from Giedion’s writings, Richard Padovan reveals how the doctrine of the zeitgeist, or spirit of the age, limited the historian’s view and substituted belief for a record of what people actually built. (5)

In Reconstructing Architecture For The Twenty-First Century Anthony Jackson shows how an attitude of belief among professional architects and professors radically changed both the style architects were taught to design in and the role architects assumed toward their clients. (6)  Jackson unmasks the spirit of the age as an ideological tool which architects used to proclaim and to spread their chosen style.  In a world that had purportedly outgrown faith, the architect became the new evangelist and missionary.

The economic and social spirit of the age

A less-intentional devotion to the spirit of the age has influenced architects and builders even more pervasively than obeisance to a single style has done.  The spirit of the age is not only the magical mechanism which Scully described.  The spirit of the age is also the consumer society, life largely reduced to products and efficiency, and the widespread belief that nothing unites a world of disparate individuals except the material facts of life itself.  The crisis in shared meaning has become institutionalized in the lack of conviction that characterizes our world view.  Yeats may well have detected our collective psychology before the rest of us:  “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” (7)

Jonathan Hale is not the only observer of how the economic and social spirit of the age has affected architects, but Hale chooses actual buildings rather than complex theories to illustrate his point.  In The Old Way of Seeing Hale examines a number of houses built in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. (8)  He limits himself to houses built in the same vernacular Georgian style.  By selecting this popular style, Hale draws attention to the majority of buildings which fall outside the boundaries of academic styles; this emphasis enables him to investigate an unconscious change of attitude in architects and builders.  The pictures Hale has collected speak for themselves.  Again and again Hale shows that the parts of the facades in the earlier buildings are all related visually.  By tracing invisible regulating lines on the photographs, Hale demonstrates how windows and doors, cornices and ornament, are linked together in the whole facade.  The newer buildings, we discover along with Hale, merely collect style attributes as signs or symbols.  They fail to relate the various parts to each other.

(Illustration 1     The parts work together to form a whole.)

(Illustration 2     The parts are unrelated.)

What precipated the change?  Hale relates the change to the attitudes—to the collective belief—of developing capitalism.  He hypothesizes that builders and architects began to regard buildings not as analogues of a harmonious world but as objects to be exploited for gain.  The tacitly accepted compositional rules which people had found meaningful for centuries gradually fell by the wayside, Hale concludes, when a new world view captured and directed the builders of a new age.

The divine model

If you conceive of a building as an analogue of a harmonious world, as a microcosm of the order you perceive in the biological world, then you are designing with a divine model.  With this attitude you never regard a building as a mere object:  you experience the building as something more at the same time.  The building becomes a re-presentation of the order you perceive and enjoy in the cosmos.  The world you experience is enchanted.  You dwell not among things; you dwell together with buildings which seem to be living beings like yourself.  Christopher Alexander captures the attitude of building with a divine model when he stands before the buildings which move him deeply.  Alexander speculates that “the works of art which touch us, which evoke great feeling, are works which have consciously and deliberately been created as offerings to God, as pictures of the universe, or of something that lies behind the universe, as pictures of the human soul.” (9)

In Towards a Non-oppressive Environment  Alexander Tzonis traces the radical change from buildings built with a divine model to buildings conceived and built for increasing control and personal gain. (10)  A Dogon village has much in common with a Palladian villa because they are both more than mere shelter:  they are images of our perception of an enchanted and meaningfully-ordered world.  Then Tzonis contrasts these examples with later buildings such as the Panopticon prison and contemporary buildings which are literal embodiments of a design brief calling for efficiency and control.

(Illustration 3     A Dogon building.  The spatial order is analagous to bodily order.)

Where did the divine model go?  What became of the meaning which whole cultures shared with each other?  What happened to the human tendency to make analogues of our buildings?  Are these attitudes mysteriously dead, or do we still employ them?

Encounter with the divine model during designing and building

Virtually all architects know implicitly if not explicitly a personal experience of faith, a moment of regarding a design as an Other rather than a thing, an experience of playing with an analogue.  You open your roll of tracing paper.  It confronts you with apparent emptiness.  You fear you won’t be equal to the task of designing a complex building.  Perhaps you begin by sketching a derivative of your last design.  Perhaps you imitate a building from the most recent issue of a magazine for professional architects.  You feel dissatisfied.  Only when you keep drawing does something appear which you hadn’t designed consciously.  It makes you smile.  It relieves your anxiety.  It stares back at you as an Other.  Is it the result of a rigorous analysis?  Deep in your heart you know better.  You’ve been wrestling with your adversary, whether you saw his face or not.  Your adversary has blessed you with a design you regard as a gift rather than a product of your conscious will.

Virtually all builders know moments of personal faith too.  You look in horror at the detail the inexperienced or doctrinaire architect has drawn for you.  You pick up the building materials and let your hands direct you to a better detail—a detail that works and is beautiful at the same time.  Consciously or not, you have had a dialogue with the knowledge imbedded in your experience.  Your ego alone is not in control.

What happens after your experience of faith?  Often it clashes with the belief you’ve been taught.  You stare in shame at the pitched roof on your tracing paper and condemn it forthwith as not belonging to the spirit of the age.  Round the front door you notice a bit of ornament which you destroy as an atavistic embellishment of your design’s pure space.  You detect a spatial progression which at first made you feel quite at home:  now it makes you wonder whether it’s capable of renewing the profession.

The divine model as source of knowledge

Scientific discoveries beyond the field of architecture may help you trust the design that appeared on your tracing paper.  Your individual experience of faith and discovery could well be a legitimate source of knowledge—not only for yourself, but for other architects and clients too.  How can we gain knowledge of buildings, of our perception of spaces and boundaries and decoration, if we don’t study the buildings themselves?  Studying existing buildings, as Grassi and others remind us, is an invaluable tool.  But faith in the experience we already possess can aid us as well.

Freud was aware of mythical motifs which recurred in the dreams of his clients, but it was Jung who documented countless recurring themes in thousands of dreams.  (11)  He called them archetypes because their structure and content transcended particular cultures, specific eras, and the personal consciousness of the dreamer.  Familiar examples of archetypal motifs especially significant for architects are the mandala—a round or square figure with a clear centre, subdivided by a cross or spokes—and the evidence that children the world over, regardless of their culture, draw houses which resemble each other. (12)

(Illustration 4     Stonehenge.  The order of the mandala is the order of the space.)

The implication for architectural knowledge is not that architects should design buildings that look like children’s drawings, or that they should build three-dimensional mandalas.  The implication for architectural knowledge is that we already possess knowledge of structures which mirror our psychological and biological nature.  You might think of a progression of spaces, a clearly-defined and decorated doorway, a particular pattern of windows in a facade, a design composed of discernible parts.  You might discover that your building’s scale and proportions arise not so much from a particular cultural tradition as from the given limits to human perception.  And if our architecture mirrors the images we carry within us, why should we not trust them, have faith in them as valid and meaningful?  Trusting them would mean, in effect, recovering the divine model of designing and building analogously.  The Other would no longer be a canonical style or the mysterious spirit of the age.  The Other would be the autonomous human psyche.

Architecture of the psyche and architecture of the world

The autonomous psyche cannot be equated with a visible portion of the brain.  The psyche is an ancient name for the soul, a name which depth-psychologists have rejuvenated in order to help them reflect on their empirical observations.  And the maps which depth-psychologists have drawn to help them order and understand their evidence look quite like the plan of a building.  The huge central court belongs to the unconscious, not to the ego, which only gradually emerges from unconsciousness to the perifery of the plan. (13)

(Illustration 5     The ego relates to the centre but does not occupy it.)

The more awareness the developing child acquires, the more territory its ego has conquered from the unconscious.  The spatial configuration corresponds to historical development as well.  Consciousness of individual identity and individual choices is a relatively recent development.  A tribe struggling to survive at a subsistence level cannot afford too much individual deviation from age-old, time-proved patterns.

As societies advance technically, they increase their control over nature.  They claim and control more and more territory.  The similarity with the hypothetical map of the psyche is astonishing:  as consciousness increases, the ego claims more and more territory from the unconscious centre.  The more I become aware of forces and attitudes and charged images which used to rule my behaviour, the more I assume I can control them.

The similarity between the hypothetical map of the psyche and the history of spatial control which Tzonis recounts is equally astonishing.  The ego claims more and more territory which previously belonged to the group in the form of customs, rituals, and meaning which the whole group shared.  And the architect designs buildings more and more from a compulsion to control their inhabitants.  Utility and gain as goals in themselves mirror the growth of the ego.  And as the ego grows larger, it runs the risk of becoming inflated.  Not the unconscious, not the collective wisdom, not the otherness of gods or God are now the centre of its perceived universe:  the ego now fancies itself as the centre.

(Illustration 6     Panopticon.  The prison guards have claimed the centre in order to control the prisoners.)

(Illustration 7     Pavilion in Segura, Basque Country.  J. I. Linazasoro.  The empty centre is the source of the spatial order and the heart of the building.)

Acknowledging the divine model

How can you design and build as an offer to God, to an Other that is not your ego, if your ego considers itself a god?  The psychogical record of human history repeatedly gives us pause:  we are not nearly so much in control of our world as we assume.  Our experience with the empty tracing paper and the shoddy detail remind us that we already co-operate with an Other.  A limited number of architects in the first third of the twentieth century believed they had found this Other in the mystical spirit of the age.  Scientific enquiry can describe the psychology that led to their belief.  Can scientific enquiry lead us to an Other stripped of ideology?

How we design, how we build, how we teach aspiring architects:  they all involve faith and belief.  Faith is trust in an Other, whether trust in the knowledge buried within our tracing paper or trust in our curiosity about what motivates us.  Belief is adherence to a doctrine or a vision or someone else’s experience.  Most architects have experienced both faith and belief.  If faith, separated from belief, can lead not only to an individual design but to knowledge and meaning which other people share as well, then it would be extraordinarily irrational to dismiss it.  Worshipping an age or a style, worshipping whatever appears to be new, lacks all objective value.  The new, like the old, can be either adequate for the human psyche or woefully alienated from it.  And the human psyche, together with the biology of the rest of the world, cannot help being the foundation of an architecture meaningful for human beings.

But can we agree on what the human psyche tells us?  Our encounter with our roll of tracing paper need not lead to designs which mirror the collective layers of the human psyche.  Our tracing paper can present us as well with forms and spatial arrangements and construction spans which appear to be totally new, utterly without precedent in the history of architecture.  We can design a bedroom with a column in the middle, a building in the form of a gigantic wave, a mile-high skyscraper.  We can defend them as new creations, as mirrors of our limitless power to shape our own world without regard for the order present in nature or in the apparent nature of the human psyche.  We can even consider them as Others.  Are they not divine models too?  They are obviously more than shelter alone.  Have we not stolen them from the archetypal depths just as Prometheus stole fire from the gods?

There is a difference between a composition that mirrors the map of the psyche and the order in the biological world, and a composition that, however intruiguing, does not.  It may well be easier to detect the difference if you’re not an architect, if you’re not subject to the beliefs your profession holds dear.  But potential clients may rightly expect their architects to be aware of the difference between scientific discovery and blind belief.  And schools of architecture have both a challenge and an opportunity:  to take their science beyond the boundaries of technology and into the realm of human perception and consciousness.  Creating buildings that mirror the order that appears to exist both outside us and inside us is a distinct path.  Should we follow the path?  The answer seems to depend on both our beliefs and our faith.  Underlying them both is a central question:  Whom or what does the architect ultimately serve?

 

NOTES

1  See Padovan, Richard, Proportion:  Science, Philosophy, Architecture:  London, Spon Press, 2001, pp. 33-39 and Maas, Tom, “Some personal reflections on the reception of Van der Laan’s work in Dutch architecture” in Living and Correspondences:  Vaals, Henry Moore Foundation External Programmes, Abdij Sint Benedictusberg, and the Van der Laan Foundation, 2000, pp. 26-45.

2  Brolin, Brent, The Failure of Modern Architecture:  London, Studio Vista, 1976.

3  Scully, Vincent, “Seaside and New Haven” in Duany, Andres and Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth, Towns and Town-making Principles:  New York, Rizzoli for Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 1991, p. 18.

4  Watkin, David, Morality and Architecture Revisited:  London, Murray, 2001.

5  Padovan, Richard, Dom Hans van der Laan:  Modern Primitive:  Amsterdam, Architectura & Natura Press, 1994, pp. 16-19.

6  Jackson, Anthony, Reconstructing Architecture for the Twenty-first Century:  Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1995.

7  Yeats, William Butler, “The Second Coming” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats:  New York, Macmillan, 1977, pp. 184-185.

8  Hale, Jonathan, The Old Way of Seeing:  Boston, Houghton, 1994.

9  Alexander, Christopher, The Linz Cafe:  New York, Oxford University Press, 1981, p. 69.

10  Tzonis, Alexander, Towards a Non-Oppressive Environment:  Boston, i Press, 197

11  Jung, C. G., The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious:  The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 9, Part 1, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1977.

12  Marc, Olivier, Psychology of the House:  London, Thames and Hudson, 1977.

13  See Edinger, Edward, Ego and Archetype:  New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1972.

ILLUSTRATIONS

1  Hale, Jonathan, The Old Way of Seeing:  Boston, Houghton, 1994, p. 49.

2  Hale, Jonathan, The Old Way of Seeing, p. 50.

3  Tzonis, Alexander and Lefaivre, Liane, Het architectonisch denken en andere architectuurtheoretische studies:  Nijmegen, SUN, 1991, p. 32.

4  Tzonis, Alexander, Het architectonisch denken, p. 56.

5  Stevens, Anthony, On Jung:  London, Routledge, 1990, p. 29.

6  Tzonis, Alexander, Het architectonisch denken, p. 115.

7  J. I. Linazasoro:  Barcelona, Editorial Gustavo Gili, 1989, p. 57.

Published in The Architecture Annual 2002 – 2003, Delft University of Technology, 2004.