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Architectural History

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Architectural History

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Kaye Ann Gonzales

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com
ARCHITECTURAL
HISTORY RETOLD

How much do you know about Greek architecture? Roman?

Gothic? Renaissance? Modernist? Perhaps more important, do
you know how these are connected or how one style evolved to
become another? Or what happened historically during each of
these periods?
Architectural History Retold is your road map for your journey
through architectural history. Offering a fresh take on what the
author calls the ‘Great Enlightenment project’, it traces the grand
narrative of Western architecture in one concise, accessible
volume. Starting in Ancient Greece and leading up to the
present day, Paul Davies’s narrative, written in an
unconventional, engaging style, brings the past back to life,
helping you to think beyond separate components and styles to
recognise ‘the bigger picture’.
The author is an academic and journalist with three decades
of experi ence in introducing students to architectural history.
The book is based on his successful entry-level course, which
has used the same unstuffy approach to break down barriers to
understanding and engagement and inspire generations of
students.

Paul Davies was born on Mersea Island in 1961 and studied at

Bristol University and the Polytechnic of Central London. He has
taught across Britain’s schools of architecture, including the
Architectural Association, for more than twenty-fi ve years. A
regular contributor to the Architectural Review, he is widely
published and is a senior lecturer teaching history and theory of
architecture at London South Bank University.

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“We’re going to buy everybody in the offi ce a copy!”
—Clive Sall, Clive Sall Architecture, London, UK

“Paul Davies’ erudite and (sometimes) misanthropic insights into

archi tectural culture have entertained me for 25 years. His
thinking was a key infl uence on my own as it has been for
countless students who have enjoyed his unique take on the
subject. His scholarship, critical insight, and the ability to place
architectural history into a relevant cultural con text are all
beautifully captured here. Davies shows why architectural
history matters. It is a brilliant introduction to the subject.”
—Sean Griffi ths, Founding Director of FAT and Professor of
Architecture, University of Westminster, London, UK

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ARCHITECTURAL
HISTORY
RETOLD
Paul Davies

Illustrated by Emily Forgot

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First published 2016
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business © 2016 Paul Davies
The right of Paul Davies to be identifi ed as author of this
work has been asserted by him in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only
for identifi cation and explanation without intent to
infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Davies, Paul, 1961–
Architectural history retold / Paul Davies.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Architecture—History. 2. Architecture and
society— History. I. Title.
NA200.D36 2015
720.9—dc23
2015011529
ISBN: 978-1-138-79946-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-79948-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-75595-3 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC

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For Julie
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blank www.ebook3000.com
CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ix Prologue xi

1 Introduction 1 2 Ancient Greece 9 3 Ancient Rome25 4

The Gothic39 5 The Renaissance55 6 The Enlightenment

71 7 The Industrial Revolution87 8 European

Modernism103 9 American Modernism121

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viii Contents

10 Postmodernism139 11 The future155

from our lexicon but is nevertheless something that got people

inter ested in the built environment out of bed every morning with
a mind for something other than estate agency; which of course,
in my more despairing moments, is precisely what I fear
architecture might become – that or some inadvertently
pretentious parlour game.
Furthermore, I tell it as a human story – mine as much as
everybody else’s – for human is what we are and because that’s
what makes his tory alive and neither some dull abstraction nor
an idiotic fairy story. Meanwhile, knowing Mies van der Rohe
kept a stash of Edvard Munch prints under his bed tells us a
great deal. The personal story is always illuminating if you can
get to it, and despite the unfortunately rar efi ed atmosphere of
the great architectural bookshops, architects are not supreme
beings, even if some aspects of our academic industry demand
we kiss the hem and fi gure out their parallel universe over
thousands of pages of diffi cult words.
The book derives from a lecture course given to eager
undergradu ates when they fi rst arrive at a London university to
study architecture in the twenty-fi rst century – a basically
chronological story explained in the context of a culture – but it
should become clear to anybody that there are many crossovers
that belie a straightforward tale and many levels to the notion of
culture and architecture. In general I have placed material where
I think it fi ts best and selected the most entertaining examples.
There are always fl aws to the construction of history, and I
have cho sen almost the autobiographical method, opinionated
in the sense that presently I may be rather down on Ruskin and
up on Morris but with the lurking feeling the situation might
possibly reverse with time. The working title of this volume was
Architecture: The Unauthorised Biography for quite a long time,
until I got fed up with the question as to what might be
unauthorised about it or, for that matter, biographical; hence
Architectural History Retold is better.
The list of what’s left out is scary but serves at least to
educate us as to what others include by comparison. In no
particular order, I remove everything I haven’t yet got much of a
clue about but some that I have: Byzantium, Ottoman and
Moorish architecture, large swathes of the Rococo, Russian
Constructivism, postwar British architecture, Decon
struction, German Expressionism, Italian Futurism and Nordic
Classicism, just for starters. I hardly mention four of the fi ve
architects James Stirling thought were the only great architects
Britain had ever produced: Mackin tosh, Vanbrugh, Archer,
Hawksmoor and Jones. Only one of these makes the fulcrum of
my discussion. I even leave out John Soane, whom Stirling left
on the bench as a substitute. There is certainly no mention of the
Prologue xiii

Catalan monk Antonio Gaudi. This bizarre reasoning I hope will

become clear as the reader progresses.
To make it relevant (a dangerous word), I do one thing that
Pevsner would never have done: I say the past never goes
away, it just mutates. The historical sense is always here even if
you don’t self-consciously cultivate it. Our media continually
re-represent the past to us, and students need mechanisms to
decode what they absorb, to gain a critical perspective, to
understand something approximating a road map. This book is
my attempt to provide such a thing.
I’m sorry there are not more women in our pantheon of fl awed
genius, but that will change. Denise Scott Brown was lovingly
pictured with Robert Venturi in a volume commemorating the
National Gal lery Extension in 1991, but the caption still read
‘Robert Venturi and His Design’. It was pathetic. But I haven’t
gone out of my way to be revisionist, either.
Neither do I dwell on particular race or colonial issues, these
being subsumed in to the larger project. When I was studying in
the mid eighties, it was still the ambition of one of my best friends
to become the fi rst black partner in a major architectural
practice in the UK. At least, thankfully, that’s exactly what he
became.
And the architecture I’m talking about represents a tiny
percentage of the work done by architects. This may not have
been true of Michelan gelo, but these days, however elevated in
reputation, architects work in teams, so when I discuss an
architect as if it is one person, I do it only for convenience.
Looking at some Mies van der Rohe blueprints, a fl ag set used
on site in the construction of the Fellows Building, IIT, Chicago, in
1956 – fragile, light-sensitive dyelines that I unroll only once in a
blue moon – I think not just of Mies but also of the person who
drew them. I’m transported into this unknown person’s world,
what he was looking forward to that week, his Friday night and
what he was dreading – perhaps Mies himself looking over his
shoulder that afternoon.
I have the advantage of not being a specialist, I can’t hide
myself away in the details of eighteenth-century doilies.
Architects are tradition ally generalists and know a little about a
lot of things. So don’t ask an architect to lay a brick wall, but
expect him to know a little about the business of doing it. This is
what makes teaching and writing about architecture so
interesting. Hence a huge number of popular and aca demic
sources form the understanding in this book, and I include the
briefest of bibliographies, rather hoping readers will look up
particular references as they go.
Being such a generalist is not easy, but we fi ght for it.
Lecturing in a university school of architecture, I have seen
deans, schools, faculties and
xiv Prologue

chancellors come and go: planning, civil engineering, urban

policy, design, even special effects have all come and gone as
our faculty partners over the past twenty years.
For myself, I suppose I’m known for the years I enjoyed
lecturing on the subject of Las Vegas. Las Vegas showed me
how things really were, how late-capitalist processes really
worked, and my application to the understanding of the Las
Vegas phenomenon was almost a moral obliga
tion as well as a lot of fun. Of course, as the times changed –
with 9/11 especially, when I gazed at ‘Alison’ dancing to ‘Living
on the Edge’ in a stars-and-stripes bikini in the White Horse, at
around 1 p.m. the day after – I realised the writing was on the
wall and another task was to hand. This book is the
consequence.
So here’s my attempt to explain our history, in not so many
words, to interested listeners, in the hope that more people
might get our subject than presently do.

On the beach. Still the mud lark on Mersea Island, where I

was born. Credit: Julie Cook
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1
INTRODUCTION

There once was a town in eastern Czechoslovakia called

Poruba. I’ve never been there; I read about it in a book one
afternoon. I don’t even know how big the town is, but I can be
confi dent it exists because it’s on Wikipedia, except now it’s in
the Czech Republic. Some of the images on Wikipedia even
correspond to those in the well-illustrated, good, but rather dry
book. It’s dry because it’s an academic book, probably devel
oped from a PhD dissertation. The book is titled Manufacturing a
Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia 1945–60 . See
what I mean? I have to wade through books like this, because
sometimes bells will ring in my head and, well, you know you’ve
got something interesting; you read something quite dull, but
you are busy reinterpreting it. This is what I assume lecturers try
to do all the time, especially if the lecturer’s slot is nine on a
Friday morning and the subject is history; that’s how to get
students out of bed. The primary means to do this is by fi lling
out the context a little. It’s all very well knowing all there is to
know on Czech housing 1945–60, but what happens if you
compare it with what hap pened in St Albans at the same time or,
for that matter, what appeared on yesterday’s news?
One student chirped up that these days Poruba is better
known for its party scene. Quelle surprise! I can picture it
already: it was originally built in an industrial landscape for
industrial purposes; they proudly checked to be sure that there
weren’t any coal seams beneath it before they built it, since it
was at the coal seam that most of the inhabitants worked. Being
part of the USSR meant championing of the worker, so the
Minister for Heavy Industry asked: ‘Don’t you want the miners,
who spend all day
2 Introduction

digging out coal without a ray of sunshine, to have at least

enough sun light in the hours that they have for a little bit of
rest?’
The town was built in the 1950s in the Social Realist style:
monu mental, Neoclassical and grand. The West has dubbed it
‘wedding cake’, a term at once both accurate and snide. There
are grand layouts of bou levards with pilasters and capitals and
reliefs in the stucco and statues of workers; there is even the
rather hopeful idea that, in the architectural transition from
home, courtyard, street, boulevard to eventual countryside, the
greatness of the socialist community is made manifest in
continuity, from fi eld to table. The entrance to Poruba is even
marked by an inhab ited triumphal arch, worthy of the precedents
of Ancient Rome, or at least eighteenth-century St Petersburg.
But this is not the image we have of housing in
Czechoslovakia 1945–65. The image we have is of drab
prefabricated identical blocks of housing with little care for the
sophistication of ideas such as an architec tural language
symbolising a greater socialist community.
So the question is about how we got from the grand
landscape of the former to the drab landscape of the latter, and
the answer is numbers. As the grand socialist enterprise
matured, with its centralised power structure and superstructural
bureaucracy and dedication to plans and targets, it conspired to
turn everything into numbers, and, within it, architecture became
a totally technically orientated task. Not a whiff of sentimental
grandeur could be tolerated. Numbers of units were more
important than what the units were, and there you have one big
lesson for not only archi
tecture but a whole political system. By the end there were no
architects in the architectural offi ces; there were just
technicians. Architects were superfl uous.
But, of course, meanwhile, what was happening in St Albans
or Craw ley or Basildon? Well, you can guess this. Local councils
were building lots of individual little houses with gardens that
looked pretty much the same, with evocations of both roses
around the cottage door and every man’s home as his castle.
I’ve just been listening to Any Questions. I did it by accident,
but it certainly struck me that the contemporary debate in the
UK, such as it is, is also being driven by numbers. There are
quests for so many ‘low-cost’ homes. Will reform of the planning
system save the economy? That is, can we build on that
meadow or another for the good of all? There’s a lot of
squabbling – that’s why we set up the planning system in 1947 in
the fi rst place – because we couldn’t quite bring ourselves to
nationalise land itself but we could nationalise the right to
develop it. It was a start. Now it’s gone back to numbers – or, in
our case, money – where so-called
Introduction 3

PHOTOGRAPH 1 My father (right) as apprentice of the month, Ruston

& Hornsby, Lincoln. 1940.

affordable homes will be built to lower specifi cations than those

that fl oat at market rate; bringing the disturbing image of the
most vulnerable placed in the fl imsiest accommodation.
At my university I’m told that my offi ce space, my library of
books, is valued at £350 per square foot. I don’t think it has
crossed the mind of the administration that perhaps the value of
the books themselves is well above that fi gure or well below or
perhaps that that fi gure cannot easily be calcu
lated at all. Of course, the value of individual books can be
assessed at any one moment, based on rarity perhaps, but, on
a broader scale, how might you compare the value of Plato’s
Republic with that of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix?
The numbers sometimes don’t establish value at all.
You can’t theorise growing fl owers, but you can theorise
creating buildings. You can’t have Marxist or post-Marxist tulips
(for that matter, you can’t have Conservative-thinking tulips
either), but you can have Marxist and post-Marxist buildings;
they would just need some explain
ing. However, most of the language used to describe buildings
these days (I’m thinking of TV programmes such as Grand
Designs) is indiscernible in tone of rapture from what might be
used in Gardeners’ World. Certainly fl owers are things we
consider pretty, and Kevin McCloud continually enjoys space as
‘lovely’, but really we might enquire deeper: ‘Well, just

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4 Introduction

what does he mean?’ Such questions have vexed me ever since

I began my own architectural education.
There are very few architects who regard architecture as a
thing. The modern American architect Louis Kahn was one, and
he sent everybody spinning round in circles as to what exactly
he meant by it as he was trying to defi ne it. Most of us see it as
a result of processes; these are not mysterious but explainable.
This is the route I have taken with this his
tory, that in general people do things because the environment
(physical/ political/social/personal/technological) facilitates them
in doing them. Then comes the magic.
What the story of Poruba illustrates for us is that of cause and
effect, and the cause and effect illustrated there is not the mere
husbandry of fl owers but the whole creation of a world, a
sociopolitical construction, a human idea for humans, or series
of ideas, in consecutive operation for generations of different
humans under variously auspicious circumstances.
Both architecture and cuisine prefi gure any culture’s
destruction. As soon as you’ve got architecture or cuisine, it
could be said you are doomed, and henceforth it’s a struggle, a
struggle to hold it together. Take the aborigines, living in perfect
harmony with their surroundings for thousands of years with
never a thought for the stuff, not so much as a shack but, then
again, a fairly challenging diet. Or the Inuit, stuck in the most
inhospitable of surroundings but daring to take a similar view. It’s
as if they say ‘don’t come anywhere near us’ while chewing
happily on two
year-old whale blubber inside freezing in blocks of ice. If you
want harmony with nature, you do not need architecture, and
you probably don’t need humans either, for civilisation, such as it
is, is the antithesis of nature. If only this were something that
architecture students had drilled into them on their fi rst day
(Architecture 101: Architecture Is Not Nature), it would render
much heartache unnecessary later on. There are of course
other things that should be taught on those fi rst days: a course
in fi rst-order logic for instance and, perhaps, a course on
cookery. That would set the students up just fi ne for the
endurance course ahead. Alas, this is a mere pipe dream. In
reality those students will take their fi rst steps on a long,
arduous and meandering road through one of the softest
subjects in the curriculum via the hardest of possible paths, with
many dead ends, U-turns and false starts. By soft I mean that
architecture is culturally defi ned but scientifi cally and
economically built, so it is inevi tably both a compromise and a
battle of wills at the same time. They will learn a very little about
a lot of things and eventually, after many years and much out of
pocket and slightly out of mind, become a professional Jack of
no trades, but apparently the sexiest one, albeit the worst paid.
Logic might decree you couldn’t have both at the same time.
Introduction 5

Just as we might put food in a restaurant, we build

architecture in to a tradition. T. S. Eliot’s essay ‘The Artist and
Individual Talent’ (1917) makes considerable play on the fact
that the term ‘traditional’ is usually derogatory but maintains that
an artist presenting mere novelty is bereft of the necessary
historical sense to offer something truly valuable. It is true we
live in a world of novelty all around us, but what of our historical
sense? Our technology promotes a certain amnesia as we fl
utter from this to that, but what of our abiding ambitions, the
enduring pursuits in the name of humanity itself?
So this is a strange history book to start from such a premise,
that of the blind leading the blind through what I shall purloin
rather grandly as ‘The Great Enlightenment Project’: two and a
half thousand years or more of catastrophe, terror and general
calamity in the honourable, in the entirely human pursuit of a
better world. It comes of a desire to reaf
fi rm that project, and particularly to those now least able to
understand it – undergraduate architectural students and those
casual observers of interest, whose embattled nerves,
bedazzled with moments, twittered out, can simply no longer
see the wood for the trees.
It is an unashamedly grand canvas; I want to provide the big
picture. But I am no Géricault, who fi rst shaved his head and
then shut himself in his studio (in all revolutionary ardour!) for
seven months to paint The Raft of the Medusa in 1818. I am the
sort of person who would have liked to be gossiping about him
doing it while sitting in the bar round the corner. What I have in
mind is more of a jigsaw, and the fi rst piece has me climb
ing a hill somewhere in the Vosges Mountains of eastern France.
I have climbed this particular hill several times, so I’m very
familiar with it. I have been whisked up it in fog in a Renault 21
on a late Janu ary afternoon by some boy racer, strained up in
sunshine in a Renault 5 packed with university friends; I have
crawled up it in a Citroën loaded down with all of a colleague’s
worldly possessions. I have been up this hill two-up on my Moto
Guzzi 500 with a girlfriend on the back, and I have walked it,
sweated it, perhaps as it should be done, by myself. At the
bottom of the hill is a little town called Ronchamp, and at the
foot of the road – or what used to be track – that leads up from
the main road is a bar-hotel-restaurant called La Pomme d’Or. I
know that well too; I’ve played babyfoot with the local youth
there, I have dined solo amid heads of wild boar on the wall, I
have stayed in one of its bedrooms leaden with Haute-Savoie
rusticity.
Halfway up the hill, and it’s a substantial hill, there is (at least
was) a second hostelry, called Les Acacias. I have stayed there
too, with my friend who was moving to Turin with all his worldly
possessions. It was a bit musty with the ghosts of so many
architectural visitors, a bit haunted.
6 Introduction

Now this was the last time I was there, and I noticed something –
the building, in French chalet style, sported just a few ‘Le
Corbusier’ details in the disposition of some tiny windows
scattered across its porch wall.
Amused, I trudged with my friend up the remaining hill. At the
top used to be a very ordinary café and gift stand. Both were
welcome by the time you’d climbed that bloody hill, and they
also sported odd but endearing little L-C motifs. However, the fi
nal ascent was to the right, where through a wrought-iron gate
and between yew hedges you began to comprehend the
billowing shape that is Le Corbusier’s majestic Ron
champ Chapel (1954).
Now this damn thing is a bit special, and much has been
speculated about it. Why is it this shape? (Nun’s hat? Seashell?
Ship?) Where does it come from? The funny thing is it’s not diffi
cult to explain Ronchamp in quite rational terms. First, there’s
that bloody hill, and in the ’50s it would have been a lot harder to
ascend it with equipment. How powerful was a truck back then?
On the summit lay the remains of the original cha
pel, bombed in the Second World War, this being a bitter area of
confl ict through late 1944. If you are piling up rubble curved
walls are stronger than straight ones and battered walls are
stronger than plumb ones, especially if you are doing so around
a concrete frame. In actuality the swooping south wall of
Ronchamp is hollow, so making this piling up a rhetorical device,
but it’s no less effective for that. Add to this a dash of Le
Corbusier’s more elemental fascinations: the passing of the day,
the weather, the formation of the landscape over time, some
notion of the sacred landscape, his notion of ‘visual acoustics’
(or visual echo), which may or may not be something to do with
punning, and the origins of architectural form itself (see Ancient
Greece), and you may get somewhere.
You can see this information painted by Le Corbusier on the
enamelled doors of the chapel, but not that easily. If you have
read L-C’s ground breaking if rather peculiar book Towards a
New Architecture, you might recall his enthusiasm for Roman
vaulting in the lofty side chapels; mean while, the roof has
something dramatic going on, such as an aircraft wing or a boat,
items he also enthused over. If you’ve tried technical drawing
with a T and set square you will wonder at how exactly he
managed its multiple curvature, since such things are now
commonplace only with computing.
And we haven’t even considered the brief yet, which
demanded both interior and exterior congregations but not at the
same time. Then you will understand why the statue of Mary is
mounted on a pivot in the east wall, to face either way, and why
the east wall embraces the space outside it so vigorously.
Consider all these things and more (I’ve left plenty out) and you
are some way to understanding the whole composition.
Introduction 7

Of course I’ve sat and drawn Ronchamp rather picturesquely,

just like any student does, in crayon white against a blue sky.
Look the thing up on Google Images and you’ll fi nd plenty of
silly sketches of this wonderful object by bemused students
making an absolute hash of understanding it in rational terms.
Perhaps they don’t want to understand it in rational terms; it is
the mystique they are after: the mist of genius.
However, as I descended the staircase at home this morning, I
was relieved that I’d also drawn the handrail detail of the little
staircase that runs up the outside of the north wall, because
that’s what I copied when we refurbished our fl at, and on my
last visit I realised something else that had nothing to do with
mystique.
It is something so obvious and rational that it qualifi es as my
fi rst rev elation in this book: Le Corbusier did not design that
rather ramshackle café, the souvenir stand, or the coach park. It
was not within his concep tion of the object to imagine such
things, and probably not within the conception of the client
either. Swarms of tourists, religious or otherwise, crawling all
over the thing – it just didn’t enter into their psyches in any way.
And, in that sense, Le Corbusier clearly would never have under
stood consumerism, or perhaps he saw it on the horizon, and as
he did so, he decided to kill himself. Now that of course is overly
dramatic conjecture; there were plenty of reasons for L-C to kill
himself in 1965, as we shall fi nd out, and we cannot even be
certain he swam out to sea that morning with the intention of
doing so.
But, whatever the case, fi fty or so years later, Renzo Piano
would be commissioned to provide a big brand-new shiny
visitors’ centre: coach park, gift shop, café and so on. The trucks
cruised up that hill. Materials might come from all over the world.
Just think, everything seemed to have changed while all the
time the humans stay the same. It goes with
out saying that the result was generally considered
disappointing. Perhaps it was the shock of such a magnifi cent
(dare I say human) 20th Century acropolis being shoved so
abruptly into the commerciality of the 21st. Certainly exiting via
the gift shop never felt so conspicuous.

2
ANCIENT GREECE

You might be thinking, what about the pyramids of Ancient

Egypt? What about Black African civilisation? What about
Babylon? The Mayans? The Chinese? Well, there’s a wealth of
archaeology out there, and we can’t say there might not be
many things to learn from these great civilisations, but for now,
let’s leave them for volume two, to consider alongside all the
other stuff I’ve left out.
This is an inherent problem with the grand narrative, leaving
stuff out, starting in the wrong place. It is clear you can shoot a
million holes in this kind of narrative if you have the
determination and an adequate university research grant, plus a
suffi cient belief in history as an artifi cially constructed project
that needs continual readjustment, new inclusions (previously
unforgivably excluded) and so on. However, just walking down
the street, a Western European street, past a museum for
instance, you will be struck with Ancient Greece as a foundation,
just as you might study ‘classics’ in traditional school curricula. It
is unfortunate that these days even the word ‘classics’ carries
connotations of class and privilege, and it’s even tempting to see
this as a conspiracy against the rest of us, for as far as we
should be concerned, understand ing how we got to where we
are today means starting with the Ancient Greeks, around 1000
BC. They represent the beginning, and even then their stories
were more ancient than that. Scholars of the West have
consistently harked back to this period with great enthusiasm, so
we need to understand why.
The Ancient Egyptians represented absolutism, the power of
the one deity over all. That’s not really us. Anyway, as Osbert
Lancaster observed
10 Ancient Greece

in his cartoon volumes of the 1930s and ’40s, the pyramids are a
bit bor ing, very expensive to construct and of little practical use.
Meanwhile, while you have the right, it’s unlikely you worship
Ra. I know of only one modern architect who has studied
Ancient Egypt, the excellent Walter Segal, who drew
archaeological discoveries on site when he was strapped to do
much else within some twentieth-century hiatus, but even that
was the result of a particular hiatus we trace back to the Greeks,
not the Egyptians.
Sixty thousand tourists climb that agonising path every day of
the Athenian summer up to the Acropolis, to the Parthenon.
They are wear ing Benetton outfi ts; at least that’s what it looks
like to me. They, at least, are branded. I am, too. I’m wearing the
sky-blue shirt that television pre senters wear because I’m being
fi lmed talking about it, and sky-blue shirts are recommended for
all TV presenters.
I’m not really supposed to know what I’m talking about. That’s
how contemporary TV works; you have to know enough but not
too much, you need to have perfected some kind of spontaneity
and you need to project effortless enthusiasm. According to my
producer, I possess this magic art in spades. According to our fi
xer, a fi gure who begins to rep
resent in entirety the whole crisis of contemporary Greek culture,
I just get things wrong, and she keeps interrupting for the sake
of authenticity. It’s a bind, making all information transmit like a
cookery programme. You have to remember Le Corbusier spent
six weeks up here trying to work out what was going on and
probably left thinking he was sure, but the latest Classical
scholarship, at least in my cursory glance, seems to veer
towards not being so sure. Across the Classical world there are
too many variables and too many vagaries. The word
‘indeterminate’ crops up a lot.
Now you could say that the Parthenon looks pretty expensive
and pretty useless, too. But it has found many uses – as temple,
treasury, ammo dump and so on. Lord Elgin bought the bits of it
he could ‘rescue’ for the British, just as the Germans and the
French rescued their own bits of ancient Clas
sical remains too, sometimes whole buildings, all in the name of
‘culture’. If the Parthenon weren’t such a miraculous building, a
building they are still reconstructing as if it were some kind of
spaceship – using tita nium fi xings and laser technology (when
in the fi rst place it wasn’t even drawn) – you would think, from a
cursory reading, that the Ancient Greeks were basically ruthless,
bloodthirsty pirates.
We get this impression from the Homeric stories. Homer’s
Iliad is, after all, pretty much a long snuff movie with a treatise
on ethics threaded through the middle. Achilles, the hero, who is
by the way half-god, most curiously sits on the beach by his
ships for most of the fi rst half,
Ancient Greece 11

PHOTOGRAPH 2 Age 19, with my fi rst motorbike, bought during my fi

rst year at university, where for some reason I was
known as ‘Hairy Paul’.

sulking against Agamemnon, who’s on the same side but has

stolen his girl. Agamemnon has been advised ‘by the gods’ to
sack Troy (but even this was a trick to favour the godlike
Achilles). Eventually, with the death of his immediate friend
(somewhat his fault), Achilles decides to go on a rampage of
revenge, eventually chasing his valiant adversary Hector around
the city walls of Troy (this is almost comic, like Tom and Jerry)
and fi nally slaying him. Then there are games afterwards, as if
anybody would have the energy.
In the companion volume, the Odyssey, the hero Odysseus
chooses the pain of mortality over immortality. That says
something about the
12 Ancient Greece

profundities of the human condition the Ancient Greeks manage

to amplify; after all who wouldn’t want to live for ever?
From these books we understand the relation of the Ancient
Greek gods to man. The gods are immortal; man is not. There is
no absolute god; there are many of them, with the master of the
god household being Zeus. They live in real places, Zeus atop
Mount Olympus, for instance, but not quite; let’s say they inhabit
the land, the air and the sea, we decide. I remember getting
very confused about Hercules; he seemed to be all sorts of
things to all sorts of people. Meanwhile it is not a happy family;
the relationships between the gods seems not unlike those
between the characters of our own long-running soap operas
Coronation Street and EastEnders. Humans of course beg for
the gods’ assistance at almost any opportunity by making sacrifi
ces, and we spot signs of godlike activity in the world around us
and in our dreams. An eagle fl ying with a snake, then dropping
it in your path: that’s an omen. We all have bad dreams; imagine
what the Ancients made of them before Freud.
Meantime, as demonstrated by ‘godlike Achilles’, we have
half-gods, mediators between the world of the gods and the
world of humans. Peo ple, in short, stand a chance, and with that
you have the advent of some kind of free will. These guys are
called heroes. With free will come cul pability, responsibility and
regret. The last of these especially gnaws – we are not cats,
dogs or horses – we do not just play to our instincts, we think
about things.
This marks humans out as different from nature. Meanwhile,
the Ancient Greeks further recognised the subtleties of the
human condition in the difference between head and heart.
While the head and the heart are obviously not so separate at
all, we often think with our ‘head’ and feel with our ‘heart’. The
Greeks put the one down to Apollo and the other to Dionysus,
illustrating the constant battle between rationality and instinct,
order and chaos.
Embracing the battle between these two, and the origin of
tragedy itself, is something essential to the understanding of
even twentieth century heroes such as Le Corbusier. When
considering his Plan Voisin (1925) we don’t quite know where to
put ourselves; are we looking at a doomed utopia or an
optimistic plan? Certainly L-C understood there was a necessity
to do things knowing they would be undone and misunder stood
– already knowing their failure while wholly promoting them –
since this was an elemental life force and not something to be
ducked. After all, humanity’s great literature (Shakespeare,
Flaubert, Tolstoy and so on) is suffused with this stuff, suffused
with tragedy.
The curious business of being a half-god might remind us of
our own conception of the superhero. In our own culture,
superheroes appear to
Ancient Greece 13

be multiplying, our cinemas and games consoles are positively

jumping with them, but they also represent this kind of duality –
that Superman is boring old Clark Kent, who can’t get the girl by
day and who turns into a massively attractive man who saves
the world as his alter ego by night.
I fi nd myself watching the sequence where James Bond goes
on the rampage through the streets of St Petersburg in a tank in
the fi lm Golden Eye. Here 007 is ‘godlike’ in Ancient Greek
terms. Miraculous escapes, great acts of heroism, the fi ght
against treachery, the duplicitous behaviour of women, the
sadistic violence and a huge dose of the absurd (it’s all fi cti
tious) make Pierce Brosnan’s chase, his fi erce gaze as he pops
out of that huge tank, intent on the Russian general who’s stolen
his girl in a Russian runabout, no less ridiculous than Achilles’s
climactic and merciless pursuit of Hector around the walls of
Troy. Except of course they put the fi lm sequence at the
beginning of the tale to get our excitement up so that we do not
lose concentration, whereas the Greeks would have had to wait
rather a long time for the action to unfold, since the Homeric
tales took days of performance.
It’s clear we need this stuff; James Bond can cheer us up from
our humdrum lives, remind us of our potential and of the
possibility of excitement, power and luxury. Meanwhile, if we see
through his quests, we read political propaganda. Ian Fleming
was telling us the USSR was bad. We are being told stuff in the
process.
Which brings us to goddesses. We have continually
reinvented our goddesses, too. We have also become them.
Female desirability and power, which you have to read between
the lines in Homer, became fully fl edged living marble with the
arrival of the stars of the silver screen with their nuances, infl
ections, pouts and stares. Roland Barthes described the
phenomenon very well in The Face of Garbo in 1956. Of course,
screen goddesses notoriously felt the effects of their actual
mortality – think of Gloria Swanson as portrayed in Sunset
Boulevard, think of Jayne Mans
fi eld or Marilyn Monroe. Marlene Dietrich, Jean Harlow, Rita
Heyworth, Bette Davis, Elizabeth Taylor all brought their own
brand of dreamy intoxication, their own glinting eye, to our
perception of what a woman was. They could be coquettish, diffi
cult, angry, sultry, deceitful, but all the time they were sexy (and
often lit from above) and all the time a mirror of their Ancient
Greek counterparts.
Perhaps today’s stars are not quite so starlit; as they sparkle
on Twitter for a while and are then mercilessly ‘trolled’. Think of
our porn stars – these screen gods and goddesses perennially fi
nd it diffi cult to cope. The porn star Savannah committed
suicide after just breaking her nose in an accident in her
Corvette. Being a hero or heroine is tough and, what’s more,
fabricated. But when you complain about all this, throw a bit of a
Gwyneth Paltrow
14 Ancient Greece

or a Madonna once you’ve made it; it will inevitably mean a

glance at the other traditions, the Eastern mystics. Maybe they’ll
suit better. Meanwhile, the Iliad is a useful historical document. It
reads like a jazzed-up version of a war memorial for those
already ancient Trojan War campaigns. To help, the text is not
really a text at all but more a lyric poem or song, with many
refrains or phrases that repeat themselves. After all, how else
should you remember the illustrious dead of long ago? Who got
it in the nipple? When? Who was plain sliced up into the brain
through his neck? By whom? It features this very graphic
portrayal out of respect. Many phrases we associate with today
come out of these trau matic descriptions, like ‘bite the dust’
(after all, it is something you might actually do in the situation),
and once Achilles even calls Agamemnon ‘dogface’.
The social structure of the Ancient Greeks is very much one of
tribes, tribes that are away from their homeland plundering
treasure in their long black ships. Their organisation is quite
democratic, as it is with pirates in general. Agamemnon is king,
but he does discuss his plans or at least has to persuade his
army to follow him, and he does consult those around him. But
of course the signs of the gods, such as those that appear in
dreams, are powerful if unreliable and open to interpretation. He
has to employ judgement. How do phenomena occur? Why
does fog descend at an inopportune moment? Why do rivers fl
ood? This site for the work of the gods is an early form of what
we would call psychiatry in advance of our more scientifi c
understanding. It is not surprising Freud dwelt so long and hard
on Greek mythology and made his fi rst major treatise The
Interpretation of Dreams , since the Ancients invented his
subject.
What the culture of the twenty-fi rst-century Western world has
largely forgotten is a basic terror: recrimination, warrior spirit,
plundering, adul tery (but the women are never sneered at),
sheer violence and a web of deception alongside these curious
moral imperatives that, when you read the Iliad, suddenly
characterise Ancient Greece as ‘our’ world. Scholars have
consistently tried to remind us of this, notably Friedrich
Nietzsche. This brings with it the notion that terror might be
somehow intrinsic to civilisation, that life is not a bowl of cherries
and that it might be simply a case of terror in the name of what?
There isn’t much architecture in the Iliad. The eventually
victorious Greeks have their ‘huts’ by their long black ships. All
the major characters seem to have a hut to sleep in and to store
their armour and weapons in, but we don’t know about the
others. In the Odyssey, Odysseus’s mari
tal bed is a tree stump, but he often fi nds himself sleeping on
porches, and there are plenty of doors. In Troy, a few habitable
rooms might be
Ancient Greece 15

strung together, and there are city walls. To make sanctuaries,

religious or otherwise, you need walls. Walls were the
archetypal act of ancient city-making. According to Cedric Price,
we can think of the form of our cities as we might our breakfast
eggs – ancient cities being boiled eggs (hard edged), industrial
fried and postindustrial scrambled (multicentred or diffuse).
However, they would have to be very unusual ancient eggs, for
the layout of the protective wall was utterly dependent on the lay
of the land. Within the walls, aggregations of buildings came and
went. Leonardo Benevelo suggests, in The History of the City,
that domestic life in, say, the Athens of Pericles and Phidias was
marginal because life was largely spent out and about in the
polis, and treasures were dedicated to public rather than private
magnifi cence; also, the use of the grid in the layout of streets
within the walls reinforced civic identity, but of everyday life little
remains.
It would not be until around 500 BC that we see a fl owering of
Ancient Greek culture in artistic terms that we might be able to
understand beyond archaeology and into architecture; even
though you could hardly see Ancient Greek architecture as a
whole as inhabitable, it tends towards a ‘safe’ (as in bank) rather
than the ‘interior’ (as in living space). I have a suspicion that this
is the reason for the comparative lack of success
ful movies depicting the Ancient Greek world, for, compared with
the Roman world (and Romans were very big on the interior),
there seems so little to dramatise apart from fantastical
apparitions in the landscape and general slaughter.
So the story of architecture is that of accretion. The sacrifi ces
had physical sites – they were done in particular places and
related to the immediate environment with presumed meaning.
The laurel tree for instance: ‘Where’s me [ sic] laurels? . . .
Ooooh I’m sitting on ’em!’, quips Kenneth Williams in Carry On
Cleo. The laurel crown was awarded to a victor at the games in
the name of a particular god. ‘Sitting on your laurels’ is a joke
we make at the expense of those we think might be languishing
too long in victory. Of course Williams is literally sitting on them
– that’s what makes his joke – and there were many other gods
with many other associations with particular plants.
So when someone’s wife loses her baby or crops fail and
everybody’s dying – matters largely inexplicable to today’s
devotees of tabloid media but no doubt easily explained by our
scientifi c community – the superstitious Greeks would make an
animal sacrifi ce, and that soon demanded an altar, which was,
in practicality, a kitchen table. You can’t carve up a pig’s head
without a kitchen table, and you can’t dissect an ox liver for
omens without one, either. Meanwhile the analysis was a
16 Ancient Greece

primitive form of medical diagnostic; if you practised it enough

times you’d learn to read the signs. The kitchen table preceded
the operating table. Gradually the trees, the adornment of trees
for memorial, just like fl owers today at sites of murders and
accidents by the roadside, become places of commemoration.
It’s a small step from those ephemeral fl owers to a permanent
memorial made of stone with an altarpiece. Just remem
ber Lady Diana.
Once we have stones, we have to ask where the designs, the
architec tural language – the Doric, the Ionic and the Corinthian
styles – come from. How were they derived? The answer, just
as with the Iliad, is lan guage and song. The origin of language
may be song – it’s what we fi rst did when trying to cheer
ourselves up when we were living in caves, or maybe it started
as a howl or tonal moan of misery or lust or as an
accompaniment to dance – but in giving birth to language,
names for things, great complexities emerged, and eventually
architecture happened because the meaning of things, the
sound of things and the shape of things became interrelated.
Similarly, when we lived in caves, we understood, at least, the
concept of ‘Mother Earth’. Mother Earth was the fountain of
everything. As we conquered and thrived, our range of gods
expanded, and as we became more confi dent, our vocabulary
enlarged.
The easiest way to explain this concept (called punning or
troping) is via a straightforward example of a very complicated
thing like a Corin thian column. Around the base of that column
runs a band of stone. It is given the same name as that of the
rope used to drag an ox to slaughter at an altar and is the same
thickness and shape. It may or may not be a bundle of a
collection of upright spears that moulds the fl uting of the
column. It takes great scholarship to get to the exact meaning of
it all, but meaning there is, since the same can be said of all the
complex curves and fi gurations that go to make up the whole
Corinthian column; they relate to myriad things, and, once they
are established, all that has to be done is to decide how big the
column will be and where to put it. Indeed, this is one of the
most convenient things about Classical architecture, for while it
is not exactly functional by our understanding of the term, it does
come as a ‘ready-made’, just like humans do. They can go
anywhere, so where?
Despite the clear sophistication, we do not get much technical
experi mentation. This could irritate modern minds. The Greeks
stuck to their elaborated but straightforward post-and-beam
structures (trabeation) where, if we look at the plans, all the
potential spans for stonework are the same. They didn’t seem
too bothered about innovation at all. This conceptual stability
remains intriguing. The physical stability does rely on something
still relevant to almost any construction today, the datum, for
Ancient Greece 17

to build a temple, wherever they wanted to put it, the Greeks fi

rst levelled the ground with a stone plinth.
There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that when the Ancients
of Delphi deemed it the centre of the Ancient Greek world and
decided to mark the exact spot, they knew exactly what to put
there – a round temple struc ture called a tholos – but it took
them three hundred years to work out where to put it because
the priests and oracles had to work out where the exact centre
of the world was. This is complicated by the fact that if you go to
Delphi, the attractive tholos structure is not actually the centre of
the ancient world; that is now deemed to be a large egg-like rock
further up the processional route to the Temple of Apollo, and
even that is fake, for it was replaced by a copy so that unruly
crowds of schoolchildren could climb over it without causing
damage. The real centre of the world is now in a museum.
However, given all this, it is hardly a surprise that the centre of
the world, birth of the world perhaps, should be a rock shaped
like an egg. After all, what came fi rst, the chicken or the egg?
Delphi is a good place to understand the purpose and placing
of Ancient Greek buildings. First, we must understand it as a
place of pil grimage and procession, at the summit the theatre
and the games arena, with the Temple of Apollo housing its
famous oracle slightly below. At fi rst I understood that she sat in
a pit underneath it, but now I understand she sat on a tripod
above her visitors. In actuality the oracle performed only one
day a week in the summer months, and she sat high on a tripod
in her sanctuary as ethylene, being lighter than air, rose to the
ceiling. Ethylene was the natural product of earthquake fi ssures
below, and mildly hallucinogenic, and it was bottled up for a
single day’s high times. The Greeks understood they needed
this kind of irrationality to explain the unexplainable, rather like
’60s hippies taking LSD. We still believe in the mind-expanding
drugs, of course, that we might gain some great insight if we
escape our humdrum world, even if usually our enthusiasm is
misplaced. However, all in all, this explains why the oracle was
very popular for a very long time.
And the oracle was as much an excuse to meet politically as
to receive divine advice; it might be compared to a twenty-fi
rst-century Davos. One imagines the conversations:
‘You going up this year?’
‘Nah, did her last year, but, as an aside, what do you think
about . . . [very important political issue]?’
In fact, what with all the tourism (before it was tourism),
oracle, games, festivals and conventions, it’s easy to see Delphi
as a kind of ancient Las Vegas.
18 Ancient Greece

Leading up to the temple is the processional route populated

by indi vidual shrines, storehouses or banks, depending on how
you look at it, where offerings to the gods, tributes – for instance
in thanks for being smiled on to win a race – were deposited.
The most famous of these is the famous charioteer now in the
Delphi museum. Meanwhile, the proces sion, the ritual, is
marvellously depicted in a relief known as The Goddess of
Victory from around 408 BC. I prefer not to think of her as a
goddess at all, because the subject is doing something so
ordinary. Projecting this image of a lady pausing to adjust her
sandal, reaching down past her fl ow ing robes to remove that
irritating, perhaps painful bit of grit, transports a lecture room full
of students back more than two thousand years. You pause and
draw breath; they are stunned, it’s a kind of magic, the empathy
we suddenly share with this woman and her world.
The buildings along the processional route were simple
rooms; we call them megarons. They could be strung along in a
straight line with a line of columns in front; then you would have
a stoa. You could put columns on the front or back or both or
around the whole thing if you wanted the form of a temple.
Ancient Greek architecture is all variations on a theme.
The main instance of complication in the planning of individual
buildings comes when you encounter the Erectheion on the
Athenian Acropolis. Here several rooms seem to have been
joined together in a far more complex way, probably
acknowledging a complex site with several religious spots all
alarmingly close together. For instance, this building has to
acknowledge a fall in the land across its width, and since the
ground is sacred, that’s what it has to do – it has to step up and
down. There is no plinth! It is also ‘fronted’ by a small portico
featuring caryatids – columns that are female fi gures – the
meaning of which has fascinated scholars for centuries.
The seriousness that the Ancient Greeks brought to the
business of siting their buildings has had profound
consequences for all of us. Since the landscape was inhabited
by the gods, offerings to them or eulogies about them had to be
made in the right place; after all, pleasing them was essential,
and the temple was our human offering to them. What at fi rst
seems rather quirky site planning is hence the result of much con
templation. What a thing looks like in the landscape, how it fi ts
into it, is crucial. Delphi, fi rst and foremost, is an incredibly
dramatic landscape. One is tempted to wonder, even today, that
they made the right choice despite the physical impracticality of
the steep slopes. The Acropolis in Athens must have looked like
a sacred place even before you thought to put a temple on it.
The relationship can be seen right from the start in Crete,
where the Minoans appeared to situate their settlements in
response to particular
Ancient Greece 19

geological forms; notably, in the distance there is usually a

mountain with two peaks with a valley in the middle and a softly
rounded hill. The symbolism seems obvious if we remember
Mother Earth, and we must presume that such natural
occurrences, along with other practi
cal considerations, of course, would precipitate occupation and
inform ‘design’.
The distinguished American academic Vincent Scully has
even gone so far as to note the implied axiality in the famous
fresco of the girl pre paring to vault over the length of a bull
(grabbing the bull by the horns) at Knossos. I suppose bulls do
charge (when they get going, and with some forbidding on our
part) in a straight line, and they come from somewhere. So if
you were planning a space in which to perform this spectacle, it
would likely be long and relatively thin in plan, just as we need
for its present-day derivative, vaulting the ‘horse’ in gymnastics.
Voilà, the axial plan!
However, as the civilisation developed with the Dorian
invasion, we see the human race asserting itself in more
complex relation to nature. If you visit the ancient theatre at
Epidaurus, you will note that extraordi nary way such a mass of
raked semicircular stonework sits neatly in the undulations of
the surrounding hills. You will also note how precise it is, wonder
at the perfect acoustics and marvel at the view. Meanwhile, visit
Olympia and you will be relieved to see the Temple of Zeus orien
tated almost exactly east/west (as you would expect refl ecting
sunrise and sunset) with all the other surrounding buildings set
at slightly jaunty angles for whatever reasons.
Later, we shall soon see that this issue of ‘context’ is a very
thorny and continually problematic one for architects, and how
we view context changes with the tools we have at our disposal.
Looking at a building via drawn plans and sections will bring a
different outlook than if you don’t have them, and it seems likely
the Ancient Greeks didn’t have them at all. It seems likely that
they talked their buildings up as much as anything, and they
must have talked for a very long time.
The post-Hellenic, late Ancient Greek culture, roughly two
centuries BC, threw up one of the most dramatic altarpieces of
the ancient world. By now, the ‘kitchen table’ analogy becomes
irrelevant. This building, well, half of it, now languishes in Berlin
in a museum specially cut to size, where it was fi rst taken by
the no-doubt triumphant German archaeolo
gist Karl Humann after its discovery in Asia Minor – although the
Soviets shifted it as war plunder to Leningrad after the Second
World War. It is the famous Pergamon Altar.
The building itself is in plan the shape of an ‘H’ with dramatic
steps up between the side wings to the altar itself. Around the
base is an incredible
20 Ancient Greece

frieze depicting war between the Olympian gods and the Giants.
Some of them are climbing or falling down the stone steps
themselves, such is the virtuosity of the sculptor’s work. The tale
itself is as old as the hills, as old as the Flood and as relevant
today as any newspaper.
But it is a diffi cult tale, and the connotations have had vast
conse quences. While in Greek mythology it represents one
thing, the fi ght of the Titans against the Greek gods, in
Judaeo-Christian history it translates to an antipathy between
the Jews and the Germanic tribes. Tacitus, the Roman scholar,
seems rather the culprit, explaining that while the Jews escaped
the Flood on the Ark, those who remained and survived played in
their own excrement – which, of course, we might consider as
fertiliser – and hence became giants, and presumably these
‘giants’ waded through the water to survive. The mythology of
the ‘giant’ northern tribes con tinues among reactionary circles
even today. When an ultra right-wing gunman shoots eighty-fi ve
kids on their holiday island in Norway, he proclaims himself the
inheritor of this tradition, a kind of supreme being, and in doing
this he shares the Nazi view.
Of course there are some conspicuous examples of how this
thread of history is periodically subverted and misread. In the
twentieth century, Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler’s architect, designed
and modelled a colossal Germania – the visualisation of the
thousand-year Reich modelled on sacrifi ce and heroism, which
within ten years proved catastrophic to the German people.
‘Blood and soil’ runs uncannily ancient, but surely it was twaddle
by the time of the Third Reich. The Neoclassical architecture
here, tainted with the horrors of the death camps and tyranny,
acquires strongly negative associations, and it is interesting that,
having very few apologists, Albert Speer is seen as a rather vain
and foolish architect who was actually just a brilliant organiser.
But Speer’s role still haunts the contemporary architect’s
conscience. Given he was in charge of slave labour on a
massive scale it is now charitable to believe his Nuremberg
testimony, that he was responsible but not guilty, as anything but
elastic with the truth. This may not have been the impres
sion we got watching the original TV series The World at War in
the early ’70s. Since his death, in 1981, the ‘good Nazi’ has
been tarnished by the build-up of facts. But even this has not
stopped the Classical cause in terms of architecture. The
Postmodern period saw renewed interest in Neoclassi
cism as a reaction against the perceived evils of Modernism and
disowned the Nazi connotation to the point where Leon Krier
could write a fresh appre ciation with Albert Speer: Architecture
1932–1942, fi rst published in 1985.
For, on the other hand, the rather restrained Neoclassical
architec ture of the Scandinavian countries of roughly the same
period has very much been seen by the British as symbolic of
our continuing democratic
Ancient Greece 21

tradition, symbolic of a kind of gentleness that brings with it

images of afternoon tea and scones and the self-deprecation of
Sergeant Wilson against the pompousness of Captain
Mainwaring. Many an English town hall from the fi rst part of the
century evidences a strong enthusiasm for a pared-down
Scandinavian classicism; attitudes were upended by the social
and technological upheavals of the 1960s.
So what makes Ancient Greek architecture so enduring?
There can hardly have been a year since that hasn’t seen a
Neoclassical building. I suppose the fi rst thing is that we marvel
at the precision and the delicacy of Ancient Greek art in general.
A relief of a woman pausing on a proces
sional route to adjust her sandal, maybe getting rid of that
irritating bit of grit, is extremely touching. We had never made
art as real as that before, nothing as subtle or humane. This is
the art of ourselves and of our feel ings as much as it is to do
with rituals and the gods.
There also seem to be technical matters that endure;
Pythagoras decoded proportional relationships rather like those
harmonies of the musical scales. The musical scales may be
ignored – you can make con temporary atonal music – but in the
fact is that it is termed atonal; it is defi ned with respect to that
which is considered tonal. In Ancient Greece the lyre was a
symbol of political harmony as well as musical.
The third reason must have something to do with the taboos,
stories and ethics, not always pleasant but nonetheless
powerful, that come out of this world. Our cultures have many
strange customs, some of which turn out to be very sensible
(such as realising incest as a bad idea) and some of which
might appear rather arbitrary (such as not eating pork). These
taboos to some extent differentiate one culture from another,
and because the Ancient Greeks spelt so much out to us,
bringing us democracy, philosophy, ethics, mathematics and so
on, we start here because they worked these codes out.
Moreover, they oversaw the birth of our conception of tragedy.
We could have started without it, we could, like the Chinese,
have started with a very non-Dorian notion of transience and fl
ow, of Zen, but we didn’t; we fi ght for things in the name of
things and die trying.
So back to the Parthenon, back to its virtuosity. If all of its
columns were projected up into the sky, they would meet at a
height of thirty miles. Each of the columns is slightly tapered out
in the middle to cor rect an optical illusion that, if they were
plumb straight, would have them looking thin in the middle. In
the British Museum, itself a Neoclassical symbol, this time of
English imperialistic pomp by Smirke, I can scruti nise up close
the entablatures ‘rescued’ by Lord Elgin in their specially
designed room. I notice in particular how the Ancient Greek
sculptor dealt with the diffi cult bits, the acute corner spaces as
the roofl ine hits the horizontal. In one he places a horse
straining to drag the sun up and in the
22 Ancient Greece

other opposite corner, the visibly tired beast dragging it down

again. Well, something had to explain what brought the sun up
each day and made it fall at night, and it is a moving and poetic
sight.
Meanwhile, in front of me on this desk is propped a plan of the
site at Olympia, origin of our Olympics, where all the tribes met
to suspend confl ict and play out the games. I note an
extraordinary arrangement, this time with the entablature(s) of
the Temple of Zeus. It’s a simple obser
vation but a satisfying one. The entablature facing west, towards
the accommodations such as they were – the Olympic village, if
you like – shows a scene from a battle between the Lapiths and
the Centaurs; it’s the scene of a wedding going badly wrong.
The Centaurs have got drunk, and they are busy molesting the
Lapith women. The message? Don’t get too drunk at weddings,
or don’t invite drunks to weddings! The second entablature,
facing east, the arena, has a different but equally beguiling
message: don’t cheat!

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3
ANCIENT ROME

While Alexander the Great got as far as India and Hellenistic art
reached the heights of expression and technique, political union
eluded the Ancient Greeks. While Alexander was marching east,
it was Rome that would step by step engulf the Mediterranean
tribes from the west, impos
ing the state – one state – with worse art but better facilities.
The state of Imperial Rome, in the popular imagination, is
organised in triumvirate (as well as periodically by a triumvirate).
We are vividly aware of their organisation, arches, orgies and
plumbing, also of caesars, centurions and straight roads, and,
third, of bloodthirsty theatre. Each of these to some extent
facilitates the others, and they work almost seam lessly together.
However, most important, states need infrastructure, and we
have historically been less concerned with the merits of the
individual buildings or palaces of Ancient Rome, even at their
most grandiose, than with an idea of Ancient Rome as a whole,
as a system. At the hub of the system we have what we begin to
read as the city – the ‘eternal city’ in the case of Rome itself,
which grew from little more than a village as a result of the
expansionist mettle of its progeny.
Although we have an author of sorts for the Parthenon in
Iktinos, we believe the Ancient Greeks were hardly specialists
when it came to building, painting and sculpture. But the most
famous architect of Rome is Vitruvius (born c.70–80 BC), who
was responsible for organising architecture into a particular set
of rules (the Ten Books of Architecture) borrowed from the
Greeks and inherited from the Etruscans. Vitruvius was also an
artilleryman.
There is no doubt that the Ancient Greek world was chaotic; it
seemed to work on the model of piracy. This may not be such a
bad thing;
26 Ancient Rome

pirates, after all, are not distracted by the whiff of nationhood,

and they are famously unspecialised – they do everything
themselves – and also notoriously democratic. As a bunch of
cut-throats, they have to agree on matters.
The Ancient Greek world was based on tribes, and to unite
them under Rome demanded the unique selling proposition that
life was better if you joined in. Of course, at the margins, you
were perpetually, or almost per petually, at war. Peace was cause
for celebration. This size of the Empire led to a large, effi cient
and expensive army at the front and a chain of command from
the emperor and Senate on down deciding what to do with them
from their base in Rome. Offi cially we tend to see Rome as a
republic, but for long periods it was actually a monarchy, and, in
general, to prove yourself as a member of an elite family, you
went out and became a successful general (or married one) and
then you returned to play out life in and around the Senate.
Thinking about Roman culture therefore conjures up images
very dif ferent from those we have of Ancient Greek life. There is
a good deal more plotting, intrigue and politics at home, simply
because things have to be run in terms of the state, and the
state can be overturned by mutiny and defeat and the
much-feared march on Rome. In his book Mythologies (1957),
the French philosopher and popular essayist Roland Barthes
notes in his essay ‘The Romans in Films’ that the predominant
characteristic of Roman antagonists is sweat, nervous sweat.
This is not just because they were enjoying the bathhouse. In I
Claudius, the novelist Robert Graves takes on the persona of
Claudius, a ‘sick, stammering, lame fool’ within the Imperial
family. Nobody thinks Claudius of any importance at all; he’s
good for nothing but barren history writing. However, this
becomes his unique advantage. One wise friend even
encourages him to ham it up a bit, because that is the only way
for him to remain safe. At home, along with the intrigue, we are
also presented with conspicuous luxury, but sometimes the
luxury is literal poison, and therein lies a certain moral of the
story.
The people are subservient to the sacred Roman eagle –
symbol of the greater Rome, or for that matter the sacred
tribune (from which the soldiers are addressed) or even the
sacred shrines where the legions’ eagles were stored. We are
still in a world governed by superstition, but Romans have it
better, and, if they aren’t already, the conquered can become
Romans too. Hence Rome conquers and converts lands it needs
to exploit, and eventually it stretches from Scotland to Syria, from
north of the Danube to North Africa and Egypt. It sustains itself
on both booty and trade. There were ‘onions from Spain,
cheeses from Holland, and stones from Gaul, as Kenneth
Williams says playing Caesar in Carry on
Ancient Rome 27

PHOTOGRAPH 3 In front of ‘the world’s biggest sign’, outside the Hilton

Las Vegas, where I gave my fi rst academic paper
(rather badly).
Credit: Julie Cook

Cleo. Meanwhile, his earlier line speaks the political truth:

‘Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me!’
Rome certainly educates us on our duties as citizens. The
original tax-and-spend economy was subject to some
unfortunate extremes; the spendthrift emperor Caligula soon
spent so much on exotic and blood drenched games that he
raised a tax on marital sex. One of his ways of making money
was simply to condemn nobles, have them killed or make them
kill themselves and seize their estates. All public positions had to
be paid for, and there was no way you could turn down the offer.
The sweat was real: the higher you rose, the worse the knife
edge of approval. More cautious emperors behaved frugally and
amassed very considerable funds, with which they could reward
the army for loyalty and the crowd for endurance.
It is the construction of this state that fascinates historians
when it becomes clear, from the 1700s on, that we are doing
somewhat the same thing. Claudius is even found debating the
alternative approaches
28 Ancient Rome

to writing history that I mention in the prologue to this book. He is

asked to decide between Livy, who is what you might call
‘discursive’, and Pollio, who is more factual. The Roman state
became a model for our own, even though Rome itself had been
left, sacked and cultur
ally abandoned, only to be rediscovered in the Renaissance.
Meanwhile, twentieth-century fascism was born in Italy, and a
more calamitous attempt at recapturing the Roman Empire can
hardly be found than the Third Reich.
It was Edward Gibbon, with his monumental, highly readable
and sty listically brilliant Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
who articulated this for the growing, rationalist, intelligentsia of
the eighteenth century (see chapter 6). He found himself
standing in the ruins of the Capitol one evening in October 1764,
listening to the call to vespers and realising the incongruity of it
all. Here began his participation in much argument about the
relation of church to state: the debate as to whether events were
purely the will of God, the cause and effect of human action, or
something in between. But he had to do this from the physically
neutral ground of Lausanne, where the clerics were less
downright dangerous than elsewhere.
Hence we do not think of Ancient Rome as physically chaotic
either. Our commonly held view of the streetscape implies cool,
calm order – just look at the Asterix comics. The fi rst pages of
Asterix and the Laurel Wreath show a comparison between the
streets of Rome and those of Lutetia in Gaul. In Rome, by
decree, traffi c is not allowed by daytime, sellers proudly sell
‘Good Fresh Fish’, ‘Cakes!’, ‘Nice Wholesome Veg’ and ‘Ripe
Juicy Melons!’ and tourists of the world visit the Circus Maximus
accompanied by a pompous guide translating Latin into Egyptian
hiero
glyphics. In Lutetia, people are simply shouting at each other
‘Moron!’, ‘Idiot!’, ‘Half-wit!’, ‘Fool!’ and similar epithets, and the
traffi c is going nowhere. Meanwhile the power of Rome lies in
unity – in Asterix and the Olympic Games the Roman athletes
all win together; you can’t pick one from the other.
Of course these are idealised images. Robert Hughes is quick
to point out that while we think of the Imperial Rome as all white
marble (with gold trim) and fresh white togas (with gold trim), it
might have been closer to a Calcutta of the Mediterranean: fi
lthy. The vast major
ity of the population lived in hovels; overcrowded six-storey
primitive shacks; insulae (islands), a sort of rickety tower block
with little or no sanitation and no chimney. The original Romans
may have piped in their water here and there via the eleven
aqueducts and lead piping, but while they had a sewerage
system of sorts, they appeared to have put a lower priority on
getting their waste out – there was no waste
Ancient Rome 29

collection, and people generally just threw it out of the windows.

There were periodic ‘shit carts’. The Roman poet Juvenal
recommended the use of padded headwear as protection
against the threat of continuous careless projectiles.
But that was by the by to your Enlightenment thinker, to whom
over all philosophy, organised trade and military enforcement
mattered most. That Rome cultivated an impressive merchant
as well as military fl eet that cut crossing times across the
Mediterranean considerably, and that it laid 85,000 km of roads
linking the Empire was kernel. Meanwhile, one traded product,
papyrus from Egypt, may even have been the reason for a
profound transformation in the possibilities for architecture, the
‘encapsu lation of space’ as well as the extension of it via maps.
Marshall McLuhan, the ’60s theorist, coined this term, and to
make sense of it we need to go back to those straight roads.
To make straight roads you need maps, and those maps need
to be lightweight and durable – making papyrus very useful –
and it also helps if your landscape is fl at. Along these roads you
march legions and ride chariots, and all roads lead to Rome.
The legions know where they are and how fast they can go by
the mileposts along the road. McLuhan even asserts (but we
might be suspicious here) that the Roman Empire declined just
as the papyrus crops failed and Egypt stopped exporting. Without
the roads, he wistfully reminds us, you are likely to need the
ancient version of a 4x4, commonly known as a horse. Hence
the cavalry was born, or at least that heavily armoured warrior
on his warhorse – well, just as long as you’ve invented stirrups
to get him on and off it.
There may be more to this than meets the eye, for the Roman
Empire was predicated on the art of war, by the legion: that
meticulously ordered fi ghting machine drilled to perfection night
and day in the gymnasium (with arms twice the weight of those
used in battle) and marched with equal perfection along those
straight roads to wherever trouble lay. It was ruthless (you
should fear your own offi cer more than the enemy) and the
vehicle of patriotism (pride should be such that internal
punishments were dealt out by soldiers themselves). It was also
a mechanism of social mobility, for it was your local farm worker,
smithy or carpenter, used to arduous work, who was the obvious
feedstock for the legion, then trained and in other ways
Romanised to gain honour by valour in the fi eld and be
rewarded when discharged as a form of citizen, usually after
sixteen years but often – when times got tough – far longer. Of
course there were other auxiliary groupings in the army (and
there was a cavalry), but the image of the legion is the symbol of
Rome itself.
The Romans buried their dead along their straight roads. Who
was buried where indicated the class of a certain district and the
identity of
30 Ancient Rome

the town. Imagine arriving at a town you had never visited before
(maybe you are not Roman) and being greeted by all these
tombs and tributes and unable to read the signs. It would be
disconcerting, at least not exactly ‘Welcome to St Albans’.
Presumably once you have papyrus, you might draw on it.
The Ancient Greeks may or may not have had papyrus; they did
have chariots (it says so in the Iliad), but then again the
landscape is generally too mountainous for straight roads. Do
you need a drawing to build an arch? You might if you want to
string multiple arches together by drawing a straight line across
a map in either plan or in section and also when you put arches
together internally and begin to make complex spaces clearly
demarcated for particular uses.
So drawing predicated such utilities as bridges and aqueducts
(the most famous of these being the Pont du Gard near
Avignon), and the inven tion and utilisation of the arch became
preeminent. So while we can enjoy great urban objects such as
the Maison Carrée in Nimes, these are essentially Greek
derivatives (and architecturally meaner versions featur ing only
one portico), and it is the promulgation of the arch that is more
important.
I once asked my fourth-year tutor what I should do on a visit to
Rome. He said, ‘You should go and sit in the Pantheon all day
long’. Well, I didn’t manage a whole day – it got rather cold – but
over the years I’ve seen his point, made with his typical impish
humour while sucking on his pipe and eyeing up a glass of wine.
The Pantheon represents the fi rst time we made architecture as
we understand it today, as a function
ing thing for us, as an interior. It is even dedicated to all the gods
(and there were a good many of them by this time), so by
making a room for all of them under one roof, you sort of
eliminate them. All the Pantheon really does is mark the passing
of the day, not by the efforts of horses dragging the sun up and
down but by a simple oculus in the centre of the dome which
casts a moving spotlight across the interior. The measure of
time is thoroughly architectural: the last book of Vitruvius’s Ten
Books of Architecture – the Roman architectural text on our
Greek architectural origins – focuses on timepieces and
sundials. Meanwhile, since the Pan
theon can really be understood only in section, it surely had to be
drawn on that papyrus so as to conceptualise the massive
thicknesses of wall needed to support its dome, to organise the
materials on the basis of the laws of statics and furthermore to fi
gure out how to lighten the weight of that dome and how to do
the hole in the middle. You would seem to have needed to draw
it to do it, because we can understand it only by studying a
drawing of it.
Ancient Rome 31

Looking at the remains of a Roman wall is unimpressive – a

lumpish coagulation of stone, brick, fl int and tile, but it is the
essence of concrete. These lumpish masses would then be
clad, when the occasion befi tted, in marble and carved for
decoration. The Pantheon features fi ner, thinner grades of
concrete as it reaches its apex, and this reveals what we might
call a tectonic graduation of part from part. This is no
Stonehenge, and, what’s more, the sophistication is not
immediately apparent, so it’s not like the Parthenon, either.
It seems unlikely that the fall of Rome corresponds singly with
a lack of papyrus, although we should note its dependence on a
global economy of sorts, but it is worth thinking about it as a
symptom. Gib bon actually holds the fall of the ‘generous’
Roman Empire to the rise of self-righteous Christianity. For him,
engaged in the eighteenth century battle for reason, the
monasticism of the medieval world was anathema. To him, the
pluralism of belief he saw in Ancient Rome, the social virtue he
saw embodied in it – the semisecular state – was utterly
compromised by the Christian Church, the main thrust of which
he seems to view as unbearable Christian stubbornness and
intractability. He writes on page 34:

The policy of the emperors and the senate, as far as it

concerned religion, was happily seconded by the
reflections of the enlightened, and by the habits of the
superstitious, part of their subjects. The various modes of
worship which prevailed in the Roman world, were all
considered by the people, as equally true; by the philoso
pher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally
useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual
indulgence, but even reli gious concord.
We can empathise with Gibbon when we look at the
contemporary etchings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi
(1720–1788) showing the giant ruins of Ancient Rome up to its
waist in detritus (human or otherwise), overgrown with creepers,
crumbling to pieces. The views at fi rst seem horribly
exaggerated (as if Piranesi felt just like Gibbon) with rustics
scuttling about, looters quarrying marble and squatters cowering
in the shadows of rotting theatres; while gentlemen stand by
pointing and ges
turing, wondering what on earth could have happened. One of
Piranesi’s most famous works is an imaginative reconstruction:
the Campo Marzio of 1762. In it, he’s dreaming of the eternal city
grander than ever before. This large lithograph is tellingly hung
on the wall of the twentieth century architect Louis Kahn’s offi ce
(see chapter 9), and we will encounter
32 Ancient Rome

the phenomenon again, in reverse, when we come to scrutinise

Albert Speer’s rather absurd ‘Theory of Ruin Value’ in the
doomed architecture of Hitler’s Germany.
In Gibbon’s view, when Constantine created the Holy Roman
Empire with the Edict of Milan of 313, which legalised Christian
worship, he, unwittingly sealed doom to eventual medievalism.
He has a point, even today; as President Obama battles for
budgetary leeway, far-right Chris
tian organisations threaten to fatally destabilise the United States
and wish to decide who is guilty on the basis of pure suspicion
without due process of law, and of course they throw in a bit of
creationism as well. History repeats itself, unfortunately.
However, it is clear the Roman system was not exactly
foolproof. Power corrupts and absolute power can corrupt
absolutely. Augustus acquired god-like status while remaining
essentially modest and good humoured; Caligula embraced that
status and was the opposite. Emperors could become deities,
and the worst made themselves deities. In such circumstances,
gossip could then become blasphemous, history could become
suddenly blasphemous, and you could fi nd yourself amid state
control as ruthless and arbitrary as that we might recognise in
the worst segments of our contemporary history.
And you can understand Constantine’s position. He had a
battle to win and, if blessed by victory the next day, promised
this U-turn on policy towards the Christians. Having everybody
worshipping every god at the drop of a hat was proving most
inconvenient, and limiting the number of gods to three – Father,
Son and Holy Ghost – might be seen as welcome and effi cient.
Hundreds of years later, Gibbon, who saw religion primarily as a
manifestation of suspicion, didn’t take kindly to the deci
sion, while at the time Constantine understandably was not in a
position to appreciate the political consequences for the
machismo of the Roman state that came with the recognition of
the Lamb of God.
Whereas the fantastical apparitions of the Ancient Greek
world seem rather underrepresented in our modern media, quite
the opposite is true of Rome. I grew up to the salaciousness of
Frankie Howerd in Up Pompeii! By the 1960s Rome was
associated not with revolutionary virtue (as we might see in the
painting Oath of the Horatii [1784] by David) but with bawdy fun.
A funny thing happened on the way to the forum.
But I enjoyed one of my fi rst visits to the cinema to see Ben
Hur, and when I was sitting in the pub the other day a man sold
me a fi lm called Centurion. It was predictably terrible, but that is
not the point; I was just wondering what we do with the myth
today. What was clear in
Ancient Rome 33

this case was that it was a story about our troops fi ghting at that
time in Afghanistan. The analogy was with those Roman legions
in Germania. It was set in Roman times, but it was an absolutely
contemporary story. This is why we cannot consign our
understanding of history to a kind of historical waste bin, for we
live it and breathe it every day, even via pirated DVDs.
This is as true for the world of architecture as it might be for
fashion or hairdressing. And when we consider Roman
architecture we are imme diately aware of two main themes that
would seem to be contradictory: engineering and showmanship.
The cities were served by aqueducts and made-up roads and,
certainly in the settlements built up from scratch (for instance in
North Africa), sewers. All of this was organised within a strict
grid pattern with gates north, south, east and west.
Entertainments were often sensibly placed outside the city walls
for fear the combatants might wreak havoc if they escaped.
On the other hand, the image we have of Roman architecture
is some thing rather bombastic, rather brash, rather stage set. It
doesn’t matter whether we are considering Caesars Palace in
Las Vegas, the Golden Pal ace of Emperor Nero (featuring the fi
rst revolving restaurant) or a spot of nouveau riche appliqué of a
Classical portico to a bungalow in Peterbor ough or a mansion in
East Cheam. The Romans never lacked application and built
marvels to prove it, but aesthetically they suffered from an infe
riority complex and copied. Roman poets even considered
themselves dull by comparison with the Greeks. Hughes points
out that the Roman apti tude for statuary was what we might call
Warholian; perhaps as many as fi fty thousand busts of
Augustus might have been fashioned all told. It is a
characteristic we can’t get away from; in this sense, Caesars (no
apostrophe) is as Roman as you’re likely to get. In Caesars
Palace, I have even seen teams of actors masking real building
work to make it more entertaining.
And I have sat for many a pleasant hour at the bar of
Cleopatra’s Barge there, relaxing on the black leather-padded
bar stools, watching the hookers sip their nonalcoholic drinks
with their little purses and sen sible shoes, listening to the thump
of ’80s disco music coming from the actual fl oating barge of a
dance fl oor, endless renditions of ‘Celebration’, ‘Music and
Lights’, and so on, all aimed at the suddenly young hearts of
middle-aged businessmen who, if they have any sense, are
about to get themselves into trouble. I became on very good
terms with one of the bar staff there, a lady from Arbroath whose
husband was in the military. You see, it all rings true – lavish
entertainments, orgies, visitors from the Empire, the military,
even superstition at the craps table. Notwithstanding the
tremendous infrastructure and organisation that back up a
machine

www.ebook3000.com
34 Ancient Rome

like Caesars Palace, you’ll never see so much as a dustcart. The

origi nal cartoon advertisement for Caesars Palace, from way
back in 1966, shows a girl feeding grapes to a rather portly,
toga-clad, balding gentleman.
Part of this second enduring theme resides in the fact that the
Romans, when they weren’t creating feats of great engineering
or marching their legions, were sticking on bits of Classical
Greek architecture to whatever building they wanted. Even
Asterix shows us this. When we encounter the ‘original’
Caesar’s Palace in Asterix and the Laurel Wreath, we see a
formidable multistorey building that is essentially a pile-up of
what we now call ‘Classical motifs’. However, this pile-up,
whether it constitutes itself in elevation, plan or section, is the
raw material for the art of com
position, and presumably composition is a rather high-minded
term for putting elements together in an agreeable, auspicious,
practical or splendid way, and architects have been trying to do
this with varying degrees of success ever since. Meanwhile, the
set designers of Hollywood have rel
ished the opportunity Rome provides with high-camp zeal. The
set of Cleopatra (1963) was the most expensive ever created
and the scene where Cleopatra (Elizabeth Taylor) arrives in the
capital is as unforgettable as it is delightfully preposterous, even
if Caesar did once return to be greeted by forty elephants with
torches held in their trunks. It does not help that the Romans
enjoyed giant phallic monuments such as Trajan’s Column and
were very fond of triumphal arches, each an apparition
representing a subconscious carnality to civic theatre.
Meantime there is the Coliseum itself, with its vivid, exotic and
murderous entertainments. Caesars built one specially for Celine
Dion, and originally the target audience was crowds of orgiastic
women shoppers; the catchphrase for Forum Shops (an adjunct
of Caesars and one of the most successful shopping complexes
in the world) was ‘Shoppus Till You Droppus’. And there are
plenty of Las Vegas strip clubs which enjoy the Roman motif,
whereas I suspect their successors (the Goths) would have
hung the exotic dancers from the gibbet.
But thankfully we employ Rome only as a motif. The Roman tem
perament employed excessive cruelty with some nasty side
effects: that you might get a taste for it. As to whether that
cruelty was necessary or otherwise, it is no surprise that the
Roman ideal suffused the art of the French Revolution –
perhaps its actual practice during the Terror – and conditioned
twentieth-century fascism. Conquering armies, slavery, sadism
and bloodlust are all linked. Prostitutes, whose lives must have
been nightmarish, would throng around the Circus Maximus to
profi t (if that can be the word) from the appalling spectacles
within. The bacchanalia
Ancient Rome 35

(by reputation originally a harmless vineyard cult) transformed

themselves into festivals where cult members assured
themselves that nothing but nothing was a crime. The Senate
legislated against the bacchanalia in 186 BC,and its members
were liquidated – largely because their activities mirrored those
of the state.
To miss this point and idealise Roman society, as so many of
the sub sequent purveyors of Graeco-Roman Neoclassicism
have done, is a case of so it goes, but recognising the fact does
explain that fondness for life in Ancient Greek Arcadia, often
bewilderingly misrepresented (with the startling exception of
Nietzsche) as one of largely innocent and unbridled fun.
Meanwhile, it also highlights the sophistication of the painter
Nico las Poussin, who named his idyllic scene of rustics around
a tomb of 1638 Et in Arcadia ego – suggesting that his
audience, amid their luxury, if they had a mind, might be
reminded of death. Death was not what you were supposed to fi
nd in the bushes of Stourhead.
So the orgy business is problematic – not quite the free love
one might imagine, not necessarily ‘a night of the senses’ (of
gaiety and laughter and potential orgasm) with the likes of
Ammonia, Senna, Erotica and Lurcio, but rather one of acute
pain, ritualistic humiliation and possible death. At least that
would be the case if you found yourself invited to the wrong
party. Only in very unfortunate circumstances might this happen
in con
temporary Las Vegas, and these days we consume even these
possibilities virtually: by watching CSI .
Once inside Penthouse, a former large car garage, we found
ourselves in a Speeresque foyer with giant breasts. Like the
colossal Constantine in Rome, where you get just bits – a head,
some toes – here you got just giant 2D breasts. Once past them
you would enter the darkened arena. By technical necessity we
always shot the interiors with the lights up, to show them off, but
in reality, once in use, the architecture was insignifi cant,
reduced fairly much to the sound system, the multiple and
multiform stages, the chairs and the dancers, all of which were
of course intricately worked. For instance, in Minx the plush
chairs (with more than a whiff of California Modern style about
them) were on rollers – since the dancers expend considerable
effort shifting them about for privacy. Meanwhile, the banquettes
in Jaguars seemed specifi cally designed, almost anthropo
metrically, for the guys to ‘kick back’ and let the dancers do their
stuff to maximum effi ciency. However, it was incredible just how
much was spent on décor, considering its utterly synthetic task,
and even some of the exteriors, for instance that of Jaguars,
could stand comparison to the Maison Carrée.
But should we take this sort of observation seriously? Am I
being seri ous when I employ observations of Asterix cartoons,
Caesars Palace Las
36 Ancient Rome

Vegas and the city’s strip clubs? Well, of course I am, because
presently I’m watching a documentary on the National
Geographic Channel, which in between advertisements for
insurance and personal injury claims is broadcasting Rome’s
Greatest Battles, and I have to say, since they try to make it
realistic by dramatising the action with ‘real’ actors or at least
very good CGI, the set designer has looked carefully at the
Asterix version of the ‘original’ palace of Caesar.
All of this seems at odds with the notion that Ancient Rome
actually represents a stable sense of order. Funnily enough,
Caesars Las Vegas is also physically an accretion with an
underlying sense of order but aesthet ically a bit of a mess, as
was Rome, which grew from a village under the threat of order
but didn’t as a result end up looking ordered at all. That sense of
order is an idea rather than a resultant fact. Le Corbusier was
shocked that the real Rome was such a mess. But remember,
such urbanity just crept up on the Romans; they had only just
got around to stringing some rooms together. When Le
Corbusier went looking for solutions to a highly industrialised
economy in 1928, he had an idea of Roman order that just
wasn’t there.
We can particularly see this new conjugation of inhabited
forms, com position, in Hadrian’s Villa, which builds in such
curiosities as an island for sulking. We can see it particularly in
the plan, because what we have here is much more advanced
than any Ancient Greek accommodation built around a tree
trunk. We can see that rooms are constituted and stuck together
using particular forms of arched roof, either barrel or dome or a
combination of the two. Le Corbusier famously sketched the
remains of these barrel-roof structures and employed them
himself: they leant themselves to a concrete construction
applicable to the twentieth century as much as the fi rst. One of
the lasting legacies of Ancient Rome, accept
ing that the know-how was lost during the Dark Ages, is
something as straightforward as concrete construction.
So in Roman architecture, we fi nd the fi rst popular evocation
of what might be pleasant to live in if you were highly privileged.
Pliny the Younger wrote a series of letters outlining the design of
commodious villas in the country, deemed the Laurentian and
the Tuscan, which have inspired myriad built and unbuilt
interpretations ever since. It is con
spicuous that he never seems much interested in building
material and construction (so to some extent he misses the
point of Roman achieve ment), but as a diplomat perhaps he
found such considerations below him, and perhaps it is with
pointed relief that he described instead the subtleties of
presence, outlook and atmosphere.
Ancient Rome 37

This pursuit of the agreeable architects will not shake off,

despite herculean efforts, for the next nineteen hundred years.
In the early nineteenth century, the German architect Karl
Friedrich Schinkel, in par ticular, seemed to take Pliny to heart,
especially at Glienicke – when he was building a retreat for a
prince on an idyllic spot south of Berlin over looking the Havel as
it broadens into the Jungfern See – and in a series of buildings
where complex aspects (rather than forms) are the key to their
pleasures (see chapter 6). Meanwhile, the Postmodernists (see
chapter 10) found Pliny, as an enthusiast for the experience of
architecture, rather a saviour and antidote to the aggressive
functionalism of Modernism. Hence a project titled ‘Pliny’s Villa’
has periodically been a stalwart in the architectural curriculum
as a chance to test both students’ powers of liter ary
interpretation and their poetic sensitivities ever since.
Pliny was so obsessed with the genteel that he took time to
elucidate, at considerable length, the soothing contribution of
particular fl owers, shrubs and trees. It is not as if he were doing
the weeding or enjoying the symbolic importance of the laurel or
the oak – here we are presented with buildings that are defi
nitively in relationship with the landscape for the purposes of
enjoyment by a refi ned class. It is tempting to say the concept
of landscape architecture is born here, to be exploited fully in the
great villas of the Renaissance, such as the Villa Giulia in Rome
(1555), an ensemble piece par excellence that includes thirty-six
thousand particular plant specimens amid the orange blossom.
Of course, all this is rather at odds with the ruinous
monumentality we experience at Hadrian’s Villa or the Palace of
Diocletian (which makes up most of the Croatian town of Split)
and that has inspired quite the opposite: a sense of Roman mass
and volume and the detritus that mired the streets of Rome.

4
THE GOTHIC

We are all aware of ‘the glory of Rome’, but we are less aware of
the extent of Rome’s reach. We get a bit vague as to exactly
how big it was or exactly how long the Empire lasted. If we set
the epitome of Ancient Greek civil isation at around 500 BC and
we understand the Gothic period to have germinated at ad1200,
that gives us a bracket of 1,700 years, that allows the glories of
Rome (including Byzantium) to occupy, conservatively, half of
our human history as far as this text is concerned. But the
Western Empire collapsed in ad476, leaving seven hundred
years very dark indeed. However, the geographical extent was
enormous, from Scotland to Africa, from Persia to Spain, divided
into two empires, and all under some or other notion of a
republic. It is not surprising that the Roman enterprise has
preoccupied our minds; it’s almost as if we can forgive a bit of
indul
gence in the lion feeding.
The sacking of Rome, the collapse of such an apparently
well-organised, boringly effi cient civilisation (we do not gasp at
the wonders of Rome; we more likely stand to attention), still
occupies the mind. Was it debt? Was it Christianity? Was it
decadence? Was it immigration? All these worry us because our
modern world looks fragile too. Meanwhile, most of us aren’t
precisely sure who the barbarians who sacked Rome were,
what, precisely, they stood for or whether we’ve now got them
as neighbours.
This is an unauthorised history, and it’s also biographical, and
under both rubrics I’m leaving the late Eastern Roman Empire,
Byzantium, out. This is of course a huge mistake, but I’m
reminded of the chapter ‘Mistakes I Have Made’ thoughtfully
included in the Marquis de Sade’s memoir 120 Days of Sodom
or, more parochially, of rock writers like
40 The Gothic

Chuck Klosterman who might routinely admit they have been

remiss in omitting the infl uence of, say, Nipple Squeezer on the
nascent Wisconsin hair metal scene.
The present trend is to attempt to let everybody play a part in
the con struction of history, to be inclusive. Great tomes seek
adequate inclusion of everything and everybody, especially in
such a conspicuously globalised world. But this is a technically
insurmountable task, and one of the para doxes of our
technology is that those big important books tend to get read by
fewer and fewer people. Biographers, meanwhile, face the very
special task of empathy – they would give their eye teeth to know
that Jesus winked at Judas; at least I would.
This book does not attempt an all-inclusive history, but to
hardly men tion Hagia Sophia, one of the greatest constructions
of all time (or, for that matter, Córdoba, that apparently sublime
orchestration of shade in the heat of southern Spain), still seems
almost criminal. It pricks my con science that my only experience
of Hagia Sophia comes from repeated watchings of From
Russia with Love .
In his Journey to the East, the great modern architect Le
Corbusier visited a good deal of ancient material to set him on
his way, but even he didn’t get much beyond the Bosporus. A
good friend of mine con fi rmed the sentiment one day – this
confi dent Californian was driving through Europe with a group
of friends in the late ’60s, and when they reached that
memorable strip of water, he just baulked; he wouldn’t go any
further. This could have something to do with our youthful
entertainments, rumours, where we situate Istanbul as the
extremity that will undo the Western traveller. The
cloak-and-dagger stories of Rider Haggard, John Buchan and
Eric Ambler come to mind – here drug
induced frenzy lurks, the beguiling sorceress, a land of
strangeness and magic.
But actually I have experienced similar undoing myself. On a fi
eld trip to Venice, another crossing point of East and West, I
found myself peril ously drunk on a mixture of vodka and valium,
plied to me in some bar or another. I didn’t believe the bar was
particularly unsavoury, but I was alone, and I woke up the next
day with a black eye and a broken camera and as a
consequence headed straight to the railway station for Vienna.
So you won’t fi nd much of Venice here either, except later, when
we go to Las Vegas.
So I am skipping the treasures of Byzantium ruefully, noting
that even though I have marvelled at the early Christian mosaics
in San Vitale in Ravenna, the Eastern Roman Empire’s Western
outpost (it’s easy to forget that Hagia Sophia is an early
Christian church, representative of Emperor Constantine’s
conversion and Istanbul as Constantinople), I fi nd
The Gothic 41

PHOTOGRAPH 4 Cleopatra’s Barge, Caesars Palace. In my mind

terminally associated with the lounge act’s ’80s funk.
Credit: Julie Cook

no drawings of it in my sketchbooks. Serendipity plays its part;

you can’t have everything – some things are in, some things are
out – so the early Christian Byzantine empire slips into the
shadows, while a true northern phenomenon, the darkness of
the Middle Ages, looms.
The barbarians may have been Goths, but we associate the
Gothic with the northern Christian Church. The relationship
overall is more com plex than we might think, but to understand
the churches we have to take some lessons (some
diagrammatic planning moves) from the earli est basilicas, an
eventual consequence of Constantine’s Edict of Milan. Imagine
taking two Greek stoas and putting them together in plan. What
you suddenly have is a central space between the two sets of
columns that we can call at fi rst a market but later a nave, with
two parallel outrigging enclosures we can call aisles; put an altar
at the top end and shelter it in an apse of some kind and you
have the basics of every village church. Why do this? Because
the Christians needed to be saved to go to heaven – and saved
weekly at least – in an organised way, so you have clergy and
con gregations and this all has to happen in an obvious building,
perhaps with
42 The Gothic

a bell tower reminding the populace of their obligations. Then

you have to keep the rain off with a decent roof – one over the
nave and two lean tos over the aisles – and decorate the interior
to get your message across, and there you have it.
The Christians were not predisposed to worship willy-nilly.
They would not beseech Jove in the street when they burnt the
toast. Christian ity demanded lifelong commitment, and that gave
the Church increasing power, grandeur and wealth. All that piety
had to be looked after, and cleverly the house always got its
percentage without ever having to deliver the goods. In fact, the
more mysterious the goods were and the more all encompassing
the project, the better the Church was going to do. It is no
wonder then, that St Francis ended up trying to convert animals
and birds. Like capitalist business, Christianity had to grow to
survive and thrive, and that’s what it did.
No one should doubt the practical advantages to society that
such faith brings. Supplicating a potentially rabble-rousing
bunch of indi vidual maniacs into a body of believers in basically
good things seems like an excellent idea. Indeed, when this
doesn’t happen (see Postmod ernism) we might worry.
Christianity might take an ungainly chunk out of your Sunday,
but it will make you feel better about your terrible desires.
So back in the land of the ice and snow; Kenneth Clark, in that
mile stone of arts TV Civilisation, notes that there can be no
planning or use for great works of architecture. We make the
best of what shelter we can in what is essentially a wasteland.
We won’t get a lot of architecture. Clark compares a Viking
longboat to a Classical temple, something the moderns would
understand ( just as they enjoyed aeroplanes). But he is sure the
Vikings lacked something, and presumably this is one of the
constituents of civilisation: that the Dark Ages were indeed dark
– dark with fear and superstition, unsettled, where beauty was
best handheld, portable in the form of embellished gold, and the
monasteries remote, isolated, so even kings couldn’t read.
Whatever the ‘Dark Ages’ were, Clark reassures us that by the
twelfth century, ‘man may (once more) rise to the contemplation
of the divine through the senses’, in short, enjoy life or at least
the prospect of the after life. Those were the words of Abbé
Suger, and with him we rise from the gloom of the Romanesque
into a new lofty luminosity, exemplifi ed at St Denis and Chartres
cathedrals, where apparently even the carts bringing the stone
and provisions for its great rebuilding were drawn by knights and
ladies of the nobility as well as by the peasantry.
This seems peculiar, certainly sudden, as does all the
mythology of a golden age that pervades a certain conception of
the Gothic era: the myths
The Gothic 43

of damsels and knights and fairy castles and crusades, which we

corrobo rate with the reality of angelic female fi gures (carved in
stone) suddenly appearing on the west portal of Chartres and
even the cultivation of the cult of the virgin herself.
But we fantasise. As a kid I would dress up in a sheet with a
red cross on it and wield my sword – a bit of wood and
cardboard – in the garden and under the stairs, just as I would
later move on to home made tommy guns and battles with the
Germans. When I was a child, medieval dramas such as The
Black Knight and Camelot were all the rage. Who’s to say these
ludicrous stories from Sir Walter Scott didn’t provide that
appropriate nickname for Margaret Thatcher, ‘The Iron Lady’?
Some of these confusions over chivalry have had even more
disastrous consequences, Nazism for instance, but they may
also inspire youth’s pil grimages to Glastonbury (Avalon) and
even the appropriate chapters in Civilisation ride high on an
amplifi ed respect for courtly love, perhaps Clark’s own. For
Clark, the chivalrous knight is the antecedent of the gentleman
he was taught to be at public school. Schools, especially the
new public schools (that are confusingly actually private schools)
that sprang up as a function of the Industrial Revolution, instilled
chivalry with great fervour.
Clark was enchanted by the period to the extent that he
bought a castle in Kent and married a countess, but if we
understand his back ground as the son of an industrialist who
reputedly broke the bank at Monte Carlo and retired to the life of
the idle rich, we shed light on his appreciation of St Francis as
the saint who gave everything away, even his clothes. The
filmmaker Pasolini (in The Hawks and the Spar rows) expertly
parodies St Francis and his attempts to bring the faith to
animals, but Pasolini was a Marxist; Clark was no such thing,
and he loved dogs. Medieval courts were full of dogs, and the
Clark fam ily loved dogs so much that when Kenneth’s son, Alan,
was dying, he expressed his joy to be joining his favourites once
again in the hereafter. Perhaps Clark’s bubbling enthusiasm for
medieval art, where women smile beatifi cally, should be viewed
with caution, because they might be smiling because they had
to. Instead, images of the burning of witches might come to
mind.
Such romantic conceptions also led to the worst excesses of the
Pre Raphaelites, the home-decorating tastes of Jimmy Page and
our own Houses of Parliament. They inspire Laura Ashley
wedding dresses and leaded light windows. Indeed, the Gothic
Revival is an all-pervasive Vic torian English style, leading (by
railway rather than charger) from the Houses of Parliament via
St Pancras Station to Manchester Town Hall and
44 The Gothic

beyond into Wilmslow’s suburbs and my teenage bedroom. All of

it is ponderous and pious and mega-gloomy.
Mentioning the Houses of Parliament twice, I went along to
have a look, through the airport-style security, right into the
corridors of power. Of course they are preposterous, leaden with
gloom. You can hardly move for a knight here and a maiden
there. If you were an architectural deter
minist, somebody who believes that buildings directly affect
behaviour, you would be both appalled (realising that Great
Britain is mired in balo ney) and relieved (because you’re a
determinist who has just been proved right).
Religious Gothic labours the vision of both heaven and hell; it
relies on redemption to one and fear of the other, and even as a
believer (compulsory) you were permanently on the balancing
scales. Our original barbarians, as well as our contemporary
Goth tribes (for Goths do not go away, they simply reinvent
themselves), prob
ably were not originally concerned with (and have now probably
given up on) heaven. They were and are diverse druid types.
Today they might bond over Hollywood special effects, dark-side
comput ing, fetish fashion, Walpurgis Night, Nosferatu, death
cults or simply an overly operatic dress sense. The Leipzig Goth
festival, held every year at Whitsun, embraces inclusivity to such
a degree as to offer the umbrella ‘all things dark’.
It is hard to imagine such a thing in the UK. It’s not because
the UK didn’t spawn Black Sabbath, doesn’t have its share of
Cure fans or readers of Dennis Wheatley, but culturally we have
not been encour aged to see the principal signifi cance of the
Middle Ages as ‘dark’. Instead, we rendered it as our heritage.
Hence UK heavy metal is, by and large, enriched with the ironic
– dark and patriotic. Think of Saxon: led by Biff Byford (from
Barnsley), Saxon manage to throw all the clichés into the mix at
the same time; they ride fi ercely patriotic wheels of steel. Their
albums include the titles Lionheart, Call to Arms, Sacrifi ce,
Power and the Glory and, best of all, The Inner Sanctum. There
is a video of them somewhere perched precariously on the
ramparts of a castle singing about maidens. You cannot say
Saxon don’t have a sense of humour. Thank goodness UK
metal does not tumble freely to the depths of Death or Black
Metal unless it migrates to Germany (or Norway) or LA.
But if Britain represents its dark side through either rose-tinted
glasses or a sense of humour, Germany does not. German
culture has fully embraced this dark side of humanity, for better
and worse and in the name of the best and the worst. The
Hanseatic churches are
The Gothic 45

stern brooding essays in control; there’s nothing light about

them. Clark noted a sense of tawdry chic in the
sixteenth-century paintings of Lucas Cranach. I read them as
spooky/deathly. Cranach’s allegories of Chris tian stories are
populated not by the idealised fi gures you fi nd in the southern
Renaissance but by people who are clearly real people. As
reformists (Cranach’s company even printed Luther’s Bible), they
offer no distance; people are assuming the position, and most of
them appear scared stiff. Who would even want to paint such a
grizzly picture as The Seven Ages of Woman and who would
hang it on a wall – unless you want to show that vanity is the
work of the devil.
Too much at home with their dark soul, the Nazis (Himmler in
par ticular) were steeped in the occult – the search for relics, the
worship of the reliquary. This horrible fascination did eventually
come to provide us with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,
but there I go again, illustrating my cultural difference and
thinking of the Holy Grail primarily in terms of entertainment and
not as something to be celebrated on a daily basis in a castle
deep in Westphalia.
Whatever, the churches got bigger and bigger – they had to.
New heights, more splendour (in England and France), more
glory to God as these towering edifi ces rose above a confusion
of shacks. Other than the cathedrals, monasteries and castles,
what was there? Matthew Collings picks out, in his This Is
Civilisation, the Hôtel-Dieu in Beaune. It is a polychromatically
jolly giveaway. Hotel is not the word; it’s a doss house provided
by the richest merchant in France at the time, Nicolas Rolin. It is
a pretty upmarket doss house for sure, but it reminds us of the
importance, to Christians, of charity rather than entitlement. It’s a
leg up, a chance to pull yourself together; it’s work ethic,
bootstraps. We are not too far from these means of provision
today. In a Gothic world, to show you care, and for the sake of
esteem and a shot at heaven, you donate.
So this is a fi ne context in which to view TV Clark’s rather
nervous (anxious, as Collings observes) appreciation of the
Gothic world. The alternative, the creeping socialism, the Reds
under the bed, are a threat to him and all he holds dear,
especially in 1968. Meanwhile Clark somehow fi nds himself in
bed with our heavy metal artistes. The ‘they don’t like us and we
don’t care’ attitude of, say, Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden is the
corollary of Clark’s privilege, and howling absurdity and strutting
machismo have brought Iron Maiden vast riches, their own jets.
Meanwhile, post-Enlightenment, a desire to live in a castle fi
nds us in interesting psychological territory. Even HRH the Duke
of Edinburgh
46 The Gothic

complained of the privies at Windsor. The draw must be the airs

and graces of Camelot but include the fantasies of Cinderella,
Sleeping Beauty, and perhaps ‘mad’ (but not) King Ludwig. But
surely Dracula, Himmler and (at least in my case) Colditz come
to haunt, and certainly ‘money pit’ looms large, as confi rmed by
Alan Clark’s amusing diaries and the despair of many a foolish
celebrity. In the medieval world, the castle was merely a hell of a
lot better than everywhere else.
Money was no object to the Earl of Bute when he employed
William Burgess to reconstruct his medieval heritage. A visit to
Cardiff Castle (circa 1880) is highly instructive. We fi rst note its
distance from Cardiff Bay, where the dirty business of wealth
creation was done, and the dark isolation and introversion the
sumptuous interior provides (literal pro
tection during the Merthyr Rising of 1831). It is authentic down to
a room playing homage to the Crusades. Thankfully modest in
scale, if not in detail, it is also comic: a monstrous absurdity
incredibly well done. It would clearly be awkward to read a book
in the darkness of a castle library.
But, having despaired at the social world of the Gothic, be it in
West minster Abbey or heavy metal, we have to admire the
technical virtuosity. It still rocks. Those architects particularly
interested in the material quali ties of things (some call this
materiality, but be aware that materialism carries a different
interpretation in both the philosophic and the eco nomic realms)
will fi nd themselves gravitating to the complexities of Gothic
vaulting because it’s fabulous. One is tempted to make a
compari son to James Hetfi eld’s fretwork.
Make those silly comparisons all you like, but we have to
remember that for all the grandeur in Gothic architecture there is
no bombast. Because (excepting those castles, an antisocial but
no doubt necessary provision) it’s all for God, and it is full of
craft, anonymous craft: the embodiment of meekness.
Meanwhile it pushes the envelope, then stretches it, always
going one step beyond. It is also full of the spirit of doing it over
and over again. It’s not for slackers. Beauvais cathedral col
lapsed six times, but they kept going.
Students should be wary of merely liking the Gothic: as an instru
ment of propaganda we can hardly be ambivalent. The
Victorians Pugin and Ruskin were certainly fervent believers,
and enjoyment would seem dependent on understanding the
theological iconography as much as the ruthless technical
virtuosity. This view may become controversial later on, but in
the meantime Chartres is hardly background. It is not something
that should be playfully and picturesquely sketched; with
experience it becomes a projection of heaven one either believes
in or
The Gothic 47

mocks. Meanwhile, of course, the Gothic also appeals to lovers

of dreamy intoxication and fearful of the republic who might
happily draw away for hours.
So personally, because I still believe we can do life another
way, my favourite Gothic is the more plastic kind. And all of this
guff provided the best name for an eatery in the most
extraordinary outpost of Post modernity in the world, a place
where the house does occasionally have to deliver the goods
and pay out. When I fi rst saw it I wept tears of joy. Deep within
the monstrous and brilliant fairy castle that is the Excalibur Las
Vegas, the visitor used to be able to dine (not so fi nely) in
Lance-a Lotta Pasta before no doubt mooching down to the
jousting show in the basement. Now that was funny,
Lance-a-Lotta Pasta. That’s life-giving spirit to folks like me – if
we laugh at it, we can digest it. King Arthur would at least bring
out the best in Monty Python. This is the bright side of dark side.
So I’m sitting in a bar in Charlottenburg in Berlin. It’s a real
vintage bar, and I come here every time I come to Berlin
because it’s around the corner from where we usually stay, but
also it has come to repre sent to me what Germany is at its best.
That is, while Germany may be the ‘engine room of Europe’,
‘strongman of Europe’, ‘Champions of the World’ (at football) or
‘the banker of the Eurozone’ and all those other clichés, it is also
a place where human satisfaction is represented in order,
insurance, assurance and total calm. It is quite uncanny. No mat
ter what technological hoops BMW and Mercedes are jumping
through for technological change and profi t, here the beer is the
same as it always has been, the sausage is the same as it
always has been and, goddam mit, that old couple over there
who come in three times a week for their beer with a brandy on
the side, if they aren’t exactly the same as they’ve always been
as well. The bar is painted dark as a cave, the silence is almost
religious, punctuated only by occasional antique rock ’n’ roll
from the jukebox.
To me this is both charming and historically fascinating at the
same time. People often ask us why we keep coming to Berlin
for our August holiday. If I were to say that Berlin represents just
about the most colos sal hangover of all time, I don’t think I’d be
getting it too far wrong. For much of its history, Germany has
been a calamity; for its relatively recent history, it has been in
cataclysm.
Germany is the centre of the Gothic. The Goths, east of the
Rhine and north of the Danube, proved a step largely too far for
the Romans. Yes, they did occupy Dacia, north of the Danube,
but Germania largely remained the territory of the warring tribes
of the north. It makes sense if you think
48 The Gothic

that ‘forests’ were just about the worst place for legions. Legions
needed straight roads facilitated by maps that needed papyrus;
Goths forged stir rups. The fact that the Visigoths, the
Ostrogoths and so on sacked Rome is slightly bemusing; you
can hardly imagine them wanting to leave those
forests or forging empires, if by empire we might mean
civilisation. For us, forests are the land of danger. Bad things
happen in forests, from bears to Buchenwald. If you want to hide
something, you hide it in the forest; that’s where the dead
bodies go; Little Red Riding Hood. In forests you become
disorientated, you lose your sense of direction, you become
confused, it’s dark and so on; you cry. Think of the fairy tales we
consume as children; the vast majority seem to concern
themselves with diffi cul ties of getting ‘lost’ in the forest.
However, for pagans the forest is a land of wonder, the home of
Pan and a source of magic. The druids of course predate
Christianity by thousands of years.
There are many ancient myths linking pagan and early
Christian thinking that have consequences for our image of
Germania, one of the most pertinent and most monstrous being
carved into the Pergamon Altar – the fi rst formulation of the
Jews versus the northern tribes and of the notion of the strength
and power of those northern tribes with their occult ways. This
notion underlies Adolf Hitler’s concept of a new Germania
reinvented thousands of years later, but we should not for
get the ongoing persecution of the Jews through the Reformation
and Inquisition, when they were always defi ned as rootless and
somehow not belonging, not at home in the forest or for that
matter in the republic either. It is easy and rational to say this
stuff is nonsense, but one day as I stared out of the window of
that Charlottenburg neighbourhood bar, I saw a father playing
like a giant with his child; she was hanging on to his thigh, and
he was taking these giant steps with her hanging on. I couldn’t
believe my eyes.
After such dour thoughts it might do well to be sensible. The
only thing remotely Gothic about Germany today is the guttural
language and a few choice typefaces that you might still just fi
nd on remote railway stations. But aside from my excursions
into the semiotics of heavy metal (which may be too much for afi
cionados), Goth fashion, a penchant for wearing black and
strange hairdos certainly count. Western youth appears to have
a secure enthusiasm for the Goth as a symbol of teenage
rebellion and as a secure depository for teenage anxiety. I take
a (very brief) look at a dating website for German Goth youth,
which features lots of ridicu lously huge boots and moody looks.
It understandably makes me feel a bit peculiar, but I still want to
go to that festival in Leipzig.
It is also peculiar to note that Leipzig is the spiritual home of
the new Europe – where the fi rst demonstrators gathered in St
Nicholas’s church
The Gothic 49

against the DDR in 1989 – as well as being a centre for German

culture in general. This festival, with its confl uence of Goth
streams (bit streams?) could perhaps become a Goth river, a
Goth estuary, an all-pervasive dark ness: ‘rivers of evil, swimming
in sorrow’, as Ozzy sings. Or maybe it’s just like Disneyland,
where on a particular day, under the Californian sunshine, Goth
kids don heavy black coats and boots and clamour to make
signs of the cross at Snow White.
Our original Goths were in a world away from this indulgence
in con temporary fl oating signifi ers. It was a life-and-death
business of life and death – on the doors of the basilica of San
Zeno in Verona there is a prime example. On these giant front
doors, cast in bronze, were instructions to the faithful that you
could actually touch. Generations have rubbed their hands over
special guidance regarding everyday events, such as chastity
and childcare. The pregnant woman’s tummy positively gleams
with evi dence of centuries’ worth of hope and faith.
Alongside the church you would fi nd a monastery. Knowledge
had to remain the domain of the Church, especially dangerous
knowledge; in fact, the containment of dangerous knowledge is
the name of the game for those hundreds of years, and it is not
until we get to the Renaissance or the Enlightenment that we
can see things any differ
ently. Think of a story such as Umberto Eco’s The Name of the
Rose for a populist evocation of such dark arts. Think why
Leonardo da Vinci had to write in code, perhaps to keep his
thoughts to himself and to avoid the charge of heresy.
Note that in the plan of a monastery as presented even in
Banister Fletcher’s History of Architecture there is nowhere to
do anything which is not strictly prescribed. You can pray, you
can sing (to God), you can weed the vegetable patch, you can
sleep (but only in a dormitory and not for long), you can look
after the chickens, but from there on your horizons are strictly
limited. There are no baths. Contrast this with Rome, where we
associate so much with bathing, with the pleasures of the fl esh.
Here the naked body is one of dread and prohibition, the devil’s
temptation, and aquatic enjoyment suddenly a vanity and dirt
the mark of sanctity. The monks could travel, but only under
necessarily fi lthy, therefore spiri tually pure conditions, since
water, especially the sea, was an unknown full of evil monsters.
This was no beach holiday.
Instead, they worked for God. The carpenters and masons of
the Middle Ages proceed in leaps and bounds. Consider the
development of a church roof – consider that roof over the nave
of San Zeno basilica in Verona. Understanding the components
of a church roof, starting with the smallest component (a tile and
its fi xing), to the biggest, will tell you a great deal about
architecture. Here matters are not mystical at all, merely
practical.
50 The Gothic

You can fi x the tile along with other tiles to form a

weatherproof cov ering only by overlaying them. It’s worth
looking out for the many ways of doing this and for the varied
types of tile that have been developed for the purpose. But the
upshot is clear – the tile is fi xed, probably with nails, by a roofer
and is the smallest component of the roof, probably because the
clay can be fi red only so big or the slate economically used so
big. The tile can span only between and over other tiles and is fi
xed to the next component up, the batten. The batten spans in
the other, horizontal, direction, whereas the tile spans vertically
or, rather, to the angle of the sloping roof. The batten has to
span a distance too, a bit longer than the tile, and it spans
between the rafters to which it is fi xed. While the batten spans
horizontally, the rafters once again span vertically, or to the slope
of the roof. The rafters are the next component up, spanning
much further than the batten but still not far enough, so they
span between purlins, which again are spanning horizontally.
The purlins are much bigger than the rafters, and they span
between the biggest component, the truss, the things you are
likely to see articulating the space of that roof as you look up
from the interior. These triangulated structures have to span all
the way between the supporting walls and support the purlins,
and because of their size and the demands put on them, even if
there are relatively few of them, they can get quite complex, with
so-called king and queen posts and hammerbeams.
The width of the nave is determined by the size of truss you
can build, and since trees grow only so big, the length of the log
or the extent to which you can join the logs together to make the
truss will be the deter mining factor.
The only way you can go bigger than this is to vault the nave
in stone. This has the advantage of being fi reproof but the
disadvantage of weight. And for now we’ve forgotten concrete, a
Roman invention now lost. However, once we can make holes in
walls by making arches, it is only a matter of perfecting
technique to turn a two-dimensional arch into a
three-dimensional vault. Vaults of ribs with infi ll characterise the
devel
opment of the medieval masons and allow bigger spans than the
length of a tree between supporting walls. But the masons soon
discovered that the problem with vaults as opposed to trusses is
that the vault pushes to some degree horizontally. The truss sits
squarely on its supporting walls and all forces are resolved in
the downward direction, but a vault to one extent or another
pushes them out, so the walls have to be buttressed. Then, if
you put holes in the buttresses, you get fl ying buttresses, and if
you need more downward force on the buttresses you pile
pinnacles on top of them, and you get a cathedral such as the
one at Cologne, which
The Gothic 51

from the outside looks like a huge porcupine, but that doesn’t
matter, because inside, with all those holes fi lled with elaborate
stained glass, it looks like the kingdom of heaven itself.
A great deal of trial and error went into these structures. What
we would call disastrous failure regularly occurred. The masons
became secretive, they moved from job to job and met in their
own hut where the clergy were kept out for fear of interference.
They became quite naturally a kind of secret society, the origin
of freemasonry and the ancestry of the profes
sional status of the architect.
Cologne cathedral did not fall down, even when the Allies
dropped thousands of tons of high explosive and incendiary
bombs on it. Cologne was victim to the fi rst ‘thousand bomber’
raid, in May 1942, and we can imagine on the one hand a
sensitive colonel in the briefi ng room, remind
ing his bombardiers that the precious cathedral stood next to the
railway station right in the centre of the city, and on the other, in
this context of total war, some hours later, a steely rationalist
bombardier drifting his B17 right over that same cathedral and
pressing the button in preference to bombing the surrounding
civilian population. We can also imagine that the fact that the
cathedral survived (demonstrating almost supernatural power)
might have severely spooked him.
The great cathedrals dominate our understanding of the
Gothic. Domestically nothing much survives because much of
the populace lived in hovels. Of course there are castles, whose
design evolution depended largely on keeping up with the latest
measures for assault. It would take the Italians to realise that
being at war didn’t necessarily mean you had to fi ght, and the
business could become more symbolic. Eventually, general
improvement in the social order would breed charming fortifi ed
houses, such as Stokesay Castle on the Welsh borders, to
provide ideal homes for today’s Conservative MPs.
So in England today we are blessed with Gothic lite, from the
humble village church – iconic feature of the English landscape
– to the triumphant cathedrals of Ely and Salisbury. But we have
the medieval map of the world, the Mappa Mundi in Hereford,
that in its accurate depiction of a psychol
ogy as well as a physical geography shows us just how horrifi c
the medieval world really was – a world which could aspire
heavenward but hardly map the coastline. There is a distinct
kink in the choir at Lichfi eld cathedral demon
strating how well the gothic masons enjoyed going up rather than
across. We’ve categorised Gothic architecture politely into
phases – Norman, Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular
– each representing that ongoing struggle heavenwards,
culminating in the jolly smart magnifi - cence of King’s College
Chapel in Cambridge. We’ve adopted it as the
52 The Gothic

style for the Houses of Parliament and dressed suburban homes

and post offi ces and pubs in ‘Gothick’. We’ve believed in it as
representing us true Brits. Dotty but highly infl uential writers
such as John Ruskin have championed it, William Burges
created fantasy castles with it and Waterhouse Victorian town
halls and railway stations with it. We have certainly overdone it,
even if I still love those Sisters of Mercy records.

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5
THE RENAISSANCE
The Renaissance could not have happened without
developments in trade, a certain rather fresh enthusiasm for the
mercantile economy and a certain questioning of the role of the
Church, all in a day’s work as far as our civilisation goes.
This despite the fact that such a large number of Renaissance
build ings are idealised church buildings, since people still
wanted to prove how godly and righteous they were compared
with everybody else. The stan dard example illustrating the birth
of this phenomenon is Florence in the fi fteenth century, as
Florence became the centre for wool – English wool as it
happens – coupled with the dyes that came from the East. But,
as well as associating the Renaissance with Florence, we could
associate it with Bruges, since that city grew the fi rst bourse,
and it was the banking houses that benefi ted as a consequence
of trade, given their innovations in the world of international
currency exchange, and that drove the Renaissance.
There were suddenly international ties to be considered as
well as local disputes. You were unlikely to jeopardise your
newfound wealth by wast ing a further hundred years debating
whether angels had wings; there were more practical matters to
address. It was a tumultuous period, with Italian city states,
principally Florence, Milan and Venice, and foreign powers,
France, Spain and even Switzerland, along with the Holy Roman
Empire, in continual competition and dispute. Sometimes they
would actually fi ght, and sometimes they realised a standoff.
There was fragility in governance, and it took Niccolò
Machiavelli, a Florentine, to produce the one work symbolic of
both the period and another birth of modern times: The Prince.
The Prince, an amazingly readable book, simply gives
56 The Renaissance

advice to the modern prince on how to conduct affairs. It is

practical rather than idealistic and hence witnesses a rebirth of
politics. In the eyes of the Church, it came very close to being
heretical, since, despite many passages reassuring the reader
of the author’s motives, it clearly puts man back at the centre of
things. Quotes such as ‘it is much more secure to be feared
rather than loved’ could after all relate to the Church at this time
as well as to any prince, but that was not exactly the
consequence of such a thought; the general consensus became
‘the end justifi es the means’, clearly not an idealist, godly
sentiment but a practical political one.
A system of continually warring families, states and nations
was hardly ideal. Despotism would provide material and artistic
gains at the great expense of others, and it would take the
second great writer of the Renaissance, Michel de Montaigne
(writing fi fty years after The Prince), to write in mordant humour
(both writers are enjoyed for their nonesoteric writing style) on
the delights of scepticism, so setting us on the road to the
Enlightenment (and Rome again).
However, Renaissance Italy did provide us with the most
fabulous art and architecture, even if it appeared to come out of
chaos. Filippo Brunelleschi began life as a clockmaker in
Florence. Remember that Vit ruvius wrote of timepieces and that
the Pantheon in Rome measures, to some extent, the time of
day, but by this time we are talking of the ratchets and weights
of mechanical timepieces, demanding the skills of the silver and
goldsmith. Skill in such small balancing machinery was
transferable to the siege engine or the pulleys and cantilevers of
cranes and scaffold ing. It was by this route that Brunelleschi
found himself an architect, as a man of fi endish ingenuity.
Alongside this knowledge Brunelleschi also cultivated an
interest in the architecture of the Ancients, travelling with his
close friend Donatello to Rome, by now a place largely to be
avoided through superstition and inhabited by derelicts.
Travelling incognito, with a staff and a basic knowledge of
trigonometry, he could calculate height by the length of a
shadow; Brunelleschi hence began to reconstitute notions of
order and proportion of ancient times, almost working
archaeologically amid the long
plundered remains, excavating and measuring things right at his
feet. Brunelleschi also pondered the beauties of the eye as he
formulated the rules of perspective via a curious little handheld
device. Previously it was widely held that the eyes were like ray
guns, outward sensors, and that whatever you saw was real. If
you saw goblins, there were goblins. What Brunelleschi
understood was that the eyes were passive receptors, that light
travelled in straight lines and behaved mathematically. Goblins
were an illusion.
The Renaissance 57
PHOTOGRAPH 5 Our wedding at the Las Vegas Fantasy Wedding
Chapel. Married by King Tut, with a belly dancer from
Brighton and
four schools of architecture on a fi eld trip.
Credit: Susan Perry

He was also rather ugly, devious, antisocial, an excellent

mimic and prone to playing practical jokes. One evening he got
a particular enemy drunk, then slunk away to hide in the man’s
bed. When the victim arrived home, Filippo pretended to be him.
Since the victim believed what he heard through his own locked
door, he was driven mad; he believed a magic show. So
Brunelleschi presents a rather classic combination, prac
tical ingenuity meeting the reinterpretation of Classical sources
under the auspices of an extraordinary personality. And he is
our fi rst modern architect.
And what ingratiates Brunelleschi’s architecture to our eyes is
a quality we cherish in the architecture of the modern period, for
it is extremely modest. It can be playfully articulate in plan (look
at the plan of the Foundling Hospital in Florence), but in
appearance it is uniformly strict, stripped, with a colour palette of
purely grey and white: ordered, calm. Both the churches of San
Lorenzo and Santo Spirito in Florence exem
plify these qualities. It is defi nitely not a reincarnation of the
operatic splendour of Rome, and it embodies none of the
strenuousness of the
58 The Renaissance

Gothic; it does not have to try too hard and offers, despite the
social con text in which it was created, spaces of great repose.
The development of perspective certainly helped this sense of
repose, and it began to be applied to the urban landscape in
general. Ideal squares, ideal cities came out of the previously
ramshackle. If we were created in the image of God, the idea
seemed to be that we had now fathomed some of his tricks.
Humanism was born. We could create places in the image of
God-given harmony; more than that, we could dream of a sense
of unity in the conception, all the pieces fi tting together in this
har
mony. This harmony might be derived from mathematical ratio or
music, then applied to plan, elevation and section. It might be
less easy to com modify harmony in three dimensions, but the
laws of perspective at least centralised vision. All this despite
the fact that in the actualities of life (Brunelleschi no less than
anybody else as a goldsmith), it meant working in appalling
conditions of fi lth and stench.
Leon Battista Alberti, who had enjoyed a precocious early life
as an athlete, linguist, pornographer (writer of fruity poetry),
antiquary, art critic and diplomat, became the propagandist for
this reinvigoration of the ancient Classical architecture with his
Ten Books on Architecture, which became the fi rst printed book
on architecture, in 1485. This was essen
tially a reworking of Vitruvius with added zeal. Where Vitruvius
seemed to see himself as a custodian of ancient knowledge,
Alberti was overtly promoting the display of Classical virtue to
the vulgar citizenry. In this sense it’s a precursor to something
we would see in the twentieth century – its machine-age
counterparts, Le Corbusier’s volumes Towards a New Archi
tecture and The Radiant City. In his work Alberti sets out
fascinating and useful information on when to fell trees, how to
choose neighbours and the mechanics of pulleys, as well as
redetermining the rules of elegant building, just as L-C railed
about the stupidity of traffi c wardens while setting out his fi ve
points for a new architecture.
The stratagem proved popular: there are rafts of examples,
but Bra mante is considered most representative of the mature
reinterpretation of the Classical, even if it’s for the tiniest of
reinterpretations of a cir cular Roman temple at San Pietro in
Montorio of 1502. Of the others, Vignola, Romano, Sangallo and
so on, I’m going to deviate; I don’t want to list.
Deviation, repetition, hesitation – that’s how you got lost in Just a
Min ute, my favourite radio programme as a boy, but also that’s
what made the show. When lecturing you may lose your thread,
pace up and down a bit, fi ll in with something else – you never
really know what you might say next, and certainly I never read
from notes. I think of the lecture hall as almost sacred, a locked
room of initiates, of participants. In a book it’s easy
The Renaissance 59
to dry that sort of thing out, become too academic. That is why
this book is drafted without reference books to hand, with confl
ict in Gaza and Ukraine and documentaries on wild boars on the
TV, with the whirr of a small fan that struggles against Berlin at
the end of July, and with only minimal use of the Internet (the
Internet, of course, is the kiss of death to something as vital as
lecturing to a group of real laughing, crying people). So we
pause, and I pace up and down a bit.
Sometimes this book’s questions revolve around
conversations I have with my wife, Julie, in the bar around the
corner. Things like: ‘What music did they play in the
Renaissance? . . . what did they have for breakfast? . . . what
was the ideal shape for a woman? . . . was Brunelleschi
homosexual?’
‘I have no idea’, I reply and then think about it.
‘I guess . . . lutes . . . wine for lunch certainly . . . all the
scaffolders on the Duomo [Brunelleschi’s technical masterpiece]
in Florence would have a fl agon of wine for lunch even at such
dangerous heights, and anyway the water was foul. I guess the
shape of the ideal woman was “rich”. . . at least potentially . . .
and homosexuality was so rife that the prostitutes of Flor
ence were asked to wear bells on their heads to remind the
gentlemen of the “correct” orientation . . . it was thought to be
(sapping the army) . . .’ And with such musings we get a
renewed sense of an arduous, highly competitive daily life.
Benvenuto Cellini (more of him later), also a gold smith,
complains of being charged with having sex ‘the Italian way’ and
his need to keep a girl in his back room ready for his every
pleasure. His exploits include swordfi ghts with ruffi ans sent to
hijack gold he’s only just been given to carry out a commission.
The level of double-cross, intrigue, pettiness, deception and
duplicity that seems to mark those times is extraordinary.
Casanova seduces his mistress while the husband wants to
watch, from the vantage point of a secret cupboard; Casanova
falls in love with a young girl, or is it a boy? When we see politics
as it was then, it is not the same as the politics we see now,
which, while venal on an international scale, rides a platform of
our supine resignation at home. This is ducking and diving for
high stakes every time you leave the house. No doubt if I’d read
the Ancient writers, the Romans Plutarch, Cicero, Seneca and
so on, Greece and Rome would become more alive too, but
even Claudius fi ghts shy of detailing Tiberius’s bestiality. Above
all, his tory is a work in progress. It unravels before our eyes, and
over the years, and over the centuries. Mies van der Rohe, the
great twentieth-century architect, was known to prize the
thoughts of St Augustine, but Philip Johnson (see chapters 9
and 10) claimed he’d never seen him read a book. So as I sit
here I want you to realise this is a live document; you must for
give my lack of reading of Seneca and Plutarch (or St
Augustine), but at
60 The Renaissance

least savour the fact that I know by this stage in my life that they
might be important and that they may become so to you.
That out of the way, let’s get back to our impression of
Michelangelo – Michelangelo Buonarroti, the original artist diva.
There’s a funny scene in the 1965 fi lm The Agony and the
Ecstasy where Rex Harrison (playing Pope Julius II this time,
rather than Caesar in Cleopatra) is about to go into battle having
laid siege to Perugia or Bologna or some such place and is
confronted by Michelangelo, played by Charlton Heston (who
also played Ben Hur), brandishing his roll of cartoons for the
Sistine Chapel. While his commanders keep running up to him
urging the pontiff to get on with it and with cannonballs raining
down around him, the pope instead spreads the drawings out on
the ground and proceeds to haggle over Michelangelo’s fee. The
scene seems so outlandish it appears ridicu lous to us, but
perhaps it wasn’t at all. Pope Julius II was a good military
campaigner, forger of alliances and great patron of the arts, and
here we just see him doing it all at the same time, condensed.
If you’d been watching the whole fi lm you would have seen
Michel angelo himself, in rather camp fashion, receive his
inspiration for the ceiling from a dramatic confi guration of cloud
forms he witnesses from the summit of the quarry where he is
cutting his stone. And we are confronted by ongoing hysteria;
his Pietà (1499) – a sculpture of Mary holding the dead Jesus,
found just inside the portals of St Peter’s – is as well known for
the sobbing crowds that continually gather in front of it. In 1972
an enraged geologist even attacked it with a hammer while
shouting, ‘I am Jesus Christ!’, so it’s now protected by bulletproof
acrylic.
The Pietà represents the astonishing combination of
naturalism and Classical composition under the auspices of a
religious theme. It is per haps the pinnacle of high Renaissance.
It is important to realise that in Gothic art the general rule was
that the most important fi gures were shown the biggest; here
such a basic conception has been utterly over turned, and in this
marble we do feel the pain. Michelangelo was so proud of it he
signed it, something he would never do for any other work, for he
suddenly felt it one step too far for a man.
But Michelangelo the architect is also temperamentally
theatrical; his combinations of motifs are so fl uid and unusual
as to demand the term ‘mannerism’. His Laurentian Library
features a fairly outrageous entrance stair, while his entrance
gate the Porta Pia (1565) for Pope Pius IV fea
tures an unusual feature in the decoration of the upper round
windows, which appear to be draped in fabric. These are
barbers’ towels, reminding us of that pope’s worthy origins. His
Piazza del Campidoglio atop the Capitoline Hill not only features
a domed and richly patterned fl oor; it
The Renaissance 61

arranges the buildings to inversely exaggerate the perspective

on reaching the top of the grand steps leading up to it.
We might view divine inspiration as contradictory to the order
and proportion we associate with Renaissance architecture. It’s
hard to imagine the passionate artist who had just completed
the Sistine Chapel fi nding the manipulation of mere Lego-like
blocks suffi cient. It wasn’t. Michel
angelo disturbed the language and emphasised the sculptural
dimension, so the Laurentian Library antechamber is tall and
small like a pit, with that overexaggerated stair bulging out, while
the library is long and thin like a tunnel. Pevsner compares this
stretching to a similar exaggeration we can see in Tintoretto’s
painting Finding of the Body of St Mark (1548), so others were
doing this, too, but then Michelangelo jumbles up the
components so that they no longer make logical sense. This is
why Jacob Burck
hardt was more inclined to think his moves ‘an incomprehensible
joke of the great master’, somebody who was confi dent enough
to bring it off. Meanwhile we can imagine him as impossible to
work with, demanding at every turn. We might also think it all a
bit over the top, but that gives us another lesson, that nothing
ever reaches stasis, that somebody always pushes things on, or
over, the edge.
Michelangelo appears as the darkest philosopher within the
famous papal room fresco The School of Athens by Raphael.
There he is brooding in brown while Plato points upward to
heavenly purity (perfect circles) and Aristotle down to earthly
facts (imperfect circles), both surrounded by clumps of all the
other thinkers, collected in the grand embrace and perspective of
the Church. Perhaps this is the summit of the Renaissance; too,
this representa
tion of largesse, the grand accommodation of ideas all in one.
While we can envy this state of affairs, all balanced and correct,
we soon realise this is not quite the case anymore.
Michelangelo’s precociousness prefi gures the Romantic, the
madness of Goya or Velázquez – who painted royal fi gures with
the faces of doughnuts – or our twentieth-century Francis Bacon,
who painted those tormented popes like salivating animals.
Once ‘God is dead’ we shall certainly reap the whirlwind. But
nevertheless we stand in front of The School of Athens in awe,
for what was in Raphael’s grasp and not our own.
Times were certainly not dull. The Villa Giulia was the party
residence of Pope Julius III. Vasari might credit himself with the
overall design, Vignola the main villa, Ammannati the playful
waterworks; even Michel angelo pitched in.
It features a delightful nympheum at the bottom of the garden
running three storeys into the ground: a land of the frolicking
nymphs, possibly literally frolicking nymphs if this pope’s
reputation is believed, frolicking nymphs usefully hidden behind
a large wall. Of course such grottoes mimic the Roman
excavations of the time, where wild pagan scenes were
62 The Renaissance

found painted on the subterranean caverns. They were

functional, too, for the cool waters of the nympheum soothed the
pope’s gout. So the representation and control of nature, the
taming of (wild or otherwise) nature, as well as historical
reference, was now the very subject, and obviously this resulted
in various contortions when it came to rela tion to God’s will, the
Church and the Garden of Eden. At the Villa Lante at Bagnaia,
near Viterbo, in central Italy (Vignola 1564), we can see that
man’s control of nature is represented by the channelling of
water – from the gurgling spring of the grotto to its passing over
a series of obstacles to its eventual presence as delightful
fountains and playthings. With the world more secure, the world
of gardening extends beyond the cloister and extends across
the landscape as a series of formal open-air rooms. A narrative
is established that demonstrates how far we’ve come, so where
do we go next?
With such power came a problem. The Reformation, the
reaction against the hegemony of the Catholic Church, was
much facilitated by a northern invention of Johannes Gutenberg
around 1439: the movable type printing press. This machine –
just as the computer has done across the Middle East today –
facilitates rebellion. The dissemination of infor mation is
sometimes more provocative than the understanding of it and is
often suffi cient to provoke anger among the already aggrieved.
It was Martin Luther who took pubic offence at the Church for
the selling of indulgences (indulgences were one step on from
the promise of heaven; they were actual tickets), and he wasn’t
afraid to say how un-Christian this practice appeared.
Meanwhile, he translated the Bible into a vernacular that
ordinary Germans could understand.
He was excommunicated in 1521, but in the north the
Reformation gained sway. Some found it personally
advantageous (Henry VIII of Eng land, for instance), but for the
Catholic Church principle was at stake (the cumulative
formulations of Church practice); there was no way you could
have people running around saying that the teachings of the
Cath olic Church were no longer consistent with the teachings of
the Bible. Hence the Inquisition, memorably explained in the
chapter ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers
Karamazov or by Monty Python in ‘Nobody Expects the Spanish
Inquisition’!
In architectural terms the Counter-Reformation, the Catholic
Church’s response to the Reformation, was a beano. The public
had to be convinced of the need for discipline and the power of
the Church just in case they turned heretical, and new churches
would become more operatic and more extreme in their
depiction of the rewards of correctly pursued faith. Ignatius
Loyola (1491–1556) founded a fanatical Jesuit order that
undertook a series of arduous spiritual exercises to the higher
The Renaissance 63

truth. This can be seen physically manifest in the Loyola chapel

in Rome (1722), which demands you stand on one spot to
comprehend the whole of God’s world in all its rollicking glory.
When you leave that spot, you don’t get it any more – a perfect
metaphor. Loyola’s fanaticism (or the notion of Opus Dei) was
thoroughly exploited in the blockbuster The Da Vinci Code .
This retaliatory swing is commonly termed the Baroque
(around 1600), where architecture – even church architecture,
especially church architecture – would turn into a veritable ice
cream cone of complex ity and movement. We should remember
that the Roman Church was everything. No event, no medical
calamity, no birth or death, no affair of state, not even the buying
of a bun seemed to preclude its intervention. The Inquisition
courts held numbers you might fi nd at bullfi ghts through the
sixteenth century. You needed the Church for everything, to
become a lawyer, a doctor, a teacher, anything. And the Church
became very wealthy (while all the time, according to Luther, it
shouldn’t be).
Remember Jesus turfi ng out the traders from the temple?
Remember ‘usury’? The making of money without personal
effort, this was a spiri tual crime according to the Holy Bible, but
it was exactly what the new currency exchanges engendered.
Once merchants had developed a system of international
exchange, where invariably currencies were valued higher in
their place of origin than elsewhere, variable exchange rates
would inevitably make money without any effort. To stay on the
right side of the Church, the merchant bankers donated vast
sums of money, and, as the cash rolled in, the Church decided
to continually fudge the issue (or build more glory to God),
something anticapitalist campaigners note even today. Only
Savonarola, with his ‘bonfi re of the vanities’ (when even
Botticelli burnt his own paintings), took a stand, only to be very
quickly assassinated in 1498.
The Catholic Church was rich, but just like our multinational
compa nies today it needed to be richer, since it had competition.
Meanwhile, the mercantile economy brought more wealth, and
opulence impressed cli ents. Baroque architecture was like
advertising; it was rabid self-promotion to the masses in an age
before television and magazines, and its masters were
Borromini and his foil, Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
It’s best to think of Bernini as a Hollywood stylist, maybe
Warren Beatty. You go to the right parties, you have all the right
connections, you can do something this way or you can do it
that way, so what do you fancy? Probably Bernini’s best-known
work is the great colonnade in front of St Peter’s in Rome –
giant arms to gather the fl ock – but his most representative is
probably the Ecstasy of St Teresa in the Cornaro chapel of
Santa Maria della Vittoria. This is far better described as St
Teresa in ecstasy

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Architectural History

Uploaded by

Architectural History

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www.ebook3000.

How much do you know about Greek architecture? Roman?

Paul Davies was born on Mersea Island in 1961 and studied at

“Paul Davies’ erudite and (sometimes) misanthropic insights into

Illustrated by Emily Forgot

1 Introduction 1 2 Ancient Greece 9 3 Ancient Rome25 4

The Gothic39 5 The Renaissance55 6 The Enlightenment

71 7 The Industrial Revolution87 8 European

Modernism103 9 American Modernism121

10 Postmodernism139 11 The future155

Further reading 167 Index 171

from our lexicon but is nevertheless something that got people

Catalan monk Antonio Gaudi. This bizarre reasoning I hope will

chancellors come and go: planning, civil engineering, urban

On the beach. Still the mud lark on Mersea Island, where I

There once was a town in eastern Czechoslovakia called

digging out coal without a ray of sunshine, to have at least

PHOTOGRAPH 1 My father (right) as apprentice of the month, Ruston

affordable homes will be built to lower specifi cations than those

what does he mean?’ Such questions have vexed me ever since

Just as we might put food in a restaurant, we build

Of course I’ve sat and drawn Ronchamp rather picturesquely,

You might be thinking, what about the pyramids of Ancient

PHOTOGRAPH 2 Age 19, with my fi rst motorbike, bought during my fi

sulking against Agamemnon, who’s on the same side but has

profundities of the human condition the Ancient Greeks manage

be multiplying, our cinemas and games consoles are positively

or a Madonna once you’ve made it; it will inevitably mean a

strung together, and there are city walls. To make sanctuaries,

primitive form of medical diagnostic; if you practised it enough

to build a temple, wherever they wanted to put it, the Greeks fi

Leading up to the temple is the processional route populated

geological forms; notably, in the distance there is usually a

tradition, symbolic of a kind of gentleness that brings with it

other opposite corner, the visibly tired beast dragging it down

This page intentionally left blank

pirates, after all, are not distracted by the whiff of nationhood,

PHOTOGRAPH 3 In front of ‘the world’s biggest sign’, outside the Hilton

Cleo. Meanwhile, his earlier line speaks the political truth:

to writing history that I mention in the prologue to this book. He is

collection, and people generally just threw it out of the windows.

Looking at the remains of a Roman wall is unimpressive – a

The policy of the emperors and the senate, as far as it

the phenomenon again, in reverse, when we come to scrutinise

like Caesars Palace, you’ll never see so much as a dustcart. The

(by reputation originally a harmless vineyard cult) transformed

This pursuit of the agreeable architects will not shake off,

Chuck Klosterman who might routinely admit they have been

PHOTOGRAPH 4 Cleopatra’s Barge, Caesars Palace. In my mind

no drawings of it in my sketchbooks. Serendipity plays its part;

a bell tower reminding the populace of their obligations. Then

of damsels and knights and fairy castles and crusades, which we

beyond into Wilmslow’s suburbs and my teenage bedroom. All of

stern brooding essays in control; there’s nothing light about

complained of the privies at Windsor. The draw must be the airs

mocks. Meanwhile, of course, the Gothic also appeals to lovers

against the DDR in 1989 – as well as being a centre for German

You can fi x the tile along with other tiles to form a

style for the Houses of Parliament and dressed suburban homes

This page intentionally left blank

advice to the modern prince on how to conduct affairs. It is

He was also rather ugly, devious, antisocial, an excellent

arranges the buildings to inversely exaggerate the perspective

found painted on the subterranean caverns. They were

truth. This can be seen physically manifest in the Loyola chapel

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