The Classical Language of Architecture

A classical building is one whose decorative elements derive directly or indirectly from the architectural vocabulary of the ancient world.

That is one description, but it is just the uniform worn by a certain category of buildings. It says nothing of the essence of classicism in architecture.

The aim of classical architecture has been to achieve a demonstrable harmony of parts. Theoreticians considered it analogous to musical harmony. Harmony in a structure is achieved by proportion, ensuring the ratios in a building are simple arithmetic functions and dimensions involving the repetition of ratios.

The five orders are Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite. First laid out by Vitruvius in De Architectura, then codified by Serlio 1400 years later during the Renaissance. They are an important choice for any architect and set the mood for the design.

They each have resembling personalities, perhaps thanks to Vitruvius, who said the shape of Doric represented the proportion, strength, and grace of a man's body. He said Ionic had the feminine slenderness and Corinthian had the slight figure of a girl. Some call Corinthian virginal while others call it lascivious. Regardless, Doric is always considered male and Corinthian feminine, while Ionic is somewhere in between, unisex and scholarly.

Architects tend to use Tuscan and Doric when they want to express roughness and toughness and a soldierly bearing. This need not be taken too seriously. Tuscan and Doric are obviously less expensive and circumstance can dictate order choice as well.

When you are looking at a Doric order executed in stone, you are looking at a carved representation of a Doric order in wood. For example, the triglyphs could be read as the ends of cross beams resting on the architrave.

When the Romans adopted the arch and vault for their public buildings, they brought in the orders. They married the highly stylized kind of temple architecture to arched and vaulted multi-story buildings of great elaboration. The orders are, in many Roman buildings, structurally useless, but they make the buildings expressive and visually dominate and control the buildings to which they are attached.

Structure and architectural expression were integrated in a variety of ways. You can have detached columns with a wall behind them which they do not touch, but their entablature is firmly built. Then you can have three-quarter-columns, one quarter of which is buried in the wall. Similarly you can have half columns. And finally you can have pilasters, which are flat representations of columns carved in relief on the wall. Those are four degrees of integration of an order in a structure, four degrees of relief, four strengths of shadow. Every time an order changes its plane of relief, say from pilaster forward to half, the entablature has to break forward too.

Vertical elements are posts. Horizontal elements are lintels. Trabeation is post-and-lintel construction, which is the system the orders belonged to. Roman buildings were designed on the basis of arches and vaults, which required massive piers to bear the loads. Columns were too slender, and the thought of divorcing them from their trabeation would look mutilated.

The Colosseum is a good example of how the Romans married the arcuated and trabeated systems. Every row of arches is framed inside a continuous colonnade. The colonnades have no structural purpose; they are simply a means of expression.

The Colosseum has four orders: Doric on the ground, Ionic on the next, Corinthian on the uppermost story, and on the plain story above an indeterminate order unique to the Colosseum. The Colosseum was one of the buildings from which the men of the Renaissance learned the most.

The Triumphal Arches of Rome were also instructive grammatically. The most famous is the Arch of Constantine in Rome. The Basilica di Sant'Andrea in Mantua by Alberti is based on the triumphal-arch theme. The most elementary fact of all about them, the division of space by columns into three unequal parts: narrow, wide, narrow, is perhaps most important, and many buildings follow that triumphal-arch rhythm.

The spacing of columns, intercolumniation, sets the tempo of a building. The Romans established five standard types from 1.5 diameter spacing, pycnostyle, to 4 diameter spacing, araeostyle, with systyle, eustyle, and diastyle in between. They evoke different emotions. Larger spacing is more stately, serene, and meditative while pycnostyle is tense and formidable.

Donato Bramante re-established the grammar of ancient Rome in buildings of the sixteenth century. His Tempietto at S. Pietro in Montorio, Rome is a recreation of an ancient Roman circular temple. Domes from future architects are clearly inspired by Bramante's little temple.

Bramante's House of Raphael is another classic invention of his that echoed down centuries to our own. It consisted of a Doric order with coupled columns standing on an arched rusticated podium. This idea was new at the time but can now be seen in Venice and the Grand Canal, the Strand front of Somerset House, and many more places.

He led architecture in Italy by extending and adapting the antique, what is now called the High Renaissance.

Palladio resurrected Rome in Vicenza and Venice with even more realism and appreciation for the orders than Bramante. You can see his love of the orders in his work. He is more articulate in exhibiting them.

Giulio Romano brought rustication to the next level of expressiveness. Rustication is the rough, countrified way of laying stones. A rough character. A mixture of the natural and the artificial. A struggle between the two. Giulio's Palazzo del Te is an assault on the grammar of classicism. It is mannerism. Everything is a bit uneasy and wrong on purpose. The stones seem to be struggling with the highly finished architectural detail.

But a much greater revolutionary than Giulio Romano, the man who really did outrage the authority of the High Renaissance and turn classical architecture into new courses, was Michelangelo.

Raphael, a classical master, could have all the pieces of his works described in Vitruvian terms. Michelangelo's is almost impossible to describe in words. It is his own personal equivalent of Vitruvius.

Michelangelo combined Corinthian and Ionic orders in his Capitoline palace. Corinthian goes double story and Ionic single story to control the whole building. Mannerism. The secondary order was Michelangelo's Capitoline invention.

The Church of Gesu in Rome, designed by Vignola, is an example of mannerism and was imitated many times in many ways, such as S. Susanna in Rome by Carlo Maderna, which is considered baroque. The difference is that Gesu is diffuse and ambiguous while Susanna has force and is decisive. The Church of Val-de-Grace in Paris by Francois Mansart derives from Gesu but is neither mannerist nor baroque. It too has its own personality that belongs to a phase of French art with classical standards of its own.

If architecture is a language, baroque is considered rhetorical in the sense of grandiloquent, contrived, persuasive oratory. Three demonstrations of baroque rhetoric are the Piazza of St. Peter's, the Louvre, and Blenheim Palace. They persuade us of the universal embrace of the Roman Church, the paramount magnificence of Louis XIV, and the invincible glory of British arms.

The Louvre in Paris is a palace and combines the purpose of a palace with an exposition of Roman temple architecture on the largest scale. The Corinthian colonnade in column pairs is dramatic and striking. The wall is set back so the columns look like part of a temple, and then at the end pavilions the wall comes forward and the order turns itself into pilasters.

In France in the middle of the seventeenth century, some questions were being asked about the true nature of the orders and the way they should be used in modern buildings. Their natural rightness was accepted and ensuring their purity and integrity was the first concern of the French critics.

This natural rightness in the orders comes from an unreasoning faith in Roman excellence, belonging mostly to the fifteenth century. This belief could come from every educated person agreeing on Rome's incomparable beauty, or because it was enshrined in certain mathematical rules that account for beauty, or perhaps because it had descended from the Greeks and thus possessed a sort of natural rightness.

The abbe Cordemoy wrote Nouveau Traite in 1706 and argued to liberate the orders from every kind of distortion and affectation. He wanted to rid them of ornamental use. Get rid of architecture in relief: pilasters, half, three-quarter, attached columns. A kind of primitivism, stripping away the brilliant play of the Italian masters and making the orders speak their original functional language.

It was not until fifty years later that another French abbe, Laugier, established the hypothesis that the ultimate image of architectural truth was the primitive hut: upright posts, cross beams, and a pitched roof. It was the model upon which all the magnificence of architecture had been imagined. He agreed with Cordemoy that all architecture in relief must go and then went a step further in wanting even walls to go. His ideal building was columns carrying beams carrying a roof, using the orders in function.

He knew walls could not actually be abolished, but as a philosopher he was dealing in the abstract. He wrote all this in his Essai sur l'Architecture. It is fair to say that any fresh, innovating work after 1755 is either colored by Laugier's views or shows a positive rejection of them.

The Pantheon in Paris embodies his principles to a spectacular degree. Even though there is lots of wall, the architect, Jacques-Germain Soufflot, intended to have more window than wall, but it proved unsafe and the windows had to be filled in. Inside, though, you can clearly see he was trying to build a church in which the order, expressed only in the round, not only looked beautiful but actually did the work of carrying the roof.

It is the first major building which can be described as neo-classical, meaning it tends toward the simplification advocated by Cordemoy and Laugier while also presenting the orders with the utmost antiquarian fidelity. Reason and archaeology are what make neo-classicism and differentiate it from baroque. However, it is always dangerous to give a label too much meaning.