Architecture As Language - Bruno Zevi - Pidgeon Digital

Architecture As Language | Bruno Zevi | Pidgeon Digital 14/05/20, 15:52
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Architecture As Language
Bruno Zevi
BRUNO ZEVI
©Bruno Zevi
It is commonly said, as you all know, that in the old buildings of the archaeological
ruins of Egypt or Greece one can read the ways of living of these ancient civilizations;
or that in the Florentine and Venetian palaces is written the message of the
Renaissance. Well, if buildings really speak, architecture is a form of communication,
it is a language that everybody should learn to understand, because all of us have to
do with the built environment. But is it only one language, or several languages? How
many architectural languages exist? Probably, as many as verbal languages, but
essentially two: the classicist language, based on rules and dogmas, such as
symmetry, rhythm, consonance, proportion, perspective, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian
Orders, and a lot of other grammatical and syntactic precepts; and the opposite
language, human, organic, anticlassicist, which is based not on form but on content,
not on the look of a building but on its use. Shall we try, just for a start, to find out
which of these two languages has more informative value?
https://www-pidgeondigital-com.proxy-auth3.iuav.it/talks/architecture-as-language/chapters/ Pagina 1 di 23
TOP: BRITISH MUSEUM, LONDON. BOTTOM:

STROZZI PALACE, FLORENCE.
©Top: Bruno Zevi Bottom: Architectural Association
Think of any monumental building, of any official, institutional structure with a big
colonnade in front of it. Let's speak with this building. Let's begin by asking who are
you? I bet there won't be any answer. The building has no identity. It could be a royal
palace, law courts, a university, a ministry, a museum. It is clear that the architect did
not care about telling you the purpose of his design. 0n the contrary, he was
interested in concealing its content behind an emphatic façade. He did not want to
speak to you, he wanted only to impress; imposing on people something solemn,
almost sacred, completely out of scale with the human being. Generally, there are
staircases before the colonnade, to make it more difficult for you to get in, to
discourage you from entering. This kind of architectural language, the classicist, is
static, universal and eternal. Nothing can be added or subtracted. If you remove a
column, the whole system will collapse because it depends on the most rigid
symmetry. Let's try asking one of its elements, for instance a column: Who are you?
Again, no answer. This column has no identity: it belongs to the colonnade, to an

almost military organization, where individual peculiarities are suppressed, and
everybody is dressed the same and aligned to the same standard height. It you don't
have columns, you will have windows; but don't try to ask a window: who are you?
You will have no answer. Windows are all equal, equally spaced along the façade,
superimposed one above the other so as to have a series of vertical axes. It is evident
that the architect, designing these windows, thought of everything except the real
function of a window, which is to give light to a room. In any palace, the rooms are
certainly not equal: the ballroom can't have the same dimensions as the bathroom.
But the architect was interested in the proportion of the façade itself, and therefore
the window of the bathroom had to be the same as those of the reception hall.
Nothing can be read of what is behind the façade. Everything has to be anonymous,
rhetorical, monumental, deprived of semantic value. This is the classicist language of
architecture; the one that spread all over the world, during the XIX century, from the
Paris École des Beaux-Arts. It is the language of an architecture symbolic of power,
authority, oligarchy, in the best case of bureaucracy, quite often of dictatorship. It is
the language typical of Napoleonic architecture, nourished by the abstract absolutes
of the Age of Enlightenment.
3
WILLIAM MORRIS' RED HOUSE, 1859,
BEXLEYHEATH, KENT, UK
©Bruno Zevi
Well, it is against this kind of language that the Modern Movement arose. The Red
House built for William Morris in 1859 is a declaration of independence from the
repressive precepts of classicism. It is not a statement, but a description of events. It
does not have an a priori form. It just enumerates contents and Functions, one after
the other, without any worry about achieving a synthesis, a unified vision. No
symmetry, and not even balance in its volumes. They grew as needed, to envelope
the spaces where people live. Look at the windows. They have quite different shapes
because the rooms they light are different, and the academic nonsense called
equilibrium between voids and walls is totally disregarded. It is clear that the
architect thought, first of all, of the spaces within the house, which are the real
content; then, designed the container. So each component of this house, window,
door, roof, and so on, regains the semantic value it had lost in the anonymity of
classicism. You can ask any of these elements: who are you? And you will receive a
precise answer.
4
FUNCTIONS, SPACES & CONTAINERS
©Bruno Zevi
I trust that, with these two examples, the separation between classicist and modern
or organic architecture is evident. Now you know how to read architecture and also
how to write it. Suppose you have to design a house. First of all you list the functions:
working, entertaining, sleeping, eating, moving from one place to another, etc. They
are quite different functions, each one of which should be expressed in an adequate
manner. The classicist approach represses what is specific. You have here four
functions; it forces them into four equal rooms, with a corridor in the middle. Each
function in a box. The four boxes together in a bigger box. You can have instead a
second scheme, with the four boxes around a central space, a Greek cross scheme. It
is a little better because the final form is not a box; however a symmetrical scheme -
in this case double symmetry - makes life in the building quite rigid. Why not try the
modern, anticlassicist approach? Each function is examined for its own requirements,
has its own form of space, each room is different in size and shape, in order to
acquire its own identity. You envelope these different shapes of spaces, and you will
have a series of different volumes. Then you will connect them through a dynamic
system of circulation.
HABITAT 67, MONTREAL , BY MOSHE SAFDIE

©Bruno Zevi
Moshe Safdie's Habitat '67 at Montreal follows this method: it piles up building units
as needed, when and where needed, in a continuum. The only trouble is that these
units are equal or very similar: they are boxes and not free volumes, specific
containers of different human content.
6
PALAZZO VECCHIO, FLORENCE, ITALY, BY
ARROLFO DI CAMBIO
©Bruno Zevi
Why should one sacrifice function and content on the altar of symmetry? There are
masterpieces in architectural history which are not symmetrical at all. Do you
remember Palazzo Vecchio in Florence? Its famous tower is dramatically unbalanced.
If it were balanced, if Arnolfo di Cambio had designed the tower right in the centre of
the building, Palazzo Vecchio would have lost its meaning.
FARM BUILDING, USA

©Bruno Zevi
Peasant buildings are never symmetrical, unless they try to copy urban palaces. Why
should vernacular architecture be symmetrical! There is no architect, so all these
absurdities of consonance, rhythm, proportion that you read in history of art books
are not needed. Functions are different, and the farmer who builds his buildings
leaves them as they are, and so achieves an expression which is much more effective
in its dissonances than an academic architect would ever get by trying to unify them.
Here you have a building process, not simply an object. If you think of it, the
vernacular is to the conventional architecture, as dialect is to Oxford English. We
should examine very often vernacular, that is, architecture built without architects,
when we find that our language is becoming too conventional and lacking semantic
meaning.
WORKERS' CLUB, MOSCOW, BY MELNIKOV

©Bruno Zevi
Architecture should speak, should tell its own story. In Moscow, before Stalin's
dictatorship, a number of Workers' Clubs were built. The best of them has three
auditoriums projecting externally, telling you that this building is meant for
community meetings.
MEDIEVAL HOUSE
©Bruno Zevi
But even more eloquent are some old houses, built without architects, where you
can read all the different functions, and also the way they were constructed.
10
SMALL BOXES INTO BIG BOXES. FREE ASSEMBLY

OF SPECIFIC VOLUMES
©Bruno Zevi
A classicist building is classicist, even if it has no columns or traditional decorations,

even if it is a glass building with a very modern appearance. It may start with
residential or office units, but then it stacks them one over the other to form a box, a
big box containing a lot of small boxes, and you have once more the classicist
approach. The organic approach, as we have seen, elaborates different volumes and
then connects them without ever forming a box. So, the organic building can grow,
you can add another room, or take away a room, and nothing happens.
11
BUILDING COMPLEX IN ROME BY STUDIO

PASSARELLI
©Bruno Zevi
You may object that an articulated plan is possible in the country-side, where you
have a large area at your disposal, and you can freely extend the building; but that it
is impossible in a city block, where land is limited and very expensive. This is not true.
There is a building in Rome, which contains shops on the ground floor, a series of
office floors, and on too some residences. Generally this kind of building is a box, and
you cannot see where the offices stop and the residences start. But, in this case, the
architect did not try to force three quite different functions in the same box. He liked
their difference, and used linguistic dissonances, as you do in music, to express it. The
shop windows are set back, so that the office block can protect them. The whole
package of offices has a glass façade, on which the old Roman walls are beautifully
reflected. The residences on top are free, as if they were villas in the countryside. I
remember that, on completion, this building looked rather strange in a street made
up of boxes. Now everybody likes it, because it communicates what it is.
12
TOP: BRUNELLESCHI'S DUOMO, FLORENCE.

BOTTOM: TORRE VELASCA, MILAN, BY STUDIO
BPR
©Bruno Zevi
An academic critic could question the proportion of the three different parts. But
what does proportion mean? It is a Renaissance taboo accepted and exalted by the
École des Beaux Arts. Total nonsense. Is Brunelleschi's cupola of the Dome of
Florence proportional? Not in the least. It is out of proportion with the church, and
with the city. That's why it is so wonderful. Cities are made up of dissonances, not of
deadly monotony. The same is true of the Torre Velasca in Milan. Out of proportion,
dissonant with the old buildings, it has changed the townscape in a positive way.
13
GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK, BY FRANK
LLOYD WRIGHT
©Bruno Zevi
As in literature, as in painting and in music, any creative work of an architect is

somewhat dissonant; otherwise it would not be creative. Any authentic poet renews
or reinvents the language. Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York
is dissonant with the Cityscape, as it proposes the continuum of a helicoid in place of
the usual superimposition of floor upon floor. If you are lazy, and refuse to make an
effort to understand what it means, what it says, you won't like it. But if you are
curious and intelligent enough to read or hear its message, you will enrich your
architectural sensitivity.
14
NATIONAL GALLERY, WASHINGTON DC, BY I.M.

PEI
©Bruno Zevi
The same with Pei's addition to the National Gallery at Washington, DC. It is
composed of triangular volumes, in full dissonance with the symmetrical, static,
monumental, slightly ridiculous, institutional buildings of the American capital.
15
BREAKING THE BOX
©Bruno Zevi
The classicist approach of architecture, we said, is the language of power, authority,

oligarchy, bureaucracy, of the State and often of the Church, of all the institutions
that are, or feel that they have to impose on the citizen. The modern, organic, anti-_
classicist language, instead, is the democratic language. Its purpose is to free, to
emancipate both the individual and the people collectively from the slavery of static,
closed, suffocating Spaces. Look around, try to discover where and how you live. We
live in boxes, packed in boxes. When we die, we are put in a coffin whose profile has
something to do with our body. But when we live, we are boxed in static cavities
which have nothing to do with our bodies, and even less with our movements. Dead,
we are symmetrical; but, alive, we are not, because we walk around fluently. The
boxes we live in, however, inhibit the fluency of our movements, they keep us still,
almost dead, like statues. Why don't we try to unpack ourselves? Imagine tearing
apart the four walls, floor and ceiling of your room, in order to get some air and some
light. It is a revolution in space. No more box. But go on, don't be afraid to use your
imagination. Why should the ceiling be equal to the floor, and why should the left wall
be equal to the right one? You could have a better arrangement, more original and
creative. Why should the walls be flat, vertical or horizontal? They could be curved,
undulating, sensuous, if you choose to have them so. Modern architecture wants to
extend and enrich the areas of your freedom, offering you more choices. It wants to
emancipate you from academic, obsolete taboos.
16
LIGHT IN HAGIA SOPHIA, ISTANBUL

©Bruno Zevi
If you are ready to discover the space within, which is the realm of architecture, then
the problem of light will immediately arise. If architecture is space to be lived in, long
before being a volume containing space, light is the very instrument through which
space comes alive. It is the light that makes the space of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul
unique. Without this kind of mysterious light, which animates the space in the most
unexpected ways, Hagia Sophia would be speechless, mute, silent.
17
CHAPEL AT RONCHAMP BY LE CORBUSIER

©Bruno Zevi
Light implies communication between the inside and the outside of a building. A box,
being a self-sufficient object, detached from the context, hostile to it, cannot
communicate, no matter how many holes you make into its walls. A glass box is
different from a stone box, but it is still a box; its degree of communication between-
outside and inside is quite poor, even if it is transparent. To establish this dialogue,
the building volume should be broken. Look at the Chapelle de Ronchamp by Le
Corbusier. It is not a box. In a way, it is formless. Thus, the landscape can enter the
volume, and the space within can explode into the landscape.
18
TOP & BOTTOM: MUMMERS THEATER,

OKLAHOMA, BY JOHN JOHANSON
©Bruno Zevi
The Mummers' Theatre in Oklahoma City, by John Johansen, is quite eloquent from
this point of view. It is not a building in the usual sense of the word, but a sequence of
building Fragments suspended in the city space.
19
MUMMERS THEATER, OKLAHOMA, BY JOHN

JOHANSON
©Bruno Zevi
So, it is almost impossible to say where the city ends and the building starts, because
the city penetrates the building in-every direction, and vice versa. Units and circuits;
continuous dialogue between the inside and the outside.
20
THE PARTHENON, ATHENS

©Bruno Zevi
This is not a new phenomenon in architectural history. The beauty of a Greek temple
depends on the fact that it is not a closed box, that the colonnade around it mediates
the passage between the outside and the inside. This is classical architecture, not
pseudo-classical, not Beaux Arts. Really classical, not neoclassical.
21
EDGAR KAUFMAN'S HOUSE, FALLING WATER AT

BEAR RUN, PENNSYLVANIA, USA
©Bruno Zevi
Translated into contemporary terms and modern techniques, you have another
Parthenon: the Kauffman House, called "Falling water", at Bear Run, Pennsylvania.
No box, no façades, no closed volumes, but space within in the most dramatic and
fascinating dialogue with the space outside, with the waterfall, the local stone, the
reinforced concrete cantilevers, and nature. The maximum dissonance to-achieve
the greatest harmony. Disintegration of the building into its components; then
reassembly and reintegration into the landscape.
22
ALBEROBELLO, APULIA, ITALY

©Bruno Zevi
Reintegration implies that you have first disintegrated. Otherwise, you don't have
reintegration, but integration a priori, which is the classicist way. Even in vernacular
architecture of ancient times, you find, first, disintegration and then reintegration. In
the primitive townscape of Alberobello, in Apulia, the whole is first decomposed into
independent units, and then reintegrated in a most civilized manner. Today, modern
architecture is under fire. It is charged with being guilty of the ruin of our old city
fabric, and of our landscapes. But, if you understand the modern language of
architecture, you will easily find out that all the buildings accused of this ruin are not
modern at all. They are classicist, boxy, Beaux-Arts with a pseudo-modern mask. You
don't like this skyscraper or that tower? Probably you are right. But imagine having
the same skyscraper or the same tower decorated with columns, pediments, cornices
of some style of the past. Would that be less offensive? Certainly not. It is the
building program that was wrong, that's why the architectural language is not
convincing. It is classicist-modern, not modern.
23
OLIVETTI BUILDINGS AT IVREA, ITALY

©Bruno Zevi
I want to show you a recent residential and cultural centre built at Ivrea, by the
Olivetti firm. The present merges with the past, with an old fortification, with an old
tower, in the language of dissonances which, as Arnold Schoenberg said, cannot' only
communicate, but also persuade and move. In recent decades, we made many
mistakes, no question about it. But this should not be ascribed to the modern
language of architecture. It is due to the misuse and misunderstanding of this
language. Its words have been applied without any care for function and content,
very often adopting symmetry, consonance, rhythm, perspective, static volumes and
static spaces, the whole baggage of the Beaux-Arts heritage. So, let's have some
confidence in the future.
24
DRAWING BY SANT'ELIA
©Bruno Zevi
To end this talk, let's see a vision of the futuristic architect Antonio Sant'Elia. They
say that modern architecture is in a state of crisis. Certainly it is, because its
language is alive and, therefore, has problems. The old, traditional languages of
architecture have no problems; they are not in a state of crisis, simply because they
are dead.
Related talks:
John Donat Anne Tyng Robert Stern

Architecture Through The Lens Perception & Proportion The Presence Of The Past
1980 1980 1980
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Architecture As Language | Bruno Zevi | Pidgeon Digital 14/05/20, 15:52

HOME ABOUT EXPLORE SUBSCRIBE FAQ CONTACT

TOP: BRITISH MUSEUM, LONDON. BOTTOM:

Again, no answer. This column has no identity: it belongs to the colonnade, to an

HABITAT 67, MONTREAL , BY MOSHE SAFDIE

FARM BUILDING, USA

WORKERS' CLUB, MOSCOW, BY MELNIKOV

SMALL BOXES INTO BIG BOXES. FREE ASSEMBLY

A classicist building is classicist, even if it has no columns or traditional decorations,

BUILDING COMPLEX IN ROME BY STUDIO

TOP: BRUNELLESCHI'S DUOMO, FLORENCE.

As in literature, as in painting and in music, any creative work of an architect is

NATIONAL GALLERY, WASHINGTON DC, BY I.M.

The classicist approach of architecture, we said, is the language of power, authority,

LIGHT IN HAGIA SOPHIA, ISTANBUL

CHAPEL AT RONCHAMP BY LE CORBUSIER

TOP & BOTTOM: MUMMERS THEATER,

building Fragments suspended in the city space.

MUMMERS THEATER, OKLAHOMA, BY JOHN

THE PARTHENON, ATHENS

EDGAR KAUFMAN'S HOUSE, FALLING WATER AT

ALBEROBELLO, APULIA, ITALY

OLIVETTI BUILDINGS AT IVREA, ITALY

John Donat Anne Tyng Robert Stern

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