Classical Architecture is a set of lectures by Demitri Porphyrios, originally delivered as the University of Virginia and Yale University in 1987 and 1989. The book is beautifully illustrated. To the lectures are appended extracts from Plato, Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, Vitruvius, Alberti and Viollet-le-Duc among others. The argument is polemical. Porphyrios is writing against modernism and deconstruction and in favour of classicism, particularly in the context of urban reconstruction.

Porphyrios follows Aristotelian ideas in defining the difference between building and architecture.

‘Significance lies not in the utility or beauty that may accompany the artefact but in the recognition of ourselves as makers of that artefact. This recognition is essentially a contemplative experience and when viewed like this the building – though it may be useful – refuses to be used in any way. Architecture begins precisely here; it speaks of the usefulness which produced it in the first place, from which it detaches itself as art and to which it always alludes’.

Aristotle says that everything is formed from something into something by agency. Art is the imitation of nature, but here imitation is not reproduction or copying. Nature is the active force in the universe and imitation, mimesis, is the representation of things in their nature, and is therefore a means of gaining knowledge of the world. Imitation is always a transformation of the world, because an artwork is composed of pieces of the world selected for their significance. In this sense art is a form of truth liberated from experience. Works of art are vehicles for what is significant for us who make, use and observe them. They are objects which have been acted upon and thereby rendered pertinent.

A work of art is a likeness rather than an argument or a concept, a likeness rendered in a sensuous medium. The medium is always different from the original, in order to ensure that we understand the form not the material. Significance can be better understood by creating a distance between original and likeness because we can recognise something in the likeness that we cannot recognise in the original. But too much distance and we would not know what was being represented and we would lose the recognition. In this sense, a work of art is a paradeigma, a representative example.

Mimesis is representation of things as they are, as they were or as they might be. The bridge between example and precept is achieved by the imitation of particular examples chosen for their typicality.

‘The classical architrave generalises the otherwise particular and contingent experience of post-and-lintel construction. The aim here is not to reproduce the lintel itself as a structural member, with its sectional dimensions and material properties specified by the engineer, for that would be a symbolically mute gesture. Instead the classical architrave makes us see the structural members which produced it in the first place, from which it has detached itself as art, and to which it always alludes. The form of the classical architrave makes us recognise the universal law of gravity and stability. Recognition, here, is the experience of familiarity with the world not simply as a collection of contingent objects and events but as an intelligible narrative’.

In the classical conception physis, that is, nature and necessity, is contrasted with techne, which is art and deliberate human intention. Techne refers to a kind of knowledge. It represents reasoned intelligence put into practice in an organised body of rules and methods, a craft. What is improvised, arbitrary or ad-hoc is not part of a craft, and nor is technique, if we take technique to be the action without the intelligence.

‘Construction and fabrication, as we know, imply a deliberate transformation of raw material involving human labour guided by a techne’.

What differs between artists is techne, or degree of skill, rather than individuality. The romantic notion of the isolated artist working outside a tradition is foreign to classicism.

The products of a craft fulfil their purpose in use. If it has typical form, we recognise the intended use in the form, for example, in wicker baskets, ceramic drinking vessels and plaited ropes.

‘In fact, on certain occasions, utensils made by craftsmen exclusively for practical use transcend their purpose as useful objects and acquire, through their familiar form, the status of symbol’.

Symbols were originally marks or tokens such as fragment of pottery that a host would give his guest as a prompt for remembering.

‘The stylised bands which adorn many clay vases are but symbolic allusions to the early forms of the stitched seam and the rope. Although this decorative adornment is useless, it is nonetheless highly pleasurable for it makes us relate back to an anterior mode of construction; be that of the flask with its seams binding the hide or the barrel tied together by wicker ropes. When habitually encoded, such symbols become accepted decorative motifs that afforded recognition of man as homo faber. The artist is a technites not because he is a craftsman who works with his hands, but because he possesses the knowledge and skill that serve to deepen our understanding of ourselves as makers, as homo faber, and thus our familiarity with the world’.

Terms for building are often connected with words for dwelling. The Old English and High German term Büan means to dwell on and till the land. However, in Greek the pull is towards construction rather than habitation. The term oikodomeo, to build, derives from oikos, meaning dwelling, and demo, meaning to construct. Domos, an alternative word for house, also comes from the construction side. It points to joining and fitting, the craft of the carpenter, unlike the Latin facere which indicates more fashioning and moulding as in ceramics, the craft of the potter. French bâtir comes from a root meaning to bind together by plaiting, particularly with the bark from trees, the craft of the weaver.

A tecton was originally an artisan in wood and later in stone and bricks and tectonics is the art of construction. The concern of tectonics is threefold: the formal properties of the construction material; the way the pieces are put together; and the visual form, which is the way the eye is satisfied with the stability, unity and balance of the work. It is because timber is discrete that carpentry becomes the craft of joining. Tectonics conveys both a sense of necessity and of freedom. The necessity comes, for example, from the sense that the materials determine the forms used and the local landscape determines the materials. But it has also its own rules and is in this sense free rather than necessary. Each art is autonomous and has its own rules and boundaries. Architecture has stepped away from the demands of building and created its own rules and boundaries. The answer to a question, why must I observe these rules is the same as the answer to the question, why must I observe the rules of the game; because they define the activity. Such rules are not experienced as constraints but as the ordering framework within which something can be achieved.

‘When we admire a building it is because it conveys both a sense of necessary and freedom. It conveys a sense of necessary because order is delimited by the form-giving capacity of the materials used; and a sense of freedom because it is bound by rules which are made as tokens of recognition of ourselves as homo faber’.

This is the lesson that classical antiquity taught and it is the lesson Porphyrios thinks we have forgotten.

Building refers to the craft of constructing shelters and architecture is the art of building. One is the product of necessity, the other the product of an artistic intention, where art is a form of truth liberated from experience. The pleasure derived from art is the pleasure of recognition, where recognition is a more authentic cognition than is possible through encounters with the usefulness of everyday objects, because art elicits the permanent from the transient.

Building techniques develop through repetition and empirical judgement until they attain typicality. Type is about what has significance for us. Architecture aims to imitate construction and shelter by means of tectonic order. Some elements of construction are universal: load bearing and load-borne (post and lintel), horizontal and vertical enclosure (partitioning, floors and roofs), demarcation of spaces & passageways and security (gates). The entasis of columns, the manner in which a column appears to broaden at the middle, represents the experience of load bearing. The classical architrave, the chief beam binding posts together, represents post and lintel construction. The triglyphs of a classical frieze represent the rhythm of the wooden beams laid to form a ceiling, which were notched at the end to create a shadow, and the metopes, the recessed gaps between them. The stone architecture of antiquity imitated timber construction. The whole construction became an object of contemplation in the idea of the Order, which set form over the necessities of shelter and tectonics over the contingencies of construction. The classical order shows us what is unchanging behind the diversity and transience of the contingent world: an analogy of the immutable laws of nature through tectonic fictions. The classical is whatever is retrieved from the vicissitudes of changing times and changing tastes.

The classical tradition revolves around the idea of decorum, that is, what is appropriate, particularly to the programme and the context. The terms for decoration and ornament come from the idea of putting in order. The Greek term kosmein, meaning to decorate, originally meant to order, as rowers, soldiers and ranks in society are ordered. Kata kosmos, which means according to the right order, becomes linked to the idea of propriety and what is befitting, and thereby shifts in its sense to adornment or ornamentation. In Latin ornare also means to put in order.

In the classical way, character means typical traits rather than individual traits. Character was given by a combination of four considerations: proportion, rhythm, akribeia & ornament. Proportion marks the boundary of the grotesque, the frontier between the human and the monstrous. Rhythm is the pattern of repetition of elements, and the rupture of those patterns. Akribeia derives from akron meaning peak or point and suggests sharpness and precision. It means something like skill and proficiency of workmanship: it’s a term for how the work is executed.

Ornament is ornament only when it suits the wearer. Classical ornamental motifs never derive from within architecture; they cannot be traced back to building techniques. They are drawn from nature, social life and mythology. Ornament simply portrays and commemorates. Ornamental profiles or motifs cannot be invented as signs or tokens.

‘Ornament is not primarily an independent object which is then applied to something else, but rather it is part of the overall presentation of the wearer or of the thing that carries it’.

2

In Porphyrios’ view, modernism has framed the debate about the city as a choice between some form of experimentation or regressive historicism. In is based on a scepticism about guiding principles, and a feeling that all conceptions of value are arbitrary, which leads to opportunism.

‘Without a canon of exemplars and no frame of reference, artistic judgement also lost its authority and had to be justified solely be the criteria of novelty and individualism’.

This is a double play; the deconstructionist’s desire to be both inside and outside tradition.

‘Classicism’s own question remains valid: how are we to assess the technological mobilisation of humanity and the earth at the beginning of the twenty-first century’.

At issue are our everyday ethical and political experiences. The relativist argues that there is something fraudulent about the classicist’s claims, the classicist replies that without a canon, relativism leads to cynicism and triviality. Classical thinking questions the meaning of ‘originality’ and founds itself on continuity and common-sense principles.

‘First, why claim, in the first place, that there exist (or ought to exist) common-sense principles of architecture and urbanism? Second, where are we to look for, and how are we to obtain, such principles? Third, how can we apply them without lapsing into vulgar or sophisticated forms of unwarranted authoritarianism’?

The classical project can be read as the search for a foundation point and a bulwark against madness. The problem is that the traditional city stands in the way of progress and the twentieth century industrial state has accustomed us to ugly cities. Porphyrios presents two concepts that present-day classicism takes from antiquity, using terms from Italian. The first he calls disegno, by which he means a wider guiding vision which articulates the goals and aspirations of the community at large. It means something like design, pattern, plan and aim and probably, in this context, type. The type or exemplar only becomes real when it is interpreted under the pressures of contingent life. The second he calls misura meaning measure, proportion and size, which are the guarantors of the ultimate success of the pattern. The pattern unfolds in the familiar forms of the urban block, the street, the piazza and the monument.

Unlike the modern city, the traditional city contributes to the well-being of its inhabitants. How this is achieved can be understood as an ethical dimension which can be grasped through two constitutive ideas of classical thought: tradition and reconstruction. Classicism isn’t engaged in a dialectic between imagined future and nostalgic past, but in understanding which elements in the tradition can be the basis for innovation. The ultimate criterion is the public good, which I take to mean here what is good in the shared space of the city. What this means is that the city provides a careful balance between public and private spaces and buildings as the physical framework for the life of its citizens. Making a city requires acceptance of civic priorities, rather than more narrowly political or economic or financial priorities. I interpret this to mean thinking about what it means to live in a city, rather than seeing the urban environment instrumentally as a vehicle for other goals.

‘The classical is rooted in a perception of history as a continual renaissance: a movement that establishes continuities by means of constant renovation, rather than through dogmatic canons.’

Is tradition a source of inspiration or merely a futile constraint? Only in the 18th century Enlightenment did the lack of the possibility of verification, for example of religious belief, become the problem of confronting prejudice. But from a classical perspective, prejudice, pre-judging, is the background against which new judgements are made. Authority, additional weight, comes from reason and knowledge, not command and obedience. To take over tradition freely means to make the traditional, what has been handed down, one’s own. Education only exists when the tradition is freely taken over. Tradition is not what is imposed by means of censorship and control. Tradition means we can relate to the world through familiarity and recognition.

‘To understand what tradition is (and specifically, in the context of these series of talks, what the tradition of classical architecture is) we have to ask the question of the relationship of one (classical) building to another. Once we formulate the question this way, two considerations become important: convention and originality.’

Any classical building may be studied not only as an imitation of the world and of construction, but also as an imitation of other buildings. A great part of design addresses the formation and transformation of conventions. Convention can best be understood by travelling, for it is encountering that which we aren’t accustomed to that we notice the conventions.

Borrowing doesn’t mean reproducing. The hallmark of creative talent is the distance between the new work and the model. Architectural forms cannot exist outside architecture. The originality of an artist is the degree to which they take up the challenge of a tradition and make us see something more than we already know. But in so far as this is history, there is also always a sense of distance from and loss.

‘The normative side of the classical refers to the achievements of a particular stage in the development of mankind: namely Greek antiquity. What we call classical, in a normative sense, is that which endures the contingencies of a changing political and economic life and of taste and fashion’.