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Building Research: Design, Construction and Technologies
Series Editor: Bárbara Rangel
Vítor Abrantes
Bárbara Rangel
José Manuel Amorim Faria Editors
The Pre-Fabrication of Building Facades
Building Research: Design, Construction and Technologies
Series Editor
Bárbara
Rangel, Civil Engineering, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal
Building Research: Design, Construction and Technologies brings together knowledge from civil engineering and architecture to make an interdisciplinary analysis of a recognized building/project or a building construction research. In each volume, the topic is a building or an aspect of a building that catalyzes the contributions of invited authors in their fields of specialization, with professional and academic backgrounds. To make the bridge between the scientific research and the construction site problems a parallel reading of the working development and the technological issues raised by that construction problem are presented. Authors, architects and engineers are interviewed and analyze the different projects in distinct stages, from concept to construction drawings, following the development of the building’s design and construction process. The series treats topics such as building technology, construction management, acoustics, maintenance, prefabrication, amongst others. As a complementary objective, authors with different backgrounds: Engineers and Architects, Researchers and Designers are invited to to contribute to the understanding of specific buildings through the analysis of those issues that influenced the development of the design or that appeared during the construction or the facility management phases.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13572
Vítor Abrantes • Bárbara Rangel
José Manuel Amorim Faria
Editors
The Pre-Fabrication of Building Facades
Editors
Vítor Abrantes
Civil Engineering
University of Porto
Porto, Portugal
José Manuel Amorim Faria
Civil Engineering
University of Porto
Porto, Portugal
Bárbara Rangel
Civil Engineering
University of Porto
Porto, Portugal
This is an updated translation of the original first edition published by Gequaltec.
Building Research: Design, Construction and Technologies
ISBN 978-3-319-22694-1 ISBN 978-3-319-22695-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-22695-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016937330
Springer Cham Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
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Editorial
This book represents the first of a series designated Building Research: Design, Construction and Technologies. The series aims to give a positive feedback to a Springer’s invitation to organize a book series on building construction using construction as a common field of work of architects and engineers and putting together research and practice.
As the group has been doing in its publications at the Faculty of Engineering of University of Porto, this series therefore proposes to put together the knowledge and complementarity of different areas involved in construction, engineering and architecture, through two large binomials, RESEARCH AND EDUCATION / PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE. For this series, the group proposes to cross the construction design and scientific research in the analysis of a thematic issue related to building research. To make the bridge between the scientific research and the construction site problems, this books series will propose a parallel reading of the working development and the technological issues raised by a construction problem. The analyses of one or two case studies, recognized projects in the international panorama, suggest topics related to the building research, such as building technology, construction management, acoustics, maintenance, prefabrication, etc. These are the themes that authors with different backgrounds (engineers and architects, researchers and designers) are invited to contribute to the understanding of the problem.
For the first issue of Building Facades Prefabrication, we selected two buildings: one in New York, by Rafael Moneo; and the other in Porto, by Eduardo Souto Moura, analyzed in the first issues of Cadernos d’Obra, a scientific journal on construction we edit at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto. The most recent building of Columbia University in New York, the Northwest Science Building, a four-hand design by Rafael Moneo and Dan Brodkin of Ove Arup, designed in 2005 and opened in 2010, and the Burgo Tower in Oporto, a building that brings a new perspective to the use of prefabrication technologies with local traditional construction systems.
Besides its importance from an architectural and urban point of view, these two buildings suggest interesting topics that are present in current building research, such as the construction of facades in high rising buildings, prefabricated facades, construction safety issues related to the development of this solution, etc. The scientific analysis is accomplished not only by presenting the architectural aspects but also to connect those aspects with management, technology and building processes in adequate depth. Alongside the case studies, specific articles on engineer and architecture explain the critic issues of these buildings, from the analysis of specific technological problems of such buildings, to the critical reading of the relationship between design and technology, and to the testimony of the designers involved in the projects.
This first issue reflects not only how closely the professional and academic areas of the construction sectors are connected but also the urgency of this connection to fulfil the current requirements of construction science and its two main fields, architecture and engineering.
For an architect, designing prefabrication could be an outlandish but stimulating challenge, because it implies particular concepts and project methodologies. Over modern architectural history, some architects explored the potentiality of the optimization of this constructive system to innovate in design conception. Wright explored the modular capacity of the brick to
design the Usonian evolutionary houses. Corbusier found the modern house formula in the Dominó house based on the prefabrication of the concrete structure for the house. Mies van der Rohe upscaled the Mechano system concept to design with steel when he arrived in the USA. Richard Rogers learned from the car industry the construction systems to increment a house. In all of these projects, it is possible to identify a common design strategy, using the modularity and repletion of the industrial production into the building construction methodologies.
The current difficulties in the construction industry have confirmed the urgent need for interdisciplinary action between all the design disciplines, including all the different engineering branches and architecture. The requirement for high levels of building efficiency and the optimization of the building process are making increasing demands on the accuracy of designs. The project is no longer a sum of contributions, but a design methodology that combines the answers to all the different requisites of the building, an INTEGRATED DESIGN PROJECT. This multidisciplinary approach to design problems is only possible if it is present in the design process from the outset.
These days, a building is required to be as efficient as any domestic appliance, but there is probably not a single machine produced by human that involves so many systems and people. The performance efficiency demanded to buildings in service by the different stresses to which they are subjected has been imposing in recent decades an increasing rigour in the definition of the various projects, particularly in the degree of scientific and technical depth in the solution presented. To reduce the construction time and anticipate this building performance, greater specifications are expected from the various disciplines involved in the design for the constructive solutions they propose for each subsystem. It is the perfect articulation of all these subsystems – structural, hydraulic, acoustic, electrical and others that will establish the perfect functioning of the building as an INTEGRATED SYSTEM. Architecture, thermal insulation, acoustics, structures and hydraulics inevitably come together to design the solution because the same building elements often belong to different subsystems. The same wall might be the structural support for a slab, an acoustic barrier in a room or a thermal barrier to the outside.
From the initial sketches to the specifications of the various materials, the design cannot definitely be a sequence of responses, but the result of a complex algorithm of the different responses of the various disciplines, the INTEGRATED DESIGN. The resolution of this algorithm, the DESIGN OF THE CONSTRUCTION, lies in the common ground that underlies all the disciplines. In determining the dimensions, materials and construction solutions, each member of the team must identify the solution that meets the requirements of his or her discipline. The optimal solution corresponds to the weighting of the responses from each of them. In designing a room of 200 m2, for example, the architect cannot design the openings to the outside without knowing what the ideal relationship is between natural and artificial lightings. The architect cannot define the shape without the acoustician determining the ideal volume for the interior space or else he is not able to design the finishing materials without knowing the desired degree of reverberation. Also, the architect cannot scale the form without knowing the dimensions of the horizontal and vertical structural components needed to achieve a span of 15 or 20 m. The final solution for the form, spans envelope, for example, is therefore the result of the articulation of all these decisions. It is an algorithm that unites the optimal values of each discipline to find the suitable dimensions of the various components of the architectural form. Prefabrication systems help to simplify this equation, part of the solution is a non-variable parcel, which gives the architectural design more freedom to invest in the design phases. The comfort performance is assured by the prefabricated components, which gives more time to the design team to invest in the architectural and design issues.
Some ideas arise from this book concerning the more important advantages of prefabrication. In the following paragraphs, as an “appetizer”, we develop three of them which are as follows:
– Prefabrication widens the space for industrialization in building construction narrowing the distance between this field and its cousin industrial engineering.
– It constitutes a very powerful tool for architects if correctly used.
– It constitutes one of the easiest ways to introduce innovation in building construction.
Prefabrication and Industrialization
Since the beginning of civilization, humans have always tried to perform their basic tasks in a more or less repetitive way in order to try to reduce the amount of effort and energy needed to do them.
It is possible to find examples in many areas, from agriculture to the confection of meals or the production of tools.
The pursuit of increasing the productivity (reduction of the amount of time spent doing a unity of a certain task), or, expressing it in another way, reducing the effort spent to achieve the same goals, has always represented therefore a major concern of humankind.
Therefore, at the construction level, industrialization has been assumed as a fundamental solution to accomplish this essential basic goal.
Prefabrication represents one of the main fields of construction industrialization. Currently, prefabrication is defined as “a set of construction techniques that are based on the production of construction elements outside of their final places of definitive setting, on site or in an external production unit, which are afterwards connected and assembled on site”.
The industrialization of construction may solve many problems such as to reduce the time needed to build (using prefabrication, many times we say to erect in opposition to build on site…) and to avoid difficult weather conditions.
Concerning cost, the situation may be a little different because prefabrication demands in general huge investments, and therefore, local site construction costs with labour and materials are substituted with costs with industrial facilities and equipments and the final trade-off of costs depends on a lot of “market issues”.
In macroeconomical terms, industrializing construction is very important for the nations and the economical zones because it facilitates exports and increases quality because quality control procedures may be applied in a better and more efficient way.
Prefabrication and Architecture
Prefabrication implies a certain discipline on the conception related with geometrical organization and repetition which also, since always, represents a barrier to its penetration on the fields of higher importance to architects.
Therefore, in general, architects have always considered prefabrication as an enemy to creation liberty, a prison which they didn’t want to submit to. For an architect, however, prefabrication may constitute a motivation and at the same time a paradigmatic inspiration of the creative process.
However, prefabrication may be a very powerful tool for architects if correctly used. Using prefabrication implies to be able to use in a wise way the “tools” of prefabrication design which are mainly modular coordination, control of construction tolerances and correct and complete design of joints. If these three issues are well controlled by the architect, using a specific design methodology gives an incredible strength to architects to consolidate and explode simple ideas.
Prefabrication design has a lot to do with building integration. Nevertheless, connection and integration arise from the “superposition” of volumetric very innovative three-dimensional modules, where each module is very carefully designed, planned and fabricated in an industrial plant. Alternatively, the design may be produced in a planar mode where pavements, walls,
ceilings and roof tops are designed as a succession of parts put together with “joints”, respecting a modular basis and managing to solve all the construction tolerances issues. Architects try to learn/copy other industrial activities such as the automobile industry, the “all-the-time” leading industry in innovation, prefabrication, automation and industrialization.
Prefabrication and Innovation
Prefabrication constitutes one of the easiest ways to introduce innovation in building construction. Innovation comes from very different origins such as academic research, internal research and development in companies, patents and original ideas.
Construction began as an artisanal activity and has recently developed into a more industrialized and mechanized industry, profiting initially from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century industrialization (although with a large delay in relation to other industries…) and from the more recent developments in all fields of science with an emphasis on materials science and CAD/CAM machines.
Prefabrication transfers production from each specific site to more or less developed and skilled industrial facilities where industrial tools may be better used. The production of construction components and “global construction systems and sub-systems” in a factory reduces the risk of mistakes, facilitates compliance with technical specifications and enhances productivity. In addition, it allows producing “high-tech” components, planar or three-dimensional, using modern industrial tools and machines.
Thus, one may consider that in these facilities translating research into practice becomes easier. Maybe this is why one might consider prefabrication as the best way to introduce innovation in construction.
Enjoy finding in this book specific ideas and solutions used in the interviews, the articles and the two real-case examples that illustrate these views!!
Part I
Burgo Tower in Porto
Abstraction and Traditional Materials in a High-Tech Façade
Tectonic Design
Conversation with Eduardo Souto de Moura on Burgo Tower about Engineer and Architecture
Bárbara Rangel, José Manuel Amorim Faria, and João Poças Martins
In 2008, for the first edition of CdO, we interviewed Eduardo Souto de Moura, to understand the development of the project of the BURGO tower in Porto, a building that crosses contemporary technologies of building facades with traditional Portuguese materials. The concept for the façade was a challenge for the architects and engineers. Traditional Portuguese granitic stone was used, which is heavy therefore difficult to manipulate during the construction. This building would certainly not be possible without a strong complicity between architecture and engineering since the beginning of the design until the construction of the façade.
To understand the particularities of the development of the project, the preparation of the building works and the construction of the building we explored four main themes in these interview. To understand the project methodology, we explored the relationship between ARCHITECTURE and ENGINEERING during the design and the construction phases. To explore the design concepts adopted, we tried to discover how the CONSTRUCTION RESEARCH influenced the architectural design development to define the building, the TECTONIC OBJECT. Finally we tried to discover how the CONSTRUCTION DESIGN determines the whole project in Eduardo Souto de Moura’s way of work.
The façade is nowadays understood as a skin, particularly in tall buildings. This concept has overpassed architecture and become in some cases the stakeholder requisite. The façade is becoming an independent system of the build-
B. Rangel (*) • J.M.A. Faria
Faculty of Engineer, Oporto University, Porto, Portugal
e-mail: brangel@fe.up.pt; jmfaria@fe.up.pt
J.P. Martins
Civil Engineering, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal
ing. Is this transforming the design methodology for architects and engineers?
Today’s architecture is divided into two different kinds of interventions: in the first kind, clients and architects require images that are materialized using the available technology. Engineers often have to suffer to cope with these kinds of images. And using today’s technology, steel structures, cantilevers, the T’s, the X’s and so on, they actually manage. Then there is another kind of architecture, that doesn’t show off as much, although architecture always has been a show, there is nothing new about that. Popes have always wanted a show, so did kings. This other kind of architecture doesn’t have these icons and doesn’t build monuments, it is dedicated to residential buildings, buildings that are more anonymous, a kind of architecture that portrays its time, its own culture. As Mies van der Rhoe said, we must make architecture with the possibilities of our time. In those cases, I still believe (I am a dinosaur) that there is a close relationship between material, language and building system. This relationship can then be changed, concealed, inverted, but it is a starting point. Without that, anything goes… It’s not bad, but it is very tiresome. One would have to imagine a concrete building wrapped in plastic or a plastic building wrapped in carbon… So the starting point is always that one, that reasonable base point, adequate material, adequate building system and meaningful language.
Sometimes that language falls short of what we intend, of insinuations we want to make and must be changed. That’s where the building skins come in. But that isn’t a kind of architecture that has interested me so far… I feel that resistance is becoming more difficult. That other kind of architecture is imposing itself through an attack, both by private clients and by image-based buildings. Public administration wants iconic buildings that leave a mark on the city and
3 © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017
V. Abrantes et al. (eds.), The Pre-Fabrication of Building Facades, Building Research: Design, Construction and Technologies, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-22695-8_1
change it. Politicians want to leave a mark, but things were always like that!
Do you think then, that the way things are going, that the value of an image and the value of a brand are becoming decisive?
I think they are undermining everything at the moment. Books’ covers keep looking nicer and more attractive regardless of their content. Architecture must have a certain atmosphere… It starts at the tender process, before cross sections, elevations and floor plans are developed, appealing 3D renders are already available. I notice that, not because I lose many bids (almost all of them actually) but because the same ones keep winning them, the ones that develop the most appealing images. And it isn’t by chance that when these architects build, they are the least interesting in my opinion. Nowadays there is a group of architects who follow a more, say, conservative approach that need to build in order to show that they are good and the ones who can draw well who need to build so they can say they’re good. It’s a little contradictory.
They follow opposite paths. In that sense, when we speak about images and the commercial sense of images, so to speak…
That is not an architectural problem. It is a general problem. I mean, today’s culture is built upon images, content does not matter in any product, either in advertising, in literature, in painting… When a painting is abstract, its content disappears. It is “oh, so nice”! Architecture is also “so nice”! It is all upside down.
Architecture is not the manifestation of an individual who decides as he or she pleases. There are too many “artists”… Architecture is a social act.
People have forgotten that architecture and engineering, which are almost the same thing, occupy places. Geography belongs to everyone, so I have no right to go somewhere and impose a formula, or a stadium, or a housing project or anything else just because it is my site. It is my site but it is not my image, it is everyone’s. That’s why architecture is a social act.
Things must be thought through so that people will later adhere to the project. In the Braga Stadium, for instance, people liked it. People from Braga call me an engineer and they take pictures with me. This means they adhered. Today, the stadium is (and I am not vain!) an object of affection for Braga’s people. People go on day-trips there.
Are we driving again to the concept of façadism?
It is not just façadism. Here we have to speak about baroque. Baroque was façadism. The problem is that baroque and baroque’s façadism had the Counter-Reformation as a background. There was an ideology that intended to show that Christianity hadn’t been hurt by the Lutheran reform. So they invested in a new language. In the popes’ concilium, new religious orders were created (like the Jesuits) and new architectural styles were developed, which resulted in well known façades such as the “Je Jesu”. Nowadays we have the images without everything else in the background. When a twisted building appears or they say that the floors go around, I don’t see Jesuits, nor popes, nor the Counter-Reformation. Why should someone go to sleep facing West and wake up facing East?! I think that this support is not there. There is “more aesthetics and less ethics”, “form over function”, when up until now, there was always some balance between form and function, one supported the other. Every style (for example, classical and so on) would show different images but would have a supporting background. Nowadays one impresses through difference, and that’s enough.
Construction is the common discipline between architects and engineers. The definition of the constructive system that will define the building is a consequence of the combination and integration of the disciplines involved: architecture, structure, fire safety, among others. The concept defined for each one of these disciplines is filtered by a set of requisites and regulations that will beacon the solution achieved. These regulations are supported by scientific research in construction.
Is it important for an architect’s notion of construction to understand the comfort engineering and not only about structural engineering?
If I were to start a school, I would teach only three subjects in six years: Drawing, Building Construction and History. Throughout the 20th century (and there are some traces about this in the 19th century), sciences moved outside their original boundaries. Some branches such as chemistry, physics or biology, follow methods and results that are then lent through analogy to other kinds of research, to other subjects. In order for History to advance, anthropology is needed, because if anthropology can study the behavior of an Amazonian Indian or an Australian native and understand what life was like in the past, it can understand many ancient social structures from the study of western societies. Therefore, History needs Anthropology, Anthropology needs Sociology, Chemistry cannot advance without Physic’s studies about DNA and neither can Biology. The exact same thing happens in architecture. If the artist-architect has a sketchpad and he draws shapes, it can be very interesting as an egocentric activity, but in order for them to be useful and materialized, he needs information. Nowadays, an architectural object must meet a
wide set of requirements. The object must be correctly materialized, cheap (there is no money!), comfortable (people demand comfort) and sustainable. You can’t have a glass pane facing South with the AC turned to its maximum! The structure must be reasonable, I won’t even say good.
So right now Architecture really needs Engineering and Engineering needs Architecture. I think that subject is outdated because there is no architect in the world who doesn’t work with great engineers from day one. In magazines you can see great designs by Koolhas, Herzog, always with the same engineers from ARUP. The same thing happens in Portugal. We need an engineer from day one because our ideas must be filtered. Today I cannot start a new project or go anywhere without an engineer, even just to take a look at a site. First of all, because it’s pleasant, we are friends, then because I can’t take a look at a site without starting to draw a line. That line is either supported or erased by the engineer: “Don’t go there, it’s a mess!”
Geotechnics, water supply, rainwater draining, is that what you mean?
No, actually I think those subjects are secondary, they come about later on. I am talking about the general design of the building, its structure and a coordinator for all those disciplines that make a building sustainable. Today’s buildings cannot overspend resources. That is why I cannot draw a distinction now.
Do you think that this relationship has become closer due to these new requirements?
I’ll even be more radical than that: I think that in a few years there will be no separation. It is a close, everyday relationship.
I am making a mirror for the Venice Biennale and I am not going to risk making a 20 m mirror that might fall over. Rui Furtado [note: a Portuguese engineer] told me how to do it straight away, what the structure will be like, if it is going to be visible from the sides or not. The relationship is so close that when he is done with the structure, the design will be almost complete. Without the structure, I cannot have my mirror, then either he will sign it or he won’t. Things used to be like that. Borromini and Bernini were not architects. They were master builders who knew about everything. The building system ruled.
Do you think that this new relationship, that could be more restricting, is actually more liberating?
I could not build the Braga Stadium without 20 engineers around me and they could not build it if they had not had 20 architects. We do have some intuition, but it is not enough to achieve a good result.
We are all in the same team, one does the cutting, the other is an anaesthetist, etc.
I think I only draw at the final design stage, over the engineering drawings. There is a story I usually tell about the Braga Stadium, a real story. The deadline was so short that there was no time to build and design. The construction works were about to halt, I would make a drawing, a collaborator would build a model, then I would propose some openings in the beams and the walls, some squares or some rectangles. When I saw the engineering models, I would say that those shapes were unacceptable… so the rectangles and the squares would become circles, but how big?
I would then draw elevations with that dimension. I would finish the design and, at night the engineer would design the reinforcement and the design would be at the worksite by 9 AM. This is an example of what I believe the future of construction will be like… Four hand duets!
Is building design moving towards an integrated methodology between the architecture and the engineers?
I understood that many years ago when I went to London for a meeting with Arup. The project I was working on with Siza was the Hanover Pavilion. Over here I cannot only work in that way except with a few engineering offices.
It was an open-space office with cubicles and tables. At the table there was the acoustics specialist, the structural specialist, the safety specialist, etc. When I brought up a topic, each one of them would tell me everything I needed to know about it. The bottom line is that the buildings are well built.
Construction Research
Since nowadays there are so many building regulations to follow and there are more and more building requirements, in what way does research contribute towards greater architectural freedom?
This is where the issue about time comes in: Nowadays, Portugal is a strange country. Designs must be completed by tomorrow and there is no time to think about solutions, unlike the rest of Europe and all over the world. Nowadays, there is not enough time for good architecture and engineering design.
Specialization makes no sense in architecture …
It doesn’t make any sense at all. An architect is someone who knows a little bit about everything and he doesn’t know everything about anything…
Architecture works this way: you don’t have to be an expert in a field. You have to study it, be sensible and then do
it. It doesn’t matter if you are building a bank or a hospital. You must be in control of the problems.
More and more different disciplines are involved in design and the designers’ responsibilities regarding compliance with regulations are growing. Can it be an obstacle to the authors’ creativity? Do you think there it will interfere too much with the author’s work methodology?
There is a lot of interference but I believe that these limits have never inhibited our imagination, quite the opposite. The more censorship there is (as long as it is reasonable, not just a tantrum) the more well defined architecture becomes. An artist’s biggest despair is having total freedom. Architects have a great advantage here. Things are well defined.
I think that among all the information from regulations, some of it is ridiculous, others are intuitive. Regarding sustainability, for instance, some things are completely ridiculous. Architecture is not good because it is sustainable. It is sustainable because it is good. It has to be.
I do not think that there is such a thing as a beautiful building people die from heat in. Sustainability is a matter of common sense. Sustainability is a necessary but not a sufficient condition.
I think that all of that information regarding sustainability is interesting but we cannot be fundamentalist about it.
In Madrid’s airport when there are about 5000 people inside, everything is very quiet. It is sustainable. Not a ray of sunshine goes into that airport, but it is bright inside, it is acoustically comfortable. It is about 1 km long, with doors every 200 m, there are about 300 people at each door but there is no noise. People tend to say it is very good because the acoustics are fantastic. I disagree; it is very good because it is an integrated design.
So you believe that the extra technical support architects have today allows further creative freedom. I am thinking about Herzog’s work or even Rem Koolhas’, although that is more evident in Herzog’s work. This is only possible if the architect and the engineer work together.
Many of the building systems that are being adopted were invented by architects. Take the use of nets, for instance. Koolhas applied a net to the Prada Museum then Herzog used it and now they are everywhere. So the magician hides one hand and reveals the other.
I do not see a dichotomy here at all. This is how I work, this is how the good architects I know work. The separation between engineering and architecture does not exist.
Do you think that the depth of the knowledge about building systems, supported by engineering, helps the develop-
ment of the lucid architectural design you often mention?
Besides that lucidity, you have to find the right solution, which is the difficult part. Architecture is always a game between information and form. The more the available information, the better the resulting form.
Siza draws and he says that drawing is intelligence’s desire. Intelligence is a more permanent state.
I just wish for lucidity for that particular moment. This lucidity is a momentary conciliation of the information that is available and the form that is possible.
What does architecture give to construction?
Then there are other details: architecture can’t just be the answer to a problem, that is called construction, not architecture. Architecture is construction plus some added value which is creating sensations that make people feel good. It can never be premeditated, if it is, it is a disaster.
So architects must understand how to create objects, as well as possible, and then they can add the details.
Borges sometimes injects some defects in the text, to disconnect it, so that isn’t so cohesive and so perfect. It adds some freshness and some life. The same happens in architecture.
When I visited Siza’s house in Belgium, it was perfect, rational, anonymous. All of a sudden, you notice a 1.2 m window you could only crawl through which is there so that you could sit down admiring the scenery in winter. That is the unexpected detail.
If you listen to Miles Davis’ Jazz, he has a theme that is repeated with some variations throughout the song but, when it seams that he will follow this metric until the end, that the song will finish that way, he does the opposite. Like that corner by Siza… That is the unexpected.
Those gaps and differences can be found throughout history and time.
People like old houses because, although they are less comfortable than newer ones, they have these variations, these unexpected details. Exceptions, no-man’s-lands, basements, attics, corridors where people could play football…
I noticed that in your early work, there was careful research about the building system in every project. The study of the building technology that was present in each case was an important tool for the development of the building design. I am talking about houses. In the North, the houses are made in stone, in Alcanena they are made in brick, in the Algarve they are whitewashed…Now that you are at a point in your career where the projects are much larger, is that kind of research still a work tool?
It is, but just as far as it leads to the rationalization of the whole process. I am not saying that this is the way buildings ought to be built, but this is the way they should start. It allows me to find standard measurement and module settings for the materials and to identify the North and South facades, etc. I use this kind of research. Just because I am building a hospital in the Algarve, I am not going to use whitewashed walls painted in blue or use limestone in Lisbon.
That might be done with a smaller object, a fait divers, a demonstration of specific research. The important part is whether you are in the right mood and the right dress for the party. So there is another kind of research.
I think I never stopped researching. I started to research different things because the scale of the problems required me to. That is the difference between a pediatrician who treats children and the physician. The scale is different.
Is the Burgo an abstract urban object made with a granitic skin?
It is an old object. It is not something I could do today. It was made when I stopped building just houses. I was in Switzerland at that time so, it must be said, I was influenced by Swiss architecture.
I understood that modernism was exhausted. It couldn’t be used in its pure form. Its time was gone. No one believed in pilotis or in a house as a living machine anymore. But that was market language, domino structure. It was the modern language that was not convincing. Post-modernism was even less convincing. It was bizarre. This was quite embarrassing for architects during that period.
This explains the success of Swiss architecture. They did not neglect their cultural traditions. They merged them with modern architecture. They created a kind of hybrid architecture, mixing tradition and modernity. For people from my generation, young people without a well defined language, it was important.
I had no experience in public buildings or large buildings. Burgo was my first large building. It brings up many of the subjects that were mentioned at that time and that were criticized with irony: “the skins and pictorial materials fashion.” These are, however, perfectly adequate for a building of that size.
I even explain it at conferences and in articles. The firemen defined the height, the width was determined by the engineers, etc. That was what happened! Then I designed some makeup: some rimmel, some red, blue and pink lipstick…
Then I had meetings with the promoters (BPI [note: a Portuguese bank] at that time). “Why won’t you build it in granite? This is a solid bank and we are in Oporto. Or build it in glass because we are a modern and transparent bank. Or
in steel because it is high-tech…” I knew that was possible because I couldn’t move the floors but I could dress it in a Lacoste polo shirt, a shirt or a T-shirt…
I understood that the skin was a reality. It was not a fashion issue. I took this arbitrary factor to its last consequences.
The building has no base, no body, no ending. You could remove three floors and it would look the same. You could add five floors and it would still look the same, so it is anti-classical.
The Burgo could only be built if it was a lot cheaper than it was designed to be. The structure was there mainly to support the façade, which was built in solid stone and steel. The new clients (who were very nice) said, “We cannot build a structure to support a façade, you will have to make it lighter.”
Is it an abstraction? Did this repetition make the building almost anonymous or did it make it sober but not anonymous at all? In the case of the Burgo, you can tell that the abstraction works. There are windows inside.
It does. The façade is sustainable. I mean, the north façade is not sustainable because it is decorative. The window depth in the South façade works very well because they are brisesoleil windows.
The eastern windows are 20 cm high. They only allow direct sunlight to enter at a certain time of the day. The same thing happens with the West facing windows. There is no problem with the Northern façade and the method works perfectly with the South one.
In this building, the design process was followed obsessively, from the first conceptual pictures until the façade detailing… Do you think that the rigor in this process is a quest for the authenticity of the object or the authenticity of the concept?
Burgo is an authentic building because it is a mirror of the lie it really is. It was not by chance that the door appears to be a rabattement of the building planes and it shows that everything is a phoney. That is why the word “Burgo” is written the other way round and why you can see the concrete columns there. It is not a stack or it would not have columns.
It is like the theme song from Truffaut’s movie, “La Nuit Américaine”. At the end of Truffaut and Mel Brooks’ movies, the cameras are moved so that the set can be seen from behind. You can see people drinking a Coca-Cola or Julius Cesar smoking a cigarette, dismantling the plot and showing that “This is fiction”
I felt the need to admit it: “Lookout, this is all a lie!” so at the time I decided to confess and to tell the truth… “It is a lie”.
Is that door, with the letters facing the wrong way, an obvious escape or is it a composition option? Those letters are only facing the wrong way because that wall is a rabattement of the façade…
It is a finishing touch. It enhances the idea that it has been pulled out. It should be part of the wall and it is made out of panels. By pulling out that panel, people have a perception that there has been a rotation of that section. People entering the building can see the columns and the beams. Actually, it is not just formalism, for two main reasons. Up to the fourth or fifth floor, the columns are so slender that horizontal steel elements were necessary. Many of those brise-soleils are real. They are actual structural elements.
Those horizontal boxes exist up to a certain level, then I kept using the same elements, but they are false.
I needed brise-soleils anyway. I would either use window shades, which is not easy when the windows are 70 m high, or I would use static elements that would create that overlapping effect.
Regarding the relationship between being anonymous and being sober that you often mention, what do you think about the urban impact of this building in Avenida da Boavista?
The word “anonymous” is very dangerous because it can be perceived as being very snobbish… The Burgo is not anonymous. I often say that the ultimate goal for an architect is to become anonymous. After is ready, the building is no longer ours. This means that when there is a collective adherence, the building ceases to be ours and it becomes everyone’s. This is the ultimate goal for an architect.
When people no longer say that a building is by someone and start to say that the Belém Tower belongs to Lisbon or that the Clérigos Tower belongs to Oporto, the buildings become anonymous. This is my goal and it is every architect’s wish: for a building to become everyone’s, not ours.
Construction Design
Was there a big change in the project when the construction work started, 10 years later? Did the designs go back to step one?
The design did not change too much. The most important issues were the costs and choosing the materials … The showroom itself became a 1:1 scale model. I had a new goal. I had to achieve that cost or it wouldn’t be built. That is why different materials and detailed designs were needed.
In the first design the granite walls in the façade were 8 cm thick…and now they are 2–3 cm thick. I evidenced this
fragile look with bolts. I didn’t do any pasting, I did not want it to look like a stone wall at all. It was not thick enough.
The structure was also redone. The previous design had thin concrete slabs but they were made lighter, molded slabs. Of course, this changed the original layout completely. Everything had to be redesigned and reconfigured because the modules are all different. The elements are not the same.
All of the floors have different heights, the elements are different and so are the gaps between them.
It is something you also learn.
Were they the result of the stack shape that was adopted?
How did these functional aspects interact with the architectural design? How do they relate to the architectural design?
It has a solid structural core that frees the building from columns. It is an open-space because I did not know what would happen to it. In an open-space the columns must be moved to the façade, which presents an important advantage: the structure determines the façade’s design.
I couldn’t face the building westwards towards Avenida da Boavista. It would be unprotected. In the late afternoon the sun would shine on the Western façade and nobody would be able to see at all. I had to move the rooms to the North and to the South. They were fine to the North and I had the brise-soleil to the South. All the bathrooms, kitchenettes and corridors were placed to the East and to the West of the building. Since there are windows, the corridors are properly lit.
This was when the façade system with 1.10 m opaque strips and 0.20 m high windows appeared on the Eastern and Western façades. The South and North façades are the opposite: 1.10 m high windows and 0.20 high strips.
The solution is perfect because it is an architectonic language. The design was adapted to an important requirement.
In these façades, we can see all the principles of shading. There are walls to the West and window overhangs to the South…In a bad design, recommendations do not blend in. Good design integrates sustainability in the work itself, improving it.
This brings us to the beginning of our conversation again… Although there are work teams that support the architect’s work, he must have a deep understanding of the technological aspects so that he can reflect them in his design since its earliest stages.
Architecture must design and create forms, and in order to do so it needs information. This is one of the few rules in
architecture: information/form. Architecture is not autonomous. We need a lot of information to create adequate forms. This is called construction.
General Arrangement Drawings
Architecture is not just this information. It is the information plus some added value. Up to a certain point, there are rules that are developed using information. From there on, you have to know how to deal with them.
North façade
East façade
Plan of Level-1
Plan from Level 1 to Level 17
A
Section
Vertical Section of the south and west façade
Vertical Section of the north and east façade
Vertical Section of the south and west façade
Vertical Section of the north and east façade
General view Copyright Luis Ferreira Alves
View of the corner of the two types od façades Copyright Luis Ferreira Alves
Image of the interior facing north Copyright Luis Ferreira Alves
Image of the interior facing west Copyright Luis Ferreira Alves
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however their brain works, their pulse beats neither faster nor slower for the common accidents of life. There is, therefore, something cold and repulsive in the air that is about them—like that of marble. In a word, they are modern philosophers; and the modern philosopher is what the pedant was of old—a being who lives in a world of his own, and has no correspondence with this. It is not that such persons have not done you services—you acknowledge it; it is not that they have said severe things of you—you submit to it as a necessary evil: but it is the cool manner in which the whole is done that annoys you—the speculating upon you, as if you were nobody—the regarding you, with a view to experiment in corpore vili—the principle of dissection —the determination to spare no blemishes—to cut you down to your real standard;—in short, the utter absence of the partiality of friendship, the blind enthusiasm of affection, or the delicacy of common decency, that whether they ‘hew you as a carcase fit for hounds, or carve you as a dish fit for the gods,’ the operation on your feelings and your sense of obligation is just the same; and, whether they are demons or angels in themselves, you wish them equally at the devil!
Other persons of worth and sense give way to mere violence of temperament (with which the understanding has nothing to do)—are burnt up with a perpetual fury—repel and throw you to a distance by their restless, whirling motion—so that you dare not go near them, or feel as uneasy in their company as if you stood on the edge of a volcano. They have their tempora mollia fandi; but then what a stir may you not expect the next moment! Nothing is less inviting or less comfortable than this state of uncertainty and apprehension. Then there are those who never approach you without the most alarming advice or information, telling you that you are in a dying way, or that your affairs are on the point of ruin, by way of disburthening their consciences; and others, who give you to understand much the same thing as a good joke, out of sheer impertinence, constitutional vivacity, and want of something to say. All these, it must be confessed, are disagreeable people; and you repay their overanxiety or total forgetfulness of you, by a determination to cut them as speedily as possible. We meet with instances of persons who overpower you by a sort of boisterous mirth and rude animal spirits, with whose ordinary state of excitement it is as impossible to keep up as with that of any one really intoxicated; and with others who seem
scarce alive—who take no pleasure or interest in any thing—who are born to exemplify the maxim,
‘Not to admire is all the art I know To make men happy, or to keep them so, and whose mawkish insensibility or sullen scorn are equally annoying. In general, all people brought up in remote country places, where life is crude and harsh—all sectaries—all partisans of a losing cause, are discontented and disagreeable. Commend me above all to the Westminster School of Reform, whose blood runs as cold in their veins as the torpedo’s, and whose touch jars like it. Catholics are, upon the whole, more amiable than Protestants—foreigners than English people. Among ourselves, the Scotch, as a nation, are particularly disagreeable. They hate every appearance of comfort themselves, and refuse it to others. Their climate, their religion, and their habits are equally averse to pleasure. Their manners are either distinguished by a fawning sycophancy (to gain their own ends, and conceal their natural defects), that makes one sick; or by a morose unbending callousness, that makes one shudder. I had forgot to mention two other descriptions of persons who fall under the scope of this essay:—those who take up a subject, and run on with it interminably, without knowing whether their hearers care one word about it, or in the least minding what reception their oratory meets with—these are pretty generally voted bores (mostly German ones); —and others, who may be designated as practical paradox-mongers— who discard the ‘milk of human kindness,’ and an attention to common observances, from all their actions, as effeminate and puling—who wear a white hat as a mark of superior understanding, and carry home a handkerchief-full of mushrooms in the top of it as an original discovery—who give you craw-fish for supper instead of lobsters; seek their company in a garret, and over a gin-bottle, to avoid the imputation of affecting genteel society; and discard them after a term of years, and warn others against them, as being honest fellows, which is thought a vulgar prejudice. This is carrying the harsh and repulsive even beyond the disagreeable—to the hateful. Such persons are generally people of common-place understandings, obtuse feelings, and inordinate vanity. They are formidable if they get you in their power—otherwise, they are only to be laughed at.
There are a vast number who are disagreeable from meanness of spirit, from downright insolence, from slovenliness of dress or disgusting tricks, from folly or ignorance: but these causes are positive moral or physical defects, and I only meant to speak of that repulsiveness of manners which arises from want of tact and sympathy with others. So far of friendship: a word, if I durst, of love. Gallantry to women (the sure road to their favour) is nothing but the appearance of extreme devotion to all their wants and wishes—a delight in their satisfaction, and a confidence in yourself, as being able to contribute towards it. The slightest indifference with regard to them, or distrust of yourself, are equally fatal. The amiable is the voluptuous in looks, manner, or words. No face that exhibits this kind of expression—whether lively or serious, obvious or suppressed, will be thought ugly—no address, awkward—no lover who approaches every woman he meets as his mistress, will be unsuccessful. Diffidence and awkwardness are the two antidotes to love.
To please universally, we must be pleased with ourselves and others. There should be a tinge of the coxcomb, an oil of selfcomplacency, an anticipation of success—there should be no gloom, no moroseness no shyness—in short, there should be very little of an Englishman, and a good deal of a Frenchman. But though, I believe, this is the receipt, we are none the nearer making use of it. It is impossible for those who are naturally disagreeable ever to become otherwise. This is some consolation, as it may save a world of useless pains and anxiety. ‘Desire to please, and you will infallibly please,’ is a true maxim; but it does not follow that it is in the power of all to practise it. A vain man, who thinks he is endeavouring to please, is only endeavouring to shine, and is still farther from the mark. An irritable man, who puts a check upon himself, only grows dull, and loses spirit to be any thing. Good temper and a happy spirit (which are the indispensable requisites) can no more be commanded than good health or good looks; and though the plain and sickly need not distort their features, and may abstain from success, this is all they can do. The utmost a disagreeable person can do is to hope to be less disagreeable than with care and study he might become, and to pass unnoticed in society. With this negative character he should be contented, and may build his fame and happiness on other things.
I will conclude with a character of men who neither please nor aspire to please anybody, and who can come in nowhere so properly as at the fag-end of an essay:—I mean that class of discontented but amusing persons, who are infatuated with their own ill success, and reduced to despair by a lucky turn in their favour. While all goes well, they are like fish out of water. They have no reliance on or sympathy with their good fortune, and look upon it as a momentary delusion. Let a doubt be thrown on the question, and they begin to be full of lively apprehensions again: let all their hopes vanish, and they feel themselves on firm ground once more. From want of spirit or of habit, their imaginations cannot rise above the low ground of humility—cannot reflect the gay, flaunting tints of the fancy—flag and droop into despondency—and can neither indulge the expectation, nor employ the means of success. Even when it is within their reach, they dare not lay hands upon it; and shrink from unlooked-for bursts of prosperity, as something of which they are both ashamed and unworthy. The class of croakers here spoken of are less delighted at other people’s misfortunes than their own. Their neighbours may have some pretensions—they have none. Querulous complaints and anticipations of discomfort are the food on which they live; and they at last acquire a passion for that which is the favourite theme of their thoughts, and can no more do without it than without the pinch of snuff with which they season their conversation, and enliven the pauses of their daily prognostics.
ON MEANS AND ENDS
The Monthly Magazine.]
‘We work by wit, and not by witchcraft.’ I .
[September, 1827.
It is impossible to have things done without doing them. This seems a truism; and yet what is more common than to suppose that we shall find things done, merely by wishing it? To put the will for the deed is as usual in practice as it is contrary to common sense. There is, in fact, no absurdity, no contradiction, of which the mind is not capable. This weakness is, I think, more remarkable in the English than in any other people, in whom (to judge by what I discover in myself) the will bears great and disproportioned sway. We desire a thing: we contemplate the end intently, and think it done, neglecting the necessary means to accomplish it. The strong tendency of the mind towards it, the internal effort it makes to give birth to the object of its idolatry, seems an adequate cause to produce the wished-for effect, and is in a manner identified with it. This is more particularly the case in what relates to the Fine Arts, and will account for some phenomena in the national character.
The English style is distinguished by what are called ébauches[38] rude sketches, or violent attempts at effect, with a total inattention to the details or delicacy of finishing. Now this, I apprehend, proceeds not exactly from grossness of perception, but from the wilfulness of our characters, our determination to have every thing our own way without any trouble, or delay, or distraction of mind. An object strikes us: we see and feel the whole effect at once. We wish to produce a likeness of it; but we wish to transfer the impression to the canvas as it is conveyed to us, simultaneously and intuitively—that is,
to stamp it there at a blow—or, otherwise, we turn away with impatience and disgust, as if the means were an obstacle to the end, and every attention to the mechanical process were a deviation from our original purpose. We thus degenerate, by repeated failures, into a slovenly style of art; and that which was at first an undisciplined and irregular impulse, becomes a habit, and then a theory. It seems a little strange that the zealous devotion to the end should produce aversion to the means; but so it is: neither is it, however irrational, altogether unnatural. That which we are struck with, which we are enamoured of, is the general appearance or result; and it would certainly be most desirable to produce the effect we aim at by a word or wish, if it were possible, without being taken up with the mechanical drudgery or pettiness of detail, or dexterity of execution, which, though they are essential and component parts of the work, do not enter into our thoughts, or form any part of our contemplation. In a word, the hand does not keep pace with the eye; and it is the desire that it should, that causes all the contradiction and confusion. We would have a face to start out from the canvas at once—not feature by feature, or touch by touch; we would be glad to convey an attitude or a divine expression to the spectator by a stroke of the pencil, as it is conveyed by a glance of the eye, or by the magic of feeling, independently of measurements, and distances, and foreshortening, and numberless minute particulars, and all the instrumentality of the art. We may find it necessary, on a cool calculation, to go through and make ourselves masters of these; but, in so doing, we submit only to necessity, and they are still a diversion to, and a suspension of, our favourite purpose for the time—at least unless practice has given that facility which almost identifies the two together, and makes the process an unconscious one. The end thus devours up the means; or our eagerness for the one, where it is strong and unchecked, renders us in proportion impatient of the other. So we view an object at a distance, which excites in us an inclination to visit it: this, after many tedious steps and intricate windings, we do; but, if we could fly, we should never consent to go on foot. The mind, however, has wings, though the body has not; and, wherever the imagination can come into play, our desires outrun their accomplishment. Persons of this extravagant humour should addict themselves to eloquence or poetry, where the thought ‘leaps at once to its effect,’ and is wafted, in a metaphor or an
apostrophe, ‘from Indus to the Pole;’ though even there we should find enough, in the preparatory and mechanical parts of those arts, to try our patience and mortify our vanity! The first and strongest impulse of the mind is to achieve any object, on which it is set, at once, and by the shortest and most decisive means; but, as this cannot always be done, we ought not to neglect other more indirect and subordinate aids; nor should we be tempted to do so, but that the delusions of the will interfere with the convictions of the understanding, and what we ardently wish, we fancy to be both possible and true. Let us take the instance of copying a fine picture. We are full of the effect we intend to produce; and so powerfully does this prepossession affect us, that we imagine we have produced it, in spite of the evidence of our senses and the suggestions of friends. In truth, after a number of violent and anxious efforts to strike off a resemblance which we passionately long for, it seems an injustice not to have succeeded; it is too late to retrace our steps, and begin over again in a different method; we prefer even failure to arriving at our end by petty, mechanical tricks and rules; we have copied Titian or Rubens in the spirit in which they ought to be copied; though the likeness may not be perfect, there is a look, a tone, a something, which we chiefly aimed at, and which we persuade ourselves, seeing the copy only through the dazzled, hectic flush of feverish imagination, we have really given; and thus we persist, and make fifty excuses, sooner than own our error, which would imply its abandonment; or, if the light breaks in upon us, through all the disguises of sophistry and self-love, it is so painful that we shut our eyes to it. The more evident our failure, the more desperate the struggles we make to conceal it from ourselves, to stick to our original determination, and end where we began.
What makes me think that this is the real stumbling-block in our way, and not mere rusticity or want of discrimination, is that you will see an English artist admiring and thrown into downright raptures by the tucker of Titian’s Mistress, made up of an infinite number of little delicate folds; and, if he attempts to copy it, he proceeds deliberately to omit all these details, and dash it off by a single smear of his brush. This is not ignorance, or even laziness, I conceive, so much as what is called jumping at a conclusion. It is, in a word, an overweening presumption. ‘A wilful man must have his way.’ He sees the details, the varieties, and their effect: he sees and is charmed
with all this; but he would reproduce it with the same rapidity and unembarrassed freedom that he sees it—or not at all. He scorns the slow but sure method, to which others conform, as tedious and inanimate. The mixing his colours, the laying in the ground, the giving all his attention to a minute break or nice gradation in the several lights and shades, is a mechanical and endless operation, very different from the delight he feels in studying the effect of all these, when properly and ably executed. Quam nihil ad tuum, Papiniane, ingenium! Such fooleries are foreign to his refined taste and lofty enthusiasm; and a doubt crosses his mind, in the midst of his warmest raptures, how Titian could resolve upon the drudgery of going through them, or whether it was not rather owing to extreme facility of hand, and a sort of trick in laying on the colours, abridging the mechanical labour! No one wrote or talked more eloquently about Titian’s harmony and clearness of colouring than the late Mr. Barry—discoursing of his greens, his blues, his yellows, ‘the little red and white of which he composed his flesh-colour,’ con amore; yet his own colouring was dead and dingy, and, if he had copied a Titian, he would have made it a mere daub, leaving out all that caused his wonder or admiration, or that induced him to copy it after the English or Irish fashion. We not only grudge the labour of beginning, but we stop short, for the same reason, when we are near touching the goal of success, and, to save a few last touches, leave a work unfinished and an object unattained. The immediate steps, the daily gradual improvement, the successive completion of parts, give us no pleasure; we strain at the final result; we wish to have the whole done, and, in our anxiety to get it off our hands, say it will do, and lose the benefit of all our pains by stinting a little more, and being unable to command a little patience. In a day or two, we will suppose, a copy of a fine Titian would be as like as we could make it: the prospect of this so enchants us, that we skip the intervening space, see no great use in going on with it, fancy that we may spoil it, and, in order to put an end to the question, take it home with us, where we immediately see our error, and spend the rest of our lives in regretting that we did not finish it properly when we were about it. We can execute only a part; we see the whole of nature or of a picture at once. Hinc illæ lachrymæ. The English grasp at this whole— nothing less interests or contents them; and, in aiming at too much, they miss their object altogether.
A French artist, on the contrary, has none of this uneasy, anxious feeling—of this desire to master the whole of his subject, and anticipate his good fortune at a blow—of this massing and concentrating principle. He takes the thing more easy and rationally. He has none of the mental qualms, the nervous agitation, the wild, desperate plunges and convulsive throes of the English artist. He does not set off headlong without knowing where he is going, and find himself up to the neck in all sorts of difficulties and absurdities, from impatience to begin and have the matter off his mind (as if it were an evil conscience); but takes time to consider, arranges his plans, gets in his outline and his distances, and lays a foundation before he attempts a superstructure which he may have to pull in pieces again, or let it remain—a monument of his folly. He looks before he leaps, which is contrary to the true blindfold English rule; and I should think that we had invented this proverb from seeing so many fatal examples of the violation of it. Suppose he undertakes to make a copy of a picture: he first looks at it, and sees what it is. He does not make his sketch all black or all white, because one part of it is so, and because he cannot alter an idea he has once got into his head and must always run into extremes, but varies his tints (strange as it may seem) from green to red, from orange-tawny to yellow, from grey to brown, according as they vary in the original. He sees no inconsistency, no forfeiture of a principle, in this (any more than Mr. Southey in the change of the colours of his coat), but a great deal of right reason, and indeed an absolute necessity for it, if he wishes to succeed in what he is about. This is the last thing in an Englishman’s thoughts: he only wishes to have his own way, though it ends in defeat and ruin—strives hard to do what he is sensible he cannot—or, if he finds he can, gives over and leaves the matter short of a triumphant conclusion, which is too flattering an idea for him to indulge in. The French artist proceeds with due deliberation, and bit by bit. He takes some one part—a hand, an eye, a piece of drapery, an object in the back-ground—and finishes it carefully; then another, and so on to the end. When he has gone through every part, his picture is done: there is nothing more that he can add to it; it is a numerical calculation, and there are only so many items in the account. An Englishman may go on slobbering his over for the hundredth time, and be no nearer than when he began. As he tries to finish the whole at once, and as this is not possible, he always leaves
his work in an imperfect state, or as if he had begun on a new canvas —like a man who is determined to leap to the top of a tower, instead of scaling it step by step, and who is necessarily thrown on his back every time he repeats the experiment. Again, the French student does not, from a childish impatience, when he is near the end, destroy the effect of the whole, by leaving some one part eminently deficient, an eye-sore to the rest; nor does he fly from what he is about, to any thing else that happens to catch his eye, neglecting the one and spoiling the other. He is, in our old poet’s phrase, ‘constrained by mastery,’ by the mastery of common sense and pleasurable feeling. He is in no hurry to get to the end; for he has a satisfaction in the work, and touches and retouches perhaps a single head, day after day and week after week, without repining, uneasiness, or apparent progress. The very lightness and buoyancy of his feeling renders him (where the necessity of this is pointed out) patient and laborious. An Englishman, whatever he undertakes, is as if he was carrying a heavy load that oppresses both his body and mind, and that he is anxious to throw down as soon as possible. The Frenchman’s hopes and fears are not excited to a pitch of intolerable agony, so that he is compelled, in mere compassion to himself, to bring the question to a speedy issue, even to the loss of his object. He is calm, easy, collected, and takes his time and improves his advantages as they occur, with vigilance and alacrity. Pleased with himself, he is pleased with whatever occupies his attention nearly alike. He is never taken at a disadvantage. Whether he paints an angel or a joint-stool, it is much the same to him: whether it is landscape or history, still it is he who paints it. Nothing puts him out of his way, for nothing puts him out of conceit with himself. This selfcomplacency forms an admirable ground-work for moderation and docility in certain particulars, though not in others.
I remember an absurd instance enough of this deliberate mode of setting to work in a young French artist, who was copying the Titian’s Mistress in the Louvre, some twenty years ago. After getting in his chalk-outline, one would think he might have been attracted to the face—that heaven of beauty (as it appears to some), clear, transparent, open, breathing freshness, that ‘makes a sunshine in the shady place’; or to the lustre of the golden hair; or some part of the poetry of the picture (for, with all its materiality, this picture has a poetry about it); instead of which he began to finish a square he had
marked out in the right-hand corner of the picture, containing a piece of board and a bottle of some kind of ointment. He set to work like a cabinet-maker or an engraver, and appeared to have no sympathy with the soul of the picture. On a Frenchman (generally speaking), the distinction between the great and the little, the exquisite and the indifferent, is in a great measure lost: his selfsatisfied egotism supplies whatever is wanting up to a certain point, and neutralizes whatever goes beyond it. Another young man, at the time I speak of, was for eleven weeks daily employed in making a black-lead pencil drawing of a small Leonardo: he sat with his legs balanced across a rail to do it, kept his hat on, every now and then consulted with his friends about his progress, rose up, went to the fire to warm himself, talked of the styles of the different masters— praising Titian pour les coloris, Raphael pour l’expression, Poussin pour la composition—all being alike to him, provided they had each something to help him on in his harangue (for that was all he thought about),—and then returned to perfectionate (as he called it) his copy. This would drive an Englishman out of his senses, supposing him to be ever so stupid. The perseverance and the interruptions, the labour without impulse, the attention to the parts in succession, and disregard of the whole together, are to him utterly incomprehensible. He wants to do something striking, and bends all his thoughts and energies to one mighty effort. A Frenchman has no notion of this summary proceeding, exists mostly in his present sensations, and, if he is left at liberty to enjoy or trifle with these, cares about nothing farther, looking neither backwards nor forwards. They forgot the reign of terror under Robespierre in a month; they forgot that they had ever been called the great nation under Buonaparte in a week. They sat in chairs on the Boulevards (just as they do at other times), when the shots were firing into the next street, and were only persuaded to quit them when their own soldiers were seen pouring down all the avenues from the heights of Montmartre, crying ‘Sauve qui peut!’ They then went home and dressed themselves to see the Allies enter Paris, as a fine sight, just as they would witness a procession at a theatre. This is carrying the instinct of levity as far as it will go. With all their affectation and want of sincerity, there is, on the principle here stated, a kind of simplicity and nature about them after all. They lend themselves to the impression of the moment with good humour and good will,
making it not much better nor worse than it is: the English constantly over-do or under-do every thing, and are either mad with enthusiasm or in despair. The extreme slowness and regularity of the French school have then arisen, as a natural consequence, out of their very fickleness and frivolity (their severally supposed national characteristics); for, owing to the last, their studious exactness costs them nothing; and, again, they have no headstrong impulses or ardent longings that urge them on to the violation of rules, or hurry them away with a subject or with the interest belonging to it. All is foreseen and settled beforehand, so as to assist the fluttering and feeble hold they have of things. When they venture beyond the literal and formal, and (mistaking pedantry and bombast for genius) attempt the grand and the impressive style, as in David’s and Girodet’s pictures, the Lord deliver us from sublimity engrafted on insipidity and petit maître-ism! You see a solitary French artist in the Louvre copying a Raphael or a Rubens, standing on one leg, not quite sure of what he is about: you see them collected in groupes about David’s, elbowing each other, thinking them even finer than Raphael, more truly themselves, a more perfect combination of all that can be taught by the Greek sculptor and the French posturemaster! Is this patriotism, or want of taste? If the former, it is excusable, and why not, if the latter?
Even should a French artist fail, he is not disconcerted—there is something else he excels in: ‘for one unkind and cruel fair, another still consoles him.’ He studies in a more graceful posture, or pays greater attention to his dress; or he has a friend, who has beaucoup du talent, and conceit enough for them both. His self-love has always a salvo, and comes upon its legs again, like a cat or a monkey. Not so with Bruin the Bear. If an Englishman (God help the mark!) fails in one thing, it is all over with him; he is enraged at the mention of any thing else he can do, and at every consolation offered him on that score; he banishes all other thoughts, but of his disappointment and discomfiture, from his breast—neither eats nor sleeps (it is well if he does not swallow down double ‘potations, pottle-deep,’ to drown remembrance)—will not own, even to himself, any other thing in which he takes an interest or feels a pride; and is in the horrors till he recovers his good opinion of himself in the only point on which he now sets a value, and for which his anxiety and disorder of mind incapacitate him as effectually as if he were drunk with strong liquor
instead of spleen and passion. I have here drawn the character of an Englishman, I am sure; for it is a portrait of myself, and, I am sorry to add, an unexaggerated one. I intend these Essays as studies of human nature; and as, in the prosecution of this design, I do not spare others, I see no reason why I should spare myself. I lately tried to make a copy of a portrait by Titian (after several years’ want of practice), with a view to give a friend in England some notion of the picture, which is equally remarkable and fine. I failed, and floundered on for some days, as might be expected. I must say the effect on me was painful and excessive. My sky was suddenly overcast. Every thing seemed of the colour of the paints I used. Nature in my eyes became dark and gloomy. I had no sense or feeling left, but of the unforeseen want of power, and of the tormenting struggle to do what I could not. I was ashamed ever to have written or spoken on art: it seemed a piece of vanity and affectation in me to do so—all whose reasonings and refinements on the subject ended in an execrable daub. Why did I think of attempting such a thing without weighing the consequences of exposing my presumption and incapacity so unnecessarily? It was blotting from my mind, covering with a thick veil all that I remembered of these pictures formerly— my hopes when young, my regrets since, one of the few consolations of my life and of my declining years. I was even afraid to walk out of an evening by the barrier of Neuilly, or to recall the yearnings and associations that once hung upon the beatings of my heart. All was turned to bitterness and gall. To feel any thing but the consciousness of my own helplessness and folly, appeared a want of sincerity, a mockery, and an insult to my mortified pride! The only relief I had was in the excess of pain I felt: this was at least some distinction. I was not insensible on that side. No French artist, I thought, would regret not copying a Titian so much as I did, nor so far shew the same value for it, however he might have the advantage of me in drawing or mechanical dexterity. Besides, I had copied this very picture very well formerly. If ever I got out of my present scrape, I had at any rate received a lesson not to run the same risk of vexation, or commit myself gratuitously again upon any occasion whatever. Oh! happy ought they to be, I said, who can do any thing, when I feel the misery, the agony, the dull, gnawing pain of being unable to do what I wish in this single instance! When I copied this picture before, I had no other resource, no other language. My tongue then stuck to the roof
of my mouth: now it is unlocked, and I have done what I then despaired of doing in another way. Ought I not to be grateful and contented? Oh, yes!—and think how many there are who have nothing to which they can turn themselves, and fail in every object they undertake. Well, then, Let bygones be bygones (as the Scotch proverb has it); give up the attempt, and think no more of Titian, or of the portrait of a Man in black in the Louvre. This would be very well for any one else; but for me, who had nearly exhausted the subject on paper, that I should take it into my head to paint a libel of what I had composed so many and such fine panegyrics upon—it was a fatality, a judgment upon me for my vapouring and conceit. I must be as shy of the subject for the future as a damned author is of the title of his play or the name of his hero ever after. Yet the picture would look the same as ever. I could hardly bear to think so: it would be hid or defaced to me as ‘in a phantasma or a hideous dream.’ I must turn my thoughts from it, or they would lead to madness! The copy went on better afterwards, and the affair ended less tragically than I apprehended. I did not cut a hole in the canvas, or commit any other extravagance: it is now hanging up very quietly facing me; and I have considerable satisfaction in occasionally looking at it, as I write this paragraph.
Such are the agonies into which we throw ourselves about trifles— our rage and disappointment at want of success in any favourite pursuit, and, our neglect of the means to ensure it. A Frenchman, under the penalty of half the chagrin at failure, would take just twice the pains and consideration to avoid it: but our morbid eagerness and blundering impetuosity, together with a certain concreteness of imagination which prevents our dividing any operation into steps and stages, defeat the very end we have in view. The worst of these wilful mischiefs of our own making is, that they admit of no relief or intermission. Natural calamities or great griefs, as we do not bring them upon ourselves, so they find a seasonable respite in tears or resignation, or in some alleviating contrast or reflection: but pride scorns all alliance with natural frailty or indulgence; our wilful purposes regard every relaxation or moment’s ease as a compromise of their very essence, which consists in violence and effort: they turn away from whatever might afford diversion or solace, and goad us on to exertions as painful as they are unavailable, and with no other companion than remorse,—the most intolerable of all inmates of the
breast; for it is constantly urging us to retrieve our peace of mind by an impossibility—the undoing of what is past. One of the chief traits of sublimity in Milton’s character of Satan is this dreadful display of unrelenting pride and self-will—the sense of suffering joined with the sense of power and ‘courage never to submit or yield’—and the aggravation of the original purpose of lofty ambition and opposition to the Almighty, with the total overthrow and signal punishment,— which ought to be reasons for its relinquishment. ‘His thoughts burn like a hell within him!’ but he gives them ‘neither truce nor rest,’ and will not even sue for mercy. This kind of sublimity must be thrown away upon the French critic, who would only think Satan a very ridiculous old gentleman for adhering so obstinately to his original pretensions, and not making the most of circumstances, and giving in his resignation to the ruling party! When Buonaparte fell, an English editor (of virulent memory) exhausted a great number of the finest passages in Paradise Lost, in applying them to his ill-fated ambition. This was an equal compliment to the poet and the conqueror: to the last, for having realized a conception of himself in the mind of his enemies on a par with the most stupendous creations of imagination; to the first, for having embodied in fiction what bore so strong a resemblance to, and was constantly brought to mind by, the fearful and imposing reality! But to return to our subject.
It is the same with us in love and literature. An Englishman makes love without thinking of the chances of success, his own disadvantages, or the character of his mistress—that is, without the adaptation of means to ends, consulting only his own humour or fancy;[39] and he writes a book of history or travels, without acquainting himself with geography, or appealing to documents or dates; substituting his own will or opinion in the room of these technical helps or hindrances, as he considers them. It is not right. In business it is not by any means the same; which looks as if, where interest was the moving principle, and acted as a counterpoise to caprice and will, our headstrong propensity gave way, though it sometimes leads us into extravagant and ruinous speculations. Nor is it a disadvantage to us in war; for there the spirit of contradiction does every thing, and an Englishman will go to the devil sooner than yield to any odds. Courage is nothing but will, defying consequences; and this the English have in perfection. Burns somewhere calls out lustily, inspired by rhyme and usquebaugh,—
‘Set but a Scotsman on a hill; Say such is royal George’s will, And there’s the foe:His only thought is how to kill Twa at a blow.’
I apprehend, with his own countrymen or ours, all the love and loyalty would come to little, but for their hatred of the army opposed to them. It is the resistance, ‘the two to kill at a blow,’ that is the charm, and makes our fingers’-ends tingle. The Greek cause makes no progress with us for this reason: it is one of pure sympathy, but our sympathies must arise out of our antipathies; they were devoted to the Queen to spite the King. We had a wonderful affection for the Spaniards—the secret of which was that we detested the French. Our love must begin with hate. It is so far well that the French are opposed to us in almost every way; for the spirit of contradiction alone to foreign fopperies and absurdities keeps us within some bounds of decency and order. When an English lady of quality introduces a favourite by saying, ‘This is his lordship’s physician, and my atheist,’ the humour might become epidemic; but we can stop it at once by saying, ‘That is so like a Frenchwoman!’—The English excel in the practical and mechanic arts, where mere plodding and industry are expected and required; but they do not combine business and pleasure well together. Thus, in the Fine Arts, which unite the mechanical with the sentimental, they will probably never succeed; for the one spoils and diverts them from the other. An Englishman can attend but to one thing at a time. He hates music at dinner. He can go through any labour or pain with prodigious fortitude; but he cannot make a pleasure of it, or persuade himself he is doing a fine thing, when he is not. Again, they are great in original discoveries, which come upon them by surprise, and which they leave to others to perfect. It is a question whether, if they foresaw they were about to make the discovery, at the very point of projection as it were, they would not turn their backs upon it, and leave it to shift for itself; or obstinately refuse to take the last step, or give up the pursuit, in mere dread and nervous apprehension lest they should not succeed. Poetry is also their undeniable element; for the essence of poetry is will and passion, ‘and it alone is highly fantastical.’ French poetry is verbiage or dry detail.
I have thus endeavoured to shew why it is the English fail as a people in the Fine Arts, because the idea of the end absorbs that of the means. Hogarth was an exception to this rule; but then every stroke of his pencil was instinct with genius. As it has been well said, that ‘we read his works,’ so it might be said he wrote them. Barry is an instance more to my purpose. No one could argue better about gusto in painting, and yet no one ever painted with less. His pictures were dry, coarse, and wanted all that his descriptions of those of others indicate. For example, he speaks of ‘the dull, dead, watery look’ of the Medusa’s head of Leonardo, in a manner that conveys an absolute idea of the character: had he copied it, you would never have suspected any thing of the kind. His pen grows almost wanton in praise of Titian’s nymph-like figures. What drabs he has made of his own sea-nymphs, floating in the Thames, with Dr. Burney at their head, with his wig on! He is like a person admiring the grace of an accomplished rope-dancer; place him on the rope himself, and his head turns;—or he is like Luther’s comparison of Reason to a drunken man on horseback—‘set him up on one side, and he tumbles over on the other.’ Why is this? His mind was essentially ardent and discursive, not sensitive or observant; and though the immediate object acted as a stimulus to his imagination, it was only as it does to the poet’s—that is, as a link in the chain of association, as implying other strong feelings and ideas, and not for its intrinsic beauty or individual details. He had not the painter’s eye, though he had the painter’s general knowledge. There is as great a difference in this respect between our views of things as between the telescope and microscope. People in general see objects only to distinguish them in practice and by name—to know that a hat is black, that a chair is not a table, that John is not James; and there are painters, particularly of history in England, who look very little farther. They cannot finish any thing, or go over a head twice: the first coup-d’œil is all they ever arrive at, nor can they refine on their impressions, soften them down, or reduce them to their component parts, without losing their spirit. The inevitable result of this is grossness, and also want of force and solidity; for, in reality, the parts cannot be separated without injury from the whole. Such people have no pleasure in the art as such: it is merely to astonish or to thrive that they follow it; or, if thrown out of it by accident, they regret it only as a bankrupt tradesman does a business which was a handsome subsistence to him. Barry did not
live, like Titian, on the taste of colours (there was here, perhaps—and I will not disguise it—in English painters in general, a defect of organic susceptibility); they were not a pabulum to his senses; he did not hold green, blue, red, and yellow for ‘the darlings of his precious eye.’ They did not, therefore, sink into his mind with all their hidden harmonies, nor nourish and enrich it with material beauty, though he knew enough of them to furnish hints for other ideas and to suggest topics of discourse. If he had had the most enchanting object in nature before him in his painting-room at the Adelphi, he would have turned from it, after a moment’s burst of admiration, to talk of the subject of his next composition, and to scrawl in some new and vast design, illustrating a series of great events in history, or some vague moral theory. The art itself was nothing to him, though he made it the stalking-horse to his ambition and display of intellectual power in general; and, therefore, he neglected its essential qualities to daub in huge allegories, or carry on cabals with the Academy, in which the violence of his will and the extent of his views found proper food and scope. As a painter, he was tolerable merely as a draftsman, or in that part of the art which may be best reduced to rules and precepts, or to positive measurements. There is neither colouring, nor expression, nor delicacy, nor striking effect in his pictures at the Adelphi. The group of youths and horses, in the representation of the Olympic Games, is the best part of them, and has more of the grace and spirit of a Greek bas-relief than any thing of the same kind in the French school of painting. Barry was, all his life, a thorn in the side of Sir Joshua, who was irritated by the temper and disconcerted by the powers of the man; and who, conscious of his own superiority in the exercise of his profession, yet looked askance at Barry’s loftier pretensions and more gigantic scale of art. But he had no more occasion to be really jealous of him than of an Irish porter or orator. It was like Imogen’s mistaking the dead body of Cloten for her lord’s—‘the jovial thigh, the brawns of Hercules’: the head, which would have detected the cheat, was missing!
I might have gone more into the subject of our apparent indifference to the pleasure of mere imitation, if I had had to run a parallel between English and Italian or even Flemish art; but really, though I find a great deal of what is finical, I find nothing of the pleasurable in the details of French more than of English art. The English artist, it is an old and just complaint, can with difficulty be
prevailed upon to finish any part of a picture but the face, even if he does that any tolerable justice: the French artist bestows equal and elaborate pains on every part of his picture—the dress, the carpet, &c.; and it has been objected to the latter method, that it has the effect of making the face look unfinished; for as this is variable and in motion, it can never admit of the same minuteness of imitation as objects of still-life, and must suffer in the comparison, if these have the utmost possible degree of attention bestowed on them, and do not fall into their relative place in the composition from their natural insignificance. But does not this distinction shew generally that the English have no pleasure in art, unless there is an additional interest beyond what is borrowed from the eye, and that the French have the same pleasure in it, provided the mechanical operation is the same— like the fly that settles equally on the face or dress, and runs over the whole surface with the same lightness and indifference? The collar of a coat is out of drawing: this may be and is wrong. But I cannot say that it gives me the same disturbance as if the nose was awry. A Frenchman thinks that both are equally out of drawing, and sets about correcting them both with equal gravity and perseverance. A part of the back-ground of a picture is left in an unfinished state: this is a sad eye-sore to the French artist or connoisseur. We English care little about it: if the head and character are well given, we pass it over as of small consequence; and if they are failures, it is of even less. A French painter, after having made you look like a baboon, would go on finishing the cravat or the buttons of your coat with all the nicety of a man milliner or button-maker, and the most perfect satisfaction with himself and his art. This with us would be quite impossible. ‘They are careful after many things: with us, there is one thing needful’—which is effect. We certainly throw our impressions more into masses (they are not taken off by pattern, every part alike): there may be a slowness and repugnance at first; but, afterwards, there is an impulse, a momentum acquired—one interest absorbing and being strengthened by several others; and if we gain our principal object, we can overlook the rest, or at least cannot find time to attend to them till we have secured this. We have nothing of the petit maître, of the martinet style about us: we run into the opposite fault. If we had time, if we had power, there could be no objection to giving every part with the utmost perfection, as it is given in a looking-glass. But if we have only a month to do a portrait in, is it not better to give
three weeks to the face and one to the dress, than one week to the face and three to the dress. How often do we look at the face compared to the dress? ‘On a good foundation,’ says Sancho Panza, ‘a good house may be built’; so a good picture should have a good background, and be finished in every part. It is entitled to this mark of respect, which is like providing a frame for it, and hanging it in a good light. I can easily understand how Rubens or Vandyke finished the back grounds and drapery of their pictures:—they were worth the trouble; and, besides, it cost them nothing. It was to them no more than blowing a bubble in the air. One would no doubt have every thing right—a feather in a cap, or a plant in the foreground—if a thought or a touch would do it. But to labour on for ever, and labour to no purpose, is beyond mortal or English patience. Our clumsiness is one cause of our negligence. Depend upon it, people do with readiness what they can do well. I rather wonder, therefore, that Raphael took such pains in finishing his draperies and back grounds, which he did so indifferently. The expression is like an emanation of the soul, or like a lamp shining within and illuminating the whole face and body; and every part, charged with so sacred a trust as the conveying of this expression (even to the hands and feet), would be wrought up to the highest perfection. But his inanimate objects must have cost him some trouble; and yet he laboured them too. In what he could not do well, he was still determined to do his best; and that nothing should be wanting in decorum and respect to an art that he had consecrated to virtue, and to that genius that burnt like a flame upon its altars! We have nothing that for myself I can compare with this high and heroic pursuit of art for its own sake. The French fancy their own pedantic abortions equal to it, thrust them into the Louvre, ‘and with their darkness dare affront that light!’—thus proving themselves without the germ or the possibility of excellence—the feeling of it in others. We at least claim some interest in art, by looking up to its loftiest monuments—retire to a distance, and reverence the sanctuary, if we cannot enter it.
‘They also serve who only stare and wait.’[40]