firmitas, utilitas, venustas no longer

Joseph McKenley, AIA , NCARB, Grizform Design Architects

We are introduced to the famous triad of Firmitas, Utilitas, and Venustas in book three of Vitruvius’

Ten Books on Architecture circa 27 BCE. “Firmness or physical strength secured the building’s structural integrity. The utility provided an efficient arrangement of spaces and mechanical systems to meet the functional needs of its occupants. And venustas, the aesthetic quality associated with the goddess Venus, imparted style, proportion, and visual beauty.

Rendered memorably into English by Henry Wotton, a seventeenthcentury translator, “firmness, commodity, and delight” remain the essential components of all successful architectural design.” With all advancements since then, it still holds true that a building well built meets all three traits equally. By extension, a city of buildings that meet all three traits equally is a happy city. Today, I find that triangles are often more obtuse than equilateral.

I find this especially apparent in the façades we build today. I find that Architects, under tremendous pressure, have given over to a new triad of priorities - speed, performance, and commerce. I find that this new triad results in buildings that quite often leaves me wanting for more - more strength in their structure and materials; and more beauty. Not usually more utility. Thanks to everincreasing building performance standards, and to costs of construction, efficiency seems to remain a very high priority for clients and so for buildings.

The façade, coming from the Latin word “faccia” or face, is a critical element in the design of cities. The façades of buildings amalgamate to define the streets and plazas that create cities.

So, building façades are the DNA of a city - their uniqueness or sameness contributes to the gestalt of that city - and as such that face is of high importance to a happy city.

Yearly, I give a lecture at the University of Maryland School of Architecture on the Façade as Mediator and as Metaphor. In that lecture, I recognized that the purpose of the façade is two-fold. First, a façade must protect the building and its inhabitants from the elements. A façade must first provide an enclosure; it should keep the rain and snow out, and contribute to providing a thermally comfortable interior. Then, the façade has a duty to the built environment - an aesthetic duty. It also has an opportunity. Façades are able to project an ideal into the built environment, in fact in my lecture I go as far as to say that façades are projections of our attitude towards typology, culture, economy, and ideology (architectural theory). Like an outfit, there is a choice in how a façade comes together - in what it looks like and what it is made of. Like an outfit, it can be appropriate or not, challenge conventions or not, be of high quality or not, but at the end of the day it is a choice (or a series of choices). It is a choice that we make on behalf of our clients that affects the built environment.

Architects have always had to choose how to make a façade, but I argue today that the factors influencing today’s choices have changed and that that change ought to be surveilled. Before talking about that change, I find it helpful to recall a condensed timeline of Architecture. I’ll start in sixteenth century Rome and Florence, where many of our Architectural History lessons were focused in (western) architecture schools. Then, I’ll leap forward to Modernism and to the International Style movement of the early 1900s; then to the 1970s energy crisis, and fast forward to today - the change or the globalized era.

The façade was of critical importance to Rome and Florence.

It was understood that buildings shaped the outdoor space - that life in a city happens outside the walls of the home and that the spaces between buildings - the streets and the plaza were just as important as the building itself.

Take for instance the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence c.1400s built by Filipo Brunelleschi - also responsible for the dome of the Florence Cathedral. According to Professor Brian Kelly’s 2021 lecture, Making Face, the church was built for the Medici family with the intent to build the front façade, made of the most important materials, last. However, the family ran out of money and so the façade was not built and what stands today is the rough ‘backup’ wall that the façade would have been attached to.

However, what really is notable about this case is the emphasis that was placed on this façade. According to Kelly, the family received several bids to design the façade including the one from Michelangelo pictured. Michelangelo’s façade design intended to mask the high nave and low side aisle in order to have more of a temple front to the building - elevating the scale and importance of the building. Scale and beauty and metaphor were the driving forces behind the design.

Jumping forward to the early 1900s, we find a push towards functionalism and away from ornamentation and classical orders. We find an embrace of technology that preferences speed of construction over craft. We find a push towards openness versus solidity - more glass, less wall. We still find a quest for beauty

(venustas) but in a new sense - one not relating to symmetry and classical orders but to the balance of asymmetries. This push culminates in and is disseminated through the International Style movement of the 1920s and 1930s and is characterized by works such as Le Corbusier’s Villa Stein (1926). Whereas the church in San Lorenzo was trying to mask the inside design with its façade, the Villa Stein’s façades are reflective of the interior spatial arrangement, consistent with Le Corbusier saying “the exterior is a result of an interior” in Towards a New Architecture, 1927, page 167. On page 177 Le Corbusier goes on to mention that “...the exterior is always an interior’’ illustrating again the importance of a welldesigned façade even despite the lack of ornamentation.

By the 1960s the international style movement began to lose traction after having far-reaching global impacts through European Architects who settled around the world post World War II. By the 1970s, Architecture, in the US, began to contend less with style and more with energy demands. According to Elizabeth Donoff, “The energy crises of the 1970s changed the way we think about natural resources, inspired environmental advocacy, and laid the groundwork(sic) for government oversight with the establishment of the Department of Energy in August 1977.” We saw the development of the

AIA Energy Committee in 1973 and by the early 1990s we saw the AIA Committee on the Environment’s and U.S. Green Building Council’s formations. This drive towards reducing energy use and making buildings more sustainable introduced a new, farreaching design criteria - building performance.

Today, performance demands on buildings are higher than they have ever been (and rightly so). Architects have been made aware of the tremendous contribution buildings make to global warmingthe biggest contribution. And with global warming currently being our biggest threat as a species, buildings will need to perform better and better, contributing less and less to global warming. Architects also have to contend with the commoditization of Architecture. Whereas historically clients might have been wealthy families and patrons of Art, today more and more the client is a business entity interested in their bottom line rather than the quality of the built environment. Building materials are a line item on a spreadsheet, waiting to be value engineered to reduce project costs. The choice between brick or stone or a composite is less and less an aesthetic decision and more and more a commercial decision. With the commoditization of Architecture also comes a new driver of decision-making - speed. Given the advancements of the industrialization that gave birth to the International Style movement and commercial pressures, clients are asking for projects to be delivered faster than ever before.

This leads me to hypothesize that cities are being built with commerce, speed, and performance as the primary driving force over firmness, utility, and beauty and it leaves me wondering if our future cities will be happy cities, filled with the delight of a beautiful built environment, or if our cities will become commodities - products of decisions made in a boardroom and passed on to an Architect.

References

Corbusier, Le. 2007. Toward an Architecture. Translated by John Goodman. N.p.: Getty Research Institute.

Donoff, Elizabeth. 2016. “The Energy Crises of the 70s.” Architect Magazine. https://www.architectmagazine.com/ technology/lighting/the-energy-crises-of-the-70s_o.

“Firmness, Commodity and Delight - Firmness, Commodity, and Delight.” n.d. The University of Chicago Library. Accessed May 4, 2022. https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/collex/exhibits/firmness-commodity-and-delight/.

Kelly, Brian. 2021. Making Face, Virtual lecture. University of Maryland School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, College Park, Maryland.