Download Structure/Ornament and the Modern Figuration of Architecture

and
the
Modern
Structure/Ornament
Figuration
of
Architecture
Anne-Marie Sankovitch
Roman architecture often reduced the Greek orders to
mere ornament applied to arcuated structures.
The Lombard chapel piled up ornament on the purist
structure of the Florentine model.
In the nineteenth century a building was made a structure
to receive an envelope of surface ornament.
To be authentically modern was to strip categorically from
structure all ornament.
Few readers would find anything remarkable about the
prominent use of structure and ornament in such statements,
which resemble actual passages of innumerable modern
writings on architecture. These two words seem to describe
unproblematically only what is physically there; "structure/
ornament" appears to embody the very nature of much built
reality. We do not in general question, or even feel that it is
necessary to question, what structure and ornament actually
signify, or to ask why they so typically appear as an oppositional pair. Nor do we often seriously reflect on the historical
origin of the pair (which is generally grossly misdated) or
study the implications of that origination. In the absence of
such critical analysis, we fail to realize how pervasive and
compelling a figuration of architecture the structure/
ornament pair is, and that it determines in massive ways much
of how we think and write about many aspects of architecture
and its history, and even to a large extent how we build. To
initiate such an analysis is the primary aim of this essay, which
is intended not to resolve issues attending specific historical
sites but rather to excavate and closely scrutinize certain
assumptions and problematics that pervade and frame structure/ornament, and thereby to put to critical questioning the
seemingly transparent nature of much recent and current
architectural discourse.
St-Eustache as Structure/Ornament Paradigm
Architectural history today frequently seeks to interpret
buildings as objects shaped by and expressive of their social
meanings and historical contexts. The function of a building
is consequently understood as primarily representational and
often as actively engaged in defining the social world of which
it is a part. It would be both unexceptional and commendable
to decide that the best way to grasp the realities of, for
instance, a fifteenth-century Florentine church is to chart the
competing economic, political, religious, and cultural forces
that brought it into being and to interpret it as a material
expression of the ascending wealth and status of the mercantile class during the period.
This alliance of contextualism and soft semiotics has been
marshaled primarily as a reaction against the formalism that
generally dominated architectural discourse from the late
1800s through the middle of the twentieth century and that
coincided with modernism and its distrust of history. Since
the embrace of social history around 1970, formalism and the
internal history of architecture have been either rejected as
elitist (or worse) or, more benignly, regarded as having
discharged their necessary but narrow task so that we can now
progress to a richer understanding of architecture in its full
multidisciplinary complexity. In the efforts to anchor architectural form in its historical context, form itself has become
self-evident and the procedures of formal analysis often tend
to be taken as a given.
That a critical inquiry into the interpretive problematics of
the properly architectural has been deemed irrelevant by
many architectural historians is largely because the current
revisionism has tended to restrict itself to questioning the
scholarship of the earlier part of the twentieth century.
Formalism is rebuffed because it is associated with an ahistorical approach, not because its procedures are inherently
flawed insofar as strictly formal questions are concerned. The
properly architectural is narrowly identified with the formal,
and the latter is understood to be well understood.1
Modern strategies of formal analysis originated, however,
not in the heyday of modernist formalism but far earlier in
the historically attentive writings of nineteenth-century theorists. The Romantics and their contemporaries created a
two-part model for interpreting architecture: buildings were
located in the newly created, self-contained historicity of the
evolution of architectural form, and simultaneously they were
understood to be historically determined and contextually
expressive objects. Architecture had its own immanent history, but this history was coordinated with social, economic,
and cultural history. It was in the service of this dual
the prim, solitary demands of formalism-that
project-not
new ways of conceiving and describing architectural form
were devised. When, in the years around 1900, the historical
part of this enterprise was suppressed, many buildings continued to be apprehended and described (if not comprehended) in fundamentally the same way as they had been for
nearly a century. With the recent reemergence of history,
many of the identical descriptions, with all their formalhistorical baggage, are again being repeated, having tacitly if
nonreflectively been granted apodictic status; prominent
among these is the structure/ornament model.
The emergence in the nineteenth century of this immensely potent mode of architectural description and its
ongoing reiteration through the present day can be illustrated in a brief survey of the descriptive history of one
building, the church of St-Eustache in Paris (Fig. 1). In the
first volume of the Dictionnaire raisonnt de l'architecture
franCaise
(1854), Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc wrote:
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1 St-Eustache, Paris, 1532-1640, interior, lithograph from the series Paris dans sa splendeur(Paris, 1866) (photo: author)
STRUCTURE/ORNAMENT
They wanted to apply the forms of ancient Roman architecture, which they knew badly, to the construction system of
Gothic churches, which they scorned without understanding. As a result of this indecisive inspiration the large
church of Saint-Eustache in Paris was begun and completed, a monument that is badly conceived, badly built, a
confused heap of debris borrowed from all over, incoherent and without harmony, a sort of Gothic skeleton draped
in Roman rags sewn together like the pieces of a harlequin's costume.2
Viollet-le-Duc's words are perhaps the most evocative rendering of a new visual and descriptive paradigm that configures
St-Eustache as a building morphologically divided between its
"skeleton," or structure, and its "rags," or ornament. Before
the early nineteenth century such a two-part perceptioneven more, such a building-had been unimaginable.
When St-Eustache was constructed (1532-1640) and for
some time thereafter observers were not much interested in
allocating it a stylistic tag. Instead they saw (and esteemed) a
monument notable for the abundance of its spatial and
material traits: the great quantity and variety of its sculptural
decoration, the great number of its piers and chapels, the
great height of its vaults, and the unquantifiable spaciousness
and richness of the building as a whole.3 This was a superlative
St-Eustache, which was seen, somatically experienced, and
textually figured by the comparative grammatical framework
whereby "big, bigger, biggest" or "some, more, most" equals
"good, better, best."'
This "superlative" discourse was eventually displaced by
the classical mode that emerged in France in the middle of
the seventeenth century. The new discourse, which sought to
separate the materiality of architecture from the idea it
represents and to dissolve it into language, was highly theorized in its procedures as concerned both the creation and
the apprehension of architecture. One interpretive gesture,
however, was left free of theoretical elaboration, for it seemed
self-evident: deciding to which of two possible manners,
Gothic or classical, a building belonged.5 This most apparently stable (because most reflexively deployed) gesture, this
first casual glance, which effortlessly sees morphological traits
that reveal the style of a building, proved imprecise and
mercurial in the writings on St-Eustache. Everyone looking at
the architecture of Paris "knew" that Notre-Dame and the
Ste-Chapelle were Gothic, that St-Sulpice and the facade of
St-Gervais were classical, but no such fundamental consensus
was arrived at for St-Eustache. For some observers the
building was Gothic,6 for others it was classical or "modern,"'7
while for a third group it was both.8 St-Eustache deflected the
classical gaze and became an odd, unknowable building,
inaccessible to the rational grasp of normal architectural
discourse.
The confusion now caused by St-Eustache can be seen in
Marc-Antoine Laugier's Observationssur l'architecture(1765).
When he first writes about the building Laugier tells us:
The interior of this church is quite remarkable. The
person who built it was strongly attached to Gothic architecture, and had a few feeble notions about Greek architecture. In this building he wanted to present some examples
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of the Greek orders. The result is those little columns
hoisted up on excessively elongated pedestals, and which
can be recognized by their bases, capitals, and fluting as
belonging to antique architecture. This church marks an
epoch in that it is only half Gothic, and, being like certain
bordering provinces where opposing habits and languages
intermingle, it signals the moment when Gothic architecture was about to die and Greek architecture was beginning to be reborn.9
In this partly Gothic St-Eustache, Laugier identifies classicizing columns that reveal themselves to his empirical scanning
by their bases, capitals, and fluting. Although he describes
only these isolated classical traits and does not indicate what
about the building is precisely Gothic, at first reading his text
seems to reveal a cognitively lucid, stylistically meaningful
St-Eustache. But the building configured here is precarious,
for its degree of Gothicness shifts as the text unfolds. First the
church is stronglyGothic as the architect has merely a "feeble
notion" of the "Greek" style, then it is halfGothic, and finally
it is dying Gothic.
I would not insist on these distinctions, which follow a
certain chronological logic and at least consistently describe
the building as partially Gothic, were it not for a subsequent
passage in Observationswhere a different St-Eustache appears,
one that is entirelyGothic:
In our churches the vault is the principal object. It is there
that the Gothic architect deploys his most brilliant resources. ... In all the churches that we have built since the
Renaissance of Greek architecture the vault is heavy and
massive. ... If one enters Saint-Eustache, there is nothing
If one
more elegant than the vault of this church....
enters Saint-Sulpice, there is nothing more insipid than
that naked barrel vault.'0
Now St-Eustache (diametrically opposed to the "insipid"
classical St-Sulpice) is regarded as a characteristic specimen of
Gothic architecture, a style that declares itself by the morphological feature of its distinctive vaulting. This abrupt visual
realignment is accompanied by a historical repositioning of
the building: from that moment when Greek architecture was
first beginning to be born the church is pushed back to the
time before this Renaissance. Is the St-Eustache of Observations Gothic and classical or purely Gothic? The text as a whole
describes an elusive and changeable structure, a shifting,
flickering architectural mirage where visuality is refracted and
the most basic of epistemological assumptions called into
doubt.
The nineteenth century brought St-Eustache to heel; architectural critics of the time, such as Viollet-le-Duc, now looked
at and configured the building with a new architectural gaze,
one that continued to search for style-revealing traits yet
divided that recognition between the structure of a building
on the one hand and its ornament on the other. It wasjust this
possibility that the previous episteme was unable to entertain,
and we should be careful not to endow a false immanent
prescience on those classical texts that claimed St-Eustache
was both Gothic and antique." That the forms of a single
monument could be composed of material traits from two
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distinct styles, with one category of traits coalescing into a
building's physical structure and another into its ornament,
was unthinkable and indeed was never stated.12 Also, despite
the fact that many eighteenth-century theorists (including
Laugier) admired Gothic architecture or, more specifically,
Gothic methods of construction, that admiration was limited
to isolated motifs such as slender columnar supports, or to
such resulting spatial effects as lightness and openness; it was
not transposed to the recognition of a comprehensive tangible Gothic structure or skeleton in the sense that Viollet-leDuc would imagine, either in Gothic monuments or, more to
the point, in St-Eustache.13
It is only in the nineteenth century that a bipartite set of
discursive spaces is produced, which all material architectural
traits are seen to inhabit, variously and unambiguously, either
as part of "structure" or of "ornament." In place of the
oscillating, unstable St-Eustache that randomly proffered
isolated details to the frustrated investigations of the classical
gaze, a building of crystalline certainty emerges. Its morphology is no longer the object of uncertainty and, in fact,
becomes a nonissue. The "structure/ornament" description
seems to explicate and encompass the entire monument,
apparently solving the mystery of the style of St-Eustache.
In the twentieth century this St-Eustache (either in its
metaphorical guise of a clothed skeleton or its apparently
literal one of an ornamented structure) is reiterated with the
hallucinatory regularity of a mantra: "Saint-Eustache is a
church with a skeleton of the Gothic type, overlaid with
Renaissance adornment" (1910); "on a medieval structure
there is Renaissance clothing" (1923); "the task of the
church-builder ... was to clothe a medieval skeleton in
Renaissance flesh" (1926); "this new clothing covers an
entirely Gothic framework of pointed arches and flying
buttresses" (1944); "the medieval structure of this church is
ornamented to the point of absurdity with elements in the
Italian style" (1947); "this Gothic structure is ... clothed in
Renaissance forms" (1953); "to this medieval structure was
unfortunately added decoration in the Italian mode" (1958);
"evidence of the Renaissance style ... is limited to ornament
applied to the Gothic piers" (1978); "the whole church was
submitted to the principle according to which Renaissance
ornament was applied to the Gothic structure" (1984); "an
Italianising ornamentation was applied to a Gothic structure"
(1987); "only the decoration is representative of the Renaissance .... The structure is still entirely Gothic" (1989);
"Saint-Eustache ... is entirely Gothic in structure, although
its decoration uses a classical vocabulary" (1997).14 Furthermore, in the 1980s at least four authors cited Viollet-le-Duc's
Dictionnaire description, allowing his words (which are irresistibly quotable) to corroborate or proxy for their own perception of the building.15
A St-Eustache is thereby produced that is virtually identical
among the great majority of twentieth-century texts; a disarmingly simple building has taken root in contemporary scholarship with the tenacity of truth. How do we account for the
strange success of this Gothic structure/Renaissance ornament St-Eustache, both as a construction in itself and as a
phenomenon that continuously solicits duplication from the
nineteenth century to the present day?
This question is not unique to St-Eustache, which is far
from being the only premodern building that continues to be
understood as divided between a structure that represents
one style and its ornament another. Much of the architecture
of sixteenth-century France and of Renaissance Europe outside Italy in general has been similarly configured by this
binary concept. One author at the cutting edge of the
antiformalist reappraisal of architectural interpretation describes a style of sixteenth-century Spain as "a hybrid local
concoction of ornamental motifs applied without regard to
the structure of the building," while another identified with
formalist readings writes that in Germany "during most of the
sixteenth century the Renaissance was simply a system of
ornament... applied to Late Gothic structures."16
Nor does Italian Renaissance architecture necessarily escape the structure/ornament model. The Portinari Chapel at
S. Eustorgio in Milan, for example, "represents ... the
transposition of the Sagrestia Vecchia of S. Lorenzo into the
formal idiom of Milan. ... The interior with its polychromatic
blurring of the structure ... and its prolific ornament ... is
far removed from the structural austerity of the Sagrestia
Vecchia."17 The Portinari Chapel differs from its transalpine
colleagues mainly in that its blurred Florentine structure and
its blurring Lombard ornament represent two regional variants of a single style, not two distinct period styles; yet like
them it finds no place on the canonical Florence-RomeVenice axis and consequently is a building that formalism has
perceived as marginal.
Moreover, since the early nineteenth century the history of
architecture in general has become littered with more buildings that are, topographically speaking, marginal or peripheral and, temporally speaking, early, transitional, or late than
buildings that have apparently achieved stasis at the central,
high, or classical point of their style. In a great many of these
cases the structure/ornament opposition is invoked as the
buildings are described as formally cleft between two different
period styles, different regional styles, or different phases of a
single style.18 Thus, onto the "Romanesque structure" of
Bayeux Cathedral has been "grafted a heterogeneous collection of borrowings from early 13th-century Ile-de-France and
English Gothic,"19 and of the architecture of fifteenthcentury France it has been said, "Never ... has Western
architecture come closer to the luxuriant ornament of the
East and to its fanciful profusion, which seems without
purpose, and is certainly unrelated to the structure."''2
Non-Italian Renaissance, non-Florentine quattrocento, French
thirteenth-century architecture outside the Ile-de-France, and
late Gothic architecture: it is precisely such fields, which were
apparently misunderstood or entirely overlooked by formalists, where scholars have been particularly eager to follow the
recent historical (re)turn in architectural interpretation. In
the current climate a respectable argument can be made that
the architecture of Renaissance Germany is not a lesser
version of the Italian, not a marginal reflection of the center,
but a historically legitimate phenomenon deserving of critical
attention on its own terms. Similarly, a thirteenth-century
cathedral that displays an early Gothic or Romanesque
structure need no longer be disdained as provincially retardataire but can be interpreted as a declaration of regional
STRUCTURE/ORNAMENT
identity, as responsive to the particular qualities of local
building materials and masonry traditions, as having a contextually specific iconographic meaning or liturgical function,
and so forth.
What present scholarship does not recognize, however, let
alone encourage critical speculation about, is that such
plunges into history often remain securely tethered to the
peculiar revenantlike presence of the structure/ornament
description. It is precisely this issue, and questions surrounding it, that I want to consider-that is, why nineteenth-century
Romantics, early twentieth-century formalists, and contemporary contextualists are so frequently in agreement about the
fundamental (structure/ornament)
character of buildings
about which they are otherwise in apparent disagreement.
The case of St-Eustache in modern architectural discourse
is well suited to an inquiry into the problematics of structure/
ornament as a descriptive pair used to figure historical
architecture. French nineteenth-century theorists were very
much in the vanguard of the movement that created the new
strategies for thinking about buildings. They wrote for the
most part about their national architecture, two main periods
of interest being precisely those relevant to St-Eustache: the
Gothic and the newly defined field of the French Renaissance. Thus, virtually from the moment the structure/
ornament St-Eustache was created, this identically configured
building appeared in the texts of writers who comprehended
it in quite different historical terms depending on whether,
like Viollet-le-Duc, they understood the French Gothic to be
the exemplary national mode of architecture or instead
assigned this role to the French Renaissance, as did many of
the Romantics. Furthermore, St-Eustache is a very large
monument prominently located in the center of Paris, so that
even when the French Renaissance (or, more typically, the
church architecture of sixteenth-century France) has been
the subject of little scholarly interest, it is a building that is
difficult to ignore. Anyone writing about the history of
Parisian architecture, or of Renaissance or classical architecture in France, or about the end of the Gothic has been more
or less obliged to include St-Eustache, cumulatively providing
ample material for my analysis.
I do not propose to begin by critically dismantling the
structure/ornament pair, for although it is a truism that any
attempt to describe an object will be a fundamentally interpretive and historically contingent act, by its very nature open to
rigorous reexamination, at the same time another often
overlooked factor needs to be considered. That is, any
description of an object, in this case an architectural object,
does more than demonstrate that a building has been seen in
a particular historically specific way: it also produces a textual
figuration or figure of the building. Such a figural building,
whatever may be its relationship to the physical building it is
seeking to represent, has its own discrete existence. It is a
cultural artifact of value worth studying in its own right. A
figural building is valuable in part because it has a certain
utility. This utility is not restricted to the ability of the figure to
convey knowledge of a building but is also specifically textual
or literary in nature. Consequently, I temporarily want to
leave the structure/ornament St-Eustache intact and begin by
691
undertaking this more positive line of inquiry and consider
what useful function this figural building might possess.
Structure/Ornament and the Critical History of Architecture
When I say that the modern structure/ornament St-Eustache
is a figurative building I mean this literally. The binary
structure of the concept is just that: a figurative structure or
construction that is metaphorically composed of two closed
and distinctly separate spaces. Onto the apparently neutral
surfaces and into the apparently empty spaces of this figurative structure a variety of observations can be placed. Structure/ornament is a figuratively conceived heuristic device
that provides architectural historians with spaces to be filled, a
structure to be embellished.
One useful consequence is that the structure/ornament
St-Eustache is a wonderfully genial building that makes itself
available to a range of critical assessments. There is no
between the structure/
predetermined
correspondence
ornament building and what is said about it-what is placed
in or on it-and the figured building confirms its own validity
as it remains stable from the early nineteenth century
onward, despite its shifting critical fortunes. For instance,
Marius Vachon (1910) describes the church architecture of
sixteenth-century France in a manner antithetical in judgment to Viollet-le-Duc's harsh characterization: "on a skeleton that is entirely Gothic, with traditional architectural
schemas, they toss, in a charming caprice of the imagination,
a Renaissance garment and adornment.'"21 And he writes of
St-Eustache:
As a whole, Saint-Eustache is a church with a skeleton of
the Gothic type, overlaid with Renaissance adornment. Of
the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages it has the boldness
and majesty of construction; of the civic monuments of the
sixteenth century it has the fantasy, the grace and the
elegance of sculptural ornamentation. And nothing more
luxurious, more delicate or more refined can be imagined.22
An imposing Gothic structure replaces Viollet-le-Duc's corrupted skeleton, elegant sculptural fantasy replaces Roman
rags, and an architect of charming sensibility replaces Violletle-Duc's depraved rag and bone picker scavenging in the
debris of the past.23 Each author is in agreement about the
essentially binary nature of the building and has so configured it, but in applying a different rhetorical veneer to its two
separate parts is able to persuade us that St-Eustache is either
a miserable or fine work of architecture.
Moreover, in each text the persuasive rhetorical veneer
applied to the structure/ornament St-Eustache performs a
narrative as well as critical function. The highly charged
language that compellingly characterizes the church serves as
a supplement to the narrative logic that organizes the story of
the encounter of Gothic and Renaissance styles in sixteenthcentury France. In the Dictionnaire Viollet-le-Duc tells a sad
story of the decline, perversion, and eventual suppression of
the French national mode as the seductive foreign forms of
Roman architecture are insinuated into a weakened Gothic
system. Vachon's La Renaissance franpaise, to the contrary,
narrates a positive encounter as a fertile medieval tradition
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in a way to horrify any classically trained architect. In some
piers, for instance, the four main faces are decorated with
Corinthian pilasters, the height of which is perhaps twenty
times their breadth, and the corners of the piers are filled
by three columns standing one on top of the other, all of
somewhat bastard design [Fig. 2].26
The architectural hero of Blunt's Art and Architecturein
France 1500-1700 is Viollet-le-Duc's despised antihero, the
French classical ideal. Blunt charts the fortunes of classicism
in a narrative of emergence, development, and triumph, in
which the sixteenth century is a period of origin and progress
rather than finale and decline. The Gothic, no longer cast in
the role of Viollet-le-Duc's tragic victim, becomes an annoying, if historically expected malingerer unwilling to recognize
that its time is up.27
All this is apparent in the description of St-Eustache, where
superannuated Gothic "tendencies" are juxtaposed with
badly proportioned and bastardized classical orders and
where Blunt is easily detected in his textual persona of a
horrified "classically trained architect." Blunt uses a historical narrative of progress to posit both the Gothic and
St-Eustache as problematic, not because Gothic equals bad
architecture, but because in the sixteenth century Gothic
equals the past, what he calls "the old," and is therefore
resistant to progress, that is, to the future, to "the new" of
classicism. Resistance is, however, manifest also in the badly
conceived and poorly executed Renaissance ornament of
St-Eustache, which, nevertheless, announces the classical
future and the ultimate futility of resistance.28
2 St-Eustache,interior,from Blunt,pl. 21a (photo:author)
nourishes and is in turn enriched by new architectural
forms.24Each plot verifies the assessment of the structure/
ornament St-Eustache; by the same token, the bipartite
building affirms the validity of the plot as the descriptive
terms that embellish it serve to sustain the historical story in
which the building is a passing moment.
That the structure/ornament St-Eustache can accommodate (house and shelter) a varietyof historicized scenarios is
crucial to its tenacious success, for in modern architectural
discourse narrativesof the history of architecture-the historicity of the history of architecture-often constitute the
ground for criticalevaluation of architecturalform. That is, in
stating that the modern St-Eustachecan accommodate different critical assessments, what I am really saying is that it can
accommodate different dramatizations of the Gothic-meetsRenaissance story. These alternativescan include stories that
contradict Viollet-le-Duc's, even those that also subject the
building to a negative aesthetic appraisal.25Anthony Blunt,
for example, writes:
It is to be expected that Gothic tendencies should survive
longer in ecclesiastical architecture than in secular, and
this is amply borne out by St Eustache.... This Gothic
structureis, however,clothed in Renaissanceforms. ... the
Italian impression depends only on the use of classical
pilasters instead of Gothic. The orders are, it is true, used
Structure/Ornament and Transitional Architecture
The self-chronicling of the structure/ornament St-Eustache,
that is, the correspondence between the building on the one
hand and the critical history of architecture on the other, is
possible because just as every author sees and configures the
same binary construction, so too is every narrative predicated
on the evolutionary concept of a transitional period style: the
building represents the passage of historical styles from the
Gothic through the Renaissance and toward classicism. For
each author St-Eustache is in transit, neither entirely departed from its Gothic origins nor fully arrived at its Renaissance or classical destination. As a result, Viollet-le-Duc is able
to include the building in his story of Gothic architecture as
persuasively as Blunt does in that of classical, and Vachon can
narrow his sights on the transitional French Renaissance.
There is no epistemological contradiction between the fact
that they all see the same bipartite St-Eustache yet situate it in
different dramas; the transitional Gothic structure/Renaissance ornament building itself seems to generate these alternate possibilities. It is all a matter of viewpoint provoked by
the same historical phenomenon of the transitionality of the
building, which can be subject to different dramatic spins and
inflections.
There is a manifest correlation between the binary apprehension of St-Eustache as composed of a Gothic structure and
Renaissance ornament and the historical comprehension of
the building as a transitional one located at the end of the
Gothic period and the beginning of the Renaissance. The
evolutionary concept "transitional" presupposes continuous
STRUCTURE/ORNAMENT
linear movement and narrative. Similarly, it must be recognized that the organization of the pair structure/ornament is
not static or bidirectional but consistently sequential and thus
inherently narrativized and endowed with historicity. "Structure" has temporal priority over "ornament," a status it
enjoys both in the way the two words are normatively ordered
(to speak of the ornament/structure
concept would be
in
and
the
is itself
architecture
deliberately perverse),
way
conceived and built in the modern period. The (metaphorical) understanding of the history of architecture as being like
a line in continuous forward motion dictates that Gothic
moves transitionally toward (or through) the Renaissance,
while the temporal organization of structure/ornament confirms the duality of perception on which the idea of transitional is dependent and the historical priority of Gothic, and
also affirms the sequential motion from the Gothic to the
Renaissance. Because of the homology between "structure/
ornament" and "transitional," the material building as perceived by modern observers and as figured in their texts can
function as an expressive synecdoche for the broad period of
architectural history of which it is a transitional fragment.
Laugier had also used a spatial metaphor when he sought
to describe St-Eustache as manifesting a style that was both
classical and Gothic. He wanted to illustrate the duality of the
building by making use of the spatial example of "bordering
provinces," and he used space as a metaphor for time: the
area where the languages and habits of two provinces overlap
is like the moment when St-Eustache appears. If this metaphor is pursued its logic cannot be sustained. The space
where neighboring provinces overlap is a nonspace with no
internal integrity and no outer borders of its own; ultimately,
it belongs more to one territory than another, or one territory
will dominate and claim it. Indeed, a few traits from the
classical province are the only ones that Laugier describes
with any acuity, whereas Gothic is a nebulous, unspecified
presence described as dying by the end of the passage. Finally,
the spatial metaphor collapses; the borderland is diminished
to a border, a line without space where no structures can be
erected. When Laugier saw the building again he decisively
centered it in the space labeled Gothic.
With structure/ornament, space is again used as a metaphor for time, except now the spatial metaphor is not a
hypothetical place external to the building but is presented as
a faithful description of the building itself which naturally
motivates it. The momentwhen St-Eustache appears is like the
figurative Gothic structure/Renaissance ornament building
that transcribes its own transitional status. In other words,
structure/ornament does more than accommodate historicized scenarios, it a priori obligesthem; the inherent temporalization of the structure/ornament figure not only demands
that the building be seen in strictly binary terms, it also
functions as a compelling narrative device. The figurative pair
permits architectural historians to behistorians, allowing them
to see and write about a building in such a way that it naturally
conforms to and promotes their desire to tell continuous
histories of the history of architecture. The primary textual
utility of structure/ornament is that it is a figurative construction whose sequential organization narrativizes the observations that are placed on or in its two component spaces.
693
Furthermore, to avoid the structure/ornament St-Eustache
is to avoid a historical understanding of the building, to
ignore its transitional place in the history of architecture and
the question of its period style. Such an evasion occurs in a
description of St-Eustache by Viollet-le-Duc in the 1867 Paris
Guide:
In the interior, the piers present the strangest profusion of
pilasters and columns that it is possible to imagine. The
effect of the whole of this interior, nevertheless, produces a
seductive impression of elegant grandeur. Those elevated
side aisles flood the nave with a beautiful, well-diffused
light. There is certainly in all of this interior a theatrical
affectation, the evident desire to astonish, and if this vessel
was entirely painted, if the windows were furnished with
lightly colored stained glass, the interior of the church of
Saint-Eustache would have all the appearance of a fairy
palace, if not of a Catholic church.29
Here, writing in the "nonserious" genre of the guidebook
Viollet-le-Duc adopts a mode of discursive visuality different
from that of the Dictionnaire. This decidedly nonanalytical,
nonrigorous, and poetic mode allows him to offer a generally
sympathetic response to the church by ignoring the question
of its style, its place in the history of architecture, and its
material division into structural and ornamental traits.
Conversely, to continue to rely on the structure/ornament
figure will invariably serve to affirm the transitionality-or the
inherent temporality-of a building even if an author seeks to
avoid this term. Although such an escape has not been
ventured for St-Eustache, Willibald Sauerlinder has recently
attempted to do so for a group of medieval Rhenish churches
that since the early nineteenth century have been seen as
transitionally situated between the Romanesque and Gothic.
Sauerlinder contrasts the formalist transitional reading with
what he construes as an alternate interpretation found in
nineteenth-century texts, an option he calls the "ethnogeographic." Carl Schnaase is cited as an example:
Schnaase ... tended to explain art by the influence of
He finds all sorts of
climate, soil and local customs....
features in the character of the Rhenish population and
Rhenish landscape, which explain for him the decorative
exuberance and the picturesque quality of the Rhenish
transitional style. If one reads through Schnaase's pages
one soon observes that while he keeps the word transition,
in reality he sees the Rhenish monuments not as transitional but as creations of an autonomous regional style that
leads not from Romanesque to Gothic but has aesthetic
value in itself.30
This is a misreading of Schnaase in its presumption of an
opposition between "autonomous regional style" and "transitional." Schnaase is not incorrect in claiming that he sees
transitional architecture: he is deeply committed to this
which he provides a
evolutionary stylistic description-for
contextual scenario. No epistemological inconsistency exists
between the evolution of architecture, which describes these
buildings as transitional, and contextualism, which examines
the uniqueness-the autonomy--of their particular transitionality as the manifestation of a singular historical and cultural
694
ART BULLETIN
DECEMBER 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 4
setting. Also, explanations in terms of national identity and
specific regional and material requirements tended to be
offered in the nineteenth century for transitional periods that
negotiated simultaneously between a stylistic past and future
as well as between local and foreign styles, whether German
Romanesque and French Gothic or, as in sixteenth-century
France, French Gothic and Italian Renaissance.31
Having distinguished between the two options, however,
Sauerlinder rejects both: "In my view neither of the two
transitional and the ethno-geographic-is
perspectives-the
really satisfactory. But, we may ask, is there no other alternative? For the answer we need to take a fresh look at the
monuments."32 After a traditional formal analysis of a number of buildings Sauerlinder poses what for him is the crucial
question and offers a possible path toward its answer:
Why did Rhenish architecture only modernize decoration
and not structure? I can't give an explanation but the
answer given by those who refer simply to the German or
Rhenish mentality is no more than self-adulatory. It would
need a closer look into economic history, history of
craftsmanship and technique, patronage and funding in
order to come perhaps closer to an answer.33
The avenues of critical inquiry proposed here do not differ in
kind from those pursued by Schnaase. Rather than interpreting these medieval churches in the context of regional
identity, Sauerlinder suggests a consideration of other contextual factors that might be called the "econo-technical" rather
than "ethno-geographic." Like Schnaase, Sauerlinder sees
the buildings and their style, and he searches in an exterior
context for an explanation of what he sees. Of greater interest
than his explanation, however, is the question Sauerlinder
asks: "Why did Rhenish architecture only modernize decoration and not structure?" If the implications of this question
are followed they lead in a direction the author certainly did
not intend: Why are the structures old and the decoration
new and progressive? Why does structure belong to the
Romanesque past and ornament to modernity and the Gothic
future? Why, in other words, are these buildings transitional?
In seeking to displace a concept that he sees as highly
problematic, Sauerlinder is inexorably drawn back to it and
to the hypnotic linearity of the history of architecture as he
employs an architectural description (also used by Schnaase)
that perpetuates the status of these Rhenish buildings as in
fact nothing other than transitional. His reliance on "structure/ornament" and his advocacy of the "econo-technical"
rather than "transitional" and the "ethno-geographic" duplicate the interpretive strategies of Schnaase and do not move
beyond them. While an inquiry into the "econo-technical"
might be productive, it cannot be productive in the way
Sauerlinder hopes-that is, as capable of offering an interpretation of the buildings that would escape the conceptual
structures of the nineteenth century-as long as these structures and their figurative guises are not themselves recognized and critically confronted.34
History and Architectural Metaphors
That architectural historians remain blind to the figurative
nature of the structure/ornament pair is not only because the
figure has effectively assumed the status of a true transcription of much historical architecture but also because since the
early nineteenth century, history in its two dominant guises
(the self-contained evolution of architectural history and
contextualism) has often been posited as the singular and
stable ground for architectural analysis and interpretation.
Architecture is the object of knowledge; history is the mode
knowledge takes to access this object. In the debates about
what kind of historical or historicized narratives should be
told about architecture, what has gone largely unnoticed is
the way that architecture and the language of architectural
discourse have provided figures to think about architecture
itself.35
The preeminence accorded history by nineteenth-century
theorists of architecture and by twentieth-century architectural historians is well known. We hardly need Michel Foucault to tell us, "History, from the nineteenth century, defines
the birthplace of the empirical....
History has become the
unavoidable element in our thought."36 To study the practice
of modern architectural discourse, particularly as it was
originally formulated in the nineteenth century, is to encounter history and its metaphors at every turn as we are offered
archaeology, history, historicity, continuity, progress, linearity,
narrative, and temporality with a vengeance. Detailed histories of architecture are narrated; architecture is conceived as
an object of historical knowledge and as an entity whose
fundamental essence is historical (whether located in the
diachronic movements of the history of architecture or
synchronically correlated to "real" history); theories of architecture are now based on the study of history and on
archaeology (that is, on a positivist, historicizedempiricism
rather than the idealized empiricism of earlier studies of
historical architecture); these architectural theories are often
written as histories, and architects conceive of their own work
in historical terms.37
But this aggressive foregrounding of history obscures the
role that architectural and spatial metaphors play in much
architectural discourse in both the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. A historian writing (in 1986) about French architectural theory of the nineteenth century states, "It was a
discourse conducted in metaphorical terms; structured by the
language of history and archeology."38 This observation is
partly right: architectural discourse of the 1800s and 1900s is
conducted in metaphorical terms, but it is not-cannot
be-structured
by the language of history and archaeology.
Properly speaking, "structure" belongs to architectural discourse; only as a metaphor can it make a transterritorial
migration and "structure" historical language.39
It would be more accurate to say that the language,
assumptions, methods, and theories of history and archaeology, the diachronic movements of the one and the synchronic
probings of the other, are themselvesstructured, ordered, and
conceived in terms of architectural and spatial figures, so that
in a partly self-reflexive movement architecture is involved in
the process that sees itself. The ascending and descending,
forward or cyclical motions of the line of the history of
architecture, for instance, cannot be charted unless there also
exists a metaphorical structure or spatial matrix that allows
that line to be plotted. In modern discourse, architecture and
STRUCTURE/ORNAMENT
695
Al
r
a P1:
ri
I
9, ru
3 St-Eustache, cross section through
transepts, engraving from Albert
Lenoir, Statistiquemonumentalede Paris,
vol. 2 (Paris, 1867), St-Eustache, pl. 8
(photo: author)
history are often mutuallyengaged in a nonseparable affirmation of the perception, conception, and description of architecture, whether historical, historicist, or historicized. Architectural metaphors (such as "structure") and architectural
figures, such as structure/ornament, serve as spatial models
that collaborate with historicized concepts, such as transitional. But a spatial model can be dangerous, for, as Jacques
Derrida warns, "When the spatial model is hit upon, when it
functions, critical reflection restswithin it. In fact, and even if
criticismdoes not admit this to be so."40
Structure/Ornament as a NarrativeDevice: A Closer Look
As a spatial model that also has the advantage of temporality,
structure/ornament is fated to preserve the transitionality(or
earliness or lateness) of buildings it configures, even if
"criticismdoes not admit this to be so." By the same token, its
temporalized bipartite structure permits and encourages
different stories about a building to be writtenfrom those that
concern the linear history of architecture. If a building is
described as cleft between these two categories of traits, any
observation about such a building will be located in one of its
two component parts-its two figurative spaces-that are kept
rigidly separate and always appear in the same chronological
sequence, permitting and controlling narratives and ensuring
that all observations are in fact narrativized.
To illustrate this more inclusive narrative or historicist role
of the structure/ornament pair and to consider further its
relationship to the transitional, I begin with a comparison of
different accounts of St-Eustache that appear in Albert Lenoir
and Leon Vaudoyer's critical history of French architecture,
"Etudes d'architecture en France," which was serialized in
the Magasin pittoresquebetween 1839 and 1852.41 The first
occurs in their discussion of the end of Gothic architecture,
where the builders of St-Eustache are favorably contrasted
with their contemporaries at the cathedral of Beauvais. The
Parisians had the good sense to face the historical music and
accept that Gothic had had its day, and therefore they made
the appropriately enthusiastic effort to embrace the new
Italian Renaissance forms (Fig. 3). Their colleagues at Beauvais, however, foolishly clung to the Gothic because they were
696
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DECEMBER 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 4
"jealous of the success that Michelangelo obtained with the
construction of the cupola of Saint-Peter's in Rome, and
wanted to prove that the Gothic style could not only equal but
surpass the great achievements of Greek and Roman architecture."42 That their ambitious, staggeringly high crossing
tower collapsed is noted by Lenoir and Vaudoyer as the hardly
surprising result of such hubris.
The eager beavers at St-Eustache, meanwhile, were caught
in a double bind:
In this church where the Gothic skeleton is preserved in its
entirety, they wanted to apply the decorative elements
which had been newly restored to honor; the round arch
was substituted for the pointed arch in all the bays (with
the exception of the apse) and the look of antique orders
was introduced for all the supporting members; but was
this attempt truly successful? And although at first glance
this church offers a very seductive overall impression, are
we not soon struck by the absence of harmony that must
necessarily result from the application of these orders, the
proportions of which are fixed by strict rules, to these
immense Gothic piers, which are destined to support
vaults whose skyward flight remained without limits? ...
Was it possible to introduce into such a complete creation
... elements borrowed from an entirely differently constituted art? ... We don't think so; and since the art of the
West had to succumb to the influence of the Italian
Renaissance, it is certainly in religious architecture that
this may be regretted.43
In other words, the builders had to do what they had to do
and if that resulted in bad architecture, well, that's progress
for you: St-Eustache, trapped in a history beyond its control,
was just as doomed to fail as Beauvais. Both the collapsed
tower of the latter and the Gothic structure/Renaissance
ornament St-Eustache serve the same evidentiary purpose,
proving that in early sixteenth-century France the Gothic was
finished and the formal dominance of the Renaissance
inevitable, whether this future was resisted or met head-on.
What I want to draw attention to about this first account is
that in it St-Eustache is entirely accommodated to the closed,
unbroken story of the history of formal evolution in architecture; its facture is told exclusively in these monosystemic
terms, and no social or contextual narrative is included. For
reasons that I will soon consider, Lenoir and Vaudoyer do not
call St-Eustache transitional. Yet their description of it conforms to the concept understood in its normative sense, and
there is a perfect alignment between this evolutionary term
and the structure/ornament building.
A very different scenario unfolds when Lenoir and Vaudoyer return to St-Eustache in their discussion of church
architecture of the French Renaissance.44 Here the continuous narrative of period styles completely breaks down. StEustache is now perceived as a drag on the movement of
architecture because of the presence of its Gothic structure;
moreover, all ecclesiastical construction of sixteenth-century
France is so characterized. In the first place, we are told, there
was very little church building in this period; second, much of
what did get built was Gothic; and third, in those few instances
where new Renaissance forms were taken up by a handful of
enterprising architects, their efforts consisted of little more
than the casual application of decorative features "accidentally thrown here and there" onto unchanged Gothic structures.45
This combination of Gothic structures and superficial
Renaissance ornament was repeated again and again, from
the beginning to the end of the century, in such works as the
apse of St-Pierre in Caen, the transept facade of Ste-Clotilde
in Le Grand-Andely, and the west facade of St-Michel in Dijon
(Figs. 4-6). The unhappy result is that "in France we still do
not possess a complete church of the sixteenth century
conceived entirely according to Renaissance principles; StEustache was not even finished [until the seventeenth century], and, moreover, even there one sees but a church where
the skeleton remained Gothic and which they wanted to dress
in the fashion of the time."46 In that one exceptional instance
at St-Eustache when architects were given the opportunity to
create not a piece of a building but a whole new important
work in the Renaissance mode, the same solution is reproduced: a new Gothic "skeleton" is constructed and "dressed"
in Renaissance decoration.
Others have been able to see a progressive (if often
faltering and recalcitrant) classicism in the church architecture of sixteenth-century France, but Lenoir and Vaudoyer,
who desperately want to see progress and development,
change and continuity in the history of architecture, are
stymied.47 For them each effort represents a first step in the
evolution from Gothic to a true Renaissance mode of church
building, a first step that is endlessly reiterated. There is never
any next step, never any follow-through. No developmental
sequence can be imposed on this static series of identical and
largely fragmentary gestures, and the history of sixteenthcentury church building shatters into a nonhistory, a story
that should have happened but never got past page one.
I would argue that it is for this reason, rather than the
described qualities of any given work, that both the individual
projects and the period as a whole are viewed as problematic
that they refuse to call Stby Lenoir and Vaudoyer-and
Eustache and the church architecture of its time transitional.
Unlike current scholars who reject "transitional" as outmoded and conceptually flawed, for nineteenth-century Romantic theorists it was a new and critically positive term used
to describe periods of particular interest where both the
evolutionary processes of architecture and the causal links
between history and architecture were laid bare for analysisand emulation.48 Two such periods were the Italian Renaissance (by which was meant the trecento and quattrocento)
and the French Renaissance minus its church construction. In
fact, the "Etudes d'architecture" championed the secular
architecture of the French Renaissance as theFrench national
mode of building, whose principles, corrupted and then
abandoned in the sterile architecture of seventeenth-century
classicism, should now be revived to serve as a model for
contemporary architecture.49
Lenoir and Vaudoyer write approvingly, for instance, of the
early sixteenth-century chiteau of Gaillon (Fig. 7):
In examining the fragments of this chiteau ... one sees
that the style of its architecture was mixed. Next to the
STRU(:TURE/ORNAMENT
697
Jil
Aw?
tsw
ji-
4 St-Pierre, Caen, apse, 1518-45,
albumen silver print from glass negative
by Edouard Baldus, 1858 (photo:
Collection Centre Canadien
d'Architecture/Canadian Centre for
Architecture, Montreal)
reproduction of the orders borrowed from antique art,
certain details indicated that the Gothic influence was not
there is nothing shocking in the
yet without effect....
of
these
mingling
styles, and this freedom of ornamentation created a very picturesque and very gracious impresthe remains of this building are extremely presion....
cious for the history of art, and as complete models of this
transitional period they may be profitably studied.50
Whereas the "mixed" style of St-Eustache is condemned for
its lack of harmony, at Gaillon a similar phenomenon is
perceived as charming and worthy of the most careful study.
Read by itself the original lengthy description of St-Eustache
cited above (to which the authors constantly refer in later
discussions) might well suggest that Lenoir and Vaudoyer
criticize St-Eustache because it represents, in the words of a
scholar writing in the 1980s, "an unwitting or forced marriage
of distinct and unrelated styles.""' But their stand on French
Renaissance secular architecture belies any such interpretation.
We can also consider their thoughts on early Italian
Renaissance church construction as echoed in the words of
their fellow Romantic advocate of transitional architecture,
LUonce Reynaud:
These were still Gothic buildings, but with purer and more
graceful forms, overlaid as it were by an alien veil, a veil
rich and diaphanous, which decorated without concealing.
There was a delightful blending of art and naivete in all
this architecture, an exquisite taste and a great refinement.
There was even originality, the borrowing from antiquity
notwithstanding; for, if some details had been imitated,
they had been brought together in a new way; there had
been nothing servile in the copying, and especial care was
taken not to alter in any way the general forms called for by
the customs of the time.52
698
ART BULLETIN
DECEMBER
1998 VOLUME
IXXX
NUMBER 4
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There is certainly room in this type of analysis, which speaks
of "naivete" rather than "faults," to accommodate favorably
St-Eustache as an individual monument. But this historicizing
gaze does not see buildings individually; rather, it evaluates
them according to their contribution to the continual progress
of architecture. To resist this role, as St-Eustache and its
contemporary church structures do in the texts of Reynaud
and Lenoir and Vaudoyer, is to cause profound epistemological anxiety.53
In these texts what can be seen to distinguish the buildings
of the Italian trecento (and quattrocento) and French Renais-
5 Ste-Clotilde, Le Grand-Andely,north
transept facade, 1555-70, engraving
from Alfred Darcel and Eugene Rouyer,
L'art architecturalen Francedepuis
Francoislerjusqu 't Louis XIV vol. 1
(Paris, 1863), pls. 28, 29 (photo:
author)
sance secular architecture from French ecclesiastical construction is that in the former cases the promise of progress
signaled in each separate transitional monument is subsequently fulfilled, and the buildings can be strung together in
a motivated linear sequence. In each work the future heralded is a future that arrives. Thus, in the "Etudes
d'architecture," the transitional secular architecture of the
reign of Louis XII is said to evolve into the less transitional
architecture of the early years of the reign of Francis I, and
eventually into a truly French Renaissance mode during the
later years of Francis and the time of Henry II.54 Of the early
STRUCTURE/ORNAMENT
699
6 St-Michel, Dijon, facade, 1520-60
and later, engraving from Lenoir and
Vaudoyer, 12 (1844): 260 (photo: New
York Public Library)
sixteenth century Lenoir and Vaudoyer wrote, "they still
proceeded by trial and error, and as this is to be expected in
transitional periods, matters of taste not yet having been
stabilized, they indiscriminately mixed all the styles; the
majority of buildings still preserved numerous traces of the
Gothic style, which was only progressively abandoned."55 It
was precisely this progressive letting go of the Gothic that they
were unable to plot in contemporary church architecture,
which could not, therefore, be seen as properly and commendably transitional.
Furthermore (and contrary to the stated intentions of the
authors), what makes the Italian and secular French works
praiseworthy is that the promise of progress in each building
is not necessarily or even primarily either a stylistic or social
700
ART BULLETIN
DECEMBER
1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 4
cr dcr Schiil)fcr des jetzt iM tier Ecole des beaux arts aufgcltclllten 1't
Si0. 28), fur wclches er 650Loi\res
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7 Chaiteauof Gaillon, portal in the courtyard of the Ecole des
der
Beaux-Arts,Paris, engraving from Wilhelm Lfibke, Geschichte
Renaissancein Frankreich,2d rev. ed. (Stuttgart, 1885), fig. 28
(photo: author)
progress but a narrative one: point A always leads to point B,
even if point B is only narratable as a decline (as happens
when first in Italy and later in France the "transitional"
Renaissance periods eventually give way to a rigid and
doctrinaire classicism). It is this narrative role that Lenoir and
Vaudoyer find themselves unable to assign St-Eustache in
their discussion of the sixteenth century. The main problem
posed by St-Eustache is not that it offends a theoretical
position about style in architecture but that it thwarts the
authors' efforts to move the story of architecture along: it
does not "go" where they want it to; indeed, it does not go
anywhere.
Yet if St-Eustache cannot contribute to the formal plot of
the "Etudes d'architecture," the description of the building
as stylistically divided between its Gothic structure and its
Renaissance ornament indicates that despite Lenoir and
Vaudoyer's refusal to call the building transitional (an evasion
to which they certainly do not draw attention), they nevertheless fundamentally recognize the church as transitional.
That their pro-transitional, pro-French Renaissance and anticlassical arguments could easily be adapted to St-Eustache
was realized by many of their contemporaries. One midnineteenth-century admirer of the building, for example,
asserts:
Renaissance style is the name commonly given to that
transitional architecture where the pointed arch flattens
and gives way to the round arch of the Greeks and Romans.
Saint-Eustache is assuredly the most beautiful expression
of this architecture, which was born in Italy at the end of
the thirteenth century, but which soon lost its proper
forms to servile imitation.56
Toward the end of the sixteenth century when, according to
Lenoir and Vaudoyer, the principles of the French Renaissance were foolishly rejected by the classicists who mechanically imitated the architecture of antiquity, the narratives of
French church and secular architecture reunite. Until that
point is attained, however, they must camouflage the sizable
gaps that occur in the history of church building as it breaks
down into an inert chronicle of isolated and identical efforts
scattered over the course of a century. They also feel obliged
to explain why French church architecture could not emulate
the route traced by Italian church architecture, which negotiated so successfully between the medieval and the revived
antique (and which led rather than followed developments in
secular building), and above all, why it did not keep pace with
the admirable, socially responsive efforts apparent in transitional French chaiteau and civic construction.
Lenoir and Vaudoyer now have little choice but to turn to
contextualism, which offers them a multitude of explanations: France was already blanketed with churches and the
demand for new ones was consequently low; unlike the
Italians, who had a strong national affinity for the antique,
which allowed them to make a clean break with the Gothic,
antiquity had no comparable meaning for the French; more
important, because of the rise of Protestantism the sixteenth
century was a period of religious crisis, "of wars and endless
massacres," and the French clergy had other things to worry
about besides the commissioning of new churches, nor were
they willing to risk weakening the position of the Catholic
Church by encouraging substantial changes in their architecture; unlike Italy, where the Renaissance of architecture
corresponded to a religious renewal, no parallel phenomenon occurred in France, where the new style primarily
satisfied material rather than spiritual needs and found itself
most vigorously developed in residential architecture."' In
their words: "The Renaissance of French architecture ... was
a protest of sensual inclinations against the mortification
imposed by Christianity and against the rigorous austerity of
medieval mores."58
Lenoir and Vaudoyer were great advocates of the view that
architecture and history were involved in a dialectical process:
The particular character that distinguishes each of the
major periods of history can be easily determined by that
of the art that corresponds to them, and reciprocally, the
successive transformations of art can only be truly appreciated when we link them to the social principles of which
they are the consequence.59
Church architecture of the French Renaissance, however,
defeats their desire to chart the reciprocal relationship
between architectural and historical forces, and they are
driven to rely exclusively on the latter to describe the
nonprogress of church building in this period; contextualism
here assumes the function of a dissembling prosthesis that
allows a broken formal history to be made apparently whole.
In the "Etudes d'architecture" the structure/ornament
St-Eustache appears in two very different stories: the first is
effortlessly told in terms of the continuous evolution of
period styles; in the second this seamless narrative falls apart
and recourse to historical explanation and contextual narra-
STRUCTURE/ORNAMENT
tive is made urgently necessary. The structure/ornament
figure houses not only two different narrativesbut also two
fundamentally distinct, even contrary, lines of argument
concerning the facture and historical meaning of StEustache. According to one, the presence of both the Gothic
structure and Renaissance ornament is unproblematic and
entirely comprehensible as the building embodies the passage from the Gothic past to the Renaissance future. According to the other, the Gothic structure signifies the resistance,
inherent conservatism, and lack of will on the part of the
clergy in sixteenth-century France, while the Renaissance
ornament, no longer interpreted as a laudable desire to obey
the historical mandate of progress, becomes a banal attempt
to evoke the current architecturalfashion, to be "a la modedu
temps."In each case the phenomenologically stable building
is subject to the identical aesthetic evaluation, but the terms
of inquiry belong to two different modes of analysis,each of
which is, however, coordinated to and controlled by the
sequential narrative structure of the structure/ornament
pair.
Each narrative also grants a different figurative status to
St-Eustache.When it is transitionallylocated in the evolution
of architecture it becomes a synecdoche designating the
historical totality of which it is a part. As a synecdoche
St-Eustache is indissoluble from the historical panorama it
represents, whereas in the contextual narrativea gap appears
between the building and its historical context; St-Eustache
now becomes an extended metaphor or allegory of the
troubled and conflicted times that produced it.
Structure/Ornament and the Multiple Narrative
In the "Etudes d'architecture" the two narratives about
St-Eustache,one of formal evolution, one concerning social,
religious, and cultural history, are kept apart in separate
essays (appearing, in fact, in different issues of the Magasin
But other texts use the sequential, binary organipittoresque).
zation of structure/ornament to graft together multiple
discourses and narratives about the building, allowing this
figurative structure to blur contradictions and permitting a
varietyof visual and critical viewpoints to be offered simultaneously. Such a use of structure/ornament can be seen if we
reexamine Anthony Blunt's account of the building.60When
cited above, Blunt's text was abbreviated in order to foreground his primarynarrativeof stylisticprogress;a closer and
more comprehensive consideration revealsthat his reading of
the building is far from homogeneous.
Blunt opens with a laconically cryptic historical interpretation of why church architecture in sixteenth-century France
did not capitulate as quickly to the new Renaissance mode as
did secular: "It is to be expected that Gothic tendencies
should survive longer in ecclesiastical architecture than in
secular and this is amplyborne out by St Eustache."The stress
on surviving Gothic "tendencies" speaks to the historicist
ideal of continuous progress in architecture, which is here
thwarted (by unnamed historical contingencies), and also to
the passivity of a building apparently unable to control its
destinywithin that progress.6'
He then continues, "It represents, however, a remarkable
compromise between new and old, quite different from St
701
Pierre at Caen. Here the plan, structure and proportions are
nearer to High Gothic than Flamboyant. The plan is almost
exactly that of Notre-Dame. ... The proportions of the nave
again recall the thirteenth rather than the fifteenth century."
Having opened with a story of stylistic survival, Blunt shifts to
a tale of architectural revival, as the designers of the building
turn away from the most recent phase of Gothic (that is, away
from the Flamboyant style that "survives" into the sixteenth
century in works like the apse of Caen) and instead evoke the
cathedral architecture of three hundred years previous. In
addition, a specific source, Notre-Dame, is posited for the
plan of the church. If Blunt first interprets the Gothicness of
St-Eustache as the unconscious persistence of a past mode of
architecture, he then sketches a wholly different scenario
where the intertwined stories of the forward movement of
architecture and its (enigmatic) historical context are now
rejected in favor of the more circumscribed story of the
design process of the building, where conscious intent and
the deliberate use of sources necessarily come into play. What
allows his conflicting interpretations to cohere is that they are
placed in the same figurative space and are thereby provided
with a counterfeit kinship, a likeness that is in name-Gothic
structure-only.
Blunt draws no conclusions from his observations, nor does
he call attention to his contradictory survival-yet-revival
schema. Instead, he continues, "This Gothic structure is,
however, clothed in Renaissance forms." This phrase, articulating the transitionality of the church, and which seems to
describe its actual fabrication, also forms a textual transition
as Blunt moves from a contemplation of the structural to the
ornamental traits of the building, summarizing (and simplifying) what has been said-it all boils down to a generic,
uniformly observed "Gothic structure"-and
introducing
what is to come:
The ornament ... is very simple, and the Italian impression depends only on the use of classical pilasters instead of
Gothic. The orders are, it is true, used in a way to horrify
any classically trained architect. In some piers, for instance,
the four main faces are decorated with Corinthian pilasters, the height of which is perhaps twenty times their
breadth, and the corners of the piers are filled by three
columns standing one on top of the other, all of somewhat
bastard design.
Whereas the structural traits were simply observed and
their possible sources identified, Blunt submits the ornamental forms to a critical aesthetic appraisal based on a normative
ahistorical ideal of classicism.'62 Taken as a whole it can be
seen that Blunt's text interprets each "part" of the building as
resistant and aberrant, but for different reasons: the Gothic
structure for simply being there, a historical hangover out of
its proper place, the Renaissance ornament for violating the
classical ideal. That he evaluates the two "halves" of the
building according to two essentially unrelated modes of
concerned with the ideal of formal progress
analysis-one
and the specific historicity of the building, the other with
transcendental aesthetic ideals of classicism untrammeled by
masked by the temporal
specific historic considerations-is
organization of the structure/ornament figure, which im-
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1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 4
poses a narrative (and historicized) coherence on them. Also,
even if Blunt does not explicitly relate his observations about
the classical elements to the ideal of formal progress, the
structure of structure/ornament conveniently and implicitly
accomplishes that for him. The building is thereby allowed to
conform to his overarching narrative of the gradual emergence and final triumph of French classicism in the seventeenth century.
But Blunt is not entirely satisfied; he continues:
And yet, in spite of these eccentricities, the interior of St
Eustache has a grandeur of space and proportions not to
be found in any other sixteenth-century church in France.
It is true that in these features it follows a medieval rather
than contemporary tradition, and it must also be noticed
that the church was to have no influence on the general
evolution of French architecture; but as an isolated work it
remains of great importance.
This passage begins with a return to a consideration of the
Gothic structure of the building. That Blunt is primarily
looking at this aspect is clear, for what he praises-the
singular "grandeur of space and proportions" of the building--is attributed to "a medieval rather than contemporary
tradition." What he means by "contemporary tradition,"
however, is confusing, for according to him, "church architecture during this period was in the main limited to additions
and alterations to existing buildings." All these projects are
described as fundamentally medievalizing, the Renaissance
presence restricted to ornamental forms and the superficial
use of the classical orders.63 By "contemporary tradition," I
would suggest, Blunt does not mean the actual historical
reality of ecclesiastical building during this period but rather
what this reality should have been, that is, less medieval and
more devoted to the development of a classical mode of
French church architecture.
Such a critique is presented in the concluding phrase: "as
an isolated work, it remains of great importance." Isolated?
From what? Here Blunt leaves no room for doubt: isolated
from the history of architecture, from a consideration of the
building's contribution to stylistic progress, from the recognition of its failure to abandon the medieval tradition and its
inability to influence "the general evolution of French architecture." If we can forget that the building's ties to the past
are too strong and its impact on the future nil, if we can
momentarily suspend our serious scholarly faculties and
suppress that St-Eustache is an evolutionary aberration, if we
can blur our vision and see only its "grandeur of space and
proportions," then we can conclude it is a work "of great
importance."
In the final remarks the text flickers between two perspectives: one looks with anatomizing scholarly precision at the
entire structure/ornament building and sites it in the evolution of the history of architecture; the other, which is barely
allowed to function, looks through squinted eyes at the
generally "medieval" (rather than specifically "Gothic")
structural aspects of the building alone yet interprets these
historically qualified traits in an isolated, dehistoricized context. This stepping out of history to view St-Eustache through
a nonanalytical perspective is of course similar to what
Viollet-le-Duc does in his description of the church as a "fairy
palace." Such a self-consciously nonrigorous, ahistorical response occasionally appears in modern literature on the
building, most often, as with Blunt, offered as an "on the
other hand" view subordinate to the serious critique of the
structure/ornament transitional building.64 Even Lenoir and
Vaudoyer preface their critical analysis with the disclaimer
that "at first glance this church offers a very seductive overall
impression." These intermittent glimpses of a grand, seductive, and sometimes unreal church emerge from a discourse
that might be called "irrational," for it appears as an inferior
alternative to the dominant "objective" discourse by which
the building is "rationally" seen and permits authors to
articulate an affective response to aspects of St-Eustache that
escape hard critical reflection-what they notice before they
are compelled to move beyond that "first glance" and
seriously gaze at the monument.
If Blunt's reading of the building as a whole is governed by
the story of continuity and progress in the history of architecture, at the same time he splices into this controlling master
narrative a number of other narratives and modes of analysis.
In this action he is aided by the figurative structure of the
structure/ornament
pair that remains intact throughout,
allowing the transitionality of the building to dominate, while
also providing a framework for his multiple interpretative
modes and viewpoints. This temporalized binary structure
imposes a de facto narrative coherence on his heterogeneous
observations (which are sometimes presented as little more
than fragments, as in "It is to be expected .. ."). But if he is
aided, he is also coerced. The diachronic structure of structure/ornament, with its two adjacent spaces that are sealed off
from each other and that always appear in the same temporal
order, both permits and insists that St-Eustache be seen
separately and sequentially in terms of an uncompromising
dualism, and it both allows and compelsnarrativized interpretations of the building.
In modern discourse, structure/ornament generally figures architectural form in such a way that a building synecdochically, metaphorically, or allegorically narrates and displays its own design process and fabrication, its location in the
linear movements of the history of architecture, and its
contextual motives and meaning. To varying degrees these
possibilities are all realized in Blunt's exceedingly complex
and nuanced, if erratic and contradictory, account of StEustache.
Looking for the Structure/Ornament St-Eustache
That the structure/ornament
St-Eustache has dominated
serious looking at the building since about 1830 is no
testament to the veracity of this construction; rather, it
pointedly underscores that the structure/ornament figure
was and has remained the common point of departure for
analysis, not its conclusion. It exists prior to research and
looking, predetermining the shape that visual and discursive
responses to the building will take. This a priori spatial model
is a powerful one: by fracturing the building into two parts
that cannot overlap, it permits no observation that bears on a
structural element to seep into the space called ornament.
Once the structure of St-Eustache is called Gothic (or
STRUCTURE/ORNAMENT
medieval, or French), nothing ornamental can be claimed by
that term; once its ornament is called classical (or Renaissance or Italian), all structure is removed from that domain.
The implications of this cleavage multiply as the definition of
each space is refined. Once a perceived desire for Renaissance modernity on the one hand or for historicist evocation
on the other has been identified at St-Eustache, neither can
inform both the Gothic structure and the Renaissance ornament of the building. Once its ornament has been called
classical, no structural trait can be so named and Gothic itself
must be understood as an architecture that is completely
evacuated of all possible classicism.
If historians are unaware of the figurative nature of structure/ornament, it cannot be said that this figure is suppressed
and hidden away. Instead, like the purloined letter, it is
concealed through the simplest of camouflages: hidden in
plain sight, it is openly displayed in the guise of a literal
architectural description that masquerades as a transcription
of what is reallythere. Structure/ornament allows the historicized gaze of modern viewers to see a building in historicized
terms, at the same time that they are encouraged to forget the
status of the pair as an a priori figurative construction.
Modern architectural discourse would have us believe that its
historical inquiries, its discovery of the historicity of architecture, of the phenomenon of transitionality, or of the historical
forces that shape architecture are fundamental to the clarified view of St-Eustache as composed of two categories of
morphologically identifiable period style traits. Again, history
is foregrounded as the foundation for architectural knowledge, and a figurative structure, which is equally implicated in
this process, is denied complicity by its presentation as a
self-evidently literal description.
At this point, we may well ask: How literal is the structure/
ornament St-Eustache meant to be? Certainly there is nothing
in any of the texts cited to suggest that their authors do not
mean what they say. But what do they mean? The material
structure/ornament building is in fact a very difficult one to
pin down. As soon as we try to take it at face value and
seriously examine it, its apparent simplicity and clarity fall
away; we find ourselves mired in contradictions and false
starts, following avenues of analysis that turn back on themselves and discovering that apparently straightforward terms
are in need of qualification.
Problems begin before the church itself is looked at, when
we try to define the terms structureand ornamentas descriptive
of material architecture. In a strictly literal sense, that is, in
architectural discourse, when we say that a building has a
"structure," this noun signifies the material realization of the
tectonic principle by which load, support, and thrust are
accommodated, as distinct from the rest of the building. On
the other hand, the word structurein English (as opposed to
French) still retains one of the original Latin meanings of
structura that allows it to denote literally the entire structure,
the complete work of architecture itself, and it is a word used
interchangeably with building, edifice, monument, and so on.65
In this sense, structureincludes the system of statics indicated
by the more strictly tectonic meaning of the word, and it also
encompasses the building's ornament. Structure thus de-
703
scribes a self-sufficient entity, the building as a closed object, a
unified and autonomous presence.
Ornament possesses a different lexical status, for it does not
belong first and foremost to the language of architecture.
Derived from the Latin ornamentum,ornamentis "anythingthat
decorates or adorns; an embellishment. ... a group of notes
that embellishes a melody," "one whose qualities adorn or
confer luster on those about him," "any adjunct or accessory
... equipment, furniture, attire, trappings."66 Ornament can
be as insubstantial as a rhetorical flourish or as weighty as the
portico, temple, and colossus that Leon Battista Alberti tells
us are the proper ornaments of a harbor.67 Lexically parasitic,
ornament only moves from the realm of the general and
conceptual to the specific and physical when we know what it
is applied to or where it appears.
In modern architectural discourse this lexical dependency
mirrors the relationship between built structure and built
ornament. Just as ornamentdepends on structurefor definition
in the structure/ornament pair, so too is the architectural
object "ornament" seen to need built structure, without
a literal fragment, as are
which it is but a fragment-whether
found at ruins and building sites, or images of fragments, as
are found in books on architectural ornament (which proliferated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries).68
Detached from its setting, ornament is a relic, a fetish, a
as Viollet-le-Duc sought to demsculptural souvenir-indeed,
onstrate, a memory of a whole object. Architectural ornament
cannot become meaningful and achieve a wholesome, nonfragmentary presence unless it appears on a structure to which it
is an adjunct or an accessory, secondary and contingent.
When considering the diachronic narrativized structure of
structure/ornament the fiction could be maintained that we
were dealing with two coequal entities. If ornamentis literally
placed in second place, its lesser status nevertheless seemed
incidental; its function was equivalent to that of structureas it
provided an equally spacious area for "half" of the building
and stories about it to be located. But the pair is more than
simply a binary one predicated on the mutual exclusivity of
the two terms: it is also an implacably hierarchical one where
ornament appears as a lexically and materially dependent
feature, as an entity that is incomplete and inessential in and
by itself.
At the same time, however, whereas ornament seems to
achieve a stable meaning within the structure/ornament pair,
the same cannot be said for structure. By itself structure may
define an autonomous architectural presence, and does so
whether it refers to the physical structural system of a building
or to the building as a totality. But a third and far less secure
meaning attaches to structurewhen it is paired with ornament,
that is, when it occurs in the context in which we often
encounter it in modern architectural literature. Here its
meaning is modified to designate everything in the building
except ornament. It is the building without its ornament or,
given the temporalization of the pair, beforeits ornament is
added, a process that must be reversed in the eye of the
viewer. In this pairing structure emerges as a negative entity: it
is not ornament; it is what is left over afterornament has been
seen and detached. Structure becomes knowable not as an
immediately apprehensible self-present presence, but as the
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residue of ornament, as the absence of ornament, as that part
of the building that cannot make itself seeable to the viewer in
the first place.
In the structure/ornament pair, structure takes on the
qualities normally associated with ornament: it is the remainder, the needy secondary entity whose need-to be seen, to be
known, to be present-is supplied by ornament. Structure
does not display ornament; rather, ornament reveals and
makes present structure and it does so by pointing to and
compensating for what structure lacks. It completes structure,
but not in the way normally thought: it does so by allowing
structure to become whole and present before ornament is
put in place; at the same time, it is only when ornament
appears on the scene that this (pre-ornamental) wholeness is
achieved.
Thus, ornament in the structure/ornament pair functions
according to Derrida's logic of the supplement, in particular
of the supplement that is the parergon (that which is next to,
attached to, outside of the ergon, that is, the work, of art).69
What constitutes parerga
is not simply their exteriority as surplus, it is the internal
structural link which rivets them to the lack in the interior
of the ergon.And this lack would be constitutive of the very
unity of the ergon. Without this lack, the ergonwould have
no need of a parergon. The ergon's lack is the lack of a
parergon... which nevertheless remains exterior to it.70
Ornament, the marginal and additional entity that is attached
to, placed on the outside of, and comes after structure, turns
out to be central, primary, and essential. Like a parergon,
ornament remains exterior to structure, but its exteriority no
longer signifies that it is easy to detach, or even that it is
detachable at all.
And like the supplemental parergonattached to the ergon,it
is by no means a simple or self-evident process to decide
where ornament ends and structure begins. If the logic of
structure/ornament demands that we start by removing the
ornament, just how is this visual vandalization of St-Eustache
to be done-and is it even doable (Fig. 8)? To begin with, it is
tricky to decide what is ornament and what is not, and we are
further constrained by the fact that ornament is qualified by a
stylistic label. We have to be careful to leave in place anything
that might be Gothic, for the logic of the binary pair
categorically insists that it belongs to structure. What do we
remove and what do we leave alone? Although the guideline
that we limit ourselves to Renaissance traits seems helpful, in
fact it adds another level of uncertainty to our violent surgery,
paralyzing our dissecting tool rather than clarifying its object.
Would we really want to claim that the sculptural detail
illustrated in Figure 9 depicts a Renaissance man?
The process is further complicated by the alternate methods by which the ornament of St-Eustache is said to appear: it
is applied to the structure, it clothes the structure, Gothic
ornament is substituted by or is translated into Renaissance
ornament. The application and clothing methods are the
most frequently suggested, but the substitution and translation procedures, which presuppose an altogether different
degree of completeness on the part of the underlying original
pre-ornament Gothic structure, are also offered. Paul Frankl,
for instance, saw St-Eustache as an example of "the passive
transition to the Renaissance" where one by one Gothic
members are replaced by Renaissance forms.7' And in 1984
Michael Hesse stated that "the whole church was submitted to
the principle according to which Renaissance decoration in
the prevailing taste was applied to the Gothic structure, each
minute Gothic motif was translatedinto an antique element."72
Although Hesse presents his "translation" remark as a corroborative amplification of his "application" observation, in
fact he describes two mutually exclusive procedures. Or does
he mean that some ornamental elements were translated
while others were applied? And if the peeling away of the
latter is fraught with difficulties, don't we truly lose our
footing with the translated ornament? At which point do we
stop and decide that it has reverted back to its original Gothic
form? Also, can we be sure about the origin of the translated
term and the direction the translation is taking? Is it possible
that a Renaissance element has been translated into a more
Gothic form rather than the other way around (Fig. 10)? And
even if we could arrest the retranslation with any degree of
certitude, would we then not have a Gothic structure with
Gothic ornament rather than a Gothic structure pure and
simple? Furthermore, a process of translation is predicated
on a real or established equivalence between two languages,
or, in this case, two repertoires of architectural forms. But this
necessary equivalence is precluded by the binary opposition
of Gothic and Renaissance architecture, which rigorously
insists on the absolute absence of any common ground
between them.
Similar doubts concerning the ability to arrive at a knowable Gothic structure attend the clothing and application
methods. If the structure has been "clothed" in ornament,
what was the point of departure: a nude or denuded Gothic
structure? Was the structure a Gothic structure before its
ornament was added or a Gothic structure stripped of
ornament and subsequently reclothed? Which meaning of
the word structure attends "Gothic structure"? The matter is
complicated by the fact that Gothic architecture-the Gothic
"style" in architecture-is often understood to be consubstantial with its structural system. One architectural dictionary, for
example, defines Gothic architecture as "the architecture of
the pointed arch, the rib vault, the flying buttress."73 If what is
Gothic about St-Eustache is reducible to this system-as it
seems to be when the word "skeleton" describes the Gothic
part of St-Eustache-is it then the vast remainder that must be
understood as Renaissance, as the ornament of the building?
All our best efforts to detach the ornament, to reconceive
and reverse the process by which it was conceived and put in
place, would be permanently stalled by the inability to agree
on what ornament consists of or how it got there. And even if
this process was feasible we would never arrive with any
security at a stable structural presence, for it is unclear what
"Gothic structure" means. Is the Gothic structure of StEustache a Gothic structural system, an entire Gothic building, a Gothic building with or without ornament, a Gothic
structure before or after Gothic ornament was attached or
taken away? We cannot know the structure of the building
until the ornament has been removed, but to remove it we
STRUCTURE/ORNAMENT
8 St-Eustache, interior (photo: author)
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9 St-Eustache, exterior, detail (photo:
author)
need to know what the structure was before ornament was
added.
The description of St-Eustache as a Gothic structure with
Renaissance ornament seems a simple one, but it is impossible to see. Structure is the recessive, unrecuperable, unstable presence that finally we cannot work back to; ornament
becomes all that we can clearly see, but we can never remove
it, see past it, without destroying the structure, which is
essential. They are both there but do not coexist in the simple
oppositional way that so many modern texts would have us
believe.
Structure/Ornament as Metaphor
This analysis might appear to be engaged in gratuitous
nitpicking, which deceptively mystifies the issue by lighting on
marginal weaknesses in the structure/ornament description
of St-Eustache. It might be argued that what is plainly
intended when St-Eustache is described as a Gothic structure
with Renaissance ornament is that the building is essentially
Gothic, that it adheres in all vital aspects to Gothic principles
and underlying systems of organization; that the restornament-is not Gothic, or maybe is a little Gothic here and
there, but not in any essential or fundamental way; and that
my insistence on literal accountability is, to say the least, naive.
Against this argument I offer two counterarguments. First,
once we let "structure" signify what is "essential" and
"fundamental," what concerns "principles" and "underlying
systems," we have moved from the domain of the physical,
visual, and literally architectural to that of the abstract and
metaphorical, a move that is concealed by the apparent
in particuaptness of using structure/ornament-structure
lar-to describe the real material presence of architecture.
Non-architectural discourses have long appropriated the
language of built architecture for metaphorical use. Earlier I
cited one example of this process as structurewas commandeered to the language of history and archaeology. Such
borrowing of architectural terms has been fundamental to
the enterprise of Western philosophy, but it also occurs
throughout all scholarly discourses and in everyday language,
where buttressed ideas, foundations of societies, keystones of
arguments, pillars of the community, scaffoldings of political
platforms, and other such metaphors regularly appear.74 As
Denis Hollier has written:
There is ... no way to describe a system without resorting
to the vocabulary of architecture....
nothing becomes
legible unless it is submitted to the architectural grid. ... It
is as if, by allowing themselves to be named metaphorically
by a vocabulary borrowed from architecture, the various
fields of ideological production uncovered a unitary vocation....
Without architecture the world would remain
illegible.75
What has not been sufficiently recognized, however, is that
having been recast into metaphor the language of architecture can return to architectural discourse in its altered
figurative state. Once general discourse has changed the
meaning of architectural terms, they can be-have beenreappropriated back to architectural discourse in their new
figurative guises in which they no longer possess a precise
architectural meaning-indeed,
they have taken on nonarchitectural significance. One relatively simple example of such
reappropriation might be the statement: "Brunelleschi's
study of Roman monuments formed the foundation of his
late architecture." That "foundation" is used figuratively
here is not in question; no one would confuse the actual
masonry substructure of S. Spirito with Brunelleschi's Pantheon-enhanced knowledge. When structureis used to designate what is Gothic about St-Eustache, however, the figurative
meaning does not unequivocally replace but is commingled
with the literal. That structurehas been away on a transforma-
STRUCTURE/ORNAMENT
707
10 St-Eustache, interior, detail (photo:
author)
tive voyage and returned home in its changed figurative
condition goes unrecognized.
When discussing structure/ornament as a figurative construction I was not overly concerned with the semantics of
structure, but its (overlooked) metaphorical meaning turns
out to be crucial. In the typical binary description of the
building structure often (covertly) signifies in the way that it
does in the following sentence describing a collaborative
mode of cyberspace fiction known as the Hypertext Hotel:
"Anyone with Internet access can visit the hotel, and once
there can embellish the existing structure (with marginalia)."76 In neither case does structure designate the literal,
tectonic, visible structure of the work (indeed, the Hypertext
Hotel does not possess such a structure); rather, structure
denotes the governing concept and essential idea-the plot
informs and
of the hotel, the design of the building-which
In
else.
the case of
fact,
structures) everything
organizes (in
St-Eustache, this "everything else" comprises its material
ornament as well as its material structure. Both literal strucentire physical building, in other
ture and ornament-the
ornament
the metaphorical structure
words-metaphorically
of St-Eustache, its design.
Thus, the figurative signification of structure does not
escape but instead confirms the parergonal and supplemental
status of ornament. If structure in its metaphorical sense is
the fully conceived structured idea of the building, then
ornament becomes the parergon that reifies the underlying essential idea, the recessive unseen structure. Without
ornament the structure would not be realized, would
not be present. Consequently, when structure takes on its
metaphorical meaning ornament does not follow it into the
realm of the invisible but gains sensationally in visual and
physical presence. The entire built building becomes the
ornament, the necessary supplement that is added to and
replaces its own structure, making the essential structure
knowable.
I am not claiming, however, that the structure/ornament
description of St-Eustache is only a metaphor, that the way it is
used in modern texts on the building is really metaphorical
and not at all literal. This is not where the epistemological
blindness lies. Modern observers of St-Eustache do mean
what they say, but they are not cognizant of all that they are
actually saying, being unaware of both the metaphorical
meaning of structure/ornament as well as the parergonal
logic that inhabits both its proper and figurative meanings.
The persuasiveness of structure/ornament in modern discourse depends on both the forgetting of its metaphorical
meaning and the foregrounding of its literal meaning in
simple binary terms. If viewers of the building start to
experience a slippage in the literal description of the building
as divided between its Gothic structure and Renaissance
ornament the other metaphorical sense of the words is called
into play. But in order to preserve the status of the pair as a
literal objective description, its metaphorical meaning is
called into play before such slippage actually occurs to the
viewer: it is a maneuver that occurs within the epistemology
and logic of the gaze, not the consciousness of the viewer. This
unrecognized move has much to do with the continued
success of the term as a description of the building. And, of
course, the third function of the pair-as a spatial model that
permits a range of narratives about the building to be
told-will also continue to confirm the binary perception of
the building (a perception that is further sustained by the
rigid opposition of Gothic and classical).
These three functions of structure/ornament (as a literal
description of the physical building, as a metaphorical understanding of its presence, and as a narrativized figurative tool)
are all operative and intertwined in modern accounts of
St-Eustache. Yet the only openly conceded role of structure/
ornament is that of a strictly literal architectural description.
The other two functions work silently behind and serve to
support the facade of the literal meaning, and they do so with
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1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 4
the unintentional complicity of those who use it that way. Or
at least this is plainly the case in twentieth-century writings on
the building, which brings me to my second argument against
the view that structure/ornament is a perfectly adequate and
common-sense description of the material St-Eustache.
Structure/Ornament as Metaphor in
Nineteenth-Century Texts
St-Eustache was conAlthough the structure/ornament
structed in the early nineteenth century, it is only beginning
in the twentieth that this building becomes ubiquitous and
overwhelms the scholarly St-Eustache literature, as was documented in the list of examples cited earlier. Unlike their more
recent academic counterparts, French architectural theorists
of the nineteenth century occasionally offered serious descriptions of the building that do not reiterate the structure/
ornament paradigm. That is, different textual figurations of
St-Eustache were produced not only by nonserious looking at
the building (as when Viollet-le-Duc described it as a "fairy
palace") but also by attempts to see and describe it in a
scrupulous, historicized way. These otherwise constructed
St-Eustaches are, nevertheless, in conceptual, theoretical, and
metaphorical alignment with the structure/ornament building. If visually, as a physical object phenomenologically
experienced and textually figured by the gaze, Saint-Eustache
is not literallydescribedas a Gothic structure with Renaissance
ornament, it is, however, theoreticallyand metaphoricallyunderstoodas divided between a Gothic "structure" and supplemental Renaissance "ornament."
Viollet-le-Duc, for example, eight years before he published
the Dictionnaire description of St-Eustache, offered a different
perception of the building in the periodical Annales Archeologiques:
Saint-Eustache is a badly built monument of the thirteenth
century, which shocks by its lack of unity. Those side aisles
of a useless height, those piers formed of an amalgam of
pilasters and columns which are irrationally entangled,
those vaults whose ribs are interlaced every which way and
are no longer indicative of the real construction, those
keystones fastened to the framework, those windows of a
disagreeable proportion which seem to be squeezed in
above that little triforium that seems more like a balustrade
than a gallery, those mullions whose soft forms indicate
neither stone nor wood construction, those flying buttresses with concave extrados, all these senseless combinations..,. are they a progress? In this case, does the antique
element add anything to the beautiful arrangement of the
scheme which is from the thirteenth or fourteenth century? We don't believe so.77
Viollet-le-Duc here presents an ekphratic antipanegyric
where the detailed list of faults figures St-Eustache as a
distorted thirteenth-century Gothic building, not as a Gothic
structure dressed in Roman or Renaissance ornament (as it is
in the Dictionnaire and in the texts of Vachon, Blunt, and
Lenoir and Vaudoyer). The entire structure, the "monument," is Gothic, and the "antique element" is not granted
an effable or visible material presence. It is first mentioned at
the very end of the passage, where it is implicated as the cause
of the debauchment of this "monument of the thirteenth
century," of its aisles that are too high, its too small triforium,
weirdly shaped flyers, and so on. Every misshapen feature
here catalogued has its healthy counterpart in Viollet-le-Duc's
description of a genuine thirteenth-century church that is
configured as an organic, complete whole, its every feature
coordinated to and expressive of a single unified principle.78
This is what St-Eustache should have been, would have been,
were it not for the insidious (yet apparently invisible) addition
of the antique element, which here does not function as a
good and necessary material supplement that completes and
makes present the structure of the building. Instead, it
becomes, in Derrida's terms, an abnormal parergon and
"dangerous supplement" that "harms the beauty of the work
... does it wrong and causes it detriment," "cuts into an
energy which must (should) have been and remained intact....
that enfeebles... and falsifies."79 The antique element is an
unnecessary corrosive extra whose intangible presence cruelly infects and perverts the fundamental ontological essencethe structure-of St-Eustache and produces this tragic doppleginger of a thirteenth-century church.
If the St-Eustache constructed in this passage is visually and
physically different than the building that will soon materialize in the pages of the Dictionnaire, nevertheless, in each case
the building is theoretically comprehended in the same
historicized and metaphorical binary terms: it is essentially
and "structurally" Gothic and only secondarily classical. In
the Annales Archeologiques,however, the antique element is not
so much literally exterior to the underlying Gothic structure
as it is metaphorically comprehended as ontologically exterior to and alien to the essential reality of the building. It is
this metaphorical, theoretically based comprehension of
St-Eustache, rather than a defined perceptual apprehension,
that informs Viollet-le-Duc's quasi-literal description of the
building as a "badly built monument of the thirteenth
century" in the Annales Archeologiquesessay and as a Gothic
skeleton freakishly outfitted in Roman tatters in the Dictionnaire.80
A more overtly figurative, that is, less literally architectural,
characterization of the building had appeared the previous
year in the Annales Archiologiques,written by Viollet-le-Duc's
fellow Gothic rationalist and restorer Jean-Baptiste Lassus.
Lassus describes St-Eustache as a building "where the Gothic
principle exists in its entirety, but is completely denatured,
weakened, and falsified by an envelope that is utterly alien to
it." This St-Eustache whose "principle" is perverted and
masked by a strange "envelope" is extremely evocative yet is
the least seeable of the modern St-Eustaches so far considered. The essence of the building is its physically insubstantial
"Gothic principle," not a tangible physical trait. Nevertheless,
Lassus's figurative St-Eustache is homologous with the more
familiar perceptual structure/ornament building for which
he is self-consciously offering a metaphorical evocation.
Furthermore, it would be a mistake to insist too much on
Lassus's nonarchitectural imagery, for in the passage from
which the above phrase is drawn he easily moves back and
STRUCTURE/ORNAMENT
forth between figurative and literal architectural descriptive
terms as he narrates what he perceives as the progressive
decline experienced in French architecture since the introduction of classical forms (a story in which, therefore, the initial
transitional period is without merit). This passage is worth
citing at some length:
It is at the end of the fifteenth century, in that period when
the art of the Middle Ages was in decline, that one begins
to see the emergence of the antique element. In seeking to
combine it with our national art, this element spawned all
those monuments of a bastard style, such as SaintEustache, for example, where the Gothic principle exists in
its entirety, but is completely denatured, weakened, and
falsified by an envelope that is utterly alien to it. Up until
that moment the antique element plays but a very secondary role.... But the closer one gets to our time, the more
ambitious it becomes and it forges ahead until finally-master of the terrain, and having snuffed out even the
slightest remains of Gothic art-it dares to show itself in all
our monuments....
But what then is architecture? an
assemblage of forms which are always in conflict with the
construction; an incoherent whole where the least details,
even though distorted, nevertheless betray their antique
origin? It is there that one must search for the cause of the
error in which the rationalist school has fallen. The
followers of this school, struck as we are by the decadent
state of our architecture, have understood, as we have, the
necessity of a reform; but rather than searching for its rules
in the genuinely true principles of our national art, they
have not penetrated beyond the scaffolding of antique
imitations which masked from them the very origin of
those principles. Dashing off in pursuit of this false goal,
which they have mistaken for the truth, even today they
have not yet perceived that they have stumbled off the true
path, that they have gone completely astray. The consequence is the error in which they have fallen as they
thought that the serious study of ancient art would be
sufficient to reform an architectural system, which is
fundamentally corrupt, impossible in our climate, impossible with our materials. In dreaming of form, they have
forgotten construction; in believing that they were creating art, they produced only archaeology.81
Lassus's opposition of essential, internal, true, and French
construction to superficial, external, false, and foreign form
articulates a fundamental assumption of much nineteenthcentury architectural discourse: that a primary object of the
gaze is to search for the contextually motivated essential
principle of a building, which is not recuperable through a
superficial scanning but through a penetration beyond mere
external appearance. A building is theorized as having an
inner, contextually responsive presence and an outer decipherable representation of that presence. In the best of cases the
exterior form, contingent rather than essential, should exist
in a motivated and expressive relationship to its internal
essence: it is descriptive and makes manifest the inner
presence, which is both structure and "structure." In bad
(dishonest and immoral) architecture, such as is here described by Lassus, the exterior form obscures the interior
709
principle either through excess or misrepresentation; it is a
dangerous supplement, not good ornament.
This act of probing for a reality beneath the surface, of
penetrating from the external to the internal, also informs
the relationship posited between architecture and history.
Just as ornament is understood as a sign of structure, as a
contextually and materially deduced entity that should represent and point to a more genuine and prior inner principle,
so too is architecture as a whole read as a product and sign of
its times, of existing in an illustrative indexical relationship to
its local and historically specific, material, topographic, and
social context.
These progressive synchronic soundings are metaphorically both archaeological in their movement from surface to
depth and architectural in their movement from exterior to
interior. But I am describing more than just another example
of the reliance of modern architectural discourse on historical (archaeology functioning as a historical tool) and architectural metaphors: each describes the condition of the sign that
is metaphor in its opposition of an inner or buried real
presence and an external surface representation of presence.
In this figurative, symbolist conception of architecture, buildings are signifiers of the contexts that produced them and are
themselves conceived as divided into representational signifiers, which are both ornament and "ornament," and essential
signifieds, which are both structure and "structure."
Such a metaphorically resonant symbolic apprehension of
architecture, with its imbrication of structure/ornament and
"structure/ornament" and its mandate to penetrate to a true
essence beyond the surface of a building, was not restricted to
French theory. It was developed elsewhere as well, particularly
in Germany (and later Vienna).82 In the mid-1800s Carl
B6tticher and Gottfried Semper coined potent theoretical
and metaphorical neologisms such as Bekleidung (dressing),
Kernform(core or kernel-form), and Kunstform (art-form) to
express the duality of the literally material and metaphorically
extramaterial aspects of architecture that I have here outlined.83
In B6tticher's Die Tektonikder Hellenen (1844-52) and "Das
Prinzip der hellenischen und germanischen Bauweise" (1846),
for example, Kernformsimultaneously signifies the physical
structure and the ontological essence of a building, which are
responsive to material and function, while Kunstformsignifies
ornament as that contingent yet necessary part of a building
that symbolically represents and makes culturally intelligible,
through the traditional art function of mimesis, the underlying essence and functional structure of the building. The
supplemental status of Kunstform is made clear when B6tticher defines it is as the "explanatory layer....
[that]
make[s] visible the concept of structure and space that in its
purely structuralstate cannot beperceived.''"84
Through theorizing architecture in terms of its underlying
ontological Kernformand its surface representational Kunstform, B6tticher was able to narrate a history of architecture
where Greek and Germanic Gothic emerged as the two high
points, and where the German Renaissance was among those
periods condemned for their use of dangerous dissembling
ornament. Like Lassus writing about his national Renais-
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DECEMBER 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 4
sance, B6tticher characterized sixteenth-century Germany as
a period
when misunderstood antique forms were adopted to clothe
buildings in the Germanic [Gothic] style. No lengthy
critique of such a meaningless welter of forms is called
for.... [This] school of thought ... remained tied to the
surface of things. No one realized that the origin of all
specific styles rests on the effect of a new structural
principle derived from the material and that this alone ...
brings forth a new world of art-forms.85
In much twentieth-century historical scholarship such theoretically sophisticated, metaphorically inflected (and parergonally entangled) understanding of historical architecture is
often transformed into a direct, unmediated transcription of
simple perceptual (if historically informed) knowledge, from
which has been stripped all metaphorical signification and
hence theoretical nuance. "Structure" and "ornament,"
Kernform, Kunstform, and Bekleidung have all become literal
built structure and ornament.86
As it was originally articulated in the nineteenth century,
structure/ornament resonates both as a literal description of
architecture and as a theorized concept dependent on figurative meanings and interchangeable with figurative terms.
Nineteenth-century writers are more fully conscious of what
they are saying than are their later counterparts, who foreground structure/ornament as a strictly literal description of
the material building (although in neither case is the spatialized, narrative function of the pair recognized). In other
words, if twentieth-century historians simply write "Gothic
ornament" when they look at Ststructure/Renaissance
Eustache with more predictable regularity than do their
nineteenth-century predecessors, this shift in frequency of
occurrence does not indicate a major epistemological shift:
everyone is essentially seeing and saying the same thing, even
if the earlier texts demonstrate a greater awareness of all that
is being said as well as more of an alignment between
authorial and textual meaning.
The insistent repetition of a single descriptive formula in
the twentieth century, however, parallels a shift of another
type: one in the primary location from which serious statements about the building are made. In the nineteenth
century they tend to be found in architectural theory based
on the study of history, whereas in the twentieth they appear
in academic architectural history that has to a large extent
forgotten its theoretical origins, which are not therefore a
subject of critical inquiry.
Building "Structure/Ornament"
That structure/ornament has been naturalizedas a commonsense way of describing much historical architecture has a
great deal to do with the fact that it has also been naturalized
as a way of building modern architecture. Lassus was not
alone in advocating that a penetrative binary reading of
historical architecture would benefit-even
more, would
save-the architecture of his time. The desire to search for
contextually motivated essential "structures" recuperable
under veils, clothing, shells, flesh, husks, shrouds, envelopes,
and the like, as a means of revealing how nineteenth-century
architecture should proceed was widely expressed by his
contemporaries.87 Vaudoyer, for example, before he turned
his attentions to the French Renaissance, wrote:
I thus think that in order to satisfy the needs of our time,
one must preferably study the fundamental architecture of
the ancients, that is to say, that which had to satisfy basic
functions and was not yet corrupted by luxury. It is in this
fundamental architecture that one can best rediscover the
reason for forms, in a word, the skeleton, which later
conceals itself under rich garments.88
As a consequence of such pedagogically motivated looking
at historical architecture, contemporary architecture itself
came to be conceived in terms of the structure/ornament
opposition. Henri Labrouste's Bibliotheque Ste-Genevieve
(1838-50), as Neil Levine has shown, was the first monument
where this binary theory of contextually and functionally
responsive architecture sought material reification.89 This
theory also informed the way the new architecture was looked
at and talked about. Describing the method of a Labrouste
follower a contemporary wrote:
He would turn his attention first to the skeleton and when
he had weighed and balanced all its parts, he dressed his
building as needs and function dictated and according to
the resources at hand, but always allowing, under the folds
of the attire, the means to divine a healthy and vigorous
form.90
If structure/ornament would eventually come to be transformed into a literal description of historical architecture, it
was almost immediately transposed to contemporary architectural production as architects tried literally to build it.
And, of course, twentieth-century architecture is also largely
conceived according to this bipartite model. The emergence
of structure as an independent and essential entity in the
nineteenth century meant that it was able to assume a
representational role that previously had been almost exclusively the domain of ornament. As a result, the potential
superfluity of ornament and its slide into the merely, superficially, or decadently decorative was virtually inevitable, as were
the endless debates about the relationship between structure
and ornament, construction and form, tectonics and representation, technology and history in modern and modernist
discourse.91
Whether a twentieth-century architect is for or against
ornament, it continues to be understood as a separate,
additional extra that is attached to the structure of a building
(even if it is conceived as motivated by and representing an
internal "structural" reality). This is true for architects who
have taken the most polemical positions, such as those
modernists who sought to strip buildings down to their
aesthetically and ethically pure Kernform,or those postmodernists who wanted to build "decorated sheds" rather than
architectural "ducks," and also for those who have sought to
conceptually reconcile the two, such as Frank Lloyd Wright,
with his Louis Sullivan-inspired "organic architecture," or
those deconstructivist architects who regard the structure/
ornament pair as a problematic oppositional modernist one
that they are nevertheless obliged to work with or "be-
STRUCTURE/ORNAMENT
tween."92 All such positions are heir to those nineteenthcentury architects who made the initial cleavage as they
sought to transform a theoretical construct, which opposed a
building's essential principle to its surface garb, into built
reality. Consequently, it is not only the multiple heuristic and
figurative functions of the pair that sustain it as a persuasive
structure in the St-Eustache literature but also its ubiquity in
modern written and built architectural discourse. The structure/ornament St-Eustache is acceptable because we tend to
think that's how buildings really work.
What is often forgotten, however, is that structure/
ornament is a distinctly modern invention, as is the status
assigned to its two members. Before the nineteenth century
ornament was not paired with a tangible physical thing called
structure; structure was not understood to be an entity with a
self-sufficient ontological, representational, or aesthetic presence; and ornament was not reductively and exclusively
conceived as a discrete, detachable object opposed to structure and subject to its own internal logic.93 Rather, ornament
had a more subtle, mobile, even incorporeal meaning.
Alberti, for example, in one of his many statements about
ornament, insists, "The chief ornament in every object is that
it should be free of all that is unseemly."94 Unlike modern
theorists who understand ornament to be the added presence
of some material thing, Alberti here defines it as the absenceof
a quality, the unseemly. In De re aedificatoria ornament is a
supplement not to structure but to beauty ("ornament may
be defined as a form of auxiliary light and complement to
beauty"95). Consequently, ornament is an extremely fluid
term: whatever means can be brought to bear to reveal the
inherent beauty of architecture all come under the heading
of ornament. Something as tangible as a column or the leaves
on a Corinthian capital are described by Alberti as ornament,
but so too are the quality of the material and workmanship
used for a building, its relative proportions, and the relationship between its component parts. Even empty spaces-apertionu m-in the surface of a wall are described as ornament.96 Every component member of a building can both
contribute to and constitute its formal beauty:
711
generate two classes of material traits: they do not produce
structure/ornament.
In the context of the subject of this essay it is particularly
relevant to cite Laugier's remarks on this methodological
duality:
We understand decoration far better than they [Gothic
architects] did: but they were far more skilled than we are
in construction. If we want to improve ourselves, we should
not consult them when the decoration of buildings is
concerned, and we should never stop consulting them for
the method by which they are constructed.99
This passage, from the Essai sur l'architecture,occurs in Laugier's discussion "On the stability of buildings," where he
deplores the lack of practical and sophisticated construction
knowledge on the part of contemporary architects and
contrasts Gothic buildings, which have lasted for centuries,
despite their being so light in construction, with recent works
(such as St-Sulpice), which are unappealingly heavy and
massively built yet are already displaying signs of structural
weakness. Like Alberti, Laugier distinguishes between the
formal shaping and proportioning of a building and the
method of its construction. Thus, the construction methods
employed by Gothic architects can be comprehended apart
from the forms in which they are built, but no formal
distinction between different classes of constructed versus
decorated traits in any given building (that is, "structure"
versus "ornament") is suggested.
An explicit statement on the essential and never entirely
detachable character of that which is decorative appears in
William Chambers's A Treatise on the Decorative Part of Civil
Architecture.Like "father Laugier," as he calls his predecessor,
Chambers adheres to the traditional distinction between
methods of construction and of decoration and writes of the
latter:
We must therefore take great care to ensure that even the
minutest elements are so arranged in their level, alignment, number, shape, and appearance, that right matches
left, top matches bottom, adjacent matches adjacent, and
equal matches equal, and that they are an ornament
[ornamentum] to that body of which they are to be a part.97
The orders of Architecture ... are the basis upon which
the whole decorative part of the art is chiefly built, and
towards which the attention of the artist must ever be
directed, even where no orders are introduced. In them,
originate most of the forms used in decoration; they
regulate most of the proportions; and to their combination, multiplied, varied and arranged in a thousand different ways, architecture is indebted for its most splendid
productions.100
But if the "minutest element" can be ornament, it can also
be part of structure (structura), of which Alberti writes, "It is
not difficult to discover the parts that make up the structure:
clearly they are the top and bottom, the right and left, the
front and back, and all that lies in between."'9 That is,
everything is ornament and everything is structure.
Looking at this issue from another perspective, for Alberti
and many architectural theorists down through the end of the
eighteenth century, a building is the result of two overlapping
and necessary practices in which an architect must be equally
skilled: construction and ornamentation. The first assures
that a building will be well built, the second that it be
beautiful and pleasing to the eye. But the two methods do not
The orders are so fundamental to the decorative part of
architecture that they silently organize the forms of a building
even when they are physically absent. Again, rather than a
category of removable traits, the decorative signifies the
entire formal repertoire of a building and the proportional
relationships between its various elements.
If Laugier and Chambers speak of construction and decoration rather than construction and ornament, this does not
mean that the word ornamenthas been abandoned. For these
authors, "decoration" generally signifies what "ornament"
did for Alberti, while "ornament" is now that which embellishes the orders (as was increasingly true in post-Albertian
writing).1?1 That is, "ornament" is applied to the orders
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DECEMBER 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 4
(which, for Laugier, include "the Gothic order"), and the
parergonal orders "not only decorate the building, but must
constitute it.''102
It is revealing to follow Laugier's difficulties as he attempts
to define "ornament" in terms of detachability. He writes,
"that which we call an ornament is an incidental adornment
[parure] ... which can be excised without harming that which
is essential to the architectural order."103 In the distinction
Laugier then seeks to make between a column and a pilaster
this definition is completely undermined. He initially argues
that a pilaster cannot be ornament because it is "clearly an
essential part of the architectural order, forming a whole with
the entablature," and one cannot "remove it without corrupting the character of the composition." Yet he concludes his
discussion on the pilaster by claiming that if pilasters and
their entablatures were cut away from the masses against
which they are "plastered," the building "would only lose its
ornament." A pilaster order in ideal isolation may be "decoration" (and thus essential), but once it is actually applied to a
building it is demoted to trivial, removable "ornament."
In a building that employs an order of freestanding
columns, the contrary situation obtains: "one cannot touch a
single one of its elements without damaging and ruining the
building." But, according to Laugier, columns are also forms
that should be applied in the place of pilasters: wherever a
pilaster appears, he advises us, a column should be inserted in
its place.104 Consequently, a column is both "decoration"--a
primary means of obtaining beauty in architecture-and has
the character of "ornament," being something that can be
added (and, by extension, taken away), and, following Laugier's logic, an element that cannot be essential to architectural
beauty.
Laugier's nonrigorous and self-contradictory, confusing
and confused attempt to distinguish column/decoration/
essential from pilaster/ornament/incidental
pointedly evidences that although prior to the nineteenth century ornament (or decoration) was never paired with and opposed to
structure, the supplemental status of that which ornaments or
decorates is a condition that tends to unite writings on the
subject fromnthe Renaissance (and earlier) to the present day.
Any effort to distinguish ornament from what it ornaments
will inevitably find itself on unstable ground, whether that
which is ornamented is a physical structure, architectural
beauty, or the orders as a compositional and formal ideal.105
Nevertheless, real epistemological differences can be recognized in the understanding of ornament and what it ornaments in texts before and after the early nineteenth century.
For theorists such as Alberti, Laugier, and Chambers the
concept of ornament contained in the following modernist
pronouncement would have been utterly unintelligible:
[P]ositive quality or beauty in the International Style
depends upon a technically perfect use of materials ...
upon the fineness of proportion in units such as doors and
windows and in the relationship between these units and
the whole design. The negative or obverse aspect of this
principle is the elimination of any kind of ornament or
artificial pattern....
Intrinsically there is no reason why
ornament should not be used, but modern ornament,
usually crass in design and machine-manufactured, would
seem to mar rather than adorn the clean perfection of
surface and proportion.106
The paring back of "ornament" or "decoration" (which are
used interchangeably in the modern texts cited in this essay)
to mean exclusively applied ornament, and the jettisoning
from "ornament" of such traditional concerns as technical
perfection, quality of materials, harmony and balance, and
the "perfection of surface and proportion" was, of course, a
crucial maneuver that allowed "structure" to materialize as a
discrete entity. What is new to the modern period is not the
slippery supplemental status of ornament but rather the
effort to so narrow the definition of ornament that it becomes
only (and problematically) detachable ornament. And if
ornament is to be detachable it must be detachable from
something as concrete, autonomous, and meaningful as itself:
the structure/ornament pair is thereby launched.
In failing to note the significant differences between
processes of construction and decoration and structure/
ornament and in unthinkingly accepting the structure/
ornament pair as a ubiquitous architectural phenomenon,
contemporary scholars have often unwittingly retroassimilated construction/decoration
to the modern binary paradigm, as in this statement of 1988: "Alberti formulated for the
first time the opposition between structure and ornament....
Certainly it has only been a devotion to the same
distinction that has allowed architects in the last hundred
years to deny the need for any ornament at all."107 Thus, a
premodern text is compelled to say something its author
cannot even imagine, and the apparent elimination of ornament in twentieth-century architecture is wrongly understood
as responding to a possibility that had been immanent for
centuries, rather than since the early 1800s, when ornament
first received its potentially detachable status.108
This does not mean that all scholars, particularly contemporary scholars of nineteenth-century architecture, are unaware
of structure/ornament as emerging in a historically specific
theoretical framework. Much has been written on this issue,
and my above analysis makes use of this work. Yet although a
great deal of this writing has been highly perceptive, in taking
as one of its principal goals the undoing of modernist hostility
to and misreadings of nineteenth-century architecture and
theory, it often exhibits a marked tendency to duplicate
uncritically the assumptions of its subjects. We are told, for
instance,
[Romantic] architects were the first to make the
NMo-Grec
radical distinction between structural principle and decorative form. In demanding that forms of decoration be
rationally induced from the materials and methods of
construction as well as from the specifications of the
program, the No-Grec architects acknowledged the distinction between appearance and reality as simply a matter of
fact, and therefore saw the process of design as the
decorationof construction .... The classical ideal of apparent
formal homogeneity was replaced by the reality of strucIn acknowledging a basic disjunctural differentiation....
tion between form and content, the substantiality of
structure and the insubstantiality of clothing form, the
No-Grec offered a new literary syntax of expression .. .109
STRUCTURE/ORNAMENT
In this presentation of architects who "acknowledge" and
"realize" "facts," in this concurring juxtaposition of an
invalid and tendentious "classical ideal of apparent formal
homogeneity" with "the realityof structural differentiation,"
and so on, we encounter a sympathetic, uncritical reader who
is persuaded that his subjects have revealed eternal truths
rather than manufactured conceptual structures that sustain
a provisional epistemology.110 Such interpretations serve to
encourage the view that the structure/ornament opposition
was a hard-won discovery of a self-evident and universally valid
phenomenon, not the historically contingent invention it in
fact is. So embedded in modern thinking is the pair that
scholars of the French Renaissance (and of other periods
traditionally seen as transitional, early, late, or peripheral) are
not alone in continuing to reiterate it as they figure much
historical architecture according to its rigid logic; they are
joined by those who are more directly engaged with the
strategies that produced this view or with the problematics it
engenders.111
It may well be that architects cannot evade the authority of
the modern structure/ornament construct (just as painters
have never been able to escape completely another much
earlier invention that is also often assumed to be a discovery,
linear perspective).112 But architectural historians are another matter. In this paper I have tried to suggest that in
failing to recognize the historical origins, theoretical dimensions, and metaphorical and figurative guises of an apparently
innocent description, contemporary historians, in dealing
with buildings "like" St-Eustache, will find that the properly
architectural continues to elude them as the form of buildings remains shackled to the strange burden of telling us their
stories.113
Anne-Marie Sankovitch, a researchassociate at the Institute of Fine
Arts, New YorkUniversity,has written about medieval and Renaissance architecture and theory. She is completing a book on the
historical, historiographical, and theoretical issues attending the
church of St-Eustache in Paris and the architectureof sixteenthcentury France [Institute of Fine Arts, 1 East 78th St., New York,
N. Y 10021].
Frequently Cited Sources
Bergdoll, Barry, Lion Vaudoyer:Historicism in the Age of Industry (New York:
Architectural History Foundation, 1994; distributed by MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.).
Blunt, Anthony, Art and Architecturein France 1500-1700 (London: Penguin
Books, 1953).
Laugier, Marc-Antoine, Essai sur l'architecture,2d rev. ed. (Paris: Duchesne,
1755).
Lenoir, Albert, and Lon Vaudoyer, "Etudes d'architecture en France, ou
notions relatives I l'Age et au style des monuments 6lev&s A diff~rentes
6poques de notre histoire," Magasin pittoresque7-20 (1839-52).
Levine, Neil, "The Romantic Idea of Architectural Legibility: Henri Labrouste
and the Neo-Grec," in The Architectureof the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, ed. Arthur
Drexler (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977; distributed by MIT
Press, Cambridge, Mass.), 325-416.
Middleton, Robin, "The Abb6 de Cordemoy and the Graeco-Gothic Ideal: A
Prelude to Romantic Classicism," parts 1 and 2, Journal of the Warburgand
CourtauldInstitutes 25 (1962): 278-320; 26 (1963): 90-123.
713
Sauerlinder, Willibald, "Style or Transition?: The Fallacies of Classification
Discussed in the Light of German Architecture 1190-1260," Architectural
History 30 (1987): 1-29.
Vachon, Marius, La Renaissance franCaise: L'architecture nationale, les grands
maitresmafons (Paris: Flammarion, 1910).
Van Zanten, David, 1977, "Architectural Composition at the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts from Charles Percier to Charles Garnier," in The Architectureof
the Ecoledes Beaux-Arts, 111-290.
1987, Designing Paris: The Architectureof Duban, Labrouste, Duc, and
,
Vaudoyer(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press).
Viollet-le-Duc, Eugine-Emmanuel, Dictionnaire raisonni de l'architecturefrancaise
du XIe au XVIe sikcle,vols. 1-6 (Paris: B. Bance, 1854-63), vols. 7-10 (Paris:
A. Morel, 1864-68).
Notes
For kindly reading my manuscript and their helpful comments on it I would
like to thank Jean-Louis Cohen, Romy Golan, Linda Nochlin, Tilde Sankovitch, and Marvin Trachtenberg. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations
are mine.
1. I should stress that this tends to be the case only in much contemporary
architectural history, for the properly architectural is a concern of many
contemporary architectural theorists. The periodical Assemblage,for example,
includes a regular feature entitled "The Strictly Architectural," which "raises
the question of what 'properly' belongs to architecture." For a summary and
examples of writings on this issue, see also Kate Nesbitt, ed., Theorizinga New
Agenda for Architecture:An Anthology of ArchitecturalTheory, 1965-1995 (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996).
2. Viollet-le-Duc, vol. 1, 240.
3. For instance,Jacques Du Breul wrote, "It will be one of the most beautiful
buildings in Europe if it can be completed as it has been begun. For nothing is
lacking as far as the perfection of the architecture is concerned, whether in
regard to its great height, the windows and openings, or the enrichment of the
diverse friezes and moldings, which are of all types and manners"; Du Breul,
Le thdatredes antiquitez deParis (Paris: P. Chevalier, 1612), 793. And according to
Germain Brice, "The building ... is at present the largest and most spacious in
the kingdom. The great size of the entire work, the number of piers (which are
in truth a bit crowded), and the height of the vaults, with the chapels, which
are all around; all these things together make this edifice magnificent"; Brice,
Description nouvelle de ce qu'ily a deplus remarquabledans la ville de Paris (Paris: La
Veuve Audinet, 1684), vol. 1, 103. See also C. Le Maire, Paris ancien et nouveau
(Paris: Theodore Girard, 1685), vol. 1, 523; and Isaac de Bourges, Description
des monuments de Paris (Paris, [16--]), vol. 1, Collectiondes anciennes descriptions
de Paris, ed. Valentin Dufour (Paris: A. Quantin, 1878), 56. I would like to
thank Paul Ch6nier of the Canadian Centre for Architecture for transcribing
the Brice citation.
4. This rhetoric dominated architectural description until the advent of
classical discourse, and St-Eustache was not the only building configured by it.
It also informs, for example, the way Philibert Delorme looked at the
architecture of ancient Rome, whose abundant diversity of architectural forms
and motifs he enthusiastically described and illustrated. For example, he wrote
about the Composite order, "on it was placed as much ornament and richness
as possible, without leaving unadorned a single part of of its cornice, cymas,
astragals, echinus, crowns, dentils and all other members ... including even
the abacus of the capitals where were sculpted eggs and all sorts of friezes";
Delorme, Le premier tome de l'architecture (1567), repr. in Delorme, Traitis
d'architecture,ed. and commentary by Jean-Marie P6rouse de Montclos (Paris:
Lkonce Laget, 1988), 201v. Similarly, if more succinctly, Arnold Van Buchel
saw the Chateau of Madrid in the Bois de Boulogne as a superlative building
that contained "a hundred rooms, with as many windows as there are days in
the year"; Van Buchel,Description de Paris, 1585-86, in Mimoires de la Sociiti de
l'Histoire de Paris et de l'Ile-de-France26 (1899): 87-88. And Sebastien Rouillard,
looking at the porches of the cathedral of Chartres, wrote, "All of these portals
are enriched with stories that are artfully delineated and sculpted. They are
also embellished with an endless number of tall columns on which is placed
such a quantity of statues of more-than-human size and of such admirable
workmanship that they seem to disappear from sight because of the othersone scarcely knows at which one to pause or of which to have the highest
opinion"; Rouillard, Parthinie, ou histoire de la tres auguste eglise de Chartres
(1609), trans. in Robert Branner, ed., Chartres Cathedral (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1969), 105.
5. This did, however, receive some methodological elaboration, particularly
insofar as different phases of the Gothic were concerned; Jean Frangois
Felibien, for instance, sought to devise a rational, empirical methodology by
which Gothique ancien (now labeled Romanesque or earlier) could be distinguished from Gothiquemoderne(Gothic proper), in his Recueil historiquede la vie
et des ouvrages des plus cilbres architectes (Paris: La Veuve de Sebastien
Marbre-Cramoisy, 1687). On Fdlibien's stylistic distinctions, see Middleton, 25:
299-301.
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6. Such as Henri Sauval, Histoire et recherchesdes antiquitis de la ville de Paris,
written ca. 1660 (Paris: C. Moette, 1724), vol. 1, 437; and Jacques-FranCois
vol. 1 (Paris: C. A.Jombert, 1752), 70.
Blondel, ArchitecturefranCoise,
7. Such as Michel de Fr6min, Memoirescritiques d'architecture(Paris: Charles
Saugrain, 1702), 27; and Jean Lebeuf, Histoire de la ville et de tout le diocese de
Paris (1754), ed. and annotated by H. Cocheris, vol. 1 (Paris: A. Durand,
1863), 121-22.
8. Such as Germain Brice, Descriptionnouvelle de ce qu'ily a de plus remarquable
dans la ville de Paris, 3d rev. ed. (Paris: Nicolas Legras, 1698), vol. 1, 219; and
Antoine-Nicolas D6zallier d'Argenville, Voyagepittoresquede Paris par M. D-(Paris: Les freres de Bure, 1778), 164.
9. Marc-Antoine Laugier, Observationssur l'architecture(Paris: Desaint, 1765),
150.
10. Ibid., 283-84. The comparison Laugier is here making is similar to that
which he had made earlier between the good Gothic Notre-Dame and the bad
modern St-Sulpice; Laugier, 174-75.
11. Indeed, such attempts are largely inarticulate. Laugier's one effort to see
such duality is notable in that he managed to perceive at least one morphologically identifiable feature (classical colonnettes) at St-Eustache. More typically,
we are simply informed that the building is Gothic and antique and are not
told what specific elements at St-Eustache adhere to either manner. AntoineNicolas D6zallier d'Argenville (as in n. 8), for example, writes "Its architecture
is of a Gothic sort mixed with a bad antique." More expansive, yet equally
elusive, is Germain Brice's figuration of the building in the 1698 third edition
of Description nouvelle, which differs markedly from that offered in the first
edition of 1684 (see n. 3 above). Whereas he had earlier praised St-Eustache as
a superlative example of Aristotelian magnificence (a critical judgment
supported by such specified traits as the quantity of chapels and the height of
the vaults), Brice (as in n. 8) now writes: "The architect has made a horrible
confusion of Gothic and antique, and has so corrupted one and the other that
nothing regular or tolerable can be seen, so that one must regret, with justice,
the great sums of money that were spent on the building under the direction
of the miserable mason who gave the designs." Unlike virtually every other
building in Paris, which Brice is able to describe with varying degrees of closely
observed detail, St-Eustache has become an elusive structure, intractably
refusing to yield to the cognitive and descriptive gestures of the classical gaze.
Language, the necessary and transparent analytical tool of classical discourse,
which should automatically know and be able to name what it sees, is here
rendered impotent. Furthermore, I would argue, it is this new, frustrating
(and singular) strangeness that causes Brice's condemnation as he executes a
metonymic shift from method to object and displaces his disorientation and
confusion onto the building: "I am confused, therefore the building must be
confusing."
12. Whereas 19th- and 20th-century observers of St-Eustache could look, for
instance, at its piers and see elements of a Gothic structure covered with
Renaissance ornament, in the early 1700s, Michel de Fremin (as in n. 7), who
paired St-Eustache and St-Sulpice together as examples of bad modern
architecture, saw the piers of these buildings as morphologically unified and
contrasted their quantity and massiveness to the lighter columnar Gothic
supports of Notre-Dame (27-39). For Fremin a pier was Gothic or not, classical
or not: it could never be both. For modern descriptions of the piers, see [A.]
Le Roux de Lincy (text) and Victor Calliat (plates), Eglise Saint-EustachedtParis
(Paris: By the authors, 1850), 20; and Earl Rosenthal, "The Diffusion of the
Italian Renaissance Style in Western European Art," Sixteenth CenturyJournal 9
(1978): 36.
13. Thus, neither the 18th-century architecture (and the theories in support
of it) that Robin Middleton has dubbed "Graeco-Gothic," where Gothic
methods of construction are entirely realized in classical forms (as at
Ste-Genevieve), nor those 18th-century projects to "improve" Gothic architecture through the reshaping of their forms as classical are able to foster or
accommodate a binary structure/ornament recognition of St-Eustache. On
18th-century theories of Gothic architecture, see Middleton; and Wolfgang
Herrmann, Laugier and EighteenthCenturyFrench Theory(London: A. Zwemmer,
1962; reprint, 1985), chaps. 5-7. The formal rectification of the Gothic is
discussed by Laugier (as in n. 9), 129-51. For more on the distinction between
18th-century construction and 19th-century structure, see the section below
entitled "Building 'Structure/Ornament.' "
14. Vachon, 149-50; Rend Schneider, L'art franais: Moyen age d Renaissance
(Paris: H. Laurens, 1923), 164-65; W. H. Ward, The Architecture of the
Renaissance in France, 2d rev. ed. (London, 1926; reprint, NewYork: Hacker Art
Books, 1976), vol. 1, 85; Pierre Lavedan, L'architecturefranCaise(Paris: Larousse,
1944), 103; Yvan Christ, Eglises parisiennes, actuelles et disparues (Paris: Editions
"Tel," 1947), 43; Blunt, 33; Am~d&e Boinet, Les iglises parisiennes, vol. 1 (Paris:
Editions de Minuit, 1958), 471; Rosenthal (as in n. 12), 36; Michael Hesse, Von
derNachgotik zur Neugotik:Die Auseinandersetzungmit der Gotik in derfranz6sischen
Sakralarchitekturdes 16ten, 17ten, und 18tenJahrhunderts (Frankfurt: Peter Lang,
1984), 25; Henri Zerner, "Le frontispiece de Rodez: Essai d'interpr~tation," in
"IIse rendit en Italie'":Etudes offertesd Andre Chastel (Paris: Flammarion; Rome:
Edizioni dell'Elefante, 1987), 303;Jean-Marie P~rouse de Montclos, Histoire de
I'architecturefrancaise de la Renaissance d la Rivolution (Paris: Editions Mengbs,
1989), 73-74; Willibald Sauerlander, review of L'art de la Renaissance en France:
L'invention du classicisme, by Henri Zerner, New YorkReview of Books, Oct. 9,
1997, 47.
15. Dieter Kimpel, Paris, Fiihrer durch die Stadtbaugeschichte(Munich: Hirmer,
1982), 160; Hesse (as in n. 14), 25; David Thomson, Renaissance Paris:
Architecture and Growth 1475-1600 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1984), 187; and P~rouse de Montclos (as in n. 14), 74-75.
16. Spiro Kostof, A History ofArchitecture(NewYork: Oxford University Press,
1985), 403; and David Watkin, A History of WesternArchitecture (New York:
Thames and Hudson, 1986), 228. On the non-Italian Renaissance in general,
Kostof writes, "most commonly building types current in the host country
would wear trinkets, or even whole mantles in the new taste" (430); and
according to Watkin, "outside Italy, Gothic persisted throughout the fifteenth
century, knowledge of the Renaissance arriving after 1500 largely in the form
of ornamental details" (210). The same view is presented in Peter Murray's
survey, where we are told that in England, "as elsewhere in Europe, Italian
influence came in by means of decorative details, and it was many years before
the structural principles were understood, let alone copied"; Murray, RenaissanceArchitecture(New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 180.
17. Ludwig H. Heydenreich and Wolfgang Lotz, Architecturein Italy 14001600 (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1974), 100.
18. See, however, n. 111 below.
19. Christopher Wilson, The Gothic Cathedral (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990), 117.
20. Henri Focillon, The Art of the West,vol. 2, Gothic, trans. D. King, ed. Jean
Bony (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980), 148. It should also be
noted that Focillon observes the same obscuring process occurring in writings
about art: "the luxuriant vegetation with which interpreters decorate the work
of art accumulates around it, sometimes to the point of entirely concealing it
from us." Focillon, Vie desformes (1934; 6th ed., Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1996), 2. Thus, it can be argued that Focillon understands Flamboyant
architecture to be both a critique as well as a perversion of good 13th-century
Gothic.
21. Vachon, 11.
22. Ibid., 149-50.
23. Vachon also avoids the macabre imagery of Viollet-le-Duc by substituting
for squelette(skeleton) the more benign ossature,a word that also translates into
the English "skeleton," and indeed has the same anatomical meaning and
shares its figurative meanings of "framework" or "structure" but does not
possess squelette'sconnotations of unwholesome creepiness, decadence, and
morbidity. Viollet-le-Duc certainly plays to these connotations here and
elsewhere in the Dictionnaire in describing the appearance of "foreign,"
usually Roman, forms in French architecture, as when he writes of the early
Middle Ages (vol. 1, 122), "architecture remains enveloped in its musty
antique shroud."
24. According to Vachon (7), "There is a direct, immediate and uninterrupted lineage from the architecture of the Middle Ages to that of the
Renaissance. The one comes from the otherjust as a plant grows from fruit
sown in the ground. When it is a germ it is nourished by it; then, having
established its roots, it draws fertilizing elements from the soil, sprouts, comes
forth, grows; and finally, in the air and light-sources of fecundity, of life, and
of beauty-it blossoms and bears fruit."
25. On the interpretive function of plots-as distinguished from storiessee Hayden White, Tropicsof Discourse:Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 58-61.
26. Blunt, 33.
27. It is worth noting that Blunt uses the term Renaissance to describe the
architecture of 16th-century France only once in his entire discussion of the
period (9, for the staircase at Blois). More typically, 16th-century buildings are
characterized as less or more classical; that is, the period is largely seen as a
nondistinctive one, meaningful only insofar as it anticipates French classical
architecture of the 17th century.
28. The "superannuated" interpretation of 16th-century French church
architecture was particularly popular with English historians before Blunt. For
instance, in his chapter entitled "Church-Building in the Sixteenth Century,
and the End of Gothic Architecture," Reginald Blomfield speaks of the "last
flicker of medievalism," "the prolonged struggle between the old and the
new," the "tendency to slip back to the old manner," of a "throwback to the
motives of much earlier work," and so on; Blomfield, A History of French
Architecturefrom the Reign of CharlesVIIItill theDeath of Mazarin (London: G. Bell
and Sons, 1911), vol. 2, 1, 6, 11.
29. Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, "Saint-Eustache," in Paris Guide, par
les principaux &crivainset artistes de la France (Paris: Librairie Internationale,
1867), vol. 2, 692.
30. Sauerlinder, 4.
31. Viollet-le-Duc, for example, wrote about the secular architecture of
16th-century France (vol. 1, 327): "The great French architects of the
sixteenth century ... were able to unite with remarkable skill the tried and
true traditions of past centuries with the recently accepted forms. If they
employed the antique orders, and if they often believed themselves to be
imitating Roman art, nevertheless in their buildings they respected the needs
of their time and submitted themselves to the requirements of climate and
materials." See also idem, Entretiens sur l'architecture,vol. 1 (Paris: A. Morel,
1863), 338-39. Unlike Viollet-le-Duc's interpretation, in many 19th-century
readings of the French Renaissance the emphasis on local requirements often
served the anxious nationalistic agenda of minimizing or denying the
presence of Italian influence. Thus, for example, about the Paris H6tel de
STRUCTURE/ORNAMENT
Ville (designed by Domenico da Cortona), Lkonce Reynaud wrote, "Remarkably, nothing evokes Italy in this architecture designed by an Italian artist....
the decorative system presents that charming fantasy, that freedom of manner,
which properly belongs to the French Renaissance and never passed to the
other side of the Alps"; Reynaud, Traiti d'architecture contenant des notions
generales sur les principes de la construction et sur l'histoire de l'art, vol. 2 (Paris: V.
Dalmont, 1858), 421. This anti-Italian interpretation of French Renaissance
architecture received its most extreme and poignant form in L0on Palustre's
La Renaissance en France, vol. 1 (Paris: A. Quantin, 1879), ii-iii, where it is
claimed that the very term Renaissance is inappropriate when applied to France
because "Unlike Italy, France did not slumber after the fall of the Roman
Empire; it was not necessary therefore to wake her up but simply to set her on
a new path. The rupture that is assumed to separate the present and the past
never existed, and nothing that was created on this side of the Alps,
particularly during the first half of the sixteenth century, is in absolute
The so-called
opposition to the manner that had long been in practice....
Italian domination of our sixteenth-century architecture makes as much sense
as the influence attributed to the Goths during the most beautiful period of
the Middle Ages."
32. Sauerldnder, 5.
33. Ibid., 11.
34. This is not to suggest that the problematics of the transitional can be
escaped by simply sidestepping or deconstructing the structure/ornament
concept. To unravel "transitional," however, is beyond the scope of this paper.
Here I will only observe that the primary theoretical problem posed by
"transitional" is that, even within the internal logic of this mode of conceiving
architecture, the supposed "opposite" of a transitional building, a monument
that conforms to a norm, does not in fact exist. Normative models can never
be iconically represented in any real building, for they are always absent,
always different from the real building; they are origins always lost in the past
or ends always deferred to the future. It is only because movement is conceived
as present in each individual building, which transcribes its absent origin and
deferred end, that the modern observer can simultaneously think of an
individual building and the evolution of architecture of which it is a part.
Hubert Damisch has observed about Viollet-le-Duc: "the 'ideal,' 'complete,'
'achieved,' model which he proposes for the Gothic cathedral, no architect
ever had it in mind at any moment of history; and, if it appears in the
Dictionnaire, it is precisely as a model,a conceptual tool well suited to reveal the
structural ties that unite the multiple creations of the Gothic age, the shared
field where they successively appear, and the problematics of the whole that
was at the horizon of each singular experience." H. Damisch, introduction to
L'architecture raisonnie: Extraits du Dictionnaire de l'architectureftanCaise by
Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (Paris: Hermann, 1964), 19. When the
transitional building draws attention to the apparently greater expanse of its
conceptual horizon it is illuminating a panoramic prospect equally available to
and equally present in every building. In the evolution of the history of
architecture as conceived by modern historians buildings can only be
positioned spatially and temporally closer to an ideal model and further away
from another: the point that marks a break in the continuum between a
normative and transitional period is always an arbitraryone. "Transitional," in
other words, is the normative condition of any building located in this
formalist continuum. On presence as the effect of spatial and temporal
differences, see Jacques Derrida, "Diff6rance," in Margins of Philosophy, trans.
A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 3-27.
35. See, however, Denis Hollier, "The Architectural Metaphor," in Against
Architecture:The Writings of GeorgesBataille, trans. B. Wing (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1989), 14-56.
36. Michel Foucault, The Orderof Things: An Archeologyof the Human Sciences,
trans. A. Sheridan (NewYork: Vintage Books, 1973), 219.
37. Most recent scholarship on 19th-century architecture and theory takes
up the theme of the new importance of history, historicism, and historicized
interpretation; a particularly useful analysis of the historical turn in France is
offered by Robin Middleton, "The Rationalist Interpretations of Classicism of
LUonce Reynaud and Viollet-le-Duc," AA Files 11 (1986): 29-48. The significance of history to 19th-century architectural production is made clear by the
architect of the Paris Opera, Charles Garnier: "architects who build monuments must consider themselves to be the writers of future history; they must
indicate in their works the characteristics of the time in which they create;
finally they must, through duty and through the love of truth, inscribe in their
buildings those indisputable signs of the period of construction"; Garnier, "La
reconstruction des monuments de Paris," Le Temps,Sept. 7, 1871, quoted in
Christopher Curtis Mead, Charles Garnier's Paris Opera: Architectural Empathy
and the Renaissance of French Classicism (New York: Architectural History
Foundation, 1991; distributed by MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.), 7 (my
translation). Thus, viewers of architecture are not alone in searching for the
signs that reveal the historical location of a building; contemporary buildings
themselves must actually be constructedin such a way that their historicity in all
its implications-as
a sign of the present that will be legible in the future, as
distinct from its past and future-is carefully encoded.
38. Barry George Bergdoll, "Historical Reasoning and Architectural Politics: L6on Vaudoyer and the Development of French Historicist Architecture,"
Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1986, xvi.
39. As Jacques Derrida has observed, "Now, stricto sensu, the notion
of"
structure refers only to space, geometric or morphological space, the order of
715
forms and sites. Structure is first the structure of an organic or artificial work
... the architecture that is built and made visible in a location....
Only
metaphorically was this topographicalliterality displaced in the direction of its
Aristotelian and topical signification"; Derrida, Writing and Difference,trans. A.
Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), 15-16.
40. Ibid., 17.
41. Although Vaudoyer is sometimes cited as the sole author of the
"Etudes" (Van Zanten, 1987, 325) and is given top billing by others (Bergdoll,
116-17), I am here adhering to the way the authorship is actually designated:
"MM. Albert Lenoir et L6on Vaudoyer"; Lenoir and Vaudoyer, 7 (1839): 4.
Vaudoyer published under his own name a much abbreviated version of the
"Etudes," which repeated phrases, whole passages, and images of the joint
endeavor but which continued through to his own day, whereas the "Etudes"
concluded with the reign of Louis XIV; Vaudoyer, "Histoire de l'architecture
en France," in Patria: La France ancienne et moderne,ed. J. Aicard et al. (Paris:
J.-J. Dubochet, Lechevalier, 1847), vol. 2, 2113-99.
42. Lenoir and Vaudoyer, 8 (1840): 62-63.
43. Ibid., 63.
44. Lenoir and Vaudoyer, 12 (1844): 259-62; 14 (1846): 105-6.
45. Lenoir and Vaudoyer, 12 (1844): 260.
46. Ibid.
47. Indeed, their account of the 16th century stands in marked contrast to
their history of earlier church architecture, of which they wrote in conclusion,
"It is thus that we have seen ... the Christian church, modest and simple at its
birth, grow and acquire a noble severity in the eleventh and twelfth centuries,
rise to the greatest height of its splendor in the two following centuries, begin
to decline in the fifteenth, and finish by dying out in the sixteenth century";
Lenoir and Vaudoyer, 8 (1840): 63.
48. As David Van Zanten has written about Vaudoyer and his contemporaries, "In architecture, the basis of theorizing was not a temporally static
interpretation ... but was instead a historical interpretation of transitions-of
syntheses--meant to define the mechanism of evolution in building"; Van
Zanten, 1977, 223; see also 223-30; Middleton (as in n. 37); and Bergdoll,
120-25. According to Willibald Sauerldnder (2), "Up to the end of the
eighteenth century transition was a terminus technicus for certain forms of
It is only with the rise of modern
[literary or musical] composition....
historicism that transition ... changed ... into a term of evolution."
49. Already in 1837 Vaudoyer had expressed the opinion that "the true
national architecture is that which was given pride of place during the reigns
of Francis I and Henry II ... this is the only one that can constitute modern
French art, for... this architecture is much better suited to the needs of our
present civilization than Gothic architecture whose forms ... contrast notably
with our customs and purposes"; Vaudoyer, ms., quoted in Bergdoll, 139 (my
translation). On Vaudoyer's interest in the architecture of the French
Renaissance, see Bergdoll, 131-40, 154-56, and passim. In the "Etudes
d'architecture," the beginning of the end of the Renaissance was signaled in
such works as Jean Bullant's Chiteau of Ecouen, of whose colossal order
Lenoir and Vaudoyer wrote, "Here is where the Renaissance is truly vulnerable
to attack; it is when its blind love of antiquity, which paralyzes all invention,
lures it beyond the point of reason to produce those puerile imitations, the
consequences of which became so quickly fatal"; Lenoir and Vaudoyer, 11
(1843): 298. Lenoir and Vaudoyer were far from alone in their interest in and
advocacy of French Renaissance architecture as a model for contemporary
building. From about the midcentury onward, for example, numerous
folio-size, multivolume, lavishly illustrated studies of French Renaissance
architecture appeared, such as Adolphe Berty, La Renaissance monumentale en
France: Spicimens de composition et d'ornementation architectoniquesempruntis aux
idifices construits depuis le rigne de Charles VIIIjusqu'd celui de Louis XITC2 vols.
(Paris: A. Morel, 1864); Alfred Darcel and Eugene Rouyer, L'art architecturalen
France depuis Francois ler jusqu''d Louis XIV Motifs de dcoration intirieure et
exthieure dessinis d'apris des modtles exicutis et inidits des principales 0poques de la
Renaissance, 2 vols. (Paris: Noblet et Baudry, 1863-66); C6sar Daly, Motifs
historiquesd'architectureet de sculptured'ornementpour la compositionet la dicoration
exterieuredes idifices publics et privis: Choix defragments empruntis d des monuments
francais du commencementde la Renaissance d la fin de Louis XVI, 2 vols. (Paris:
Ducher, 1870). As their titles suggest, these works had a dual purpose, which
Daly explicitly spells out at the beginning of his text (vol. 1, 1): "that of
facilitating the practical and day-to-day work of the architect, and that of
throwing new light upon the history of French architecture from the
beginning of the Renaissance up to the present day." For a discussion of
architectural periodicals and the French Renaissance, including an analysis of
the modes of graphic representation utilized, see FranCoise Boudon, "Le
regard du XIXe siacle sur le XVIe siicle franCaise: Ce qu'ont vu les revues
d'architecture," Revue de l'art 89 (1990): 39-56.
50. Lenoir and Vaudoyer, 10 (1842): 126-27. On the use of the fragments of
Gaillon in Felix Duban's courtyard at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (1832-40), see
Van Zanten, 1987, 71-83.
51. Thomson (as in n. 15), 188.
52. L6once Reynaud, "Architecture," in Encyclopidie nouvelle, ed. P. Leroux
andJ. Reynaud, 2d ed. (Paris, 1839), vol. 1, 777; trans. in Van Zanten, 1977,
228. For Vaudoyer and Lenoir's take on the early Italian Renaissance, see
Lenoir and Vaudoyer, 10 (1842): 123-25.
53. In his Traitt d'architectureReynaud (as in n. 31) does not even try to cope
with the issue when he charts the history of church architecture from the early
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LXXX NUMBER 4
Christian style latin through the eighteenth-century style moderne (218-317).
The discussion of the style de la renaissance (301-11) contains no mention of
French architecture, and St-Eustache appears retrospectively in the discussion
of style moderne, where it stands in for all church building of the otherwise
ignored French Renaissance: "After a few attempts--of which the church of
Saint-Eustache in Paris is the most complete and best realized example-to
apply the forms of Renaissance architecture to the plans and proportions
established by Gothic architecture, the basilica of Saint-Peter's became a
model for the entire Christian world" (311). This sentence represents the sum
total of Reynaud's thoughts on the history of ecclesiastical construction in
16th-century France, despite his earlier announcement that the French
Renaissance will be one of the principal architectural styles he will consider
(92), which he indeed otherwise does, as the secular architecture of the period
presents him with no theoretical or narrative problems.
54. Lenoir and Vaudoyer, 10 (1842): 125-28, 193-200, 225-27, 265-68; 11
(1843): 49-54, 121-26, 193-98, 297-302, 397-401.
55. Lenoir and Vaudoyer,11 (1843): 194.
56. Abb6 Balthasar,"L'6gliseSaint-Eustachede Paris," RevueArchiologique
11 (1855): 718. Similarly, according to AbbWGaudreau, "the architecture of
Saint-Eustache is precisely that of the transition of the Gothic to the
Renaissance, where one finds the sober simplicity of the first style and the
elegance of the second, which subsequently became overburdened with a
reprehensible profusion of decoration"; Gaudreau, Notice descriptiveet historique sur l'Vgliseet la paroisse Saint-Eustachede Paris (Paris: Dentu, 1855), pt. 2, 8.
57. Lenoir and Vaudoyer, 12 (1844): 259-60; 14 (1846): 106. As for the
contention that the Italians had a natural affinity for the antique that led them
to embrace fully its revived forms, the rather obvious counterclaim, which was
then being championed by Viollet-le-Duc and others-that the French had a
natural affinity for the Gothic that should have compelled them to reject the
antique-was one that Lenoir and Vaudoyer were specifically arguing against.
They take the position that 13th-century Gothic was a decadent corruption of
good Christian Romanesque architecture and not a distinctively French mode
of architecture worth reanimating. They thus dramatically denounced the
ambitions of Gothic revivalists: "What! the Gothic should be our national art!
and we should repudiate all that has been achieved since then! What! such
would be the limits imposed on the French genius, and since the fifteenth
century our art should have lost all originality, all character! We cannot believe
it"; Lenoir and Vaudoyer, 12 (1844): 262.
58. Lenoir and Vaudoyer, 14 (1846): 106. The text continues, "It is thus
entirely natural that it was first in residential buildings that were adopted those
alterations whose goal was to obtain a well-being and pleasures more in
harmony with the civilization of that period." It was also for this reason that
not expenot problematically atransitional-did
civic architecture-although
rience the building boom that residential architecture did; Lenoir and
Vaudoyer, 10 (1842): 195.
59. Lenoir and Vaudoyer, 10 (1842): 121.
60. Blunt, 33.
61. Blunt is perhaps referring to such factors as those evoked by W. H. Ward
(as in n. 14), 85: "whereas in the castle the reason of its being-its
fortification-was
growing obsolete, and some semblance of it was retained
only from habit, in the church the functions were unaltered, and no change in
essentials was tolerated."
62. In the preface to the fourth edition of Art and Architecturein France
(1980) Blunt defined what he meant by classical: "In architecture I take the
word 'classical' to imply the correct use of the Orders according to the practice
of the Ancients ... but at the same time the pursuit of certain qualities of
clarity and simplicity, a preference for regular forms (circle and square), for
plane surfaces, clearly defined masses, and simple materials such as stone and
stucco rather than marbles and gilding, the result being a static monumental
style related to certain familiar types of ancient Roman buildings ... and to the
works of Italian architects of the High Renaissance" (12).
63. Blunt, 32-34.
64. After a traditional structure/ornament critique of the building, A. Le
Roux de Lincy (as in n. 12), for example, writes, "In spite of everything, it must
be admitted that this monument has grandeur; its structure is strong and bold;
the choir in particular has a quality that is austere and dignified" (20).
Similarly, Leon Palustre (as in n. 31) writes, "if the ornamentation is
sometimes capricious, the church never fails to be full of nobility and
grandeur, so that certain features, which a strict logic cannot but condemn,
effect an intense seduction upon the spirit" (vol. 2, 1881, 130).
65. The Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary, 1st ed., gives as one definition of
structura "a building, erection, edifice, structure."
66. American Heritage Dictionary (1971); Webster'sNew International Dictionary,
2d ed.; OxfordEnglish Dictionary, 1st ed.; emphasis added. These meanings are
also signified by the Latin ornamentum, which the Lewis and Short Latin
Dictionary, 1st ed., defines as "apparatus, accoutrement, equipment, furniture,
an ornamental equipment, ornament, mark of honor,
trappings, etc....
decoration, embellishment, jewel, trinket."
67. Leon Battista Alberti, On theArt of Building in TenBooks, trans.J. Rykwert,
N. Leach, and R. Tavernor (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 261-62.
68. For some French examples, see n. 49 above.
69. On the problematics of the supplement, see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. H. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).
70.Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. G. Bennington and I.
McLeod (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), 59-60.
71. Paul Frankl, GothicArchitecture(Baltimore: Penguin, 1962), 213-14.
72. Hesse (as in n. 14), 25; emphasis added.
73. Nikolaus Pevsner, John Fleming, and Hugh Honour, A Dictionary of
Architecture(Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook, 1976), 212.
74. On the role of architecture and architectural figures in philosophical
and other discourses, see Derrida (as in n. 39), 3-30, 278-93; and Mark Wigley,
TheArchitectureofDeconstruction:Derrida's Haunt (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1993).
75. Hollier (as in n. 35), 33-35.
76. "The Pleasures of the (Hyper) text," Talk of the Town, New Yorker,
June
27-July4, 1994, 44.
77. Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, "Du style gothique au XIXe siecle,"
Annales Archiologiques4 (1846): 350-51.
78. Ibid., 341-43.
79. Derrida (as in n. 70), 64; Derrida (as in n. 69), 215.
nature of Viollet-le-Duc's theory in the
80. On the antiphenomenological
Dictionnaire, see Damisch (as in n. 34), 20-23.
81.Jean-Baptiste Lassus, "De l'art et de l'arch6ologie," Annales Archiologiques2 (1845): 198-99.
82. For a critical overview of the international scene, see Kenneth Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and
TwentiethCenturyArchitecture(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), chaps. 2, 3.
In England, A. Welby Pugin's theories of Gothic architecture, where each
ornamental motif was seen to assume or display a structural function, led him
to an assessment of St-Eustache and the architecture of 16th-century France
that strikingly parallels many contemporary French texts: "from the moment
the Christians adopted this fatal mistake, of reviving classic design, the
principles of architecture have been plunged into miserable confusion. ... At
first it was confined to the substitution of a bastard sort of Italian detail to the
ancient masses. This is particularly striking in the French buildings erected
during the reign of Francis the First .... The church of St. Eustache, at Paris, is
a most remarkable example of this period"; Pugin, An Apologyfor the Revival of
ChristianArchitecturein England (London:J. Weale, 1843), 7-8.
83. On B6tticher (including a discussion of his tectonic theory in the light
of contemporary debates in German aesthetic philosophy about the representational in art, the purposiveness of art, and the hierarchies of the arts), see
Mitchell Schwarzer, "Ontology and Representation in Karl Bbtticher's Theory
of Tectonics," Journal of the Societyof ArchitecturalHistorians 52 (1993): 267-80.
On Semper's theory of Bekleidung, see Harry Francis Mallgrave, Gottfried
Semper:Architect of the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1996), 180-81, 185-88, 293-302. On the relationship between the theories of
B6tticher and Semper, see Mallgrave, 219-25; and Wolfgang Herrmann,
GottfriedSemper:In Search of Architecture(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984),
pt. 2, chap. 3. For Semper, see also Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of
Architectureand Other Writings, trans. H. F. Mallgrave and W. Herrmann, intro.
W. Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). The theories
and neologisms of B6tticher and Semper were widely taken up and developed
by theorists and architects down to the end of the century, such as, for
example, Adolf Loos, "The Principle of Dressing" (1898), in Adolf Loos,
Spoken into the Void:CollectedEssays 1897-1900, trans. J. Newman and J. Smith
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), 66-69. For the history and application
of one metaphorical neologism, see Werner Oechslin, "The Evolutionary Way
to Modern Architecture: The Paradigm of Stilhiilse und Kern," in Otto Wagner:
Reflections on the Raiment of Modernity, ed. Harry Francis Mallgrave (Santa
Monica, Calif.: Getty Center, 1993), 363-410.
84. Carl Bbtticher, "The Principles of the Hellenic and Germanic Ways of
Building with Regard to Their Application to Our Present Way of Building," in
W. Herrmann, trans. and ed., In What Style Should We Build? (Santa Monica,
Calif.: Getty Center, 1992), 163; emphasis added.
85. Ibid., 153. Unlike Viollet-le-Duc and Lassus, however, who in their
Annales Archiologiquesessays advocated a return to a Gothic structure purged of
its classical scaffolding, Botticher proposed a different solution for contemporary architecture: "The structural principle is ... to be adopted from the
[Germanic] arcuated system and transformed into a new and hitherto
unknown system [through the exploitation of the new material of iron]; for
the art forms of the new system, on the other hand, the formative principles of
the Hellenic style must be adopted in order to give artistic expression to the
structural forces within the parts, their correlation, and the spatial concept" (159).
86. An interesting reversal of this process occurs in Oechslin (as in n. 83),
where, as indicated in the title ("The Evolutionary Way to Modern Architecture: The Paradigm of Stilhiilse und Kern"), a 19th-century metaphor for
structure/ornament is revived by the author and employed to chart a history
of early modernism. Oechslin describes this history as novel in that it does not
emphasize radical breaks with the past but rather stresses an evolutionary
development from historicism (with its historicized ornament or Stilhiilse) to
pure modernism (with its naked structural Kern). In other words, Oechslin
revives Stilhiilse und Kern as a metaphor that allows him to narrate the story of
early modernism, a story in which Otto Wagner becomes a transitionalfigure as
the chronology of his oeuvre synecdochically embodies the movement from
historicism to modernism. That the model is not only binary and sequential
but also metaphorically organic (unlike the architectural structure/
ornament) only strengthens its narrative capability. The result is a curious
elision of 19th-century writing about itself and Oechslin's own narrative. He
thus cites, for example, as remarkably prescient and "visionary" an 1886 text
of Joseph Bayer, who described the path contemporary architecture will
STRUCTURE/ORNAMENT
probably take: "now the mysterious vital forces push up and the real, true, and
essential building form of the period grows powerful limbs within the
traditional masks and draperies of style. And if in the end it is completely
organized and fully mature, the so beautifully ornamented, historical Stilhiilsen
will peel away; they are shed forever and the new Kern appears bright and clear
in the sunlight" (385).
87. On this new mode of interpreting architecture in France, see Levine,
357-93; and Van Zanten, 1987, chap. 2.
88. L6on Vaudoyer, letter of 1831; trans. (with slight modifications) in Van
Zanten, 1987, 8. Similarly, B6tticher (as in n. 84) wrote, "All opinions for or
against a particular style have referred only to the outer shell, that is to the
scheme of the building's art-forms, which were considered to be identical with
its principle of style. The true essentials have never been seriously considered;
the discussion has never actually turned to the source of the art-forms and of
the diversity of styles, namely the structural principles and material conditions
on which each is based" (150).
89. Levine, 325-57.
90. L. Radoux, in Revue gtnrale de l'architectureet des travaux publics (Paris,
1879), 80; trans. in Van Zanten, 1977, 214. Criticism of contemporary
architecture was also often framed in these binary material terms, as when
Viollet-le-Duc (vol. 8, 493-94), wrote: "For many people, style in architecture
only consists in a decorative envelope, and, even among artists, there are many
who sincerely believe that they are producing a work of style because they have
stuck several Etruscan, or Greek, or Gothic, or Italian Renaissance moldings or
ornaments onto a structure that has nothing in common with the art of those
periods."
91. On the mutation of ornament into the decorative, seeJacques Soulillou,
Le dcoratif (Paris: Klincksieck, 1990), 15-35.
92. The criticism of these positions often sounds a familiar note, as in, for
example, this denunciation of postmodern "decorated sheds": "not only is
there a total schism between the inner substance and the outer form, but the
form itself either repudiates its constructional origins or dissipates its
palpability"; Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture:A Critical History, 3d rev.
ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 307.
93. Thus, it is only in modern discourse that ornament (its function, history,
and rules) becomes an independent topic of reflection, and what ornament is
applied to does not necessarily enter the picture, in such writings as Owen
Jones's influential The Grammar of Ornament (London: Day and Son, 1856);
Alois Riegl, Problemsof Style:Foundations for a History of Ornament (1893), trans.
E. Kain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Adolf Loos, "Ornament
and Crime" (1908), in The Architectureof Adolf Loos, 2d ed. (London: Arts
Council of Great Britain, 1987), 100-103; and, more recently, E. H. Gombrich,
The Sense of Order (Oxford: Phaidon, 1979).
94. Alberti (as in n. 67), 163.
95. Ibid., 156.
96. Ibid., bks. 6-9. The pre- or nonmodern conception of ornament appears
throughout these four books on the subject. For example, "Like the temple,
the basilica should be set on a podium, but the height of the podium should be
one eighth less, in keeping with its lower religious standing. All its other
ornament should lack the gravity of that of a temple" (230); or "Watchtowers
provide an excellent ornament, if sited in a suitable position and built on
appropriate lines; if grouped closely together, they make an imposing sight
from afar" (257). Nor is ornament-being
paired with beauty in general,
to designate exclurather than specifically with architectural beauty-used
sively architectural qualities or features: "The countryside along a route may
be a considerable ornament to a military road, provided it is well maintained
and cultivated, and full of villas and inns, and plenty of attractions; with views
now of the sea, now of mountains, now of lakes, rivers or springs, now of
parched rock or plain, and now of groves or valleys. If the road is neither steep,
nor torturous, nor obstructed, but rolling as it were, level, and quite clear, it
will also be an ornament....
Moreover, if the traveler often comes upon
objects that stimulate conversation, especially if it is about high matters, that is
an ornament of the greatest dignity" (244).
97. Ibid., 310.
98. Ibid., 61. The only thing Alberti excludes from structure are foundations: "The foundations, unless I am mistaken, are not part of the structure
itself; rather they constitute a base on which the structure proper is to be
raised and built."
99. Laugier, 129.
100. William Chambers, A Treatiseon theDecorativePart of CivilArchitecture,3d
ed. (1791; reprint, with a "Life of Sir William Chambers," and "An Examination of Grecian Architecture," by Joseph Gwilt, London: Priestly and Weale,
1825), 150; emphasis added.
101. "Ornament" could, however, also continue to have a more comprehensive meaning and signify an entire formal repertoire. Such a use of "ornament" is present in the treatise ofJ. L. de Cordemoy (upon which Laugier had
heavily drawn for his Essai), as in the following passage, where gout (close to
the modern "style") and ornemens seem to be virtually interchangeable:
"Michelangelo truly brought honor upon himself for having revived the style
[gout] of ancient architecture; but he would have done even better had he at
the same time retained that which is good in Gothic architecture: I mean by
this the spaciousness and sharp clarity of the intercolumnations which are so
pleasing to us. For example, would not the churches of Royaumont, of
Longpont, and of Sainte-Croix of Orleans be of the greatest beauty if they had
the ornaments [ornemens] of ancient architecture?" Cordemoy, Nouveau traittd
717
de toute l'architecture (Paris: Jean-Baptiste Coignard, 1714), 110. On the
relationship between Laugier and Cordemoy, see Middleton, 26: 98-101.
102. Laugier, xvii.
103. Ibid., xvi.
104. Ibid., xvi-xviii.
105.Jennifer Bloomer has provided an incisive analysis of Alberti and the
problem of the supplement in the distinction he seeks to make between
beauty, which he tells us "is some inherent property," and ornament: "if the
'inherent property' is a sufficient condition for beauty, ornament, as an
addition that for Alberti is a positive one ('Who would not claim to dwell more
comfortably between walls that are ornate? .. .'), is in excess of the conditions
for beauty, while at the same time pointing to a lack in the essentially beautiful
(unornamented) object. There is the suggestion of the temporal condition
here also: The beautiful object is first beautiful without ornament; ornament is
added after the establishment of the beautiful object. When this occurs there
must logically be a slipping away of beauty, because for the object to possess
beauty in the first place, 'nothing may be added ... but for the worse.' So
when something (ornament) is added, the beautiful object becomes both
worse (no longer its pure self) and better ('more delightful')"; Bloomer,
"Tabbles of Bower," in Deconstructionand the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture,
ed. P. Brunette and D. Wills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
231-32.
106. Alfred Barr, "Modern Architecture: International Exhibition: Foreword" (1932), in Defining Modern Art: SelectedWritingsofAlfred H.
Jr, ed. A.
Bar,
Newman and I. Sandler (NewYork: Abrams, 1986), 79-80.
107.John Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the
Middle Ages, and the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988),
153.
108. Some have seen the structure/ornament
pair as already present in
antiquity. For example, Thomas H. Beeby writes, "Until this century, ornament was conceived of as a primary aspect of architecture, and a building was
constructed as a structural vessel to receive the veil of surface ornament. ... In
the case of classical architecture, evolving from Greece, through Rome and the
Renaissance, to neoclassicism, the rules governing the placement and disposition of ornamental elements becomes quite elaborate"; Beeby, "The Gramas Grammar," Via 3 (1977): 12.
mar of Ornament/Ornament
109. Levine, 332.
110. Such sympathetic readings seek justification in the way their subjects
had been perceived at the time they were writing. When Neil Levine
undertook his reassessment of the Bibliotheque Ste-Genevieve, for example,
he sought to challenge the prevailing modernist reading of the building that
had been offered by Sigfried Giedion: "To preserve the building's prescient
quality of utilitarian instrumentality, Giedion had to delete from his reconstruction of Labrouste's intention any mention of the decorative forms by which
the structure of the library makes itself manifest as a work of art, in a word its
clothing" (326). Consequently, a principal aim of Levine's study was to restore
to the structure of the library the decorative "clothing" suppressed by
Giedion. Yet we would do well to listen to Jacques Soulillou (as in n. 91), who
writes about such attempts to rectify so-called modernist injustices, "Such a
reactive interpretation only supports the illusion of an autonomous decorative
space controlled by its own laws" (14).
111. Although this paper concerns structure/ornament and its relationship
to nonnormative architecture, in fact, its narrative role has also been exploited
to write about canonical buildings. To take one example: in his discussion
"The Classical Age of Gothic Architecture," Louis Grodecki divides Reims
Cathedral into its conceptual Chartres-derived model, or "structure," and its
opulent ornamentation. The former allows the building to be located in the
continuous formal history of Gothic architecture and to be narratable in
systemic hypostatic terms-as an improvement or critique on the Chartres
type (itself a reconceptualization of earlier Gothic solutions), which will be
subject to further mutations at Amiens and beyond. The lavish ornament
(which neither hinders nor contributes to the progress of the Gothic) is
explained through the exceptional purpose of the cathedral as a setting for
the royal ceremony of the sacre, and is also understood as a regional
architectural preference. The cathedral as a whole is interpreted as the
synthetic product of a dialectical process between the specific contextual
factors leading to the creation of this singular building and the overall
evolution of Gothic architecture of which it is a moment. These two narrative
lines are allowed to coexist and to be told simultaneously (and any conflict
between them to be elided) because they are structured by the structure/
ornament model; Grodecki, Gothic Architecture,trans. I. M. Paris (New York:
Abrams, 1976), 119. On the problematics of "normative" architecture as
distinct from "transitional," see n. 34 above.
112. The necessity of critical attention to this pair by contemporary
architects is stressed in Kenneth Frampton's polemical rereading of the
history of modern architecture, which takes the theoretical complexity of
structure/ornament as a central theme. Frampton (strongly influenced by the
writings of Gottfried Semper) characterizes structure and ornament in terms
of the difference between the "ontological" and the "representational"
aspects of architecture, which is a difference between "the core of the building
that is simultaneously both its fundamental structure and its substance" and
"the skin that re-presents the composite character of the construction";
Frampton (as in n. 82), 16.
then
113. A possible answer to the question, "If not structure/ornament,
what?" will be presented in my forthcoming book on St-Eustache.