Introduction
Let me begin by explaining the title of this essay, which may suggest that either this topic is too elementary for an academic discourse or it is too vast to be sensibly tackled in one essay. If indeed this title is unmanageably big as a question, it is driven by ignorance rather than arrogance. It would have been a quite reasonable question, so I thought, if it was asked by a first year architectural student. I did hope to get a clean-cut answer when I started my architectural education in Nanjing, China, in the early 1980s. Now I know that we – the architectural educators – do not give students clear answers to this question (or for that matter any question concerning architecture and design that they may have), for it is almost habitual for us to tell students that we live in a multi-faceted and fast changing world; no one, therefore, should even attempt to search for canonical answers to a complex problem. We have been persuaded, though not always whole-heartedly, to believe that there is no absolute truth in life, let alone design related matters that are forever innovative, if not merely non-linear and elusive. Anyone who has had the experience in a studio jury these days shall secretly admit that teaching architectural design is easy as long as one has a good supply of witty anecdotes of famous architects, and better still, is able to call them by their first names. We, in other words, tend to skirt around the context so that we can avoid the content.
I hope the reader will bear with me, for the following preamble is almost biographical. Let me go back to my beginning. Surprisingly, I was not too disappointed when I first attempted to ask this question. The spiritual leader of architecture at that time in the “Nanjing School” (the Department of Architecture at the then Nanjing Institute of Technology)<FootNote>
The Nanjing Institute of Technology has been reverted to its old name Southeast University.
</FootNote> in the early 1980s was Professor Yang Tingbao, who studied architecture in the same studio with Louis Kahn in the 1920s in the University of Pennsylvania. Both Yang and Kahn were taught by the Frenchman Professor Paul Philippe Cret, who was recruited to Penn in 1903 to teach architectural design when he was still a young man (at the age of 27) and only just graduated from the French École des Beaux-Arts. After working in Cret’s office for one year, and a hasty “grand tour” in Europe, Yang returned to China in 1927. In China, despite the war in the 1930s and other social turbulences, Yang and his disciples managed to preach architectural design with a fairly consistent method for more than half a century – that is, the virtue of the plan.<FootNote>
For more discussions on the ‘Nanjing School’, Yang Tingbo and Louis Kahn, see my, “The Character of a Building”, in Xing Ruan and Paul Hogben eds. Topophilia and Topophobia: Reflections on the Human Habitat in the Twentieth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 92–113; and “Accidental Affinities: American Beaux-Arts in Twentieth-century Chinese Architectural Education and Practice,” in JSAH 61,1(2002): 30–47.
</FootNote> The key measure is that a good plan must be shufu (comfortable); by contrast, a not-so-good plan is jücu (awkward). Time – lots of time – was spent on making a plan, inch by inch, into the most fitting one for its use (the actual word “function” was used but without any connotation of the early twentieth-century European functionalism). Of course, sections and elevations would be wrestled with the same measure, though there was little “formal gymnastics” in section. To cut a hole in the floor as a void volume with a height of more than one storey, for example, was a novelty. At that time I did not know there was a Beaux-Arts legacy behind this disciplined method, which, it seemed to me, was taught almost as a doctrine.
But the faith in the virtue of the plan was quickly shaken shortly after Yang’s death in 1982. The so-called postmodernism in architecture crept into China in the mid 1980s. A fanciful historicism cast on the building’s facade shifted the focus away from the plan. Architectural design in the studio became a dress contest. At about the same time, the anti-Pomo Swiss school ETH (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich) came to Nanjing. The Swiss colleagues (professors as well as students) told us that we missed the Bauhaus boat, hence the avant-garde spirit in the art of architecture. To be fair, the restrained Swiss “missionaries” only suggested that the novelty of architectural form should be derived from a tectonic logic: the materials and construction system would take care of the formal development. Let the process dictate the outcome, so they promised. They, unlike a few visiting American students, did not ask us to go and look in a rubbish bin for a new form that one had never seen before.
In 1991, after having completed a few large buildings, I left China to teach architecture in the west, but I was a confused young man and did not know what actually could be taught in architectural design.
Parti and poché
For a good number of years, I must admit, I survived reasonably well by having learnt the art of skirting around in a design critique (although I still could not manage to call famous architects by their first names). In the meantime I grew increasingly frustrated with the lack of tangible content that could be taught in a design studio until I accidentally discovered what were taught to Yang Tingbao and Louis Kahn by Professor Paul Cret in the 1920s at the University of Pennsylvania [
1]. To my pleasant surprise, these were the Beaux-Arts roots of my early Nanjing education. The brief story goes like this:
Architecture, as an academic discipline, was first taught in the French royal academy in the late seventeenth century, though the Ecole des Beaux-Arts was founded only in 1819. The inception was a noble one: Louis XIV wanted to elevate the status of the stonemason to that of the philosopher. The Sun King, it seemed, was only concerned with the splendour. But there was also a political agenda: the academy would attack the medieval guilds that were not under direct royal control. In the early days, only academic disciplines were professed in the academy, such as fortifications, mathematics, geometry and stonecutting. Architectural design, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was taught by practicing architects (called ‘patrons’ in French) outside the academy in ateliers. Two disciplinary foundations slowly emerged through various compositional terms, but only became crystal clear, and gained some prominence, towards the turn of the twentieth century, but they had a short-lived aftermath (though the French École des Beaux-Arts was officially, and indeed symbolically, closed down much later in 1968 in Paris). The two disciplinary foundations are
parti and
poché [
2].
With great lucidity, Professor Cret explained to his disciples, including Yang and Kahn: parti is like a political party. Once you have formed your “party line”, you have made a clear choice. Freehandedly scribbled diagrams by a 6B pencil are all too familiar to a trained architect, though our students these days may not have been taught, or are even discouraged, to do so (since the digital tools will come up with three-dimensional models according to, so I am told, the parametrics). But a parti diagram, often drawn without scale, dimension and materiality, reveals the essence of architectural configuration in plan. Parti, in other words, suggests the way in which the human relations are wilfully organized through spatial disposition. To say the least, the human relations are to be animated by the intent of parti. To follow the footsteps of Professor Cret, let me make an attempt to further elucidate the meaning as well as the instrumentality of a parti.
Consider a history of housing: houses come in all kinds of types and styles that vary in cultures and historical periods in pre-modern times, and are likely to vary significantly even in individuals in our time. But when viewed as a formal configuration, beyond the shapes and dimensions, housing, both as a place and as an activity, throughout history, surprisingly can be classified in a few limited partis. They include courtyard, matrix of interconnected rooms, and terminal rooms open to a common corridor. These three partis, when contested in a selected scope in time and place, roughly correspond with the chronology in the European housing history on the one hand, but only one of them, the courtyard parti, largely reflects the pre-modern China of an almost 3000 year time span. Although the room-and-corridor parti dominates all modern societies, the clear demarcations among rooms and corridors have become a little blurry.
What then does each parti suggest in terms of the human relations that occupy them? Each parti, despite the cultural, geographical, and historical differences of the houses, nonetheless transcends them to reveal potent common grounds. In an ancient Greek courtyard house, a well-to-do Roman domus, or a pre-modern Chinese quadrangle house, the concentric configuration – enclosed rooms wrapping around a court (or a few courts) that is the central room open to the sky – enabled a legible family hierarchy to connect the earthly life to the cosmos. The court, in addition to its daily amenities, therefore was, of more importance, reserved for gods and ancestors through daily and seasonal ceremonies and rituals. The small courtyard, called tianjing (sky well), in a Southern Chinese house, for example, was charged with the ambience of incense burning in commemorating family ancestors.
A matrix of interconnected rooms in a sixteenth-century Italian villa, according to Robin Evans, is not neutral, and it is “appropriate to a type of society which feeds on carnality, which recognizes the body as the person, and in which gregariousness is habitual”. However, I personally think that the dominance of vision, as a result of the accelerated development of glass lenses and glass panes in windows in the Italian Renaissance, was to place the emphasis on vistas in large country villas towards the outside world. This too was an important concern for the interconnected room matrix. The Villa Rotonda, after all, was built to watch fireworks. Nineteenth-century corridors in an English house tell the opposite story, where privacy is the paramount concern [
3]. In a similar but more selective reading, Yi-Fu Tuan sees this development – from the loosely defined and interconnected indoor spaces in the Middle Ages to the segmented and specialized rooms in the nineteenth century – as the development of modern self-consciousness [
4]. These discernments suggest that a
parti works, for it is understood by the inhabitants, if only subconsciously.
A social scientist is able to consciously decipher the meaning of a building by using a parti diagram. But what the social scientist often does not use is the method of poché, which the architect must use to blacken the solid parts of a plan to indicate the degree of enclosure of a building envelope so that the “carved” out cavities of the building as well as the openings of windows and doors are clearly revealed. It also shows the scale of the human body and the proportion and the texture of rooms. Although parti may be buried in poché’s richness, poché tells of the felt quality – the ambience, and more importantly, the traces of the human body and the inhabitation. Poché, arguably, was the essential tool of the architectural trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe. For a student of the Beaux-Arts, one compulsory way of leaning architectural design was to repeatedly exercise rapid tracing of poché based on good plans. Rough and sketchy it may be, such a poché plan shows a clear sense of architectural enclosure – that is, the building as a receptacle with a conscious demarcation between the interior and the exterior, a point to which I will return later.
In its most elaborate manner, a nineteenth-century architect would take poché to rendu – fully rendered plans and sections (sometimes with colour). It is evident that both the elevation (as the external envelope of the building container) and the interior room (as the internal envelope) are designed in immaculate detail by the architect. The colour and the material may not be as photo realistic as our computer-generated renderings: in fact the architect had the habit of using saturated water, which he used to wash his brushes during the rending, to give the entire sectional interior rooms a so-called “dirty wash”. The focus undoubtedly was the felt ambience of the interior room. Attention to details notwithstanding, one curious area that was given a complete miss was what lies in-between the external envelop and the internal envelope. Unlike a modern architect, the nineteenth-century architect could not be bothered to deal with what is in-between, for the collaboration between the architect and the builder/engineer was natural, and the architect did not have to pretend that he actually knew how to put a building together. In our time, the architect draws large sections to showcase his/her construction and detailing capacity (many buildings win design awards due to their beautiful details, despite the lack of a good parti), whilst mass building products and economy set the unnecessary limits for architecture.
Let me be indulgent, and imagine that parti and poché were still being taught in our design studios. Now armed with them, what then would be the musings among students, or for that matter, architects, arising from wrestling with the following paradoxical architectural problems?
Pattern versus type
One way of using
parti and
poché is to superimpose a mathematical understanding on them: that is, the relationship between pattern and type. According to Edmund Leach, the great British anthropologist, the emphasis on type is “butterfly collecting”. [
5] One can be in the race of gathering myriads of types in the search of a new butterfly. Yet, after all, they are the same as a butterfly, which in itself is, mathematically, a pattern. Let me again try to justify my generalization of a history of housing as three patterns, or
partis as previously mentioned: print the three housing partis – courtyard, interconnected room matrix and terminal rooms open to a corridor – on a piece of thin rubber sheet, and then stretch and even twist the sheet. The shapes and dimensions of each house no doubt will be changed. They are, in other words, three different types of houses after some turning and twisting. But each pattern remains mathematically the same one.
Poché, as the primary craft and tool of an architect, enriches the types of courtyard houses, but according to the circumstance.
Louis Kahn understood this only too well: Form (with capital F), Kahn said, must be held, whilst Design (with capital D) is circumstantial. Kahn used the example of a spoon to illustrate: the Form of a spoon, the idea, which comprises of a bowl and a handle, must be held. The Design of a spoon – silver or metal handle, round or oval-shaped bowl – are largely determined by the availability of the material, economy, taste, fashion, hence is circumstantial. I should like to think that Kahn’s discernment has something to do with his Beaux-Arts education. Although Kahn’s poché was a supreme art (one only needs to consider the Kimbell Museum), he was more interested in developing a concentric parti that enshrines what Kahn saw as the two essential activities of the human life – meeting and learning, which, in a broad sense, represent the collective group life and the development of self and individuality. Such a parti can be either a library or a parliament house. Parti therefore is a generalization. Unlike Kahn, a good number of modern architects do not dare to generalize; they are instead in the game of classification (they are butterfly collectors!). Architects these days are almost always in a nervously vigilant mental state as in a beauty contest: we must keep an eye on Rem Koolhaas or Zaha Hadid just in case they have invented an unprecedented new shape for buildings.
Of course there is no guarantee that any generalization is correct. There are good
partis, and not-so-good
partis. As academics, we know only too well from our blind-refereeing peers that any attempt at generalization in our research papers is too often perceived as an unforgivable sin. But the enduring life of a good
parti (as a mathematical pattern) is an irresistible call. Let us remember Leach’s advice: “Generalization is inductive; it consists in perceiving possible general laws in the circumstances of special cases; it is guesswork, a gamble, you may be wrong or you may be right, but if you happen to be right you have learnt something altogether new.” [
5] On this note, avant-garde architects are simply too conservative, if not too modest, for their goal is not to search for a
parti of any idealism.
Stability versus mobility
Further to the previous musings, a parti suggests stability, for the nature of a parti is its unchanged character. You can not reinvent the parti of a spoon, Kahn would have said! Although poché must be circumstantially fitting, once a parti is realized as a building, poché too is stably condensed, quite literally, as “bricks and mortar”. In the absence of parti and its poché, we moderns have been allured to the seemingly unlimited possibilities of mobility. We tell ourselves that the world is constantly changing; our built world therefore should be responsive. Technological advancement has enabled future-oriented architects to predict that before long buildings and cities will change shape and size in relation to the seasons (shrinking to save energy in winter), and perhaps change according to one’s mood. This is ludicrous for Yi-Fu Tuan, who argues that buildings must necessarily stay the same in order to calm our fear of change and unpredictability: “Suppose this madness can be applied to nature so that the hill in my neighbourhood will obligingly loom like a mountain when my mood calls for something large? Renaissance architects couldn’t have guessed that one day their Vitruvian ideal of man as measure could lead to the extremity of making man so much the measure, so much in command, that the external world, having totally merged with human fantasy, simply melts away.” <FootNote>
Tuan in email conversation with Xing Ruan, 8 December 2006
</FootNote>Now, the responsive built environment is becoming increasingly real: a high-rise tower in Dubai will turn and twist according to wind patterns, if not yet one’s mood<FootNote>
For examples see Michael Jantzen’s Windshaped Pavilions, www.walrus.com/~ddprod/michaeljantzen, accessed 26 June 2007, and David Fisher’s “Dynamic Architecture,” www.dynamicarchitecture.net, accessed 26 June 2007
</FootNote>.
But let us pause. Consider two possible perils of a changing built world. One, a constantly responsive and changing building is aimed to prolong our sense of excitement, hence happiness. But alas, happiness, as it means in many languages (say in Chinese and French), is a “quick joy”. It is, in a more familiar expression of our time, a state of ecstasy, which can not, or should not, last for too long. We otherwise would definitely shorten our longevity, if not be exhausted to death. Let me try to convince you with this example: a history of pre-modern Chinese architecture of more than 3000 years is not nearly as exciting as that of Europe, for the Chinese never changed their
parti (I mentioned one of them earlier: the courtyard). For one benefit, the unchanged nature of Chinese architecture helped enshrine the fear of change in life. No civilization, says Lin Yu-tang, could sustain a high blood pressure for more than 4000 years [
6]. What happened after the nineteenth century, and now: the Chinese have changed their
parti, and are eagerly chasing new
poché. The rest, of course, is history.
Two, the stability of the built world is necessary to ensure that the essential biological make-up of humans is maintained – that is, ironically, our mobility. If we became over-adapted to a changing environment that would satisfy our fantasies, as Lewis Mumford alluded to, we could become complacent oysters: they have lost the ability to move freely<FootNote>
Lewis Mumford makes a clear distinction “between the mainly free-moving protozoa that formed the animal kingdom and the relatively sessile organisms that belong to the vegetable kingdom. The first, like the oyster, sometimes become over-adapted to a fixed position and lose the power of movement; while many plants free themselves in some degree by underground rootings and above all, by the detachment and migration of the seed.” Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, London: Secker & Warburg, 1961, 5
</FootNote>.
Orthogonal versus oblique
The advancement of modern technology has given architects unprecedented freedom. The almost unlimited richness of poché notwithstanding, one consequence of this freedom is the tendency of doing away with the orthogonal, and going for the oblique. We are no longer satisfied with the centrality of a cosmic dome or a cathedral ceiling; we instead let our architects exercise their gymnastic fantasies. The Spaniards have ended up having an art museum in Bilbao that has almost no verticals and with little horizontals (expect part of the floor that is not ramped). The Chinese are excited by their Central Television Tower in Beijing that has been twisted into a Moebius stripe (or almost). Yes the advanced technology and the ingenious Arup engineers have enabled the building to stand up, which, by the look of natural gravity, was to fall. Yet again we may question the discipline and limits of poché, which surely should be grounded in our biological impulse if not cultural and religious roots. That is, the conservatism of the human body – we must stand up-right vertically, and lie prone horizontally. What would a room do to us if there are no sufficient verticals and horizontals in it <FootNote>
I am indebted to Professor Yi-Fu Tuan for reminding me of the conservatism of the human body and its relationship with architecture, as well as his thoughts on the “anti-corruption” architecture that defies time.
</FootNote>?
Confinement versus transparency
Let me paraphrase a comparison between a Gothic cathedral and a modern skyscraper that Yi-Fu Tuan has made in several of his publications, including Topophilia [
7]. Tuan reminds us that a Gothic cathedral, when it was inhabited in its time, often could not be viewed in the distance as an architectural object that we moderns now are able to see in a European city: there was no wide enough open space before a cathedral in a crowded medieval city. A Gothic cathedral, therefore, was conceived and built as a confined internal world that catered to three or four senses, rather than vision alone. It is, to be precise, an architectural enclosure. The heavenly ambience in a Gothic cathedral is a simultaneous combination of music (heavenly sound as it was supposed to be!), skylight filtered through rose windows, the tactility of aged materials that invite human touch, the fragrance of burning candles, and even the subtle odour disseminated from moist stone. The bodily experience of an architecturally confined world evokes emotions as well as thoughts through many senses. A modern skyscraper, a significant hallmark of the twentieth century, often built in steel and glass, caters mainly to our vision. The verticality of a modern skyscraper is not an internalized world; it is by contrast an outward viewfinder with stacked offices or apartments. Even the summit of a skyscraper is about the view: either a restaurant, or simply a viewing platform, on the top floor of a high-rise tower, occasionally offering visitors an opportunity to expand their horizon. The glass and shiny metallic surfaces are too sleek to register senses other than vision, let alone stimulate them emotionally as in a Gothic cathedral.
Such a comparison perhaps can be tested in many other parts of the human habitat in the twentieth century, ranging from cities, institutions, leisure centres to homes, and the conclusions of more comparisons, dare I say, would be similar: the modern built world is largely a clinical and yet visual world. We have nearly turned our interior life into an exterior one by wrapping our buildings, from houses to public institutions, with large area of glass. The demarcation between the interior and the exterior, for which humans took many thousands of years of learning to realize its importance, and which was shown as early as in Roman architecture, has been diminished. What has disappeared as a consequence is the felt ambience of a room, along with the intimacy of an interior life that architecture must enshrine. This, for Gaston Bachelard, is the very meaning of a House: without that, a person would be a dispersed being [
8].
Aging versus metallic sheen
Advanced technology developments have afforded architects endless choices to construct and seal their buildings, which, for the sake of clarity in discussion, I have simply borrowed the Beaux-Arts term and call it poché in this essay. The favoured building finish in modern times, as already implied, seems to be a layer of “metallic sheen”. Beneath this surface lies the promise of modern technology – that is to prolong life. Indeed, we now live longer than ever, but the limit still is the inevitable mortality. In modern times, we have been successful in hiding the decay of life (we very rarely see a dead animal in the city, let alone a dead human body); our building surface gives an impression that they are not only anti-corruption, but will also stay young for ever. The world is an odourless postcard! Any metallic sheen, however, is prone to fashion, which, ironically, is accelerated by technological advancements. The cost, physically and symbolically, is the tragedy of a rat-race plastic surgery. The university campus where I work, for example, is full of buildings with shiny surfaces. Appealing to the eye as they are, this is the result of constant and costly “face lifting”. But to defy time in architecture by chasing what is vogue is a race in vain. Yes, the nineteenth-century neo-Gothic sandstone quadrangles in a different university may have aged, but our colleagues there can always remind us of the lingering voice of a famous mathematician in the great hall.
The felt quality, inside and outside
I would like to conclude this essay with a story of Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French essayist. Montaigne was allegedly known for having this weird habit: he often asked his maid to slightly wake him up in the early morning so that he could deliciously fall into sleep again [
9]. Even sleep, a state of oblivion, can be felt, hence better enjoyed, with a faint sense of consciousness that is beyond vision. If there is anything that we can learn from
parti and
poché, it must be the reminder of the felt qualities of the built world, which have been much suppressed by the dominance of vision in modern times, and which design education must now address. More specifically in architecture, the idea of
parti and the discipline of
poché will ensure that, in a succession of movements, we venture out to the capacious world but we can always return to our beautifully confined interior that anchors both our body and mind.
Note: The early version of this essay was delivered as a keynote address by the author at Connected – International Conference on Design Education, Sydney, 11 July 2007.
Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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