The Necessity of Tradition in Architecture

To choose to practice traditional and not Modernist architecture is possible today because of a new doctrine promulgated in 17^th. c. France. Earlier, there was no question that any new buildings extended a tradition, either the one prevailing in the locale of the new building or after the Renaissance one that people worked to recover from antiquity.

This arrival of choice was the legacy of some literary academicians who had busied themselves in a Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. They decided their work was superior to ancient work, and the French Academy’s architects followed suit by arguing whether the beauty of their new buildings was superior to that of ancient models. The academicians enlisted the methods of natural scientists and had ancient models of beauty accurately measured, with the result that the numerical proportions that ancient doctrine taught were necessary for beauty were absent. Ancient models could be disregarded. What followed in the second half of the next century was Claude Perrault’s doctrine that beauty was not objective and universal, which left judgments of beauty to be merely relative and variable preferences. Beauty now resided in the eye of the beholder.

This new doctrine loosened and then annulled using traditional configurations, assemblies of membratures, and ornament visible, to be sure, in Claude Perrault’s magnificent but unprecedented East façade of the Louvre. More consequential was this: The art of architecture was separated from its role of providing beauty as the counterpart to the good sought by the political entities that used its buildings. It now became a fine art or beaux art that offered pleasure to sight just as did its mates painting, sculpture, dance, music, poetry.

Today we see this in hegemonic Modernist culture with leading architects producing unprecedented, creative, innovative designs at the farthest remove from tradition. In this culture contradictions abound: Architecture is considered an autonomous art and free vehicle for self-expression; historians teach that building are the influence of the Zeitgeist of different cultures produce buildings; and a building’s unique status as a public object is left unconsidered even though it necessarily occupies a public place, it cannot be hidden from public view, and even when privately owned nonetheless receives public protection.

These contradictions undermine the classical tradition in which a building and anything else in the public realm and necessarily engaged in the public life is obliged to contribute to the common good. It facilitates the pursuit of happiness or human flourishing and the good life in which we model our actions on the objective and universal good in what we do, the true that we know, and the beautiful in what we make. These pursuits imitate the objective, universal, principles of the order, harmony, and proportionality of cosmic order. Guiding the pursuit are traditions that draw on the knowledge of our predecessors and will also serve our successors. In the art of architecture tradition facilitates achieving the beautiful to serve and express the purposes that serve those who seek the good and the true as it draws on past experience and adapts it to ever changing new circumstances. Balancing tradition and innovation has led to the austere beauty that Brunelleschi and John Russell Pope produced and to the equally beautiful confections of Bernini. Perrault, and Stanford White.

Today tradition is a pariah in architecture. Relativism commands the narrative of the history of architecture, reducing purposes that buildings serve in civil and religious orders to mere functions and disregarding a building’s place in its urban setting and its service to the civil and religious orders that build them. Rather than revealing a building’s visual complexity and connections to and departures from traditional designs it is assessed according to mere formal properties of style, and its style places it in a chronological sequence of stylistic similarities identifying cultural eras that march relentlessly through progress toward Modernism.

Lacking is a detailed and full-throated defense of the necessity of tradition in architecture. In reading a recent essay by Samir Younés, my colleague at the University of Notre Dame, I encountered invaluable insights into the necessity of tradition in architecture, some of which appears above. It constituted his keynote address to The International Jacques Ellul Society (The Ellul Forum, # 70, Fall, 2022) that investigates the legacy of the broad range of that 20^th c. French protestant philosopher. Younés, an architect, focuses on what Ellul called technique and its role in undermining the millennial experience with the Classical world and the rise of Modernism’s anti-traditional historicism.

First, some definitions: Professor Younés kindly supplied the following: “Technique, as defined by Ellul, is the pursuit of utmost rationality and efficiency that can be attained at any given moment and the conquest of all human activity for that purpose. Technology(ies) is a discourse of technique, e.g. Zoning is a technology that serves the idea of technique by turning what previously was a city into a segregation of zones. Often, nowadays, the sciences are accessed through a technological discourse. This is why fewer scientists engage in scientific conjecture and more of them are technologists whose work is a combination of previous technologies.”

Here we encounter not science but scientism. The natural sciences seek to identify the laws of nature that predict and control phenomena that can be observed, measured, and organized logically and are not affected by the human will. Scientism is the misuse of those methods by applying their discoveries to interpret and act within the realm of human thought, belief, and actions. When scientism is applied to theories and practices of architecture, it fails to account for the effect buildings have on the well-being of individuals and society. It fails to engage with the order, harmony, and proportionality that we seek in our civil affairs. It is uninterested in architecture’s role of suggesting the character of the purposes that buildings serve. And beauty is absent.

If scientism undermined the classical tradition, presentism led to the historicism that has nullified the value of tradition that history conveys. (Here historicism involves more than using styles of earlier eras.) Presentism involves using the present-day to interpret the past. It occurs in two ways. One involves substituting current standards and concepts for what the past actually held. The other uses current preferences, fashions, and style to judge past achievements, which inevitably proves their inferiority and present uselessness. Both inhibit achieving Modernism’s promised utopia.

Younés emphasizes nature’s role in Ellul’s argument. He reminds us that the word carries two meanings with both operative in the Classical world. Capitalized, it refers to Nature at work or natura naturans and bound by Natural law operating across time and wherever humanity has dwelled. This Nature includes human nature, and it engages individuals in a fruitful exchange with itself and with others in society. Religions see God at work here; purely secular belief acknowledges its role in our lives and world. We cannot know its content completely, but we can and must observe its ever present, eternally enduring, and objective presence in paradigmatic examples of the harmony, order, and proportionality that it superintends and that our human nature relishes. A familiar Natural law document we value has us pursue our happiness, which we find in our best imitations of Nature and nature in what we do, know and make.

Capitalization is unsuitable for the other meaning of nature. Here, nature as natura naturata refers to the actions and products that flow from the work of Nature’s laws and also from our own willful actions. Here we work with Nature in our human quest for sustenance, comfort, safety, efficiency, and other quantifiable qualities. The art of building more than the art of architecture facilities and serves these efforts as they satisfy the relative criteria of good, better, and best leaving to architecture enmeshment with absolutes such as good or evil acts and beautiful or deficient appearance.

Architecture has been unable to abate the scientism and presentism that dominate the art of building. Consider the roles of engineering and real estate development, the simple-mindedness of style, the role of the “form follows function” mantra with extreme caprice at the other extreme, and beauty left as an orphan. .

In Younés’ essay the Historicist world is the antipode of the Classical world. It has no role for Nature either as natural law or as human nature within natural law. This absence makes Modernism unsuitable as a servant and expression of the purposes of our natural law regime.

Living abundantly and well requires that we accept the guidance of Nature and continue consulting nature and humankind as we pursue the blessings of life, liberty, and happiness. The Founders did so when they birthed our nation. So did the generation that reunited the nation in the “second founding.” And so have others who have protected and defended the nation’s commitment to the ideals of the classical tradition that are so clearly articulated in our founding documents and embodied in our best buildings and urbanism. There have been lapses; we are in one now, but our repeated recoveries and expansions offer proof that we can restore our polity and the architecture that serves and expresses its purposes. We can do so by honoring and using traditions that are congruent with the guidance of Natural law and the traditions that connect generations across time as we build in places we love. That is a choice worth making!