Architecture - Andrew Ballantyne [14]
Making gestures
Extravagance is not the only way to find gestural qualities in things, and enhance their status. An ascetic philosopher would aim for a table that was pointedly less extravagant than the norm, and its purpose would be to show high-mindedness rather than low status as such. A democratic president would need to show on different occasions both imperial grandeur (when entertaining visiting heads of state) and absolute ordinariness (showing a rapport with voters). We might feel ashamed if our head of state lived in an apartment with inexpensive catalogue furniture, but in another mood might resent the extravagant costs involved in furnishing high-status accommodation from the public purse. The architectural setting has a part to play in putting in place a sense of how it would be appropriate to behave, and in indicating the status and aspirations of its inhabitant. It can be simply a personal matter, if we don’t care what anyone thinks, and decorate to suit ourselves, or can be very public theatre, broadcast around the whole world.
The meaning in buildings is not fixed in them. For example, the cottages that were built by agricultural workers for their own use were not considered as a form of artistic expression, but as serviceable shelters (Figure 2). However the romantic poets saw the simple cottages of the rural poor as an expression of tenacious virtue in bleak circumstances, which meant that they were seen as gestural, and then by the end of the 18th century there was a fashion for small-scale rural retreats (cottages ornées), which certainly should be seen as artistically expressive, and were designed that way. There has been a long tradition of looking at agricultural workers as virtuous and romantic that started somewhere in the ancient world. It was already a tradition when Virgil wrote his Eclogues in the first century BC. Already then there was a sentimental interpretation of agriculture that could develop because there was a class in that society that did not have an everyday involvement in agriculture, but who could see it from a distance and think of it as enviable, or innocent. The most famous architectural expression of this sensibility in the ‘modern’ world is the hamlet that Marie-Antoinette commissioned at Versailles, where she could step aside from her duties as the queen in the world’s most splendid court, and pretend to be a simple milkmaid, in touch with nature and her feelings. The gesture is a blend of innocence, naïveté and sauciness. Another example is Blaise Hamlet near Bristol, that was designed by the architect John Nash as a self-consciously pretty and well-managed group of houses for retired employees of the Blaise estate, a genuine but highly visible gesture of benevolence on the part of the landowner. This has particular poignancy because Nash was also responsible for one of the most extravagant princely dwellings of this or any other time: the Royal Pavilion at Brighton (Figure 3). Even in small illustrations, there is no doubt about the relative status of the inhabitants of the dwellings shown in Figures 2 and 3. Without any specialized knowledge of architecture, we know how to read the signs. Even if we thought that the building in Brighton was relatively normal, it would be clear that it was not the low-cost option, and in fact it was stylistically outlandish and novel. It was not only extravagant, it also relished the display of that extravagance, and still today sweeps visitors along with the sheer exuberance of its display.