and to find a new way of doing things that responded to new ways of living, and new ways of building. Stylistically they are quite different from one another, and it does not help to understand them by saying that the work should all be called by the same name (Art Nouveau, or whatever) but what they had in common was that they were designing individualistically, and evidently striving for originality. Previous generations of designers had habitually appealed to some idea of ‘correctness’ to give their work authority. The buildings would look like the admired models from the past, which would be refreshed with individual creative thought, but always working within an established framework of decorum. Even radical change could be authorized by appealing to precedents, if the architect looked to the distant rather than the recent past for the buildings that would be held up as exemplary. In Florence at the beginning of the 15th century, at the start of the Renaissance, the architecture that was all around was medieval in character, and adventurous architects such as Alberti and Brunelleschi brought about change by focusing attention on Roman architecture. In the mid-18th century, when Baroque architecture was at its most sumptuous and exuberant, there was a call for a return to simplicity and the expression of fundamental constructional principles. That appeal was made in the first instance by Marc-Antoine Laugier, a priest attached to the chapel at Versailles, which was more Baroque and excessive in its decoration than anywhere else on Earth. In 1753 he published an essay in which he imagined a primitive hut, made out of trees that were still growing in the ground, as the origin of monumental architecture. As the century progressed, and archaeological excavations produced better knowledge of the monuments of ancient Greece, it became possible to make an appeal for the revival of Greek taste in the name of turning towards purity and simple elegance. And then again in the 19th century, when classical architecture was normal, and other styles were used for exotic special occasions, Gothic architecture was revived, especially by Pugin who presented it as a truly Christian architecture, uncontaminated by association with a pagan past (Figure 5). In each of these examples a change in current taste and practice was brought about by making an appeal to the architecture of the distant past, and by making a break with the architecture of the immediate past.
22. Expiatory Church of the Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain (begun 1882); architect: Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926). This is not Barcelona’s cathedral, which is a fine medieval building in the heart of the old city, but a project initiated by a Barcelona bookseller, Josep Bocabella, who directed the efforts of the Association of the Followers of St Joseph (founded 1866) which grew to have half a million members, including the Pope and the King of Spain. The project’s first architect soon parted from the project, and Gaudí took over from 1883, when work had barely reached ground level. The church is being built slowly, from private subscriptions, and is still incomplete, but work continues, following Gaudí’s general intentions. Gaudí’s idiosyncratic and striking sense of form was grounded in a profound understanding and rethinking of structural principles, and of practical building techniques.
One way in which to make a reputation as an architect is by producing work that is in some sense original, so that it is immediately apparent whose work it is. Gaudí’s architecture would be a case a point. No one else has ever put up buildings quite like his. However it is not the case that the more original a building is, the better it is, or the more worthy of attention. The Parthenon is a building of the highest quality, but it looks very like all the other Greek temples of its age and it would not have been a better building if it had departed more radically from that type (Figure 7). Having said that, it is not without originality: the building was not simply a repetition