Architecture - Andrew Ballantyne [6]
In art history the corresponding break is seen to be with the discovery of geometrical perspective, in Brunelleschi’s circle. However there was another far-reaching change that had been making more gradual progress, and that was the breakdown of feudal power as the merchant traders amassed fortunes that were greater than those of the hereditary princes. The sense of the novelty of Brunelleschi’s artistic enterprise was perhaps more because it was funded by new money than because it marked any radical break with the artistic achievements of his predecessors. I would not want to argue that the break away from feudalism and the invention of geometric perspective might have sprung from a common cause, which to me sounds too metaphysical. What does make sense to me is that the adoption of the new art by the people with new money made it seem all the more radical a departure. In our own day we see the great fortunes made from film, music, and computer businesses taking their place alongside the great inherited fortunes, and a different sense of style is associated with the way of life. The houses of the rich and famous often do not conform to the established canons of respectable taste, and may not be treated seriously by architectural historians now, but in the future, looking back, they will look as astonishing and unrepeatable as the houses of the 18th-century landed aristocracy. And strange as it may seem, we could find our own era represented in the architectural history books by these outlandish creations that seem utterly remote from our own experience of living now. Written up with one critical agenda the story might be called ‘Late Capitalism and the Triumph of Kitsch’. From another, imbued with the values of the new age, the same buildings could be exhibited as evidence that ‘Your Dreams Can Come True’.
What I am trying to do here is to give a sense of how different perspectives influence what it is that we see when we see buildings. They are involved in a complex way with an indefinite number of cultural and technical matters, and therefore they can have different levels of significance in different spheres. Moreover, when we try to pigeonhole them in categories, they have ways of escaping. We establish the categories, but then have to acknowledge that if we look closely they are not exact, and there are borderline cases. The more we know about a specific culture, the more statements about it sound like sweeping generalizations. What looks like a gradual evolution from a distance might have been a painful disillusionment for individuals, and on the contrary something that looks like a fault-line across Western culture might actually have been a fairly gentle process that was no more traumatic than a number of other changes. Nevertheless, we need some sort of framework if we are to understand anything about our orientation in the subject, and this is the framework that we have. It is just as well, though, to realize that it must not be expected to carry too heavy a load.
A closer look
Within each of the broad periods mentioned above, there is room for subdivision. For example, when the ancient world is understood in a very general way it can be quite adequate to call the architecture of Greece and Rome generically