All architecture, even the most sophisticated, is a product of the Earth in one form or another. We might call this the ‘soil’ of architecture. People travel the world to visit beautiful cities: Siena, Venice, Rome, Krakow, Prague. We fall in love with the Italian hill towns and the beauty and simplicity of African mud buildings, but we fail to explain to ourselves why our ‘advanced’ society cannot create such buildings, towns and cities for itself. If the failure of these buildings and cities is that they lack soul, how can we add soul to the soil of architecture?
The world of form is so all-enveloping and so close to us that we sometimes fail to realise its full power. A piece of cardboard will bend even under its own load; yet change the form by folding it to make corrugations and the same thickness cardboard will carry many times its own weight. A block of cast iron or steel will sink when placed in water, yet the same materials worked into an appropriate form will float and sail across the oceans. When several hundred people crowd on to a transatlantic jet and the load of all those people lift off into the sky, it is the power of form in operation; the power of form ‘performing’ what earlier generations would have called miracles. When a piece of Mozart’s music moves us powerfully to tears it is the same power of form in operation. Although the form of a Mozart symphony is of a different order than the aerodynamics of a Boeing 747 it is nevertheless the power of form being precisely applied in both cases.
When we step out of the skies and into the more familiar formal realms of the city we often seem to operate under the impression that form has lost its power. Yet if form can lift us both physically and emotionally into the celestial realms, by what means does it lose its power when it enters our cities? The truth is that it does not. Form continues to have power, but form used mindlessly releases power indiscriminately. The psychologist James Hillman suggests that contemporary cities are having a desensitising effect on their inhabitants. In his words urban form is having an “anaesthetic” rather than an “aesthetic” effect on humanity. In constructing our urban environments we seem to have forgotten that form has power: poor form makes us feel poor; well-conceived form makes us feel good. In other words, great architecture and art can heal; but out of the myriad of forms available to us, which are the forms that we should choose?
The gap is to be found between balanced opposites, and the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto identified such qualities as an essential ingredient of all art; “in each and every case,” he writes, “there must be a simultaneous reconciliation of opposites.” Aalto’s own work was a masterclass in this regard: his works abound in oppositions reconciled. I found it also in William Empsom’s analysis of poetry; and in the field of music Leonard Bernstein has described how both symmetry and the technique of balancing opposed phenomena can be used to structure a work. My own analyses of Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp and Ralph
Erskine’s work show oppositions used in a similar manner, a technique which I have argued elsewhere speaks of visual logic. The orderliness of a work which is sometimes treated very casually is thus revealed as the life-giving aspect of the work, which opens us to the transcendental sphere of life.