The Philosophical Tradition of Classical Architecture: Part I

Vitruvius famously starts Book I, Chapter 1 of his Ten Books on Architecture with a brief overview of the education of an architect. He tells us that the required subjects are writing, drawing, geometry, optics, arithmetic, history, physics, natural and moral philosophy, music, law, physics, and astronomy. Many contemporary readers of Vitruvius are frustrated by what he leaves unsaid in his writings. However, he states that he is the authority in architecture itself, and does not claim to be an expert in any of those particular subjects: we can then forgive him for leaving gaps in our knowledge of the ancient world. I hope to be able to fill in a few of these gaps to provide a somewhat fuller picture of what an architect in ancient Greece or Rome knew, in particular by looking into the well-known writings of ancient teachers that formed the basis for the Greco-Roman educational system.

The education required of an architect, as stated in Vitruvius, is none other than the standard Greek and Roman course in the liberal arts, which was almost universal for the upper and professional classes, and would have been well-known by his Greek-educated patron Caesar. This system of education derives mainly from the ancient Greek philosophers Pythagoras and Plato; the former founded a mystical school of music and mathematics, while Plato was the pupil of Socrates, founder of Western philosophy. Nowadays, philosophy is hardly ever taught, but in former times it was an essential subject for the professional. A person without philosophy (Greek for the “love of wisdom”) could hardly be trusted to rule over other men, be he a military commander or an architect. Since nearly all of the major schools in the Roman Empire of Vitruvius’ time claimed descent from Plato, I hope to provide a brief introduction to classical philosophy, centering on his views. In particular, these are the questions that I hope to answer in subsequent articles, from a classical viewpoint:

What is art?

What makes an artist?

How can we judge art?

What is architecture and how does it relate to the arts?

What is beauty?

The modern answers to these questions, if they are answered at all, are hopelessly complex and are often just left to individual opinion. However, following the tradition of Socrates, I hope to move beyond just mere personal opinion to what he called “right opinion”, or opinion guided by reason.

This classical philosophical tradition is rooted in the remotest of antiquity, now lost to us, and often is related to music and its orderings; some architectural terms actual come from ancient music theory. We can look back to ancient Egypt, Babylon, and even India for the roots of this tradition, although the view is very hazy, and we often just grasp at shadows. The ancient Greeks of two and and half millennia ago, however did write things down, and these writings have been copied and studied ever since, and provide a firm foundation for our studies.

The earliest of Greeks studied nature and music, but their theories were abandoned, often because these studies were viewed as being fruitless. Men instead became interested in power and the means to achieve raw power; it was in this period that Socrates became a philosopher; he believed that these men called Sophists abandoned wisdom, and he instead attempted to find the truth, even though that was difficult to do. He mainly did this via the Socratic method, where he would ask critical questions and analyze the answers using logic.

Socrates wrote nothing, but he is a character in the writings of several of his pupils, including most famously Plato. The arts feature prominently in Plato’s writings, and he considers architecture as being among the highest of arts, comparable to that of a ruler or military commander. Plato writes about the nature of an artist, and why imitation of great arts is admirable.

Plato’s main contribution is the Doctrine of Forms, where he states that there are unchanging, eternal Forms or Ideas, that a person must discern if he is to become a philosopher. Geometry cannot be understood unless a student can perceive, for example, the true form of a triangle: what is a triangle, always? A chalk triangle on a blackboard is an irregular shadow, reflection, or image of a true triangle—and a student cannot understand the Pythagorean Theorem unless he sees the true, unchanging, essence of triangles. The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is always equal to the sum of the squares of the other sides, however, this is never true for chalk triangles, since they are irregular, but is only true for the ideal triangle as it exists in the realm of the forms. So philosophy, to Plato, is the ability to discern the forms of things, and not to be misled by mere appearances of things that exist in the material world, since these are imperfect shadows of the perfect forms.

Plato’s pupil Aristotle was more practical than his teacher, seeing the Forms imbedded in this world instead of existing in some otherworldly realm. Aristotle founded many fields of study, and systematized much of what Plato wrote. One of his contributions is the doctrine of the Four Causes for describing a thing. What is a house? It isn’t just a pile of building materials, although that is the Material Cause of the house. What makes a house a house is the Formal Cause of the house; this is the form or design that exists in the mind of the architect and which is embedded in the house itself; if it loses its form, it is just a pile of materials. The Efficient Cause of the house is the craftsmen who do the building, while the Final Cause or End is the reason why the house was built in the first place. Classical philosophy places the most emphasis on the Formal and Final Causes, while modern philosophy is concerned with Material and Efficient Causes.

Both Plato and Aristotle founded schools that lasted until the end of the Classical Era. While Aristotle was neglected for a while, his writings became the core of the great and remarkable Medieval synthesis, influencing the entirety of the ancient West, and which is undergoing a revival today. Several other schools of philosophy became popular as power became centralized in the Empire and men became less free. The schools of Epicureanism and Stoicism were two ways that people coped with this situation, and have influence to the present day.

Near the end of the ancient world, the great school of Neo-Platonism was founded, bearing much fruit in the early Middle Ages; it was rediscovered during the Renaissance. This school is much less practical than its forbearers, but makes up much of the Western mystical tradition, even to the current day. A deep theory of beauty can be developed from this philosophy.

Plague, war, doubt, and a breakdown of teaching authority at the end of the Middle Ages halted the classical philosophical tradition, which was unbroken for nearly 2000 years. The revival of classical architecture during the Renaissance was based on a classical philosophy that was soon to be forgotten, while the new Modern philosophy that developed in the succeeding centuries fought against these ideals. Modern architecture flows naturally from this modern philosophy.

The classical philosophical and art tradition of the Western world has strange parallels with the East. The ancient doctrines of art and philosophy in China and India depend on a Doctrine of Forms similar to that of Plato. All traditions have a similar view of the role of the artist in society. The ancient Jewish tradition of art had a great influence on the West, and the balance between Jewish and Greek thinking greatly influenced the practice of architecture in the Middle Ages and in the Modern era.

The symbolism of Classical Architecture is complex and an interesting field of study in itself. Some scholars propose that the classical tradition of architecture was unbroken from the ancient Greeks through the Gothic era, and that just the symbols changed. The deeper theory of architecture, based on the classical philosophical tradition, remained the same. One emphasis of Modern architecture is the removal of all symbols, or the use of historical symbols in a humorous way.

Classical architecture can be understood better by studying the philosophies of the ancients, and how this tradition developed over the centuries. Besides being historically interesting in itself, these philosophies can be used as both a defense for the contemporary revival of classical architecture and as a way of perfecting the practice of classical architecture.

Copyright (C) 2006 by Mark Scott Abeln ALL RIGHTS RESERVED