In the late 1980s, architecture in the Neth- style. (The text included here is the first Erik Terlouw erlands found itself in an ambiguous, yet in the series.) It is a fascinating history, interesting position. In the knowledge that precisely because of Erik’s meticulous an outline based on a series of ‘isms’ could and nuanced account of his search and hardly do justice to the extraordinary the understated style of his fierce criti- character of those years, I would like to cism. Perhaps this is why these texts THE ARCHI- describe them as follows. With the storms have lost none of their value. of postmodernism and deconstruction seemingly confined to the international Jurjen Zeinstra scene, in the Netherlands the worn-out Member of the editorial board ‘structuralism’ of the Forum generation from OASE 18 to 41 TECTURE is quietly replaced by a light-hearted neo- Translated by Laura Vroomen modernism, which fuses effortlessly with the emerging visual culture of those years. With the arrival in Rotterdam of ‘super- hero’ Rem Koolhaas the storms, or their OF REASON aftermath, finally reach our shores, to the delight of a new generation of architects. The youthful OASE editors with their varied, burgeoning ideas about architec- ture are part of this generation and, from their deliberate position on the sidelines, use a series of special issues to try and find some depth amid all the hype. 29 Erik Terlouw played an important role in all this. He has, without doubt, been OASE one of the most prolific editors in the magazine’s history. With few exceptions, his texts and translations are lengthy and erudite. Through a meticulous analysis of historical precedents, they focus on the essence of architecture and architectural FIRST PUBLISHED IN thought. They use history as a source: it would be a mistake therefore to read his texts purely as historical tracts. His arti- cles explore several closely linked themes. These themes tie in with the contempo- rary architectural development outlined in his article ‘Image building’ (OASE 28), in which the old architectural categories ‘presence’ and ‘place’ make way for ‘rep- resentation’ and ‘time’. For Erik Terlouw the dissatisfaction with this development triggered his search for the roots of architecture’s visual cul- ture. His study of the source material and the connections he establishes were impressive and yielded a series of three lengthy articles published in three issues of OASE: 29, 30 and 42. To some extent they rewrite the history of Western ar- chitecture as a history of the concept of 186 The detailing of the mouldings and the other elements 1 stead, Perrault posits beauties he calls ‘arbitrary’, ‘for they tive beauties’ – Antoine Picon, that comprise a building are to architecture what words ‘In order to judge this cor- depend on the will to give a certain proportion, a form and a Claude Perrault ou la Curiosité rectly we must suppose that d’un Classique (Paris, 1988), 137. are to an oration. certain shape to things that could be different in all of these OASE #75 there are two kinds of beauties 2 Germain Boffrand, Livre d’Architecture, 1745 in Architecture, that is those things without being misshapen.’ Architecture is about know- Perrault himself went into grounded in persuasive reasons ing this latter form of beauty: ‘It is a fact that knowledge of detail about this difference in meaning. He argues that the The wealth of materials used, the grandeur of the building, and those that depend solely on the arbitrary beauties is most essential in forming what is prejudice. I consider the beau- term symmetry as it was used the precision and neatness with which it was built and its ties grounded in persuasive called taste, and that only in this do true Architects stand out by Vitruvius is synonymous symmetry: these were the fundamental beauties that Claude reasons those through which from those who are not.’3 with proportion, and uses the latter in his translation. For Perrault ascribed to architecture in a 1683 text that can be works must be pleasing to all The distinction that Perrault draws is in the same vein . such as the wealth of the the use of the term symmetry seen as the beginning of rationalism in architecture, the material, the grandeur and the as that drawn by Malebranche a few years earlier in his in French architecture treatis- Ordonnance des cinq espèces de colonnes selon la méthode des an- magnificence of the edifice, the De la Recherche de la Vérité between two kinds of judgements es, see Werner Szambien, Sym- métrie, Goût, Caractère, Théorie ciens.1 This collection seems very much removed from a view precision and the neatness of (Jugements). The first, which coincides with Perrault’s positive the construction and its symme- et Terminologie de l’Architecture of architecture that seeks to find in it something akin to a lan- try,’ Ordonnance des cinq espèces beauties, is ‘a judgement of the senses . which exists within à I’Age Classique 1550-1880 guage, that is to say a structure that in its capacity to visualize, de colonnes selon la méthode des us, without us and even in spite of us’. The second is ‘a free (Paris, 1986), 61-78. For the anciens (Paris, 1683), iv ff. The link between harmonious represents something. Even the term ‘symmetry’, which in the judgement of the will, which one can also discard if one proportions and neo-Platonic wealth and grandeur were not 4 sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century meant a perceived as such by everyone. wishes to avoid errors’. Claude Perrault, even though he had ideas, see Erwin Panofsky, harmonious, proportional relationship between the elements Simplicity also had a beauty designed the Paris Observatory and the new east wing of the Idea: A Concept in Art Theory (New York, 1968), 53 ff. and the whole of the building, and which thus linked architec- of its own. François Blondel Louvre, was not primarily an architect, but a man of science. assailed Perrault on this point; For the precise development ture to the world of (neo-Platonic) ideas, did not signify any- see Wolfgang Herrmann, He had been a member of the Académie des sciences since its of these ideas in architecture, thing more to Perrault than it does to us.2 The Theory of Claude Perrault founding in 1666, where he concentrated mostly on compara- see Rudolf Wittkower, Archi- (London, 1973), 133. But of tectural Principles in the Age of tive anatomy and the invention of all manner of machines and Humanism (London, 1952). course Perrault did not mean 5 that every building should be measuring instruments. Colbert, the driving force behind the 3 ARBITRARY BEAUTY as grandiose and as big as pos- founding of this academy, likely commissioned Perrault to Perrault, Ordonnance, sible. In his Abregé des dix livres op. cit. (note 1), vii. Yet, as the rest of his text makes clear, these ‘positive beau- write a new translation of Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architec- 4 d’architecture de Vitruve (Paris, 6 ties’, precisely because of their unquestionable nature, are 1674), he had already spoken ture, the Libri Decern, in 1667. In the annotated translation Malebranche, Oeuvres, I actually of little import for architecture as a science. In their of a ‘reasoned use of the posi- of this book, which had functioned as a sort of law book (Paris, 1979, 1st ed. 1674), 117. William Chambers, after study- for architecture during the Renaissance, and in his own ar- ing Perrault’s treatise, drew a chitecture treatise, the Ordonnance des cinq espèces, Perrault distinction between ‘particular endeavours to subject architecture to the same kind of analy- qualities in Visible Objects that Act immediately upon the sis that others, particularly Descartes and Malebranche, had organs of Vision’ and qualities previously applied to the other sciences. that owe their power to ‘the The writings of Descartes, Malebranche and Perrault Ideas we connect with them’, see Herrmann, The Theory cover different domains, of course, but they converge in their of Claude Perrault, op. cit. method of analysis. In general terms we can say that this is an (note 1), 159-160. This division analysis of the imagination, of an explication of the represen- coincides exactly with that of THE ARCHITECTURE OF REASON ERIK TERLOUW Malebranche, but has the dis- tation present in thought. During the classical period defined advantage that in architecture, by Michel Foucault, this also entailed, and without any clear virtually everything has to be distinction, an analysis of the language, of the sentences, the relegated to the second catego- ry, making it unsuitable for the sequence of words, regulated by grammar, through which this critique Perrault envisioned. thought was expressed.7 The imagination that earlier, in the In Perrault’s categorization, it sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, had is not the ‘immediate effect’ of a particular beauty that is the been the quintessential faculty by which to acquire knowl- decisive factor, but its unques- edge, through the transformations that it could engender in tionable nature. representation, was now, in the latter half of the seventeenth 5 For Perrault’s scientific century, the domain of prejudices and errors, because it linked activities, see Antoine Picon, things and their characteristics in a vague, never actually extant Claude Perrault, op. cit. (note 1), similarity. Wherever Jean Martin, in his 1547 translation of 29-101, and for the relation- ship between his ideas and Claude Perrault, Vitruvius, uses the word ‘imagination’, Perrault resorts to the those of Descartes, see Alberto Mémoires pour servir à Pérez-Gómez, l’histoire naturelle des Cartesian ‘meditation’.