Geoffrey Scott, 1914. 60 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041165494 by guest on 27 September 2021 Geoffrey Scott and the Dream-Life of Architecture MARK CAMPBELL When the English aesthete Geoffrey Scott sat down in the spring of 1918 to continue the “history of taste” he had begun four years earlier with the Architecture of Humanism, he was struck by a frustratingly sudden attack of writer’s block. The severity of this attack was even more pronounced given his long-standing plans to add to this history; yet in spite of his initial enthu- siasm, Scott’s daughter-in-law, the writer Iris Origo, vividly remembered the scene in his study, where a large piece of foolscap . lay for many weeks upon the centre of his desk, bearing, in his fine scholar’s hand, the following words, and these only: A HISTORY OF TASTE Volume I Chapter I “It is very difficult . .”1 Origo was alluding not only to Scott’s difficulty with writing, however, but to the gravity of his “black moods,” which left him “incapable of doing any work” and would ultimately result in his complete nervous breakdown later that year.2 Following his doctor’s concerned advice, Scott traveled to Switzerland, where he was treated in the Lausanne clinic of Dr. Roger Vittoz (1863–1925), one of the preeminent psychologists of the period and the author of the mag- isterial Treatment of Neurasthenia by Teaching of Brain Control.3 With a perfunctory sweep of his hand, Vittoz proclaimed Scott a neurasthenic, his much-preferred diagnosis, and prescribed a lengthy course of treatment. This regime, another famous patient noted, was “a system of mental control and concentration,” in which Vittoz advocated “the habit of eliminating unnec- essary thoughts and worries from one’s mind [by] practic[ing] eliminating letters from words, or one number from a set of numbers.”4 Although it is impossible to know how closely Scott followed this regime—given that the second volume of his history ended where it had begun, with the taunting ellipsis that followed the phrase “It is very difficult . .”—it can be suggested that he was more than adept in the elimination of letters from words and had progressed to the subtraction of words from sentences and, perhaps, even Grey Room 15, Spring 2004, pp. 60–79. © 2004 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 61 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041165494 by guest on 27 September 2021 the erasure of ideas from arguments. Like his “incapacity to do anything,” however, Scott’s writer’s block was more selective than it was all-consuming. And it was during these days recu- perating in the Swiss air that he worked on the poems he would publish as A Box of Paints in 1924 and Poems in 1932.5 In a strange coincidence, Vittoz’s treatment seems to have been especially conducive to writing poetry, as the experience of yet another patient, T.S. Eliot confirms. Following his own nervous collapse in 1921, Eliot sought refuge in Lausanne. His treatment successfully cured his writer’s block, and when he returned to London the following year, he carried with him the by-product of his stay: the first complete draft of The Waste Land.6 Together with their love of verse, it seems that Scott and Eliot shared an appreciation of Vittoz’s treatment with a tempered understanding of the consequences implicit in Eliot’s immortal line, “My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad.”7 But the question here is what form did Scott’s nerves take? Or—to be more precise—what influence did his famously fragile nerves have over his argu- ment in the Architecture of Humanism and its description, following a con- temporaneous notion of aesthetic empathy, of how architectural inhabitants projected their emotions on the walls that enclosed them? Again, this is a question that can be addressed through another line of Eliot’s poetry, one that foreshadowed the complications that lay behind Scott’s account of the inhabitation of space. Although Scott described this process in the Architecture of Humanism in consciously positivistic terms, noting that it was an exchange that was “true and reliable,” his own immedi- ate experience suggested that these correspondences were decidedly more nuanced and uncertain than he had allowed. “As Eliot had written of such an ambivalence in 1911, these were physical states that were projected . as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen.”8 For Scott, this screen was not only the interior surfaces of architecture but the blank expanses of the page that followed after his frustrating ellipsis. And the diaphanous pat- terns that his nerves cast were composed not only of his sensory perceptions of architecture but of his image of architectural history. While Eliot’s self- awareness of his nerves resulted in some of the masterpieces of modernism, Scott’s nervousness consoled itself with his turn to an anachronism of the nineteenth-century: aesthetic connoisseurship. Within this turn, however, Scott’s promotion of an architecture that would “construct, within the world as it is, a pattern of the world,”9 and his theorization of the inhabitation of space, would be complicated by that least diagnostically convincing of dis- eases, neurasthenia. As he outlined his project in 1914, Scott explained that his original intention 62 Grey Room 15 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041165494 by guest on 27 September 2021 to “formulate the principles of classical [architectural] design” had been thwarted by the “present state of thought.” “While there may be a lack of architectural taste,” he bemoaned, “there is, unfortunately, no lack of archi- tectural opinion.”10 Scott felt that the Victorian era’s eclectic “revivals” had perverted “architectural taste,” and he further argued that a series of critical misconceptions—which he famously labeled as the “romantic, ethical, tech- nical, and biological fallacies”—had unduly confused “architectural thought.”11 In the first—“destructive”—part of the Architecture of Humanism, he sought to disprove these fallacies and argue for a return to classical architectural principles, as they were expressed in such works as his own luxurious house, the Villa Medici by Giuliano da Sangallo (constructed 1458–1461). However, Scott did not simply base his argument for this return on a promotion of the Renaissance as a “style,” although he certainly advocated that, but on a new form of criticism that considered the inhabitant’s spatial “reaction” to archi- tecture, a form that allowed him to argue that Renaissance works provided the highest “satisfaction of aesthetic delight.”12 In the book’s second—“constructive”—part, Scott explained how this “sat- isfaction” took place through a “psychological” investment in architecture: a “humanization” that he believed could restore “taste.” Scott imagined that the inhabitants wrote themselves into architectural space, and in this way he argued that architecture became a sort of biographic composite of their emo- tional states. While his conception of this process suggested that architecture reaffirmed biographic existence, his explanation of it assumed that architec- ture remained subservient to its subjective aestheticism (in the sense that it was a product of this process), and his historical idealization of the Renaissance collapsed its three-dimensional object into his pictorial memory. As Scott’s friend the English writer Vernon Lee had written of such an aesthetic sensi- bility, what mattered was not a concern with the “actual thing,” in all its three-dimensional complexity, but rather a “contemplation of the Aspect,” an idolization of the two-dimensional image.13 In this way Scott’s ideals were commensurate with the aestheticism of his mentor and erstwhile employer, the American art connoisseur Bernard Berenson, as well as with the ideals of an expatiate Anglo-American society whose members lived in turn-of-the-century Florence and celebrated the Renaissance as the epitome of artistic creation. Scott worked as Berenson’s private secretary from 1908 to 1912 while he labored on the Architecture of Humanism, and, as several critics have noted, he was heavily influenced by Berenson’s examination of the art-work from “the point of view of the aesthetic spectator.”14 Giuliano da Sangallo. Villa Medici, 1458–1461. Campbell | Geoffrey Scott and the Dream-Life of Architecture 63 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041165494 by guest on 27 September 2021 Of course, this viewpoint was synonymous with that of the connoisseur, and such an appreciation of architecture, like Berenson’s delectation of art, was as invested with connoisseurial ambition as it was infused with “human- ist” sentiment. Interestingly, Berenson’s own conflation of the humanist with the aesthetic is particularly evident in his only meditation on architecture, “A Word for Renaissance Churches,” written in 1893 and published in 1902. As he described the church of Santa Maria della Consolazione at Todi, Berenson noted that he found it almost inconceivable that “the purpose of the building was other than the realization of a beautiful dream of space. It suggests no ulterior motive . Such a buildings sings not to the glory of God, but the Godhead of man.”15 (Or, it can be suggested, praised the Godhead of Berenson.) Although Berenson preferred to take his humanism in Renaissance paintings, his influence over Scott suggests that the Architecture of Humanism can be productively considered as Scott’s