JCA DECORUM 1 01 JCA DECORUM 2 02 JCA DECORUM 03 3 Decorum: Tentative notes on its contemporary relevance and use Johan Celsing “The greatest glory in the art of building is to know what is appropriate.” later Pope Nicholas V. His comments on architecture are objective and Leon Battista Alberti1 often deal with elementary practical factors but fundamentally they offer a philosophical consideration of the discipline viewed from an We can all probably agree that some brilliant projects possess great, intellectual and cultural perspective. For this reason the work has been perhaps even sublime, beauty. How that helps us in our practical seen as a survey of the subject intended more for an aristocratic cultural endeavours to ensure the standards of what we build is less clear. And élite than for practising architects or master-builders. One senses is beauty our goal? These reflections spring from highly concrete that Alberti balanced his classical pre-Christian discoveries with the experiences as a practitioner. But also from a peculiar feeling of prevailing mediaeval Christian world view. resignation, almost of tedium, that while it seems to be possible I am not referring to Alberti here to offer some kind of historical to realise so much, almost everything, in buildings in the market background. Alberti’s treatise has an idiosyncratically personal but economies of the west, on the other hand remarkably little of all that also moral tone. Important concepts in his work seem to me to be is built seems desirable, or even important. Formal inventiveness particularly relevant and useful for us today as well. exists but frequently it seems to conceal the absence of any sustaining, One of these is Decorum, the appropriate. This concept has become fundamental approach to the discipline, the task or the world around us. somewhat suspect today, in Scandinavia at least, as the term has come That the answer to the question of what makes a project beautiful or to suggest the conventional and the discreet. But if one explores the important cannot solely be found in the aesthetic categories is becoming sources of the concept, one discovers instead some age-old western increasingly clear. It seems as if the tools to which we can resort are to moral concepts that still today impinge upon our ethical attitudes. In be found in reflection or wisdom. After all architecture is also described actual fact, the term derives from elucidation of the virtues. And these, as an old man’s profession. As with really sublime matters, it seems as if I claim, are also worth consideration by architects. Originally the term we can only approach the answer by making detours outside our own was used in literary contexts, one of which was Aristotle’s Poetics. Cicero, professional domain. one of the Latin authors Alberti repeatedly cites, refers to it in De Officiis, One famous and genuinely inspiring document that touches on which in its turn invokes classical Greek philosophy. Aristotle himself these issues in our discipline and our concrete practices was written writes about the virtues in their different forms in The Nichomachean by Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) and even today his ideas remain Ethics. The cardinal virtues are: Courage, Justice, Wisdom, Restraint. useful. Although Alberti is famous in architecture, he was in fact a In his discussion about what constitutes the moral virtues Aristotle scholar whose erudition and close study of both classical and mediaeval claims that courage, for instance, is a middle course between fear texts enabled him to develop an approach to some of Europe’s central and blind confidence. Generosity, he asserts, is the middle course moral concepts. Such advanced study of philosophy was as unlikely between close-fistedness and extravagance. Where and how the balance then as it is today for the majority of practitioners. If in those days it between the extremes will be found is not predetermined but has to was the building traditions passed down within the guilds that were be understood from case to case. What is fitting, what is appropriate. most esteemed and handed on to following generations, today’s market As with questions about laws and ordinances, Aristotle says that these prefers a glib visual approach that corresponds to the image of today’s must always take the form of simplified generalisations that have to be prevailing trends. specified in individual cases. Aristotle claims that we acquire the virtues It is in De re Aedificatoria, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, that by repetition as we do other forms of knowledge. Alberti discusses in a memorable and inspiring way both theoretical The relevance of the virtues is, in my opinion, just as great today as and practical aspects of architecture. Although his starting point in it used to be. In some respects we express ourselves differently, however. this book is Vitruvius’ De architectura , it is in fact a more multifaceted Is courage an out-of-date virtue belonging to the military realities of text explicitly grounded in both Classical Roman and Greek learning the Hellenistic period when Athens was at war with Sparta, the Persians and authors such as Cicero, Aristotle and Thucydides. Less explicit but and other peoples? A wise colleague pointed out that courage is no less important is also the way in which the text merges Classical maxims important today. But for battles of a different kind. The challenges with concepts advanced by the encyclopaedists of the Middle Ages.2 facing humanity such as the climate question, overpopulation and For most of his life Alberti was closely linked to the Catholic church. inequality will undoubtedly demand our courage as well. As a young man he studied at famous seats of learning in Venice and In his treatise Alberti elegantly incorporates Decorum into Christian Padua, where one of his fellow-students was Tommaso Parentucelli, Italian architecture in the 15th century. He describes building according 7 JCA 01 DECORUM to the prevailing hierarchies. What applies for private dwellings, houses, cast on site (white Danish cement with Dolomite cross as ballast). Once is possibly some liberty in design but above all the building must not the form-work has been dismantled there will be no further treatment vaunt itself and transgress its social role. Even the dwellings of princes of the surface of the concrete so the casting will demand a great deal of should be subordinate to the supreme, the house of God, the Temple. If care. The all-embracing roof covers very different spaces that house the one frees oneself from this socially hierarchical use of the concept, it can building’s various functions. Next to the great furnace room, its ceiling instead offer a tool to help us to make our own scrutiny of the content tracing the external shape of the building, lies a smaller Ceremony of our architectonic dispositions and their results. In what follows I Room. In the light shed by a slit in its barrow-vaulted ceiling the comment on a few contemporary and, in my view, impressive examples mourners can here bid farewell by the coffin. An atrium has been carved that spontaneously and without any manifest theoretical superstructure out of the building to enable the employees to gather beneath the open embody memorably judicious architecture. One can of course also point sky for rest and recreation without encountering any mourners. The out that virtuous architecture is not created because one has studied atrium, surrounded by sliding glass doors with white concrete passages the right authorities… On the other hand ‘practice maketh perfect’. behind them, provides a source of light and enables the staff to keep Moreover I claim that it is inspiring and impels reflection about our an eye on what is going on in other parts of the building. The entrance alleged contemporary unicity to see how relevant a work written five for the public and for mourners is marked by a canopy inside of the centuries ago can be for the age in which we now live. To see that many perimeter of the building block. Located under a generous roof, this of the questions our predecessors encountered are those we face today, open area provides a link between the interior and the surrounding albeit in another guise. woodland. This is where people assemble or wait, surrounded by Being trained to see that it is not style, perhaps not even appearance, delicate brickwork and a massive granite column. In my view, both now but the underlying approach that is really decisive. and in the past there is an architectural tradition that is rooted in what decorum and the virtues invoke. A STONE IN THE FOREST Alberti's concept of decorum may at first sight seem a long way from Repeatedly in my own practice the question arise of what is fitting, the spirited everyday settings created by the French architects Lacaton appropriate, at every level in the conception of a project. In the current Vassal ( Anne Lacaton 1955–, Jean Philippe Vassal 1954–). But I claim project on the new crematorium at Stockholm’s Woodland Cemetery that in them it is possible to perceive more clearly than in the work of the diversity of the aspects has meant that striking the balance of what most other architects the unerring ability to develop what is fitting, seems appropriate has been particularly multifaceted. These questions appropriate, for each specific task. have not been made less demanding by the cemetery administration’s One of their early projects from 1996 in Bordeaux provides stringent budget. considerable food for thought. The task assigned to the architects was How can the new crematorium with its ritual subordination part of a programme through which the city intended to embellish be incorporated into the cemetery’s ensemble of landscape and a number of existing squares.