转一篇关于Joseph Rykwert的文章，不少掌故
First Principles: Joseph Rykwert and the Use of History
by: Helen Thomas
Paper given in the SAHGB Session at the 59th Annual SAH Meeting, at Savannah 2006
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Introduction: History as Critique
The work of Joseph Rykwert has a complex presence within British architectural historiography. Amongst architects and historians, opinions are divided. In 2005, for example, a long list of illustrious names was gathered in support of his nomination for the 2006 RIBA Gold Medal. This had previously been awarded to historians like Lewis Mumford in 1961, then Nikolaus Pevsner and John Summerson, and finally Colin Rowe in 1995. Rykwert’s supporters were not restricted to academic architectural historians, who were relatively few, but included figures from across the spectrum of architectural culture. The list included ex-students or colleagues like Daniel Libeskind, Bryan Avery and George Baird. The remainder ranged from internationally-known architects like Frank Gehry, Charles Correa, Richard Meier, Vittorio Gregotti and Arata Isozaki to other influential people, including Kenneth Frampton, Richard Sennett and Phyllis Lambert.
Rykwert also has detractors, and many of them have spoken from the established centre of British art history. They have questioned several aspects of his work, but the two principal issues that we will address today are his use of historical sources, and the way in which his writing is constructed. The former is key to Rykwert’s historical and pedagogical methodology during the period under discussion, and the latter reflects his approach to architectural history.
In 1973, Ernst Gombrich wrote a critical review of Rykwert’s book On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History. “Mr. Rykwert is not really concerned with the history of an idea …” he says “but with a cluster of associations for which he looks in the writings of modern architects, in architectural treatises of the past, in ancient legend and religious rituals.” The review continues: “Within half a page we are reminded of Robinson Crusoe, of Lord Monboddo's advocacy of an airbath, and of Pestalozzi's ideas on education, only to return to various attempts to "reform" the architectural orders.” As part of a wider critique of Rykwert’s methodology, which he describes as ‘speculations about origins,’ Gombrich’s criticism encompasses the very structure of the book: “It certainly would not be easy to organize this vast material, but here as elsewhere Mr. Rykwert prefers suggestive allusion to systematic presentation.”
Reyner Banham was another of Rykwert’s critics. In his review of The First Moderns, written in 1980 he also comments upon the legibility of Rykwert’s writing: “Could it be that very smart architectural historians are making their subject just a bit too much of an arcane mystery?” he asks. This query is pertinent, for without the accessibility of Rykwert’s journalistic writing, and proof in his small book Church Building of 1966 that he could structure his arguments in a conventional way; it could be assumed that Rykwert was unaware of the way his texts were constructed.
Gombrich and Banham’s reviews succinctly describe, though from a negative point of view, the representation and use of history that Rykwert developed during the period 1967 to 1980. It is this era of Rykwert’s work that this paper addresses and during that time he published three books. The first was On Adam’s House in Paradise published in 1972, the second was The Idea of a Town published in 1976 as a substantial rewriting of an article in Forum from 1963, and the third was The First Moderns, published in 1980.
Writing as a means of communication was as important to Rykwert as it was to his critics Gombrich and Banham, but their methodologies were different. All of them used techniques developed to reach beyond an academic readership. In addition to his scholarly works, Gombrich is well known outside academic circles for his books A Little History of the World, written in 1935 for children, and recently translated into English, and The Story of Art, first published in 1950. Banham was concerned with writing in a style accessible to practitioners as well as academics, and he developed a recognisable and compelling journalistic voice. Rykwert, too, combined scholarly writing with journalism written for architects, but in the three books of this period he developed a very particular way of communicating. This paper proposes that at times Rykwert used the form of his text as a critical tool. The non-linear, associative structures that he used in his writing and enacted through his teaching were intrinsic to his questioning of the hegemony of Enlightenment thought, with its rationalizing tendencies and convenient genealogies.
1967 is our starting point because it is the year that Rykwert took up his first major academic position, as the founding Professor of Art at the new University of Essex. He remained there until 1980. This position gave him the opportunity to develop an approach to teaching architectural history alongside and in relation to his academic writing and research. During his first year there, he set up a masters course in Architectural History and Theory. With his students and colleagues like Antoine Grumbach, George Baird and Dalibor Vesely he began to explore how a study of architectural history and theory could impact upon contemporary architectural production. Together, they began to challenge the anti-historicism of pre-war architectural production, and post-war architectural education, which they saw as a legacy of rationalist Enlightenment thought. Rykwert’s return to first principles involved a rereading of the texts of pre-Enlightenment architectural theory in order to give them meaning in the present.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Who is Joseph Rykwert?
Why did Rykwert make such a determined return to historical sources, and then reuse them is such an unconventional way? His work needs to be considered in relation to the traditions of British architectural historiography that preceded him, and the intellectual climate at the University of Essex. The wider context of his academic and vocational training, and practice as an architect and teacher is also relevant.
Rykwert came to London as a schoolboy refugee from Warsaw in 1939. After studying architecture at the Bartlett and the Architectural Association, he attended courses at the Courtauld Institute, and at the Warburg Institute under Rudolf Wittkower. A period in architectural practice followed, and he worked for Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry amongst others. He taught at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm in 1958. Here, like Banham a year later, he was influenced by the way that design was studied alongside the related disciplines of sociology, anthropology and semiology. His awareness of phenomenology also stems from this period. He was Librarian at the Royal College of Art from 1961. In 1967 he left the Royal College to take up his post in the Department of Art at the University of Essex.
It was in the Department of Art at Essex that Rykwert’s use of architectural history in his teaching and writing began to come to fruition. The location of the Department of Art within the School of Comparative Studies provided the academic context for his teaching. As at Ulm, the approach was interdisciplinary. The School also included the Departments of Literature, Sociology, Government and Politics. First year students were taught all subjects, with Enlightenment studies as the key.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ways of reading
The seminar that Rykwert ran on the masters course was called ‘Theoretical Literature of Architecture before 1800.’ The course syllabus described it as an examination of the Italian treatises of the 16th and 17th centuries, and the French literature of the 18th century. His students were required to make intensive study of short, specific texts and respond in a direct and personal way. Each student had to prepare a seminar based on a set text. Architectural historian and professor John McKean was a masters student between 1970 and 1971, and he kept a course notebook. An early entry sets out Rykwert’s advice for reading a text and presenting a seminar: First, Read it, then secondly, Make it clear that you understand it. Thirdly. Add commentary and Fourthly. [Include]Your own attitudes, any ideas, feelings etc. however way out.
During the seminar, the students’ presentations were discussed in depth, and considered in comparison with texts from the same and other periods. Rykwert’s contributions to the seminars, made in response to the spontaneous dynamic of the conversation, were an important part of the learning process. Architectural historian and professor Alberto Perez-Gomez was a masters student between 1973 and 1974. He points out that Rykwert “went in depth and ‘unpacked’ the texts for us. His ‘agenda’ was to teach us to read carefully and with respect, to hear the answers to our own questions through the texts.” Another student remembered that during “four, six weeks, we looked at one paragraph of Alberti … I was completely and utterly taken aback by the whole thing, by the intensity of it.”
The slide shows the text that McKean was asked to present for the first seminar of the year, on Vitruvius. The text encourages reflection upon the meaning of words such as ordering, shapeliness, and correctness in relation to personal ideas about architecture. In this way, students were encouraged to return to the first principles of design in order to question, without formal preconception, fundamental architectural assumptions and ideas. Rykwert guided his students in applying this thinking to present-day architecture, which at that time would have been post-war modernism. McKean recalls Rykwert’s key contemporary references as Aldo van Eyck, Giancarlo de Carlo and Hassan Fathy, each one an example of the thinker-practitioners that Rykwert was training his students to become. At the same time, Vesely was introducing students to groups like Archigram, and the work of the Smithsons.
At this juncture it is interesting to consider the way in which Rykwert structured On Adam’s House in Paradise. This book begins with a discussion of the way in which modernist architects like Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright and Eric Mendelsohn made use of concepts and representations of the primitive, and moves steadily backwards in time, through the English and German theorists of the 19th century, 18th century French theory and ultimately classical and pre-classical articulations of dwelling. He starts from the present and makes a journey toward the past, in a structure that bears comparison with the process of his seminars.
Rykwert’s method of teaching students of architecture was unprecedented and for the students taking part, very exciting. As McKean has pointed out, in Britain “no-one was teaching history of architecture in schools, far less ideas. There wasn’t any kind of philosophical debate in my experience and I think for the people around.” This situation was not restricted to Britain. Perez-Gomez had received his architectural training at the Polytechnic in Mexico City. Here the curriculum had been defined by Hannes Meyer’s austere functionalist approach, which precluded any study of architecture from a historical or cultural perspective. In reaction, Perez Gomez sought a place where he could study the history and theory of architecture more deeply. Rykwert’s description of the Masters course in the University of Essex Prospectus was enough to attract him to England from Mexico.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Historians or practitioners
The University’s General Prospectus made it clear that Rykwert’s masters course in the History and Theory of Architecture was not a course for art historians, despite its location in the academic Department of Art. It was instead a “one-year scheme of study … open to those who have completed an intermediate course in architecture, engineering or design.” The aim of the course was to enable potential architectural practitioners to understand and respond to architecture as a social and cultural phenomenon, rather than a purely scientific and rational one.
Rykwert saw the engagement of architectural practitioners with architectural history as very important. In 1980, he took part in a symposium called ‘History in Architectural Education’ in which he made his feelings clear: “the history of architecture done by architects is important,” he said. “It is because we as architects know how we proceed when we are on the drawing board, and how we make decisions, that we can understand certain decisions of past architects. I still remember talking with a colleague about a certain very distinguished art historian, and … the colleague to whom I was speaking said, “You see, X is extremely learned and very ingenious, but the trouble with him is that he is like a very clever eunuch in a brothel: He knows who does it with whom, how many times, which way and in which room; but what he can’t understand is why they want to do it in the first place.”
Its not difficult to detect an antagonism towards the art historical establishment in these words, and Rykwert saw his masters course as an opportunity for challenge. In conversation about the setting up of the course he said: “I wrote a programme which suggested that art history should be taught quite differently from the Courtauld method. Not on the basis of connoisseurship and the chromatics, but on the basis of a socially committed art history in which you start off by looking at objects and not necessarily paintings, and treat them all as evidence of how they were made in their context. Then you look at the city as the context of the works.” His approach is set out at the start of The Idea of a Town: “The town is not really like a natural phenomenon. It is an artefact – an artefact of a curious kind, compounded of willed and random elements, imperfectly controlled, if it is related to physiology at all, it is more like a dream than anything else."
Rykwert's nurturing of the architect, or architecture student, as an active producer and consumer of architectural history and theory was an echo of earlier British intellectual traditions. The early 20th century, as John Summerson pointed out during the presentation of the 1967 RIBA Gold Medal to Pevsner, "was a time … when all, or nearly all architectural history in England was written by architects. This situation had changed with the arrival of the Warburg Institute and its professional art historians in the 1930s. The work of scholars like Pevsner had introduced both new objects of study to the field of architectural history – including the Modern Architecture being produced in other parts of Europe, and new methodologies for approaching them. Architectural history had become separated from the production of architecture, and relocated in the hands of professional, institutionalised historians. It was this relationship between architectural history and practice that Rykwert sought to reconfigure.
Rykwert was able to react against the 'Courtauld methods' that he talked about in relation to his own teaching only because he has studied in both places, and was cognizant of their libraries' systems of classifying and processing knowledge, particularly visual knowledge. Rykwert's approach was literary and social in its sources and evocations. This set him apart from the Warburg and Courtauld traditions, at least those based on their vast Libraries of visual reference.
Like other architects and writers during the 1950s, he was influenced by the publication of Warburg scholar Rudolf Wittkower's Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, published in 1949. Various architects responded to Wittkower's attempt to analyze architectural production through a reading of theory. Several of these were associated with the Independent Group, and led by Banham and the Smithsons. They were particularly interested in Wittkower's re-evaluation of Palladio, which formed the catalyst for a debate around theories of proportion and composition in modern architecture. The use of architectural history by these intellectuals and architects was quite different to that of their predecessor architect-historians, who had looked to history for formal ideas.
Former students of Wittkower who also cited the book were architect-trained historians Alan Colquhoun and Colin Rowe, who noted that the book "offered provocative analyses of formal and conceptual similarities between 16th century architecture and early Modern Architecture." For Rykwert, it was Wittkower's use of textual and documentary sources that was important, and his concern with the relationship between architecture and society. In other fundamental ways, however, Rykwert's interpretation of the relationship between architectural and theoretical production was different to Wittkower's. The latter's interpretation of Renaissance architecture as a will to order, and an embodiment of scientific truth continued the rationalizing Enlightenment tendencies that defined existing histories of Modernist architecture. It was precisely this linear, rationalizing process that Rykwert sought to disrupt.
If we return now to Gombrich's critique of Rykwert's writing as 'speculations about origins' in relation to the discussion above, we can begin to interpret it in the light of Rykwert's intellectual ambitions. His good friend, the artist Michael Ayrton, described Rykwert's approach in an essay in his book Fabrications. Ayrton writes of 'The Fabricator' – the true historian, who "as Picasso once put it" needs to convince the spectator "apropros the visual arts, of the truth of the painter's lies." The possibilities of historical narrative were interesting to him, and he described two kinds of approach: "The historian peers at his quarry by means of a shaft of light cast by his learning and powered by his research, eschewing the densities of darkness which inevitably surround his core of verifiable vision and which lie, uncharted, a terra incognita ... The fabricator, on the other hand, gropes his way, in partial blindness and aided only by the handrail of proper scholarship and the white staff of his imagination with which he taps his lonely way, feeling for such turnocks of probability that may bear his weight."
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Conclusion: writing and speaking
Like Ayrton's fabricator, Rykwert was interested in the creative possibilities of the 'densities of darkness' – which for him were inherent in the social conditions that produced the objects of his study. The associational digression, the anecdote, and the fractured narrative of books like The Idea of a Town, and On Adam's House in Paradise are a means of describing and making reference to this wider and often chaotic context. In conclusion, it is useful to consider the importance of the situational in Rykwert's methods in relation to his interest in the oral delivery of history. In 1984 he published an article on its traditions in the AA Files. In instructing his students he would advise them to write as if the text were to be read out aloud, an approach inspired by his study and supervision of translation of Alberti's writings. Due to the prohibitive cost of producing each volume, Alberti wrote his texts to be read aloud to groups of listeners, rather that read silently by the independent reader. Under these circumstances, the relationship between the text and the reader becomes socialized. Comprehension of the text does not rely on a clearly laid out communication between author and reader. Its success relies instead on inspiring a creative dynamic, a meeting of minds.
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Notes (some of these refer to primary sources):
1 Ernst Gombrich, 'Dream Houses' New York Review of Books November 29, 1973
2 ref review
3 George Baird, 'Introduction' Body and Building: essays on the changing relation of body and architecture. Edited by George Dodds and Robert Tavernor. (Cambridge Mass, London: MIT Press, 2001) p. 13. Baird describes how Rykwert attended seminar series on the topography of Rome and Raphael's Stanze.
4 John McKean's masters course notebook.
5 ref interview
6 ref interview
7 ref interview
8 University of Essex General Prospectus for 1971-2 p. 66
9 Joseph Rykwert, 'A Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body?' in History in, of, and for Architecture, papers from a symposium "History in Architectural Education" Cincinnati, Ohio, May 30-31, 1980 edited by John E. Hancock
10 Rykwert was officially appointed for three years as Professor and Chairman of the Department of Art from 1st October 1967, Reporter (University of Essex) no. 9 23rd December (1966): 10 University of Essex (UoE) Archives. The quote is from an interview with Joseph Rykwert by the author, 21.1.03.
11 Joseph Rykwert, The Idea of a Town (London: Faber and Faber, 1976) pp. 23 – 24.
12 John Summerson
13 Colin Rowe paraphrased in Henry A. Millon 'Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles on the Age of Humanism: its influence on the development and interpretation of Modern Architecture' Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians v. 31 1993 p. 83
14 Alina Payne's discussion of the impact of Wittkower's book in the 1940s and 50s describes approach in this way in, 'Rudolf Wittkower and Architectural Principles in the Age of Modernism,' JSAH Vol 53, 322-342, September 1994 pp. 322-342 (these descriptions p. 325, 326, 323)
15 Michael Ayrton, Postscript, Fabrications (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972) p. 220
16 Conversation with Robert Tavernor 18.1.06, masters student 1978-9
17 ref Alberti texts – translation and later commentary
by: Helen Thomas
Paper given in the SAHGB Session at the 59th Annual SAH Meeting, at Savannah 2006
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Introduction: History as Critique
The work of Joseph Rykwert has a complex presence within British architectural historiography. Amongst architects and historians, opinions are divided. In 2005, for example, a long list of illustrious names was gathered in support of his nomination for the 2006 RIBA Gold Medal. This had previously been awarded to historians like Lewis Mumford in 1961, then Nikolaus Pevsner and John Summerson, and finally Colin Rowe in 1995. Rykwert’s supporters were not restricted to academic architectural historians, who were relatively few, but included figures from across the spectrum of architectural culture. The list included ex-students or colleagues like Daniel Libeskind, Bryan Avery and George Baird. The remainder ranged from internationally-known architects like Frank Gehry, Charles Correa, Richard Meier, Vittorio Gregotti and Arata Isozaki to other influential people, including Kenneth Frampton, Richard Sennett and Phyllis Lambert.
Rykwert also has detractors, and many of them have spoken from the established centre of British art history. They have questioned several aspects of his work, but the two principal issues that we will address today are his use of historical sources, and the way in which his writing is constructed. The former is key to Rykwert’s historical and pedagogical methodology during the period under discussion, and the latter reflects his approach to architectural history.
In 1973, Ernst Gombrich wrote a critical review of Rykwert’s book On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History. “Mr. Rykwert is not really concerned with the history of an idea …” he says “but with a cluster of associations for which he looks in the writings of modern architects, in architectural treatises of the past, in ancient legend and religious rituals.” The review continues: “Within half a page we are reminded of Robinson Crusoe, of Lord Monboddo's advocacy of an airbath, and of Pestalozzi's ideas on education, only to return to various attempts to "reform" the architectural orders.” As part of a wider critique of Rykwert’s methodology, which he describes as ‘speculations about origins,’ Gombrich’s criticism encompasses the very structure of the book: “It certainly would not be easy to organize this vast material, but here as elsewhere Mr. Rykwert prefers suggestive allusion to systematic presentation.”
Reyner Banham was another of Rykwert’s critics. In his review of The First Moderns, written in 1980 he also comments upon the legibility of Rykwert’s writing: “Could it be that very smart architectural historians are making their subject just a bit too much of an arcane mystery?” he asks. This query is pertinent, for without the accessibility of Rykwert’s journalistic writing, and proof in his small book Church Building of 1966 that he could structure his arguments in a conventional way; it could be assumed that Rykwert was unaware of the way his texts were constructed.
Gombrich and Banham’s reviews succinctly describe, though from a negative point of view, the representation and use of history that Rykwert developed during the period 1967 to 1980. It is this era of Rykwert’s work that this paper addresses and during that time he published three books. The first was On Adam’s House in Paradise published in 1972, the second was The Idea of a Town published in 1976 as a substantial rewriting of an article in Forum from 1963, and the third was The First Moderns, published in 1980.
Writing as a means of communication was as important to Rykwert as it was to his critics Gombrich and Banham, but their methodologies were different. All of them used techniques developed to reach beyond an academic readership. In addition to his scholarly works, Gombrich is well known outside academic circles for his books A Little History of the World, written in 1935 for children, and recently translated into English, and The Story of Art, first published in 1950. Banham was concerned with writing in a style accessible to practitioners as well as academics, and he developed a recognisable and compelling journalistic voice. Rykwert, too, combined scholarly writing with journalism written for architects, but in the three books of this period he developed a very particular way of communicating. This paper proposes that at times Rykwert used the form of his text as a critical tool. The non-linear, associative structures that he used in his writing and enacted through his teaching were intrinsic to his questioning of the hegemony of Enlightenment thought, with its rationalizing tendencies and convenient genealogies.
1967 is our starting point because it is the year that Rykwert took up his first major academic position, as the founding Professor of Art at the new University of Essex. He remained there until 1980. This position gave him the opportunity to develop an approach to teaching architectural history alongside and in relation to his academic writing and research. During his first year there, he set up a masters course in Architectural History and Theory. With his students and colleagues like Antoine Grumbach, George Baird and Dalibor Vesely he began to explore how a study of architectural history and theory could impact upon contemporary architectural production. Together, they began to challenge the anti-historicism of pre-war architectural production, and post-war architectural education, which they saw as a legacy of rationalist Enlightenment thought. Rykwert’s return to first principles involved a rereading of the texts of pre-Enlightenment architectural theory in order to give them meaning in the present.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Who is Joseph Rykwert?
Why did Rykwert make such a determined return to historical sources, and then reuse them is such an unconventional way? His work needs to be considered in relation to the traditions of British architectural historiography that preceded him, and the intellectual climate at the University of Essex. The wider context of his academic and vocational training, and practice as an architect and teacher is also relevant.
Rykwert came to London as a schoolboy refugee from Warsaw in 1939. After studying architecture at the Bartlett and the Architectural Association, he attended courses at the Courtauld Institute, and at the Warburg Institute under Rudolf Wittkower. A period in architectural practice followed, and he worked for Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry amongst others. He taught at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm in 1958. Here, like Banham a year later, he was influenced by the way that design was studied alongside the related disciplines of sociology, anthropology and semiology. His awareness of phenomenology also stems from this period. He was Librarian at the Royal College of Art from 1961. In 1967 he left the Royal College to take up his post in the Department of Art at the University of Essex.
It was in the Department of Art at Essex that Rykwert’s use of architectural history in his teaching and writing began to come to fruition. The location of the Department of Art within the School of Comparative Studies provided the academic context for his teaching. As at Ulm, the approach was interdisciplinary. The School also included the Departments of Literature, Sociology, Government and Politics. First year students were taught all subjects, with Enlightenment studies as the key.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ways of reading
The seminar that Rykwert ran on the masters course was called ‘Theoretical Literature of Architecture before 1800.’ The course syllabus described it as an examination of the Italian treatises of the 16th and 17th centuries, and the French literature of the 18th century. His students were required to make intensive study of short, specific texts and respond in a direct and personal way. Each student had to prepare a seminar based on a set text. Architectural historian and professor John McKean was a masters student between 1970 and 1971, and he kept a course notebook. An early entry sets out Rykwert’s advice for reading a text and presenting a seminar: First, Read it, then secondly, Make it clear that you understand it. Thirdly. Add commentary and Fourthly. [Include]Your own attitudes, any ideas, feelings etc. however way out.
During the seminar, the students’ presentations were discussed in depth, and considered in comparison with texts from the same and other periods. Rykwert’s contributions to the seminars, made in response to the spontaneous dynamic of the conversation, were an important part of the learning process. Architectural historian and professor Alberto Perez-Gomez was a masters student between 1973 and 1974. He points out that Rykwert “went in depth and ‘unpacked’ the texts for us. His ‘agenda’ was to teach us to read carefully and with respect, to hear the answers to our own questions through the texts.” Another student remembered that during “four, six weeks, we looked at one paragraph of Alberti … I was completely and utterly taken aback by the whole thing, by the intensity of it.”
The slide shows the text that McKean was asked to present for the first seminar of the year, on Vitruvius. The text encourages reflection upon the meaning of words such as ordering, shapeliness, and correctness in relation to personal ideas about architecture. In this way, students were encouraged to return to the first principles of design in order to question, without formal preconception, fundamental architectural assumptions and ideas. Rykwert guided his students in applying this thinking to present-day architecture, which at that time would have been post-war modernism. McKean recalls Rykwert’s key contemporary references as Aldo van Eyck, Giancarlo de Carlo and Hassan Fathy, each one an example of the thinker-practitioners that Rykwert was training his students to become. At the same time, Vesely was introducing students to groups like Archigram, and the work of the Smithsons.
At this juncture it is interesting to consider the way in which Rykwert structured On Adam’s House in Paradise. This book begins with a discussion of the way in which modernist architects like Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright and Eric Mendelsohn made use of concepts and representations of the primitive, and moves steadily backwards in time, through the English and German theorists of the 19th century, 18th century French theory and ultimately classical and pre-classical articulations of dwelling. He starts from the present and makes a journey toward the past, in a structure that bears comparison with the process of his seminars.
Rykwert’s method of teaching students of architecture was unprecedented and for the students taking part, very exciting. As McKean has pointed out, in Britain “no-one was teaching history of architecture in schools, far less ideas. There wasn’t any kind of philosophical debate in my experience and I think for the people around.” This situation was not restricted to Britain. Perez-Gomez had received his architectural training at the Polytechnic in Mexico City. Here the curriculum had been defined by Hannes Meyer’s austere functionalist approach, which precluded any study of architecture from a historical or cultural perspective. In reaction, Perez Gomez sought a place where he could study the history and theory of architecture more deeply. Rykwert’s description of the Masters course in the University of Essex Prospectus was enough to attract him to England from Mexico.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Historians or practitioners
The University’s General Prospectus made it clear that Rykwert’s masters course in the History and Theory of Architecture was not a course for art historians, despite its location in the academic Department of Art. It was instead a “one-year scheme of study … open to those who have completed an intermediate course in architecture, engineering or design.” The aim of the course was to enable potential architectural practitioners to understand and respond to architecture as a social and cultural phenomenon, rather than a purely scientific and rational one.
Rykwert saw the engagement of architectural practitioners with architectural history as very important. In 1980, he took part in a symposium called ‘History in Architectural Education’ in which he made his feelings clear: “the history of architecture done by architects is important,” he said. “It is because we as architects know how we proceed when we are on the drawing board, and how we make decisions, that we can understand certain decisions of past architects. I still remember talking with a colleague about a certain very distinguished art historian, and … the colleague to whom I was speaking said, “You see, X is extremely learned and very ingenious, but the trouble with him is that he is like a very clever eunuch in a brothel: He knows who does it with whom, how many times, which way and in which room; but what he can’t understand is why they want to do it in the first place.”
Its not difficult to detect an antagonism towards the art historical establishment in these words, and Rykwert saw his masters course as an opportunity for challenge. In conversation about the setting up of the course he said: “I wrote a programme which suggested that art history should be taught quite differently from the Courtauld method. Not on the basis of connoisseurship and the chromatics, but on the basis of a socially committed art history in which you start off by looking at objects and not necessarily paintings, and treat them all as evidence of how they were made in their context. Then you look at the city as the context of the works.” His approach is set out at the start of The Idea of a Town: “The town is not really like a natural phenomenon. It is an artefact – an artefact of a curious kind, compounded of willed and random elements, imperfectly controlled, if it is related to physiology at all, it is more like a dream than anything else."
Rykwert's nurturing of the architect, or architecture student, as an active producer and consumer of architectural history and theory was an echo of earlier British intellectual traditions. The early 20th century, as John Summerson pointed out during the presentation of the 1967 RIBA Gold Medal to Pevsner, "was a time … when all, or nearly all architectural history in England was written by architects. This situation had changed with the arrival of the Warburg Institute and its professional art historians in the 1930s. The work of scholars like Pevsner had introduced both new objects of study to the field of architectural history – including the Modern Architecture being produced in other parts of Europe, and new methodologies for approaching them. Architectural history had become separated from the production of architecture, and relocated in the hands of professional, institutionalised historians. It was this relationship between architectural history and practice that Rykwert sought to reconfigure.
Rykwert was able to react against the 'Courtauld methods' that he talked about in relation to his own teaching only because he has studied in both places, and was cognizant of their libraries' systems of classifying and processing knowledge, particularly visual knowledge. Rykwert's approach was literary and social in its sources and evocations. This set him apart from the Warburg and Courtauld traditions, at least those based on their vast Libraries of visual reference.
Like other architects and writers during the 1950s, he was influenced by the publication of Warburg scholar Rudolf Wittkower's Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, published in 1949. Various architects responded to Wittkower's attempt to analyze architectural production through a reading of theory. Several of these were associated with the Independent Group, and led by Banham and the Smithsons. They were particularly interested in Wittkower's re-evaluation of Palladio, which formed the catalyst for a debate around theories of proportion and composition in modern architecture. The use of architectural history by these intellectuals and architects was quite different to that of their predecessor architect-historians, who had looked to history for formal ideas.
Former students of Wittkower who also cited the book were architect-trained historians Alan Colquhoun and Colin Rowe, who noted that the book "offered provocative analyses of formal and conceptual similarities between 16th century architecture and early Modern Architecture." For Rykwert, it was Wittkower's use of textual and documentary sources that was important, and his concern with the relationship between architecture and society. In other fundamental ways, however, Rykwert's interpretation of the relationship between architectural and theoretical production was different to Wittkower's. The latter's interpretation of Renaissance architecture as a will to order, and an embodiment of scientific truth continued the rationalizing Enlightenment tendencies that defined existing histories of Modernist architecture. It was precisely this linear, rationalizing process that Rykwert sought to disrupt.
If we return now to Gombrich's critique of Rykwert's writing as 'speculations about origins' in relation to the discussion above, we can begin to interpret it in the light of Rykwert's intellectual ambitions. His good friend, the artist Michael Ayrton, described Rykwert's approach in an essay in his book Fabrications. Ayrton writes of 'The Fabricator' – the true historian, who "as Picasso once put it" needs to convince the spectator "apropros the visual arts, of the truth of the painter's lies." The possibilities of historical narrative were interesting to him, and he described two kinds of approach: "The historian peers at his quarry by means of a shaft of light cast by his learning and powered by his research, eschewing the densities of darkness which inevitably surround his core of verifiable vision and which lie, uncharted, a terra incognita ... The fabricator, on the other hand, gropes his way, in partial blindness and aided only by the handrail of proper scholarship and the white staff of his imagination with which he taps his lonely way, feeling for such turnocks of probability that may bear his weight."
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Conclusion: writing and speaking
Like Ayrton's fabricator, Rykwert was interested in the creative possibilities of the 'densities of darkness' – which for him were inherent in the social conditions that produced the objects of his study. The associational digression, the anecdote, and the fractured narrative of books like The Idea of a Town, and On Adam's House in Paradise are a means of describing and making reference to this wider and often chaotic context. In conclusion, it is useful to consider the importance of the situational in Rykwert's methods in relation to his interest in the oral delivery of history. In 1984 he published an article on its traditions in the AA Files. In instructing his students he would advise them to write as if the text were to be read out aloud, an approach inspired by his study and supervision of translation of Alberti's writings. Due to the prohibitive cost of producing each volume, Alberti wrote his texts to be read aloud to groups of listeners, rather that read silently by the independent reader. Under these circumstances, the relationship between the text and the reader becomes socialized. Comprehension of the text does not rely on a clearly laid out communication between author and reader. Its success relies instead on inspiring a creative dynamic, a meeting of minds.
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Notes (some of these refer to primary sources):
1 Ernst Gombrich, 'Dream Houses' New York Review of Books November 29, 1973
2 ref review
3 George Baird, 'Introduction' Body and Building: essays on the changing relation of body and architecture. Edited by George Dodds and Robert Tavernor. (Cambridge Mass, London: MIT Press, 2001) p. 13. Baird describes how Rykwert attended seminar series on the topography of Rome and Raphael's Stanze.
4 John McKean's masters course notebook.
5 ref interview
6 ref interview
7 ref interview
8 University of Essex General Prospectus for 1971-2 p. 66
9 Joseph Rykwert, 'A Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body?' in History in, of, and for Architecture, papers from a symposium "History in Architectural Education" Cincinnati, Ohio, May 30-31, 1980 edited by John E. Hancock
10 Rykwert was officially appointed for three years as Professor and Chairman of the Department of Art from 1st October 1967, Reporter (University of Essex) no. 9 23rd December (1966): 10 University of Essex (UoE) Archives. The quote is from an interview with Joseph Rykwert by the author, 21.1.03.
11 Joseph Rykwert, The Idea of a Town (London: Faber and Faber, 1976) pp. 23 – 24.
12 John Summerson
13 Colin Rowe paraphrased in Henry A. Millon 'Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles on the Age of Humanism: its influence on the development and interpretation of Modern Architecture' Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians v. 31 1993 p. 83
14 Alina Payne's discussion of the impact of Wittkower's book in the 1940s and 50s describes approach in this way in, 'Rudolf Wittkower and Architectural Principles in the Age of Modernism,' JSAH Vol 53, 322-342, September 1994 pp. 322-342 (these descriptions p. 325, 326, 323)
15 Michael Ayrton, Postscript, Fabrications (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972) p. 220
16 Conversation with Robert Tavernor 18.1.06, masters student 1978-9
17 ref Alberti texts – translation and later commentary
