Timothy Hyde - Ugliness and Judgment: On Architecture in the Public Eye

Princeton University Press

Princeton and Oxford

Copyright 2019 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press
41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR
press.princeton.edu

Jacket illustrations: (front) Royal Courts of Justice, Strand. Collage/London Metropolitan Archives, City of London. (back) Hayward Gallery, South Bank Arts Centre, London. John Donat/RIBA Collections.

Some sections of chapters 2, 3, 5, and 6 appeared in earlier form in the following articles or book chapters. I am grateful to the respective publishers for permission to include this material. London Particular: The City, Its Atmosphere, and the Visibility of Its Objects, Journal of Architecture 21, no. 8 (December 2016): 127498; Piles, Puddles, and Other Architectural Irritants, Log 27 (Winter/Spring 2013): 6779; Some Evidence of Libel, Criticism and Publicity in the Architectural Career of Sir John Soane, Perspecta 37: Famous (2005): 14463; Libel, in The Printed and the Built: Architecture, Print Culture, and Public Debate in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Mari Hvattum and Anne Hultzsch (London: Bloomsbury, 2018); Signed, Anonymous, in Terms of Appropriation, ed. Amanda Lawrence and Ana Miljacki (London: Routledge, 2017).

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-0-691-17916-2
eISBN 978-0-691-19264-2 (ebook)

Version 1.0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018958379
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Design: Luke Bulman Office, New York

For India and Elias

What an ugly building. This succinct judgment, commonly enough expressed, has in its repetition underwritten a broad critique of architecture based in large part upon a presumed differentiation between public and professional points of view, between what people think and what architects think. This presumption, that architectural thinking proceeds along a path distinct from that of social thought more generally, reinforces the seemingly obvious conclusion that architecture as a social object is and ought to be subject to judgments fashioned by public figures and by social commentary. In Great Britain, where the architectural profession has during the hundreds of years of its existence certainly made efforts to engage persuasively with the public, the start of the twenty-first century was marked by some startling proposals to concede even more fully to the public the arbitration of architectural success and failure. The president of the Royal Institute of British Architects suggested the compilation of a Grade X list (so named to parallel the Grade I and Grade II lists of historic preservation) containing the most vile buildings of the preceding century, the plain eyesores, the bad, the mediocre, the horrendous buildings whose demolition should be actively encouraged, according to the public consensus from which the list would derive.

Expressed through a myriad of such epithets, ugliness has attached to architectural debates in Great Britain with notable but unremembered persistence over the past centuries. It has long been cast as the decisive element of judgments large and small. The architect Sir Edwin Lutyens condemned the roof pitch of forty-five degrees as the ugly angle; a young and censorious William Morris declined to explore the Crystal Palace in 1851, having proclaimed it to be wondrously ugly; in 1793, the anonymous author of Drossiana in the European Magazine visited St. Pauls Cathedral and found Sir Christopher Wrens ornament ugly and ill-judged. Countless other examples lie within architectural histories, some trivial or short-lived, others influential and enduring; a few have employed the term approvingly, as a positive value within specific circumstances, but the vast majority of instances intend unambiguous derogation. Of course, opinion changes over time as one historical period reflects upon its predecessors, and unanimity of judgment is rarely if ever achieved. It is not the individual judgments, then, that are persistent, nor their validity. It is the category itself, ugliness, that has maintained a special pertinence within the social evaluation of architecture in Great Britain.

But what exactly is the nature of this pertinence? What are the roles of ugliness in architectural discourse, and what are its consequences in social debate? Invoking historical episodes of taste, style, and aesthetic judgment to better discern the social role of architecture, I pose these and another, rephrased question: not, how is architecture subject to societal judgment, but rather, how does architecture participate in societal judgment?

The presumption that architectural thinkingthe professionand social thoughtthe publicexist apart from one another, at incommensurable distance, obscures the certainty that public and professional perspectives on architecture have been deeply intertwined in the evolution of a number of social practices; it elides the many circumstances through which architectural practices enjoin social thought more generally, outside of and often in advance of the decisions and events that produce individual buildings. My intention in this book is not to engage the question of ugliness as a matter of fact, offering confirmation or rebuttal of one or other particular accusation of ugliness. Nor do I propose to engage ugliness only as a matter of taste, describing instances of architecture in relation to contemporaneous opinion and mores. Instead, by abjuring the presumption that the gap between internal structures of disciplinary judgment and external modes of societal judgment is traversed only in the register of taste, I investigate moments when architecture has contributed obliquely but concretely to the criteria and instruments of societal judgment even and especially when architecture has been construed as ugly and its social assimilation therefore resisted. Debates on ugliness, I believe, expose how architecture (not only buildings but more so the thoughts and motives and mechanisms that accompany them as architectural discourse) not simply served as an object of judgment but acted as a means for the solicitation and formulation of judgments, and how, in doing so, architecture participated in the production of devices and effects distributed through other registers of public life.

The aim of this investigation into architecture and ugliness is thus not to define ugliness in itself, but to expand contemporary debate on the instrumentality of aesthetic judgment. Though its aesthetic dimensions are foundational to the disciplinary self-understanding of architecture, and should therefore be authoritative aspects of its encounters and exchanges with social institutions, it is commonplace that criteria for judgment such as cost, practicality, or environmental impact today possess an authority as grounds for the social valuation of architecture significantly greater than that of aesthetic criteria. The interpretation of architecture in aesthetic terms very often reduces to the analysis of individual reception (by a user or a critic) or authorial intent (of an architect or a client), so that aesthetic interpretation and sociocultural analysis are set apart from one another, rendering opaque what it is that architecture does or judgment does in a given circumstance. What makes ugliness such an important category of judgment, however, is precisely its resistance to this segregation of the aesthetic registerfor ugliness is properly conceived as an objects excessive entanglement with the real contingencies of social life, as a hindrance to an objects reduction to the purely aesthetic. With ugliness understood not as an aesthetic value but as a social judgment, exploring architectural ugliness brings to light an understanding of the social instrumentality of architecture, revealing its unacknowledged relationships to a variety of nonarchitectural protocols or structures in law, or science, or politics that organize social and political life.