Book review: “How Architecture Works: A Humanist’s Toolkit” by Witold Rybczynski

The subtitle of a book can be distracting, enlightening and, at times, misleading.  My sense — for what it’s worth — is that the author may come up with the title, but it’s often the publisher and the marketing people who compose the subtitle.

I think that’s what happened with Withold Rybczynski’s 2013 book How Architecture Works: A Humanist’s Toolkit — and, in this case, it was a good thing.

Rybczynski, an architect, bestselling author and scholar, writes in his introduction that he conceived of his book as “a conceptual toolkit for thinking about the experience of architecture.” At the end of his book, he expresses the hope that “what I have called a conceptual toolkit” will help readers understand the variety of design approaches used by architects. He doesn’t anywhere use the phrase “humanist’s toolkit.”

But his book benefits from the subtitle in several ways, and so do his readers.

 

In other words, for humanists

For one thing, “A Humanist’s Toolkit” signals that this isn’t a book for those steeped in the field and art of architecture — or, at least, not only for such readers. Architects and architecture fans will find much to enjoy in How Architecture Works, but they aren’t Rybczynski’s primary audience.

He dedicates the book “To the students of my freshman seminar class, who taught me to look anew at architecture through youthful eyes.”

That’s whom he’s writing for — young people new to looking at architecture and non-experts of any age who know that the art of architecture is important but aren’t sure how to think about it.

Rybczynski is writing for generalists who want to learn how to look at a building and know what to look for in its design and construction — in other words, for humanists.

 

Other forms of art

Another benefit is that the subtitle can be read to signal a broader use for the toolkit Rybczynski offers the reader.

Regarding his “conceptual toolkit,” Rybczynski writes:

It helps to have a sense of what architects are trying to do, both practically and aesthetically, to understand how architecture works. In this book I describe ten essential topics of architectural concern, and the different ways in which contemporary architects do — and sometimes intentionally don’t — address them.

So, this is a book about architecture and how to understand what architects are attempting to do in their designs.

Yet, I was struck, while reading How Architecture Works, that Rybczynski’s “ten essential topics” were applicable for use in examining other forms of art — for painting, for instance, or for a poem, or for a cantata.

 

“Ten essential topics” — architecture

Rybczynski offers a chapter on each of his “ten essential topics,” and here is the list:

• Ideas — “Great buildings are often the result of a single — and sometimes very simple — idea,” such as the Pantheon in Rome, “a vast drum supporting a coffered dome, illuminated from above by a coffered dome.”
• The Setting — “Paintings and sculptures can be autonomous works of art, but architecture is always part of a place,” such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece Robie House on a South Side street in Chicago. Rybczynski writes that he was disappointed it wasn’t a free-standing as he’d imagined from photographs. “The house was on a shallow lot, very close to the sidewalk with a walled service yard and virtually no garden, and it was surrounded by neighboring houses and apartment buildings, instead of by a natural landscape as in Richard Nikel’s lyrical photograph.”
• Site — “Every site has its own questions. What are the main views of the building, and what does one see from the building? Where do people arrive, that is, where is the entrance? What is the nature of the surrounding buildings: good, bad, or indifferent? Is the site flat or sloped? Where is the ‘back” of the building? Not least, from where dos the sun shine?”
• Plan — “One of Le Corbusier’s frequently quoted maxims is ‘The plan is the generator.’ What does that mean? In his Swiss Calvinist way, Le Corbusier saw planning as nothing less than the basis of civilization ‘Without planning we have the sensation, so insupportable to men, of shapelessness, of poverty, of disorder, of willfulness.’ ”
• Structure — “Some architects care deeply about an ‘honest’ representation of how a building is built and reveal the structure, which complicates life for the builder, since what looks simply is often difficult to construct.” In other words, some architects like to show the skeleton, sinews and other internal structures of the building.
• Skin — “Le Corbusier defined architecture as ‘the masterly, correct and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light,’ but what we actually see when we look at a building is its skin…It is the skin that makes the first impression.”
• Details — “As Roger Scruton has observed, while much about the design of a building is dictated by the context and the site, the client’s demands, building codes, and functional and structural requirements, the design of details I one thing over which the architect exercises almost complete control. That is why details are important: they express architectural ideas — and ideals.”
• Style — “There is another way in which the practitioner’s view of style differs from the historian’s. A historian uses style to categorize the past, while an architect uses it to organize the present. Whether he is designing in a specific historical style or pursuing a personal vision, an architect is obliged to be consistent, not simply when it comes to individual details…but throughout.”
• The Past — “This intimate relationship to the past sets the architectural profession apart, for while medicine and engineering both have recorded histories, neither doctors nor engineers consider a knowledge of the past — especially the distant past — to be an essential qualification for contemporary practice. In that regard, architects are more like lawyers who practice common law that is based on judicial precedents.”
• Taste — “Most schools of architecture devote the first year of the curriculum to design exercises whose aim is less to impart specific practical knowledge than to develop visual and conceptual abilities — that is, to develop taste.”

 

The idea

These are ten aspects of the art of architecture that will help the non-architect understand, as Rybczynski’s title says, how architecture works — in practical terms and aesthetic ones.

They are also, as I said above, useful in considering other works of art.

For instance, the role that an idea has in the creation of a poem can be seen in two very different examples.  Carl Sandburg’s “Fog” is a very simple and direct take on its subject:

The fog comes

on little cat feet.

 

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches

and then moves on.

By contrast, the idea behind Allen Ginsberg’s Howl is nothing less than the state of America in mid-twentieth century:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,…

One is big, and one is small, but both are driven by an idea.

 

Site, structure, plan and the past

Like architects looking back to the past — or refusing to do so — painters use the past in various ways, such as to comment on the present, such as Frances Bacon’s 1953 Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X which goes back three centuries to use the strikingly executed and psychologically revealing Portrait of Innocent X by Spanish artist Diego Velázquez as a base for sharp and graphic distortion.

When it comes to site, think of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, created about forty years before Velazquez’s painting. Or Leonardo da Vinci’s mural The Last Supper, from a few years earlier, on the wall of the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan where, because of moisture, it has suffered grave damage from the beginning.

The Sistine Chapel ceiling is also an example of a plan, one that began with the requirements of Pope Julius II and later was expanded by the artist who is thought to have worked with one or more theologians to decide which scenes from the Book of Genesis to illustrate.  It’s also possible, by close study of the text of Moby Dick, to develop a schematic of the plan Herman Melville used in writing the great novel.

In terms of structure, just give a listen to classical music, for example, the Goldberg Variations by J.S. Bach (1741). In a post titled “Best Classical Music of All Time,” Joshua Weinfeld writes: “The Goldberg Variations demonstrate Bach’s unmatched mastery of structure and variation. Built from a single harmonic foundation, the work explores limitless expressive and technical possibilities. Revered by keyboardists and composers alike, it remains one of the most studied and performed works among the best classical compositions.” He ranks the piece 22^nd on his list.

 

Skin, setting and style

The skin of buildings designed and constructed by architects is made of materials, such as glass, steel and wood. The skin of many of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings, such as The Starry Night (1889), is a coating of thick brushstrokes that give his images weight as well as color and shape.

When it comes to setting, consider the huge statue of a seated Abraham Lincoln, sculpted by Daniel Chester French and carved by the Piccirilli Brothers. It weighs 170 tons and is made up of 28 blocks of white George marble.  The figure of the president is 19 feet tall, and it sits on an 11-foot pedestal.

It would be too gargantuan for most places, but, with the Lincoln Memorial as its setting, it fits well. That’s because the Memorial, which recalls a classic Greek temple, is itself, well, monumental, at 190 feet long, 119 feet wide, and 99 feet tall.

In architecture, the client is the one who is paying for the new building, and the client often has strong ideas on what style should be used in designing it.

In literature, the client is the reading public — general readers and the critics — and an original writer who doesn’t fit into the style that is fashionable at the moment is likely to be ignored. That’s what happened to Emily Dickinson and Melville, their greatness not discovered until after their deaths.

 

Details and taste

In architecture, the details of a building are grace notes to the overall design, important but not crucial. In a novel, by contrast, the details are the words that add up to create the text.

Consider the scene in David Copperfield when David’s stepfather’s spinster sister comes to take charge of him:

It was Miss Murdstone who was arrived, and a gloomy-looking lady she was; dark, like her brother, whom she greatly resembled in face and voice; and with very heavy eyebrows, nearly meeting over her large nose, as if, being disabled by the wrongs of her sex from wearing whiskers, she had carried them to that account. She brought with her two uncompromising hard black boxes, with her initials on the lids in hard brass nails. When she paid the coachman she took her money out of a hard steel purse, and she kept the purse in a very jail of a bag which hung upon her arm by a heavy chain, and shut up like a bite. I had never, at that time, seen such a metallic lady altogether as Miss Murdstone was.

Everything about Miss Murdstone, each of those sentences, does much to create the feeling and reality of David’s world and experience. Of course, the novel would still be great without those sentences. But it is a richer novel because of them. It is a discrete piece of writing; yet, it isn’t. The novel is the web woven of such words and sentences. These are not grace notes, but the steel and concrete of the story.

Rybczynski notes that architects are taught the inner workings of design and construction to help them develop their taste.

Readers and writers, painters and their viewers, all other artists and art-lovers, work to develop their taste — their ability to look closely at art and understand what is going on and respond emotionally and intellectually, their ability to be open to taking in great and unexpected art.

It’s the artist’s taste that results in the artist’s own art.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

7.24.26