1000 Monuments of Genius. Christopher E.M. Pearson
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the spoils of war and to reap the profits of commerce. As with all such manifestations of power, the great monuments of the world are in this sense more often than not the products of despotic rule, inhumane value systems or an unfair division of resources, and could certainly be condemned as such. The Victorian art critic John Ruskin, for example, could even launch a contrarian attack on the ancient Greek temples – erstwhile symbols of fledgling democracy, humanistic culture and refined aesthetic sensitivity – as oppressive and dehumanising. Ruskin particularly objected to the Classical buildings’ demand for monotonously repetitive carved ornament (such as mouldings, dentils or capitals), the manufacture of which would seem to have demanded a machine-like subservience on the part of the stonemasons. Even today a visit to the Colosseum in Rome or the great Mesoamerican pyramid-temples (n° 814; n° 821; n° 823) may well arouse uneasy thoughts of the mass slaughter that occurred there over the centuries, if not the backbreaking labour that went into their creation. The world’s largest church, the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace (1985–90) in Yamoussoukro, Côte d’Ivoire, is generally seen as a self-indulgent folly on the part of that impoverished country’s onetime president rather than as an architectural masterpiece of the first order. More often than not, however, and especially in the case of the venerated relics of older civilisations, we have an understandable tendency to set aside the questionable morality of their patronage and simply to appreciate the splendour, mystery and ingenuity of their built creations. With the passage of time, even the survivals of Nazi architecture, those morally repugnant but undeniably impressive reminders of recent atrocities, have gone some distance towards being the subject of dispassionate academic interest and even a measure of professional (rather than political) admiration from some practising architects, who see in them the evidence of a continuing European debt to the still-relevant legacy of Greece and Rome. Ideologically offensive regimes, it can easily be demonstrated, do not automatically produce either good or bad results in architecture, and from a purely aesthetic or technical standpoint the question of politics might even be left out of the discussion altogether – a rationalisation that continues to allow some contemporary architects to work for politically suspect patrons. More generally, as the Maltese architect Richard England has observed: ‘When all is said and done there remains the building.’
Perhaps a more basic – though equally unsatisfactory – aspect of the ‘elite’ definition of architecture lies in its inherent bias towards monumentality: what about those cultures that, for whatever reason, chose not to build durable or extravagant monuments? Would not this definition exclude the extraordinarily skilful but often small-scale or impermanent structures of many Native American, Oceanic or African tribal groups, the domestic buildings of the ancient Greeks, or any number of localised traditions making use of fragile materials or given to humble, everyday uses? This perhaps unrealistic discrimination lies behind architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner’s famous comparison of a cathedral and a bicycle shed in his Outline of European Architecture (1943): the former was held to represent ‘architecture’ (perhaps even with a capital A) with distinct ‘aesthetic appeal’ while the latter was seen as mere ‘building’ of a strictly functional character. As this example suggests, the question is at the same time complicated by the professional divide between architecture and engineering (and indeed building and contracting). Can purely utilitarian structures, whatever their technical merits, be seen as architecture? The success of the modern movement in deliberately merging or blurring the parameters of both fields has perhaps rendered the question less pressing in the present day, but the status of ancient shelters, barns, warehouses and the like has yet to be dealt with.
Having laid out this series of caveats, we can now see that this book presents a selection of monuments that fits a more traditional definition of architecture. (The number of houses included in the later sections, reflecting a growing theoretical interest in the dwelling over the last few centuries, may represent a countercurrent.) Illustrated here are some of the most prominent examples of historical architecture to have survived above ground. Eschewing monuments that have vanished without a trace or which have left only scanty remains on the surface, the guiding principle has been to choose buildings that are still visible, even in mutilated or partial form, and which can be serviceably represented by a photograph. Apart from the fact that increasing world population and affluence over the last century has dramatically increased the sheer amount of monumental (or at least large-scale) architecture being erected, this editorial decision may help to explain why relatively few pre-medieval structures appear here while the number of buildings from after 1900 is so great. In consequence, this book cannot give a full account of, say, Hellenistic architecture, many of whose masterworks – like the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus or the Pharos of Alexandria – have disappeared from view almost entirely, leaving only a few scattered stones and shattered statues to evidence their onetime existence.
The definition of architecture also raises the question of the classification and sequencing of monuments. Older texts on architecture tended to simplify the process of historical classification by creating only two basic categories: ancient and modern. This has long been overlaid by the historiographical investigations of the last two centuries, and has further been complicated by a growing understanding of non-Western building traditions. A complete global chronology of architecture, though highly complex, can now be established. The beginning student of Western art and architecture soon learns that a great number of specialised terms – ’Renaissance’, ‘Neo-Palladian’, ‘Churrigueresque’, ‘Postmodern’ and so on – are used to describe historical buildings. (Similarly, the study of non-Western architectural cultures demands the assimilation of another set of historical labels, such as the Heian period in Japan, the Qing dynasty in China, or the Umayyad dynasty in Muslim countries.) These pigeonhole terms are at once chronological, regional and stylistic in character. But in any modern text on architecture, the introduction of such terms is immediately followed by qualifications: none is absolute, and their value lies primarily in their usefulness rather than their innate truth or accuracy. The chronological division between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, for example, is notoriously difficult to gauge with any degree of accuracy: classicising tendencies can be traced far back into medieval thought and practise, while medieval building traditions continued long into the 17th century in many parts of Europe. The Baroque, which is generally held to run from the later 1600s to about 1750 in Europe and the Americas, is untidily overlapped on either end by the Renaissance and the Neoclassical age, and indeed can even be held to define a stylistic tendency toward exuberant formal experimentation that cuts across historical or cultural divisions: it is quite possible to talk of ‘Baroque’ tendencies in late Roman provincial architecture or in Japanese shrines of the early Edo period, for example. It is therefore wise to see such labels as indicating relatively loose architectural affinities rather than as airtight categories in the manner of botanical taxonomy.
Structure and Materials
The earliest buildings that have been revealed by archaeological investigation are relatively simple shelters of mud, stone, wood and bone – well suited, indeed, to William Morris’s primal definition of architecture as ‘the moulding and altering to human needs of the very face of the earth itself’ (1881). Perhaps the most interesting aspect of many of these prehistoric buildings is the intimation that practical concerns played only a secondary role in so many of them: just as the magnificent but largely inaccessible cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamira may appear to have served no immediate ends in terms of basic survival, the great monolithic constructions of Stonehenge and Carnac – which clearly demanded inordinate amounts of sheer physical labour – were intended purely for ritual usage. Many elaborate tomb structures would also fit this definition. Even domestic space, as suggested by foundations excavated in the very ancient Neolithic city of Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, is often indistinguishable from spaces of a sacred character. This observation perhaps serves simply to underline that a putative distinction between those activities associated with day-to-day existence and those connected with spirituality and the supernatural was by no means as clear in earlier times as it may seem to be today.
The mud ziggurats and palaces of the Mesopotamian civilisations set the precedent for the more durable stone architecture of ancient Egypt. This, in turn, was to inspire the limestone and marble temples of the Greeks, who evolved that elegant and aesthetically sophisticated mode of building that we have come to term the Classical. Based on the basic building unit of the column and making use