CHAPTER SEVEN

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HOW MUCH DOES AN ARCHITECT NEED TO KNOW?

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Architecture’s old argument about what one person should know

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Vitruvius expected architecture to draw upon many forms of knowledge, but modern professional culture has made breadth suspicious for good reasons. Expertise has deepened beyond anything one person can possess, and the word polymath can sound less like description than applause. It is worth asking what remains useful in the old idea without pretending that curiosity across fields is the same thing as specialist competence.2

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Charles Wright Architects has used the term in describing Wright's background and practice.¹ That makes it relevant to this investigation, but not independent evidence of anything. Practices are entitled to describe themselves. Critics are equally entitled to become suspicious when the description arrives with a word that once belonged comfortably beside Leonardo da Vinci. My first inclination was therefore to get rid of it. Vitruvius made that more difficult.1

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I had remembered De architectura as an early source for the architect as universal genius: geometry before breakfast, philosophy over lunch, astronomy in the afternoon. The actual argument is considerably less foolish. Vitruvius expects the architect to possess an alarming breadth of learning, including drawing, geometry, history, philosophy, music, medicine, law and astronomy, but he also recognises that the architect cannot achieve the specialist mastery of those who devote themselves entirely to individual fields.² What he requires is sufficient understanding to judge among them and to recognise their relevance to architecture. This does not make every competent architect a polymath. It does suggest that architecture has always contained a problem of breadth.

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The profession itself makes that problem worse because almost nothing it touches belongs exclusively to architecture. A wall is simultaneously structure, enclosure, environmental mediator, fire separation, acoustic device, material assembly, spatial boundary and, if the architect is lucky, something worth looking at. A window can become an argument involving light, heat, ventilation, waterproofing, structure, manufacture, view, privacy, cost and regulation before anybody has decided whether it is beautiful. Specialisation helps us solve these problems by separating them. Architecture has to put the consequences back together. Here polymath begins to recover a little usefulness, although perhaps not in its grand historical sense. What interests me in Wright is less the claim to mastery across multiple disciplines than the persistence of a polymathic disposition: an appetite for crossing boundaries between forms of knowledge and testing what happens when they are forced into the same architectural decision.

None of this proves polymathy. It describes architecture. That objection needs to remain in the room. Every serious architect works across multiple forms of knowledge because buildings require it. Breadth alone therefore tells us very little. If the argument for Wright is simply that he has designed houses, public buildings, schools, healthcare projects and larger institutional work while being interested in art and engineering, we have discovered that an architect has had a varied career. Australian architecture supplies formidable counterexamples.

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Glenn Murcutt immediately complicates any attempt to make breadth the central measure. His body of work is concentrated compared with a large multidisciplinary practice, yet the intellectual range within it is considerable. Structure, climate, material economy, landscape, construction and occupation are repeatedly brought into unusually close relationship. The 2002 Pritzker Prize citation emphasised precisely the combination of environmental responsiveness, material intelligence and disciplined architectural thought that made his apparently modest buildings globally consequential.³ Murcutt suggests that synthesis can become wider by going deeper.3

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John Wardle creates the opposite difficulty. The more I looked for an Australian comparison that might establish Wright's breadth as unusual, the more Wardle made the exercise troublesome. This is precisely why he belongs here. The Australian Institute of Architects' Gold Medal citation describes a practice capable of moving from intensely considered residential work into major educational, cultural and commercial projects while retaining a strong architectural identity.⁴ The comparison removes several easy claims at once. Wright is not unusual simply because houses led to institutions, because a relatively concentrated design culture survived increasing scale, or because architectural character persisted across different programmes.4

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Even this list makes me nervous. Biography can manufacture uniqueness simply by adding enough variables. Every person's life becomes unprecedented if described with sufficient resolution. The relevant question is therefore not whether another architect has precisely the same résumé. Of course not. It is whether the conjunction produces a recognisable mode of architectural thought. That brings us back to synthesis. I have resisted the word because architecture uses it too easily. Every project description seems eventually to “synthesise” site, programme, context and environment, usually shortly before the photographs demonstrate that the building has a roof. If synthesis means only that several requirements have been accommodated at once, it tells us almost nothing.

The stronger meaning is more demanding. A synthesis occurs when the interaction between different forms of knowledge changes the architectural answer. Stamp is useful again, provided we do not let it monopolise the discussion. Structure there is not simply calculated after the form is imagined. The mass of the construction participates in the character of the building. Water is not merely an engineering issue or landscape feature; it affects the spatial and visual reading of the house. Climate is not a sustainability paragraph attached to an otherwise independent object; it contributes to the tension between openness and defence. This does not mean every decision arose simultaneously or from one person. Buildings are messier than critical prose. It means the final architecture is difficult to divide back into the categories through which it had to be produced. That may be a better test for synthesis. The parts remain identifiable, but their consequences no longer do.

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John Lautner understood something similar, although through a very different architectural temperament. His houses frequently make structure, site, movement and spatial experience difficult to separate. Engineering can become the means through which the architectural idea is physically intensified rather than merely supported. The comparison with Wright is useful at that level and dangerous beyond it. There is no convincing reason to turn Wright into an Australian Lautner, and doing so would flatten both architects. What matters is the shared refusal to assume that the technical and experiential problems belong to different buildings.⁵5

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Frank Lloyd Wright pushed the proposition further still. His idea of organic architecture sought continuity among site, structure, material, furnishing and occupation, sometimes extending architectural control to an extent that modern collaborative practice would find difficult and occasionally undesirable.⁶ The historical importance of that ambition is obvious. So is its authoritarian possibility. Totality has a politics. The architect who believes everything is related may eventually conclude that everything should therefore be controlled by the architect. That is where the idea of the Total Architect becomes dangerous. The phrase initially sounds like an inflation of polymath. If a polymath knows many things, perhaps the Total Architect knows all the architectural things and controls their final arrangement. This produces exactly the heroic figure we have spent several chapters dismantling.6

That formulation is narrower than omniscience and considerably more demanding than style. It does not ask the architect to replace specialists. It asks architecture to remain responsible for what happens when specialist decisions encounter one another in physical space. The distinction helps explain why the Artist–Engineer idea has survived this far.

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It would be indefensible if it meant Wright possessed the professional expertise of an engineer simply because his architecture engages structure, water or environmental performance. He does not need to. The term becomes more useful when engineer describes an aspect of architectural thinking: curiosity about how physical systems behave, how forces move, how materials work and how technical constraints can participate in architectural invention rather than arriving afterwards to make the invention stand up. The artist half needs similar restraint. This is where polymathy begins to seem both useful and inadequate. It identifies breadth, curiosity and movement between territories, but it does not explain what Wright does with them. A collector of disciplines could be a polymath without synthesising anything. The more interesting operation occurs between the disciplines. Polymathy names the territory. Synthesis names the movement across it.

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There are also ordinary explanations for breadth. Projects arrive. Clients ask for things. Practices need work. One commission leads to another. Geography matters. Opportunity matters. The economy matters. Some of what looks like intellectual expansion from a distance may have felt at the time like keeping an office running. That mundane possibility improves the argument rather than destroying it. A genuine architectural disposition should survive contact with contingency. The interesting thing is not the number of trophies. Architecture has no shortage of trophies. It is the movement between categories, scales and organisational structures. Large organisations achieve breadth by distributing expertise. The unusual question in Wright's case is how much conceptual continuity can remain around an identifiable architect while the knowledge required to make the work becomes increasingly distributed.

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If identity consists of formal signatures, collaboration makes persistence difficult because other architects alter the form. If identity consists partly of the questions an architect repeatedly brings to a project, it may survive more easily. How should a building meet climate? How separate should interior and exterior become? Can technical necessity intensify rather than diminish spatial experience? How do material, structure and landscape alter one another? What happens when the project crosses a boundary between fields? By now I no longer think polymath should be dismissed. I also don't think it is the final word. And even synthesis leaves something unresolved, because connecting several forms of knowledge still raises the question of why they should be connected in the first place. Architecture can coordinate disciplines efficiently without producing anything we would call a whole. It can solve interfaces while leaving the deeper relationships untouched. The ancient argument about what an architect should know therefore turns out to conceal another question. What is all that knowledge for?

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Vitruvius wanted an architect capable of judgment across fields. Modern practice has made the fields vastly more specialised while leaving the need for judgment intact. Wright's career gives us one contemporary version of the problem, but it does not solve it by restoring the Renaissance universal man. That figure is gone, if he ever existed as neatly as architectural mythology suggests. Something else remains possible.

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An architect can know that his knowledge is incomplete and still accept responsibility for relationships beyond any one speciality. He can invite other forms of expertise without assuming that collaboration makes architectural judgment obsolete. He can move between art and technical knowledge without claiming professional mastery of both. He can pursue breadth while recognising that breadth without depth becomes tourism. That is a considerably less glamorous figure than the polymath genius. I suspect it is also closer to the architect we have actually been looking for. The trouble is that once architecture is understood this way, the buildings can no longer be explained by their individual ingredients. Structure, landscape, climate, material, programme and image tell us what enters the work, but not why the work sometimes feels as though those things belong together. To understand that, we need to stop counting fields. We need to ask how much of a building can become one thought.

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Notes & References →

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