In studying the history of architectural style there is a great temptation to impose a narrative of linear progression – from the primitive to the sophisticated, from the plain to the decorated. This approach began with Alberti and others in the Renaissance, but was set forth definitively in the early 1700s by a German art historian, Johann Winckelmann. By refining the theories of his contemporary, Abbe Laugier, Winckelmann established a narrative in which one style follows another in succession – a series of broad formal movements or architectural traditions, some logically derivative of their predecessor, some in opposition or rebellion to the immediate past, and a few seemingly independent. For this and other contributions, he is considered the father of art history.
Winckelmann’s version became canonical and this way of thinking remains pervasive today even though it has frequently been discredited by archaeology. Since Winckelmann, there has been a tendency to construct a progression from the primitive to the sophisticated, often delineated with a graphic family tree, starting with a lean-to or hut made of mammoth tusks or branches and culminating with the style that was au courant in whatever culture constructed the narrative. But architectural evolution, like biological evolution, is misrepresented by such an approach. While a straightforward chronology is more easily grasped and certainly more easily memorized, unthinking reliance on this idea of linear sequence limits our understanding. To examine the forces of history requires intelligence and insight, not simply rote memorization.
The shortcomings of this approach can be illustrated by a few simple examples.
Canadian architectural histories often availed themselves of Indian villages in order to illustrate primitive stone-age architecture - Huron villages in Eastern Canada, Haida villages on the West Coast. Regrettably this rather tenuous narrative was contrary to archaeological and historical evidence as far as the West Coast was concerned. The primitive “stone age” village of the Haida was not at all stone age. By the time white men first started recording these stone-age villages, the Haida had been using trade-acquired metal tools for about a century and a half, and had developed craftsmen who were expert in using them. There is no evidence that this type of construction on the West Coast pre-dates the arrival of metal tools – hence, we are not dealing with stone-age technology.
Fortunately, we have a West Coast “Pompeii”. Ozette, a 16th-century Indian village, was preserved by a giant mud slide. At the time of its demise the community had been in existence for about a millennium and a half. The village made use of copper and, more unexpectedly, iron. The iron in the village was not of European manufacture, but bore a strong resemblance to the kind of iron in use in the 15th century among the primitive Siberian tribes or in the 14th century by the northern Mongols. Even before European contact, North West Coast Indians were well acquainted with rude iron, and expert at working with copper – hence, by definition, not stone age.
Another truism of architectural categorization is that the degree of refinement, or the decorative sophistication of workmanship, is used to classify art and architecture in terms of the maturity and evolution of a style. The development of Haida art belies this theory. Even a cursory examination leads one to the immediate conclusion that the older pieces are executed to a greater degree of refinement and decoration. Some would explain this away with references to the pernicious effect of increased contact with the dominant white culture.
The other difficulty with using the primitive-to-sophisticated model is that even in Europe historic evidence belies it, whether viewed over centuries or over decades. The sophisticated Roman use of reinforced concrete was not equaled until the early 1900s. (In fact, knowledge of concrete disappeared during the middle ages and was only redeveloped in the 1700s.)
In terms of short trends, the primitive-to-sophisticated, plain-to-decorated approach is not even applicable in a modern Canadian context. If one examines Canadian high-street shop fronts from the early 1900s and compares them with the equivalent in the 1930s the latter are less architecturally sophisticated, and certainly less decorated, than their precursors.
This idea of progress in a single direction, rather than as a series of recurring cycles, is bequeathed to us by Judaism through the early Christian church, a subject to which we will return in a later chapter.
Ultimately, the era and culture that a building was built in is one of the best pieces of information available in determining its style. Though the Gothic and Greco-Roman Classical styles have returned in cyclical fashion, there is usually a not-so-subtle variation in each iteration. In general, architectural styles are like the hem lengths of women’s skirts – cyclical, with each iteration claiming definitive primacy.
[Next post: St Paul's Indian Church]
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