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The Challenge of Architectural Meaning
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by Robert Nauman
University of Colorado-Boulder
Boulder, Colorado
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| | Building a Context
Architecture can be a challenging subject for art history students. Too often, the formal elements of design become the focus of class discussion, and students become lost in the "pavement to pediment" vocabulary lists that seem to have little relevance to any broader cultural issues. As these daunting tasks of memorization mount, enthusiasm for the subject wanes. As teachers, we all know that people learn best when they're enthusiastically engaged with a topic, but how do we initiate discussion or engage students' imaginations when the topic is architecture?
To address this question, I propose that you think of a topic in the arts that you really enjoy teaching. Perhaps it's the art of Michelangelo, or a work from antiquity, or a painting by Vincent van Gogh. How do you teach it? Let's say you adore Van Gogh's painting. You probably convey this to students by explaining the ways Van Gogh combined, or synthesized, so many aspects of the artwork he most appreciated into his own -- the Dutch landscapes, Rembrandt's humanism, the formal elements of Japanese prints, Millet's realism and appreciation for the peasants, and the impressionists' colors and brushwork. Perhaps you read some of Van Gogh's letters to his brother, Theo, to give a sense of the passion he felt toward his work. In other words, you go beyond merely describing the work -- you invest it with meaning. You create a context for the work that goes beyond the short description given in the survey text you use, drawing on a visual vocabulary from past chapters.
When discussing architecture, teachers often use this approach up to a certain historic point. For example, you might put the Egyptian pyramids into a broader cultural context (students love hearing about mummies, right?). Or, when discussing classical work, you might have the class read about classical mythology or view films that relate to the glories of Rome -- and, given these contexts, students will remember works like the Colosseum. But how does one do that with nineteenth- or twentieth-century architecture? Given the limited length of this article, I'll focus on just a few works from those centuries as examples.
Example 1: Monticello
We'll begin with an easy one -- Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. Your survey text probably devotes a few paragraphs to this home. To make this home more interesting to your students, you'll have to provide more context and invest a bit more effort. Fortunately, providing that context is relatively easy with Monticello, and you can make your students do most of the work by posing a few questions to get them started. Have them go to the Monticello Web site and look at the images there:
 Monticello: The Home of Thomas Jefferson
Ask them to imagine how this building would have been experienced and by whom.
Remind your students that Monticellowas built early in the country's history and ask them to articulate how this might have affected the structure: How did Jefferson want his visitors to experience his estate? What does this home say about the principles upon which the U.S. was established and the founders' hopes for the future? Why are there Native American artifacts in the entry? (Remember Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase and hopes for the country's future expansion.) Why are those particular busts in the Tea Room? (They represent some of Jefferson's fellow countrymen as well as French Enlightenment personages involved with restructuring France's government.) Most texts note that the building's design draws on both English and French architectural traditions -- but remind your students that U. S. leaders at that time, as participants in the establishment of a new country, also wanted the design to refer symbolically to this country; it does so not only in terms of artifacts related to Western expansion but with allusions to earlier republics and democratic traditions. Note Jefferson's innovative solutions to design challenges -- see the bedroom, for example, in which the bed is situated in a wall space. Why? Because there was no air conditioning, and the breeze in the summer funneling through this space would create a cooler atmosphere. In the winter, Jefferson could draw curtains around it and create a small space that would be heated by his body warmth. Ask your students to suggest examples of Jefferson's practical innovations that could be incorporated into their own homes.
There is also another context here. Looking elsewhere on the Web site, students will read that Monticello was a working plantation that employed 130 slaves. Jefferson kept their presence invisible to his white visitors. Slaves served the house through underground service areas. Help your students assimilate that information: How would the slaves have experienced Monticello? How would their experience have differed from the average white visitor's during Jefferson's era? How does one encourage a student to look at diversity or gender issues in architecture? Looking at Monticello from these different perspectives is a way to give architecture a broader, more complex context. Ask your students to imagine themselves as a house. How would they describe themselves? How would they say people would experience them -- approach them and walk through their spaces?
Example 2: The Villa Savoye
Let's do a twentieth-century example. We'll make this one a bit more difficult, still choosing another image found in all the surveys -- Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye. Once again, the information can tie into a Web site (just do a GoogleTM search -- or let your students do it). For demonstration purposes, go to:
LeCorbusier -- Villa Savoye
This is one of multiple sites with images that take the user through the Villa Savoye. Compare this experience to the survey text descriptions. Most survey texts stop at a description of the exterior. (Ask your students: is that the only way they experience their homes, or do they also experience them as interior spaces that are perceived by moving through them?) The exterior is described in terms of its formal elements. Then most texts give an important clue to understanding this building -- they note that it combines elements of classical Greece and the machine age. How does the Villa Savoye do that? By the exterior description provided in the texts, the student is led to believe that it's because of the supporting columns, or pilotis, and the materials (concrete and steel). Yawn.
Let's propose something slightly different -- let's say Le Corbusier went beyond that and carried these notions into the interior of the house. Look at the Web site pictures. You'll notice that the main circulation elements in the house are ramps. Why? How did a person climb up to the Parthenon (Le Corbusier's favorite building)? Via ramp "equivalents" -- paths that wound their way up to the Parthenon. The machine aspect is tougher, but fortunately Le Corbusier is also very clear in saying that one of his favorite icons of machine technology was the ocean liner. People ascended into those liners via ramps with metal railings -- just like those in the Villa Savoye. Let the students use their imaginations to draw other parallels between this house and the Acropolis/Parthenon and machine technology -- the idea of the enclosed garden roof as a small Acropolis, for example. Ask them something like, "What does the word 'villa' imply -- what are the connections to the classical past?" Look at the materials used in the villa's construction. Point out to students that the basic construction method -- like that used in the Parthenon -- a post-and-lintel system (with steel and concrete instead of stone). What does the difference in those materials imply? Stone can only span relatively small spaces (the Parthenon had little interior space); steel and concrete allow spatial freedom and larger interior spaces (such as classrooms).
Example 3: The Schröder House
I'll use one last example to demonstrate how you might take clues from survey texts and expand them to make architecture more interesting. Most texts mention that the Gerrit Rietveld's Schröder House was built for a widow, Truus Schröder-Schräder, who had three children.The interior of the house was very much a collaborative effort between the two (Rietveld, although married, was romantically involved with Schröder -- something you don't read about in the survey texts). Schröder wanted a home where she and her children could communicate as equals -- thus the open spaces with sliding partitions. In this regard, the house is very playful. Most students will probably be able to envision living in a house with partitions like that and rearranging them each day according to their mood. There's an excellent book on the topic of women and modernist architecture by Alice T. Friedman titled Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History that discusses modern homes built by male architects for female patrons. It might be worth looking at as a model for reinvesting modern architecture with more diverse meaning than formal analysis provides.
I'm not implying that by reading a few chapters in a book, you'll immediately be able to pass on information that will equip your students to score brilliantly on AP® Exams. Perhaps, though, reading those chapters or something similar will help you guide students toward understanding architecture in a different way -- as forms that have a richness and multiplicity and complexity of meanings that draw on the past and exist in their own specific present. That, after all, is what makes the arts inspirational -- not merely their formal qualities, but the meanings they evoke that resonate within us. When we inspire our students to study the arts, we enthusiastically share those meanings with them. We pass on to them something that will enrich their lives -- in the case of architecture, by giving new meaning to the built environment. Those lessons last a lifetime. And maybe, in the process of learning them, your students will also gain the skills needed for success on the AP free-response question related to architecture.
Robert Nauman received dual master's degrees in music and fine arts before completing his Ph.D. in art and architectural history at the University of New Mexico. He currently teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where his research focuses on art and architectural history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nauman has served as a Reader and Table Leader for the AP Art History Exam, and he teaches an honors section of the art history survey at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Nauman is the author of several books and articles dealing with issues of contemporary architecture. His latest book, On the Wings of Modernism: The United States Air Force Academy (University of Illinois Press, 2004), deals with issues of American modernism and architecture during the cold war era. He is currently writing a chapter for a Northwestern University Press publication on the architect Walter Netsch, in addition to writing a book about English factory towns at the turn of the twentieth century. He received a Presidential Award for his contribution to the publication Modernism at Mid-Century: The Architecture of the United States Air Force Academy, and his book On the Wings of Modernism was nominated for the Society of Architectural Historians' Alice Davis Hitchcock Award, awarded yearly to -- according to the society's Web site -- "the most distinguished work of scholarship in the history of architecture published by a North American scholar.
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