Out-Law, Dis-Order, and In-Justice Captured in Concrete: the Design of the Scottish Parliament Building

This post is the latest in an occasional series that contrasts traditional and modern architecture. The principles that underlie the two modes of design are explained in an earlier article: Cacophony and Monotony are the Twin Principles of Modern Design. Whatever Happened to Harmony?

Here is the current Scottish Parliament building, designed by a Spanish architect and completed in 2004.

Wikipedia tells us on the page devoted to the building:

A major public inquiry into the handling of the construction, chaired by the former Lord Advocate, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, was established in 2003. The inquiry concluded in September 2004 and criticised the management of the whole project from the realisation of cost increases down to the way in which major design changes were implemented. Despite these criticisms and a mixed public reaction, the building was welcomed by architectural academics and critics. The building aimed to achieve a poetic union between the Scottish landscape, its people, its culture, and the city of Edinburgh. The Parliament Building won numerous awards including the 2005 Stirling Prize and has been described by landscape architect Charles Jencks as “a tour de force of arts and crafts and quality without parallel in the last 100 years of British architecture.”

As usual, you have architectural experts asserting that it is good, while most of the people who have to look at it on a day to day basis struggle with the ugliness of it. This is the pattern of modern culture. The people who appreciate such things are the elites who flatter themselves that they are cultured, and hence set apart from the great unwashed masses. Typically they had to go to university to have good taste educated out of them.

In regard to the stated aims: I am curious as to how this speaks visually of Edinburgh, the Scottish landscape, the Scottish people, or Scottish culture. Could anyone looking at this building without knowing what or where it was discern anything Scottish about it? I am struggling to see any of these things myself. It reminds more of a hurriedly erected seaside hotel that might be seen in the home country of the architect, Spain. 

Contrast the above with a building previously associate with the Scottish parliament, in Parliament Square, Edinburgh, built in the early 19th century.

The design visibly speaks of the function of the building – the formulation of law in accordance with the principles of justice and directed to the common good and the maintenance of order in society. Law and order – the two go together. The design incorporates the universal principles of harmony and proportion. The principles of harmony and order are derived from an analysis of the pattern of the cosmos and what in common perception makes it beautiful. “Cosmos” is a Greek word that also means both “beauty” and “order”: the ancient Greeks assumed that these things went together and were universal, which is to say, that they were apprehended by all people.

As universal Christian principles, developed from those of the ancient Greeks, the principles of harmonious proportion are appropriate to Scotland too. The Scottish landscape is in my opinion as beautiful a part of the cosmos as one can find. Therefore, the mathematical principles of cosmic harmony and order that become the design basis for this building are deeply connected to the Highlands of Scotland or the Western Isles.

The Isle of Skye in the Hebrides

The design of the building is also characteristic of the traditional architecture of Edinburgh, a city that attracts many visitors because of the beauty of the Georgian and neo-classical architecture of its center. Most of it was built out of a locally quarried sandstone, and thus incorporates into itself the very fabric of Scotland’s geography, and hence also its people and culture.

The principles of harmony and proportion - which I describe in my book The Way of Beauty, and teach in my course The Mathematics of Beauty at Pontifex University - are apparent in the Parliament Square buildings and the others in New Town. See how the three stories of different dimensions work together harmoniously in accordance with the mathematical principles of musical harmony.

These buildings will continue to be an attraction long after the modern version has been razed to the ground and forgotten.

Edinburgh’s Georgian ‘New Town’, the architecture that characterises the city.

The Good, and the Bad and Ugly: Harmony and Cacophony in North Wales and Princeton

Here’s another in an occasional series in which I feature buildings I see on my travels. The hope is that it will inspire architects, or those who commission their work, to build more beautiful buildings, and actually make the effort to learn the mathematics behind traditional harmony and proportion (as described in Section II of my book The Way of Beauty). My assertion is that, to draw a musical analogy, harmony is the principle of traditional architectural design, while monotony and cacophony are the principles of contemporary architectural design. I give a deeper explanation in a past article, here.

First, the Good - harmony: here are some examples in North Wales, and one from the campus of Princeton University. Then the Bad and Ugly - cacophony - as exemplified by the newly opened New College West in Princeton NJ, which deliberately seeks to depart from the harmonious proportions of the otherwise beautiful neo gothic campus.

Here are the restored gothic buildings at St Winifride’s Well in North Wales. This is a pilgrimage site in which, as at Lourdes, people dip into the well water and are cured. It has been a pilgrimage site since the 7th century, when St Winifride was cured miraculously after being decapitated.

Next we see the 18th century Georgian houses on the seafront of an old resort, Beaumaris, in Anglesey. I tried unsuccessfully to find out why a Welsh town has a name derived from a French phrase, beau marais meaning beautiful marsh.

These traditional buildings incorporate proportions that are based on musical theory. An indication of this is the design in groups of three, with differing sized windows that relate to each other in visual harmony, just like three notes in a chord. The mathematics that governs the design is comparable to that which governs the frequencies of the notes in a chord.

Now look at a building on the old campus at Princeton.

  

The neo-Gothic campus of Princeton was built in imitation of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, mostly in the early part of the last century. However, as recently as 2007, Whitman College was completed, also in a neo-Gothic style. (The name comes from the main donor, a past CEO of eBay.) It blends into the rest of the campus perfectly and the architects are to be congratulated for resisting the temptation to be nonconformist!

Continue Reading this Article. . .

Something Harmonious, Something Monotonous, Something Cacophonous

As a regular photo feature, I am going to post a photo of a building that displays clear harmonious proportion. Each time I will try to contrast it with either something either monotonous - with dull, even spacing - or cacophonous, which has random proportions. For more information on the mathematics of beauty and proportion see my book, The Way of Beauty or the Mathematics of Beauty course at Pontifex University, which goes into even greater depth. This course is offered both for Master“’s credit or Continuing Education Units. These trace the development of this field back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and early Christian figures such as Boethius and Augustine. 

Today, we have a side view of the Parry Mansion, an 18th-century house in New Hope, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, which is now preserved in historical form and houses the local historical society. I took the side-on snaps myself on a walk around the town. The engraved stone block set into the structure up high say Benj.n Parry 1784.

 
The windows show a perfect chord in stone. Three different magnitudes work together visually like three notes in a major triad. As we move upwards we get a sense of the rhythm: the first relates to the second as the second relates to the third. For some context, I have added photos of other views below too.

And in contrast here’s some cacophony. This house has random proportions. The porch doesn’t fit the entrance and bears no relation to the windows to the right. It’s probably a nice house to live in, since as long as you are inside, you can only look out of it, and therefore don’t need to be worry too much about how ugly it is

It has clean-cut sharp lines that give it some attractiveness, perhaps, when viewed in isolation, but there is no discernable pattern of proportion here that relates the parts to each other. I want to strip that porch away so that I can see what the rest of the house looks like! Similarly, its randomness means that it will be almost impossible to harmonize its design with other buildings around it, which will make the neighborhood look random and ugly, with houses that bear no relation to each other. It will sit unhappily in a natural setting too, looking like a concrete scar on the landscape, for the dimensions of traditional harmonious proportion which this artist rejected are based upon the observation of the cosmos. The only way to stop it from looking as though it doesn’t belong is to remove as much nature from around it as possible, as has been done here, and hide the view of nearby buildings: alternatively, one could have so much climbing ivy and shrubs that the proportions of the building itself are hidden from view altogether.

So long, Frank Lloyd Wright. Or at least his influence, we hope.