How artists and architects throughout time have conceived the relationship between architecture, nature, and art
The Primitive Hut, introduced in Marc-Antoine Laugier's Essai sur l’architecture (1755), emphasizes a return to the fundamental principles of architecture. The concept represents the most basic form of human shelter, built using simple, natural elements: four columns, a horizontal beam (entablature), and a sloping roof for protection from the elements. This structure embodies the purest and most essential aspects of architecture, unadorned by the excesses of later styles, such as Baroque architecture, which Laugier criticized for its complexity and ornamentation.
The Primitive Hut reestablishes the mimetic foundations of architecture by advocating for designs that imitate the simplicity and functionality found in nature. Good architecture, Laugier argues, should emulate essential and unadorned forms, reflecting the inherent harmony between humanity and the natural world. This idea has had a lasting impact on architectural theory, influencing subsequent discussions about the relationship between architecture, nature, and human needs.
Laugier expresses admiration for Gothic church interiors, noting their ability to produce powerful impressions on his soul by imitating rows of trees. He describes the range of emotions these structures evoke, from a state of transcendent enthusiasm to shock, disgust, and revulsion (Observations sur l’architecture). His discussions on the emotional and spiritual impact of architecture “open the door to theorizing the visual effects of architecture through an analysis of sentiments arising from ocular impressions... transforming the very nature of the relationship between the observer and architecture” (Armstrong 184). The Enlightenment's Zeitgeist, particularly sensationalism, elucidates the direct and immediate relationship between physical objects and the mind, tracing the origin of ideas and knowledge to sensation or sense perceptions. Alongside Laugier, Enlightenment architects emphasized the interplay between architecture and nature, focusing on the emotional and sensory experiences evoked by architectural forms. They designed with an understanding of how architectural and landscape elements could affect observers' senses, using visual frames and associative forms to convey deeper meanings. Drawing inspiration from representational arts like drawing and painting, these architects sought to elicit similar emotional responses, enriching the observer's experience of space.
The Picturesque Garden is an aesthetic category developed in the 18th century, characterized by a preoccupation with creating landscapes that resemble natural scenes depicted in paintings. This style emerged as a reaction against the formality and order of Neoclassicism, embracing irregularity, asymmetry, and variety to evoke a sense of natural beauty.
According to Neil Levine, the revolutionary aspect of the eighteenth-century English landscape garden lies in its relationship to seventeenth-century landscape paintings by artists like Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. These picturesque gardens, akin to three-dimensional paintings, juxtapose architecture with visual arts such as painting and drawing, emphasizing architecture's ability to imitate nature. Consequently, architecture transforms into a visual representation of narratives and meanings, blending fiction with scenery.
Lorrain’s Paintings as a probable inspiration for Stourhead:
It’s worth noting that in Western art history, landscape painting as a genre did not truly emerge until the Renaissance and was considered a lower genre until the late eighteenth century. The works of Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain were categorized as historical paintings, where natural and architectural elements served merely as backgrounds and settings for narratives—primarily pastorals or events from the Bible or classical mythology.
According to Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf, Poussin seeks to recreate the communities of ancient Greece, using Roman architectural elements and Palladio’s architectural principles. His heroic landscapes are stylized, arranged views akin to those found in many Italian towns, emphasizing basic stereometric forms — the cube, the cylinder, and the pyramid.” Poussin’s configurations of planes may indicate “different types of collective constellations”: the monuments and buildings in the background represent human society and common achievement; the middle ground serves as a transition from the world of community to nature; isolated figures in the foreground, “vulnerable, without the protection of architecture (that is, civilization), face the fundamental conditions of life symbolized by a state of pure nature” (102-5). Thus, architecture, in addition to serving as background scenery, represents civilization, community, and collective achievement, without which humanity faces the elemental forces of nature and the fundamental conditions of existence in isolation. Another interpretation posits that these heroic landscapes embody Stoic values, which diminish artificial forces, arguing that morality and virtue require a return to nature. In this view, architecture represents the artificial growth of society.
Poussin uses Roman buildings to depict Greek sceneries:
As in Poussin’s paintings, architectural motifs in the picturesque garden are composed as scenery, featuring an eclectic variety of forms and styles. This differentiation and pluralism of styles open the door to architectural characterization and association. Each building is designed to evoke a certain mood, provoke thoughts, and convey messages and meanings based on its historical traditions. Unlike in the paintings, architecture in the picturesque garden assumes an active role in telling the story and engaging the observer. At Castle Howard, geometry becomes the central factor in differentiating and determining building
types and their corresponding meanings. As Levine notes, “The Temple, the Mausoleum, and the Pyramid each declare their independence from the other two through their geometry, while relating to the others in the expression of geometry’s three primary forms” (38). These structures are, in a sense, metaphors extracted and abstracted from their historical appearances. Rooted in historical traditions and shared memories, these geometric figures are representational rather than abstract.
It is not until the beginning of the 20th century that geometry completely loses its reference to nature and historical meanings. Bauhaus designers began to break down objects into primary geometric forms and use them to create new items. Artists such as Malevich, Kandinsky, and Mondrian explored geometry as a non-representational vocabulary, each with separate approaches and philosophies.
Both Malevich and Mondrian emphasized asymmetry. Malevich ensured that his figures were slightly skewed so that the viewer would not identify them as pure geometry. For instance, what is interesting about Malevich’s Red Square is that it is neither exact nor perfect but asymmetrical and off-centered. Irrational, intuitive, and in motion, the square engages the observer and provokes curiosity. Mondrian’s structure, on the other hand, is rational. Influenced by Hegel’s Dialectics, Mondrian sought a timeless, asymmetrical, dynamic equilibrium that reveals the world’s underlying structure.
Asymmetric composition is the key feature of the picturesque garden, but its idea of asymmetry, unlike the art of Malevich and Mondrian, which seeks to express the underlying truth of the world, is representational and eclectic—in a sense, the opposite of abstraction and deduction. Nature is asymmetric, irregular, and non-axial. The winding paths and reciprocal vistas not only imitate nature but also stage nature, “encompassing ‘real’ landscape beyond the garden’s actual limits, thus blurring distinctions between the composed and the natural, between art and nature” (Bergdoll 76). In contrast to the highly formal and artificial French gardens, the picturesque garden implies an act of returning to nature, embodying both sensationalist and stoic values.
The Sublime, in the 18th century, refers to the awe-inspiring power and vastness of nature that evoke deep emotional responses. Romanticism, emerging later in the same century, emphasizes individual emotion and the glorification of nature's beauty and power.
The position and development of landscape paintings reflect how people observe and investigate the world they live in, and how they perceive their relationship with nature, the known, and the unknown. Generally speaking, the heroic landscapes before the Romantic era are composed in a well-calculated manner, providing an aesthetically pleasing background for narratives. The scenery is mostly poetic, graceful, and serene, embodying classical beauty and ideals. With the growth of the Romantic movement, landscape painting shifts from the beautiful towards the sublime, with nature becoming the main theme or pure subject of painting. Instead of serving as the setting for historical or religious events, nature itself becomes the event, the message in its own right—a message that is too vast to comprehend, too intricate to decipher.
Unlike nature, architecture—whether as scenery, metaphor, human achievement, or representation of nature, narrative, or civilization—is always comprehensible. It does not serve as a place for people to contemplate and confront the elemental forces of creation. Architects such as Laugier, Leroy, and Boullée often describe architectural effects as imitations of nature. This concept is particularly evident in the picturesque garden, where buildings and their embodied messages are concrete and comprehensible, making them accessible to human understanding. By comparison, in de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings, architecture itself, like nature in Romantic landscapes, becomes the message, the enigma, and the cipher. This metaphysical architecture embodies a Nietzschean worldview, where everything—including nature, architecture, and humanity—is perceived in its essence as a "thing".
The idea that everything is essentially a "thing" and that the observer contemplates and reflects upon these "things" represents a fundamentally different aesthetic and awareness of the world. This concept aligns with the notion of Mono no aware and lacrimae rerum—the pathos of things, tears of things, and the transience of things.
Mono no aware is a Japanese term expressing an awareness of the impermanence of things and a gentle sadness at their passing. Similarly, lacrimae rerum, a Latin phrase from Virgil's Aeneid, evokes the tears inherent in the human experience and the sorrow embedded in the world's transient nature. These philosophies highlight a deep emotional engagement with the ephemeral and mutable aspects of life.
The pathos of space can be expressed through the displacement of objects, the inversion of interior and exterior, and the presence of absence and emptiness. It emphasizes daily, used objects and materials themselves, rather than relying on the outstanding scale and geometry commonly employed in architectural practice to produce visual effects. This approach highlights the subtle emotional and existential qualities of space, focusing on the ordinary and transient aspects of our environment.
The pathos of space and things:
Works Cited
Armstrong, Christopher Drew and David Le Roy. Julien-David Leroy and the Making of Architectural History. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2012., 2012. Classical tradition in architecture.
Bergdoll, Barry. European Architecture 1750-1890. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Lagerlöf, Margaretha Rossholm. Ideal Landscape : Annibale Carracci, Nicolas Poussin, and Claude Lorrain. New Haven : Yale University Press, 1990., 1990.
Neil Levine, Modern Architecture: Representation and Reality. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009.
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