Style

Definition

Style names the aesthetic sensibility associated with a given cultural period rather than a discipline. In Deyong's account, two opposing modern theories of style underwrote the avant-garde's attempt to define a style unique to its time. Semper's Der Stil (1861) traced the origins of architecture to craft, technique and performance — the shape of an amphora as an index of how the ancient Greeks collected water from the roofs of their houses; a definition that "must have presaged the modernist dictum form follows function," but which "applies mainly to the building's structure and exterior." Riegl's Late Roman Art Industry (1901/1903) identified style with the psychology of form: ornament as "the visible expression of an inner desire (Wollen) to transform the world via our interaction with it," grounded in man as "a longing (active) being" who "wants to interpret the world… in accordance with his inner drive (which may change with nation, location, and time)." Riegl further tied styles to two alternating modes of perception, optic and haptic — a schema paralleled by Worringer's categories of abstraction and empathy (see optic-haptic-perception).

The distributive consequence is the chapter's central claim: Semper's trajectory leads to functionalism relegated to structure and the exterior (Muthesius, the Bauhaus's post-Expressionist functionalism, "the canonical version of the history of modern architecture"), while Riegl's and Worringer's notion of style proved influential for the modern interior (van de Velde, Loos) — "an alternate history centered on the modern interior" relating "not to engineering and technical performance, but to the philosophy of aesthetic experience and the psychology of perception, in a word, a cultural sensibility." The style question is therefore not a period-costume matter but the very hinge on which the disciplinary relation between architecture and its interior turns: "Just as the split between form and function is ultimately an artificial one, so too is the dichotomy between architecture's interior and exterior."

This wiki also holds the historiographic critique of style-surveys: Hollis (via Scott on Summerson) shows that histories organized by style demand an "ersatz purity of vision" that falsifies composite, multi-authored interiors (see historiography-of-the-interior) — style is not only a theory of form but a historiographic technology.

Key Thinkers

• (Discussed in the source, not yet paged — see log: Gottfried Semper, Der Stil (1861) — style from craft, technique and performance; Alois Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry — style as the psychology of form, ornament as Wollen; Wilhelm Worringer — abstraction and empathy; Hermann Muthesius and Henry van de Velde — the 1914 Werkbund debate as the theories' first open conflict.)
• Adolf Loos — the Riegl-lineage practitioner: condemned ornament yet distanced himself from the purists; his style is split between austere exteriors and tactile, luxurious interiors.
• Sarah Deyong — the historiographer of the two-definitions schema and of the alternate, interior-centred history of style.
• Edith Wharton & Ogden Codman Jr — the proportional definition of style, the concept's earliest architectural theory in the wiki's record (1898/2006): "the essence of a style lies not in its use of ornament, but in its handling of proportion… decoration is always subservient to proportion; and a room, whatever its decoration may be, must represent the style to which its proportions belong" (p. 388); the organic-style thesis — the Louis XIV/XV/XVI "styles" "were, in fact, only the gradual development of one organic style, and hence differed only in the superficial use of ornament" (Note 1, p. 390); conformity defined as proportional acceptance "within those limits allowing free scope to the individual requirements" (p. 389); and the inescapability thesis — "an artistic tradition of over two thousand years," against which "he cannot originate a whole new architectural alphabet" (p. 389).

Related Concepts

• Optic and Haptic Perception — Riegl's perceptual basis of style; the alternating modes he associated with artistic styles.
• Architectural Ornament — for Riegl, ornament is not superfluous addition but the visible expression of Wollen; the ornament debate is a debate about style.
• Modernism — the canonical (Semperian/functionalist) vs. alternate (Rieglian/psychological) histories of the modern movement.
• Aesthetic Experience — the alternate history relates to "the philosophy of aesthetic experience and the psychology of perception."
• Historiography of the Interior — style as the organizing category of survey history, and its critique (ersatz purity of vision).
• Phenomenal Transparency — the compositional elaboration of Riegl/Worringer-style in Rowe & Slutzky's interior architecture.
• Streamlining — style as transferred engineering code ("a stylistic code evoking 'speed'") and as bodily symptom; the style-theory third ground (the body's eliminations).
• Taste — the social coding of style in consumption, from the interior-design side of the wiki.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Historical Tradition (Wharton & Codman 1898/2006) — style's proportional definition and its inescapability, the concept's earliest architectural theory in the wiki's record: "the essence of a style lies not in its use of ornament, but in its handling of proportion. Structure conditions ornament, not ornament structure" (p. 388); "a room, whatever its decoration may be, must represent the style to which its proportions belong. The less cannot include the greater" (p. 388); the lay diagnosis ("it is usually by ornamental details, rather than by proportion, that people distinguish one style from another," p. 388) and the architect's concession to it ("a concession to the client who, having asked for a Louis XVI room, would not know he had got it were these details left out," p. 388); Note 1's organic-style thesis — the three Louis "styles" as "only the gradual development of one organic style… differ[ing] only in the superficial use of ornament" (p. 390); the garbled-styles complaint ("the garbled form in which they are presented by some architects" making "people distrustful of 'styles'," p. 388); the rococo audit ("the wavy movement which, in the best rococo, was always an ornamental incident and never broke up the main lines of the design," pp. 388–389); the definition of conformity ("To conform to a style, then, is to accept those rules of proportion which the artistic experience of centuries has established as the best, while within those limits allowing free scope to the individual requirements," p. 389); the inescapability thesis ("the difficulty of getting rid of style… an artistic tradition of over two thousand years"; "he cannot originate a whole new architectural alphabet," p. 389); and the suited styles for modern life — "Italy since 1500, in France from the time of Louis XIV, and in England since the introduction of the Italian manner by Inigo Jones" (p. 389). Where Deyong's two theories ground style in production or psychology, Wharton & Codman ground it in proportion — and where the survey treats styles as periods, their Note 1 treats the Louis sequence as one organic style's phases. See proportion, the-double-test, tradition-vs-innovation.
• Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (Hope 1807/2006) — style's earliest furniture-scale document (1807): Hope's programme is announced as "the totally new style of decoration here described" (p. 154) — an ancient-derived style ("the elegancies of antique forms and ornaments… with all the requisites of modern customs and habits") offered not as period costume but as the escape from fashion ("such forms would acquire a timeless quality," headnote); the design-reform lineage's founding style-claim, whose historicity (the "English Empire" taste of 1807) poses the timelessness question the page's later sources resolve into Riegl's psychology and the decorators' comparison. See the-antique, fashion.
• A history of style and the modern interior (Deyong 2018) — the two modern definitions of style (Semper vs. Riegl); the Werkbund dramatization; the alternate interior-centred history; the closing dissolution of the form/function and interior/exterior dichotomies.
• (Re)constructing Histories (Hollis 2018) — the survey-of-styles historiography and its "ersatz purity of vision" (complementary source: style as historiographic problem).
• The Classical Language of Architecture (Summerson 1963) — style as a classical grammatical system; modernism as classical parentage (the canonical style-history Deyong's alternate history offsets).
• The Sterility of Perfection + The Rule Breaker's Success (Baldwin 1972/2006) — style in practice, at the decorator's end of Deyong's alternate history: Baldwin's designs "freely play with history, form and finish" (editors' introduction, p. 26) — period styles ("Norwegian Louis XVI," Louis XVI desk, Chippendale table, Bessarabian and Oriental rugs) treated as raw material to "mix and match… to charge their individual characteristics and create a uniquely decorated room," not as period-fidelity mandates. Where the survey historicizes style from outside, Baldwin lives inside it: style as the personal charge of the room ("A tiny library – with boiserie and double doors – can have as much style as a ballroom," p. 30).
• Suitability, Simplicity and Proportion (de Wolfe 1913/2006) — the decorator's prior theory of style-as-raw-material, a generation before Baldwin: "Don't go about the furnishing of your house with the idea that you must select the furniture of some one period and stick to that. It isn't at all necessary. There are old English chairs and tables of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries that fit into our quiet, spacious Twentieth Century country homes. Lines and fabrics and woods are the things to be compared" (p. 84) — comparison of qualities, not fidelity to pedigrees; period pedantry's shams rejected ("apoplectic chairs whose legs were fashioned like aquatic plants; tables upheld by tortured naked women… under the guise of being 'authentic period furniture,'" p. 84); and the method's democratization ("all of us can easily learn the ear-marks of the furniture that is suited to our homes," p. 84). De Wolfe is the first interior-side statement that style is comparative raw material rather than a mandate.
• The Dining Room (Eastlake 1868/2006) — style's house-holding thesis, the earliest statement in the wiki (1868): "Choose what style of furniture we may, it should surely be adopted throughout the house we live in" (p. 102) — style as a single, principled choice extended house-wide, against both the room-code convention (each room its own "principle of design," p. 102) and the multi-style mansion ("Gothic halls, Elizabethan chambers, Louis Quatorze drawing-rooms, &c., &c., all under one roof," p. 102). The excerpt also supplies the style-side target of every later interior theory: the trade-governed convention where "certain types of form and certain shades of colour are to be… for ever associated with certain apartments in the house" (p. 101) — style-by-decree rather than style-by-choice. Direct tension with de Wolfe (1913): Eastlake demands one style throughout; de Wolfe refuses single-period fidelity. See stylistic-unity, fashion, taste.
• From Wiener Kunst im Hause to the Wiener Werkstätte (Houze 2002/2006) — style's Viennese birth scene and its marketing constitution: the modern style "outlined" by the Wagner school on the Biedermeier's simplicity ("These men have outlined a new style," p. 156); the new style gendered ("much like a Viennese woman," p. 157); and the emergence thesis — the "tension between resisting and exploiting issues of fashion with regard to the emergence of modern style" (editors, p. 156), resolved into the complementary process: "the design of artistic interiors and furnishings, and the marketing of fashionable goods… a complementary process that allowed both ends to fuel one another creatively" (p. 160). Where Deyong's two theories of style (Semper's production; Riegl's Wollen) are rival accounts of style's source, Houze adds the third term both omit: style's dissemination — the secessionist style existed as such only through its trademark, its journals, its showroom-homes (see secessionist-style, wiener-werkstatte, biedermeier).
• Internal disconnect: Material memory in the John Portman originals (Marinic 2018) — style's end-state thesis, via Baudrillard: "Acknowledging his perspective on the death of the subject through enslavement to mass media, as well as Michel Foucault's critique of subjectivity, the spatial freedom of the John Portman original interiors reveals the end of style and a return to something more coded and intuitive" — and via Jameson, the cause: postmodern pastiche is "linked to an inability to develop new 'styles' as they are perceived to have already been invented," so that "art and the past are endlessly recycled and modernism becomes merely a postmodernist code." Portman's own split registers the condition: glass envelopes coded "'modern'" over "interior spatial postmodernity" — style surviving as code on the surface while the interior cycles through trend (see postmodernism, fashion).
• Streamlining: The Aesthetics of Waste (Lupton & Miller 1992/2006) — style as engineered code and as bodily symptom: streamlining "quickly became a stylistic code evoking 'speed' and 'modernity,' applied to immobile objects for which aerodynamic engineering is more fictional than functional" (p. 209) — a style transferred from physics to commerce, its curves "biologically curved yet industrially hard and incorruptible" (p. 210). And the anonymous/flamboyant periodization: "The flamboyant product designs of the 1930s were preceded by the more anonymous modernism of the bathroom and kitchen, which earlier had begun to replace heterogeneous collections of domestic equipment with continuous, coordinated ensembles" (p. 205) — the modern style's first American form was the fixture, not the teardrop. The essay's deepest claim styles style itself as symptom: "streamlining embodied an aesthetic of waste, a material style for expressing the logic of consumption" (p. 210) — "biological, economic, and stylistic" elimination "compact[ed] into one form" (p. 211). Where Deyong's two theories ground style in production (Semper) or psychology (Riegl), Lupton & Miller add a third ground: the body's eliminations (see streamlining, process-of-elimination, modernism).
• 'House Beautiful': Style and Consumption in the Home (Madigan & Munro 1996/2006) — style's popular-taste reality check, the page's first sociological source: "The broad movements of contemporary design: Art deco, Moderne, Scandinavian modern, Hi-tech, only partially reflect popular preferences" (p. 221); the mass-market styles inventory — "traditional cottagey (flowers and pine); country house (flowers and mahogany); modern, hi-tech (plain colours and black ash); and postmodern (pastel colours and beech)" (pp. 221–222); office-design echo (hi-tech's Taylorist efficiency supplanted by the human-relations softening "not unlike the 'customer friendly' refits which have transformed the public areas of building societies and banks," p. 222); and the lived condition of style — "all these styles spill over into one another because few people buy all their furniture at the one time and because the styles themselves are hybrid" (p. 222), the household's real style being "the subject of constant renegotiation… an important aspect of self-presentation and a statement about the social roles to which individuals aspire," "constrained and circumscribed by the dominant and conventional meanings attributed to different patterns of consumption, and the material resources available to the consumer" (p. 226). Where Deyong's style is a theory and Houze's a trademark, Madigan & Munro's style is a household practice — hybrid, spilling over, renegotiated — that the named movements only partially govern. See taste, fashion, respectability.
• Why Architecture Matters (Goldberger 2009) — styles as languages that 'continue to change and evolve' (p. 143); the 'style for the time' debate (pp. 138–44); and the argument that the best buildings redefine style rather than respond to it (glossary, p. 180).

Open Questions

• Is Riegl's Wollen — an inner drive that "may change with nation, location, and time" — a collectivist or an individual psychology of style? The chapter uses it for both epochal and personal registers (Loos).
• If style "pertains to… a cultural period, rather than a discipline," can the interior have its own style history at all, or only a share in its sister fields' styles?
• Does Schumacher's parametricism-as-style (see source-notes/schumacher-2008-parametricism-as-style) repeat the Semper trajectory (style from technique and production) or the Riegl trajectory (style from a collective Wollen)?
• Baldwin plays freely with historical period styles "in service to the comfort and expression of living" — is the decorator's eclectic use of style the lived proof of Deyong's "cultural sensibility" account (style as psychology and personal charge), or does free play dissolve style into quotation?
• Lupton & Miller's streamlining gives style a symptom-reading ("a material style for expressing the logic of consumption"): can a whole style be the displaced expression of a bodily process (the excretory aesthetic), or does such strong psychoanalytic stylistics dissolve the Riegl/Semper question (what style is) into a depth-hermeneutic (what style represses)? See streamlining, psychoanalysis.
• De Wolfe's anti-periodism ("Lines and fabrics and woods are the things to be compared," 1913) predates Baldwin's free play by six decades — is the decorator's comparative use of period qualities the practical answer to whether the interior has its own style history, one organized by fitness and comparison rather than by period surveys?
• Eastlake's demand that the chosen style "be adopted throughout the house" (1868, p. 102) and de Wolfe's refusal of single-period fidelity (1913, p. 84) pull in opposite directions — one style house-wide versus compared qualities room by room. Is the decorator's eclecticism the betrayal of the unity principle the reform movement founded, or its fulfilment (harmony as the achieved relation between compared things rather than identity of source)? And which side does the multi-style mansion — Eastlake's target — actually stand on once the comparison method has domesticated period mixing?