Semper's practical aesthetics was meant to provide a vehicle for historical interpretation, a basis for educational reform, and a logical method of inventing. In short, it was to provide a total method for the interpretation, diffusion, and production of architecture and art. So far, I have examined only the first part of this diverse ambition: the comparative method as a vehicle for explaining the historical development of art. Now it is time to approach the final step of the practical aesthetics: the dream of a method to guide not only the interpretation, but also the production of architecture.

Semper's hope of moving from a descriptive to a prescriptive theory of architecture relied on the framework of the comparative method. Although comparative anatomy and linguistics had provided a model for the interpretation of organic wholes, they had been less explicit about the possibility for systematic prediction. The disciplines in which this ambition was formulated most explicitly were neither anatomy nor linguistics, but rather the new sciences of man: sociology and political science. By means of comparison, these disciplines aimed to progress from explanation and description to experimentation and prediction, establishing a science of human culture. This was the ambition that fuelled and informed Semper's method of inventing.

Chapter 8 examined the intellectual framework of historicism, looking at the way such seemingly adverse tendencies as historical individualism and historical determinism were fused within it. Trying to grasp this ambiguous framework, I drew on Gadamer's notion of the aporias of historicism, by which he pinpointed the inherent tension in historicist thought between romanticism and positivism. This peculiar fusion was made possible by the organic analogy, recasting history as a self-regulating system, complete at every point yet governed by comprehensible laws. The organic paradigm seemed to do for history what it had done for anatomy and linguistics: to allow for a methodical explanation and prediction of historical phenomena, establishing a science of history and historical expressions. This aspiration lies at the heart of nineteenth-century historicism, pointedly defined by Heidegger as history becoming “an object of contemplation for method”.

However, if the aesthetic-organic framework of historicism sheds light on certain ambiguities within Semper's practical aesthetics, it does not illuminate the aspect of Semper's thinking that I have called his poetics; that is, his notion of art as a creative interpretation of praxis. Emphasising the inalienable presence of the past embodied in art, Semper's poetics of architecture presented a mode of history very different from the historicism of style and epoch. Following Gadamer, we may talk about this as Geschichtlichkeit: the inescapable historicity of human existence.

Semper's emphasis on the origins of architecture linked him to a long tradition of architectural thinking. In fact, his origin tale, encountered in the Introduction, bears an unmistakable affinity to Vitruvius's description of the first gathering of men:

It is suggested here that the origin of architecture is part and parcel of the origin of society. For Vitruvius, as for Semper, language and architecture were two primordially civilising institutions, preconditions for as well as expressions of human culture.

The dream of fully capturing one's own horizon of understanding, and objectifying the presupposition for understanding itself, was one that could not have succeeded. As Vesely points out, “in order to do so, it would have been necessary to transform the whole culture to which architecture inevitably belongs into verifiable conditions and to make them part of a complete functional system.” Semper himself implicitly testified to this recognition by the incompleteness of his project. “I can assure you,” he wrote to his impatient publisher awaiting the third volume of Der Stil, “that it was not carelessness, indifference, and certainly not ill will, but motives and emotions of quite a different nature that prevented me again and again from fulfilling … the obligations I have towards you and the public”. In this epilogue, I would like to touch upon these ‘feelings and motives’, to scrutinise more closely, that is, the inherent limits of a ‘science of architecture’.

This investigation takes us back to Kant, whose Critiques were precise attempts to investigate the inherent limits of human reason. Knowledge, for Kant, was possible only insofar as intuition – received through the sensate faculty – can be subordinated under laws given by the understanding itself. Our knowledge of the phenomenal world is restricted to those aspects of it that can be subsumed under the categories of the understanding, such as cause and effect, substance, and so on.

FROM GESCHICHTEN TO GESCHICHTE: THE ORGANIC UNITY OF HISTORY

Semper's practical aesthetics presupposed a strict correspondence between style and its historical conditions of becoming, a correspondence he accused his contemporaries of having ignored to disastrous effect. This idea of correspondence rested on distinct assertions about history: about the way history is structured and about the way we can access this structure as a guide to the present. Semper's assertions were not original. They arose out of a rich German tradition for historical thinking that emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century and came to its full articulation in the nineteenth. One influential contribution to this tradition was Wilhelm von Humboldt's “Ueber die Aufgabe des Geschichtschreibers” (1822). Advising the historian about his task and how to conduct it, Humboldt boldly declared the historian's objective to be “the depiction of what takes place [Darstellung des Geschehenen]”. The self-evident ring of this statement is deceptive. For what is das Geschehene? In answering this question, Humboldt presented a key to nineteenth-century philosophy of history. The ‘stuff of history’ is not simply individual historical events, but rather what binds them together as an apparent unity. The essential task of the historian is to articulate this unity. “What has taken place … is only partially visible in the world of the senses”, Humboldt explained. “The remainder must be added through feeling, deduction, and conjecture.” Individual historical events must be grasped in their ‘inner, causal connections’.

If in Part II I mapped the theoretical framework that underlies Semper's practical aesthetics, it is now time to address how Semper believed this framework could affect contemporary architectural practise. Having looked at Semper's theory of practise, in other words, we must now examine his practise of theory. Although Semper warned against attempting to implement the formula for style directly, he nevertheless insisted on its applicability. The practical aesthetics was meant to be not just another contribution to aesthetic speculation, but also “sufficiently specific and complete in itself to be of practical use”. My concern in Chapter 7 is to identify this ‘practical use’ and to look for the way in which Semper's practical aesthetics delineated the role and responsibility of architecture in the nineteenth century.

More than anything, the architectural discourse of the first half of the nineteenth century was conditioned by the problem of self-expression: how to conceive and craft a ‘style of our time’. At the time Semper formulated his theory of style, the question “In which style should we build?” had already fuelled debate for decades. The debate rested on two related assumptions. First, it relied on a notion of style understood as the relative character of time and place.

This study concerns a dilemma that for a long time has both disturbed and conditioned modern discourse on architecture. It is a dilemma played out in the tension between continuity and innovation: the desire to maintain tradition while at the same time find genuine expressions for contemporary culture. A body of work displaying this tension with particular incisiveness is that of the German architect and theorist Gottfried Semper (1803–79) (Figure 4). Semper struggled his whole life to formulate a “fundamental principle of invention, that with a logical certainty could lead to true form”. Yet, at the same time, he emphasised the need for historical continuity as an ontological basis for society and a creative source for architecture. The conflict between upholding tradition and simultaneously wishing to invent it by will is painfully present in his work, as it is in the history of modern architecture. It is this “fine ambiguity of Semper's system” that makes it so relevant for our present-day situation.

The ambiguity of Semper's position is mirrored in the multifarious ways his work has been interpreted. He has been labelled a materialist as well as an idealist, seen as a proto-functionalist who anticipated the Sachlichkeit of the modern movement, or as an eclecticist, legitimising nineteenth-century stylistic licentiousness. Some have seen him as a Marxist revolutionary: a heroic rebel whose aim it was to “displace the institutional location of architecture”; whereas others have dismissed him as a petit bourgeois and a defender of liberal capitalism.

Semper's practical aesthetics involved several methodological steps. If the theory of formal beauty explained the ‘intrinsic coefficients’ of art, and the formula for style explained their modification by particular historical conditions, one step was still missing: a way to understand the correspondence between style and society as it unfolds through history. Missing, in other words, was an overall matrix in which individual historical moments could be coordinated into a comprehensive system of world history. If this could be achieved, it would be possible to explain the correspondence between artistic form and social-material conditions throughout history – for the first time establishing a complete and systematic science of the origin and development of art.

Looking for precedents for this ambitious project, Semper found contemporary human sciences in a deplorable state. In his view, the lack of proper methodology had made the study of man a “chaos of facts and experiences” accumulated “without coherence or principles”. To counter this confusion, Semper sought a method that could “find again those connections between the things, and … transform into an organic system of comparison what was before only an exterior and more or less arbitrary system of coordination and of exterior order.” Such a move from an ‘analytic’ to a ‘synthetic’ science, he argued, had already been achieved in a few other disciplines:

The previous chapters outlined the way in which notions of origin and imitation conditioned architectural discourse in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Semper was profoundly influenced by this discourse. He shared many of the prevailing neoclassical attitudes and framed his theoretical pursuits in terms of origins and imitation. He also had a thorough knowledge of idealist and romantic philosophy, and its influence on his work is convincingly documented. Yet, Semper subjected the notions of origins and imitation to a radical reformulation until they no longer had the same meaning as for his neoclassical or romantic predecessors.

THE PRIMITIVE HUT REBUILT

We have already encountered Semper's scornful attitude to enlightenment theories of the origin of architecture. In his opinion, the obsession with the primitive hut had produced merely “fruitless speculations, which have not seldom led to dangerous errors and false theories”. Semper dismissed the wooden hut as the formal origin of the Greek temple, and rejected Quatremère's ‘fairy tale’ of the cave and the tent. Although recognising its importance, he refused to frame the question of origins as a search for the original abode of man, concluding categorically that “it is impossible to trace architecture, as the expression and accommodation of social organisms, back to its earliest beginning”. To attempt such a thing would be like wanting to trace a language back to “the babbling of children or to the unarticulated voices of the animal world”.

In October 1848, the British Museum received a remarkable shipment from Constantinople. Austen Henry Layard – adventurer, archaeologist, and diplomat – had started his Middle Eastern excavations in November 1845, in fierce competition with the French archaeologist Paul Emile Botta. Less than two months later, he unearthed a monument last mentioned in the Old Testament: King Ashurnasirpal II's palace in Calah. In the years that followed, until 1854 when the Crimean War put an end to such financial extravaganza, an extraordinary collection was assembled in London. With the magnificent sculptures and bas-reliefs depicting hunts, battles, and sacrifices, the Assyrian treasures formed a pictorial chronicle of a forgotten civilisation (Figure 1).

The arrival in London of Layard's Assyrian find caused both celebration and unease. It strengthened the status of the British Museum as a seat of ancient art, but it also threatened the classical principles upon which both the institution itself and its recently inaugurated building were based. The event challenged the view of ancient Greece as the autochthonous cradle of art, indicating that Greek classicism – widely regarded as a symbol of the dignity and superiority of Western culture – had its roots in the ‘barbarian’ East. Layard's collection shook nineteenth-century art history to its foundations and had a prffound effect upon the incredulous audience who witnessed its arrival in Bloomsbury. Among the audience was a German architect temporarily stranded in London: Gottfried Semper.

The cult of origins constituted only the first part of a twofold doctrine central to neoclassical aesthetics. Although the origin theory of Laugier and others identified the source and model for art, it did not address the question of how this model was to be emulated. To do this was the task of the doctrine of imitation. This was a doctrine with ancient precedents, yet one that would, in its enlightenment guise, become a vehicle for a very modern idea of art. Whereas the classical notion of imitation centred around the idea of beauty as mediation of goodness and truth, the enlightenment doctrine of imitation would – paradoxically – approach an ideal of aesthetic autonomy.

Semper never explicitly developed a theory of imitation. On the contrary, he always maintained that architecture, unlike the other arts, was not imitative, and in this lay its virtues: “Architecture has its own store of forms and is not an imitative art like sculpture and painting.” For Semper, the nonimitative arts, under which he grouped architecture, music, and dance, had a privileged position in the aesthetic hierarchy. They were “the highest purely cosmic … arts, whose legislative support no other art can forego.” Semper elaborated this point in one of his most potent statements on architectural imitation: