PAINTER PUGG RECONSIDERED
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may be a
vil~
thing, considered as a shield; the former being adapted
to their proper use, and this not."
Hogarth echoes this classical fragment in his first chapter: " . .. in
shipbuilding the dimensions of every part are confined and regulated
by fitness for sailing . . . When a vessel sails well, the sailors call her
a beauty; the two ideas have such a connection." And such a note
brings to mind so many arguments for "functional beauty," from those
of Horatio Greenough in the first half of the nineteenth century when
he praised the aesthetic economy of "the American trotting wagon"–
"the redundant pared down, the superfluous dropped, the necessary
itself reduced to its simplest expression"-to Le Corbusier's enthusiasm
for marine architecture, and the clean forms of the automobile and
aeroplane in the pages of
L'Esprit Nouveau
in the early 1920s.
But with Hogarth the emphasis is always on nature, "the living
machines of nature" and nature's functional beauty. "Functionalism"
in
architecture thirty years ago stood for a theory of design for per–
formance ; it stood for the introduction of engineering standards into
architecture to replace aesthetic standards. Perhaps Le Corbusier's de–
liberately hyperbolic description of a house in
Vers une Architecture
as
"a machine to live in" was a belated romantic expression of the same
trend. But in 1936 Le Corbusier had already turned toward Hogarth's
ideal of "the living machines of nature." "I have noticed little by
little," he stated in an address on "Architecture and the Arts," "that
the revolution in the modern techniques of the building profession was
bringing to us an astonishingly complex biology of the house. This com–
plexity of the modern plan puts us in opposition to the classical square
room we have known so far. Sometimes, as a result of the biological
necessity of the plan, curved or oblique partitions are necessary...."
Already in the Paris Exposition of 1925, at the
Pavillon de l'Esprit
Nouveau
of Le Corbusier, were exhibited, side by side, natural objects,
stones, shells, roots with strange forms and manufactured objects that
had reached a high standard of perfection in serial production, such
as
glasses, bottles and laboratory materials. Toward 1930 the name of
the architect Alvar Aalto began to be known outside Finland. And
about the same time the painters Joan Mir6 and Paul Klee, whose work
is
likewise characterized by the use of biomorphic shapes, also began to
win
international recognition. Aalto's gift is an ability to solve his build–
ing
problems in forms which have an essential resemblance to the
organic forms of nature, the character of which he sought to emulate
in
them. Today he and Le Corbusier still continue to hold as their
ideals of architectural organization the intricacy of nature and of these
