The first of the categories of the Vitruvian triad is "benefit." Since then, that is, for 2000 years now, all and sundry, from great architects and theorists to people far from architecture, have been saying that the benefit is above all. They argue about beauty, hope for strength, but use, like Caesar's wife, is beyond suspicion. Meanwhile, the history of architecture clearly shows that this category is more than dubious.
The best, most famous, greatest works of architecture are either completely useless, or their use has a very specific and rather symbolic than practical meaning.
The Greeks built temples, and we, not worshiping Zeus, Athena, or Arethmis, worship these temples. The temple was considered a dwelling place, the home of the immortal gods. The question is, why does God need a House?
The second dubious idea enjoys an equally solid reputation - the idea of the origin of architecture from a primitive man's hut, which for some reason was very similar to an ancient Greek temple - it had vertical supports and a gable roof. This scheme is at the heart of the most famous temples.
It would seem that temples are temples, but the houses of ordinary Greek citizens should have been such huts or more modest likenesses of temples. But no, the houses of ordinary townspeople from Athens did not look like these huts. So not all architecture and not all building practice grew out of the hut, but only the architecture of the immortals.
In the middle of the last century, when Soviet architecture abandoned the Roman classics and the Stalinist Empire style, the idea became popular that architecture, to some extent, belongs to any building. Therefore, the idea of I. L. Matzah that construction can be divided into two parts: "simple" construction and "architecture" was categorically rejected as an idealistic, anti-materialist bourgeois theory.
Everyone immediately agreed with this, and the era of standard panel construction began, in which not excesses in the form of columns and cornices were added to simple construction, but only pleasant proportions.
The history of architecture, however, was taught the old fashioned way. Students studied the Propylaea of the Athenian Acropolis, the Triumphal Archs of the Roman Caesars and the Triumphal Arches, which arose relatively recently, in the war of 1812, including those in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
The uselessness of these arches from the point of view of the urban plan or some kind of their practical use remains a blatant deviation from the Vitruvian triad, although Vitruvius himself, listing benefits, strength and beauty separated by commas, had too high hopes for these categories. But here is one of the most charming architectural works - Bernini's colonnade at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, well, what is its use? It was not built to create a shadow - the square in front of the cathedral was not shaded by it.
But what did Vitruvius himself mean by utility?
It should be noted that, although the triad of Vitruvius is discussed by thousands of authors, almost no one quotes the place in the Third chapter of Book One, where Vitruvius himself explains what he understands by these three categories: PPK - Strength, Benefit and Beauty. Vitruvius starts with strength, his use comes second and beauty comes last. Now (attention!), The floor is given to Comrade. Vitruvius, he writes:
"Benefit is determined by" error-free and unimpeded for use arrangement of premises and a suitable and convenient distribution of them to the cardinal points, depending on the purpose of each. " (Vitruvius. Ten books on architecture. Volume 1. Per. FA Petrovsky. M., 1936. Page 28).
Consequently, the Pyramids of the Pharaohs are, perhaps, the most "useful", because for them the "location of the premises" in the cardinal directions, as archaeologists found out in the 20th century, were carried out most accurately. Although the dead were buried in these rooms. Even Stonehenge, for all its seemingly uselessness, corresponds to the astronomical conditions of Vitruvian use.
But let's leave this pure plastic and move on to the buildings - first of all to the temples.
Apparently, it will not be a big exaggeration to say that the lion's share of architectural structures are temples. But can the Vitruvian criterion of utility be applied to temples? Most likely it is impossible, or such an application will be the purest formalism.
Temples also have a canonical orientation, but this orientation hardly comes from the correspondence of the premises of the temple to their purposes. If in a medieval cathedral all residents of the city could seek salvation from a raid, then this function of the temple as a refuge is still not the main one.
The main function of the temple is to be a place of prayer. But prayer does not require structures with a foundation made of stone; it requires a foundation of a different type - sincere faith.
If we consider the temple as a place of keeping a sacred object, then still not a temple, but only the relic itself corresponds to the purpose of the meeting and prayer. The imperceptible transfer of the feelings of believers from objects of pure speculation and faith to building structures and their decor is one of the mysteries of human history.
Sacralization of the temple space as a symbolic operation, of course, takes place and is not a secret, but the genetic roots of this sacralization are far from obvious, although they are perceived by consciousness as a truth requiring neither research nor proof.
Here, first of all, the inversion of the external and the internal is noticeable - places in nature were once sacred: a symbol of faith was seen in sacred groves and springs, in the temple, on the other hand, the external space becomes internal, and the external space around the Temple refers to the “world” as a space of non- transcendental. The temple, becoming transcendent to the world, nevertheless strengthens the very understanding of the world as a symbolic, not pragmatic space.
A detailed analysis of the formation of the temple and its spaces (external and internal) should have become one of the directions of the study of architecture in its millennial ties with cult practice, which sometimes concealed, then exposed the autonomy of the symbolism of architecture itself.
This work, apparently, lies ahead of architects who are accustomed to a textbook presentation of the history of architecture, where the fusion of architectural and confessional symbolism has already outgrown all scales and has become a kind of new crystalline ambivalent subject of experience.
This story, expanding the image of the temple to the city, or including in its eye a similar temple image of the palace, all the time loses sight of the real prototype - but not the hut, hut or hut of a primitive tourist in the Promised Land, but the place of existence of a family and tribe, clan and ethnic group …
Later alliances of architecture with industry, power, ideology, science (including, above all, sociology and psychology), archeology and construction technology, industrial technology, methodology, theater, photography and cinema, advertising, the market, etc., - did not contribute to an understanding of the intrinsic nature of architecture.
Functionalism tried to instill in architecture that for its own good it was unquestioningly obedient to its conditions, the bureaucracy took architecture under its wing and began to supply it with countless norms and rules of good behavior, mathematics again tried to point out to architecture the importance of geometry and proportions, philosophy set aside architecture from modernity, keeping it place in memory, phenomenology has demonstrated to architecture a subtlety of experience that architecture itself is no longer capable of - and so on.
I remember all this not out of professional rancor and not out of despair, but only so that the freshness of its uselessness would breathe into my face with a breeze of hope.
Truly useless is sacred and it is not “beauty” that will save the world (there is, in spite of Dostoevsky, another interpretation of this thought - “the world will be saved by blondes”), but uselessness.
It is no coincidence that "useful" in cooking and pharmaceuticals is already strongly associated with bitterness or tastelessness.
Having recovered from social and psychological lessons, architecture now seeks salvation in magic - Feng Shui of architecture will soon replace SNIPs.
No, architecture is close to the people, which allows you to forget about the benefits and strength, not to mention the beauty, from which nowhere to hide anywhere.
And I want to be in its shadow or under the shadow of its benevolent indifference, to wake up from the intoxication of benefits and breathe in deeply the wind that blows architecture even on the hottest day of practical ecstasy.
