Introduction

A BICYCLE SHED is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of
architecture. Nearly everything that encloses space on a scale
sufficient for a human being to move in, is a building; the
term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to
aesthetic appeal. Now aesthetic sensations may be caused by a build-
ing in three different ways. First, they may be produced by the treat-
ment of walls, proportions of windows, the relation of wall-space
to window-space, of one story to another, of ornamentation such as
the tracery of a 14th-century window, or the leaf and fruit garlands
of a Wren porch. Secondly, the treatment of the exterior of a build-
ing as a whole is aesthetically significant, its contrasts of block against
block, the effect of a pitched or a flat roof or a dome, the rhythm of
projections and recessions. Thirdly, there is the effect on our senses
of the treatment of the interior, the sequence of rooms, the widening
out of a nave at the crossing, the stately movement of a baroque
staircase. The first of these three ways is two-dimensional; it is the
painter's way. The second is three-dimensional, and as it treats the
building as volume, as a plastic unit, it is the sculptor's way. The third
is three-dimensional too, but it concerns space; it is the architect's
own way more than the others. What distinguishes architecture
from painting and sculpture is its spatial quality. In this, and only in
this, no other artist can emulate the architect. Thus the history of
architecture is primarily a history of man shaping space, and the
historian must keep spatial problems always in the foreground. This
is why no book on architecture, however popular its presentation
may be, can be successful without ground plans.

But architecture, though primarily spatial, is not exclusively
spatial. In every building, besides enclosing space, the architect
models volume and plans surface, i.e. designs an exterior and sets
out individual walls. That means that the good architect requires
the sculptor's and the painter's modes of vision in addition to his own
spatial imagination. Thus architecture is the most comprehensive of
all visual arts and has a right to claim superiority over the others.

This aesthetic superiority is, moreover, supplemented by a social
superiority. Neither sculpture nor painting, although both are

xix