Architecture News & Views We Need More Adventurous Buildings

Date Published:

27/05/2008

The current enthusiasm for the neo-vernacular is sometimes viewed as a relatively new and British phenomenon, but its roots are to be found across the modern world. In the second half of the 18th century, people who were not obliged to live in cottages, who didn't work on the land, began for the first time to develop longings for the rustic life - longings which those who actually lived on, and from, the land had never previously harboured.

There was a new enthusiasm for pastoral poetry, peasant costumes and simple farm-like buildings. Marie-Antoinette, queen of France, charged her architect Richard Mique to build a model peasant village at the end of her garden in the palace of Versailles, and equipped it with a cowshed, a milking parlour and a pigsty. Dressed in rustic costume, she would watch peasants at work and perform in plays about country life.

Credit: Wikipedia

An interest in the rustic way of life led Marie-Antoinette to have a model peasant village built at the bottom of the garden at Versailles palace.

Of course, we shouldn't be led by this aesthetic shift to conclude that people were at this time becoming any more rustic in themselves. They were falling in love with the rustic in their art and architecture precisely because - as a result of industrialisation and modernisation - they were losing touch with the rustic in their own lives.

The more developed a society, the greater we can expect its sympathies for the rustic to be. There is no greater evidence of Britain's urban character than its deep-seated attraction to the idea of the countryside. Our architectural tastes tell us as much about what we lack as what we love. We are drawn to call a building beautiful when we detect that it contains those qualities in which we personally, or our societies more generally, are deficient. We respect an architectural style that can move us away from what we fear and towards what we crave: a style which carries the correct dosage of our missing emotions.