Architectural Composition by John Beverley Robinson

During recent trips to historic cities in Europe and America, I have grown increasingly amazed at the level of consistent design proficiency demonstrated in the historic architecture.  The astoundingly sensitive attention to architectural proportion and detail is such that these cities (often built as recently as the early 1900s) sometimes appear to have been conceived by a species other than our own!

Vienna, Austria 2007

At the turn of the last century, traditional architecture reached a zenith.  The classical art of architectural composition, revived during the Renaissance, was refined through the efforts of many talented architects and through the numerous ateliers and schools of design that orbited the great Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris (1648-1968).  The Ecole des Beaux Arts is today often remembered for grand and ornate buildings, but upon closer inspection, its practitioners demonstrated equal proficiency at the design of beautifully proportioned and modest structures with quite reserved details.  

Great effort was made to teach these principles of architectural composition to new generations of designers in order to keep this noble tradition alive. This period saw the publication of many wonderful texts about the art of architectural composition.  These books, which detail the process used to create the astoundingly beautiful architecture of this period, unfortunately fell largely into disuse and were forgotten during the radical cultural shifts and experimentation that occurred during the Modernist era of the early and mid 1900s.  Luckily, efforts to digitize our literary heritage, such as the Google Books Library Project, are making these tremendously valuable and useful volumes easily available once again!

One such book worth reading is Architectural Composition by John Beverley Robinson, first published in 1908.  The book is subtitled "An Attempt to Order and Phrase Ideas Which Hitherto Have Only Been Felt by the Instinctive Taste of Designers" and attempts to articulate universal principles of architectural composition, regardless of style.  Its words are every bit as applicable to the design of urban buildings today as they were during Robinson's own time.  Over the next several posts I'll summarize this wonderful book's primary points. 

Amazon: Architectural Composition (1908, by John Beverley Robinson)