Sainte Chapelle (Paris, France, Built 1248)
People often think of architecture as the “background” of our lives, but to architects, buildings are complex systems and artistic creations. Just as a novelist uses syntax to convey plot or a composer uses counterpoint to evoke emotion, an architect employs a specific grammar to architecture. While it shares characteristics with music, literature, and sculpture, architecture possesses a different vocabulary centered on creating volumes and objects in the physical world.
The Nouns and Objects: Mass and Volume
St. Peter’s Basilica (Rome, Italy, Built 1626)
In literature, nouns are the objects of action. In the architectural dialect, mass and volumes play these roles. Mass refers to the solid, physical matter—the stone, steel, and glass object that occupies space. Volume, however, is the “void” contained within those solids, which humans inhabit and use.
If sculpture is the art of the solid, then architecture is the art of the hollow. A sculptor shapes a block of marble to be looked at; from a different perspective, an architect shapes a series of well-organized voids to be seen from within and used in both specific and non-specific ways. The “grammar” here lies in the tension between the two: how a heavy, imposing mass can enclose spaces and be composed of light-filled, beautiful volumes.
The Rhythm of Sequence: Architecture as Music
Chrysler Skyscraper ( New York, NY, Built 1928)
In architecture, sequence serves as the verbs. Goethe famously described architecture as “frozen music.” This comparison is most evident in the unfolding of spaces. While a musical composition is experienced over time, a building exists in space, so both are experienced chronologically. As a person moves through a structure, they experience a rhythmic progression of “compression” (small, dark hallways) and “expansion” (like sunlit atriums). Architecture, however, unlike music or cinema, does not unfold in a single correct sequence, but is experienced in a multiplicity of ways over time and by different people. This adds tremendously to its complexity and to different “readings” of the spaces by different people with different perspectives and histories.
This spatial choreography is the architect’s version of a melody. The transition from a low-ceilinged entrance to a soaring vaulted ceiling is a crescendo—a deliberate emotional manipulation achieved through the logic of movement and scale. This is characteristic of architecture, evident in all the different buildings of different eras from different cultures around the world.
The Syntax of Structure
Barcelona Pavilion (Barcelona, Spain, Built 1928)
If architecture has a formal logic akin to the rules of grammar, it is found in structure. Structure is the invisible or sometimes visible framework that create the architectural spaces. It is the dialogue between gravity and material. Whether it is a post-and-lintel system or a high-tech cantilever, the structure provides the “syntactic” integrity. Without it, the building is merely a pile of materials—a collection of words without a sentence structure. Columns are the words, planes are the sentences, and volumes are the paragraphs that are used to convey the meaning and function that the architect intends to express the Philosophy of the Architecture he or she is attempting to create.
The Adjectives: Light and Materiality
Fallingwater (Mill Run, PA, Built 1937)
If mass is the noun, then light and materiality are the adjectives. Light is perhaps the most ethereal component of the architectural language. It has the power to redefine volume and reveal the texture of mass. The way light interacts with a surface—washing over a rough concrete wall or piercing through a narrow clerestory window—determines the “mood” of the space. And natural light also changes over the course of the day and over the passage of the seasons: low and eastward in the winter mornings and high and bright from the south in the northern hemisphere’s summers. The sun anchors a building to its place and time, almost like a sundial.
Unlike a painting, where light is captured in a single moment, in architecture, the impact of light is dynamic, ever-shifting with the sun’s path to illuminate the building’s planes and volumes, changing both throughout a single day and throughout the passage of a year.
Since the dawn of time, mankind has sought to instill beauty and proportion into its architecture. This comes from the philosophy of architecture they wished to express, but also through the structure and detail they used to create the masses, volumes, and structures they designed. Learning the Grammar of Architecture will give anyone a far greater appreciation of the subtle and beautiful aspects of design that are embodied in the houses, churches, skyscrapers, and other structures that have been built with care, precision, and intention.
If you would like your next New England or Rhode Island building project to be undertaken by a firm that understands the subtleties and details of the Grammar of Architecture, please reach out to the award-winning architects of A4 Architecture, and we will be pleased to discuss assisting you.
Ross Cann, RA, AIA, LEED AP, is a teacher, writer, and practicing architect living in Newport, Rhode Island. He is a graduate of Yale, Cambridge, and Columbia Universities, where he earned degrees with honors in architectural history and design. He is the Founding Principal of A4 Architecture and Founding Chairman of the Newport Architectural Forum community group. He has been a licensed architect and member of the American Institute of Architects since 1993. He became an instructor and critic at the Parsons School of Design in New York in 1992 and has taught architectural history and design since then. He has been an adjunct instructor in the Salve Regina University Circle of Scholars program for more than a decade.