E is for Elevation: A-Z of Historic Buildings
An elevation is the face of a building. It’s also its façade, a borrowing from French, also meaning face! The facade of a building sets its tone. The decorative features or lack thereof define most reactions to a building. For historic buildings, features on the facade can be vital to finding the date of construction. Are the windows headed with ‘flat arches’ in brick, or wooden lintels? Is there a fanlight?
Facades also tell us a lot about the effect that was intended by the builder. Symmetrical facades tend to appear during the so-called ‘great rebuild’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onwards. Before then, windows and doors tended to be arranged in whatever format made sense to the builders and master masons as they worked. Yet, in the 19th century, asymmetry returned with a vengeance due to the Gothic revival. Neo-Gothic architects made a point of designing buildings with asymmetrical elevations, where the disposition of windows gives viewers a clue of the function of the building’s interior.
Considering all this, it’s hugely puzzling that elevation drawings appear so late in architectural history. The first drawings in western architectural history for full ‘elevations’ or facades appear around the year 1300 (indeed, paper only appeared in Europe around 1260). Before then, drawing was done typically on a 1:1 scale, detail for detail, on poured plaster floors, spare stones, or slates.
Cologne ‘Plan F’ plan of the west facade, ca.1280, ink on paper. Public domain.
The classic essay by James Ackerman on Renaissance architectural practice points out how buildings were designed chiefly on plan rather than elevation well into the 16th century. Designers would pick out a few details of decoration in sketches. The rest seems to have been improvised and tweaked as the project was carried out. This is perhaps surprising, since we’re talking about designs by the great draughtsmen-artists of the Italian Renaissance, including Michelangelo and Raphael.
By the 17th century, however, architectural drawings show us elevations which are every bit as familar as today’s drawings of facades. Christopher Wren’s drawings, for example, look fundamentally modern in their precision, clarity and scale.
Today, the facade is being re-considered. Modernist tenets of the ‘free facade’ and ‘structural honesty’ which ultimately derive from the 19th century theories of Viollet le Duc among others, produced minimal facades. These ideas are being questioned by many who work on urbanist theory. Ideas like ‘eyes on the streets’—that windows enhance public safety by giving natural surveillance—are starting to be taken seriously. Similarly, the concept of ‘coherent complexity’, that a facade has richness to delight the eye, without overwhelming it, are being explored by the likes of CREATE Streets, combined with psycho-aesthetic research on how architecture can improve people’s sense of well-being.
