The Beginning of Architecture

A. Compared to other human activities, architecture is a young art that had its beginnings only 10,000 years ago when men and women, having discovered agriculture and husbandry, were able to give up roaming the surface of the earth in search of food. Until then they had been exposed to the weather, precariously protected by tents of animal skins. Perpetually on the move, they cooked over campfires and gathered in small tribes.

All of this changed when people became sedentary. Tents were supplanted by more substantial abodes, and a permanent hearth became the center of the home. Numerous huts sprang up in fertile areas; contact between families became more frequent and intimate; villages grew. From village to village a network of paths was worn. At times paths had to cross rivers and ravines, requiring the construction of footbridges made out of tree trunks or suspended from ropes of vegetable fillers.

The clustering of huts created the need for larger huts where village problems could be discussed.

These larger structures served both as town halls and churches, since spiritual needs have always gone hand in hand with the physical. Indeed the larger monuments of archeological architecture were often motivated by spiritual needs.

B. The last ten thousand years spanned more than 300 generations but we who have witnessed the incredible changes brought to our cultures by the Industrial Revolution may feel that architecture has not changed much, at least over the last 6,000) years. This constancy in the built environment should not surprise us. if we realize that architecture satisfies basic physiological needs, which have not changed since Homo tapiens appeared about 3 million years ago. We eat the same kinds of food as our prehistoric ancestors, and we cook food much as they did. We sleep on horizontal surfaces (though surely softer today than then), we protect ourselves from the weather, and we procreate in the only way we can. Architecture is the most conservative of the human arts and sciences because it caters to these unchanging needs of man. Even our spiritual needs, which may have changed somewhat and may have produced different rituals, arc as basic today as they were in prehistory.

C. Changes in architecture, more quantitative than qualitative, have been motivated by the conglomeration of people. The city is a friend to architecture. Whether we gathered in villages, and then towns and cities, the better to defend ourselves from enemies or whether the exchange of trades and crafts required the proximity of first hundreds, and eventually millions, it was the city that led us to erect taller and taller buildings and to enclose larger and larger spaces. In 2000 B.C. Minoan cities on Crete already boasted four-story houses, and tenements in the most popular sections of Rome had risen as high as ten stories.

We are the heirs of these builders. We think of ourselves as the most individualistic human beings in history and yet we gather in large halls to sec the same spectacles and live in beehives containing hundreds of identical apartments. Nostalgic as we may be for the simple life of the forest, most of us find the ways of the city more congenial and more efficient. By the year 2000 twenty cities, most of them in Latin America and Southeast Asia, had concentrated 20 or more million people in small areas. We have become members of group cultures. The relative isolation of the countryside is no longer our way of life.

D. Science and technology at their best are motivated to satisfy genuine human needs. If architecture has never changed much in its functional aspects, it has undergone a fantastic technical revolution. The needs of the city will be satisfied, and technology, spurred by the discoveries and inventions of the industrial and scientific revolutions, has come to help.

It may be surprising to realize that such a highly technological field has contributed so much to our innate need for beauty. To those of us who cannot live without beauty, this is an encouraging thought. The separation of art and technology is both unnecessary and incorrect; one is not an enemy of the other. Instead it is essential to understand that technology’ is often a necessary component of art and that art helps technology to serve man better. Nowhere is this more true than in architecture and structure, a marriage in which science and beauty combine to fulfill some of the most basic and spiritual needs of humanity.