I have long been taken by a statement Aldo van Eyck made way back in the late fifties and recorded in Team 10 Primer. He is, a bit before his time, looking back on Modernism and searching for perspective in which to place its innovations, as well as for direction for subsequent developments.

After admiring the significant new contributions of the Modernists, he maintains that, “The time has come to gather the old into the new; to rediscover the archaic qualities of human nature, I mean the timeless ones. Man is always and everywhere essentially the same. Modern architects have been harping continually on what is different in our time to such an extent that they have lost touch with what is not different, with what is always essentially the same. We can meet ourselves everywhere in all places and ages – doing the same things in a different way, feeling the same differently, reacting differently to the same.”

I like van Eyck’s attitude for its concurrent appreciation for what is old and what is new. He sees no conflict between innovation and endurance. He observes that to discover anew is to discover something new, but he is also comfortable with what is never new or fresh or different but “always essentially the same.”

I am encouraged to think that there might be some principles of design and building that respond to what is “always essentially the same.” I like the idea that there might be some building forms that would not feed our compulsive appetite for novelty but would touch that part of us that savors the drama of sunset, no matter how many times we have seen it, or revels in the bloom of spring, although the experience is recurrent and familiar. Are there shapes or forms or materials or light qualities in architecture that speak so directly to our senses or to our common cultural experience so as to be truly timeless?
We do: after all, still walk on two legs, see through two eyes in the front of our head, smell and taste with physiological mechanisms that presumably have changed very little through recorded history. We still speak and eat and socialize and love and scheme despair and delight, as the human animal virtually always has. Can’t an argument be made that what actually does change, in terms of human environmental needs from generation to generation, is but a finger or perhaps a hand on the body architecture – a relatively minor and not a controlling feature?

The notion of something “classical” in a generic sense refers, I think, to what is “always essentially the same” – to that which endures, that which becomes a standard, or a “classic.” I was very much taken by the title of the Architectural Design issue of several years ago called “Classicism is Not a Style.” It was a great, provocative title, even if the contents of the magazine did seem terribly preoccupied with classicism as a style, with much concern for such things as “Doricism” and “Classico-vernacular.”

It seems to be a bit overly-ambitious to try to make a case for Classicism not being an identifiable style in architecture. Yet there is fruitful ground to be explored in seeing Classicism as more than just a style – rather, in some ways, as an embodiment of what has seemed recurrently and perhaps timelessly true and meaningful in architecture.

Kurt Forster recalled in a recent lecture at the University of Texas the early 16th-century desire to be “ancient in a modern manner and modern in an ancient manner.” The Renaissance phraseology is more than just catchy. It suggests a discovery of commonality- a true integration across time-one parallel, as Forster noted, to the actual physical integration of ancient fragments at times into contemporary 16th-century composition.

This seems to be a sensibility we have neglected in recent times in favor of an almost frenetic worship of the avant-garde. It is difficult to imagine, in our own time, a contentment with being judged by longstanding criteria of value and quality. It is unlikely that we would be satisfied to see ourselves as an extension of a respectable tradition. These notions seem directly in conflict with the dominant mid-20th-century infatuation with progress and newness and change.

There is an intrinsic antagonism, it seems, between a devotion to timelessness and a love of the avant-garde. Timelessness speaks to what is proven and unchanging, the avant-garde to what is new and experimental. I would certainly not go so far as to eschew the avant-garde, but I would gladly volunteer my own weariness with the unrefined parading of fashion we have experienced in recent decades, all in a search for freshness – for what is new and special to our own time.

Ever since van Eyck made his call for a return to “constant human qualities,” we have run quickly through Functionalism and Brutalism and Neo-Expressionism and Metabolism and Adhocism and Pop and High Tech and Post-Modernism and Late-Modernism and Rationalism, etc. , etc.-each of which has indeed reflected something new and exciting about our time. But each of these has also warped its expression of culture to emphasize what is new over what is equally legitimate but “always essentially the same.”

An emphasis on the avant-garde – what is new – sells well. It makes for good media hype. It gives us academics lots of stuff to write about, and it feeds our compulsive quest for the elusive goddess of Progress. But it also seems to produce environmental planned obsolescence – a series of artifacts that speak so narrowly that they are quickly dated and have little meaning beyond their immediate context in time.

Words like “Timeless” and “Classical,” quite honestly, are frightening. But if one takes away the capital ‘T” and capital “C” and thinks simply of approaching problems in a time-less – that is, not time-lacked-way with a concern for c1assic- that is, enduring-values, the words become much more approachable.

I can see in a genre of 20th-Century Mediterranean Classicism in America an attitude that approaches the notion of timelessness. These are not buildings that allude to the past or recall the past or parody the past so much as buildings that speak to something in us that is equally valid in the past or in the present. They carry, in the true intention of T. S. Eliot’s much-quoted phrase, “perception not only of the pastness of the past but also its presence.” They seem to touch those constants in human experience that transcend time.

The three buildings illustrated here are representative of any number of buildings espousing this attitude, if not perhaps with the same finesse. One of the buildings is from the early period this publication is meant to address – from the beginning of the century. The other two are more contemporary-one completed in 1968, the other in 1972. But part of the point is that they almost might have been done at any time. Their concerns are more timeless than timely.

The first of these buildings is Battle Hall, currently the architecture library on the University of Texas campus in Austin. It was designed by the New York architect Cass Gilbert in 1910. It was a seminal work in the shift of campus architecture at the University of Texas from a 19th-century eclectic hodge-podge to a 20th-century cohesive and “Classical” character.

Battle Hall was designed at the peak of Gilbert’s career. (It was completed just as he received the commission for the Woolworth Building.) It is a well-built, handsomely detailed building made of local Cordova Cream limestone with terra cotta and metal trim. It pays an undeniable homage to the Boston Public Library by Gilbert’s early mentors – McKim, Mead and White. The Boston building, of course, likewise owes a great debt to the Biblioteque St. Genevieve in Paris, which of course owes a debt to any number of Renaissance Palazzi, which of course owe a debt to Rome and Rome to Greece, etc.

The parti of the building is not a particularly novel or innovative one, yet in its reproportioning of its predecessor’s elements, in its lushness of color and pattern, and in its sophistication of detail, it shows the great skill and sensitivity of its designer.

The building is an enormously successful and important one-not so much as an isolated vision in a photograph, or as a landmark in the development of architectural history, but as a real working artifact. Gilbert’s interpretation of Mediterranean Classicism was immediately welcomed on the University of Texas campus-not because it was Mediterranean Classicism so much as that it simply fit. The warm local stone, clear skies and lush vegetation embraced the vocabulary Gilbert contributed. The building set a tone of graciousness, refinement and order alongside an oddly concurrent warmth, craftiness and informality. It simply felt right for a University building in Austin, Texas.

My grandfather studied in Battle Hall when he was a law student at the University 70 years ago. My parents both studied there in the early forties. And I have spent a few hours there myself. A lot has changed in Texas in the last three generations, but a great deal more has stayed the same.

By addressing itself to basic – almost timeless – architectural concerns, Battle Hall has endeared itself to all three of the past generations. And while the architectural community has changed its fancies periodically over that time, the owners and users of the building have not only maintained an appreciation for its worth, but have extended its vision to a whole campus and even rather extensively over the region.

The next two buildings illustrated here have a shorter track-record of timelessness, but they have a good future ahead of them. The Marshall Steves house in San Antonio by O’Neil Ford (1968) seems a classic example to me of a building that does not flaunt its place in time. In many ways it could be an 18th-century building-like, for example, the Palace of the Governors in downtown San Antonio. It could be a 19th-century building. It could have been done in the 1930s, or it could have been a building that slowly grew through the centuries.

Like Giulio Romano in the early 16th century, Ford has literally woven old and new together with ancient artifacts and crafts combined seamlessly with new ones. There is no propensity to mock or highlight allusions but rather an effort to be “ancient in a modern manner and modern in an ancient manner.”

With its gracious patios, its lofty vaults, its warm stone and rich wood, the Steves house is clearly within a longstanding Mediterranean tradition, which it demonstrates to have great breadth of interpretation.

The Kimbell Museum (1972) in Fort Worth by Louis Kahn is where I started my preparation for this paper and is where I will end this piece. I am haunted by a statement Kahn made during the design of the Kimbell in which he declared, “My mind is filled with Roman greatness.”

The Kimbell is chock-a-block full of the inspiration of Mediterranean Classicism. Kahn said, “The (Roman) vault etched itself in my mind.” And indeed the scale, the material, the eccentric manner of support and even the penetration for light at the top all seem comfortably rooted in Roman Classicism. The graceful arches; the contrapuntal rhythm of arches and interstitial spaces; the crafty, articulate joinery with explicit frame and infill; the mixture of sensual curve and rigid orthogonality – all draw on Roman precedent, not just in principle, but often in actual form as well. But, above all, what Kahn brings from Rome is a handling of light and dark. He parallels the Italian sun with its Texas counterpart, letting it ooze through controlled openings. He drops intense light periodically in an otherwise cool, softly lit space. He uses the characteristic Mediterranean courtyard to bring light fully into the otherwise walled galleries, but even then he tempers the light with vegetation.

It is interesting to me that none of these buildings that seem so fine to me were real blockbusters in their own immediate time. Remarkably, none of the three – not even the Kimbell – was featured by a major American architectural journal at the time of its completion. They were, perhaps, not the latest, most telling architectural statement for their own era. But they seem a genre that weathers very well and, as such, seem to embody much of what is best and true in Mediterranean Classicism.