Numerous commentators have undertaken this quest for centuries but no clear consensus has emerged, though at least since the early modern period, function had generally been ascribed some role. G W F Hegel in his magisterial Aesthetics, and Ludwig Wittgenstein in his philosophical notes, both gave an important role to function. In this article, I wish to review the pervasive belief that form and function have some connection, but in the particular instance of buildings whose purpose is to exert some form of authority.

Authority can, of course, be highly ambiguous and many non-architects are reluctant to give architects the right to exert it. They may want to adapt the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley about his fellow poets, that they are ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’, but the real legislators have proved unwilling to cede that position to poets or architects. The Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, has insisted that the small and discreet, almost cartoon-like effigy of Edwin Lutyens should be removed from the Presidential Palace, which Lutyens designed for the viceroy for the British Raj, for its colonial connotations. Strange, then, that the palace itself, a far larger symbol of colonialism, remains in use . . .

In respect of the relationship between form and function, Hegel argued that architectural form came about to provide enclosure for social rituals and ceremonies, where form describes in outline the nature of those events. While the ‘spirit’ – the closest Hegel comes to ‘meaning’ – is not embodied in the form as it exists within the rituals themselves, the form nonetheless makes spirit manifest. This is the purpose Hegel assigns to art (with architecture, where form and spirit are completely separate if cognate to each other, being the most basic medium of art). Art itself is part of the process through which the spirit, proceeding from religion through art to philosophy, achieves self-actualisation. In this apparently simple idea, Hegel pinpointed and made manifest a series of dualities which ran through subsequent theory, for instance between structure and decoration, or form and function.

Perhaps more directly, Wittgenstein claimed that meaning lies in use. The arguments of two great philosophers gave cover for many architects to add their own twist to the relationship between form and function. As early example was A W N Pugin, for whom, ‘There should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, construction or propriety . . . the smallest detail . . . should serve a purpose’. The modernist slogan ‘form follows function’ was probably most crudely stated by Hannes Meyer, Gropius’ successor as head of the Bauhaus, who claimed that ‘architecture = function x economy’.

The problem here is not the association of form with function. It is the degradation of the idea from the richness implied in Hegel’s characterization of the relationship – that function embodies broad social beliefs and practices which we might, with suitable trepidation, call culture. Pugin, by contrast, postulated a narrow concept of function based on physical performance, which led him fetishise how drops of water drip from a corbel. Too many architects followed Pugin, ending up with the deplorable Meyer. Thinking of that sort caused many of the flaws of ‘first century modernism’, such as the lack of emotional resonance that John Jennifer Marx so enjoys highlighting. But of course it seems to suit too many architects to keep the discussion at a banal level because it makes it easier to control.

The Marxist Meyer at least recognized the importance of economy in his equation, but treated it predictably as utilitarian. Other economic traditions offer a far richer insight into the relationship between function and economy. This dates back to the origins of economic thought as an independent discipline in the early modern period, and specifically to the great economist and originator of speculative property development, Nicholas Barbon (c1640-1698). He pinpointed an obvious distinction between the needs of the body and those of the mind. The former were easy to satisfy and to define; the latter were in his word, ‘infinite’, springing from desire and causing an upward vortex of economic activity. The result was wealth and work.

The needs of the mind essentially spring from desire, the subconscious pattern of thought, belief and wishes that motivate us alongside and sometimes outstripping reason. What else could have led the hard-headed bankers of 15th century Florence to spend between one third and one half of their wealth on building palazzi, which had less utility than the buildings they replaced? Often they went bankrupt in the process, with envy provoking the population to slaughter them in particularly nasty ways. What led to the ostentation of late 19th century domestic architecture in the US? To the heroine of an Edith Wharrton novel, having a dress of the right silk in the right colour, drawing room with the right decoration and hung with the right (European) paintings was far more efficacious as a way of displaying her taste and her husband’s wealth than merely having a dining room that excluded cooking odours and a house that kept the rain out.

The fruit of needs of the mind can be seen wherever wealth exists, from the Roman fleshpots of Herculaneum and Pompeii, through Renaissance Florence, Great Britain in the 18th century, the Paris of Balzac or the United States during the era of robber barons, to the Gulf States now. But throughout time satisfying the needs of the body has been the goal of most buildings and their designers, often cutting themselves off from mainstream thought which revolves around the mind. That, I propose, is one of the main reasons that architecture is sidelined from political, social and cultural life: it simply will not address that most pervasive of emotions, aspiration.

One architect and theorist who eschewed the trend towards banality but from a different motivation, was Aldo Rossi. He argued that what persisted in urban form were strong, clear, geometric shapes that survived long after their original functions became anachronisms. The purer the form, the likely it was to survive because it would be easy to adapt to new functions. Rossi recognized that these archetypal forms through the patterns of use and re-use embodied something about culture in general, in particular its accretive condition, rather than individual, discrete activities. This seems more wholesome and profound than obsessing over rainwater management and is certainly more culturally resonant.

However, despite most architectural innovation coming from finding new ways to satisfy new wants of the mind, that has often evoked suspicion or worse. The Inquisition, Sumptuary Laws, committees of taste, 19th century morality and in the UK at least, post- World War II cultural policy raged against excessive display and conspicuous consumption. Ruskin wrote the three volumes of the Stones of Venice largely to advocate for a moral basis for art and architecture against the ‘decadent’ classicism that came in with the Renaissance, which he condemned as ‘Pagan in its origin, proud and unholy in its revival, paralysed in its old age . . . an architecture invented, as it seems, to make plagiarists of its architects, slaves of its workmen, and sybarites of its inhabitants; an architecture in which intellect is idle, invention impossible, but in which all luxury is gratified and all insolence fortified.’

But what of buildings whose purpose relates to authority? Almost any public building could come into this category, including religious buildings, law courts, police stations, town halls and perhaps most importantly, at least in the UK, parliaments.

Our significant parliamentary reform in recent decades is reflected in architecture. There are two new parliaments to serve devolved governments in Scotland and Wales, while the home of the ‘mother of parliaments’, the Palace of Westminster, is the object of ongoing concern over its condition. It has numerous fire hazards (ironically it was a catastrophic fire in 1834 that destroyed most of the mediaeval palace leading to the familiar 19th century building); it is riddled with asbestos, and its efficacy as a parliament building is questioned despite its historic authority. The Welsh Parliament or Senedd, by Richard Rogers’ firm Rogers Stirk Harbour (now RSHP) was largely designed by Ivan Harbour and has recently been adapted to allow for increased powers and size. It is quite possibly unique in being the only parliament actually designed by a parliamentarian – Rogers was an active member of the House of Lords until shortly before his death. (Norman Foster also became a Lord while his firm designed the German Reichstag, but he was never an active member of the House).

We shall return to the Senedd’s revisions in a later edition of this newsletter: here we will focus on the Palace of Westminster, an outlier among parliamentary buildings. It is unusual in being Gothic rather than Classical (or Modern); it is also unusual in the way it incorporates numerous phases of building: surviving the fire, its oldest extant part is Westminster Hall, which dates from the 11th century. The layout and rectilinear shape of its debating chambers frequently raises eyebrows, especially on the faces of European parliamentarians in thrall to circular debating chambers and rationalism as the underlying principle of political systems. But in reality each of those ‘oddities’ are part of what gives it authority.

The Palace of Westminster grew from the 11th century onwards to absorb some of the religious authority of the adjacent Westminster Abbey into the business of secular government. The two coronations of 1066 (Harold Godwinson and his nemesis at the Battle of Hastings, William the Conqueror) already symbolised the transfer of divine to secular power through ritual; the building cast that, or tried to, in stone. Initially the palace was a Royal residence, but as the bodily presence of the king was fundamental to government, it became a key centre, even though, during the Middle Ages, government followed the king as he travelled around the country. The palace had an explicit role in representing authority; this was especially true of the great hall, rebuilt in the 14th century to house functions that exuded Royal power, from law courts to coronation banquets. Other set-piece spaces such as the painted chamber, once the king’s bedroom but which became the place where parliament met, also represented authority.

Medieval government was a dialectical dance between king and parliament, and its piecemeal evolution was reflected in the piecemeal evolution of the palace. In the early middle ages, the king ruled through a Great Council, comprising great lords and magnates of the church. Among the more significant episodes in this ‘dance’ were the signing of Magna Carta in 1215, through which the king recognized his obligation to follow the law, and the expansion of parliament by the summons of the ‘Commons’ – knights of the shires and burgesses of the towns – alongside the lords from 1265. Initially they sat in the same chamber, but by the early 14th century, lords and commons met separately, solidifying into the two chambers of England’s and later the UK’s bicameral parliament.

Initially these developments made little mark on the architecture of the palace. Parliament met wherever the king was residing, often in the great hall of a royal castle or that of a great noble. When it did meet at Westminster, the commons tended to sit in the chapter house of Westminster Abbey, reinforcing the relationship between the two institutions – the only building in the area explicitly intended for decision-taking through deliberation and debate. It was only in 1547 that the Commons was first granted a dedicated space, nearly 300 years after the first summons. This was in the former St Stephen’s Chapel, a high gothic chantry intended as a counterpart to Paris’ Ste Chapelle. It had become available with the Dissolution of the Monasteries of the previous decade, itself part of the break with the Roman Catholic Church which also saw the emergence of the doctrine that the ‘King in Parliament’ (ie Lords and Commons) was the country’s highest sovereign body. In any case the 150-year-old chapel needed some modification to make it suitable for its new role, and to accommodate around 400 members rather than the 40 or so chantry monks. It acquired galleries, a lowered ceiling for acoustic reasons, and new seating. Over the following three centuries, it underwent many alterations, largely to accommodate more members and improve their amenity, designed by architects like Christopher Wren, James Wyatt and John Soane. By the time the latter was appointed as architect to the Palace of Westminster in the 1790s, the House of Commons was considered extremely inadequate: it had to accommodate 200 more members than originally intended after the Acts of Union with Scotland (1707) and Ireland (1801); its sightlines and acoustics were terrible and it had sparse accommodation for guests and the increasingly influential press.

That did not hinder it from acquiring authority. When the House of Commons itself had one if its periodic episodes of wanting to improve its accommodation in the early 1830s, various architects, well-known and unknown, as well as several MPs, submitted designs. They ranged from following the existing layout to various different shapes, including circular. The ageing Soane reminded the committee that it was 40 years since he had made his first proposals for a new House, but all these initiatives were rendered irrelevant when the fire of 1834 destroyed most of the Palace.

Charles Barry, the architect who, with assistance from Pugin, won the competition for its replacement, repeated and improved the authority exuded in the destroyed buildings. He repeated the rectilinear form of the two chambers where rival parties oppose each other across a narrow space, and which by then had become an inherent part of British politics. Pugin’s decorative schemes for both reinforced the relationship between them, and yet imbued each with an expression of authority.

But it was Barry’s overall composition that showed the greatest improvement. He placed the two chambers at either end of a long axis, with the ornate monarch’s throne in the Lords, used once a year but representing the presence of the monarch whenever the House sits without his or her presence, at one end. The axis ends with the chair (not a throne) of the Speaker of the Commons. In this apparently simple device, Barry managed to express the fundamental constitutional principle of authority lying in the sovereign body of the King in Parliament. And the public are allowed some axis, via the central lobby, reached from a cross-axis where they can meet with their legislators.

Britain is often ridiculed by fashionable political scientists for supposedly not having a written constitution. This goes against the post-Enlightenment trend towards rationalism as the final arbiter of political thought, something many British political theorists from Edmund Burke to Michael Oakeshott have treated with suspicion – which does not help to quell the ridicule. But Barry’s plan is a simple and powerful exposition of the constitution which is more visceral or real than any written document, whether inscribed on vellum or encoded in a data centre.

What makes these rationalists feel uneasy is the constitution’s flexibility, paralleled by the fluidity of Common Law (as opposed to codified law). This has seen first England and later the United Kingdom through numerous existential crises, and various reforms, all through some form of tradition-cognate consensus.

One of the most articulate and persuasive advocates of Britain’s peculiar constitutional arrangements was Winston Churchill. In a speech to the House of Commons in 1943, about the rebuilding of the chamber after it was bombed in 1941, he made a strong case for Parliament to continue to operate on its existing model. He couched this in architectural terms, dismissing calls to change the layout of the chamber to a more common (and fashionable) circular geometry on the grounds that the rectilinear chamber allowed opposing views to be raised and debated, which he argued that circular chambers compromised because of their encouragement of groupthink. Speaking when the outcome of World War II was still in the balance, he concluded, ‘Politics may be very fierce and violent in the after-war days . . . We shall certainly have an immense press of business and, very likely, of stormy controversy. We must have a good, well-tried and convenient place in which to do our work’.

So for Churchill the House of Commons exuded not just an abstract notion of authority but authority of the right sort, that might bring the country to those ‘sunlit uplands’ he hoped for in 1940. It is his grasp of the long-gestated significance of the architecture of parliament – he had by 1943 been a member of parliament around 40 years – that is lacking now. The projected cost of refurbishing the palace is put at tens of billions of pounds, and is predicted to take several decades to complete (both figures change on whether the assumption is that the building would be entirely decanted or remain in use). Work has already been ongoing for more than a decade, with a design for a ‘temporary’ House of Commons chamber commissioned and designed (from WAF regulars Allford Hall Monaghan Morris), but no consensus has emerged. Instead, criticism has rarely risen above the typical level of British commentary on architecture of ‘I like/don’t like it’ or ‘it’s too expensive’, in this case not wholly unreasonable.

The Opposition Conservative Party has stated that it will oppose the ongoing proposals unless they are shown to be ‘good value for money’ (whatever that means); the party leader, the otherwise impressive Kemi Badenoch, has referred to taxpayers being asked to fund the palace’s transformation into a ‘net-zero Dubai hotel’. There is no such proposal.

This is a time where the reasoned understanding of history is necessary, but does not, alas, seem to be evident in the discussions of legislators or indeed the general public.