Water water - use of water in architecture

Architectural Review, The, Dec, 1998 by Peter Davey

Since Roman times, water has been a life-enhancing adjunct to buildings intensifying their meaning and impact.

The emperor Nero was one of the first to relate water to architecture on a large scale, and he did not make himself popular by doing so. Suetonius described the gardens of the Golden House as having 'an enormous pool, more like a sea than a pool, which was surrounded by buildings made to resemble cities'.(1) The lake was clearly regarded as the most extravagant feature of the Domus Aurea, built almost in the middle of Rome after the great fire. The whole enterprise was so much disliked that after Nero's suicide, his successors quickly destroyed obvious signs of his odious reign, and the pool is reputed to have formed the site (and shape) of the Colosseum.

As well as the reflecting and reflective lake, Nero's garden almost certainly contained rills and streams, for much of it was given over to 'faked rusticity - woods here, open spaces and views there'. Tacitus was cutting about the 'cunning impudent artificialities [of] Nero's architects and engineers, Severus and Celer, [who] did not balk at effects which Nature herself had ruled out as impossible'.(2) The Romans invented the landscaped garden, and relished the relationship of ordered architecture to real or contrived nature. Grand Roman buildings were associated with water, still or rushing unlike the work of the Classical Greeks, who lacked the engineering skills to command the element as an adjunct to architecture.(3)

Water and engineering were integral to Roman culture: the chief priest(4) was called Pontifex Maximus, greatest bridge builder, the man who made links over water. Roman aqueducts brought water to the cities, where its arrival was celebrated in ceremonial fountains. The baths with their huge volumes of water were a focus of public life. A wealthy Roman almost always included a nymphaeum in his villa: a fountain and basins dedicated to the gods of water and springs (nymphs). In even relatively modest Roman houses, water played an integral part, for the atrium, with its central impluvium (rain-water pool), was the first space to be encountered on entering. Under the compluvium (the opening that let the rain in), the impluvium was more than just a cistern, for the image of the sky was caught in it, and light was reflected upwards to the roof and surrounding rooms, as well as reaching them from above.(5) Water, luminosity, volume and structure were all intimately related.

Power of the earth and the monarch

They were not to be so again in Europe for a thousand years after the collapse of the Western Empire, though the sensibility continued in the Muslim world where Roman aquatic engineering skills were developed and enhanced to make splendid gardens from the Alhambra to the Taj Mahal. The Italian Renaissance re-invented the aqueduct and, with it, the wonders of water related to buildings. Re-awakened understanding burst out with astonishing power and imagination in the middle of the sixteenth century at the Villa d'Este(6) where water jets, sprays, squirts, chatters and cascades in innumerable ways, both apparently natural and clearly artificial.

At the bottom of the great gushing hillside which so poetically demonstrates newly-rediscovered command over hydraulics, there is a tranquil passage, where large rectangular fish-ponds reflect the sky. They are the precursors of a new and different sensibility, and a new relationship of humanity to nature, brilliantly analyzed by Vincent Scully who argues that 'In the Italian garden, water is the awesome gift of the earth; in the French garden, water becomes primarily the optical medium by means of which the sky is reflected'.(7) Scully describes the great canal at Versailles where 'our gaze moves rapidly down the tapis vert, but when it hits the water it literally takes off. It no longer adheres but slides - slides across the water to the sky reflected in it ... the human brain, led on by the human two-eyed vision that Descartes analyzed so well, shapes every inch of space to the horizon, and by implication, far beyond it. A human absolutism rules the world at last'.(8)

In total contrast to water as the demonstration of the cosmic power of the Sun King is the age-old celebration of the element as fun. Even Pliny (not a man to offer a joke if a solemn aphorism could he used instead) enjoyed playfulness sometimes, for instance in a curved marble bench in his Tuscan garden from which 'water gushes out from under the seat as if pressed out by the weight of people sitting there, [it] is caught in a stone cistern then held in a polished marble basin which is regulated by a hidden device so as to remain full without overflowing ... A fountain opposite plays and catches its water, throwing it high in the air so that it falls back into the basin, where it is played again at once'.(9) Pliny and his guests reclined on the marble couch with their lighter supper dishes floating about on the basin 'in vessels shaped like birds or little boats'.