14 Quotes by Peter F. Smith

As students in the 1950s we were conditioned into despising the excesses of baroque/rococo architecture; that is, until we were reprogrammed by Nikolaus Pevsner in his Slade lectures at Cambridge.

Buildings are the unavoidable art, whether the high art of the architectural masterpiece or the rich vernacular heritage of villages, towns and cities. Their forms and details are absorbed mostly on the nonconscious level, yet they weave their spell on the mind without our consent. They influence mood and demeanour, especially when they tap in to the subterranean currents of archetypal symbolism. On this level they can transmit subliminal messages of reassurance.

…echo the Gerard Manley Hopkins line: ‘likeness tempered with difference’. So, the attainment of knowledge has affinities with the perception of harmony – order transcending complexity to establish a new concept with its unique elegance.

It also needs to be remembered that symbolism can affect an aesthetic response in a negative way. To one person the fortress-like chateau towering above the town of Saumur is ‘picturesque’; to another it is a symbol of the tyranny visited on the populace by the military aristocracy and, as such, undermines the aesthetic outcome.

There is no obvious survival advantage in experiencing these views, just as our delight in walking the streets of any well-preserved medieval town has nothing directly to do with improving our adaptive capability. The fact is that there is a whole realm of emotional experience which seems to refer back to a pre-rational relationship between humans and the natural environment. This is what archetypal symbols are all about – ‘arche’, the beginning.