Architecture has long used the analogy of language to describe a codification of formal gestures or stylistic tropes into a communicable system of representation for a collective subject. The terms of this analogy are abstract – form must be intelligible, architectural elements given symbolic meaning – and it is through this abstraction that a language begins to be constructed which has a relevance in cultural consciousness. 


The classical language of architecture was, until comparatively recent times, the communicative basis of Western architectural form.  Derived from the classical ideal of “divine impassibility and beauty residing in pure lines and harmonious proportions,” this language provided acolytes with the grammatical tools with which to communicate across historical time, assimilating ideas based on a correspondence between man, form, and the universe. ^[1] In order to be constructive, the principles governing and structuring a language must be legible to society collectively, not in a deterministic cause and effect relationship, but in a manner which has the capacity for change and revision.


For Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson, the architect behind some of the most inventive examples of 19th century architectural production, the common language was that derived from the ‘eternal laws’ with which he was concerned: “Some people imagine that the rules of architecture are arbitrary [...] but the fact is, the laws which govern the universe, whether aesthetical or physical, are the same which govern architecture. We do not contrive rules; we discover laws. There is such a thing as architectural truth.”^[2]


Contrary to what this statement might seem to suggest, Thomson was not dogmatic in his application of the formal laws of antiquity.  He was as remarkable for his comprehensive knowledge of the classical language as for his radical use of it.  “The promoters of the Greek Revival,” Thomson believed, had “failed because they could not see through the material into the laws upon which that architecture rested. They failed to master their style, and so became its slaves.”^[3]


Through his identification of language as tool, as opposed to language as doctrine, Thomson gave importance to the structural foundation of this language upon which mutable form could be conceived, and in doing so, forged a territory in which formal inventiveness and idiosyncrasies could be incorporated without departure from an elemental stylistic base.  His approach was not historicist.  Within his work, overarching laws governing harmony and proportion are conflated with a pictorial sensibility.  As John Maule McKean discusses in his 1985 essay ‘The Architectonics and Ideals of Alexander Thomson,’ “in concentrating on an ideal, via the abstract, [Thomson] did not see history as a great and gradually developing tapestry to which he could join.  Rather, his more transcendental aim was to use the data of history to reveal essences […] Thomson was innovating in order to reinforce the intended illusion.”^[4]


In pursuit of the underlying structures of architectural language, the morphological root of the ideal, it would be easy to render architecture a cloistered, autonomous, discipline.  An understanding of the evolution of architecture based only on an internal, disciplinary syntax and the delineation of interests seen as intrinsic to architecture itself, however, negates the wider socio-cultural and political context in which any building is conceived and constructed.  To formulate this understanding would require history to be viewed as fragmentary, as a heterogeneous collection of episodes, a stance which diverges from an account of history composed of models from which a language could be deciphered.


In his analysis of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s 1794 description of the Belvedere Torso, Jacques Rancière discusses the formation of an autonomous history of art as being subject to a historical basis for the conception of collective life.  The fundamental contingency this engenders becomes critical in developing a disciplinary autonomy which retains cultural relevance.  It is within this relationship, within relative autonomy, that the idea of legacy is situated.


Rancière describes the convergence of the once fragmentary histories of objects and ideas from antiquity, uniting the theories of the ideal and the actuality of the archaeological real into a singular totality.  Through bringing these strands together, the totality is given critical autonomy through the internalised relation of the objects to each other, with the ideal as interlocutor.  Critical autonomy is used here to describe meaning within this totality; disciplinary autonomy derives meaning in relation to the other, to the collective.  Rancière employs history as a concept to generate the contingencies required for a disciplinary autonomy to exist:

“History does not come to take the constituted reality of art as its object.  It constitutes this reality itself.  In order for there to be a history of art, art must exist as a reality in itself, distinct from the lives of artists and the histories of monuments […] Yet reciprocally, for art to exist as the sensible environment for works, history must exist as the form of intelligence of collective life.”^[5]

History, in this context, represents a collective subject.  It occupies the realm of shared values, the public realm, and signifies the commonality between “those who draw the blueprints for collective buildings, those who cut the stones for those buildings, those who preside over ceremonies, and those who participate in them.”^[6] It is inherently a product of its environment and becomes the intermediary between collectivity and the autonomous space of individual imagination.  It occupies the critical liminal position.


The reciprocity which is pivotal to this lays plain the fundamentally dialectical nature of autonomy. Whilst Rancière’s discussion specifically deals with the history of art, an understanding of the contingent relationships governing architecture is similarly significant.  To posit an absolute autonomy of architecture would necessitate dissolving the dialectic we have just constructed, removing architectural form from its cultural and societal context.  Architecture is a repository for culture: it holds social memory; it works to bring together iconography and semiotic issues with material.  This most powerful social aspect of architecture, its capacity to engage with and be engaged by its context, cannot be excluded in order to form an argument for an autonomous discipline.  Relative autonomy on the other hand, an autonomy contingent on place and time, on politics and socio-cultural patterns, on geographical specificities and a global transfer of knowledge, constructs the framework to bring these divergent issues into a productive relationship.  Considered in relation to the work of an architect, a building, or an architectural object, this leads to a far more complex conception of legacy.


The concept of a formal legacy within architecture is necessarily auto-reflexive.Key to the relevance of form or element in a time past its initial present is the understanding of formal legacy as re-presenting objects, as opposed to presenting artefacts.  What distinguishes the two positions is the nature of the formal. When considered as object, the formal is relational.  Specific to a place and time, the object embodies the contingencies and inherent ambiguities resulting from its re-presentation.  As artefact, the formal is conceived as purely self-referential and self-sufficient − the expression of an internal logic.


Thomson aimed to express an ideal and this is how his legacy should be thought.  Elements from antiquity are re-presented as objects in their own right rather than as facsimile or artefacts content with reifying fragments from the past.  Andor Gomme and David Walker in their 1968 book The Architecture of Glasgow conclude: “None of Thomson’s direct successors really knew how to benefit from his example or to understand what he had done to the remnants of the classical tradition.  Like all great artists who have inherited a tradition formed into a different context of civilization, Thomson not only absorbed it into himself but adapted it and reformed it into something which could once again be a living and expressive medium.”^[7]


The amalgamation of the manifold historiographies and social influences orbiting architectural discourse can never result in a unified theory or absolute truth.  Legacy, as a result, does not exist within a closed autonomy of form but in the heteronomy of architectural production and experience. It is intertwined with a temporal and contextual understanding. 


From the banks of the Nile 1500 years BCE and the rocky hills of Mycenae and Athens a century later, formal legacies have been transmitted across millennia and continents and have been reimagined for a different place.  Thomson’s radical use of the language of antiquity combined an articulation and redistribution of its elements and with a formal inventiveness and revised semiotics befitting his own time.  He produced architecture which displays an exceptional originality and his buildings have come to act as pivotal references in their own right.  Through abstraction, not facsimile, but re-presentation.