At an astonishing lecture at the Institute for Classical Architecture last week, historian Nancy Steinhardt traced the influence of the École des beaux-arts through Chinese architecture. To illustrate how marginally Chinese traditional architecture was positioned within the canon, she showed the frontispiece of Banister Fletcher’s 1924 book The History of Architecture, a drawing called “The Tree of Architecture." Embedded in this diagram are some not-so-certain notions that still have purchase today: that ancient Greece is the primary origin, that Asia is a minor source, that contemporary American and European forms are the highest expression, and that the Middle East, South America, and Africa beyond Egypt don’t exist.
Though the interpretation is single-minded (progress is symmetrical and vertical) and the representation is kitschy (robed figures posed beneath the branches embody virtues of Geography, Geology, Climate, Religion, Society and History), it’s hard to resist the charms of this illustration. The tree and figures are rendered naturalistically but composed melodramatically, like scenes in Puvis de Chavannes. What tree in real life is shaped like this, with a dense, high crown and strangely criss-crossing lower branches? More deeply, there’s something touching about Fletcher's desire to fit a subject as expansive and as complex as the world history of architecture in a single diagram. In middle school I had an English teacher who taught us how to diagram a sentence graphically, to draw a horizontal, fallen-tree structure and set each word on its own limb. It gave immense satisfaction to tease language into its most basic components like this, but at the same time it was always understood that any sentence, once uttered, surpassed its spindly diagram. As he was imagining "The Tree of Architecture,” Fletcher might have felt something similar.