Balbus; or, the future of architecture — Themes and Context

The Dress Analogy and Its Limits

Barman's opening gambit—comparing architecture to clothing—is not merely rhetorical. He uses it to expose a fundamental difference: while dress conforms to the fixed outline of the human body, architecture must respond to the 'sweeping and rapid changes' of society. This leads him to dismiss fashion-driven architecture as superficial. He writes that describing a building as 'modern' because its windows follow a thirty-year-old aesthetic is a 'curious tendency.' Instead, he locates modernity in structural responses to new social and legal conditions, such as zoning ordinances. The analogy thus serves as a diagnostic tool, not a decorative flourish.

Zoning as a New Architectural Impulse

Barman devotes considerable attention to American zoning laws, which he sees as a fresh 'governing impulse' replacing the older principle of internal form. He describes how a zoned building—like the Bell Telephone Building in St. Louis—is shaped by external regulations, stepping back in obedience to the law. This, he argues, produces a different kind of beauty, one that cannot be compared to Chartres Cathedral. The zoned building is 'a matter of cubic feet piled up around a private road,' its form dictated from without. Yet Barman does not dismiss it; he sees promise in its rationality, even as he acknowledges its limitations in irregular street layouts like London's.

The London Example: Devonshire House

Barman points to Devonshire House in London as a rare local example of zoning principles at work. He notes wryly that it is 'not excessively clear' why American regulations governed its design, but he values it as an illustration of 'the laws of growth to which American architecture will in future be subject.' The building's stepped-back façade, creating open courts, embodies the new external impulse. Barman contrasts this with the 'internal form' that produced older masterpieces, suggesting that zoning substitutes a rational, street-directed order for caprice. His tone is analytical rather than celebratory, treating Devonshire House as a case study in architectural evolution.

Barman's essay is less a prediction than a diagnosis. He does not claim to know what future architecture will look like, but he insists that its forms will arise from social and legal pressures, not from stylistic revivals. Readers should approach Balbus as a period argument rooted in 1920s debates about modernism and urbanism. The excerpts reveal a writer more interested in causes than in aesthetics, and more comfortable with analogies than with prescriptions.

There’s something touching about Barman arguing that even Chartres was shaped by its moment, not just its makers. It makes me think of another city caught mid-transformation—Amsterdam in Rembrandt’s day, where every new canal house whispered a similar tension between commerce and craft. I keep returning to Rembrandt's Amsterdam — Themes and Context for that same quiet ache of watching a place become itself.