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era; nevertheless, it goes far beyond basic proportional
manuals of architecture and its equipment, like that of
Ernst Neufert,
11
by introducing a human dimension.
The modesty, the obviousness, the generality and the
seeming neutrality of his proposals are striking. This
is not, however, a theory of architecture in the sense of
either Gromort or Boudon;
12
rather, it is a ‘discourse on
the method’ or a collection of compositional principles
teeming with practical examples and pleasant critiques,
but one that avoids at all cost being a book of recipes.
In short, it is the equivalent of Kevin Lynch’s landscap-
ing principles applied to architecture and urban plan-
ning.
13
It is no doubt in his recourse to the elements of
architecture that Philippe Samyn most closely parallels
the theories of Palladio and Alexander. Rather than
a building comprising a group of elements making
up an order (capitals, columns, bases, entablatures,
pediments) and a system of proportions and contour
modulation as in most classical theories, Philippe
Samyn’s architecture unfolds by spatial sequences,
which he has slowly developed over his already long
career. Among these sequences are everything to do
with materialised passages (interior and exterior), with
entrances, an early example of which can be seen in
the Design Board offices
(01-147)
, visualised in the
thickness of the facades, the transparency or opacity
of the horizontal and vertical walls, and the affirmation
of structures that respond to a desire for clarification
of the means of architecture. In addition, there is a
systematic desire to determine the compositional axes
that, on most occasions, are based on the four points
of the compass.
The significant number of articles and conferences
about Philippe Samyn and the books that have been
devoted to him, or to which he has contributed at least
in part, leads one to wonder if – from one book or
paper to the next – a personal theory of architecture
is taking shape. Before attempting to answer this
question, we should recall that, for Philippe Samyn,
architecture is above all a concrete construction before
it is either pure abstraction or the materialisation of a
political dream.
14
It is clear that architecture, both dur-
ing times of crisis and in moments of invention, cannot
take place outside of its ideological and economic con-
texts – no matter how much attention architects, who
are grass-roots people after all, pay to these contexts.
When Philippe Samyn, in an interview about public
competitions, compares himself to a peasant working
in his field and not looking any further, we know that
he is not entirely taken in by what he is saying.
15
These
are clearly things that one has to say, if only to recall
the craftsmanship side of the profession and its materi-
ality. Nevertheless, Philippe Samyn is, among archi-
tects of his generation and those younger, one of those
rare creators who still draw things other than illegible
scrawls; in this respect, we can compare his general
and detailed sketches to those of Jean Prouvé.
16
But the craftsmanship is located somewhere beyond
the lead of his pencil. Although for Le Corbusier
architecture remained close to sculpture or painting,
the calculation that he had mythologised was inacces-
sible to himself and thus not his affair, any more than
the behaviour of structures in their physical reality.
On the other hand, these essential characteristics of
architecture did not escape Victor Horta, whose work
will surely one day be studied systematically, over and
above the formal and structural invention, the in-depth,
quasi-intuitive or empirical science of the physics of
construction.
Can one therefore reasonably construct a personal
theory of architecture on such premises? Let us return
to Van de Velde, one of whose favourite themes
was ‘rational design’: function giving rise to form.
Ultimately, his practice was rooted above all in the
creation of interior landscapes of architecture and its
contour modulation. Is this to say that the architect, to
paraphrase Boudon, is poorly placed to speak about
architecture and, in particular, to measure the exact
distance that separates theory and practice?
17
Let us
return, finally, to Philippe Samyn, whose writings and
papers constitute fragments of a corpus of ‘rational