The anthropology of building: architecture is made of four elements (hearth, roof, enclosure and mound), each born of a craft, and the wall began as a woven textile, so that its surface is by nature a “dressing”.
Semper (1803–79) was the leading German architect of his generation (the Dresden opera house and art gallery, and later the museums and Burgtheater in Vienna) and a revolutionary who fled Dresden after the uprising of 1849. In exile in London he helped arrange sections of the Great Exhibition of 1851, where a full-size Caribbean hut on display confirmed the theory he published that year in The Four Elements of Architecture.
Instead of Laugier’s hut of trees, Semper begins with the hearth, the social centre around which people first gathered. To protect it three further elements were needed: a roof on posts, an enclosure of hung mats and woven screens, and a raised mound to keep the floor dry. Each element belonged to a craft (ceramics and metalwork to the hearth, carpentry to the roof, weaving to the enclosure, masonry to the mound), and each craft left its techniques and ornaments to architecture long after the materials had changed.
In Der Stil (two volumes, 1860–63) Semper developed this into a vast theory of style as the product of material, technique and purpose. Its best-known idea is the Bekleidungsprinzip, the principle of dressing: since the first walls were textiles, the visible surface of a wall (painted, panelled, incrusted) is not a deception but its true nature. The idea shaped Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos in Vienna and still underlies thinking about cladding and the building envelope.
The book, part by part
I The Four Elements of Architecture (1851)
Hearth, roof, enclosure and mound; the crafts that correspond to them; the Caribbean hut; the polychromy of ancient architecture, which Semper had defended since the 1830s.
Rules: The four elements
II Der Stil, vol. I (1860): Textiles
Weaving as the primal art: knots, seams, borders and patterns, and the principle of dressing (Bekleidung) by which the wall inherits the forms of the textile.
III Der Stil, vol. II (1863): Ceramics, carpentry, masonry, metal
The other crafts and their symbolic transfers into architecture: the “change of material” (Stoffwechsel) by which forms outlive the materials that produced them.