227erates dynamic colour relationships. As a consequence, we ex-
pect picturesque architecture to offer a pictorially composed
dynamism, colour, contrasts of light and shadow, diversity
and irregularity – and at the same time, an impression of co-
hesion and coherence. The picturesque is precisely the delib-
erately created and apparently unintentional aspect of a situ-
ation, the apparently fortuitous convergence of magnitudes,
directions and colours, which nonetheless stand in a recog-
nizable relationship of equilibrium with one another. Our
understanding of picturesque architecture rests upon themes
that were developed throughout history, particularly in the
eighteenth century and in Romanticism. In the meantime, the
nostalgic and culturally critical cultivation of a supposedly
natural, albeit composed disorder, of the apparently original,
the authentic, has become questionable, even coming under
suspicion of being infected by kitsch. Taking its place in some
instances, meanwhile, is a poetry of fashionable brittleness
that extends all the way to a picturesque image of wretched-
ness, a kind of dirty realism that is itself hardly secure from
the danger of sliding into kitsch.
The painterly conception holds architecture at a dis-
tance, freeing the beholder from the physical constraint of its
unmediated spatial presence and allowing him or her, accord-
ing to August Schmarsow, to work out the ‘unity of body and
space in the surface of a distant image’ intellectually in a state
of ‘tranquil contemplation’. Reduced to an individual > per-
spective, the spatial reality becomes the object of a primarily
aesthetic form of pleasure.
Despite the non-architectural character of this restricted
point of view, picturesque architectural compositions and city-
scapes, with their aesthetic condensation of spatial superposi-
tions, vistas and colour relationships, are often an enrichment
of architectural experience. Spatial depth does not so much
impel physical movement as it serves a tension-filled visual
composition in a tableau of overlapping forms and contrasts
of directionality. Even during physical movement, picturesque