Changing Uses of Classical Architecture

Page 1

ARC134 PROJECT 2 GUIDANCE •  Take two printed copies of your paper draft to section this evening. •  A Word template is on Blackboard to guide formatting of the paper and website post. Brackets are there to indicate the type of material to plug into the template—they should not appear in the final paper or post. •  Refer to Project 1 as needed with a hyperlinked sentence but don’t discuss Project 1 as part of Project 2. •  Provide identifying information for each of your three topics via subheadings. •  Go further in engaging the architectural specificity of your three topic selections. Choose one kind of representation (ideally plan but section, elevation, façade photograph, etc. are also viable) and use it for each of your three topics. Discuss it directly in the text so that you are spurred to show exactly how the project engages your hypothesis architecturally.


ARC134 CHANGING USES OF CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE Humanism: Renaissance Italy 18th c. European Historicism New aesthetic categories: picturesque and sublime Romanticism


ARC134 CHANGING USES OF CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE Humanism: Renaissance Italy The wealth generated by transatlantic trade supported a building boom in Europe, including the construction of churches, palaces, and villas by bankers and merchants in Florence and the Veneto. Adapting forms and principles from classical Rome, these patrons and their architects developed a humanist architecture that used pagan antiquity to legitimize new social arrangements that challenged Christian doctrine.



Pienza (formerly Corsignano), Italy View of an Ideal City, ca. 1490


Michelozzo di Bartolomeo [?], Pazzi Chapel, Church of Santa Croce, Florence, Italy, early 1430scommissioned by Andrea de’ Pazzi


Doctrine of harmonic proportion, or “the music of the spheres,” associated with Pythagoras Beauty = the materialization in form of a mathematical order found in nature Art = mimesis (imitation of divine perfection)

above: center: right:

anonymous, drawing of a music teacher Francesco di Giorgio, ideal church plan Alberti, façade of Santa Maria Novella


Leon Battista Alberti Sant’Andrea, Mantua, Italy, 1472commissioned by Ludovico Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua


Trajan’s Arch, Ancona

S. Francesco





Alberti’s treatises: On Sculpture, 1433 On Painting, 1435 On the Art of Building in Ten Books, 1430s-1485


Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) working in the Sforza court in Milan


Donato Bramante, Tempietto of San Pietro in Montorio, Rome, Italy, 1502-


central-plan precursor: Alberti, San Sebastiano, Mantua, 1460-

Byzantine martyrium type

Basilica plan (San Lorenzo)


frieze iconography: liturgical instruments (with antique pagan corollaries, below right)


Giuliano da Sangallo, Villa Medici, Poggio a Caiano, outside Florence, c. 1485 James Ackerman: a villa is “a building in the country designed for its owner’s enjoyment and relaxation;” a satellite of and counterpoint to the city.





Palladian villas in the Veneto or Terraferma


Palladio, Villa Capra (La Rotonda), outside Vicenza, 1550-


Palladio, Villa Capra (La Rotonda), outside Vicenza, 1550-


Palladio, Villa Capra (La Rotonda), outside Vicenza, 1550-

Roman baths


ARC134 CHANGING USES OF CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE 18th c. European Historicism Archeological excavations and the new “science� of history led European scholars and architects to see architecture as a product of its time and place, embedded in specific cultures rather than the reflection of timeless and universal ideals. This allowed architects and clients to evoke multiple versions of classical architecture, and to draw on an eclectic array of alternative traditions ranging from Gothic to Mughal and beyond.


Colen Campbell, Mereworth, Kent, 1722with Palladio’s Villa Rotonda (above R) Palladian Revival treatise: Vitruvius Britannicus, 1715-25


Villa Rotonda

Richard Boyle (Earl of Burlington), Chiswick House, outside London, 1725 Grand Tour: tour of Italy to see Renaissance and classical art and architecture


Villa Rotonda


James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, Antiquities of Athens, begun 1741, published 1762 Stuart sketching the Erechtheion on the Acropolis


Frontispiece to The Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam, Esquires, 1775 “A student conducted to Minerva, who points to Greece, and Italy, as the countries from where he must derive the most perfect knowledge and taste in elegant architecture”

Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Reflections on the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, 1755: “there is but one way for the moderns to become great, even inimitable; I mean, by imitating the Greeks”

Historicism = the belief that architecture and other arts reflect the nature of the society and epoch that created them


Robert Adam, Kedleston Hall, Yorkshire, England, 1760


Robert Adam, Osterley Park House, Middlesex, England, 1761East portico, based on the Erechtheion in Athens


Osterley Park: Pompeiian decoration Pompeii excavated 1746-63


Composite plaster decorations used by the Adam brothers in the 1780s


ARC134 CHANGING USES OF CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE New aesthetic categories: picturesque and sublime 17th and 18th century philosophers and artists began to recognize that beauty was not the only mode of aesthetic appreciation. The concepts of the picturesque and the sublime stimulated artists, architects, and garden designers to exploit a range of historical traditions for their expressive potential.


Chiswick, near London: garden plan by Lord Burlington, 1720s; continued by William Kent from the early 1730s picturesque landscape garden


Chiswick from the west in 1753, showing the cascade designed by Kent in the early 1730s


Chiswick: Kent’s design for the Great Walk and Exedra garden follies


Palladian pavilion (red) with older Jacobean house (orange) and “hyphen� (yellow)


Rousham, near Oxford, begun 1725 by Charles Bridgeman, continued after 1737 by William Kent

View from the house

Gothic Mill with “eye-catcher� (in background)

Associationalism: doctrine that conceives architecture as a sign evoking associations with fables or with specific places and historical periods.


Stowe, Buckinghamshire, begun 1713 by William Kent, continued by Charles Bridgeman

Garden follies at Stowe: William Kent, Grecian Temple, 1748-

James Gibbs, Temple of Liberty, 1741-44


Stowe in 1746: the Rotondo, by Sir John Vanbrugh, with John Bridgeman’s “ha-ha” to the right Acts of Enclosure: 17th and 18th c. laws that abolished the medieval system of land tenure by absorbing small land holdings into large estates


Henry Flitcroft and Henry Hoare II: Stourhead (gardens), 1744-


Colen Campbell, Stourhead (house), 1720-21 author of Vitruvius Britannicus


Views of Stourhead (above) with two paintings by Claude Lorrain (below): “Landscape with Shepherds,” 1645 (L) and “Landscape with Aeneas at Delos,” 1672 (R)



Versailles


Earl of Shaftesbury, The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody (1709): “I shall no longer resist the passion growing in me for things of a natural kind, where neither art nor the conceit or caprice of man has spoiled their genuine order, by breaking in upon that primitive state. Even the rude rocks, the mossy caverns, the irregular unwrought grottoes and broken falls of waters, with all the horrid graces of the wilderness itself, as representing NATURE more, will be the more engaging, and appear with a magnificence beyond the formal mockery of princely gardens.�

Acts of Enclosure 17th and 18th c. laws that abolished the medieval system of peasant farming and common land tenure, replacing it with the privatization (enclosure) of farmland within aristocratic estates


Richard Payne Knight: “the beautiful” (L) and “the picturesque” (R), 1794 Classical aesthetics: art strives to achieve beauty through mimesis (imitation of nature) Romantic aesthetics: art emulates different aspects of nature to achieve different effects: beautiful / picturesque / sublime Edmund Burke: “I know nothing which is sublime which is not connected to the sense of power; this branch proceeds naturally…from terror, the common origin of the sublime.”


Richard Payne Knight, Downton Castle, Herefordshire, England, 1772 architectural picturesque


Characteristic landscapes and their architecture: Richard Brown: "Norman, Tudor, Grecian, and Roman Residences: Their Appropriate Situation and Scenery," 1841


Horace Walpole, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, England, 1749-77 Gothic Revival within the framework of romanticism and the search for picturesque effects


Horace Walpole, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, England, 1749-77 Gothic Revival within the framework of romanticism and the search for picturesque effects


Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778): Romantic neoclassicism emphasizing the sublime


Étienne-Louis BoullÊe Cenotaph for Newton (project), 1783 architectural sublime Sensationalism = the idea that architecture affects us not only through concepts but also through sensations, vivid experiences


Étienne-Louis BoullÊe, Metropolitan Cathedral (project), 1781


James Wyatt, Fonthill Abbey, 1795-1807 Gothic Revival as a technique of the architectural sublime


Characteristic landscapes and their architecture: Richard Brown: "Norman, Tudor, Grecian, and Roman Residences: Their Appropriate Situation and Scenery," 1841


ARC134 CHANGING USES OF CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE Romanticism Neoclassical architecture, initially associated with Enlightenment rationality, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries also served as a framework for Romantic approaches that took a historicist approach to architecture as a technique for expressing attitudes based on class interests, cultural sensibilities, and nationalist ideologies.


Greco-Gothic synthesis: L:Nicolas Nicole, Church of the Madeleine, Besanรงon, France, 1746-66 R: Johann Friedrich Dauthe, Nikolaikirche, Leipzig, 1784


Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essay on Architecture, 1753

Allegory of the primitive hut structural rationalism: mimesis reconceived as the emulation of natural and rational constructive principles


Jacques-Germain Soufflot, Ste.-Geneviève, Paris, 1756-90


Jacques-Germain Soufflot, Ste.-Geneviève, Paris, 1756-90




Gothic buttressing within neoclassical shell



Sir John Soane, Bank of England, London, 1788-1837 Romantic neoclassicism


Sir John Soane, Bank of England, London, 1788-1837 Romantic neoclassicism


Sir John Soane, Bank of England, London, 1788-1837


Piranesi

Soane and his assistant, Joseph Gandy: the Bank of England depicted in a future ruined state


Sir John Soane, Bank of England, London, 1788-1837 Romantic neoclassicism



Municipal Corporation Building (1888) and Victoria Terminus (1878-87), Bombay, India: Gothic Revival public buildings by Frederick W. Stevens


High Court Madras, India 1888 Indo-Saracenic Style


National Art Gallery (originally Empress Victoria Memorial Hall) Madras, India 1906 Indo-Saracenic Style


Friedrich Gilly, Design for a Monument to Frederick II, Berlin, 1797

Frederick II (“the Great”), 1712-86 King of Prussia 1740-86 an “enlightened despot” creator of the Sanssouci Palace


Friedrich Gilly, Design for a Monument to Frederick II, Berlin, 1797

Frederick II (“the Great”), 1712-86 King of Prussia 1740-86 an “enlightened despot” creator of the Sanssouci Palace


Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841), Schauspielhaus (National Theater), Berlin, 1819-20 Art and architecture as didactic instruments Civic ideal of architecture as a means of Bildung (individual self-cultivation)


Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841), National Theater, Berlin, 1819-20 Art and architecture as didactic instruments Civic ideal of architecture as a means of Bildung (individual self-cultivation)


Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841), National Theater, Berlin, 1819-20


Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841), National Theater, Berlin, 1819-20


Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841), National Theater, Berlin, 1819-20


inaugural production: Iphigenia of Tauris


Greece perceived as cradle of the modern, enlightened nation-state:

Leo Von Klenze: “There was and is only one architecture and there will only ever be one architecture, namely that which reached its perfection in the formative years of Greek civilization... That it should be the Greeks who discovered this perfected architecture was merely coincidence, or even more divine destiny; it belongs as much to Germany as to Greece.�


Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Altes Museum (Old Museum), Berlin, Germany, 1824-28


Schinkel, Altes Museum (Old Museum), Berlin, 1824-28

Emerging civic center for Berlin: the Lustgarten, bordered by Arsenal, Museum, Cathedral, and Palace



stoa with Ionic columns + Prussian eagles






Kunstkonversationen (dialogues about art)



Lustgarten with Arsenal, Museum, Cathedral, and Palace


Turn static files into dynamic content formats.

Create a flipbook
Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.