Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh

HAA0040:Introduction to Western Architecture

Frick Fine Arts Auditorium (room 125)

A SOURCEBOOK FOR

INTRODUCTION TO WESTERN ARCHITECTURE

Professor Franklin Toker

SUMMARY OF LECTURES AND KEY WORKS

USING THE "FIVE FACTORS" METHOD TO ANALYZE BUILDINGS

Before looking at the contents of western architectural history, the following method should be of help in writing, speaking, and thinking about buildings. As we look at buildings--whether on the street, in digital scans, or in books--we will find ourselves making hundreds of observations on the shapes of doorways; the shadows cast by towers; the acoustical properties of hallways; the changing nature of internal and external light. To discuss buildings we need to organize these observations into one coherent system. One of the most efficient ways to do that is to present building as the product of five factors, or agents of change. The acronym FACIT (Latin for "he/she/it makes") helps us to remember this sequence. The five factors are:

function

aesthetics

context (physical and social/historical)

ideology (the idea or theory behind the design)

technology and structure

Typically one can see these factors, or agents of change, at work. Anyone walking through the Capitol while Congress is in session will understand what the main function of the building is. An observer could figure out the materials and building technology of the Capitol fairly well by simply looking at it as a response to physical context (climate etc.) One could also make out the aesthetic of the various parts of the Capitol: the sobriety of color and plainness of texture of the oldest parts, and the gaudy decoration of the post-Civil-War rooms. One would not need to know the historical timeframe for the construction of the different parts of the Capitol--but we could guess at it--nor the social context of those years to make those observations.

What we cannot see is the historical context and the prevailing ideology of America during the years in which the Capitol was first designed and later added to. To know that, we would have to do extensive reading, not only on the history of the Capitol but on the history of the United States. This data we could not know from just looking at the Capitol: we would need to consult history books to find that out.

To summarize the five factors:

Function tells us what the building was designed to do. How is this revealed?

Aesthetics: what presuppositions or decisions of taste were made when the building was designed: rough rather than smooth; rounded forms rather than straight; irregular rather than regular?

Context. Ultimately, almost everything fits under the title of "context." The first context is geographical (land and climate) and specific to the setting of the building: urban, suburban, or rural; type of city or neighborhood etc.

The second type of context is the temporal, social, and cultural context of the building, as far as we can make it out. We can tell the cultural context of a neighborhood by such signs as ethnic traits or lifestyle: is the neighborhood clothes store a Brooks Brothers or a K-Mart? The cultural context and even the physical context of a neighborhood may have radically shifted with time, but architecture is like a portrait: what we see on the exterior conveys something about the interior too.

Ideology: what mental image is propagated from the building just looking at it on the outside? Or feeling it inside? Does the building convey the personality of its patron? of its architect?

Technology, insofar as we can see it: lighting, heating, cooling, ventilating, plumbing, glass: what appears to make the building inhabitable or visitable? This includes structure, insofar as we can judge: what holds the building up, and how is this exploited for visual or even emotional effect? We can also guess about the expense of the materials or labor conditions in erecting the building?

The five factors listed above will almost always explain why a building turned out as it did. Some buildings, such as the Gothic-style Cathedral of Learning on our campus, or Colonial-style supermarkets, are not so much indicative of change but of resistance to change: an architectural fashion that clung to Gothic or Colonial long after the original context for those styles had died off. In those cases, we have a triumph of aesthetics over technology: people can (and, perhaps, should) build in the contemporary style, but they are not obliged to.

A NOTE ON DIMENSIONS

The following basic dimensions of a few local landmarks give us a sense of scale for the buildings around the globe. We can start with the room we generally meet in: Frick auditorium, room 125. This is about 45' (' is the standard symbol for feet) wide by 60' long to center stage. Its height is about 30', which suggests that it might have been designed in increments (or modules) of 15'. If so, the room would be three modules wide, four modules long, and two modules high, for a width to length to height ratio of 3:4:2. Classrooms 203 and 204 upstairs are about 25 x 30'. The main reading room of the library is about 35' wide and 58' long. The facade (main entrance) of the Frick Fine Arts Building [see the plan in this Sourcebook and some views on the website] is 122' wide and 177' long, except for the gallery that projects in the back.

By comparison, the main block of the Cathedral of Learning, without projecting wings, is roughly 225' square: that would be the dimensions of the first 20 floors of the tower portion. The building is 40 stories high, about 535'. The Washington Monument in Washington is 555' high, and the newer skyscrapers in New York and Chicago have exceeded 1000' feet (their stories are about 10' high: a 15-story skyscraper would be about 150' high). The Commons Room at the base of the Cathedral of Learning is 128 x 175', and 60' high to the top of its vaults. Heinz Chapel, across from the Cathedral of Learning, is 253' high to the top of its spire. The lawn on which the Cathedral of Learning and Heinz Chapel sit covers 14 acres.

Now to some distances: it is approximately 800' from the Frick Building to Hillman Library, and some 1,200' from here to the Cathedral of Learning. It is 4,000' from Frick to Trees Hall--that's almost exactly three-quarters of a mile (1 mile = 5,280'). From Frick to the "O" at the corner of Oakland and Forbes avenues is 1,600'. The "academic" portion of Fifth Avenue from the Cathedral of Learning lawn west to the Carlow University campus, is also 4,000 feet.

Now to some comparisons. The largest of the three Great Pyramids of Egypt is 756' long on each side. It is 480' high, and its base covers 13 acres. If moved to Oakland, it would fill up nearly all of the Cathedral of Learning lawn. It would be just 50' lower than the Cathedral top, and it would take us about as long to walk along one side as it does for us to walk from Frick to Hillman.

The main chamber of the Pantheon in Rome is about as wide as the Commons Room in the Cathedral of Learning: 143', but it is also 143' high, much taller than the Commons Room inside. Hence its total interior volume is much greater. The Pantheon walls are nearly 15' thick, so its main block measures 172' in length and width, plus its porch gives it an overall length of 228'. The Gothic cathedrals such as Chartres and Amiens were some 200' wide and as much as 500' long inside. The vaults of Amiens reach about 140': as high as a 14-story modern skyscraper!

The most famous Renaissance building, St. Peter's basilica in Rome is about 700' long by 450' wide, bigger than all the Gothic cathedrals. But some of the richest monuments were surprisingly small. The Pazzi Chapel would nicely fit in our auditorium: 36' wide by 60' long, except that its inner volume rises to about 65', over twice as high as our ceiling. One of the most exquisite of all the buildings we will study in this course is, however, ideally dimensioned for this building. The Tempietto of S. Pietro in Montorio in Rome would fit perfectly in the rotunda of our building (in the Gallery portion, just off the cloister): it is just 15' wide inside, about 27' in total exterior diameter, including columns, and rises to about 45', including its stepped base. That would just fit within the vaults in our rotunda, which is based--not coincidentally?--on Italian Renaissance architecture to begin with.

ARCHITECTURE AND THE COSMOS I: EGYPT

Reading: Roth, Understanding Architecture, Chapter 10, pp. 188-207

Old Kingdom (c. 3200-2100 B.C.E.) Centralized political and economic organization. Kings (Pharaohs) of divine origin; powerful system of central and local officials.

Middle Kingdom (c. 2100-1800 B.C.E.) Feudal age of powerful landed nobility, with some centralized power in the hands of the Pharaohs.

New Kingdom (1570-1085 B.C.E.): Foundation of military empire extending south to Abyssinia, east to Euphrates. Corresponding expansion of foreign trade. Enormous wealth and luxury. Brief, unsuccessful attempt by Ikhnaton to establish monotheism. In the Ptolemaic period (c. 300-30 B.C.E.) centralized power was briefly revived.

Egyptian architecture is characterized by preference for simple cubic masses, sense of weight, solidity, permanence. Massive tremendous scale, heavy walls and supports. Repetition of similar geometric forms: rectangular and polygonal piers, columns with capitals and shafts in simplified plant shapes. All-over decoration in low or sunken relief or painting. Axial organization. Architecture symbolic of eternal order, reflects natural order of environment of the Nile Valley. Artistic conventions begun in Old Kingdom last 3000 years, but the Temple/Tomb of Queen Hatshepsut, at least, shows some innovation in its concern for scale and movement and even tactile values. Note one point Leland Roth's text (p. 202) makes: the tomb reliefs recall an expedition to bring back myrrh trees from Somalia, and to emphasize this, actual myrrh trees were planted around the tomb. Encompassing our sense of smell in a building is pretty rare: can you propose other examples?

Key Works:

1) Earthwork mounds, Newark, Ohio; Hopewell Culture ("paleo-Indians"), around 100 BCE to 500 CE. (Anthropologists use BCE and CE as neutral replacements for the earlier "BC" and "AD".)

2) Great Serpent Mound, near Dayton, Ohio, ca 1000 CE.

3) Saqqarah, near Cairo, Egypt: Step Pyramid and temple complex of King Zoser; architect: attributed to Imhotep, c. 2700 BCE: pp. 194-197. [NOTE: illustrations are indicated by page numbers in Roth.]

4) Pyramids of Cheops, Chefren and Mycerinus, Giza (near Cairo), c. 2600-2500 BCE

5) Temple/Tomb of Queen Hatshepsut at Deir-el-Bahari, Egypt. Architect: attributed to Senmut, c. 1500 BCE: pp. 201-203.

Literature of architecture:

Plans, sections, elevations in architecture (Roth fig. 10.11 on p. 198 is a plan of the pyramids; his fig. 10.12 on p. 199 is a section drawing; and his fig. 13.18 and 13.19 on p. 292 are two different cross-sections of the same building: the ex-church of Hagia Sofia; fig. 17.9 is an elevation drawing; fig. 6.11 on p. 129 combines a plan, an elevation, and a section of Palladio's Villa Rotonda.

WORKS IN CONTEXT

--Images of Earth, the Milky Way, and the planets from the Hubble Telescope in outer space

--Stonehenge, near Winchester, England: 1750 BCE.

--Mastaba form; p. 195

--Karnak: Temple of Khons in the precinct of Amon-Re, 12th century BCE; pp. 204-205

ARCHITECTURE AND THE COSMOS II: SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

Recommended Reading:

--Labelle Prussin, "An Introduction to Indigenous African Architecture," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 33 (1974):183-205. Available online at http://links.jstor.org/stable/988854

--Suzanne Preston Blier, "Houses are Human: Architectural Self-Images of Africa's Tamberma," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 42 (1983):371-382. Online at http://links.jstor.org/stable/989923

--Frank Willett, "African Architecture"in African Art, chap. 4, pp. 115-137

--Julius Glück, "African Architecture," in Douglas Fraser, ed., The many Faces of Primitive Art: A Critical Anthology, Englewood Cliffs NJ, 1966.

Looking at "ordinary" architecture in Africa, tells us about one of the world's oldest and richest architectural traditions--almost the only one that still survives from the dawn of human history--and reinforces the description--analysis--critique methodology that informs this course.

African architecture works on a traditional village scale, rather than following global architectural styles: the representative works chosen for today may lead us to some root concepts of African style. It is difficult to look at architecture in Africa and to hope to cover the entire continent: my personal experience has been with traditional architecture in East Africa, among the Geriyama, but the literature is massively slanted to West Africa, especially to the architecture of the Dogon, Ashanti, Hausa, and Yoruba peoples. This literature is indeed informative, but only regionally. Trying to use it to discuss all of Africa would be like using Taos Pueblo in New Mexico as representative of all American housing.

African architecture is a direct evocation of its physical environment, and takes its style--and it is extremely stylish--not from abstract aesthetic notions but from the basic need and image the building has to serve. The climate of Africa is extremely varied, from forests to grasslands to desert. Thus the available building materials are also varied, from mud to stone to thatch, and they change region by region (the way American architecture once changed regionally, until shipment of materials by railroad "nationalized" American style in the 1850s).

Sub-Saharan Africa produced some large-scale works, such as the Great Zimbabwe in Zimbabwe, but on the whole we do not find "architects" in traditional African building: what we find instead are traditional builders, who combined a certain priestly function as well. One is impressed above all by the symbolic imagery of traditional African building. Using mud may have certain technical disadvantages, but it is probably the most expressive of all materials. It not only lends itself brilliantly to surface decoration, but the very shapes of the buildings express their functions and their ideology. The facades of Dogon houses, for example, have many similarities to their masks. Much village housing is marked by anthropomorphism: the house not only houses its owner (and maker), it expresses his or her stage in life, and is closed down at his or her death. The African house totally engages with its cosmos, both physical and social.

Key work:

1) Traditional earthen roundhouse, Tamberma (Batammaliba) region of Togo and Benin: view and cutaway diagram and elevation, with traditional names for house parts (figs. 1, 5, 12 in Blier article), and website.

Literature of architecture:

vernacular, anthropomorphic, traditional, cosmological, environment, eco-friendly

WORKS IN CONTEXT

--The Great Zimbabwe (stone fortress), 14th-15th c., Zimbabwe

--Houses of the Geriyama tribe at Chonyi, Kenya, east coast of Africa, 21st century

--Traditional mud architecture, Bozo region of Mali; fig. 1 in Prussin.

--Traditional wood openwork screen house, Ghana; fig. 4 in Prussin.

--Traditional earthen roundhouses, Tallensi and Konkomba regions of Ghana; fig. 5, 12 in Prussin.

--Traditional stone construction, Dogon region of Mali; fig. 8 in Prussin.

--Mud mosque, Kawara, Upper Volta (ex-Ivory Coast)

--Decorated house facades, Zaria, Nigeria: painted facades and mud relief, including a bicycle

--Ribbed beehive clay houses, Musgu tribe, northern Cameroon

--Mud wall and thatched roof house, Congo, Central Africa

--Wood-ribbed house, Cameroon

--Cave-house in shape of a human face, Bomarzo, Italy, 16th c.

--Kailisha squatter camp, outside Capetown, South Africa; late 20th-early 21st c.

ARCHITECTURE AND BEAUTY: GREECE

Reading: Roth, Chapter 11, pp. 215-240.

Bronze Age Aegean culture: 3000 to about 1200 BCE

Iron Age Greece: 1200 to 650 BCE

Minoan (c. 2000-1400 BCE) Chiefly palaces. Destroyed c. 1700 BCE, rebuilt, destroyed again c. 1400. Great palace of the legendary King Minos at Knossos, Crete, featured complex plan around central court, maze-like store rooms, stairways with inverted column and air shafts, painted decoration, indoor plumbing. There were private houses as well.

Mycenean c. 1400-1200 BCE at Mycenae and Tiryns, Greek mainland. Became dominant culture as Minoan declined c. 1400 BCE Fortress-like citadels featured cyclopean walls, massive gates.

Greece. Small city states on peninsulas and islands separated by mountain ranges and sea. Sea trade and colonization make for close connections with Asia Minor, the Near East, southern Italy and Sicily.

Early Classic (c. 480-450 BCE) Overthrow of Tyrants; republican city states. Primacy of Athens. Chiefly Doric order, less extreme curves, more restrained in expression.

Classic (c. 450-400 BCE) Age of Pericles. Period of peace. Greatest brilliance and wealth of Athens. Synthesis of Doric clarity and simplicity and Ionic delicacy of proportion and line. Use of sculpture.

Key Works:

1) Knossos, Crete: palace of legendary King Minos, c. 3000-1450 BCE, in its last phase c. 1600--1450 BCE; p. 217.

2) Tiryns, Greece: citadel with megaron, c. 1500--1300 BCE, pp. 218-219. See website for reconstructed view of citadel and reconstructed Megaron exterior.

3) Paestum, Italy: temple of Poseidon II (also called Hera II), c. 550 BCE, p. 24. (adjoining temple on website).

4) Athens: the Acropolis with the Parthenon, by Ictinus (apparently over a foundation prepared by Callicarates), 442-437 BCE; p. 235-240.

5) Athens: the Propylaia, by Mnesikles, c. 437-432; p. 234.

Literature of architecture: megaron, shaft, capital, post-and-lintel (trabeated) system illustrated on p. 29; optical refinements; Plato's philosophy of idealism (knowledge based on ideal forms); Aristotle's philosophy of empiricism (knowledge based on our experience from the five senses of sight, hearing, smell, feel, and taste).

WORKS IN CONTEXT

--Votive plaques representing houses: Crete, 3rd millennium BCE

--Aegina: Temple of Aphaia (Athena), c. 500-490 BCE, or later

--Athens: Erectheum, Acropolis, 421-405 BCE

--Athens: Temple of Athene Nike, Acropolis, 427-424 BCE

ROMAN ARCHITECTURE I: FOUNDATIONS

Reading (for both this and following lecture): Roth, Chapter 12, pp. 247-273. Suggested: Norberg-Schulz, Chapter 3

Roman Republic (4th c. to 27 BCE) Originally small republican city state, chiefly of free landowners. Expansion into entire Mediterranean basin with corresponding growth of commerical and financial power; world trade. Decline of small landowners, growth of landed aristocracy, wealthy commercial class, slave labor. Absorption of Greek culture.

Roman Empire (27 BCE to 476 CE) Empire established by Augustus. Conquests in Central Europe and north to England during first two centuries. Centralized and orderly world-wide organization around old and newly founded urban centers. Creation of overall administrative and legal framework comparable to modern. Extensive public works, imperial patronage of the arts.

Roman Architecture: Roman architecture inherited a vocabulary of architectural forms from Greece but applied it to a strikingly different set of objectives. In classical Greece the dominant objective was an architecture of economy, equilibrium and clarity. Roman buildings were technically far more ambitious than Greek structures and richer in their interplay of volumes. In the Imperial period, Roman buildings de-emphasized the exterior to concentrate on the lavish surfaces and sequence of spatial experiences on the interior that were made possible by the newly exploited technique of concrete. Roman architects developed the arch and vault system of construction in order to create interiors on an enormous scale. Large-scale planning and intricate but dynamic progressions along a series of shifting axes mark the last products of Imperial Roman architecture. The baths and law courts that served so important a function in supporting the cult of the Emperor were a fertile source of ideas for the architects of the Christian buildings that would follow.

Key Works:

1) Nîmes, France: so-called Maison Carrée (properly Temple of Jupiter), 1st c. BCE; p. 251

2) Nîmes (near): Pont du Gard, 1st c. BCE; pp. 33-35

3) Palestrina (ancient Praeneste), near Rome: Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia, c. 80 BCE; p. 252

4) Pompeii: House of Pansa, p. 264, second century BCE. (Similar to Vettii house, standing to 79 C.E., on website).

5) Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, written about 29 BCE.

6) Colosseum (properly Flavian amphitheater), Rome: c. 72-80 C.E.; p. 268.

--Tivoli, near Rome: round temple of the Sibyl or of Vesta, 1st c. BCE

Literature of architecture: Arch and vault (arcuated system), p. 34-35; dome (pp. 37-38), barrel vault (pp. 34-35) and groin vault (p. 36); engaged column, tension & compression; illusionism ("a perception that fails to give the true character of the object perceived"); creative disorientation.

ROMAN ARCHITECTURE II: CONCRETE VISIONS

Late Antique style (from 3rd c. CE): Increasing pressure from barbarians at frontiers (soldier-emperors). Shrinking economic prosperity. Gradual decline of landed aristocracy and wealthy commerical class, replaced by court aristocracy. Steady growth of proletariat and slave class, mercenary army. Disappearance of middle class. Emperor more and more despotic on pattern of oriental rulers, with complicated court ceremonial. Imperial policy frequently determined by demands of proletarial and by popular religious movements (such as Mithraism and Christianity).

Christianity recognized in 313 (Edict of Milan); became state religion in 380.

New materials for the sculptural and volumetric richness of late imperial or Late Antique architecture: concrete with brick and stone facing, marble veneers. Sculptural decoration usually free standing statues in niches. Walls painted in illusionistic fresco. Buildings axially organized, with logical relations of main and subordinate axes, from single units to large scale city plans. Spatially, Roman architecture shows a development from closed, simple space units and regular articulation to more complex spatial relations, more fluid interpenetration of spaces, more rhythmic organization of space and mass.

Key Works:

1) Forum of Trajan, Rome, c. 111-117 CE; architect was Apollodorus of Damascus for Emperor Trajan; pp. 256-258.

2) Basilica Ulpia, the middle element in the Forum of Trajan, as on p. 258.

3) Pantheon, Rome, c. 118--128 C.E.; possibly designed by Emperor Hadrian with Apollodorus of Damascus: p. 37, pp. 260-261 and website.

4) Constantine's basilica (audience-hall) at Trier, Germany, early 4th c.

5) Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine, Rome, 307-312 C.E.: p. 36, 259.

Literature of architecture: cross-axial planning; basilica; apse; "poured" concrete (actually laid on: it was too thick to be poured, as it would be today)

EARLY CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE

Reading (combined with next lecture): Roth, Chapter 13, pp. 275-299.

Optional reading on excavating an Early Christian church: Franklin Toker, "Amid Rubble and Myth: Excavating beneath Florence's Cathedral," Humanities 20/2 (March/April 1999):14-18, online at http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/1999-03/toker.html.

The invention of the Christian church was one of the brilliant--perhaps the most brilliant--solutions in architectural history. This was achieved by a process of assimilating and rejecting various precedents, such as the Greek temple, the Roman public building, the private Roman house, and the synagogue. The Early Christian period saw the growth of Christianity, effectively an underground Eastern mystery cult during the first three centuriesC.E.. It was established as the state religion of the Empire under the successors of Constantine. Ecclesiastical administration set up within the framework of the Roman Empire. Little change in social and economic order. Gradual split between Eastern and Western Empire in state and church. Political and economic breakdown of the West, ending in barbarian invasions.

By far the most common building type in Early Christian architecture was the basilical church, developed from the Roman secular basilica. There was also a centralized type developed from Roman tombs. Basilical plan modified for liturgical requirements; congregation and clergy segregated in nave and aisles vs. transept and apse. Different variants in East and West.

Key Works:

1) Pompeii: House of Pansa, p. 264, second century BCE.

2) Christian house-church, Dura Europos, Syria, 230 C.E.; p. 278; compare with House of Pansa in earlier lecture.

3) [Old] St. Peter's basilica, Rome, c. 324-possibly 319-to 335: pp. 281-82.

4) S. Apollinare in Classe, Ravenna, Italy; consecrated 549; pp. 283-284.

Literature of architecture: transept, apse, nave, aisles, atrium, catechumen, clerestory, basilica, "house-church"

WORKS IN CONTEXT

--King Herod's temple, Jerusalem, Israel: first-century BCE successor to King Solomon's temple: destroyed in 70 CE; replaced by Dome of the Rock on same terrace.

--Synagogue, Dura Europos, Syria, about 230 CE: west wall with Torah (Bible) niche and frescoes, today in National Museum, Damascus.

--Rome: S. Sabina, around 425

--Florence: Early Christian cathedral of S. Reparata, built over the walls of a Roman domus; later rebuilt and finally destroyed after 1296.

BYZANTINE ARCHITECTURE

Byzantine Empire (eastern): Eastern Roman Empire dominant from fifth century, reaching its highest point under Justinian (527-565). Extremely centralized and despotic personal rule. Brilliance and magnificence of court and court ritual.

For purposes of this class, to be regarded as a work of Byzantine architecture a building must bear three hallmarks: Chronologically it must be a structure erected between the sixth and the fifteenth century. Politically, it must have belonged to territory controlled by the Byzantine empire, directed from Constantinople, in that same chronological period. (The main buildings were designed in Constantinople, no matter where they were built.) Stylistically, it has to adhere to the stylistic canon of Byzantine architecture, which tended to rich surfaces, plans and sections rich in spatial interplay, especially culminating in domes. Strong emphasis on vaulted central type as a result of variants in ritual. Structure: occasional basilicas with open timber roofs; more typically, central type with domes on pendentives or squinches and groin vaults supported by piers; walls have no structural function, become decorative screens. Free-flowing interior space, light continuous wall surfaces straight and curved. Coloristic treatment of surfaces, with all-over decoration: mosaic, marble veneer, lacy carved capitals, spandrels, and balustrades. Solidity of wall dissolved by shimmering light, frequently from hidden sources.

Key Works:

1) Sta. Costanza, Rome; 4th, possibly 5th-century; pp. 286-287. Not a Byzantine construction, but showing the tendency to rich centralized space that would become the hallmark of Byzantine later.

2) Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Jerusalem, Israel, ca. 326, elongated and given a rotunda over tomb of Christ around 384; p. 285. Not Byzantine either, but shows special qualities of centralized structures, especially round ones.

3) S. Vitale, Ravenna, Italy, 526--consecrated 547: pp. 288-290; portraits of Emperor and Empress Justinian and Theodora.

4) Hagia Sofia (=Santa Sophia), Istanbul (Constantinople), Turkey, 532-37, by Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletos: note thinness of screen wall below the dome; pp. 36-39, 291-292 and website.

--Shanksville PA: Flight 193 memorial, 2001 until today.

Literature of architecture: central-plan church, pendentives, screen wall (a relatively thin wall supporting nothing but itself, analogous to the "curtain wall" on skyscrapers).

EARLY MEDIEVAL, CAROLINGIAN, and OTTONIAN ARCHITECTURE.

Reading: Roth, Chapter 14, pp. 301-15.

The Early Medieval period in architecture extended from about 550 to 1050, and covers three phases:

--Early Medieval itself (what used to be called the "Dark Ages"), around 550-750;

--Carolingian, 750-950 (named for Charlemagne, in Latin Carolus Magnus);

--and Ottonian, 950-1050. These are approximatate dates, since the styles considerably overlapped. Ottonian particularly overlapped with Romanesque architecture (see notes for lecture following).

Carolingian and Ottonian buildings epitomize the organization of the feudal, agricultural society formed on the ruins of the western Roman Empire in central and western Europe. Episcopal seats and especially monastic centers were the main cultural centers throughout the Early Medieval, Carolingian and Ottonian eras. The Carolingian Empire was formed on French and German soil by Charlemagne after 750 and reached its height around 860. This was a period in which the Early Christian basilicas and the Byzantine structures in or near Europe were re-evaluated and in some cases replicated. Carolingian style declined with the decline of its political base, which was very rapid after the year 800.

Ottonian refers to the architecture of the Holy Roman Empire (Germany and large parts of France and Italy) under the three emperors Otto I, II, and III, from 962 to 1002, and their successors to around the year 1050. Their architecture was conservative, once again based on a reformulation of the Early Christian basilica, but with sensitive changes of emphasis.

Key Works:

EARLY MEDIEVAL:

1) Mausoleum of Theodoric; Ravenna, Italy, about 500-526; see website.

CAROLINGIAN:

2) Lorsch, Germany: Torhalle (gatehouse; also known as the Königshalle) of the Imperial Abbey, 768-774 or later; see website.

3) Aachen, Germany (= Aix-la-Chapelle in French): Charlemagne's palace chapel, 792-805; architect: ascribed to Archbishop Odo of Metz; pp. 303-304.

OTTONIAN:

4) Abbey church of St. Michael, Hildesheim, 993-1022 (though placed in your text under "Romanesque architecture," this is entirely Ottonian rather than Romanesque in sprit); p. 315.

Language of Architecture: pier, rhythm, bay (the distance of one structural support to the next), alternating support system

ARCHITECTURE, MEMORY, MORALITY, AND QUALITY

Optional reading: Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz, 1270 to the present (In Hillman: D805 P7D89); Architecture and its Ethical Dilemmas, ed. Nicholas Ray (In Frick: NA1995.A755); David Watkin, Morality and Architecture Revisited (In Frick: NA645.5.E25.W37).

This class brings up memory, morality, and quality--three issues very important to architecture or any branch of human creativity, yet hard to pin down. Your class text, intelligent though it is, does not address them, and the FACIT method only gets to them indirectly. One is: what is the role of memory in our thinking about architecture? The second: what role should morality play in our assessment of buildings? The third: how more generally to assess quality in architecture?

There are no key works to today's lecture, but these are the main buildings to be cited:

--Minoru Yamasaki: World Trade Center, New York; built 1966-77, destroyed September 11, 2001.

--Benjamin Henry Latrobe & others: United States Capitol, Washington DC, 1790-1865

--Louis le Vau, completed by Jules Hardouin-Mansart: Versailles Palace and gardens, France; seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries

--Engineers of the SS under Heinrich Himmler: Concentration camp at Auschwitz, German-occupied Poland, 1941

--Rothchild/Doyno Architects: Fairmont Apartments, Pittsburgh (Garfield), 2007

--Celli-Flynn Architects: Posvar Hall, University of Pittsburgh, 1974

ROMANESQUE ARCHITECTURE

Reading for Romanesque and Gothic: Roth, Chapter 14, pp. 311-328

The Romanesque style dominated Europe for about a century, 1050--1150, after which it was supplanted by Gothic in France, but it held on in Italy, Spain, and Germany for another century.

Romanesque architecture is marked by the integration and monumentalization of elements from Roman, Early Christian and provincial Byzantine architecture. Cathedrals and monastic churches, mostly basilican in type. Plan determined by liturgial demands: High Mass, antiphonal choirs of clergy, separation of clergy and people. Numerous altars with relics, etc. Massive and austere, with heavy walls, small windows. Usually vaulted: clearly defined tactile space and interior. Articulation on exterior and interior by vertical and horizontal members defining main and subordinate divisions. On the exterior, varying combinations of twin facade towers, crossing and transept towers, sharply marked nave, aisles and transept wings, apses with ambulatories and radiating chapels.

On the interior, clearly segregated bays, clearly marked stories and massive supports frequently set in alternating rhythms. Open timber roofs or ribs on vaults (barrel and groin), compound piers and heavy moldings accentuate interior divisions, horizontal and vertical; sometimes half-barrel vaulted galleries with vaulted aisles below; applied members in varied combinations (salient pier buttresses, pilaster strips, engaged shafts, arched corbel tables, string courses, etc.) mark exterior subdivisions. Wide variety of local styles in Tuscany, Lombardy, Rhineland, Burgundy, Normandy and England. Importance of pilgrimage routes (Southern France and Spain), sponsored by Benedictines (Cluny). The events that provoked the most dynamic change were the Pilgrimage Roads and the Crusades.

We study Romanesque architecture both for its own splendors and for its influence on Gothic. The Romanesque-to-Gothic transition is rather special, though not unique, in the chronology of architectural styles. Nearly all the elements of Gothic architecture were in fact created in Romanesque churches. But by themselves they did not lead to Gothic: Gothic is the integration and aesthetic exploitation of these elements. Such a situation repeated itself in the transition from Renaissance to Baroque architecture, in the transition from Baroque to Rococo, and in the transfer of modern architecture from the U.S. to Europe around 1910. Today we will see what these transitional elements were; next week, how they were exploited by the early Gothic builders.

Key Works:

1) St.-Philibert, Tournus, France, c. 1000: p. 323 and website.

2) St.-Sernin, Toulouse, France, c. 1080-1120: pp. 320-322. For a good impression of its galleries and ribbed barrel vault, see Ste.-Foye at Conques, p. 319.

3) Durham Cathedral, England: Experiments in rib vaulting c. 1093ff, vaulted ca. 1130; prototype "flying buttress" (actually quadrant arch in gallery); pp. 325-326.

4) Caen, France, St.-Etienne (Abbaye aux Hommes), c. 1068-1120: "folded" square bay shape; true six-rib vaults around 1100 or 1120; only on website.

Language of Architecture: gallery, crypt, ambulatory, transverse arch, barrel vault, quadrant vaults, wall buttress, mass-loading, point-loading, rib vault (p. 40), radiating chapels; Pilgrimage Roads

GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE I: THE ENGINEERING

Recommended readings: Maury Wolfe and Robert Mark, "Gothic Cathedral Buttressing: The Experiment at Bourges and Its Influence," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 33 (1974):17-26, online as http://www.jstor.org/stable/988836 ; John Summerson, "Heavenly Mansions: An Interpretation of Gothic," in Summerson, Heavenly Mansions, pp. 1-28, on reserve; Robert Mark, "Structural Analysis of Gothic Cathedrals: Chartres and Bourges," in Scientific American 227 (1972):90-99.

Reading: for this lecture and the one following: Roth, chapter 14, pp. 326-349; Suggested reading: Norberg-Schulz, Chap. 6.

This first look at Gothic architecture will concentrate on its development as a technical system.

EARLY AND HIGH GOTHIC (c. 1150-1300):

Architecture: limited almost entirely to cathedral cities of north-east France. Plan determined by liturgical function (cf. Romanesque), greater concentration on the high altar. Climax of skeleton construction; ribbed vaults, applied shafts, flying buttresses, stepped pier buttresses, all in delicate adjustment, form extremely light, thin, skeletal framework. Walls reduced to diaphanous screens of tracery and glass; facade wall dissolved by sculptural decoration, enormous recessed portals, tracery and glass. Verticality through tall, thin proportions, pointed arches, continuity of vertical members. Opposing principles of logical clarity of vertical and horizontal divisions and emotional quality given by dim light (stained glass), and fluid vertical continuity, reconciled by extreme thinness and delicacy of divisions. Materials: ashlar masonry, glass. Rib-vaulted structure adapted to meet new requirements. Elimination of alternate support system calls for oblong rib vaults. Full explication of concentrated weight and thrust; thin shafts and piers, flying buttresses from spirelike stepped pier buttresses at outer edge of aisles to haunch and springing of nave vaults.

Key Works:

1) Abbey church of St.-Denis, outside Paris, facade and east end, 1140-1144; patron: Abbot Suger. Suger said he had architects working for him but (deliberately?) did not give their names; pp. 329-31.

2) Amiens Cathedral, begun 1220, completed about 1275; architects: Robert de Luzarches, Thomas de Cormont, Regnault de Cormont; pp. 40, 92, 334-335. Interior view of the choir close to that of Beavais cathedral, p. 338.

3) Beauvais Cathedral, collapsed after 1225, perhaps because of poor intermediate buttressing pier; pp. 336-38.

4) Bourges Cathedral, best buttresses developed around 1200, but not copied (see discussion in Wolfe and Mark article).

Language of Architecture: formwork, clerestory, flying buttress

GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE II: THE POETRY

Recommended reading: Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism: hardcopy on reserve, or electronic resource at

http://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.01070.0001.001.

This lecture takes a second look at Gothic architecture, here from the standpoints of artistic composition, cultural expression, and spiritual meaning. The final result was dematerialized structure: the architecture of transcendence.

LATE GOTHIC WORLD (c. 1300-1500): Formation of a new international culture supported by courtly and patrician upper classes: the Papacy; great nobles; bankers and business men. Combination of practical business sense and romantic revival of chivalry. Scholastic logic and system replaced by realism and sentiment, often merged with mysticism. Humanization of religious experience: growth of practical religion (Franciscans, Dominicans). Impoverishment of lower classes, accelerated by plague, civil and foreign wars (Hundred Years' War). Religious and social rebellions. Late Gothic period overlaps the beginnings of the Renaissance in Italy (c. 1400-1500).

LATE GOTHIC CULTURE: Dominance of France; cultural center in royal domain of north-east France (Ile-de- France). Revival of commercial activity during and after the Crusades; growth of new merchant class and guilds. Importance of cities as centers of cultural as well as economic life (cathedrals, universities). Systematization of doctrine: resolution of conflicts between pagan and Christian authorities, theology and secular knowledge, faith and reason in a grandiose synthesis. Thomas Acquinas: the Summa Theologiae.

LATE GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE: influenced by the requirements of new monastic orders and wealthy burgher class. Plan: frequent elimination of transept, numerous altar niches; hall churches. Adapted to needs of individual worship and to new emphasis on sermon and secular types. Plain exteriors; wide, often low interiors, broad spreading space. Emphasis on wall surfaces. Surface decoration: multiplication of ribs, shafts, etc., for decorative purposes; wall paintings. Little articulation on exterior or interior: rejection of High Gothic logic. Wide windows, often with plain glass.

Key Works:

1) Sainte-Chapelle, Paris, 1243-48; architect: Thomas de Cormont; pp. 341 and colorplate 4.

2) Chartres Cathedral, remnant lower central facade, mid-12th century; interior begun 1194: p. 96 and website.

Language of Architecture: Abbot Suger, St. Thomas Aquinas, Scholasticism, sic-et-non

WORKS IN CONTEXT

--Nürnberg, Germany: Sankt Lorenz, parish church, 14th-15th c., with choir ca. 1480.

--Villard de Honnecourt sketch, c. 1220; p. 125.

--City planning in Siena, Italy, and the Piazza del Campo, 13-14th c.

--King's College Chapel, Cambridge; architects Reginald Ely and John Wastell; 1446-1515; p. 345.

THE EARLY RENAISSANCE: BRUNELLESCHI

Reading: Roth, Chapter 15, pp. 353-365.

Historical background: Growing importance of the upper bourgeoisie (especially merchants, bankers). Expansion of industry and world trade; voyages of exploration begin. Commercial and financial dominance of Flanders and Italy. Increased patronage of the arts by wealthy individuals.

Cultural history: Fifteenth century, first half: Principal center, Florence. Organization of civic life in Florence with guilds playing dominant role, often under leadership of wealthy families (the Medici). Patronage of arts, literature, poets, philosophers, etc., by merchant princes. Intensification and redefinition of humanism as a philosophy assigning man a rational place in the cosmos--religious, ethical, political, and economic. Emphasis on fusion of rational and practical viewpoints, drawing on ancient philosophy, literature, and art as examples of the humanistic viewpoint.

Architectural history: In terms of formal analysis, the Renaissance in architecture marks a return to the vocabulary and (in part) the compositional principles of classical architecture, and hence a return to the foundations of western art. The importance of this achievement can hardly be overemphasized, because the return to rationality and modular linkage in building prefigures the emphasis on rationality and scientific method so characteristic of the modern world. But in terms of human significance, we are indebted to the Renaissance architects for instilling "self-awareness" in their buildings, parallel to the self-awareness of Renaissance painting, sculpture, and philosophy. These themes are first enunciated by the two co-founders of Renaissance architecture, Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti. Brunelleschi represents self-awareness in his concern for architecture as a system of mathematical co- ordinates rather than an arbitrary or irrational selection of forms. Highly important is the new kind of architect envisaged and encouraged by Alberti, who wrote in his treatise On Building, around 1452: "Painting and mathematics are as indispensable to the architect as the knowledge of metrical feet and syllables is to the poet, and I doubt whether a superficial knowledge of these arts will suffice."

Both the Early and High Renaissance popularized two new formal approaches to architecture. One is the central-plan church (as opposed to the longitudinal basilica), in which the altar is set in a circular or polygonal building, or one with four equal arms (the so- called Greek Cross). The other is the module--the basic unit of measure in a modular plan, generally derived from the human body. The module is then repeated numerically throughout the building. This numerical system, popularized around the time of Brunelleschi, replaced the geometric basis of most medieval architecture, which could not be expressed in terms of whole numbers.

Key Works:

1) Arnolfo di Cambio: original plan for the Duomo (Cathedral) of S. Maria del Fiore (over the destroyed church of S. Reparata), Florence, with Gothic cupola, 1296.

2) Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446): Dome (cupola) for Cathedral of S. Maria del Fiore, Florence, 1420-36; pp. 358-359.

3) Brunelleschi: plan and view of the Baptistery piazza, Florence, c. 1420

4) Brunelleschi: S. Lorenzo, Florence, begun about 1420

5) Brunelleschi: S. Spirito, Florence, designed 1434, begun 1444 to the 1470s; p. 364

--Masaccio and Piero della Francesca: perspective-based paintings, 1420s-1460s.

--Brunelleschi's possible conception but not execution: Pazzi Chapel at S. Croce, Florence, 1429-61

Language of Architecture: Quattrocento (15th century), humanism (originally the study of ancient texts; later, a sense of culture based on humankind), perspective, proportion (how two units relate to each other, e.g. 1:4), module (smallest self-contained component from which the whole building can be derived). The module is typically stated in architectural/mathematical units, like "ten feet." But sometimes the module implies an anthropomorphic element instead, like a human arm or foot, or a body height.

DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS: ALBERTI and FILARETE

Optional reading: John Onians, "Alberti and Filarete: A Study in their Sources," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 34 (1971):96-114; online at http://www.jstor.org/stable/751017 .

Readings: Roth, pp. 367-372.

Cultural history: Fifteenth century, second half: Decline of the merchant class in Florence, except for a small group of bankers. Concentration of wealth in a few great families, establishment of a new landed aristocracy. Refined court life under Lorenzo de Medici. New mystical philosophy (Neo-Platonism) in court, and religious mysticism in popular sphere (Savonarola). Growing importance of other middle and northern Italian courts (Urbino, Mantua, Milan, etc.) and papal court. Fall of House of Medici and French conquest of Italy at end of century.

Alberti expands on Brunelleschi's experiments by stressing walls rather than points in his buildings, and by enwrapping architecture in a wider urban and social context. Ancient Rome was for Alberti a far more potent design source than it was for Brunelleschi. Alberti is crucial also for the social history of architecture, since he moved it from a technical art to a branch of the humanities, where it has remained--rather ambiguously--ever since.

Filarete, a Florentine architect working in Milan, is an enigmatic figure who nonetheless played an important role in the evolution of High Renaissance style. The early projects by Leonardo da Vinci drew on the same spirit of enquiry of Alberti, and developed some of the schemes in the notebooks left behind by Filarete in Milan.

Key Works:

1) Project for rebuilding St. Peter's, Rome; 1450-70s.

2) Leonbattista Alberti (1404-1472): Ten Books on Architecture, written ca. 1450, published 1485.

3) Alberti: S. Andrea, Mantua, 1472-18th century; pp. 370-372.

4) Antonio Averlino, called Filarete (1400?-1469): "treatise on architecture," ca. 1462 (unpublished until modern times)

5) Filarete: Ospedale Maggiore (main hospital) of Milan, Italy; ca. 1460

6) Filarete: buildings for the ideal city of Sforzinda: see p. 361 and website.

Language of Architecture: space, mass, volume

THE HIGH RENAISSANCE: LEONARDO AND BRAMANTE

Reading: Roth, Chapter 15, pp. 372-375

The High Renaissance (c. 1495-1520): Rise of strong central governments all over Europe, parallel with growth of large-scale capitalistic enterprise. Accession of Henry VIII in England (1509), Francis I in France (1515), and Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor and heir to Spain, Netherlands, Austria, Naples and Sicily, etc. (1519).

In Italy, during the brief interlude of peace between two foreign invasions, shift of political and cultural center to Rome with expansion of papal territory and sphere of influence, especially under Julius II (1503-1513). Republic of Venice only competing power in Italy.

State patronage of the arts replacing private patronage. In Italy, romantic cult of antiquity replaced by rational recreation of classic principles in classic vocabulary for modern purposes: systematic balance between Christianity and paganism, with the two mutually complementing each other.

In the High Renaissance the focus of architecture moved physically from Florence to Rome and Venice, while its aesthetic objectives became the search for an all-encompassing spatial experience, with simultaneity replacing sequentiality as a spatial objective. The three major architects of the century were Donato Bramante, Michelangelo, and Andrea Palladio. Bramante expanded on the Quattrocentro idea of self-awareness, which he transformed into a perception of one's position in a complex by response to mass and volume. Bramante articulated ideas that may have originated with Leonardo da Vinci, an enormous force in the exploration and graphic rendering of volume.

For Michelangelo and Palladio, see notes for the lecture following.

Key Works:

1) Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519): architectural sketchbooks and notebooks written in Milan, 1480s and 1490s: p. 360; represention of a church interior in anti-perspectival rendering (website).

2) Donato Bramante (1444-1514): S. Maria presso S. Satiro, Milan, c. 1478-85; website illustration

3) Bramante: Tempietto of S. Pietro in Montorio, Rome, possibly 1502 or as late as 1508; p. 352, with section as intended to be built on website.

4) Bramante and others: New St. Peter's, Rome, founded 1506 for Pope Julius II, with fragmentary elevation and reconstruction of proposed plan, p. 373 and view of construction underway, p. 374.

Literature of Architecture: Cinquecento (16th century), Pope Julius II (reigned 1503-13), central-plan building, orthogonal section and elevation; positive-negative concept of mass and space (the play of mass and void in which space emerges not merely as a vacuum but as an almost tangible positive force, as in Brunelleschi's S. Spirito, in which the chapels were meant to create positive space on the outside but negative space on the inside (and the observer simultaneously conscious of both).

WORKS IN CONTEXT

--Leonardo da Vinci: Adoration of the Magi, Florence, 1481

--Leonardo: Last Supper, Milan, 1495--97

--Bramante: S. Maria delle Grazie, Milan, c. 1490

PERSONAL VISIONS: MICHELANGELO AND PALLADIO

Reading: Roth, Chapter 15, pp. 374-384, and those below:

The sixteenth century certainly produced an exceptional number of masterpieces in architecture. While the first decades of the century were marked by the same optimism that had characterized the fifteenth century, the later decades were not. The years after 1520 were marked by intense conflict on a religious, political, and social basis. The mercantile powers, predominantly Protestant, in the North ranked themselves in opposition to the Catholic, aristocratic, agricultural states of Southern Europe. The Protestant Reformation, beginning in 1517, led to religious and political wars in Germany and Netherlands and the English defeat of Spain in the aborted Armada expedition of 1588. The temporal power of the Papacy were eclipsed in wars against Francis I of France and Charles V, head of the Holy Roman Empire. The traumatic event in Italy was the Sack of Rome by imperial troops in 1527. Henceforth the century was marked by reactionary causes and the rise of rigid political and religious absolutism. The mid-century Catholic Counter-Reformation was dominated by Spain and implemented by the Inquisition. The Medici family (for whom Michelangelo worked) reestablished itself in Florence under the autocratic Grand Dukes of Tuscany. The state and individual magnates of Venice (for whom Palladio worked) quite successfully kept aloof from these conflicts, though change was threatening the ancient republic as well. (Only recently we have learned that several of Palladio's clients were, or were accused of being, secret Protestants.)

Mannerism was an artistic tendency rather than a full-born style. It is often linked to the social tensions in Cincquecento Italy. Both Michelangelo and Palladio were certainly touched, at least, by this current. It was a variant of Late Renaissance style that used a classical vocabulary to create an anti-classical ambiance of conflict and doubt. Tensions are created by means of spatial ambiquities, contrasts of open and shut or rough and smooth, conflict between architectural, or disintegrating forms. Axes show new interest in movement in space towards a goal. Use of colossal order. Sometimes tensions are ignored in favor of a deliberate, cold, classicistic perfection. This disturbing style reflects the unresolved political, philosophical, social and religious conflicts of the sixteenth century.

At St. Peter's, Michelangelo completed the work of his three predecessors with a mastery of scale and organizing powers--characteristic of all High Renaissance artists--and in addition returned to architecture some of the expressionistic qualities that had been downplayed in the Early Renaissance.

The extent to which Michelangelo was able to impose his personal style upon St. Peter's without essentially altering the interior is astonishing. We can see in comparing his plan to Sangallo's that a few strokes of the pen were sufficient to change a complex and confused form into a simple and cohesively organized unit. Sangallo, in taking from Bramante the scheme of a major cross echoed in four lesser crosses at the corners, had expanded the later to constitute isolated pockets of space. . . . Michelangelo, by merely walling off the entrances to each of Sangallo's disconnected spaces, made one church out of many; he surpassed the clarity that he admired in Bramante's plan in substituting for the concept of major and minor crosses a more unified one of an integrated cross-and-square, so that all circulation within the Basilica should bring the visitor back to its core. The solution was strikingly simple, and far more economical than any proposed before: it even seems obvious, once it is familiar; but in a generation distinguished for great architects, it took one trained as a sculptor to discover a form that would express the organic unity of the structure. Unity was Michelangelo's contribution to St. Peter's; he transformed the interior into a continuum of space, the exterior into a cohesive body.

James Ackerman, The Architecture of Michelangelo, 1961

Andrea Palladio's architecture was concerned with self-awareness through a reduction of building components into a refined harmony. In human terms, Palladio fashioned houses and churches of such grandeur that the men and women who use them might indeed take on the god-like appearance we read of in Renaissance philosophy and literature.

Harmonic Proportion: Renaissance architecture stressed the consistent ratio of all parts of their buildings, one to the other and from each part to the whole in height, width and depth. Alberti and Palladio especially favored harmonic proportion, in which all parts in a building stood in arithmetical ratios which were derived from muscial harmony.

That the house may be commodious for the use of the family, without which they would be greatly blame-worthy, far from being commendable, great care ought to be taken, not only in the principal parts, as the loggia, halls, courts, magnificent rooms, and ample stairs, light and easy of ascent; but also, that the most minute and least beautiful parts be accomodated to the service of the greatest and more worthy...As our Blessed Creator has ordered the members of our bodies in such a manner, that the most beautiful are in places most exposed to view, and the less comely more hidden; so in building also, we ought to put the principal and considerable parts, in places the most seen, and the less beautiful, in places as much hidden from the eye as possible... in the remaining part of the fabric there may be great, middle-sized, and small rooms, and all near one another, that they may reciprocally be made use of.

Andrea Palladio, Four Books of Architecture, 1570

Key Works:

1) Michelangelo Buonarotti (1475-1564): substitute plan for St. Peter's, 1546, built through 1590 (compare Antonio Sangallo proposed substitute plan; exterior and interior views as modified after Michelangelo); p. 375.

2) Michelangelo: Laurentian Library at S. Lorenzo, Florence, 1524ff; p. 383.

3) Andrea Palladio (1508-1580): Four Books of Architecture, 1570

4) Palladio: Villa Rotonda, or La Rotonda, properly called the Villa Almerico-Capra, near Vicenza, c. 1550-67; pp. 128-29; 378-80.

Literature of Architecture:

Mannerism (a tendency popular roughly 1530-80), harmonic proportion.

WORKS IN CONTEXT

--Raphael: School of Athens fresco in papal apartments, The Vatican, 1509

--Raphael: The Expulsion of Heliodorus (same location), 1511-12.

--Palladio: Villa Barbaro, Maser; ca. 1560; p. 255--256.

BAROQUE ARCHITECTURE IN ITALY

Reading: Roth, Chapter 16, pp. 397-417

The Baroque: Grandeur of popes revived by affirmation of their supreme authority in Council of Trent, and by vigorous campaigns of new Counter-Reformation orders (especially Jesuits) for the expansion of the political influence of the papacy and for the firm entrenchment of Catholicism in Flanders, southern Germany, Austria, and Poland as well as in Italy and Spain.

Baroque is an international style of great range and power characterized by great variety in individual expression. Subordination of parts to total dynamic organization of masses in space, for dramatic climax. Manipulation of light and shade enhanced by sculpture, frescoes on walls and ceilings, altarpieces, rich decoration.

Michelangelo is also highly important as a bridge to Baroque architecture. From Michelangelo, Gianlorenzo Bernini took the scale and grandeur of his piazza and colonnade at St. Peter's. Francesco Borromini was inspired by Michelangelo's sculpted surfaces and molded interior volumes as he designed S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, a design so "alive" that it suggests (in the words of critic Siegfried Gideon) an architecture that has mastered not only space but time.

Intellectual context: Resurgence of philosophical discussion (Spinoza, Descartes) and scientific investigation, notably in astronomy (Galileo), physics and mathematics (Newton), physiology (Harvey), and optics. Perfection of telescope and microscope. It has been argued that the Baroque preference for the oval over the Renaissance-preferred circle follows the discovery by Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) that the planets revolve around the sun in oval rather than--as had been believed--circular orbits.

Baroque in Italy: A monumental style, particularly under Bernini, in which buildings are created for popes, kings, Roman nobility. Classical types and forms used for highly dynamic and dramatic large-scale schemes, integrating building with surroundings and with whole city plan. Also small-scale buildings for intellectual monastic orders. Inventive modification of classic vocabulary used with taste and precision in free combinations. New concept of fluid space and malleable mass (Borromini). Imaginative and sophisticated variations on themes of solid geometry.

Key Works:

1) Andrea Palladio: Olympic Theatre (Teatro Olimpico), Vicenza, begun 1580; view, plan, and section pp. 106-07.

2) Domenico Fontana, architect and city planner to Pope Sixtus V (Felice Peretti; ruled 1585-90): Replanned streets of Rome, 1585-1600; pp. 416-417. Best example: piazza del Popolo.

3) Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680): Baldachin (high altar canopy; 1624-33) and Cathedra Petri (sculpture and architecture working together over the apse altar; 1660s) in St. Peter's.

4 Bernini: St. Peter's Square (piazza S. Pietro), Rome, begun 1656; pp. 408-09.

5) Bernini: Cornaro Chapel in Sta. Maria della Vittoria, Rome, 1646; p. 409.

6) Francesco Borromini (1599-1667): Palazzo Spada court passageway, Rome, 1650s.

7) Borromini: S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane ("S. Carlino"), 1634-66; pp. 410-12.

Literature of Architecture: Forced perspective (architectural setting in which a building element is made to seem farther away than it actually is), indirect lighting, "Gesamtkunstwerk"

BAROQUE IN FRANCE AND ENGLAND

Reading: Roth, Chapter 16, pp. 418-427

Historical context: Increasingly powerful absolute monarchy in France, (kings Louis XIII, Louis XIV), organizing all branches of activity under the state, from industry to art and literature (foundation of the academies). Predominance of classicism in all the arts. France the dominant political and military power on the continent, but less important commercially and industrially than England and the Netherlands.

Tremendous expansion of commercial and industrial activity in Holland and England, and of their colonization and world trade, with England taking the lead toward the end of the century despite internal conflicts between king and parliament. Industrial prosperity of Flanders. Decline of Germany and Spain.

Classicizing Baroque in France: Greater reticence, and increased emphasis on classical clarity and correctness, corresponding to the rational and monumental absolutist scheme of values. Baroque spatial expansion.

England in the Seventeenth Century: Architecture tended to be purely classicizing (Inigo Jones), building in the tradition and spirit of the High Renaissance and of Palladio; or more eclectic (Wren), showing French and Dutch influences as well as those of Italian Baroque and High Renaissance architects.

Key works:

1) Gianlorenzo Bernini: rejected plans for the redesign of the Louvre, Paris, 1664-1665; p. 130.

2) Claude Perrault, Louis Le Vau, and Charles Le Brun: East facade of the Louvre as built, c. 1667; p. 131.

3) Versailles palace garden facade, 1669-85 begun by Louis le Vau (1612-70); completed by Jules Hardouin-Mansart (1646-1708); Hall of Mirrors (Galérie des Glaces), c. 1680 by Hardouin-Mansart and le Brun; whole complex 1660s into the 18th c.; pp. 416-420. Versailles is about 16 km (10 miles) from Paris.

4) Andre le Nôtre: Versailles park, designed 1661-68; p. 418.

5) Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723): proposed plan for rebuilding London, 1666; p. 422.

6) Wren: St. Paul's Cathedral, London, 1675-1710. Greek cross plan, 1672; "Great Model" design 1673; Warrant design 1675; redesigned 1675 as is; pp. 423-427.

Literature of Architecture: Ecole des Beaux-Arts, academic architecture, French classicism

WORKS IN CONTEXT

--Inigo Jones, (1573-1652): Queen's House, Greenwich, begun 1616.

--Jones: Banqueting Hall, Whitehall, London, 1619-22; projected expansion, 1638; p. 391

--Albert Speer: redesign of Berlin for Adolf Hitler, 1943-45.

ROCOCO STYLE

Reading: Roth, chapter 16, pp. 429-437; chapter 17, pp. 439-467 and selected pages in chapter 18.

Rococo, Neoclassicism and Romanticism are three influential movements from the eighteenth century, which was a pluralistic century of "movements" rather than of period styles (in that respect, much like our own times). These movements are not sequential developments, but constantly overlapping, as we will see in the next three classes.

The Rococo style of the first half of the eighteenth century is often represented as Late Baroque, but it matters little whether Johann Balthasar Neumann (1687-1753), for example, was a Rococo or Late-Baroque architect. Italy, Southern Germany, and France remained tied to the Baroque tradition in its last manifestation, the Rococo, in which the interaction of space and form in movement remained a basic element of design. In both exterior and interior designs, Rococo gives an impression of elegance and refinement by the use of smooth, light-colored surfaces, generally curved, and extensive areas of glass (windows and mirrors). Where the Renaissance preferred "perfect" geometric forms, and the Baroque opted for complex geometry, Rococo forms were often hand-drawn and arbitrary, hiding any exact geometric origin. It was the rocaille (French for shell) ornament: a free, curvilinear pattern of crisp stucco plant and shell forms, that gave its name to Rococo.

Johann Balthasar Neumann was the most important Rococo architect in Germany. He was later than the French and English Baroque architects, and was thus influenced by the decorative vocabulary of French Rococo. But overall his architecture was a Late Baroque German development of Borromini's style. Intersecting ovoid spaces and interpenetrating vaults create a sense of weightlessness and of lively movement. White walls, the extensive glass surfaces of large windows, and the illusionistic decoration of walls and ceiling produce an impression of openness and lightness. The delicate web of thin mouldings and crisp, curvilinear patterns, the stucco figures perched casually on architectural members or floating above them, and the rhythmic designs of the paintings give decorative liveliness to the curving surfaces. Neumann's variations on classical vocabulary continued the tradition begun by Borromini.

Key works:

1) Johann Balthasar Neumann: Würzburg Residenz (Prince-Bishop's Palace), Würzburg, Germany, designed 1722; center block with Kaisersaal and grand staircase, 1737 and later; pp. 428-429.

2) Frescoes in the Kaisersaal and grand staircase, painted by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, 1750-53; p.428.

3) Neumann, Vierzehnheiligen (country pilgrimage church) in Bavaria, Germany, designed 1738; redesigned by Neumann 1742, completed 1772, after Neumann's death; interior design mainly by Johann Jakob Michael Küchel; pp. 431-435 and colorplate 5.

Language of Architecture: reflected ceiling plan, stucco, al di sotto in su.

NEOCLASSICISM AND RATIONALISM

Reading: part of preceding section

Neoclassicism: the Rational Element: Eighteenth-century archeological studies, combined with a reaction in taste against the decorative Rococo style and a desire to revive certain of the historical connotations of the ancient world (such as the heroic virtues of the Roman Republic) produced the Neoclassical movement in the second half of the eighteenth century in Europe and the United States--although the brilliant villa at Chiswick was earlier. Classicizing works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (especially those of Palladio) often served as models. In general, earlier Neoclassicism uses Roman models and emphasizes their republican associations. The Greek Doric order is revived, and gave birth to a specific sub-style called the Greek Revival.

Key Works:

1) The Earl of Burlington (Richard Boyle) and William Kent: Chiswick House, outside London, begun 1725; p. 442; compare: Palladio's Villa Rotonda.

2) Juste-Aurèle Meissonier, proposed facade for the church of St.-Sulpice, Paris, 1726, on website.

3) Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni, winning design for the facade of St.-Sulpice, 1732--77, on website.

4) Abbé Laugier: Essay on Architecture ("Essai sur l'architecture") 1753, with frontispiece for 1755 edition, showing the "natural" state of architecture; p. 444.

5) James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, Antiquities of Athens, researched 1751-55; published 1761 through 1787; p. 445.

6) Jacques-Germain Soufflot: The Panthéon, Paris (ex-church of Ste.-Genevieve), 1755-92; pp. 438, 447-48 and textbook cover.

7) J.-N-.L. Durand, Lectures on Architecture ("Precis des Leçons"), Paris, 1802-05 and 1821, on the modular basis for rational architecture; see p. 473 and several of Durand's pages illustrated on the website.

8) Karl Friedrich von Schinkel: Altes Museum (Old Museum), Berlin, 1824-30; pp. 473-474.

Literature of Architecture: historicism; Enlightenment, Primitive Hut, rational architecture, functionalism, rooms en suite; program.

ROMANTICISM IN ARCHITECTURE

Reading: part of preceding section

The Romantic movement in architecture lasted from about 1750 to about 1850. It began--above all in England and Germany--as an urge towards simple, sincere feeling and natural behavior as opposed to court etiquette. We could define it as: architecture loosely based on the past: it emphasized the imagination and sentiment, and aimed at maximizing the emotional reaction of the observer. All historical styles were thought to be natural and desirable as antidotes to the unpleasant reality of Rococo artificiality and the industrial revolution. In that sense the movement could be called escapist, above all as a reaction to the industrialization of architecture.

The word "romantic" was applied to whatever might call forth "sublime" associations: ruins and other reminders of past grandeur and of the melancholy passage of time; manifestations of the forces of nature and man's impotence before them; and expressions of extreme emotion, reflecting the uncontrolled forces in man's nature, from passion to insanity. The Gothic style--used by Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill--was considered one of the best ways to bring out these associations, but other buildings reflected the exotic styles of China, Egypt, and (in the nineteenth century) North Africa. Although the outward forms of the revival styles are copied, sometimes fancifully, sometimes exactly, the content is never that of the original style, but always "romantic".

So far, so good. But the argument gets a little more complicated when we examine the romantic side of Neoclassicism. As the product of the 18th-century Enlightenment, the rationalist element generally prevailed in Neoclassicism: one can certainly trace it in Germany, France, England, and the United States. But the French architects of the era of the French Revolution, especially Boullée and Ledoux, while superficially rationalists, sometimes carried their works to such extremes of scale and severity that their final effect is romantic, too. The distinction between rationalist and romantic is made here in the hope of pedagogical clarity and helpfulness, rather than as a hard and fast distinction.

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was an architect as well as a statesman and scholar. His desire to establish a sense of cultural tradition in this new country is reflected in his architecture, which reflected his study of the famous models of European classicism and his reading in the classicist theories of architecture. He was one of the first architects anywhere to adopt Roman building types to the functional requirements of public and academic buildings.

Key works:

1) Horace Walpole: Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, England, outside London, 1749-77 (the vaults in the long gallery are only plaster); p. 462. Compare Lord Burlington's Chiswick villa nearby.

2) Richard Mique, Dairy (Hameau) for Marie Antoinette, Versailles, 1778, p. 458.

3) Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) and Charles-Louis Clerisseau: Virginia State Capitol, Richmond, 1785-89, p. 460. This design was both rationalist and romantic; the website shows it towering over Richmond with a distinct Acropolis effect, as photographed by Matthew Brady during the Civil War.

4) Etienne-Louis Boulée, Cenotaph to Newton, 1783; p. 449.

5) Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806): Architecture Considered in Relation to Art, Morals, and Legislation (L'Architecture considerée sour le rapport de l'art, des moeurs et de la legislation"), 1804.

6) Ledoux: Royal Saltworks at Chaux (the Salines de Chaux), Arc-et-Senans, France, 1775-79; p. 451 shows saltworks as developed later into an ideal city plan. Website reproduces gatehouse and director's house as built and as standing today.

7) Ledoux: Utopian projects including the Inspector's House at the Source of the Loue, project, ca. 1785 (published 1804 and 1847); p. 450.

8) Robert Mills, Washington Monument, Washington DC, 1836--1880s (website only; or go visit).

Literature of Architecture: associatism; sublime, "speaking architecture"; architecture as social engineering

WORKS IN CONTEXT

--Ledoux: Prison project for Aix-en-Provence, 1785

--Jefferson: Monticello, Charlottesville, VA, 1770-84 and 1796-1806.

--Jefferson: University of Virginia, Charlottesville VA 1817-26.

--François Barbier for Racine de Monville: Column-house and other exotic designs at Le Désert de Retz, France, 1774.

--Etienne-Louis Boulée, project for a Library, c. 1781

--Ledoux: Barrière de la Villette, and other tax-gates for Paris, 1785--89; p. 449.

--Jean Chalgrin, Arc de Triomphe, Paris, designed 1806

CONTRADICTIONS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ARCHITECTURE

Reading: Roth, Chapter 18, pp. 469-486, 502-504.

Optional: Franklin Toker, "Richardson en concours:The Pittsburgh Courthouse," Carnegie Magazine (journal carried in Frick Library) 9 (1977):13-29

The nineteenth century continually lamented the fact that it had no style of its own: it seemed a prisoner of earlier styles, particularly Greek-based and Gothic-based. Not until its very end did the century come to terms with the two revolutionary building materials it had spawned: steel and glass. It used them, but could not acknowledge them as "proper" architecture. The nineteenth century was also the first moment in architecture marked by freedom from architectural constraints. All architecture throughout history had been constrained by local conditions: local building materials, local workmen and their traditions, local taste, specifics of the local climate (hot or cold, dusty or damp, daytime and nighttime), and local architectural iconography. But through industrialization of building materials, of construction techniques, and fast steamship and railroad delivery of materials from all over the world, the nineteenth century was the first period of architecture to free itself from such constraints.

Revivals in nineteenth-century architecture: Successive and simultaneous revivals of historical styles are symptomatic of a desire for a stable and continuing tradition in the midst of the revolutionary changes of the industrial age. The Neoclassical (Roman and Greek) revivals were paralleled and followed by a romantic neo-medieval revival; these styles continue throughout the century. The revivals of Renaissance and Baroque were more limited.

The Pittsburgh Courthouse as an exemplar of nineteenth-century revival architecture. One can enjoy the Pittsburgh Courthouse of H.H. Richardson immensely just from looking at it, and it is very rewarding. But to "unlock" the richness of the Courthouse, you would need to think about it as the nineteenth century would have thought about it: the mentality of its architect Richardson, of the Allegheny County Commissioners who commissioned the building, the way the architect sought to convey the function of the building, and about its iconography (the meaning that is conveyed through its visual "text"). In Neoclassical buildings, for example, columns instantly evoke Greece and Rome, and what they stand for: antiquity, justice, reason, imperial power. Gothic towers evoke the Middle Ages: Christianity, faith, emotion, mystery, the supernatural. (Hollywood probably learned how to use the latent symbolism of architecture better than anyone.)

Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-86) exemplified a creative use of historical style that became known as "Richardson Romanesque." His plans reflected the differentiation of function in each unity; particularly in his early works, spatial units were arranged in imaginatively asymmetrical designs to open onto each other with increasing freedom.

At the Pittsburgh Courthouse, Richardson was strongly influenced by the Beaux-Arts design method--since he had personally studied at the École des Beaux-Arts. His fully symmetrical oblong design for the Courthouse reflects Renaissance palaces, while the elevations (the wall designs) owe much to Romanesque and Gothic precedent. Richardson's Romanesque vocabulary was generally consistent with his basic principles of architectural planning: aggregation of simple units and emphasis on the massiveness of construction in stone. Richardson always stressed the positive contribution of natural materials to the design: the gigantic rough-hewn granite blocks for the exterior were brought to Pittsburgh pre-cut from Massachusetts, while the fine limestone blocks for the interior were pre-cut in Indiana.

When we understand the function of the Courthouse, Richardson's aesthetic ideals, the physical and social context in which the building was conceived, the idea or image of Justice held by post-Civil-War America, and the technology of the building's construction, then we are far along in the history and analysis of the monument. But that analysis is in one way incomplete: nineteenth-century architecture--architecture in virtually every period, really--must be understood as a public art. A major building, especially the most important building in town, could not exist as an architectural orphan. An amateur builder or an overbearing patron can always put up an eccentric building that cares little about prevailing architectural style. (Indeed, our own Frick Fine Arts Building is such an example: does it look typical of buildings erected in 1965?) But every building by a professional architect is part of a dialogue with what went before, and possibly with what came after it. The Pittsburgh Courthouse is probably the second most imitated building in the United States, after Independence Hall. Even Frank Lloyd Wright recalled it, in his 1959 design for the Marin County Civic Center in California.

So a complete understanding of the Courthouse means we have to go outside Pittsburgh, even outside the United States, to understand where the building "fits" as a nineteenth-century building.

We can, and must, apply FACIT analysis not merely to a building but to a whole architectural style. When we do, we see that the Courthouse, though a fairly "backward" building technologically, is nonetheless tremendously influenced by technology. Richardson, like most nineteenth-century architects, was liberated from purely local materials: the Pittsburgh Courthouse uses nothing local: the exterior granite came from Massachusetts, the interior limestone from Indiana, all brought by railroad. The architect paid minimal heed to the local climate: heating, ventilating, air-conditioning, plumbing, and lighting created a completely new artificial climate for the first time in history. Local workmen could be supplanted by outside crews: the builder of the Pittsburgh Courthouse came from New England, and most of the material was prefabricated elsewhere. The invention of photography, and the proliferation of books and magazines on architecture meant that style had become universalized. "Local" architecture had come to an end: what would replace it?

Looked at this way, we see infinitely more to the Pittsburgh Courthouse than what is visible from the corner of Forbes and Grant streets.

Key works:

1) Sir Charles Barry & A.W.N. Pugin: Houses of Parliament, London, designed 1836, built 1840-1860s, pp. 475-78.

2) Charles Garnier: Opera House, Paris, 1861-74; p. 468; 483-85 and website.

3) H.H. Richardson: Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail, Pittsburgh, 1884-88; p. 503 and plan of main courtroom floor and facade in this Sourcebook; plus, please visit it Downtown.

4) Richardson: Marshall Field Wholesale Store, Chicago, 1885; destroyed ca. 1935, p. 412.

Literature of Architecture: Gothic Revival, "Beaux-Arts design philosophy; eclecticism

WORK IN CONTEXT

--James Wyatt: Fonthill Abbey, 1795

HARNESSING--BUT ALSO SUPPRESSING--THE NEW TECHNOLOGIES

Reading: Roth, Chapter 17, pp. 460-464; chapter 18, pp. 486-490

Along with the use of historical styles, the nineteenth century was marked by new structural methods--the result of the industrialization of architecture through the Industrial Revolution. Undisguised by any ornamental overlay, new structural systems appeared in purely utilitarian and temporary buildings. In these, steel framework and often glass walls replace traditionally masonry designs with framed openings. Exhibition buildings like the Crystal Palace in London (1851) and the Eiffel Tower in Paris (1889), and greenhouses, bridges (Brooklyn Bridge, opened 1883), factories, and railroad stations showed a variety of such applications of the steel framework construction.

These buildings were not without problems, however. They were regarded by contemporaries as engineering, not as architecture. Partly this was the result of old prejudices of what a building should look like. But in part this resulted from the thinness and lack of aesthetics of the new "greenhouse" buildings. Joseph Paxton, the creator of the Crystal Palace, did not really regard that marvel as architecture, either. He went on to create Victorian country houses in traditional styles and technology, which was perhaps what he thought "proper" architecture was.

Strangely, maybe, as the 19th century plunged into new technologies, three of its most important architectural thinkers turned to Gothic to help them articulate their design philosophies. But maybe that was NOT so strange: after all, no style had ever been as daring & technology advanced before the 19th century as was Gothic. Pugin, Ruskin, and Viollet-le-Duc all "used" Gothic as their design basis. Pugin advocated a return to Gothic literally, for its moral qualities. Ruskin used Gothic by example, calling for an architecture of history and humanism that would equal Gothic. Viollet-le-Duc used Gothic, too, but only by analogy, calling for an architecture that exploited current building technology as did Gothic.

Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture is the most stirring of the three writings. In it, Ruskin called for:

--the use of functionally expressive ornament

--truth in expression of building materials and structure

--expressive massing

--beauty derived from the observation of nature

--bold and irregular forms

--durable construction

--adherence to traditional Christian architectural forms.

It remained for an architectural theorist of the highest order, Eugène-Emanuel Viollet-le-Duc, to bridge the gap between the new materials and old expectations of "proper" architecture. His Discourses on Architecture of 1858-72 proposed how the new materials could be used to give nobility to architecture, without taking away either from its richness or its technical modernity. Interestingly, Viollet-le-Duc used Gothic as his model, not for its emotional or spiritual side, but for what, he believed, was its "rationalism": i.e., its use of building materials for highest economy.

Viollet-le-Duc's writings and illustrations had wide impact. Gustave Eiffel's Eiffel Tower and Dutert and Contamin's Galerie des Machines, both for the Paris Exposition of 1889, were two widely copied exemplars of the new style. The Eiffel Tower, at 300 meters (1000 feet) by far the highest structure ever attempted, was so economically designed that a model of it at 1:100 scale, would weigh mere ounces.

In Europe, Art Nouveau was in part based on certain sinuous, organic curves found in Viollet-le-Duc's illustrations, but the resulting buildings stressed the decorative over the structural. In the U.S., the reaction was led by the Chicago School. These architects rejected the traditional vocabulary of historical ornament, sometimes inventing new ornamental forms that expressed new principles of architectural design, especially in their emphasis on the wall as surface rather than mass. Structural steel and reinforced concrete (ferro-concrete) eliminated the traditional load-bearing wall: the resulting curtain wall became a "light" surface enclosing spatial volumes. New building types (especially the skyscraper) and the free interpenetration of interior spaces are also made possible by the new construction.

Louis Sullivan, imbued with his French Beaux-Arts training, which put high stress on clear relationships between the different rooms in a plan, formulated the principle of making every part of a building--elevations as well as plans--express its function. Thus was born a new architectural principle: functionalism.

Sullivan's dictum of "form follows function" became a basic principle of twentieth century architecture. The "style" of the Chicago School was the result of the natural use of new materials and of the function of their buildings. These buildings made no references to a historical past.

Key works:

Comparing two London railroad stations:

1) Isambard Kingdom Brunel: Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol, England, designed 1829, completed 1864; website carries the Robert Howlett photograph of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, ca. 1843.

2) Sir Joseph Paxton: Crystal Palace, London, 1851 (moved and enlarged; burned 1936); p. 488.

3) A.W.N. Pugin, Contrasts, 1836 and 1841; and True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture, 1841; p. 479.

4) John Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1849; p. 484.

5) Eugène-Emanuel Viollet-le-Duc: Discourses on Architecture ("Entretiens sur l'Architecture"), 1858-72: website.

6) Gustave Eiffel: Eiffel Tower, Paris World's Fair, 1889; website.

7) Charles-L.-F. Dutert and Victor Contamin: Gallerie des Machines (Machine Hall or Palace), Paris World's Fair, 1889; p. 490.

8) Books or essays by Louis Sullivan: "The tall office building artistically considered" (1896); Kindergarten Chats (articles of 1901 collected into book 1918, with the famous quote "Form follows function"); The Autobiography of an Idea (1924)

9) Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler: Wainwright Building, St. Louis, 1890-91. (Roth, p. 10 and 509, illustrates their similar Guaranty Building in Buffalo)

6) Antoni Gaudí: Casa Mila, Barcelona, 1905-07; pp. 511-12 (Gaudí called this Modernisme)

7) Sullivan: Carson Pirie Scott (built as Schlesinger and Meyer) Department Store, Chicago, 1899-1904.

Literature of architecture: Functionalism, Chicago School, load-bearing wall, curtain wall, Art Nouveau.

WORKS IN CONTEXT

--Abraham Darby III: Coalbrookdale Bridge, Ironbridge, England, 1777

--Lewis Cubitt: King's Cross Railway Station, London, 1851.

--George Gilbert Scott, W.H. Barlow and R.M. Ordish: St. Pancras station and Grand Midland Hotel, London, 1863--1876 (Scott for the exterior, Barlow and Ordish engineers of the train shed); pp. 484-89.

--John Nash: Royal Pavilion, Brighton, England, 1815-18

--Decimus Burton (Richard Turner, builder): Palm House, Kew Gardens, London, 1844-48

--William Butterfield: All Saints', Margaret Street, London, 1850-59: exterior and interior on website.

--Gaudi, Church of the Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, 1884, mainly 1903-26, consecrated 2010.

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT AND ARCHITECTURE AS SECOND NATURE

Reading: Roth, Chapter 18, pp. 495-517.

Optional reading: Franklin Toker, Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America's Most Extraordinary House (New York, 2003).

Modern architecture was almost born in late nineteenth-century Chicago, particularly in the buildings of Sullivan. But that movement lost its strength, partly because Sullivan's pupil Frank Lloyd Wright took it in another direction.

Organic architecture: Wright was the major precursor of Modernism. His special contribution was the idea of "organic" architecture, drawing on an idea originally born in England and expressed in this country in Andrew Jackson Downing's Architecture of Country Houses, 1850. Wright held that architecture ought not merely fit in a natural setting, but also follow nature's rules of economy, simplicity, and structure. In his desire to relate his buildings to their natural environment, Wright's architecture was more romantic than his intellectual European counterparts. His Fallingwater, the most famous private house in the world, is not just a building but an important chapter in American cultural history. It is a cliché to say that we are privileged to have that great building so near to Pittsburgh. Rather, my personal research on Fallingwater suggests that the building could have gone up nowhere else but in the region of Pittsburgh.

Key works:

1) Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959): Robie House, Chicago, 1909, p. 498.

2) Wright: Buildings, Plans, and Designs ("Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe") published in Berlin, 1910-1911; p. 43; An Autobiography, 1932 and later.

3) Wright: Fallingwater, the Kaufmann House, near Pittsburgh, PA, 1934-37, p. 60.

--Chicago Tribune competition, 1922.

--Frank Lloyd Wright, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1959.

THE INTERNATIONAL STYLE: GROPIUS, LeCORBUSIER, MIES

Reading: Roth, Chapter 19, pp. 519-539.

Architecture in the early twentieth century was marked by problems (and opportunities) created by new technology, new kinds of urban planning, and social and environmental issues. Among the fascinations of the modern skyscraper is the fact that modern technology gives it a completely artificial physical environment: it need respond to none of the climatic parameters that limited architecture in the past. Early 20th century architects built on the functionalist tradition of the Chicago School, creating the first genuinely new style in two hundred years.

The roots of the modern architecture of the later twentieth century are found more in France and Germany than in Wright and Sullivan, however. The turning point came after World War I, in the work of LeCorbusier and Mies. Theirs was an abstract architecture of simplified, geometric shapes. Known as the International Style, it was characterized by a poetic minimalism.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe got his start in architecture in the ferment of the transferral of modern architecture from Chicago to Germany and France just before World War I. But he had a spiritual precursor, too, in Karl Friedrich von Schinkel and the rationalist side of Neoclassicism. In his famous dictum of "less is more," Mies stated his belief in a universal architecture in which particulars of site, materials, etc., hardly apply. The resulting works were as abstract in their way as was contemporary painting before and after World War I. But these buildings were no mere functionalist products: they had a richness, almost a spirituality, that is hard to evoke in our Postmodern age.

One sees this best in two of Mies's masterpieces: the Barcelona Pavilion of 1929, and in the austere perfection of Mies's Seagram Building of 1957. It is ironic that a skyscraper erected on Park Avenue in New York only half a century ago is today seen as "historic." But that is what the Seagram Building is. The Seagram Building illustrates that no building can ever be entirely "functional," and no building entirely without function. The Seagram Building is the logical conclusion of a set of architectural forces that had their roots in the mid-nineteenth century, but at the same time it is an arbitrary creation of an individual artist. One of the many ironies to the Seagram Building is that a work in such a radical tradition became a great icon (along with Elvis?) of the conformity of Late Capitalism in the Fifties.

Key works:

1) Walter Gropius: The International Style book, 1925.

2) Gropius and Alolf Meyer: Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany, 1925-26; p. 521-25

3) LeCorbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret): Towards a New Architecture, 1924 (English trans. 1927); pp. 528-30.

4) LeCorbusier, Villa Savoye, Poissy-sur-Seine, near Paris, France, 1929, pp. 531-33. Compare with Fallingwater, 1937: the latter so utterly tied to its place, the former so utterly liberated from it.

5) Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: Friedrichstrasse office building projects (glass skyscrapers), Berlin, 1919-21.

6) Mies: German Pavilion, Barcelona Exposition, Barcelona, Spain, 1929, pp. 525-28.

7) Mies: Crown Hall, IIT Campus, Chicago, 1956, p. 14

8) Mies (with Philip Johnson): Seagram Building, New York City, 1957; see Roth pp. 145-46, with highly pertinent remarks on how wasteful of energy the building was, and is.

WORKS IN CONTEXT

--Peter Behrens, AEG Turbine Works, Berlin, 1909

--Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer, Fagus Shoe-Last Works, Alfeld-an-der-Leine, Germany, 1911; p. 523.

--Willis Polk, Hallidie Building, San Francisco, 1918

--Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913

--Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912

--Erich Mendelssohn: Einstein Tower, near Berlin, 1919-21.

--Theo van Doesberg, Rhythms of a Russian Dance, 1917

--Reitveld, Schroeder House, Utrecht, Netherlands, 1923

--Mies: project for a brick country villa, 1925

--Albert Frey, Aluminaire House 1931, now moved to Central Islip, Long Island

ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY IS DEAD!--OR IS IT?

Reading: Roth, chapter 19, pp. 539-565; chapter 20, pp. 567-615.

With the opening of the Seagram Building in 1957 western architecture once again achieved the international unity that had eluded it for two hundred years, but that unity was short-lived. Critics could not long ignore the fact that this unity was achieved at a cost of the honesty of materials Sullivan, Wright, and Mies had earlier championed. It was achieved only with other sacrifices, too. One was the sacrifice of the city: the great modern towers abandoned the city as much as their medieval prototype towers withdrew and dominated the Italian hill-towns.

A second defect of modernism was the sacrifice of personal or local character: these office towers were so classical and elegant that they could be copied--not with the same creativity, to be sure--in the cookie-cutter rows that so deadened western cities. A third was the sacrifice of history: for a good while, modern architecture believed that it had no past, only a future. And a fourth was the sacrifice of the natural environment: ever since the Houses of Parliament, buildings carry their own environment (by 1890 there was even a form of air-conditioning), so they shut themselves off from the natural environment around them. Worse, they pollute that environment with their smoke, fumes, and befouled air-conditioning run-off. And now we realize that we are finally running out of the fossil-based fuels that provide energy to the huge structures made possible by modern engineering.

There have been several reactions to Modernism. LeCorbusier bridged the gap between abstract and expressive architecture, as well as between the tectonic and sculptural approach to building. Mies van der Rohe never wavered from his early design formulations, but other "early modern" architects did. Wright's last works were strange and highly personalized visions of history (Guggenheim Museum, Marin County Civic Center). LeCorbusier's chapel at Ronchamp went against a score of his early positions, and admitted history, representation, and eccentric use of materials where they had formerly been banished. Eero Saarinen's TWA terminal at JFK Airport caused Americans in particular to ask if there were not some alternatives to "classical" modernism (although elsewhere Saarinen was all corporate elegance, as in the CBS Building).

Finally, Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, written in Rome in 1962 and published by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1966, argued that the American city had a logic and a strength that should be frankly incorporated in contemporary style, rather than papered over. Venturi saw architectural history as far more quirky and eccentric than the "classic" and ever-progressive view that had formerly been propagated. This opened the floodgates to new departures in architectural design, embracing history, populism, anthropomorphism, and vernacular design.

The result was architectural pluralism (meaning an era in architecture with unlimited design possibilities). One path beginning in the 1960s and 1970s was what was then termed Postmodernism, an approach in which colorful, decorative, sometimes whimsical buildings marked a return to historicism, but in which the vocabulary from the past was abstracted in personal, expressive ways.

The term Postmodernism is still used in your textbook, but being an essentially negative rather than positive term, it has not proved especially profitable for understanding architecture today. More useful seems the term Cybertecture, which acknowledges and celebrates the radical transformation of architecture through CAD--computer-aided design. Virtually all new buildings use CAD in their design today. We'll look at a half-dozen brand-new works, most of them still unfinished, and also at some forerunners that look as though they were computer-based even though that technology was not fully exploitable when they went up.

Key works:

1) LeCorbusier: Chapel of Notre-Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, France, 1950-55; pp. 549-51.

2) Jorn Utzon: Sydney Opera House, Australia, designed 1957, opened 1973; p. 554-556.

3) Eero Saarinen: TWA (now American Airlines) Terminal, JFKennedy International Airport, New York, 1956-62; p. 552 and website.

4) Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, Centre Pompidou (Centre Beaubourg), Paris, 1971-77; p. 576.

5) Robert Venturi: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, written 1962, published 1966.

6) Venturi: Venturi House, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, 1962; p. 581.

7) Charles Moore, Piazza d'Italia, New Orleans, 1975-80; website only.

8) Frank Gehry: Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain, 1987-97; p. 601.

WORKS IN CONTEXT

--LeCorbusier: Unité d'Habitation, Marseille, 1947-52.

--Robert Venturi, Benjamin Franklin House, Philadelphia, 1976

--Michael Graves, Portland Public Service Building, Portland OR, 1977;

--Philip Johnson: AT&T Building, New York City, 1978-84

--Philip Johnson and John Burgee: PPG Place, Pittsburgh, PA 1979-84.

--SITES: Best Stores, various American locations, 1970s and '80s.

--Maya Lin, Vietnam Memorial, Washington DC 1982; website only.

--James I Freed, Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, 1994.

--Millennium Park, Chicago, 2000; outdoor auditorium by Frank Gehry; Crown Fountain by Jaume Plensa; Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor.

--Rafael Viñoly, David Lawrence Convention Center, Pittsburgh, 2003.

ARCHITECTURE TODAY: CYBERTECTURE? GREEN?--or BOTH?

Special readings:

--William J. Mitchell, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn (On Architecture) (Cambridge MA 1996 & later eds). In Hillman TK5105.5 M57; on reserve.

--William McDonough, Michael Braungart, Stephen Hoye, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way we Make Things (North Point Press, 2002 and audio/Kindle editions)

The hardest history to write is the history of your own era, and that certainly applies to all architecture post-Mies van der Rohe. As stated earlier, the term "Postmodernism" has fared poorly. For a while, in the 1970s and 1980s, it seemed to mean something valid, as though there were a coherent global movement operating on a set of shared objectives. But by the 1990s no such movement had coalesced, so we are left with the concept of architectural pluralism, which basically means anyone can design anything and get applause for it. This also encompasses the exceptional phenomenon of starchitects, those dozen woman and men (Pei, Eisenman, Herzog & de Meuron, Nouvel, Gehry, Foster, Caletrava, Liebeskind, Hadid, and Ando) who design buildings around the globe with the kind of adulation Alberti, Michelangelo, Bernini, and Wright could only dream of. But is that a good thing?

Instead of looking at the stylisms in contemporary architecture, we would get more profit from looking at what makes these gigantic and complex buildings possible, which is the computer.What fascinates me as a historian are those many buildings that wished to be (and some that pretended to be) designed by the computer in CAD (computer-aided-design) before cyber-architecture was really viable. These would include Jorn Utzon's exceedingly complex Sydney Opera House, designed in 1957 but not opened until 1973, in large part because the technology for such stretch-the-envelope buildings did not exist in 1957. At a far more modest scale, but with much higher level of intellectual--almost utopian--vision were the designs of Peter Eisenman's House X and its predecessors, going back to 1969. Starting with House VI in 1974, these were rendered in fake-computerized designs by Randall Korman (personal communication from Korman). It wasn't for a decade or more that Eisenman figured out how to actually apply the computer to his design problems!

Now that the computer is commonplace in architecture, and it shows (Gehry etc.); we can look at some of the world's most adventuresome buildings, almost all of which seem to be going up in the United Arab Emirates. Since architecture generally (not always) follows the path of money and power, what does it mean that these structures are all going up halfway around the globe, but paid for in American petrodollars? And what does it mean that every one of these star buildings are designed by the same starchitects one find everywhere on the globe? Does it not bode ill for contemporary architecture that there is not a single new name among their designers?

At the opposite end of the spectrum are the "green" buildings that began to appear toward the end of the 20th century. We will examine William McDonough's Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies, at Oberlin College, from 2000, as a representative example, because Architect magazine recently called it the most important green building of the last thirty years. In October 2010 McDonough challenged his audience: "Design a building that makes oxygen, that sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, provides habitat for hunreds of species, accrues solar energy, has food and fuel, makes complex sugars and food, creates microclimates, changes colors with the seasons, and self-replicates. How are we doing?"

"It took our species 5,000 years to put wheels on our luggage: we're not that smart."

So two kinds of contemporary buildings seem to be vying for our attention: those by the starchitects, which are generally so wasteful of energy, and those by the greens, much more concerned on context than on formal values. A synthesis does seem possible, since it is only by applying computer-aided design to buildings that we can ensure their energy conservation. Contemporary architecture may be split in its priorities, but there is no question we are living in an age of great architectural creativity.

1) Jorn Utzon: Sydney Opera House, Australia, designed 1957, opened 1973; p. 554-556.

2) Peter Eisenman, House X, 1976-78 (part of a sequence that goes back to the 1960s); p. 574.

3) David Childs for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill/SOM: Freedom Tower, designed 2005 and now under construction in New York, for 2014(?). Even if it reaches its proposed 1,776 feet, this will NOT be the tallest building in the world. Daniel Liebeskind won the competition for the master plan of the site in 2003.

4) William McDonough: Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies, Oberlin College, Oberlin OH, 2000.

WORKS IN CONTEXT

"Starchitect" buildings in Qatar, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai:

--I. M. Pei, Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, Qatar (United Arab Emirates), opened 2008.

--Herzog & de Meuron, Museum of Eastern Art, Doha.

--Jean Nouvel, Qatar National Museum, Doha.

--Nouvel: Louvre Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi

--Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi (12 times the size of the New York Guggenheim); completion planned for 2012

--Norman Foster, Sheik Zayed National Museum, Abu Dhabi

--Zaha Hadid, Performing Arts Center, Abu Dhabi

--Tadao Ando, Museum of Maritime History, Abu Dhabi

--Skidmore, Owings & Merrill/SOM: Dubai Tower (Burj Khalifa); at 2,717 feet, the current tallest building in the world; Dubai; 2004-09.