 Stonehenge - England  Pyramids - Egypt  Ziggurat - Sumeria  Parthenon - Greece  Colosseum - Rome  Taj Majal - India  Flying Buttresses- Chartres Cathedral |
Construction becomes intelligent and thus architectural when it is efficient and immediately appears so. If it is the simplest and most advanced type of structure, solving the task set for it, and conceivable in its age, construction will have the quality of perfect appropriateness and will also be the expression of the mechanical knowledge of a culture. It becomes intelligent also when it is made to emphasize its simplicity and to express its system of support so that both can be immediately understood.
The cities of Rome, Ravenna, Constantinople,
and Isfahan became possible with their colorful domes, cavernous
markets, and decorated palaces. Their interior spaces also became
symbolic in their shape and decoration as seen in the Islamic
mosque and in Byzantine and Gothic churches. With the Renaissance in Europe around 1400, there came a new sort of architecture in which mass and interior space were manipulated to produce aesthetically pleasing pictures like those in paintings and sculptures. The elaborate symbolism of primitive and medieval art disappeared.
In its
place was a purely human-centered handling of form and space
to produce visual delight. The demystification of architecture during the Renaissance prepared the way for modern design. In the 19th century the picturesque, the design of both buildings and their landscape surroundings as if they were pictures, evolved.
But the simultaneous evolution of society, science, and industry collided with this view of architecture, suggesting the very different idea that building could be an important instrument of social betterment if made healthy and efficient.
Thus it has come about that next to the
theater-set architecture of New York City's Fifth Avenue there
is that of the hospital-like housing projects, which has left
many architects with the difficult choice between working as
decorative artists or as social planners. EARLY ARCHITECTURE
STONEHENGE- The earliest permanent constructions consist of huge stones, roughly shaped, arranged in lines or circles. The one at Stonehenge in England is the best known of these complexes. The stones were set up by several successive peoples inhabiting the region between 3000 and 1600 BC. They are grouped in four concentric circles, two of which are formed by paired uprights bearing huge capstones.
Because they are arranged to align with the sun at the summer and winter solstices, it is generally assumed that the complex served as a monumental calendar in which rites were performed on significant days of the year. Similar circles of stones were set up elsewhere in England, at Avebury most particularly, and in France at Carnac. Clusters of stones spanned by roof slabs, called dolmens, and single stones that stood on end, called menhirs, were also erected in large numbers, especially in Europe.
EGYPT and the PYRAMIDS- The Egyptian pyramids were far more sophisticated and larger in size but similar symbolically: sacred stones. The fertile Nile Valley permitted civilization to develop there around 3000 BC ruled by god-kings, the pharaohs. The necessity of carrying out extensive irrigation projects meant that the Egyptians were organized to build on a large scale. Furthermore, the high limestone cliffs hemming in the valley provided an inexhaustible supply of fine building stone.
Royal tombs were built along the edges of cliffs, at first as low rectangular mastabas, then as tall four-sided pyramids. The earliest of the pyramids was that of the pharaoh Zoser erected at Saqqara about 2700-2600 BC. Three huge pyramids built at Giza, near Cairo, about 2500 BC were the culmination of the series (see Pyramids). The largest of these, the great pyramid of the pharaoh Cheops, measured 756 feet (230 meters) on a side at its base and was 481 feet (147 meters) high. In spite of its huge size, however, it enclosed no space other than a narrow passage leading to a small tomb chamber in its center. It was constructed of limestone blocks weighing between 3 and 15 tons that were simply piled on top of each other.
The Egyptians worshiped the sun as their chief god, often represented by a symbolic pyramidal stone, or ben-ben. The Egyptian hieroglyph for the sun was a triangle divided into three zones horizontally--red, white, and yellow. It would seem to represent the sun (the top, or yellow zone) spreading its rays upon the Earth (the bottom, or red zone). The pyramids at Giza were once faced in a smooth coating of white marble with a band of pink at the base and a pyramidal block of pure gold at the top.
It has been concluded that the pyramids themselves were huge ben-bens, symbols of the sun and its rays reaching down to Earth. When the pharaoh died he was said to ascend the sun's rays to join his father, the sun-god. Thus the pyramid would also seem to have been the symbolic staircase up which its occupant, the pharaoh, would climb to reach heaven. What breathtaking symbols these must have been lined up on the west rim of the Nile Valley!
ZIGGURATS - SUMERIA- To the east of Egypt another civilization appeared about 3000 BC, that of the Sumerians in the river valley of the Tigris and Euphrates called Mesopotamia, or the "land between the rivers."
The Sumerian temple was a small brick house that the god was supposed to visit periodically. It was ornamented so as to recall the reed houses built by the earliest Sumerians in the valley. This house, however, was set on a brick platform, which became larger and taller as time progressed until the platform at Ur (built around 2100 BC) was 150 by 200 feet (45 by 60 meters) and 75 feet (23 meters) high. These Mesopotamian temple platforms are called ziggurats, a word derived from the Assyrian ziqquratu, meaning "high." They were symbols in themselves; the ziggurat at Ur was planted with trees to make it represent a mountain. There the god visited Earth, and the priests climbed to its top to worship.
The ziggurat continued as the essential temple form of Mesopotamia during the later Assyrian and Babylonian eras. In these later times it became taller and more tower like, perhaps with a spiral path leading up to the temple at the top. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that the main temple of Babylon, the famous Tower of Babel, was such a tower divided into seven diminishing stages, each a different color: white, black, purple, blue, orange, silver, and gold.
GREECE- The greatest of the early religious types is the Greek temple, which evolved during the thousand years before the birth of Jesus. Until the age of Alexander the Great, the Greeks erected permanent stone buildings almost exclusively for religious monuments, like the Egyptians, Sumerians, and Hindus. Their temples were not large enclosures of space but statue chambers containing a god's sacred image. These chambers were accessible only to priests. Yet the Greek temple has always been seen as fundamentally distinct from and superior to most other early religious types, partly because of the simplicity of its form, partly because of the exquisite refinement of the best examples (especially the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens), and partly because it is seen to reflect the emergence in Greece of a rational, philosophical approach to art that replaced earlier belief systems.
There are two types of Greek temple: the Ionic, evolved in Ionia on the eastern shore of the Aegean Sea, and the Doric, evolved on the western shore. The two systems are called orders because their parts and proportions are ordered and coordinated. Their forms must originally have had symbolic meaning. Both show the same basic plan: a central windowless statue chamber, the cella; a porch, usually with two columns in front; and a ring of columns, the peristyle, around the four sides. The cella and porch seem to have been the original elements of the temple. They reproduce the primitive Greek house so that the god is symbolically depicted as living like a chief. The temple is usually set on a natural hill, or acropolis, but has no artificial platform beyond a three-step foundation, or stylobate. The peristyle was a later addition, apparently borrowed from the Egyptians, evidently to enlarge and ornament the symbolic god-house inside. A low, sloping roof tops the building with gables, called pediments, on the short sides.
What is remarkable and unique about the Greek temple is the conscious adjustment of these orders by Greek architects for purely aesthetic effect. For the first time in history, architects, not priests, directed these building projects. Many of their names are known, and several wrote books about their aesthetic experiments. A book that has survived to the present is 'De Architectura' (On Architecture) by the Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, who was active at the time of the birth of Christ. It is an authoritative source of information on much of Greek architectural theory and practice.
ROME- The Romans had developed pozzolana concrete about 100 BC but at first used it only for terrace walls and foundations, as, for example, at the Temple of Fortuna Primigenia at Palestrina, erected about 80 BC. It apparently was the notorious emperor Nero who first used the material on a grand scale to rebuild a region of the city of Rome around his palace, the expansive Domus Aurea (Golden House), after the great fire of AD 64 (which he is erroneously said to have set). Here broad streets, regular blocks of masonry apartment houses, and continuous colonnaded porticoes were erected according to a single plan and partially at state expense. The Domus Aurea itself was a labyrinth of concrete vaulted rooms, many in complex geometric forms. An extensive garden with a lake and forest spread around it.
The architect Severus seems to have been in charge of this great project. Emperors and emperors' architects succeeding Nero and Severus continued and expanded their work of rebuilding and regularizing Rome. Vespasian (emperor AD 63-79) began the Colosseum. Domitian (81-96) rebuilt the Palatine Hill as a huge palace of vaulted concrete designed by his architect Rabirius. Trajan (97-117) erected the expansive forum that bears his name (designed by his architect Apollodorus) and a huge public bath. Hadrian (117-138)--proud to serve as his own architect--built the Pantheon as well as a villa the size of a small city for himself at Tivoli. Later Caracalla (211-217) and Diocletian (284-305) erected two mammoth baths that bear their names, and Maxentius (306-312) built a huge vaulted basilica, now called the Basilica of Constantine.
TAJ MAJAL - INDIA- The Islamic tradition closed impressively with the Taj Mahal, erected in Agra, India, in 1630-48, during Muslim rule. It is a domical tomb monument covered in carved marble.
CHARTRES CATHEDRAL - GOTHIC- The prosperity and the building campaigns of the Romanesque period were slight, however, in comparison to the vast development of economic and building power of the Gothic period, which began in the late 12th century. In France, between 1140 and 1200, a new and more efficient type of masonry vaulted construction was invented. The Roman vault was a consistent mass of concrete that had been poured over a heavy wooden mold and left to harden. The new Gothic vault consisted of a network of separate stone arches, or ribs, spanning the space, between which were laid a thin webbing of small stones. This kind of vault was lighter and its thrusts were more clearly defined, since they passed down the ribs. This meant that the walls of the building supporting the vaults could be made thinner and opened with large windows. Furthermore, beginning in 1194 with the construction of Chartres cathedral, the weight of these vaults was supported on flying buttresses, light structures of stone piers and arches standing outside the mass of the building itself.
Neoclassicism
Soufflot's Pantheon was not only the culmination of the baroque tradition but also the first hint of the future course of architecture. It shows a growing awareness of the possibility of achieving pictorial effects. The building uses an ingenious hidden system of Gothic buttresses, which make possible the high windows that bring light streaming through the layers of columns and arches, which, in turn, support the roof vaults. The interior of the Pantheon is dramatized in much the same way as the contemporary Italian engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi dramatized his views of ancient Roman monuments and buildings.
Picturesque and Gothic Revival.
The picturesque soon came to include exotic forms from the Near East and the Orient, as well as from Gothic architecture, by then a form of building that had survived only in rural areas. As early as 1750, the writer Horace Walpole had put Gothic decorations on his villa, Strawberry Hill, just outside London. But the fashion for the medieval historical novel, introduced by Sir Walter Scott, combined with enthusiasm for the picturesque, made the Gothic an alternative style of building by the early 1800s.
Structural honesty became structural rationalism in the works and writings of the French architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. The most conscientious 19th-century student of Gothic structural techniques, Viollet-le-Duc wrote in favor of the creation of a modern architecture that would use modern materials like iron and glass as rationally as Gothic architecture had used stone. Viollet-le-Duc's writings were widely read in Europe and the United States well into the early 20th century, and they influenced architects as diverse as the Spaniard Antonio Gaudí and the Belgian Victor Horta (both designers in the naturalistic Art Nouveau style) and the American Frank Lloyd Wright, who espoused the organic use of materials.
Classicism
At the same time that the revival of Gothic architecture and the development of new forms based on Gothic structure were taking place, Classicism was continuing to develop in European and American architecture. The monumental Romantic Classicism that appeared about the time of the French Revolution, and its parallel--though more modest--in the new American republic, gradually gave way to more experimental forms.
When Thomas Jefferson designed the University of Virginia at Charlottesville in 1817-26, he used Classical forms to evoke the spirit of ancient republics and to teach proper taste to the students. The German architect and painter Karl Friedrich Schinkel put a vast row of columns across the front of his Altes Museum in Berlin (1824-28) in order to produce the sense of grandeur appropriate to a major public building. But even in the work of Schinkel, the Classical style was beginning to be abstracted into a system of post-and-lintel construction that organized space into regular bays.
By the 1830s architects were beginning to question whether the repetition of ancient forms had any meaning for modern society with its new industries, institutions, and standards of living. When Henri Labrouste designed the Bibliothèque Ste-Geneviève in Paris in 1838-51, he used the more practical and less imposing arched forms of the Renaissance in a building whose composition and decoration were dictated by its interior organization and purpose rather than by historical model. As the century progressed, architects turned to using the forms of the Classical tradition in more decorative and pictorial ways. In France, Charles Garnier's Paris Opéra of 1861-75 reflected the opulence of contemporary society in its baroque forms and rich decorations. It also served as a set piece in the new system of grand boulevards laid out by Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann with the encouragement of the emperor Napoleon III. In the United States the Renaissance and baroque became favored styles for the houses of wealthy businessmen and for the buildings where they worked and the public institutions they endowed. The firm of McKim, Mead, and White was the best known and most successful architectural servant of the merchant classes, designing such varied works in New York City alone as the Villard houses of 1885 (now part of the Helmsley Palace Hotel), Columbia University of 1893, the University Club of 1900, and Pennsylvania Station of 1906-10.
Technology
A dramatic growth in the influence of technology on architecture occurred in the 19th century. With the Industrial Revolution architecture developed a relationship with manufacturing. Industry created a need for new types of buildings, and at the same time new building materials and techniques were being made available by industry. Huge spaces, unobstructed by bulky vertical supports, were needed for factories and mills. The goods they produced were stored in warehouses and shipped from docks and train sheds. When they reached their destinations, they were sold in shops joined by great covered passages or, later in the 19th century, vast department stores. These new buildings were made possible by the development of new technology: first, cast and wrought iron in the late 18th century, and, after the Bessemer process was invented in 1856, steel. Iron and steel are lighter than stone and stronger than wood and can be made quickly into structural elements at a factory and shipped to a construction site.
It soon became clear that the technology of industrial buildings could be turned to other uses, the most important of which was building more efficiently in the cities where growing population pushed up land values until it became desirable to put tall buildings on small lots. In the booming cities of the United States in the late 19th century, the skyscraper gradually came into being. Little by little, iron and steel supporting elements were added to stone and brick buildings, until in 1885 William LeBaron Jenney designed the Home Insurance Company Building in Chicago, Ill. It was the first building in which the exterior walls were entirely supported on a steel frame. By the 1890s United States cities were dotted with tall office buildings. Architects like Louis Sullivan of Chicago tried to emphasize the simplicity and rugged strength of the steel frame in their works but also strove to make them artistic by shaping them or decorating their surfaces. Sullivan, though claiming originality, drew from the geometric and naturalistic ornament of the past, like the Moorish and Gothic, in tall office buildings such as the Wainwright Building in St. Louis of 1890-91.
Other architects turned to Classical and medieval forms. The blend of steel construction and stylistic revival produced some of the great United States skyscrapers of the early 20th century such as Cass Gilbert's Woolworth Building of 1911-13 in New York City and Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells' Tribune Tower of 1922-25 in Chicago.
Post-Modernist
Postmodernism. In the 1960s some modification of the prevailing attitudes toward design of the previous 50 years began to take place. There was a revival of interest in traditional forms and historical styles. The United States architect Louis Kahn reacted to the abstraction in the works of Le Corbusier and Mies by using regular geometric compositions and materials such as brick, stone, and wood that made reference to the spirit of some of the architecture from the past, especially Egyptian, Greek, and Roman. Other architects rejected International Style modernism in more literal ways, using past forms like Classical columns or drawing on the architecture of modern popular culture, the highway, and the suburb for inspiration. This artistic experimentation has run parallel to the explosion of construction for purely practical purposes.
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