معرفی Architecture books

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A1 Early Christian Architecture

 

 

The term Early Christian is given to the basilican architecture of the church prior to the reintroduction of vaulting about the year 1000. The surviving churches in Rome that most clearly evoke the Early Christian character are San Clemente (with its 4th-century choir furnishings), Sant' Agnese Fuori le Mura (rebuilt 630 and later), and Santa Sabina (422-432). While Byzantine architecture developed on the concept called the central church, assembled around a central dome like the Pantheon, the Western or Roman church—more concerned with congregational participation in the Mass—preferred the Roman basilica. Early models resembled large barns, with stone walls and timber roofs. The central part (nave) of this rectangular structure was supported on columns opening toward single or double flanking aisles of lower height. The difference in roof height permitted high windows, called clerestory windows, in the nave walls; at the end of the nave, opposite the entrance, was placed the altar, backed by a large apse (also borrowed from Rome), in which the officiating clergy were seated. The Eastern emperor Justinian I was in control of Ravenna during his reign (527-565). Some of the constructions there can be considered Byzantine, as they featured mosaic mural compositions in Byzantine style. Two of Ravenna's great churches, however—Sant' Apollinare Nuovo (520?) and Sant' Apollinare in Classe (530?-549)—are basilican in plan. See Early Christian Art and Architecture

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A2 Byzantine Architecture

 

 

Byzantine architecture has its early prototypes in San Vitale (526-547) in Ravenna and in Saint Sergius and Saint Bacchus (527) in Constantinople, both domed churches on an octagonal plan with surrounding aisles. But it was Justinian's great church at Constantinople, Hagia Sophia, or the Church of the Holy Wisdom (532-537), that demonstrated how to place a vast dome over a square plan. The solution was to place the dome on pendentives, or spherical triangles, that make a circle out of the square by rounding its corners.

The pendentive can be understood by visualizing its geometry. A square drawn on the ground has two circles, one circumscribed around it, the other inscribed within it. A hemisphere set on the larger circle is intersected by vertical planes rising from the sides of the square, forming four arches. A horizontal plane is then passed through the hemisphere at the tops of these arches, providing a ring on which is built the dome, which has a diameter equal to the circle inscribed within the square. The pendentives are spherical triangles, the remaining portions of the first, or outer, hemisphere.

At Hagia Sophia, two opposing arches on the central square open into semidomes, each pierced by three smaller radial semidomes, forming an oblong volume 31 m (100 ft) wide by 80 m (260 ft) long. The central dome rises out of this series of smaller spherical surfaces. An abundance of small windows, including a circle of them at the rim of the dome, provides a diffused light.

Byzantine figurative art developed a characteristic style; its architectural application took the form of mosaics, great mural compositions executed in tiny pieces (tesserae) of colored marble and gilded glass, a technique presumed to have been borrowed from Persia. Byzantine churches, each with a central dome opening into surrounding semidomes and other vault forms, and accompanied by the characteristic iconography, proliferated throughout the Byzantine Empire—Greece, the Balkans, Asia Minor, and parts of North Africa and Italy—and also influenced the design of churches in Western Christendom. Later churches are often miniaturizations of the original grandiose concept; their proportions emphasize vertical space, and the domes themselves become smaller. When Moscow became Christian, Europe was already into the Renaissance, but Moscow's Saint Basil's Cathedral (1555-1560) shows how Byzantine domes finally became onion-shaped tops of towers, no longer relevant to interior space making. See Byzantine Art and Architecture

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A3 Romanesque Architecture

 

 

A plan drawn on parchment of a now-vanished monastery in Sankt Gallen, Switzerland, shows that by the time of Charlemagne (742-814) the Benedictine monastic order had become a big departmentalized institution, but not until almost 1000 did church building come to life throughout the West. At first, the architects were all monks, for the monasteries supplied not only the material wealth but also the aggregated learning that made the new initiative possible.

The basilican plan used in earlier times needed elaboration to accommodate a new liturgy. The essential symbol of the cross was incorporated in the form of transepts, a cross axis (perhaps borrowed from Byzantium) that served to identify the choir (for the monks), as distinct from the nave (for the public). Beyond the choir, in a semicircular apse girded by the ambulatory (a semicircular extension of the aisles), stood the main altar, the focal point of the building. Subaltars, needed for the daily Mass required of many monks, were placed in the transepts and in the ambulatory. At the nave entrance were placed narthexes, vestibules and reception areas for pilgrims. Although many French churches—Saint Savin sur Gartempe (nave 1095-1115), Saint Sernin in Toulouse (1080?-1120), and Sainte Foy in Conques (begun 1050)—had barrel-vaulted naves, Saint Philibert in Tournus (950-1120) used transverse arches to support a series of barrel vaults, with windows high in the vertical plane at the ends of the vaults. Ultimately, the groin vault became the preferred solution, because it offered high windows together with a continuous longitudinal crown, as in Sainte Madeleine in Vézelay (1104) and Worms Cathedral (11th century) in Germany. The semicircular arches of the groin vault form a square in plan; thus, the nave consisted of a long series of square bays or segments. The smaller and lower vaults of the aisles were often doubled up, two to each nave bay, to conform to this configuration. The greatest monastic Romanesque church, Cluny III (1088-1121), did not survive the French Revolution but has been reconstructed in drawings; it was an immense double-aisled church almost 137 m (almost 450 ft) long, with 15 small chapels in transepts and ambulatory. Its design influenced Romanesque and Gothic churches in Burgundy and beyond. Another important stimulus to French Romanesque was the pilgrimage cult; a convergence of routes led over the western Pyrenees into Spain and thus to Santiago de Compostela, where the pilgrim could venerate the presumed relics of St. James. Along the routes to Spain, certain points were sanctified as pilgrimage stops, which led to the erection of splendid Romanesque churches at Autun (1120-1132), Paray-le-Monial (1100?), Périgueux (1120), Conques (1050), Moissac (1120?), Clermont-Ferrand (1262), Saint Guilhem le Désert (1076), and others. See Romanesque Art and Architecture

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A4 Gothic Architecture

 

 

At the beginning of the 12th century, Romanesque was transformed into Gothic. Although the change was a response to a growing rationalism in Christian theology, it was also the result of technical developments in vaulting. To build a vault requires first a temporary carpentry structure, called centering, which supports the masonry until the shell has been completed and the mortar has set. Centering for the ordinary groin vault must be for an entire structural unit, or bay, with a resultant heavy structure resting on the floor. About 1100, the builders of Durham Cathedral in England invented a new method. They built two intersecting diagonal arches across the bay, on lighter centering perhaps supported high on the nave walls, and then found ways to fill out the shell resting on secondary centering. This gave a new geometric articulation—the ribbed vault. Ribs did not modify the structural characteristics of the groin vault, but they offered constructional advantage and emphatically changed the vault's appearance.

Another development was the pointed arch and vault. The main advantage was geometrical. Vaults of various proportions could cover a rectangular or even a trapezoidal bay, so that nave bays could correspond with the narrower aisle bays, and vaulting could proceed around the curved apse without interruption. Also, the nave walls containing clerestory windows could be pushed just as high as the crown of the vault. Soon this clerestory became all window, filled with tracery and stained glass that conferred a new luminosity on the interior.

With these advances, the master builders were encouraged to construct more elegant, higher, and apparently lighter structures. But the vaults had to be kept from spreading outward by restraint imposed near the base of the vaults, now high above the aisle roofs. The solution was another innovation, the flying buttress, a half arch leaning against the vault from the outside, with its base firmly set in a massive pier of its own.

This new style received its most intensive development in the Ile-de-France. The abbey church of Saint Denis (1140-1144), the royal mausoleum near Paris, became the first grandiose model. Bishops in prosperous northern cities were then drawn into competition for designers and artisans to outdo other cathedrals. The beginning dates of the major French examples are Laon, 1160; Paris, 1163; Chartres, 1194; Bourges, 1195; Reims, 1210; Amiens, 1220; and Beauvais, 1225. The beginning dates of English Gothic cathedrals are Canterbury, 1174; Lincoln, 1192; York Minster, 1261; and Exeter, 1280. The collapse of the Beauvais choir in 1284, however, indicated that structural limits had been reached. The transverse span of the nave vaults of these cathedrals was in the range of 9 to 15 m (30 to 50 ft), but the rebuilt Beauvais choir attained a height of 47 m (154 ft).

Although the finest medieval architecture was ecclesiastical, secular builders also constructed great buildings in the years 1000 to 1400. The medieval castle is a romantic symbol of feudalism; one of the most impressive and best-preserved examples is the Krak des Chevaliers (1131) in Syria, built by the Knights Hospitalers at the time of the Crusades.

Military architecture was a defensive response to advances in the technology of warfare; the ability to withstand siege remained important. Fortifications sometimes embraced whole towns; important examples include ?vila in Spain, Aigues-Mortes and Carcassonne in France, Chester in England, and Visby in Sweden. Urbanization increased on a large scale, brought about by the needs and desires of many groups, including the church and its monasteries, the nobles and kings, the craft guilds, and the merchants and bankers. The planning patterns that developed are quite different from the arbitrary geometry of Roman cities or of Renaissance theorists. Throughout northern Europe, where hardwood remained available until the Industrial Revolution, timber frame construction flourished. In half-timber construction, a quickly erected wood frame was infilled with wattle and daub (twigs and plaster) or brickwork. Monastic barns and municipal covered markets necessitated large braced wooden frames. The descendants of Vikings built the curiously beautiful stave churches in Norwegian valleys. In the Alps whole towns were built of horizontally interlocked wood timbers of square cross section. Brick architecture also flourished in many regions, notably Lombardy (Lombardia), northern Germany, Holland, and Denmark. See Gothic Art and Architecture

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B The Architecture of Islam

 

The Islamic concept of a mosque as a place for ablutions and prayer differs from the idea of a Christian church, and the desert climates in which Islam first became established required protection from sun, wind, and sand. The initial prototype was a simple walled-in rectangle containing a fountain and surrounded with porticoes. A qibla, or wall toward Mecca, had in its center an apse, or mihrab, with a nearby pulpit, or minbar; the shelter at this end consisted of multiple arcades of transverse and lateral rows of columns. Structural elements were the arch and the dome; roofs were flat unless forced upward by vaults, and there were no high windows. The mosque had at least one tower, or minaret, from which the call to prayer was issued five times daily. The same basic plan is followed to this day

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B2 Islamic Architecture in India

 

 

The Mughal peoples, who had embraced Islam, made incursions into India and established an empire there. Mughal architecture was based on Persian traditions, but developed in northwestern India in ways peculiar to that region. The earliest remaining mosque, the Qutb, near Delhi, was begun in 1195. It is impossible to separate Mughal religious architecture from that erected to glorify the Mughal Empire.

The great builders were the emperors of the 16th and 17th centuries. Their most impressive monuments are a succession of imperial tombs. Notable are the superbly architectonic tomb (1564-1573) of Humayun in Delhi, the jewel-like Itimad-ud-Daulah (1622-1628) in ?gra, and the beautifully proportioned and decorated Taj Mahal (1632-1648), also in ?gra. A typical tomb was a high central dome surrounded by smaller chambers arranged about two intersecting axes so that all four sides of the structure are alike. It is built on a raised platform overlooking a large formal garden, surrounded by a wall, with pavilions at the axial points.

Each of the 16th- and 17th-century Mughal emperors elaborated the huge forts at Lahore, Delhi, and ?gra. These forts included living quarters, mosque, baths, public and private audience halls, and the harem. One compound, that of Fatehpur Sikri, was begun in 1571 and abandoned in 1585. See Indian Art and Architecture. Islam forbade the representation of persons and animals; yet craftsmen created highly ornamented buildings. The motifs are geometrical designs, floral arabesques, and Arabic calligraphy. The materials are glazed tile, wood joinery and marquetry, marble, mosaic, sandstone, stucco carving, and white marble inlaid with dark marbles and gemstones. See Islamic Art and Architecture

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VII THE NEW AGE

 

 

The cultural revolution in Western civilization now called the Renaissance brought about an entirely new age, not only in philosophy and literature but in the visual arts as well. In architecture, the principles and styles of ancient Greece and Rome were revived and reinterpreted, to remain dominant until the 20th century.

A Renaissance Architecture

 

 

The Renaissance, literally meaning “rebirth,” brought into being some of the most significant and admired works ever built. Beginning in Italy about 1400, it spread to the rest of Europe during the next 150 years.

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A1 Italian Renaissance Architecture

 

 

The families who governed rival cities in northern Italy in the 15th century—de Medici, Sforza, da Montefeltro, and others—had become wealthy enough through commerce to become patrons of the arts. People of leisure began to take serious scholarly interest in the neglected Latin culture—its literature, its art, and its architecture, whose ruins lay about them.

Early in the 15th century the city of Florence was in the process of completing its cathedral. Piers had already been erected to support a dome almost as large as that of the Pantheon in Rome. A proposal for its completion was submitted by Filippo Brunelleschi, who had studied Roman structural solutions. His constructed dome (1420-1436) is derived from Rome but is different; it is of masonry, is octagonal, has inner and outer shells connected by ribs, is pointed and rises higher, and is crowned with a lantern. Its drum with circular windows stands alone without buttressing, for the base contains a tension ring—huge stone blocks held together with iron clamps and topped with heavy iron chains. Two additional tension rings are contained within the dome's double shells. Brunelleschi stood at the threshold between Gothic and Renaissance. His Pazzi Chapel (begun 1441?), also in Florence, is a clear statement of new principles of proportion and design.

A new type of urban building evolved at this time—the palazzo, or city residence of a prominent family. The palazzi were several stories high; rooms were grouped around a cortile, or courtyard; the outer walls of the palazzo were on the lot lines.

The Florentine architect Leon Battista Alberti, in his design for the Palazzo Rucellai (1446-1451), employed in its facade three superposed classic orders, much as in the Roman Colosseum, except that he used pilasters instead of engaged columns. They seem to have been engraved in the wall plane; the resulting compartmentalization of the facade provides a logical setting for the windows. Alberti also published in 1485 the first book on architectural theory since Vitruvius, which became a major influence in promoting classicism.

In the 16th century, Rome became the leading center for the new architecture. The Milanese architect Donato Bramante practiced in Rome beginning in 1499. His Tempietto (1502), an elegantly proportioned circular temple in the courtyard of San Pietro in Montorio, was one of the earliest Renaissance structures in Rome.

The erection of a new basilica of Saint Peter in Vatican City was the most important of many 16th-century projects. In drawing the first plan (1503-1506) Bramante rejected the Western basilica concept in favor of a Greek cross of equal arms with a central dome. Popes who came after Julius II, however, appointed other architects—notably Michelangelo and Carlo Maderno—and, when the church was completed in 1612, the Latin cross form had been imposed with a lengthened nave. Michelangelo's dome, ribbed and with a lantern, is a logical development from Brunelleschi's in Florence. It rises in a high oval and is the prototype not only for later churches but for many state capitol buildings in the United States.

Toward the middle of the 16th century such leading architects as Michelangelo, Baldassare Peruzzi, Giulio Romano, and Giacomo da Vignola began to use the classical Roman elements in ways that did not conform to the rules that governed designs in the early Renaissance. Arches, columns, and entablatures came to be used as devices to introduce drama through depth recession, asymmetry, and unexpected proportions and scales. This tendency, called Mannerism, is exemplified by Giulio's sophisticated Palazzo del Tè (1526-1534) at Mantua (Mantova). The architect Andrea Palladio practiced in the environs of Vicenza and Venice. Although he visited Rome, he did not wholly adopt the Mannerist approach. He specialized in villas for gentleman farmers. These villas explore all the variations on the classical norms: governing axis defined in the approach, single major entrance, single major interior space surrounded by smaller rooms, secondary functions extended in symmetrical arms, and careful attention to proportion. They were immortalized by Palladio's publication The Four Books of Architecture (1570; trans. 1738), in which drawings for them appear, with the dimensions written into the plans to emphasize Palladio's harmonic series of dimensions that govern the major proportions. These books later enabled Inigo Jones in England and Thomas Jefferson in Virginia to propagate Palladian principles among the gentleman farmers of their times. In two large Venetian churches, San Giorgio Maggiore (1565) and II Redentore (1577), Palladio made important contributions toward the adaptation of classic ideas to the liturgical and formal traditions of Roman Catholicism

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A2 Northern Renaissance Architecture

 

 

Renaissance ideas had spread rapidly to France by 1494. French royal policy was to attract Italian artists (beginning with Leonardo da Vinci in 1506) while at the same time encouraging and developing native talent. It is believed that the Italian architect Domenico da Cortona designed the extraordinary Château de Chambord that Francis I built (1519-1547) in the Loire Valley, which retains outward characteristics of a medieval castle. The French architects Jacques Androuet du Cerceau the Elder and Philibert Delorme worked at Fontainebleau, and Delorme was architect for the Château d'Anet, where Benvenuto Cellini was employed as sculptor. In Paris, work on the Louvre was undertaken by Pierre Lescot in 1546.

Philip II of Spain engaged Juan de Herrera and Juan Bautista de Toledo as architects for his colossal Escorial (1563-1584) near Madrid—half palace, half monastery. England was somewhat slower to change. Inigo Jones, its principal early Renaissance architect, visited Italy and emulated Palladio in such works as the Banqueting House (1619-1622) in Whitehall, London. See Renaissance Art and Architecture.

B Baroque and Rococo Architecture

 

In early Renaissance and even Mannerist architecture, elements were combined in rather static compositions; classic design implies a serene balance among the several components, and spaces locked into the geometry of perspective. Unsatisfied with this, the baroque architects of the 17th century deployed classic elements in more complex ways, so that the identity of these elements was masked, and space became more ambiguous and more activated. Baroque movement is understood as that of the observer experiencing the work, and of the observer's eyes scanning an interior space or probing a long vista. Some of the later rococo works contain a richness of ornament, color, and imagery that, combined with a highly sophisticated handling of light, overwhelms the observer

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B1 Italian Baroque Architecture

 

 

Italians were the pioneers of baroque; the best known was the architect-sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini, designer of the great oval plaza (begun 1656) in front of St. Peter's. Francesco Borromini produced two masterpieces, both on an intimate scale, in Rome. San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (1638-1641; facade completed 1667) distorts the dome on pendentives into a coffered ellipse to stretch the space into a longitudinal axis; its facade undulates, entablature and all. The plan of Sant'Ivo della Sapienza (begun 1642) is based on two intersecting equilateral triangles that produce six niches of alternating shapes; these shapes, defined by pilasters and ribs, rise through what would ordinarily be a dome, continuing the hexagonal concept from floor to lantern. Guarino Guarini designed a church in Turin, San Lorenzo (1668-1687), with eight intersecting ribs that offer interstices for letting in daylight. His even more astonishing Cappella della Santa Sindone (Chapel of the Holy Shroud, 1667-1694), also in Turin, has a cone-shaped hexagonal dome created by six segmental arches rising in eight staggered tiers

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B2 French Baroque Architecture

 

Seventeenth-century French architects also designed baroque churches, one of their greatest being part of Les Invalides, Paris (1676-1706), by Jules Hardouin-Mansart. The best French talent, however, was absorbed in the secular service of Louis XIV and his government. The Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte (1657-1661) is a grandiose ensemble representing the collaboration of the architect Louis Le Vau, the painter Charles Lebrun, and the landscape architect André Le Nôtre. The Sun King was so impressed that he engaged these designers to rebuild the Château de Versailles on a truly regal scale. The Palace of Versailles became the center of government and was continuously enlarged between 1667 and 1710. Bernini submitted designs for enlarging the Louvre in Paris, but Claude Perrault was finally awarded that commission (executed 1667-1679). French architecture of le grand siècle lacks the exuberance of Italian baroque, but its designers achieved the epitome of elegance

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B3 English Baroque Architecture

 

 

In England the rebuilding of London after the 1666 fire brought to prominence the many-talented Sir Christopher Wren, whose masterpiece is Saint Paul's Cathedral (1675-1710). He also designed or influenced the design of many other English churches. Among other innovations, Wren introduced the single square tower belfry with tall spire that became the hallmark of church architecture in England and the United States.

B4 Baroque Urban Design

 

Baroque thinking powerfully addressed the area of urban design. Michelangelo's Campidoglio (Capitol, 1538-1564) in Rome had already provided a model for the public square, and villas such as Vignola's Villa Farnese (begun 1539) in Caprarola showed how these important buildings could extend axial ties into the townscape. Baroque church facades frequently had more to do with their accompanying piazzas than with the church interiors. Often, whole new towns were built on formal principles. Early in the 18th century Peter the Great brought Italian and French baroque architects to Russia to create Saint Petersburg. In the New World were built such large urban centers as Mexico City; Santiago, Chile; Antigua Guatemala, Guatemala; Philadelphia; Savannah, Georgia; and Washington, D.C. See Baroque Art and Architecture

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B5 Rococo Architecture

 

 

When Louis XIV died (1715), changes in the artistic climate led to the exuberant rococo style. Once again the work of Italians—notably Guarini and Filippo Juvarra—provided the basis for a new thrust. The expression of royal grandeur has survived in Paris's Place de la Concorde (begun 1753) by Jacques Ange Gabriel and the great axis and plazas (1751-1759) by Héré de Corny at Nancy. A more intimate and personal expression appears in Gabriel's Petit Trianon (1762-1764) at Versailles. Rococo came to full flower, however, in Bavaria and Austria. The Austrian Benedictine Abbey (1748-1754) at Ottobeuren by Johann Michael Fischer is only one of a brilliant series of spectacular churches, monasteries, and palaces that includes Balthasar Neumann's opulent Vierzehnheiligen (Church of the Fourteen Saints, 1743-1772) near Bamberg, Germany, and the Amalienburg Pavilion (1734-1739) by the Flemish-born Bavarian architect François de Cuvilliés in the park at Nymphenburg near Munich. The many elaborate colonial churches found throughout Central and South America attest to the power and influence of the Roman Catholic church during baroque and rococo times. They include cathedrals in Mexico City, Guanajuato, and Oaxaca de Ju?rez, Mexico; Antigua Guatemala, Guatemala; Quito, Ecuador; Ouro Prêto, Brazil; and Cuzco, Peru; as well as such northern missions as Sant' Xavier del Bac in Tucson, Arizona, and the chain of missions on the California coast. The Spanish architect José Churriguera developed an extremely elaborate decorative style that, transferred to Latin America and somewhat debased, was given the name Churrigueresque. See Latin American Architecture

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B6 Neoclassical Architecture

 

 

In many countries of northern Europe the elegance and dignity attainable through adherence to classic rules of composition retained appeal, while in central and southern Europe and Scandinavia, baroque and rococo ran their course. In England, the duke of Marlborough's great Blenheim Palace, designed (1705) by Sir John Vanbrugh, emulated in rougher and reduced form the grandeur of Versailles.

A renewed interest in Palladio and his follower Inigo Jones emerged. Development of the resort city of Bath gave opportunities to John Wood and his son to apply Palladian classicism to the design of Queen's Square (1728), the Circus (1754-1770), and finally the great Royal Crescent (1767-1775), in all of which the individual houses were made to conform to an encompassing classic order. Robert Adam popularized classicism, expressing it notably through delicate stucco ornamentation. Historical scholarship became more precise, and true Greek architecture—including such pure examples of Doric as the Parthenon—became known to architects through the 1762 publication by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett of Antiquities of Athens. These developments reinforced the grip of neoclassicism in England, and the resulting type of architecture became popularly known as the Georgian style. In what was to become the northeastern United States, Peter Harrison and Samuel McIntire took their cues from English architects in their own version of Georgian architecture, which was called Federal after the United States won independence. In the Southeast, with an aristocracy predominantly rural, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Latrobe, and others derived their building style more directly from Palladio. Jefferson, whose early virtuosity had been demonstrated in Monticello (1770-1784), was also moved by ancient Rome, and placed a version (1817-1826) of the Pantheon at the head of his magnificent Lawn at the University of Virginia. See Neoclassical Art and Architecture.

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A Eclectic Revivals

 

 

Disenchantment with baroque, with rococo, and even with neo-Palladianism turned late 18th-century designers and patrons toward the original Greek and Roman prototypes. Selective borrowing from another time and place became fashionable. Its Greek aspect was particularly strong in the young United States from the early years of the 19th century until about 1850. New settlements were given Greek names—Syracuse, Ithaca, Troy—and Doric and Ionic columns, entablatures, and pediments, mostly transmuted into white-painted wood, were applied to public buildings and important town houses in the style called Greek Revival.

In France, the imperial cult of Napoleon steered architecture in a more Roman direction, as seen in the Church of the Madeleine (1807-1842), a huge Roman temple in Paris. French architectural thought had been jolted at the turn of the century by the highly imaginative published projects of Etienne-Louis Boullée and Claude Nicholas Ledoux. These men were inspired by the massive aspects of Egyptian and Roman work, but their monumental (and often impractical) compositions were innovative, and they are admired today as visionary architects.

The most original architect in England at the time was Sir John Soane; the museum he built as his own London house (1812-1813) still excites astonishment for its inventive romantic virtuosity. Late English neoclassicism came to be seen as elitist; thus, for the new Houses of Parliament the authorities insisted on Gothic or Tudor Revival. The appointed architect, Sir Charles Barry, was not a Gothic expert, but he called into consultation an architect who was—A. W. N. Pugin, who became responsible for the details of this vast monument (begun 1836). Pugin, in a short and contentious career, made a moral issue out of a return to the Gothic style. Other architects, however, felt free to select whatever elements from past cultures best fitted their programs—Gothic for Protestant churches, baroque for Roman Catholic churches, early Greek for banks, Palladian for institutions, early Renaissance for libraries, and Egyptian for cemeteries.

In the second half of the 19th century dislocations brought about by the Industrial Revolution became overwhelming. Many were shocked by the hideous new urban districts of factories and workers' housing and by the deterioration of public taste among the newly rich. For the new modes of transportation, canals, tunnels, bridges, and railroad stations, architects were employed only to provide a cultural veneer.

The Crystal Palace (1850-1851; reconstructed 1852-1854) in London, a vast but ephemeral exhibition hall, was the work of Sir Joseph Paxton, a man who had learned how to put iron and glass together in the design of large greenhouses. It demonstrated a hitherto undreamed-of kind of spatial beauty, and in its carefully planned building process, which included prefabricated standard parts, it foreshadowed industrialized building and the widespread use of cast iron and steel. See Crystal Palace. Also important in its innovative use of metal was the great tower (1887-1889) of Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel in Paris. In general, however, the most gifted architects of the time sought escape from their increasingly industrialized environment by further development of traditional themes and eclectic styles. Two contrasting but equally brilliantly conceived examples are the sumptuous Paris Opéra (1861-1875) by Charles Garnier and Boston's grandiose Trinity Church (1872-1877) by Henry Hobson Richardson

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B Modern Architecture

 

At the turn of the century, designers appeared who refused to work in borrowed styles. Antoni Gaud? in Barcelona, Spain, was the most original; his sinuous Casa Mil? (1905-1907) and the unfinished Iglesia di Sagrada Familia (Church of the Holy Family, 1883-1926) exhibit a search for new organic structural forms. His work has some affinity with the movement called art nouveau, which had been inaugurated contemporaneously in Brussels and Paris. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whose masterpiece is the Glasgow School of Art (1897-1899; 1906-1909), espoused a more austere version of art nouveau

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B1 The Skyscraper

 

 

The Chicago architect Louis Sullivan, in his Wainwright Building (1890-1891) in St. Louis, Missouri, his Guaranty Building (1895) in Buffalo, New York, and his Carson Pirie Scott Department Store (1899-1904) in Chicago, gave new expressive form to urban commercial buildings. His career converges with the so-called Chicago School of architects, whose challenge was to invent the skyscraper or high-rise building, facilitated by the introduction of the electric elevator and the sudden abundance of steel. They made a successful transition from the masonry bearing wall to the steel frame, which assumed all the load-bearing functions. The building's skeleton could be erected quickly and the remaining components hung on it to complete it, an immense advantage for high-rise buildings on busy city streets. Sullivan is memorable not only for his own work but for having provided the apprenticeship of Frank Lloyd Wright, America's greatest native architect, whose career extended 50 years beyond that of Sullivan. See American Architecture.

B2 Reinforced Concrete

 

In France attention centered on reinforced concrete. Auguste Perret achieved early success in Paris with his apartment building (1902-1903) in the Rue Franklin and his Théâtre des Champs-Elysées (1911-1912). Tony Garnier had, during his studies in Rome, created a detailed design for an imaginary city with many buildings, all in concrete; its plans were published in 1917 as La cité industrielle. Vienna was the scene of work by Otto Wagner and by Adolf Loos, who worked in severe linear forms and proclaimed that “ornament is a crime.” Peter Behrens, a founding member of the Deutscher Werkbund (German Craft Alliance), is revered as a German precursor of modern architecture. See Modern Architecture

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B3 The Bauhaus

 

 

When the Bauhaus opened, the modern movement in architecture began to coalesce. The Bauhaus school (Weimar, 1919-1925; Dessau, 1926-1932; Berlin, 1932-1933) brought together architects, painters, and designers from several countries, all determined to formulate goals for the visual arts in the modern age. Its first director was Walter Gropius, who designed the innovative buildings for the move to Dessau; its second was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The new architecture demonstrated its virtues in new Siedlungen (low-cost housing) in Berlin and Frankfurt. An exhibition of housing types, the Weissenhof Siedlung (1927) in Stuttgart, brought together works by Mies, Gropius, the Dutch J. J. P. Oud, and the Swiss-French Le Corbusier; this milestone identified the movement with a better life for the common man. The chastely elegant German Pavilion (1929) by Mies for the Barcelona Exhibition, executed in such lavish materials as travertine, marble, onyx, and chrome-plated steel, asserted a strong, formal argument independent of any social goals. Gropius, his disciple Marcel Breuer, and Mies eventually established themselves in the U.S., where they enjoyed productive and influential decades—extending through the 1970s for Breuer—as architects and teachers. Le Corbusier, over a long career, exerted immense influence. His early publications championed a machine aesthetic and urged the replacement of traditional cities in favor of life and work in skyscrapers arranged regimentally in vast parks. His Villa Savoye (1928-1931) in the French countryside downplays a sense of structure and materials in order to dramatize complexity of spacial organization and allow a subtle ambiguity between interior and exterior space. In the 1950s, with Jawaharlal Nehru as client, he laid out the new capital city of the Punjab, Chand?garh, and designed for it three monumental concrete government edifices standing in a vast plaza. In France he produced two unique religious buildings, the pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp (1950-1955) and the Dominican monastery of La Tourette (1957-1961), both in concrete. Having abandoned the extreme rationalism of his early career, he manipulated form and light in these extraordinary structures for emotional response and dramatic effect

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B4 Innovative Architecture

 

Such structural engineers as the Swiss Robert Maillart, the French Eugène Freyssinet, and the Italian Pier Luigi Nervi produced works in reinforced concrete that combined imagination with rationality to achieve aesthetic impact. Among architects the Danish J?rn Utzon, in Australia's Sydney Opera House (1957-1973), and the Finnish-American Eero Saarinen, in Dulles Airport (1960-1962) near Washington, D.C., employed unusual structural solutions. From his base in Helsinki, the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto extended his oeuvre through more than four decades, refusing to celebrate the industrialized repetition of steel, concrete, glass, and aluminum, but molding spaces with utmost sophistication, great care in the distribution of light, and the use of materials—stone, wood, and copper—with familiar and sympathetic tactile qualities. The American Louis I. Kahn infused his designs with a transcendent monumentality recalling Roman classicism, as in the transformation of tunnel vaults into light-modulating girders in his Kimbell Art Museum (1972), located in Fort Worth, Texas

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B5 The International Style

 

 

Despite such noteworthy exceptions—including such later works of Wright as New York City's Guggenheim Museum (completed 1959)—the style initiated by the Bauhaus architects and termed the International Style gradually prevailed after the 1930s. The theory and practice of the new style was introduced in the United States largely through the efforts of Philip C. Johnson, one of Gropius's students at Harvard University. In the hands of its most gifted exponents, such as Mies, the International Style was particularly well suited to large metropolitan apartment and office towers. The chaste elegance and subtle proportions of Mies's Lake Shore Drive Apartments (1951) in Chicago and (with Philip C. Johnson) his Seagram Building (1958) in New York City represent modernism at its finest. Many of his imitators, however, seized on its commercial potential; it proved extremely efficient for large-scale construction, in which the same module could be repeated indefinitely. Inner spaces became standardized, predictable, and profitable, and exteriors reflected the monotony of the interiors; the blank glass box became ubiquitous. Assessing modernism after a half century in which it was dominant, commentators pointed out that even though it was embraced by big business and big government, the lay public never grew fond of it. At most an austere classicism was conceded to it, but this was achieved in a coldly impersonal and often overwhelming way. Modernism had cut off architecture's roots in the past by about 1930. Suddenly it became incorrect for a new building to show any resemblance to old ones; and for a period of time the study of historical styles almost disappeared from professional schools