Glory of Ugliness Sir John Summerson in the Architectural Review
Architecture
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December 5, 1993
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VILLA MADAMA: A Memoir Relating to Raphael'south Project. By Guy Dewez. (Princeton Architectural Printing, $45.) In the course of conjecturing how Raphael might have completed the country house he designed for the Medici family on a hillside overlooking Rome simply left unfinished at his death in 1520, the Paris-based historian Guy Dewez constructs an elegant meditation on the nature of architectural idea and our power to revive the spirit of a vanished age. The photographs, drawings, diagrams and written documents he marshals in support of his speculations near the Villa Madama heighten an appreciation of Raphael'south faultless sense of proportion and decorum, whether in painting or architecture.
More than important, the most revered artist of his lifetime and his cultivated clients were convinced they could create a new Roman compages worthy of the ancients. One majestic photo of the interior of its portico from the Alinari Archives in Florence, taken a century ago, encourages the belief that even in a half-finished state the villa (now used by the Italian Government as a invitee house for visiting dignitaries) attained the platonic its designer envisioned. The author'southward elevated, finely reasoned statement is of a piece with Raphael's Apollonian ndeavor.
MICHELANGELO Builder. Past Giulio Carlo Argan and Bruno Contardi. Translated by Marion 50. Grayson. (Abrams, $125.) While hordes of tourists in the Vatican flock to encounter the Sistine Chapel and the Pieta, true connoisseurs have themselves effectually to the dorsum of St. Peter's Basilica to view unimpeded the virtually superb compages of the Vatican circuitous: the monumental apse and mighty dome past Michelangelo. Yet so towering were his achievements every bit a sculptor and painter that it is difficult for many to realize he was also the pre-eminent architect of his age.
The esteemed fine art historian Giulio Carlo Argan, who died in 1992 at the age of 83, and his student Bruno Contardi trace the architectural career of this volatile genius with acute insights into the decisive role that patronage and politics (ecclesiastical besides every bit secular) played in determining who congenital what during the Italian Renaissance. Argan, a Communist who served as Mayor of Rome in the 1970'southward, goes beyond anecdotal history in his profound agreement that the greatness of Michelangelo's architecture lies in "the relationship between a physicality and a spirituality that were equally exalted."
The duality he writes of so evocatively is present above all in Michelangelo'southward sublime additions to the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence: his New Sacristy (a burial chapel for the Medicis) and his vestibule for the adjacent Laurentian Library. At that place, the turmoil and terribilita often associated with his marbles and frescoes give fashion to a transcendent calm that makes one believe compages brought this protean creator a peace of mind that eluded him elsewhere.
TAJ MAHAL. Photographs by Jean-Louis Nou. Text by Amina Okada and M. C. Joshi. (Abbeville, $65.) Reduced in many people's minds to an icon as over familiar as the Mona Lisa, the Taj Mahal -- the mausoleum built by the Mogul Emperor Shah Jahan between 1632 and 1643 for his adored 2nd wife, Mumtaz Mahal -- is nonetheless a supreme masterpiece of world compages. The white marble sepulcher'south colossal scale is a cosmic gild of magnitude abroad from the intimate nature of its inlaid stone detailing. Yet the Taj is a composition of astonishing coherence and almost inconceivable richness.
Never has the lapidary fine art been infused with more architectonic appropriateness. Bold black Koranic verses nix around sinuous polychrome tendrils; pierced alabaster screens filter low-cal onto intricate geometric pavements. The whole scheme is fabricated ethereal by the translucent marble famously luminous in moonlight.
The subtle colour photography of Jean-Louis Nou, who died final year, does total justice to the Taj Mahal as a personal love poem and a landmark of civilisation, moving with equal feeling from shut-ups of semi precious rock flowers to distant vistas. In this marmoreal paradise garden of unfading freshness, Nou joins the generations of devotees who have seen the Taj not equally a tomb but as an affirmation of life.
SANCTUARIES OF Castilian NEW Mexico. By Marc Treib. Drawings by Dorothee Imbert. (University of California, $55.) The churches built by the conquistadors and their descendants in what is now the Southwest United states are amongst the most moving edifices ever made for Christian worship. As with all architecture, the class these religious outposts of the Spanish Empire took was shaped by forces of economy, geography and politics. In this case, the constraints imposed by limited physical and fiscal resources, a harsh climate and colonial rule gave these tough little structures an adaptive grapheme and intensified beauty akin to those of the virtually ravishing desert flowers.
Though formulated on models of the Spanish Bizarre, itself an imitation of Roman Baroque, the old churches of New Mexico necessarily employed colloquial building methods that in turn affected the final designs. Marc Treib, a professor of architecture at the Academy of California, Berkeley, is one of the rare historians today capable of identifying, evaluating and interpreting the circuitous influences in an compages as hybrid as this. Mr. Treib, an builder, has a abrupt eye for telling structure techniques, which is crucial in the analysis of a characteristic local expression.
Sensitive to the fact that an conflicting architecture was imposed on the terrain of indigenous Indian tribes, the author gives a well-rounded account that avoids trendy political correctness while acknowledging the conceptual standoff betwixt American Indian and European notions of man-made infinite. Meticulously researched, shrewdly considered and splendidly written, this scholarly but attainable piece of work is sure to go a classic in its field.
THE ART AND Compages OF FREE MASONRY: An Introductory Study. Past James Stevens Curl. (Overlook, $sixty.) A secret society that uses the attributes and practices of the building art as its symbolic ground is such a natural subject for an compages book that one wonders why a general pattern history of the Masonic movement had non appeared long earlier this. Indeed, a correct agreement of the revolutionary architecture of the Age of Enlightenment, lately the object of much renewed interest, is dependent on a knowledge of the arcana of Freemasonry.
James Stevens Curl, a professor of architectural history at Leicester Polytechnic in England, gives a brisk only thorough run-through of the probable origins of the order in the stoneworkers' guilds of the tardily Heart Ages, its spread during the Counter-Reformation and its noon of influence during the 18th century. He is at his best in pointing out architectural motifs that are easy for the uninitiated to miss, making this a useful companion book to contempo studies of the architects Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Etienne-Louis Boullee, Jean-Jacques Lequeu and Karl Friedrich Schinkel (he designed the most memorable of all sets for Mozart's Masonic allegory "The Magic Flute").
Mr. Curl's curmudgeonly tone, obsessive mastery of detail and sympathy for extreme eccentricity all contribute to a curiously fascinating reading experience. The unexpected turns up on almost every folio, such as his assertion that Sir John Soane's tomb "has a number of Masonic allusions mixed with his stern, quirky multifariousness of stripped Classicism, simply the design had a long life, for it was the inspiration for Giles Gilbert Scott's cast-iron telephone boxes introduced between the ii world wars."
BACK OF THE Big HOUSE: The Compages of Plantation Slavery. By John Michael Vlach. (University of North Carolina, material, $37.50; paper, $18.95.) The French Annales approach to history, which examines the lives and activities of common people rather than those of their leaders, has come up to the report of the architectural by. An first-class case of the validity of assessing "the short and unproblematic register of the poor" for their larger implications can be found in this revealing history of the long-ignored farm structures built by and for the African-American slaves who fueled the agronomical economy of the Southward before the Civil War.
Visitors to historic antebellum plantation houses are familiar with the euphemism "the dependencies." But this gritty-looking book makes it uncomfortably articulate that the existent nature of slave quarters was not simply subsidiary just subhuman. As the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted wrote of one tiny, windowless hovel he saw during a bout of the cotton-growing states in the 1850'southward, "I should have conjectured that information technology had been congenital for a pulverization-house, or maybe an ice-house -- never for an animal to sleep in."
John Michael Vlach, a professor of American studies and anthropology at George Washington Academy, interweaves contemporary reports, oral histories of one-time slaves and archeological evidence of surviving outbuildings in an unemotional but powerful manner. This sobering look at compages's potential for oppression presents a sharp rebuke to revisionist historians who are attempting to depict the slaves of the Old South equally upwardly mobile entrepreneurs who used an evil system to their ain advantage.
MODERNITY AND HOUSING. By Peter G. Rowe. (MIT, $45.) The modernistic movement in compages, in the aftermath of Globe War I, predicated its initial stage on providing better housing for workers. Its solutions were far from perfect. Simply the sweeping rejection of modernist principles -- especially a sense of social responsibility -- that characterized the 1980'due south focused with particular malice on the failures of postwar urban housing schemes without offering a practical alternative.
This desperately needed volume, by Peter G. Rowe, the dean of the Graduate Schoolhouse of Design at Harvard, will accept special pertinence for the generation that has come of historic period since the idea of the Great Order withered and has been educated with picayune notion of the place that intelligently planned urban housing must have in any humane polity.
"Modernity and Housing" also offers a refresher course in the principles behind this century'southward near noteworthy attempts at establishing new urban communities. Six successful examples in the U.s. and Europe (three from the 1920's, 3 from the 1970's) are accorded the same clearheaded assay in a series of detailed example studies that underscore the multiplicity of options that must be considered in our fragmented society.
ARCHITECTURE Civilization 1943-1968: A Documentary Album. Edited by Joan Ockman with the collaboration of Edward Eigen. (Columbia Books of Architecture/ Rizzoli, fabric, $l; paper, $35.) "Plenty deeds," alleged a slogan on a wall of the Sorbonne during the evenements of 1968. "We desire words!" Thus it has been e'er since in the loftier realms of architectural idea. Only as Joan Ockman, an adjunct acquaintance professor at the Columbia University Graduate Schoolhouse of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, demonstrates in this immensely provocative anthology, theory and action demand not be mutually exclusive pursuits.
A mixture of classical texts (such as Frank Lloyd Wright's "In the Nature of Materials: A Philosophy") and surprising rediscoveries (including "Remove Shortcomings in Pattern, Improve Work of Architects," by Nikita Khrushchev), this well-counterbalanced selection recalls the broad spectrum of concerns compages addressed as the industrial West rebuilt in the aftermath of World War Ii.
This thoughtful assemblage -- embracing the pragmatic arroyo of Robert Moses also as the poetic vision of Gaston Bachelard, the lucidity of Lewis Mumford and the obscurantism of Manfredo Tafuri, the experienced historical perspective of Sir John Summerson and the youthful urgency of architecture students on strike at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts -- brings together more than than lxx essays, reviews, manifestoes, position papers, letters and retorts, many of which are translated into English language for the first time and have been available heretofore simply in hard-to-find journals. Ms. Ockman'southward sagacious prefaces establish a continuity seldom plant in an omnium-gatherum, and her freedom from ideological bias is a bracing paragon of intellectual high-mindedness.
THE GLASS House. By Philip Johnson. Edited by David Whitney and Jeffrey Kipnis. (Pantheon, $35.) Withal designing at age 87, Philip Johnson remains a self-transformer of Ovidian versatility. Despite the dubious quality of his stylistically rapacious skyscrapers of the 1980'southward, Mr. Johnson'south place in the history of 20th-century civilisation is secure: equally pioneering collector, influential curator, prescient patron, distributor of institutions and promoter of young talent.
He has also produced a scattering of buildings likely to withstand the test of time, none more and then than his ain Glass Firm of 1949 in New Canaan, Conn. Recently deeded by Mr. Johnson to the National Trust for Historic Preservation (which will open it to the public after the architect's death), this glamorous weekend retreat in a timelessly bucolic setting is the refracting lens through which his singular career must be viewed.
Dissimilar the beginning-generation modernists who preceded him, Mr. Johnson has seen no disgrace in borrowing from his concurrent betters -- in this case, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose glass-box Farnsworth House of 1946-51 in Plano, Ill., was designed before merely built subsequently its more famous adaptation. Yet Mr. Johnson'south highly personal version of Mies'due south reductivist concept departs from the prototype in many ways that make the Glass House a thoroughly American rendition of the country house ideal.
This compendium of nineteen previously published essays (five of them, plus a new preface, past the architect) is augmented by photographs of the celebrated vitrine and the eight other structures subsequently erected around it. Together, those praiseworthy follies course a 3-dimensional autobiography reflecting Philip Johnson's most original creation: himself.
CALATRAVA BRIDGES. By Kenneth Frampton, Anthony C. Webster and Anthony Tischhauser. (Artemis/Rizzoli, $95.) Not since the 1930'due south heyday of the legendary Swiss engineer Robert Maillart has a designer of bridges captured a scenic flair for dynamism and drama more than effectively than the 42-year-old Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. Though Mr. Calatrava's work (the subject of a Museum of Modern Art exhibition earlier this year) has ranged from railway stations to a project for the completion of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, by far the best portion of his output is represented in this monograph on his spanning structures.
Visitors to the 1992 world's off-white in Seville crossed over Mr. Calatrava's daringly asymmetrical Alamillo Span to accomplish the exposition site, merely to find little architecture at that place that lived up to the excitement generated by the thrilling link between the old metropolis and the fairground. It and his 32 other bridge designs remind one of the romantic appeal that can yet be imparted to infrastructure, which since the celebrity days of public works has get the ugly stepsister of architecture.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/05/books/architecture.html
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