Review - Ancient Greek Architects at Work: J.J. Coulton

For Plato, what distinguished the architect was that he did not just work out what should be done, like an accountant, but also gave the necessary orders to the workmen until the building was finished.

Design held a distinct character in ancient Greece. Monumental architecture is easily ruined by mistakes, for what has already been built cannot be modified as corrections are prohibitively expensive. The lack of drawn plans or preliminary design is astounding.

The ancient Greek architects used proportion in the absence of scale drawings. The building process was a technique of applying rules of proportion, and the ‘module’ became the unit whereby all other elements were multiples or fractions of the module. However, much remains unknown on how the rules of proportion were applied. What we can bring from this is that Greek architects used a sense of space in order to construct the temples.

Review - Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal: Colin Rowe

In the essay, ‘Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal’, Colin Rowe introduces into the Architectural vocabulary the term transparent.

He also draws a distinction between two senses of transparency, the literal and the phenomenal. While this distinction is very noticeably Hegelian/Kantian, the essay does not enter into explicit discussion about the nature of knowledge.

Transparency is fundamentally a method or device whose characteristic is to allow interpenetration. Colin Rowe presents certain instances of transparency such as the League of Nations project by Le Corbusier.

The problem with transparency is its relationship to knowledge.

Along with juxtaposition and comparative analysis, what is to be known is something other. Knowing is not inherent with in the method. The placement of what can be known into something other is symptomatic of Kantian thought; noumen/phenomen.

Indeed, within the essay Colin Rowe notes that: ‘They [superimpositions of form] transpose insignificant singularities into meaningful complexities.’ Only through some thing else can some thing be meaningful. The singularities are insignificant.

Review - Chicago Frame: Colin Rowe

Colin Rowe attempts to answer the question of Frank Lloyd Wright’s unwillingness to use a structural frame.

Despite the proliferation of steel frame construction in Chicago, Wright distinctly rejected its use.

Instead, Wrightian architecture arose from an ‘organic’ demand for the integration of space and structure; and as fulfilling this demand, the building becomes a single, complete, and self-explanatory utterance.

The Chicago frame resulted from economics and the need for a product for sale; conditions imposed by the real estate speculator.

The cast iron steel frame that can accommodate many floors and square footage is attractive to fiscally conservative minds and acceptable to architects operating within a culture of uninhibited business.

The frame is a solution to a problem; equipment. Despite the International Style’s ability to impart iconographic and social importance on the frame, the Chicago school had no part in such activities.

Wright did not use a structural frame because of his unique relationship to it. “He was too close to it to be able to invest it with the iconographic content which it later came to possess; too close to the Loop to feel other than its abrasiveness and constriction; and too undetached from Chicago to see the city as the idea which it so nearly is and which the reforming mind of the 1920’s might have wished it to become.”

Review - Composition and Character: Colin Rowe

For where the mid-nineteenth century reaction against the Picturesque had attempted to achieve some kind of synthesis between the laws of structure, the nature of materials, and the intimate and objective qualities of style, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century reaction was led almost exclusively to emphasize phenomena of vision; and, by using history as a kind of dictionary, to deduce from it certain formal schemes apparently quite extrinsic to any particular style or culture.

In any final analysis of its theory, modern architecture seems to rest upon a conviction that authentic architectural form can only be engendered by recognizing the disciplines which function and structure impose. However, the authors of the composition books find that this thesis cannot engage their convictions, but a truly significant building is pre-eminently a structure, organized according to the principles of architectural composition and infused with a symbolic content which is usually described as character.

By this shifting of emphasis from the work of architecture in itself to the effect of the work upon the spectator, the late eighteenth century was able to accommodate a conspicuously dominant academic theory [composition] and a powerfully subversive undercurrent [picturesque, scenery, like a painting.]

‘Character’s’ presence was envisaged as determined by some evident particularity. Character in architecture, as in physiognomy, is produced by the prevalence of certain distinctive features, by which a countenance or a building is at once distinguished from others of the same kind.

In the strictest sense of the word, any organization is a composition, but within architectural discourse correct composition is a formal common denominator extracted from historical and current precedents envisaged as an ideal by academia.

Review - Mannerism and Modern Architecture: Colin Rowe

Colin Rowe uses a technique of comparative analysis in order to come to some conclusion about Mannerism and Modern Architecture.

The parallels seen between Modernism and Mannerism are only valid if Architecture is seen as contrivance and a series of devices.

For example, the presence of elements of a different scale in immediate juxtaposition in Modern and Mannerist architecture lead to the conclusion that both architectural movements, Mannerism and Modern, had a commonality.

Mannerism suffered from drawing our attention to individual elements; an absence of a holistic approach.

This focusing on individual elements is a result of self-centred and cosmos-ignored manner of looking. Only if the individual sees meaning can such a focus on elements and devices be acceptable.

Colin Rowe and the importance he places on Mannerism throughout the essay suggests that he sees meaning as existing solely within the individual.

Mannerist architecture as well as Post-modern architecture sees a problem with function and reacts by employing contradictory devices; columns that do not support, stairs that are impossible to climb.

Function understood in a meaningful way is not seen as a device, nor a contrivance. Function cannot be understood as a purpose arbitrarily applied. Function cannot be divorced from the object as a whole. Outward appearances should resemble inner purposes, and function cannot be divorced from aesthetics.

Review - The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa: Colin Rowe

The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa

Through a comparative analysis of Palladio’s Villa Malcontenta and Le Corbusier’s Villa Garches, Colin Rowe presented in 1976 an interpretation that attempted to shift meaning from its traditional place within geometry and structure to a now popularly accepted place of allusion and signification.

Both architects, Le Corbusier and Palladio, look to structure as a justification for their dispositions, but Rowe sees the justifications as excessive and attributes the justifications to “personal exigencies of high style”.

Colin’s characterization of exigencies is indicative of an underlying cultural division between self and cosmos. His interpretation of Palladio is inadequate because no such division existed for Palladio. Even if we allow Colin’s interpretation to remain, it brings us no closer to understanding Architecture.

If Colin Rowe were asked the question: Are things beautiful because they give pleasure, or give pleasure because they are beautiful?, he would certainly answer things are beautiful because they give pleasure. The reference to beauty at the beginning of his essay is merely that, a reference. He has no interest in beauty itself, but his position is decidedly self-centred instead of cosmos-centred, or even some mixture of the two.

The essay in question does not see the inevitability of form and presents it as “personal exigencies”. The mathematics of the ideal villa attempts to undermine Modern architecture in general through acknowledging that Palladio and Le Corbusier both use structure and the placement of structure as justifying their very different villas. This criticism is inadequate in that it does not present a full picture of either Villa Malcontenta or Villa Garches.

For Palladio at least, man was oriented within a cosmos whose source was located transcendentally. Although as a humanist Palladio emphasised the autonomy of self and cosmos, he never undermined the balance of the whole. Man took an increased role in beauty and meaning, but he was not alone in creating them.

Colin Rowe presents instead a comparative analysis where geometry and structure are reduced to references. His analysis of structure at once criticizes its use by both architects, and provides an erroneous reason that both villas are known only through references and context. “That is, one is able to seize hold of all these references as something known;…”

Palladio’s villas are to be known in a manner very different from Colin Rowe’s manner of thinking. Indeed, Rudolf Wittkower explored Palladio’s villas and the central tenet of his work is this: “Man is in the church no longer pressing forward to reach a transcendental goal but enjoying the beauty that surrounds him and the glorious sensation of being the centre of this beauty”, and that architects created the central plan for churches “to eternalize the present”.

In order to understand Palladio’s work, one must enjoy the beauty of the villas. To do so implies re-orienting the self with relation to the cosmos, and acknowledge that beauty has a metaphysical worth, an unchanging objectivity, and an extension which is universal. Hence, through beauty it is possible to eternalize the present. This appreciation of beauty is not possible within a strictly anthropocentric manner of thinking which Colin Rowe has attempted to use.

Architecture throughout history has been grounded in meaning, beauty, ineffability, and divinity. If we wish to understand Palladio’s Villas, for example, it is impossible to do so without such transcendentals. To approach an understanding of such transcendentals places the task beyond the realm of ideas or subjective allusions or references, and instead calls for a direct unmediated consciousness.

If we define mysticism as either a religious tendency and desire of the human soul towards an intimate union with the divinity, or a system growing out of such a tendency and desire, then understanding architecture is coextensive with understanding mysticism.