For those who may be interested, I am posting an excerpt of my writing in process on the social roots of architecture.
In the history of human construction, unlike animal or insect construction such as bird nests, bee hives, ant hills and beaver dams, technological ingenuity in construction is generally the result of dictates of culturally-based esthetic preference rather than pure functional requirements. This is what makes architecture an art. And art is uniquely a human creation. No other species creates art besides humans. Yet the concept of art presupposes the undesirability of the ordinary and mundane. In Bali, there is a saying: "We have no art; we do everything well." The elitist problem in art is fundamental in all human endeavors. Wright's ideas were formed at a time of symbiotic harmony between socialist and fascist ideals, nutured by American individualism and New World optimism. (Wright's contemporaries: Le Corbusier and Picasso were Communist party members). Wright's rejection of mercantilism of European styles so prevalent in his early career was motivated by his disdain for their social content. Wright's rejection of the modern commercial office building was religious. This rejection of destable social symbolism is new. The dome, pride of Roman engineering and potent expression of imperial grandeur, had been viewed by early Christians as detestably pagan and a symbol of tyranny. Early Christian preference for basilicas in central Italy of triangular roof trusses had been rooted in a popular distaste against established Roman architectural motifs. Roman esthetics was rejected because early Christian worshippers considered it theologically heathen and socially oppressive. Early Christian church-goers preferred, as a gathering place of communal worship, the more neutral form of a Roman basilica, which was a hall of justice, with its flat ceiling, to the domical symbolism of Roman imperial power and oppression. It was only after Constantine (280-337) founded Constantinople in 330 as his capital in the former Greek colony of Byzantium, putting Christianity under imperial control (caesaropapism) in 323, and the adaptation of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire under Theodosius (374-395), that domical churches became acceptable to Christians, first in the east and only gradually in the west. Later, Charlemagne (742-814) and his successors would undertake to promote the Holy Roman Empire, reviving the concrete Roman domical form in masonry as a prototype motif for Romanesque Christian churches, symbolic of a propitious union of religious piety and imperial power. During the Renaissance, emerging from centuries of Gothic verticality based on a longitudinal Latin cross plan, the fascination with rediscovered antiquity would bring back domical designs which would best fit over plans of a Greek cross motif, with equal lengths in all its four arms. The Greek-cross plan for churches would conflict, however, with the traditional requirement for long processional naves in Roman Catholic ecclesiastical liturgy, to which the Latin-cross plan, with its long vertical stem, would be more naturally disposed, as in modified Basilica churches. Renaissance architects, in proposing designs for new church buildings, would struggle to simultaneously satisfy the conflicting aims between their esthetic fixation on the innate beauty of the dome and the functional requirements of Church liturgy. This tortuous endeavor would never achieve total success, despite considerable concentration of inventive genius in an artistically rich epoch, fueled by ample opportunities for experiment through abundant church commissions by the secular popes and later by the counter-reformation.. The design of the greatest cathedral of Christendom: St Peter's in Rome, would be a classic example of this conflict between form and function in Renaissance architecture. The esthetic power of the Pantheon, well-preserved domical Roman structure in Rome, first built in 27 B.C. by Agrippa (63-12 B.C.) to honor all gods in Roman pantheism, rebuilt around early second century by Hadrian (r. 117-138), would dominate the thinking of Renaissance architects fourteen centuries later. St Peter's would be commissioned in 1505 by Pope Julius II (pope 1503-1513) as a tomb for himself, at the height of the Church's secular power. The construction of St Peter's would require so much of the Church's resources that its financing would bring about indiscriminate selling of indulgence, the pardon of temporary punishment due for sin, by a friar named Tezel travelling through Germany. This abusive practice would provide Martin Luther (1483-1546) with the convenient evidence of the mother church's decadence. Luther would exploit the decadence of the Church as a rallying cry for overthrowing an institution the religious dogmas of which he had came to question. Like all revolutionaries, Luther would equate the evil of the disease with the sin of the patient. St Peter's would finally be built based on a Greek cross plan from a design by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1474-1564), derived from an earlier concept by Donato Bramante (1444-1514). Bramante's plan for St Peter's harks back to his diminutive Tempietto in St Pietro in Montorio, Rome, completed in 1510, which would be destined to become a giant of an architectural gem inspired by a small circular domical Roman temple. The peerless beauty of Bramante's Tempietto would be crowned by a dome of only fifteen feet in diameter, as compared to Michaelangelo's 137-foot-diametered dome for St Peter's basilica. After Bramante's death, his design for St Peter's would be altered to a Latin-cross plan by the sociable and accommodating Raphael Sanzio (1484-1520), a better painter than an architect. Unfortunately for him, but fortunately for architecture, Raphael would die in 1520, before much damage could be done to Bramante's original plan, which ironically would be protected by the heavy investment already sunk into foundation work prior to Bramante's death. Michelangelo's bold design would consolidate Bramante's original concept of interlocking snowflake-like crosses into a forceful central Greek cross plan defined by four massive mannerist columns superimposed on sub-motifs of smaller crosses, topped by a magnificent dome one hundred and thirty-seven feet in diameter that, when completed in 1626, one and a quarter centuries after it's commencement, would rank as one of the greatest achievement in Renaissance architecture. But in 1612, Carlo Maderna (1556-1629), known to posterity as the architect who would ruin Michelangelo's great design, succumbing to clerical pressure to satisfy liturgical needs, would make the mistake of lengthening the nave and adding the gigantic and poorly scaled front facade. This architectural sin would obscure the perspective view of Michelangelo's superb dome from the front plaza fourteen years before the dome's completion, and in the process making the greatest church in Christendom look like a mundane and oversized three-story building with a dull facade of prosaic design. The view to Michelangelo's magnificent dome would be salvaged only by the grand baroque piazza of Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini (1589-1680), enclosed by a famous colonnade of 284 Tuscan columns which would inspire English poet Robert Browning (1812-1889) to write two centuries later; "With arms wide open to embrace
The entry of the human race."
In architecture, engineering skills evolve tortuously from the reservoir of technology in order to deliver the preferred shapes idealized by man's abstract vision. Gothic construction, most identifiable in popular culture by the flying buttress, is the technological response to the medieval aspiration towards light and height being transformed into ecclesiastical architecture. It is the most unnatural manner of stone construction, a willful defiance of both the natural characteristic of stone and the immutable law of gravity, in the name of spiritual piety. French Gothic masons, in their religious zeal, would carry stone construction beyond its natural limits. Their superhuman efforts would culminate in Beauvais Cathedral, constructed between 1225 and 1568, a period of over three centuries during which, after repeated collapses, the builders would push the top of its vault to an extreme height of 157.5 feet, about three and a half times its span in width, to make it the loftiest Gothic stone church anywhere and one of the wonders of the Medieval world. English art critic and social commentator John Ruskin (1819-1900) would write with awe in The Seven Lamps of Architecture: "There are few rocks, even among the Alps, that have a clear vertical fall as high as the choir of Beauvais." God forbid. The same is true of Chinese roof bracket systems of "dougong" and "buzuo", designed to do with wood construction that which it is not naturally predisposed to do, in order to satisfy a preconceived form in the shape of a volumetric and massive roof floating airily above supporting columns. It is a fascination with cultural delight in the simultaneous embodiment of otherwise mutually-exclusive contradiction between massiveness and weightlessness.
Chinese architecture seeks to project the timeless stability of a Confucian society. Greek architecture seeks to express the balanced order of Athenian democracy. Roman architecture glorifies the majesty of imperial power. Romanesque architecture evolves as a focal point of communal agricultural organization based on a spiritual humility commonly cherished by early Christians and a need for fortified compounds against barbarian invasion in a fallen empire. Gothic architecture derives inspiration from the pious vision of a medieval urban society and the collective civic pride of competing towns. The Renaissance produces an architecture of humanism that lends dignity to capitalistic individualism. The Stuart Architecture of late English Renaissance, particularly during the reign of Charles II (1660-1685), patron of Christopher Wren (1631-1723), with its heavy emphasis on Church building, echoes the triumph in England of Presbyterianism and Restoration politics. Wren, trained as an astronomer-mathematician at Oxford, with only 6 months of architectural training upon visiting Paris late in youth in 1665, during the expansion of the Palais du Louvre, would keep company with Bernini and Mansard, celebrated architects of his time. Never having visited Italy, Wren would become spellbound by French ideas, in divergence from Indigo Jones (1573-1654), the Italian-influenced English architect of Stuart Architecture who would introduce to England the much copied Palladian motif, a composition consisting of an arch and support columns within a super order of giant columns supporting an entablature. Andrea Palladio (1508-1580), drawing on the written work of Vitruvius, would publish his influential I quattro libri dell'architectura in 1570, translated into English as The Four Books of Architecture in 1716. After the great fire of 1666, Wren would prepare within a few days a great plan for the reconstruction of London which would never be executed. Aside from the celebrated St Paul's cathedral, reflecting the rise of Protestantism, Wren would execute 52 other Protestant churches in London between 1670 and 1711, at the rate of almost one per year, most of which would still stand in modern time. While Stuart architecture would herald the advent of Protestantism in England, the Baroque would be the awe-inspiring instrument of the Counter-reformation, sponsored by the Jesuits, defenders of the True Faith. It would spread quickly to all Roman Catholic countries. Louis XIV would later co-opt the propaganda effectiveness of the Baroque and the stately legitimacy of Classicism to enshrine the stature of absolute monarchy. Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1735-1806), the leading architect of France immediately prior to the French Revolution, esthetic interest in whose style of rhetorical severity would be revived among Post Modern Rationalist in the 1980's, would find himself imprisoned by the revolutionaries after 1789 for his role in designing monuments and instruments of socio-economic-political oppression, such as the monopolistic saltworks at Arc-et-Senans, a prison at Aix, and the ring of 50 barriŠres custom toll houses around Paris. These barriŠres, so admiresd by academic critics, would be so hated by the public as symbols of the oppressive ancient regime that most of them would be torn down during popular uprising during the Revolution. In reaction, the ascetic simplicity of Neoclassicism would become the embodiment of the purist ideals of revolutionary France. Napoleon, builder of empire rather than buildings, would impose his Roman-inspired imperial style on the decor of the French Renaissance, remodelling the palatial rooms of the Chateau Fontainebleau with motifs of military tents from the battlefield. He would select the bee as symbol for his imperial insignia, signifying his admiration for bee-like characteristics of hard work, loyalty, fierceness toward enemy and efficient organization, so evident in its instictive ecological roles as gatherer of honey and facilitator of botanical fertilization. The Napoleonic age would produce the Empire style of richly adorned neoclassic silhouette, created by architects Percier and Fountaine, which would later be adopted by the German bourgeoisie into a style known as Biedermeier. Napoleon's nephew, Napoleon III, the bourgeois Emperor who would achieve power with speeches on the glory of his uncle's military exploits while his celebrated uncle did it with live battles; who would monger fear of social radicalism while his uncle promised the vision of a new world order; would resurrect the baroque style and infest it with the cultural obesity of vulgarity and ostentatious exhibitionism of the Second Empire. Napoleon III's style would be imitated by every subsequent pint-size dictator until the socially-conscious, moralist Modern Movement would emerge after the collapse of the obsolete European dynastic orders brought about by the First World War. Modern architecture would rise from the hopes of social democratic ideals stemming from the collapse, in the aftermaths of the First World War, of the European monarchies and their attendant social and esthetic values as constituted in the system of court-sponsored academies. While the cultured public would welcome the new artistic phylosophy, the official suppression of the Modern Movement by both Nazi Germany and the post-Lenin Soviet Union would force its migration to the United States where it would be co-opted into the service of corporate capitalism, after being sanitized of most of its social-democratic program. Post Modernism, with its naive fascination with traditional motifs devoid of social content, would be a resultant stylistic development from boredom with a Modern esthetic stripped of its radical social root. It would reflect the distorted values of the self-indulging yuppie generation and the greed-worshipping environment of deregulated capitalism of the decades since the Vietnam War. Traditional Chinese architecture seeks to express the ideals of feudal social stability and the eternal validity of Confucian values. Stifled by the Confucian aversion for change, the basic form of Chinese architecture would not evolve beyond its classical period in the Tang dynasty, further development from then on being limited to stylistic ornamentations and decorations. The same rigid, conservative ideas that have contribute to the unyielding preservation of Chinese culture for over 4,000 years would serve also to choke off its continued development. Indiscriminate, blanket preservation of the past leads inevitably to cultural embalmment which, while effective in preventing decay in the dead, is unfortunately lethal to the living. Perhaps the Daoists who are concerned with the concept of constant change while accepting the notion of changing constancy, know what they are talking about after all. Palaces, temples and tombs are the 3 most important classes of buildings in ancient cultures. This is true for the ancient Chinese, the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians and the Greeks. The Romans were probably the first people to build important buildings for public and private pleasure, in the form of baths, arenas, race courses and villas. Religious and political buildings have occupied center stage for most of human history. Not until the rise of modern capitalism would buildings designed for profit become important architecturally. The Greeks invented the concept of Orders of Architecture. An order of architecture is a design assemblage consisting of a pedestal consisting of a base, a die and a cap; an upright column in the form of a shaft sitting on a base and topped by a capital; and an horizontal entablature, divided into architrave, frieze and cornice at top. The entablature in a traditional Greek building fits horizontally below the triangular pediment that disguises the conventional wood-trussed roof behind. Each architectural order is governed by its own rules of proportion and commands its own associated moulding and ornamentation. It is a formal vocabulary of architecture as well as a standard for manufacturing of ornamental building parts. Its proper application provides the grammar of good design in the classical style. The Greek architectural orders were originally expressions of civic pride among the city states of Greece, with each city state preferring its own. The application of architectural orders to building in the Greek colonies implied political allegiance to the city of its origin. As time passed, the orders were used for purely aesthetical purposes. To the Greek orders of Doric, Ionic and Corinthian, the Romans added Tuscan and Composite. Egyptians and Mesopotamians used columns with capitals, some motifs of which influenced Greeks capital deigns, but they did not develop any formal Orders of Architecture. Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879), the French architect and restorer of historical buildings, would assert that the Greek Orders of Architecture are not derivations in stone of earlier timber construction, as postulated by some academicians. He would claim instead that they are designs whose sense of stability and permanence rest in the inherent characteristic of stone as a building material. The Greeks Architectural Orders is composed of the pedestal and the column on which rests the entablature, to be applied in conjunction with the two-dimensional triangular pediment on the main facade, masking the wood roof trusses behind. In contrast, traditional Chinese architecture develops an Architectural Order that is composed of the column, the entablature beam, and the 3-dimensional roof form with its support system of roof brackets, known as dougong and bracket clusters, known as buzuo. As they evolve with sophistication, the "dougong" and "buzo" become the most significant elements of the composition, the equivalent of the flying buttress in Gothic architecture. Reflecting its democratic tradition rooted in sanctity of individualism, Greek buildings were designed by individuals whose names were recorded. The Parthenon (Doric c. 447-432 B.C.) was designed by architects Ictinus and Callicrates with Pheidias as master sculptor. The Temple of Zeus Olympius at Agrigentum (Doric, c. 470 B.C.) was designed by Theron. The Temple of Zeus at Olympia (Doric, c. 460 B.C.) was designed by Libon. The Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae, near Phigaleia in Arcadia (Doric, c. 450 B.C.) was designed by Ictinus. The Temple of Nike Apteros at Athens (Ionic, c. 450 B.C.) was designed by Callicrates. The Erechtheion (Ionic, c. 420-393 B.C.) on the Acropolis in Athens, with an eastern hexastyle (5 bays) portico, a northern tetrastyle (3 bays) portico and a southern Caryatid portico, was designed by Mnesicle. Caryatids, columns in the form of a female figure, a motif of questionable taste and despicable political symbolism, were traditionally taken to represent the brave women of Caria, whose citizens sided with the Persians against the Greeks in the Persian Wars (500-449 B.C.), and were made slaves after their capture by the Greeks. The women of Caria were so highly prized by their Greek captors for their physical beauty and noble character, and they afforded their masters such great social prestige in the slave-owning democracy of Athenian Greece that statues of them in stone were incorporated into Greek monumental buildings. The Caryatid motif would be widely revived during the Renaissance, and subsequently by the eclectic academic styles of the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly during the Classical Revival period. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (356 B.C.), known also as the Hellenistic temple, was designed by Deinocrates with Scopas as master sculptor in the time of Alexander the Great. It stood on the site of 2 or more previous temples including the so-called Archaic Temple designed by Cheriphron (550 B.C.) which had been destroyed by fire (400 B.C.), and rebuilt by architects Paeonius and Demetrius of Ephesus. The Temple of Artemis, one of the 7 Wonders of the World, was the center of the Pan-Ionic festival of the Asian colonies in honor of Artemis, as the Parthenon was of the Panathenaea festival in the motherland in honor of Athena. Artemis, daughter of Zeus and Leto and twin sister of Apollo, was an Olympian goddess of wildlife and a virgin huntress. She was a patroness of hunters. Artemis valued her chastity highly and was guarded by nymphs whose virginity she guarded as jealously as her own. Athena, on the other hand, was goddess of war, the female counterpart of Ares. She is however also a goddess of peace and like Mierva, with Whom the Romans identified with her, Athena is a patron of the arts. She was said to have been born out of Zues' skull, fully armed, when Hephaestus, son of Zeus by Zeus' sister Hera, split Zeus' skull after Zeus swallowed the pregnant Metis alive upon learning that the son Metis bore from his seductive rape would be destined to overthrow him. Although, unlike the Parthenon which would still stand in modern time, none of the superstructure of the great Temple of Artemis survived, visual reconstruction in detail was possible through the description of Pliny the Younger (62-113), the Roman statesman whose letters have become for posterity mirrors of Roman life, of good taste and of well-written Latin. The Temple of Artemis played a part in one of the last dramas of the pagan world in its stand against Christianity as preached by St.Paul at Ephesus (Acts xix). In the Ephesians, epistle in the New Testiment of the Bible, the temple is associated with the famous cry of a lost cause: "Great is Diana of the Ephesians!" Diana is the Roman name for the Greek Artemis. Some of its grand architectural parts were transferred to other buildings, notably the eight dark-green marble columns which now separate the nave from aisles in St Sophia, Constantinople. The Temple of Apollo Didymaeus at Miletus (c. 335-320 B.C.) was designed by Paeonius of Ephesus and Daphne of Miletus. The Corinthian order was designed by Callimachus, a worker in Corinthian bronze. The Olympieion at Athens (c. 174 B.C.) was begun by Antiochus Epiphanes of Syria, from designs by Cossutius, a Roman architect so it is often regarded as a Roman building. It was never completed. Pliny the Younger recorded that, in B.C. 80, Sulla transported some of its columns to Rome for use in the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. Roman buildings, like those of the Chinese, were almost always designed by anonymous architects because the patrons who commissioned them were considered by society as being more important than the architects who were frequently captured slaves. Of all the great buildings erected by the Romans only Apollodorus of Damascus was mentioned as architect for Hadrian for the Temple of Venus in Rome (123-135) and for Trajan's Basilica (98-112). The Arch of Constantine, the Baths of Caracalla (211-217), Agrippa (20 B.C.), Trajan, Titus (80) and Diocletian (320) and Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli (124), all had anonymous architects, as did the Coliseum (72) built by Vespasian and the Pantheon (27 B.C.) built by Agrippa, a great town-planner, close friend and son-in-law of Augustus whose daughter, Julia, was Agrripa's 3rd wife. Aggrippa's naval operations were instrumental for Octavia's decisive victory over Mark Antony ar Actium in 31 B.C. The architects of record for St Sophia in Constantinople built for Justinian who was heavily influenced by Greek culture, were Anthemius of Tralles and Isodore of Miletus, architects of Greek origin. St Sophia was the greatest building in Byzantium, an empire that successfully combined Roman political tradition, Greek culture and Christian beliefs. Vitruvius (Markus Vitruvius Pollio) of late 1st Century B.C. and early 1st Century A.D., the Roman architect and engineer for Augustus, was known not by buildings he designed but by his writings, a 10-volume De architectura, a treatise on city planning, building materials, temples and Greek orders of architecture, public and private buildings, interior decorations, waterworks, chronometer instruments, construction and military machines. Chinese architects, like their Roman counterparts, are mostly unhonored by their society and unnamed in history, the exception being Yan Li'ben, who would occupy a place in history more for the government posts he had held than for the buildings he had designed.
Henry C.K. Liu
I apologise for the length. But if you reach this point, you must have found the above somewhat interesting.
>