Contemporary
Architecture
Phases
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Neo-classicism - Boullee & Ledoux
Industrial Revolution
Arts & Crafts Movement – Gaudi, Horta, F.L.Wright
Futuristic Movement – Sant’ Elia
Expressionism – Mendelsohn, Taut
Constructivism
BAUHAUS – Gropius & Behrens
Modernism – CIAM, Le Corbusier, Mies, Wright, Alvar Alto
The Indian context – Colonial & Indo – Saracenic – Chisholm,
P.W.D., Lutyens’ New Delhi
etienne-louis boullee
&
claude nicolas ledoux
Arts & Crafts Movement – Gaudi, Horta, F.L.Wright
Hotel Tassel
Casa Milà
Sagrada Família
Robie House
Interior of the Horta Museum
Futuristic Movement – Sant’ Elia
La Citta Nuova, 1914
Expressionism – Mendelsohn, Taut
Einstein Tower
Glass Pavilion
Constructivism
BAUHAUS – Gropius & Behrens
Wassily Chair
Modernism – CIAM, Le Corbusier, Mies,
Wright, Alvar Alto
Phases
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TEAM X
Brutalism
Influential writings of Jane Jacobs, Robert Venturi,
Christopher Alexander & Aldo Rossi
Post – Modernism - Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, Rem
Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid and others
Vernacular - Laurie Baker, Tadao Ando, Hassan Fathy, Paulo
Soleri and Geoffrey Bawa
The Indian context - Architecture after Independence –
Charles Correa, B.V.Doshi, Achyut Kanvinde and others -
Leading
to a New
Architecture
Historical Overview
Origins of Neo-classicism
Enlightenment Architects
– Boullee & Ledoux
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Historical Overview
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The Beginning – The origin of modernity
The Enlightenment – That moment in
the mid-eighteenth century
when a new view of history brought architects to question the classical
canons of Vitruvius & to document the remains of the antique world in
order to establish a more objective basis on which to work.
The necessary conditions for modern architecture appeared some time
between architect Claude Perrault’s late 17th century challenge to the universal
validity of Vitruvian proportions
&
the definitive split between engineering and architecture which is dated to
the foundation in Paris of the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees, the first
engineering school, in 1747.
Cultural
transformations
- Neo-Classical architecture
1750-1900
Origins
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Neo-classicism
seems to have emerged out of two different but related
developments which radically transformed the relationship between man
and nature.
1.
A sudden increase in man’s capacity to exercise control over nature.
Technological changes led to a new infrastructure and to the
exploitation of an increased productive capacity.
2.
A fundamental shift in the nature of human consciousness, in
response to major changes taking place in society, which gave birth to
a new cultural formation.
This shift yielded new categories of knowledge and a historicist mode
of thought which led to the emergence of humanist disciplines of the
Enlightenment – sociology, aesthetics, history and archaeology.
Search for a true style
The over-elaboration of architectural language in the Rococo interiors and
the secularization of Enlightenment thought compelled the architects of the
18th century, by now aware of the emergent and unstable nature of their
age, to search for a true style through a precise appraisal of antiquity.
Their motivation was not simply to copy the ancients but to obey the
principles on which their work had been based.
The archaeological research that arose from this impulse soon led to a
major controversy:
to which of the four Mediterranean cultures – the
Egyptians, the Etruscans, the Greeks and the Romans – should they look for
a true style?
Theoretical developments
Claude Perrault questioned the validity of the Vitruvian proportions. Instead
he elaborated his thesis of positive beauty and arbitrary beauty.
positive beauty – standardization and perfection.
arbitrary beauty – such expressive function as may be required by a
particular circumstance or character.
Abbe de Cordemoy ’s book – Nouveau Traite de toute l’architecture (1706).
He replaced the Vitruvian attributes of architecture – utilitas, firmitas and
venustas (utility, solidity and beauty) by his own trinity of ordonnance,
distribution and bienseance.
While the first two categories concerned the correct proportioning of the
classical orders and their appropriate disposition, the third introduced the
notion of fitness which warned against the inappropriate application of
Classical elements to utilitarian structures.
Theoretical developments
Jacques-Francois Blondel opened an architecture school in Rue de la Harpe
in 1743.
He became the master of the so-called ‘visionary’ generation of architects –
Etienne-Louis Boullee, Jacques Gondoin, Pierre Patte, Marie-Joseph Peyre
and probably the most visionary of all, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux.
Blondel’s “Cours d’architecture”(1750) establishes his concerns regarding
composition, type and character. He was preoccupied with appropriate
formal expression and with a differentiated physiognomy to accord with the
varying social character of different building types. The age was already
having to confront the articulation of a much more complex society.
Projects
Etienne-Louis Boullee
He devoted his life to the projection of buildings so vast as to preclude their
realization. He evoked the sublime emotions of terror and tranquility
through the grandeur of his conceptions.
Genre terrible – the immensity of the vista and the unadorned geometrical
purity of monumental form are combined in such a way as to promote
exhilaration and anxiety.
He was obsessed with the capacity of light to evoke the presence of the
divine.
This intention is evident in the sunlit haze that illuminates the interior of his
“Metropole”.
Projects
Etienne-Louis Boullee
Cenotaph for Isaac Newton, c.1785.
A similar light is portrayed in the vast masonry sphere of his projected
cenotaph, where by night a fire was suspended to represent the sun, while
by day it was extinguished to reveal the illusion of the firmament produced
by the daylight shining through the sphere’s perforated walls.
He remained obsessed with imagining the monuments of some omnipotent
state dedicated to the worship of the supreme being.
His influence in post-revolutionary Europe was considerable, primarily
through the activity of his pupil Jean-Nicholas-Louis Durand, who reduced his
extravagant ideas to a normative and economic building typology.
Projects
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux
Ideal city of Chaux, 1804.
This is one of the first essays in industrial architecture – it consciously
integrated productive units with workers’ housing.
Each element in this complex was rendered according to its character.
Thus the salt evaporation sheds on the axis were high-roofed like agricultural
buildings and finished in smooth ashlar,
while the director’s house in the centre was low-roofed and pedimented,
rusticated throughout and embellished with classical porticoes.
He extended this limited typology to include all the institutions of his ideal
city.
Plan view of the facilities
The Royal Saltworks
House of supervisors
Projects
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux
Barriere de l’Etoile, 1785.
These toll-gates were shining exemplars of the Age of Reason.
They were erected under the ancient regime as control-points for the
collection of taxes.
They were just as disconnected from the culture of their time as the
idealized institutions of Chaux.
A whole world separated Ledoux’s arbitrary but purgative reconstitution of
fragmented classical parts in these toll-gates from Durand’s rational
permutation of received classical elements.
Projects
Karl Friedrich Schinkel
Schauspielhaus
He acquired his early enthusiasm for Gothic not from Berlin or Paris, but from his
own first-hand experiences of Italian cathedrals.
The combination of political idealism and military prowess seems to have demanded
a return to the classic.
His masterpieces in Berlin include the Neue Wache(1816), Schauspielhaus(1821) and
the Altes Museum of 1830.
While the guardhouse and the theatre show characteristic features of Schinkel’s
mature style, the influence of Durand is clearly evident in the museum.
Projects
Karl Friedrich Schinkel
The Altes Museum
The Altes museum is a prototypical museum plan taken from Durand’s
Precis and split in half.
Schinkel created a spatial articulation of extraordinary delicacy and power,
as the wide peristyle gives way to a narrow portico containing a
symmetrical entry stair and its mezzanine.
Henry Labrouste
Blondel’s Neo-classicism was continued by Henry Labrouste, who had
studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
He insisted on the primacy of structure and on the derivation of all
ornament from construction.
Reading room of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève
Neo-Classical heritage
It was divided into two closely related lines of development –
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The Structural Classicism of Labrouste
The Romantic Classicism of Schinkel.
&
The Structural Classicism tended to emphasize structure – the line of
Cordemoy, Laugier & Soufflot.
The Romantic Classicism tended to stress the physiognomic character of the
form itself – the line of Ledoux, Boullee and Gilly.