Week 5: Eyes dance across surface, music enfolds, light washes from above. Worship spaces stand as tangible expressions of faith in glass and stone.
Week 6: The first millennium ends, the modern world map unfolds. We see more enlightened places and people than in previous notions of the "dark age".
Week 7: Making rules to break with gothic ideas and re-link to the ancients of the western world. Observing continuities with the past in the east.
Week 8: As western rules made and written, designers work across genre and scale to bend and break the rules. Eastern designers maintain a continuous approach.
Week 9: Colonial expansion brings ideas and people around the world. In these encounters, emulations and maintaining differences both become important.
Week 10: Architecture and design obscure significant political, social, and cultural change brought by revolution and invention throughout the world.
Building on the past to create a better future
During the fifth week of class we talked about the ideas of expressing of faith through glass and stone and architecture being frozen music. People of this time expressed their religions by building elaborate places of worship in which to house their religious practices or places that were symbolic of their faith. For example, the pyramids, the parthenon, the pantheon, the basilica of constantine and this is also still done with churches today. They also tended to build religious buildings on important religious sites such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre which marks where Jesus is buried and the Church of the Nativity marks where he was born. Santa Costanza in Rome marks where Constantine's daughter's burial site.
Evolution of the Early Churches
Then there was the concept of architecture being frozen music and how they both shaped one another. For example, in this video the although the cathedral shown is not one of the ones we reviewed in class the music being played within its hall still seems to fit with the architecture around it.
This and many other spaces the music and the architecture seem to reflect one another and fit together as one.
"I call architecture frozen music."
-Joham Wolfgang von Goethe
"Architecture is music in space, as it were, a frozen music."
-Friedrich von Schelling
In the sixth week of class we discussed the unfolding scenes of world maps. Every topic that we have studied in this class has been a cognitive map and their under lying ideas have been based on cognitive maps. These maps talk about the rules and the physical space of the buildings and the architecture.
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| Circle, Groves, and Stacks |
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| Combination of circle and cross marks very sacred space |
Everything can be a cognitive map and can be interpreted included the spaces and places within architectural buildings.
Then we moved on later in the week to talking about gothic cathedrals which are also planned out using cognitive maps such as:
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| gothic cathedral layout |
The cognitive map in the upper image is demonstrating the purpose of the layout of most gothic cathedrals including this one which is the Cologne Cathedral.
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| Cologne Cathedral |
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| Cognitive map of planning of Amiens Labyrinth |
This cognitive map is used in the planning out of the labyrinth of the Amiens Cathedral. At the very center of this labyrinth is a stone with images honoring the architects and the bishop.
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| Amiens Labyrinth |
These miraculous cathedrals were massive in size with elaborate decoration and ornamentation. These buildings were intended to show the relationship between man and God by stretching as far skyward as possible without collapse. Which unfortunately the majority of these gothic cathedrals did collapse because they did not yet have the proper means to create a building of this size and extravagance however the ones still standing today managed to be saved. With these churches they were trying to create a glass lantern which goes back to the earlier idea of expressing faith through glass and stone which is the two major materials in these cathedrals.
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| Amiens Cathedral |
During the seventh week we talked about the great western and eastern design rule book. The western world was trying to explain the world around them through use of architecture and taking broad ideas from the past and using them to make new things. Whereas in the eastern world they tend to build upon the same ideas over and over again and never really change much instead they just replace the things that do not work and stick with the things that do. Both the eastern and western worlds speak the same design language just in their own unique ways.
In the eight week of class we learned about the rules from the previous week and how designers began to go out of their way to break these rules. We also talked about how during their breaking of the rules they spared no expense in doing so through either elaborate decorations, extragerating details, they put an emphasis on materials, made elaborate front facade to strut their stuff. Also, they focused more on spreading out horizontally and controlling the landscape rather than stretching the building vertically. Some buildings of this time period followed some of the rules while breaking others to make the building stand out from the rest.
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| Baroque style |
One of these buildings known as the Villa Rotunda designed by Palladio resembled the Pantheon but instead with a porch on each of the four sides of the building which broke the rules of being on axis because the building did not have a specific sense of direction due to the four identical porches that did not specify which way to enter the space. This building influenced Monticello which we visited on our field trip earlier this week. With Monticello I think that the back of the building or the garden entrance looks more like it should be the front entrance than the main entrance itself. Another designed space that influenced Jefferson's work at the University of Virginia is the Piazzo Campidoglio designed by Michelangelo. In this space there are two buildings angled slightly towards the main building to create emphasis on the central building. Jefferson uses this in the design of the UVA lawn in front of the library to put emphasis on the large domed library as the most important building.
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| Piazzo Campidoglio |
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| University of Virginia lawn |
Throughout all of the architecture that the have studied water has been a very important element. From the aqueducts to the detailed decoration in the Baroque time period. They can all be linked back to an important aspect of water.
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| Water, water, water |
We also discussed how architecture is constantly changing and building on what previous designers have done and improving it based on the past. We used the nautilus shell to demonstrate this idea of constantly changing and expanding forms of architecture and design.
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| Nautilus shell picture with my added information and theories |
In week nine we started talking about colonial expansion and how people and ideas started to move all around the world. The ideas of needing commodity, firmness, and delight in design are still as prevalent in this time period as they were before. During this time everything was in revolution and being modern became very important. Then we covered the semiotics and language of design. The semiotics are the latent meanings in everyday life that need to be uncovered to truly understand the design.
"There exists a normally hidden set of rules, codes, and conventions through which meanings particular to specific social groups are made universal."
-Ronald Barthes
Then in the tenth and final week of this unit we talked about the idea of taking matters and turning them over on themselves and the idea of a design cycle. The design cycle would resemble that of a cartwheel, which Patrick demonstrated in class for us, because it is a continuing loop that in architecture and design that goes from revolution to revolution. In an ideal world each of these loops and periods are even to one another. However, in reality they are very different. We also again looked at the idea of object, space, building, and place which has been an important idea throughout this entire semester and not just this specific unit. Viewing architecture in this way helps us to look at the connections between all of the aspects of design. The connections of the object to the space, the space to the building, and the building to the place. All of these things are interconnected. We also covered the revolution and how ironically the rules were being followed in the "revolution" whereas they were being broken and stretched in the Baroque time period just before this one. This causes it hard to identify objects, spaces, and buildings because usually the ones that looked revolutionary actually were not. Then we finished off the unit with briefly talking about the worlds fairs but there are covered in more detail in the next unit.
So overall we are still dealing with the general overall ideas still being passed down through time. These ideas include circles, groves, and stacks; the ideas of cognitive maps that can be used to explain architecture; the importance of water; importance of commodity, firmness, and delight; connections between object, space, building, and pace; and the idea of viewing architecture and design as nautilus shell because it is constantly building on pervious ideas from previous time periods but trying to out do them at the same time. Architecture and design is ever changing and always expanding in its ideas, forms, and underlying concepts to create a spectacular history and an even more extraordinary future.
Images from Google Images
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