It's back to architecture for a little while, and the next series of posts will all be on the same overarching theme -- coziness. It will start from the small scale and work up progressively toward an entire city plan.
We'll be visited yet again by some of our favorite recurring characters here -- America and Japan exhibiting the cultural traits of the Dark Ages in Eurasia, re-examining the Dark Ages in Eurasia itself with a mind toward how they cycle with Humanist / Enlightenment cultures over the course of a 2000-year cycle, the place of architecture in American ethnogenesis (and how we invented so-called Modernism), specifically Frank Lloyd Wright pioneering just about every family of building style that makes us us (and most of it coming from ground zero of American ethnogenesis -- Chicago), the utter cluelessness of most architectural and other critics when they try to figure out American culture, and so on and so forth.
Along the way we'll explore an aspect of architecture that has received shockingly little critical attention, including in books that are devoted to formal spatial / geometric analysis. E.g., The Dynamics of Architectural Form by Rudolf Arnheim (1977), a formal critical book that I happen to have a handy copy of -- but I figure there's little discussion elsewhere, or else he would've included it in his citations and footnotes.
And that aspect is... CONCAVITY, as opposed to the far more common convexity. There is a very tiny amount about this aspect regarding interior spaces or individual elements like a column or vault, but we'll be taking a far larger view of the entire building and its grounds, and of entire neighborhood and city plans.
Everyone just assumes that when you talk about "shapes" of buildings, they have to have a convex perimeter -- where every vertex of an angle joining two walls, is pushed outward from inside the building. For example, a rectangle or pentagon or hexagon or octagon or in the limit a circle / ellipse.
We're going to see just how concave you can make a building's exterior -- where some of those corners between two walls have been pulled inward toward the center of the building. For example, a U shape, a "spokes stemming from a hub" shape, etc.
But we can't cover that topic until we start with a smaller scale, and examine how cozy Americans prefer their buildings to be, how Dark Age and defensive and fortress-like we like them, how we assume the central state is weak and nomads / bandits / feuding factions are unchecked, etc. Only then will it make sense why America pioneered concave building shapes, and how early we invented them.
And then the usual corollary -- that the Euros were at least a generation behind us (sometimes longer), copying us, and just slapping a different Bauhaus-y branding on top of our popular styles that almost always trace back to Frank Lloyd Wright.
It cannot be otherwise -- he was born in 1867 and was churning out pioneering works in the 1890s. Walter Gropius, the earliest Euro modernist, was born in 1883, and was not churning out his distinctive works until the 1920s -- a full generation delayed from the grandfather of American -- and therefore Modern -- architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright himself.
But we will give the Euros their due -- their Dark Age due, that is. And the Saharo-Arabians of the Dark Ages as well. I haven't looked too far into East Asian examples, other than to confirm that Japan is on a different timeline and is currently Dark Age like we are.
If you're sick and tired of cathedrals and chateaus, and want to see CASTLES for a change...
If you'll just puke seeing another grid layout for a city's streets, and want to see eccentric arterial meanderings and cul-de-sacs everywhere...
If you'd rather not set foot in the city to begin with, but retreat to pastoral hamlets...
We're going to see just how fucking awesome Eurasia used to be -- during the Dark Ages.
Mainly, though, the focus will be on American ethnogenesis, and the model is one of convergent evolution -- similar environments selecting for similar adaptations, not like we consciously revived the Dark Age castle complex in America. They just turned out similarly due to America having a weak central state, just like Eurasian societies did back then.
I'll put together the first post as soon as I can, but in the meantime, let this programming note cleanse your brain of whatever dIsCouRsE-sludge has been flung against it lately, and get it re-acquainted with some of the major recurring themes here, before we take off on the journey. ^_^
Why don't I share the list of books I'm consulting, aside from rummaging through online sources. I scored all of them VERY cheap in thrift stores or used bookstores, they're by no means rare or expensive, and any one would be a great start if you're curious about architecture.
ReplyDeleteJust for the picture quality alone! Or the line drawing quality. Nothing on the internet is as good as the professionally shot and printed photographs from the good ol' days.
You're lucky if one of their descendants took a nice picture and uploaded it to Flickr in 2008. Otherwise you'll get the same exact image, repeated a zillion times, from an image search. And they won't have multiple views, good lighting, composition, or anything like that. The only good images on the internet are digitally preserved scans / copies of a photograph that someone shot and printed several decades ago.
* * *
The Dynamics of Architectural Form, by Rudolf Arnheim
Dimensions: Space, Shape & Scale in Architecture, by Charles Moore and Gerald Allen
Encyclopedia of American Architecture, by William Dudley Hunt (1980 edition, chock full of Midcentury Modern and Brutalist examples to illustrate everything)
American Architecture since 1780: A Guide to the Styles, by Marcus Whiffen
Buildings for Commerce and Industry, by Charles King Hoyt
Frank Lloyd Wright: The Masterworks, by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer
Romanza: The California Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, by David Gebhard
Landmarks of Los Angeles, by Patrick McGrew
Columbus, Indiana: A Look at Architecture, by Columbus Area Visitors Center (1984 edition)
Castles, by Charles W.C. Oman
Romanesque Art in Italy, by Hans Decker
It is worth noting that the kind of medieval castle that we contemporaries are familiar with in terms of image first became widespread with the disintegration of the Carolingian Empire:
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle
Convexity vs. concavity comes up also in the grid vs. arterial layout! Grids being convex (exposed, isolating), arterials being concave (cozy, bonding).
ReplyDeleteAnd "transit" layouts also apply on the smallest scale, within a room like a classroom!
This is why I procrastinate on some of these topics, cuz they keep turning up more and more connections and insights... but at a certain point, they'll have to be addenda that go in the comment thread, and the foundation has to be laid in a standalone post.
The first facet I'll look at doesn't involve convexity vs. concavity very much, more like the scale of spaces, but it'll touch on geometric complexity as well.
It's not so much about the collapse of the Frankish Empire, but the rise of nomadic empires that were getting a foothold in Europe, or nomadic raiders who fell short of an empire but were still a harassing presence. That coincided more or less with the stagnant and collapsing stage of the Frankish Empire.
ReplyDeleteNamely the Vikings (empire), Moors (empire), and Magyars (regular raiders). They were not Christian, they were nomadic, and two of them (Moors and Magyars) were foreigners who didn't speak an Indo-Euro language. So they were meta-ethnic nemeses within Europe.
The castle-building empires were spawned in reaction to these (seemingly) permanent nomadic mega-armies / empires. The Franks didn't build castles cuz they arose in reaction to the Roman Empire, a sedentary civilization.
Why didn't the Byzantine Empire build castles, since they were spawned by the frontier with various nomadic groups like the Alans, Huns, early Goths, etc.? Perhaps due to these groups being here today, gone tomorrow kind of nomads -- coming in waves every several generations, but not being a regular raiding group, or setting up their own nomadic empire nearby.
There needed to be imperial-level asabiya to build castles cuz they're very expensive and long-term oriented, meaning the nobles / elites must be willing to sacrifice a decent amount of their wealth in order to build something that will last for centuries, redounding to the benefit of the community / society at large, not just their own narrow bloodlines, not just for the next couple generations.
At first they were made of earth and timber -- not so expensive, not very long-lasting. But better than nothing. Soon they were made from stone, more expensive and long-lasting.
I reject the view that they arose *primarily* due to internal feuding among noble factions -- they had plenty of that in the Frankish Empire, like their integrative civil war involving rival factions led by queens Brunhild and Fredegund. Or jockeying for position between the various components of the empire, like Austrasia vs. Neustria.
Yet the Franks were not extensive castle-builders (either the earth-and-timber type or the stone type). They had tons of wealth, they were highly cohesive -- but they didn't arise in response to nomadic nemeses.
If anything, they were more nomadic than their nemesis -- starting out as part of the Germanic volkerwanderung, reacting against the sedentary civilized Roman Empire. Likewise, the Vikings were not castle-builders -- they were nomads themselves, arising in response to the (by that time) sedentary civilized Frankish Empire.
It remained for the French, British, and Spanish empires to become castle-builders (at home and abroad, e.g. in Italy and Sicily).