Travels in the History of Architecture PDF
Preview Travels in the History of Architecture
Tr avels in the History of Architect ur e ROBERT HARBISON travels in the history of architecture by the same author Eccentric Spaces Deliberate Regression Pharaoh’s Dream The Italian Garden The Built, the Unbuilt and the Unbuildable The Shell Guide to English Parish Churches Thirteen Ways Reflections on Baroque Tr avels in the History of Architecture ROBERT HARBISON reaktion books For Kelly and Livia Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33 Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2009 Copyright © Robert Harbison 2009 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Harbison, Robert Travels in the history of architecture 1. Architecture –History I. Title 720.9 isbn: 978 1 86189 435 9 Contents Preface 7 1 Egyptian 13 2 Greek 34 3 Roman 59 4 Byzantine 80 5 Romanesque 95 6 Gothic 112 7 Renaissance 135 8 Mannerism 159 9 Baroque 173 10 Historicism 199 11 Modernism I: Functionalism 217 12 Modernism II: Expressionism, Constructivism and Deconstruction 236 Afterword 264 Further Reading 269 Acknowledgements 277 Photo Acknowledgements 279 Index 281 Preface At times I have wanted to write a history with none of the expected examples in it, containing in fact nothing recognizable at all, but feared this might lead to something like a garden I remember from childhood, whose maker allowed into it only plants that everyone else regarded as weeds. This would bear the true mark of the autodidact (a title I have little right to, but claim anyway) or the outsider who aspires to overturn every single convention, just for the sake of the commotion it makes. Like many others I have felt the excitement of Derrida’s destabilizing attacks on basic intellectual certainties, but soon realized that I couldn’t live day in and day out in the world he conjures up, and was then shocked to find this risky heresy catching on and becoming an orthodoxy. There’s an earlier destabilizing mode that won my allegiance the minute I heard of it: New Criticism. I won’t try to give its history but just to sketch its consequences for someone trying to write one. Essentially New Criticism denied that history was important. In fact, this movement regarded history or ‘background’ of any kind as pure obstruction that got between the observer and the thing itself. ‘The thing itself’ was a poem to begin with, and New Criticism offered a new way of encountering poetry. You had to forget everything you knew or had heard about the work in question. To help you in this exercise the poem’s title and the name of the author were often left off so that you had just the words themselves, which you regarded as something like inarticulate pebbles that rattled together in an order that didn’t yet have a name. Of course this deliberate strangening was an artificial procedure, but based on the valid idea that it is the poem (or painting or building) that matters, so that you should make the most direct contact with it that you can, first as a physical object appealing to the senses, and only later as an intellectual construct that depends on cultural conventions and takes its place in a long line of such things. The method was presented as stringent 8 and rigorous, with a hint of the controlled scientific experiment, but as interpreted by me it was highly romantic, based on the notion of the innocent eye and the fresh vision of the child in oneself. So the believer in this method is particularly unfit to write a history, aspiring, as he does, to see ‘a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower’. In this mode of vision all times are simultaneous, and all works of art have their homes in the mind, not in everyday places or spaces. Yet perhaps one can imagine a kind of history that never loses hold of the sensuous presence of objects, but combines them in a connected sequence that makes sense of historical change. To do this without loss of immediacy maybe you need to believe in the iconic value of some forms and not others, that is, in a kind of canon. Perhaps I simply hope to rewrite the canon, not to topple it, perhaps only (some of the time at least) to give new reasons for the inclusion of the same old monuments. Of course, a reader will want to know how this retelling of the history of Western architecture differs from all those that have preceded it. First of all it is noticeably compact. I’ve made no attempt to be comprehensive and have tried to avoid including sets of examples that all show the same thing or nearly the same thing just because they occur in different places. History here is not a flood of names and dates. True to the mystique of the primacy of the object, the book should leave a reader with a vivid sense of particular buildings and places. Hence the idea of ‘travels’, which start in the experience of being there and keep the sense of distances crossed on the ground, even in their most intense brushes with theory. A contrary impulse also appears, congruent with the impatience that pares the list of cases down to the absolutely essential – a search for non- architectural artefacts that embody the essence of a period more starkly than any building can. It sometimes seems that the author thinks he can compose the poem of Egypt or the Romanesque, that would consist of images of iconic force that preside like Wagnerian leitmotifs over whole tracts of the subject, so the animal-headed god or the carpet page of a manuscript could express instantaneously the same perspective on real- ity that would require much digging to excavate from architecture. Some such belief in the revelatory potential of certain specific cultural forms goes part way to explain the intermittently oblique angle of approach in this book. Non-architectural material like Egyptian hieroglyphics and Renaissance allegories are used as shortcuts to get at the core of a style more quickly, and sometimes as a demonstration that architecture is part of something larger, sweeping it up into longer vistas. Part of what makes architecture special and more physically liberat- ing than other art forms is the fact that one actually visits it and wanders in it, coming round corners to meet surprises that might not have hap- pened in just that order if you had turned another way – or might never
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