Category: Architecture and Building

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This image of the construction of the Tower of Babel is interesting in a number of ways. For example, the general overt busyness of the construction sight is bright and refreshing, and the designer/architect seems enormous, and holds a compass skyward as the foreman (hat in hand) approaches with some skyward concerns of his own.  The skinny wheelbarrow at right is quite fine, as are the Renaissance cranes and scaffolding.   And as new as this building is, it seems to have some age built into it, what with the small trees and shrubs growing from it at different levels, a kind of Tuscan deteriorated elegance as the building is being built. This was not an uncommon motif seen in the engravings and woodcuts and paintings recording architecture during this period, but it is unusual to see it in a building under construction. 

The print is identified as Anonymous, and a source says that it was printed around 1500, but it looks slightly newer than that to me, maybe more mid-century. 

JF Ptak Science Books  Daily Dose from Dr. Odd     

Dr. Odd presents these two fine images as part of the developing series Stuff Blocking the Horizon.  The first image is a superb photo montage by Paul Citroen (1896-1983), called Metropolis–complex, controlling, massively detailed, and beautiful. 

[Paul Citroen, Metropolis, 1923.]

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[Both of the following engravings are available for purchase via our blog store]

Over the years I’ve seen many architectural prints, and I’ve come to determine that I most enjoy the comparative views.  It is uncommon to see a single-sheet engraving dedicated to different forms of columns, as we see here in plate 93 (page 307)  of volume one of A.C. Daviler’s Cours d’Architecture qui comprend les Ordres de Vignole…published in Paris in 1710. Daviler (1653-1701),was an architect and a student of Jean-François Blondel (1683-1756) who worked very extensively on the architectural theory of Giacomo Barozzi or Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola (1507-1573). Here he identifies and classifies 20 different types of columns, just to make sure that everyone was on the same page.   

Actually, the very first engraving in the work is dedicated to a definition of terms, establishing the basis for the forms that would be discussed over the following thousand pages.  It is an excellent way to start a book, making sure that everyone has a common identification for what standard words would mean. It is a standard and veery good idea but not often illustrated. 

And the detail:

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This lovely cover belongs to W(illiam) A(iken) Starrett’s Skyscrapers and the Men who Build Them, published in 1928.  It is a design cut into the publisher’s blue cloth and highlighted a bit in gilt, and at least to my experience is fairly well singular.  Or at least very unusual.  The “skyscraper” as a building was at least seven decades old (as was the safety brake for the elevators–first referred to as “vertical rail car”– that made these six+ storey buildings  possible back in the early 1860’s) when the Starrett book appeared. Its an interesting achievement, and seems to be filled with a fair amount of history (he does talk about the history of elevators, for example) but mainly concentrates on the new buildings of the 1920’s.  Mostly, though, I liked the book cover. 

I like the foreground of the more-antique skyscraper in blue, giving way to the recent turn-of-the-century-esque skyscraper in gold, and then the massive under-construction monster in blue in the background–all set against a gold sky.  Its a job well done by the nameless designer.  The design has a Renaissance flavor to it, skyscrapers or not. 

A review of the book appeared in the Town Planning Review in 1931 and is available in full text  here.
And a detail of those lovely (2mm) windows at bottom:

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This Rococo edition of Vignola [Jacopo (Giacomo) Barozzi da Vignola (Italian, Vignola 1507–1573 Rome)] features fabulous interpretations of the classic textbook, the images of columns and plans of buildings and designs of rooms and so on all are decorated with bits and pieces of 18th century humanism.  The detail above (with the nearly-full engraving below) is embellished with a very uncommon scene of children fighting and playing. It is one of many that are illustrated with scenes of everyday life which really have nothing to do with the image in which they find themselves, a little bit of When Worlds Collide happiness. 

[Source: private.  The full title of the book:  Livre nouveau, ou, Regles des cinq ordres d’architecture / par Jacques Barozzio de Vignole ; nouvellement revù, corrigé et augmenté par Monsieur B*** architecte du roy ; avec plusieurs morceaux de Miche-Ange, Vitruve, Mansard, et autres célebres architectes tant anciens que modernes … ; le tout d’après Mrs. Blondel, Cochin et Babel, graveurs ..Edited by Jacques-François Blondel (French, Rouen 1705–1774 Paris); designed by Pierre Edmé Babel (French, 1720–1775); engravings designed by Charles Nicolas Cochin II (French 1715–1790); title page engraved by Jean-Charles Le Vasseur (French, 1734–1816).]

Which is a detail from:

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Walter Gropius (1883-1969, founder of the Bauhaus School and one of the principle builders of modern architecture) and Martin Wagner (1888-1957) were thinking of a new type of “town”, of a different sort of settlement for people, when they wrote this exercise instructional for their Harvard course. Housing as a townbuilding¹ problem, written during the war in 1942, was intended to be an exercise (or  “problem”), a case to be studied by the students in the departments of landscape architecture and the graduate school of design at Harvard. The class opened with this rare² pamphlet as a basis for course work, given to the students on 2 Feb 1942, with the problem’s answers expected to be on Gropius desk five weeks later.  Gropius and Martin put a tough, wide-ranging, landscape-changing question and expected answers in a very short period of time, though they definitely had a very structured plan and approach to dealing with massive implications of their exercise.  The theory was outlined there in the paper, of course, and was expanded much more fully in class.  And then there was this: a full page of datelines and expectations, a way of dealing with a large problem in logical chunks, adding up the answered bits, and then delivering a larger answer at the end and on time. 

[The original work is available at our blog bookstore.]

I’m not an architecture or design historian, so much of this paper was a little lost on me–but I could definitely appreciate the way in which the great Gropius outlined the process of problem-thinking and solution for his students.  This may be the part of this paper that I liked the most. 

In  “The Walter Gropius House Landscape: A Collaboration of Modernism and the Vernacular”³ (published in the  Journal of Architectural Education, 1984, 57 (3), p. 39) Eric F. Kramer wrote:

“Sounding similar themes in a 1942 joint studio problem for landscape and architecture, Walter [Gropius] wrote of the inspiration of the vernacular landscape and of integrating with existing systems: ‘Such a landscape invites the artist planner to observe and preserve its variety of aspects, and to invent a settlement pattern that .ts into its natural beauty. Fortunately our forefathers have already traced out a settlement pattern that fits very well into the landscape.’ Gropius–the grand master builder and master teacher–set out the problem and the solution”.

There are of course major statements in city-building and human resettlement in this work, but for now, I’m still concentrated on the Bauhaus-founder’s outline for problem solving.   

Notes

1.  The full title: Housing as a townbuilding problem; a post-war housing problem for the students of the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, February-March, 1942.

And in that publication Gropius writes: “When we speak of ‘new townships’ we think of a new type of human settlement “, with a redefined vision of what a “town” means, using an idea of “reception basins” for spheres of cities as centers of culture, art and commerce “and our open country as furtherer if an industrialized agriculture and of forestry and recreation”. (page 21).  And all of that to be manufactured along the lines of “planned super-highway systems, one branch of which is to go through New England region and will supposedly cut through the towns of Weston and Weyland”.–Gropius and Martin.

2. This copy was in the Office for Emergency Management; only  six other copies have been found and these in excellent collections: MIT, Harvard Special Collections, Harvard College of Design, Cornell, Columbia and the NYPL (Special Collections).  So the publication is pretty scarce, and given its method of printing and distribution, it looks like not many survived, though it is difficult to say how many were actually printed.  In any event, few survived.

3. The abstract of this paper is helpful: “The Walter Gropius House Landscape A Collaboration of Modernism and the Vernacular”. “The Gropius house landscape is a potent physical manifestation of the design debates of its era. The landscape is an element of both mediation and integration forging a reciprocal and evenhanded relationship between architecture and site. Shaped by modern architectural sensibilities translated to the landscape and developed at a moment when landscape architecture was struggling to .nd a modernist inspiration and voice, it is an object lesson in the development of a modernist landscape architecture in America…”   
“In these studio problems, Gropius consistently encouraged students to find new form in the functional requirements of modern times and yet to integrate with existing systems through an understanding of their own functionally driven evolution.”