Architecture (building)

B

4

Baroque Urban Design

Baroque thinking powerfully addressed the area of urban design. Michelangelo’s Campidoglio (Capitol, 1538-1564) in Rome had already provided a model for the public square, and villas such as Vignola’s Villa Farnese (begun 1539) in Caprarola showed how these important buildings could extend axial ties into the townscape. Baroque church facades frequently had more to do with their accompanying piazzas than with the church interiors. Often, whole new towns were built on formal principles. Early in the 18th century Peter the Great brought Italian and French baroque architects to Russia to create Saint Petersburg. In the New World were built such large urban centers as Mexico City; Santiago, Chile; Antigua Guatemala, Guatemala; Philadelphia; Savannah, Georgia; and Washington, D.C. See Baroque Art and Architecture.

B

5

Rococo Architecture

When Louis XIV died (1715), changes in the artistic climate led to the exuberant rococo style. Once again the work of Italians—notably Guarini and Filippo Juvarra—provided the basis for a new thrust. The expression of royal grandeur has survived in Paris’s Place de la Concorde (begun 1753) by Jacques Ange Gabriel and the great axis and plazas (1751-1759) by Héré de Corny at Nancy. A more intimate and personal expression appears in Gabriel’s Petit Trianon (1762-1764) at Versailles. Rococo came to full flower, however, in Bavaria and Austria. The Benedictine Abbey (1748-1754) at Ottobeuren, Bavaria, by Johann Michael Fischer is only one of a brilliant series of spectacular churches, monasteries, and palaces that includes Balthasar Neumann’s opulent Vierzehnheiligen (Church of the Fourteen Saints, 1743-1772) near Bamberg, Germany, and the Amalienburg Pavilion (1734-1739) by the Flemish-born Bavarian architect François de Cuvilliés in the park at Nymphenburg near Munich.

The many elaborate colonial churches found throughout Central and South America attest to the power and influence of the Roman Catholic church during baroque and rococo times. They include cathedrals in Mexico City, Guanajuato, and Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico; Antigua Guatemala, Guatemala; Quito, Ecuador; Ouro Prêto, Brazil; and Cuzco, Peru; as well as such northern missions as Sant’ Xavier del Bac in Tucson, Arizona, and the chain of missions on the California coast. The Spanish architect José Churriguera developed an extremely elaborate decorative style that, transferred to Latin America and somewhat debased, was given the name Churrigueresque. See Latin American Architecture.

B

6

Neoclassical Architecture

In many countries of northern Europe the elegance and dignity attainable through adherence to classic rules of composition retained appeal, while in central and southern Europe and Scandinavia, baroque and rococo ran their course. In England, the duke of Marlborough’s great Blenheim Palace, designed (1705) by Sir John Vanbrugh, emulated in rougher and reduced form the grandeur of Versailles.

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A renewed interest in Palladio and his follower Inigo Jones emerged. Development of the resort city of Bath gave opportunities to John Wood and his son to apply Palladian classicism to the design of Queen’s Square (1728), the Circus (1754-1770), and finally the great Royal Crescent (1767-1775), in all of which the individual houses were made to conform to an encompassing classic order. Robert Adam popularized classicism, expressing it notably through delicate stucco ornamentation. Historical scholarship became more precise, and true Greek architecture—including such pure examples of Doric as the Parthenon—became known to architects through the 1762 publication by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett of Antiquities of Athens. These developments reinforced the grip of neoclassicism in England, and the resulting type of architecture became popularly known as the Georgian style.

In what was to become the northeastern United States, Peter Harrison and Samuel McIntire took their cues from English architects in their own version of Georgian architecture, which was called Federal after the United States won independence. In the Southeast, with an aristocracy predominantly rural, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Latrobe, and others derived their building style more directly from Palladio. Jefferson, whose early virtuosity had been demonstrated in Monticello (1770-1784), was also moved by ancient Rome, and placed a version (1817-1826) of the Pantheon at the head of his magnificent Lawn at the University of Virginia. See Neoclassical Art and Architecture.

VIII

The Industrial Age

The Industrial Revolution, which began in England about 1760, led to radical changes at every level of civilization throughout the world. The growth of heavy industry brought a flood of new building materials—such as cast iron, steel, and glass—with which architects and engineers devised structures hitherto undreamed of in function, size, and form.

A

Eclectic Revivals

Disenchantment with baroque, with rococo, and even with neo-Palladianism turned late 18th-century designers and patrons toward the original Greek and Roman prototypes. Selective borrowing from another time and place became fashionable. Its Greek aspect was particularly strong in the young United States from the early years of the 19th century until about 1850. New settlements were given Greek names—Syracuse, Ithaca, Troy—and Doric and Ionic columns, entablatures, and pediments, mostly transmuted into white-painted wood, were applied to public buildings and important town houses in the style called Greek Revival.

In France, the imperial cult of Napoleon steered architecture in a more Roman direction, as seen in the Church of the Madeleine (1807-1842), a huge Roman temple in Paris. French architectural thought had been jolted at the turn of the century by the highly imaginative published projects of Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude Nicholas Ledoux. These men were inspired by the massive aspects of Egyptian and Roman work, but their monumental (and often impractical) compositions were innovative, and they are admired today as visionary architects.

The most original architect in England at the time was Sir John Soane; the museum he built as his own London house (1812-1813) still excites astonishment for its inventive romantic virtuosity. Late English neoclassicism came to be seen as elitist; thus, for the new Houses of Parliament the authorities insisted on Gothic or Tudor Revival. The appointed architect, Sir Charles Barry, was not a Gothic expert, but he called into consultation an architect who was—A. W. N. Pugin, who became responsible for the details of this vast monument (begun 1836). Pugin, in a short and contentious career, made a moral issue out of a return to the Gothic style. Other architects, however, felt free to select whatever elements from past cultures best fitted their programs—Gothic for Protestant churches, baroque for Roman Catholic churches, early Greek for banks, Palladian for institutions, early Renaissance for libraries, and Egyptian for cemeteries.

In the second half of the 19th century dislocations brought about by the Industrial Revolution became overwhelming. Many were shocked by the hideous new urban districts of factories and workers’ housing and by the deterioration of public taste among the newly rich. For the new modes of transportation, canals, tunnels, bridges, and railroad stations, architects were employed only to provide a cultural veneer.

The Crystal Palace (1850-1851; reconstructed 1852-1854) in London, a vast but ephemeral exhibition hall, was the work of Sir Joseph Paxton, a man who had learned how to put iron and glass together in the design of large greenhouses. It demonstrated a hitherto undreamed-of kind of spatial beauty, and in its carefully planned building process, which included prefabricated standard parts, it foreshadowed industrialized building and the widespread use of cast iron and steel. See Crystal Palace.

Also important in its innovative use of metal was the great tower (1887-1889) of Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel in Paris. In general, however, the most gifted architects of the time sought escape from their increasingly industrialized environment by further development of traditional themes and eclectic styles. Two contrasting but equally brilliantly conceived examples are the sumptuous Paris Opéra (1861-1875) by Charles Garnier and Boston’s grandiose Trinity Church (1872-1877) by Henry Hobson Richardson .

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