Kindle Notes & Highlights
Neoclassicism, was anything but a revival; it represented rather a fundamental investigation of the very bases of architectural form and meaning.
In the 175os an alliance between archaeological exploration and architectural theory was inaugurated which would continue through the nineteenth century.
Two events set the stage intellectually for architectural debate in the middle decades of the century when built production was slowed first by the War of Austrian Succession (1740-48) and then the Seven Years' War (1756-63):
In the spirit of Voltaire and of Turgot, whose commitment to progress would colour the entire period, architects grappled with the overarching challenge of Enlightenment philosophy: how to reconcile the quest for primary eternal truths with a growing awareness of the relativity and contingency of man's cultural expressions.
All the splendors of architecture ever conceived have been modeled on the little rustic hut I have just described. It is by approaching the simplicity of this first model that fundamental mistakes are avoided and true perfection is achieved"
The first hut embodied in its simplicity a process of imitation that could reform architecture and ground it again in
reason. It already comprised all the elements of architecture: upright column, spanning entablature and protective sloping roof.
A return to origins was by no means an impediment to progress; rather it was an essential first step.
James Stuart (1713-88) and Nicholas Revett's (172o-1804) pioneering Antiquities ofAthens, conceived as early as 1748, was overtaken by several parallel and rival undertakings by the time their first volume appeared in London in 1762 [4], notably, and much to Stuart's chagrin, by the Frenchman Julien David Leroy's Ruins ofthe Most Beautiful Monuments of Greece, rushed into publication in 1758.
Comte de Caylus (1692-1765), a wealthy antiquarian and collector whose researches were lavishly published as Recueil d'antiquites egyptiennes, etrusques, grecques, romaines etgaulloises (1752-65), the first work to treat ancient monuments as historical testaments.
Debate quickly focused on whether or not ancient monuments were to be studied in order to approach a greater fidelity in reproducing the different ornaments and parts of the Classical orders or to gain insight into how civilizations gave rise to architectural forms.
Proposing an intimate relationship between the evolution of society and architectural
elements-most particularly the Doric order for which he proposed three distinct phases-Leroy married the concerns of architectural aesthetics and standards with the new history of Voltaire and Turgot.
Piranesi argues that the Romans developed their architecture directly from the Etruscans, an older race than the Greeks, who brought the arts to a state of impressive perfection when Greek civilization was still in its infancy.
Carried away by the strength of his own rhetoric, Piranesi even asserted that Greek influence was a principal factor in Roman architecture's decline from reason to caprice in the late empire, when Greek workmen and fashion permeated Italian culture
Similarly the modern architect must not be satisfied with being a faithful copyist of the ancients, but based on the study of their works must display an inventive and-I am tempted to say-creative genius; and by wisely combining the Greek, Etruscan, and Egyptian styles, one must give rise to the discovery of new decorations and
new manners.''
The central problem, worked out over centuries, was how to marry the image of the Christian cross inscribed in the Latin-cross floor plan with a grand cupola which could represent the cosmos on earth and make the Christian temple an experience of the infiniteness of creation in the perfect space contained within a dome.
By 1770 Soufflot had developed a remarkable system of three superimposed masonry domes [15], creating at once a high exterior profile and, on an intermediary dome, a mysteriously lit surface viewed through the oculus of the innermost dome.
Robert Adam (1728-92)
Trained in Scotland, where his father William Adam was leading architect until his death in 1748, Robert and his brother James opened an office in London after 1758 which became one of the most influential and innovative practices of the century. Their output was prodigious, including major country houses with their parks (e.g. Harewood House, 1759-71, Osterley Park, 1765-8o, Newby Hall, 1767-8o), castellated houses in Scotland (Culzean, 1777-92), city houses on all scales from mansions (Derby House, London, 1773-74) to terrace-house developments (Portland Place),
...more
It was this celebration of savant empiricism which was the very essence of the philosophy of the picturesque, one of the most distinctive of British contributions to the experimental architecture of the second half of the eighteenth century.
Few of Adam's great house commissions of the 176os were realized ex novo, but it became increasingly a fundamental aspect of the picturesque philosophy that a designer should enter into a dialogue with the environment and the pre-existing, not only to find brilliant compositional solutions but even to play consciously with the overlay of meanings and associations in such interventions.
