This is the first book to consider these new scientific and humanistic models in architectural terms. Constructed as a series of five essays around the themes of beauty, culture, emotion, the experience of architecture, and artistic play, this book draws upon a broad range of discussions taking place in philosophy, psychology, biology, neuroscience, and anthropology, and in doing so questions what implications these discussions hold for architectural design.
Drawing upon a wealth of research, Mallgrave argues that we should turn our focus away from the objectification of architecture treating design as the creation of objects and redirect it back to those for whom we design: the people inhabiting our built environments.
Stocking Jr. Brandt and David C. Jones Index Descriptive content provided by Syndetics"! Author : S. This work on the Golden Temple is the first one of its kind in that it has been done by a professional whose research and creative contribution in the three fields of Architecture, Engineering, and Aesthetics is quite well known. The author has developed a new method of studying historical monuments, and of establishing their distinct styles on the basis of illustrated analysis of the three fundamental elements of building design: space, structure, and form.
Dr Bhatti has convincingly shown how Sikh Architecture is an independent style of building design, which has produced the Golden Temple, Amritsar: a marvel of Sikh Architecture with its characteristic ebullience and aesthetic charm.
This book is a definitive work on the theory and practice of building design with a befitting research methodology, which should benefit students, teachers, practitioners, and scholars alike worldwide. Author : Witold Rybczynski Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN: Category: Architecture Page: View: Read Now » An essential toolkit for understanding architecture as both art form and the setting for our everyday lives We spend most of our days and nights in buildings, living and working and sometimes playing.
Buildings often overawe us with their beauty. Architecture is both setting for our everyday lives and public art form—but it remains mysterious to most of us. In How Architecture Works, Witold Rybczynski, one of our best, most stylish critics and winner of the Vincent Scully Prize for his architectural writing, answers our most fundamental questions about how good—and not-so-good—buildings are designed and constructed. Introducing the reader to the rich and varied world of modern architecture, he takes us behind the scenes, revealing how architects as different as Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, and Robert A.
Stern envision and create their designs. He teaches us how to "read" plans, how buildings respond to their settings, and how the smallest detail—of a stair balustrade, for instance—can convey an architect's vision.
Ranging widely from a war memorial in London to an opera house in St. It is an enlightening humanist's toolkit for thinking about the built environment and seeing it afresh. This revelatory book is his grand tour of architecture today.
This book explores the atmospheric issue from an independent, architectural perspective. The first section introduces and analyzes the atmospheric concept inside the lexical scope of the architectural discipline. The second one studies the topic throughout the sensory-emotional filter of the perceiving subject located in the built environment. Henderson , Richard E. Since Free ebooks since ZLibrary app.
Publisher: The M. Please read our short guide how to send a book to Kindle The file will be sent to your email address. You may be interested in Powered by Rec2Me Related Booklists 0 comments Post a Review To post a review, please sign in or sign up You can write a book review and share your experiences. But details tell nothing essential about architecture, simply because the object of all good architecture is.
Understanding architecture, therefore, is not the same as be- ing able to determine the style of a building by certain external features. It is not enough to see architecture; you must experi- ence You must observe how it was designed for a special pur- it.
You must dwell in the rooms, feel how they close. You must be aware of the textural effects, discover why just those colors were used, how the choice depended on the orientation of the rooms in relation to windows and the sun.
Two apartments, one above the other, with rooms of exactly the same dimensions and with the same openings, can be entirely diflFerent. You must experience the great diflFerence acoustics make in your concep- tion of space: the way sound enormous cathedral, with acts in an its echoes and long-toned reverberations, as compared to a small. Man's relation to implements can be broadly described thus: children begin by playing with blocks, balls and other things which they can grasp in their hands.
As time goes on they demand better and better tools. It may be a real cave dug into a bank, or a primitive hut of rough boards. But often it. This "cave game" can be varied in a thousand ways but common to them all is the enclosing of space for the child's own use. Many animals are also able to create a shelter for themselves, by digging a hole in the ground or building some sort of habitation above it.
But the same species always does it in the same way. Man alone forms dwell- ings which vary according to requirements, climate and cultural pattern. The child's play is continued in the grown-up's creation, and just as man progresses from simple blocks to the most refined implements, he progresses from the cave game to more and more refined methods of enclosing space.
Little by little he strives to give form to his entire surroundings. And this — to bring order and relation into human surround- ings — is the task of the architect. Seeing demands a certain activity on the part of the spectator. The retina is like a movie screen on which a con- tinuously changing stream of pictures appears but the mind behind the eye is conscious of only very few of them. On the other hand, only a very faint visual impression is necessary for us to think that we have seen a thing; a tiny detail is enough.
A visual process can be described as follows. A man walking along with bent head receives an impression of blue jeans; a mere hint will suffice. He believes that he has seen a man though actually all he saw was the characteristic seam running down the side of the leg.
From this one small observation he concludes that a man has passed him on the sidewalk, simply because where there is that sort of seam there must be jeans and where there are. Usually his ob- servation ends here; there are so many things to keep an eye on in a crowded street that he cannot bother his mind with his fellow.
But for some reason our man wishes to have a closer look at the person He observes more details. He was right about the. If he is not a very dull person he will now ask himself: "What does she look like?
His activity can be compared to that of a portrait painter. First he forms a rough sketch of his subject, a mere suggestion; then elaborates it enough for it to become a girl in jeans; finally he adds more and more details until he has obtained a characteristic portrait of that particular girl. The activity of such a spectator is creative; he recreates the phenomena he observes in his effort to form a.
But ichat they see, what they re-create when observing the same object, can vary enormously. There is no objectively correct idea of a thing's appearance, only an infinite number of subjective impressions of it. This is true of works of art as of everything else; it is impossible to say, for instance, that such and such a conception of a painting is the true one. Whether it makes an impression on the observer, and what impression it makes, depends not only on the work of art but to a great extent on the observer's susceptibility, his mentality, his education, his entire environment.
It also depends on the mood he is in at the moment. Usually it is easier to perceive a thing when we know some- thing about it beforehand. We see what is familiar and disregard the rest. That is to say we re-create the observed into something intimate and comprehensible. This act of re-creation is often carried out by our identifying ourselves with the object by imagining ourselves in its stead. In such instances our activity is more like that of an actor getting the feel of a role than of an artist creating a picture of something he observes outside him- self.
WTien we look at a portrait of someone laughing or smiling we become cheerful ourselves. If, on the other hand, the face is tragic, we feel sad. People looking at pictures have a remarkable.
A weak little man and a zest for life when he sees a swells with heroism Hercules performing daring deeds. Commercial artists and pro- ducers of comic strips are aware of this tendency and make use of it in their work.
Men's clothes sell more readily when they are displayed on athletic figures. The observer identifies himself with the handsomely built model and believes he will resemble him simply by donning the same apparel. The boy with glowing cheeks who sits. It is a well known fact that primitive people endow inanimate objects with life. Streams and trees, they believe, are nature spirits that live in communion with them. But even civilized people more or less consciously treat lifeless things as though they were imbued with life.
In classical architecture, for example, we speak of supporting and supported members. Many people, it is true, associate noth- ing particular with this. But others receive the impression of a heavy burden weighing down the column, just as it would a human being. This same conception is expressed in Greek columns by a slight outward curvature of profile, the "entasis," which gives an impression of straining muscles —a surprising thing to find in a rigid and unresponsive pillar of stone.
The various parts of a chair are given the same designations that are applied to human and animal members — legs, arms, seat and back. And often the legs are actually shaped like animal parts, such as lion paws, eagle claws, and doe. Such surrealistic forms have appeared periodically ever since ancient times.
Besides these, there are many examples of "organic" forms which neither resemble nor represent anything found in nature. They were employed in the German Jugend. An automobile, for instance, is called a "Jaguar" and in keeping with the idea asso- ciation its lines recall the speed and brute force of its namesake. Even things which in no way suggest organic forms are often invested with human characteristics. We have already seen how riding boots and umbrellas can affect us as real personalities.
Hans Andersen, who gave a ball and a top the power of speech, used to cut out silhouettes in which a windmill became a human being, just as it was to Don Quixote. Portals are often described as "gaping," and the architect of the Palazetto Zuccari in Rome actually formed an entrance of that building as the gaping jaws of a giant.
The Danish architect Ivar Bentsen, who throughout his life. This house here sits with its back against a hill,. Go outdoors in any direction and observe it and you will see how the schoolhouse lifts up its head and peers out over the broad countryside south of the town.
To Dickens a street of houses was 39 a drama, a meeting of original characters, each house speaking with a voice of its own. But some streets are so dominated by a conspicuous geometric pattern that even a Dickens cannot give life to them. Anyone who has visited one of the towns in Shropshire with their tarred half-timber Tudor houses will remember the strong impression made by the broad black. Brinck- mann has given an elucidating analysis of a picture of a certain street in the little German town of Xordlingen.
How then are the proportions of the two-dimensional picture converted into pro- portions in three dimensions, into a conception of depth? The windows are of almost identical size which gives the same scale to all the houses and makes the three-storied in the background outgrow the two-storied in the foreground.
All roofs show ap- proximately the same pitch and complete uniformity of material. The ever-diminishing network of the tiles helps the eye to ap- prehend the distances and thereby also the real size of the roofs.
The eye passes from smaller to larger roofs until it finally rests on the all-dominating one of the Church of St. Nothing indeed creates a more vivid illusion of space than the constant repetition of dimensions familiar to the eye and seen in different depths of the architectural perspective.
These are the realities of. When finally the. By keeping an eye on the picture while reading Brinckmann's description it is possible to experience the whole thing exactly as he describes it. But when you see the place in reality you get a very different impression of it. Instead of a street picture you get an impression of a whole town and its atmosphere.
Nordlingen is. Your first glimpse of it, through the town gate, gives you the concep- after passing tion of atown consisting of identical houses with pointed gables facing the street and dominated by a huge church. And as you penetrate further into the town your first impression is con- firmed. Nowhere do you stop and say: "It should be seen from here. You are now in the middle of the picture itself. This means that you not only see the houses directly in. Anyone who has first seen a place in a picture and then visited it knows how different reality is.
You sense the atmosphere all around you and are no longer dependent on the angle from which the picture was made. You breathe the air of the place, hear its sounds, notice how they are re-echoed by the unseen houses behind you.
There are streets and plazas and parks which were deliberately laid out to be seen from a particular spot. It might be a portal or a terrace. The size and position of everything seen from there were carefully determined to give the best impression of depth, of an interesting vista. This is particularly true of Baroque lay-.
An interesting example of this, and one of the sights of Rome, is the celebrated "view through the keyhole. Schdfflersmarkt with St.
Above a brown door to the right are the arms of the Knights of Malta. But the door is closed and barred. Through the keyhole alone you can get a view of the sequestered precincts. And what a view it is! At the end of the deep perspec- tive of a long garden walk you see the distant dome of S. Peter's swelling against the sky. Here you have all the advantages of a deliberately planned view because you see reality as through a telescope, from a fixed point — and nothing interferes to distract your attention.
The view has only one direction and what is behind the observer plays no part in it. But this is a rare exception. Ordinarily we do not see z picture of a thing but receive an impression of the thing itself, of the entire form including the sides we cannot see, and of all the space surrounding it.
Just as in the example of the girl in jeans, the impression received is only a general one — usually we do not see any details. Rarely can a person who has "seen" a building give a detailed description of it. If, for example, a tourist visiting Nordlingen suddenly saw the church, he would immediately realize it was a church.
If we see the letter L we recognize it without knowing what sort of L it is. Simply seeing the vertical and horizontal strokes together tells us that it is an L. In the same way we know that we have seen a church when we have merely received an impression of a tall building combined with a steeple.
And if we are not interested in knowing more we usually notice no more. But if we are interested we go further. Is it really a. We discover that it is higher than most towers, which means that we must alter our first im- pression of it. During the visual process we seem to place the octagonal tiers on top of the rectangular block originally we had — not noticed that they were octagonal. In our imagination we see them rising out of the square tower like sections of a telescope. No, it is not finished at that.
After having roughly decided on the main forms he continues by adding details which shoot out from the body like buds and thorns. If he has had manual training in one of the building trades he knows how the individual parts are produced.
It gives rials, them change from an amorphous mass of ordinary- to see stone and wood into a definite entity-, the result of his own efforts. About 45 miles north of Paris lies the town of Beauvais with its great cathedral. Actually it is only the chancel of a cathedral that was never completed but its dimensions are so enormous that it can be seen for miles, towering above the four-storied houses of the town. The foundations were laid in and the vaulting was finished in It was one of those heavenward- aspiring Gothic structures with pillars like tall, slim trees which seem to grow right into the sky.
They were about feet high. The construction proved too daring, however, and the vaulting collapsed in And the builders were apparently so fascinated by this purely structural problem that they made a virtue of necessity- and turned the supporting mem- bers into a rich composition of piers and arches embellished with sculpture. In other words, purely structural features were treated aesthetically, each one given almost sculptural form.
The architect can become so interested in forming all the structural parts of a building that he loses sight of the fact that construction is. But it is understandable that the architect can come to the conclusion that the aim of his calling is to give form to the materials he works with. According to his conception, building material is the medium of architecture.
But, you may ask, can there be any other? And the answer is. Instead of letting his imagination work with structural forms, with the solids of a building, the architect can work with the empty space —the cavity — between the solids, and consider the forming of that space as the real meaning of architecture. This can be illustrated by an example. Ordinarily a building is. In the case of Beauvais the problem was to raise a church on a flat.
But let us suppose the site to be an enormous, solid rock and the problem to hollow out rooms inside it. Then the architect's job would be to form space by eliminating material in this case by removing some of the rock.
The material itself. In the first instance it is the stone mass of the cathedral which is the reality; in the second the cavities within the mass. This can also be illustrated by a two-dimensional example which may make it clearer. If you paint a black vase on a white ground, you consider all. If we try to fix the figure in our. Gone is the vase and in its 47 stead are two faces in profile. Now the white becomes the con- vexities projecting out onto the black ground and forming nose, lips and chin.
We can shift our perception at will from one to the other, alter-. But each time there must be an absolute change in perception. We cannot see both vase and profiles at the same time. The strange thing is that we do not conceive the two figures as complementing each other.
If you draw them you will in- try to voluntarily exaggerate the size of the area which at the moment appears as convexities. Ordinarily convex forms are seen as figure, concave as ground. This can be seen on the figure above. The outline here being a wavy line it is possible to see either black or white convexities, as you choose.
But other figures, such as one with a scalloped edge, are not perceptually ambiguous. There are innumerable classic patterns which are identical no matter how you look at them. A good example is found in weav- ings in which the pattern on the reverse is a negative reproduc- tion of the one on the right side.
But most two-dimensional motives that are carried out in two colors force the observer to see one of the colors as figure and the other as ground. In Carli in India there are a number of cave temples.
They were actually created, as I have described above, by eliminating material — that is by forming cavities. Here the cavity is what we perceive while the solid rock surrounding it is the neutral back- ground which was left unshaped. When you stand inside the temple you not only experience the cavity the great three-aisled temple hollowed out of the rock but also — the columns separating the aisles which are parts of the rock that were not removed.
I purposely use the word "cavity" because I believe it illus-. This question of terms is of great importance. German art-.
You can speak of the "Raum" of a church in the sense of the clearly defined space en- closed within the outer walls. In Danish we use the word "rum" which sounds even more like the English word but has the wider meaning of the German Raum. The Germans speak of Raum- Gefiihl, meaning the sense or conception of the defined space. In English there is no equivalent.
In this book I use the word space to express thatwhich in three dimensions corresponds to "background" two dimensions, and cavity for the limited, ar- in chitecturally formed space. And I maintain that some architects are "structure-minded," others "cavity-minded;" some archi- tectural periods work preferably with solids, others with cavities.
It is possible to plan a building as a composition of cavities alone but in carrying it out the walls will almost inevitably have certain convexities which will intrude on the observer in the same way as the pillars in the Carli temples do.
Though we begin by conceiving the temples as compositions of architectural cavities, we end by experiencing the bodies of the columns. The opposite can also happen. You under construction and think see a house of it as an airy skeleton, a structure of innumerable rafters sticking nakedly into the air.
But if you return again when. The original wooden skeleton is entirely erased from your memory. Cave temple at Carli, India. In other words, you have gone from a conception of solids as the significant factor to a purely spatial conception.
And though the architect may think of his building in terms of construction, he never loses sight of his final goal —the rooms he wishes to form.
Gothic architecture was constructional; all bodies were convex with more and more material added to them. If I were to point. George and the Dragon in Nicolai Church in Stock- holm. The sculptor was so enamoured of spiky excrescences of all kinds that no human being could possibly conceive the shape of the space surrounding the dragon.
A column during the same period became a whole cluster of shafts. Seen in cross-section it looks as though it had broken out on all sides in small, round knobs. The transition from Gothic to Renaissance was not only a change from dominating vertical elements to dominating horizontal ones, but above all a complete transformation from an architecture of sharp and pointed struc- tures to an architecture of well-shaped cavities, the same sort of.
The illustrations in the work of the great Italian architectural theorist, Serlio, clearly show the new conception. A favorite Renaissance form is the circular, domed cavity. And just as the. Gothic was expanded on all sides into a cluster of shafts, pillar. Bramante's plan for S. Peter's in Rome forms the loveliest. If you consider the dark, hatched part as "figure" you will find that it forms a very queer remainder after the cavities have been hollowed out of the great wall masses.
It is like a regular cave temple dug out of the enor- mous building block. The plan, as we know, was changed and the church today has a somewhat different form.
In full dayhght. But during the great church festivals the room is transformed. You now experience. All daylight is shut out and the light of thousands of candles and crystal chandeliers is reflected from the gold of vaults and cupolas. The church is. Peter's, Rome, in candle light. Copenhagen City Hall in ivhich the architect has particularly stressed the solids terminating them in peaks and spires.
Copenhagen Police Headquarters. The Danish architect Martin Nyrop i , who designed Copenhagen's City Hall, had like so many of his contemporaries the carpenter's view of architecture as a structural might art. He was making his interested in constructions an aesthetic experience, among other ways by giving them rich ornamentation. Everywhere he showed how the building was put together. The City Hall is a large edifice with an irregular, spiked silhouette of gables, spires and pinnacles.
By the time the next monumental building was planned for Copenhagen the conception of architecture had swung full round. This building. Police Headquarters, is formed as a huge block cut oflF flat at the top. Nothing projects above the horizontal band which finishes the walls. All construction is carefully hidden; it is impossible to form any idea of how the building was made.
What you experience here is a rich composition of regular cavi- ties: circular and rectangular courts, cylindrical stairways, round. Nyrop's City Hall is embellished with semi-circular bays which push out from the facade. The many cavities of Police Headquarters, on the other hand, are enriched with semi-circular niches pushing back into the solid masses of the walls.
Plan of Minerva Medica, Rome. Southeast of S. Peter's in Rome there is a Renaissance monument of unique classical beauty —the city gateway Porta di Santo Spirito, by Antonio da Sangallo. It is rather difficult to decide what it is that gives this structure its noble character. Like the triumphal arches of ancient Rome it is composed entirely of familiar elements: a vaulted archway in a framework of columns and niches.
But here, on the slightly curved front, every one of these old elements appears in a new and sublime form, amazingly whole and impressive. The niches in antique triumphal arches were for the most part simply small recesses designed to hold statues.
It is so large that it breaks through the cornice which forms the impost of the gateway arch; this continues into the niche, casting deep shadows and giving added emphasis to the cyhndrical body.
Of equal simplicity and greatness are the half-columns with their slightly swelling forms, which are emphasized by the curves at their bases. The gateway was never finished but you do not feel that any- thing is would hardly be enhanced by the addition of lacking. It capitals and all the other details usually found on traditional entablatures.
The horizontal cutting-off of the columns gives a clear picture of their cylindrical form. The most striking thing about this piece of architecture, however, is that it is without orna- ment; it has only bold, clear-cut mouldings which outline the main forms at decisive points and emphasize important lines by the dark shadows they cast.
The whole thing is done with such power and imagination that the observer feels he is confronted by a great building though in reality it is only a large relief, an embellishment of the wall surrounding an archway. The rhyth- mic alternation of strikingly concave and convex forms produces an effect of order and harmony. There is a fitting interval be- tween the contrasting shapes so that the eye can get its fill of the one before passing on to the counter-movement of the next.
This was how the elements of classical architecture appeared to the Italian people of the Renaissance. They experienced them in the beautiful Roman ruins which at that time, as still today,. Marble facings, bronze and gilded ornaments, sculpture, and all small details, had disappeared.
Left standing were only the great main forms, the noble wall masses with their vaults, columns and niches.
The Renaissance architectural theo- rists succeeded in transferring this aspect of sublimity and gran- deur to the illustrations in their books on architecture, in which simple woodcuts gave the main structure alone, without any petty details. Michelangelo: Porta Pia, Rome. About twenty years later Michelangelo designed for the walls of Rome another gateway of a very different character: the Porta Pia at the city's eastern boundary. Instead of pointed arches they employed semi-circular ones.
When the church was not actually a centrally planned building, its rhythm from the west door to the dome of the crossing progressed at a dignified pace from one perfect form to the next. Renaissance architecture was based on mathematical rules of proportioning and, as we have already seen, you intuitively comprehend the harmony which the architect consciously and calculatedly devised.
Experiencing Architecture by Steen Eiler Rasmussen. Copyright Disclaimer: This site does not store any files on its server.
0コメント