1000 Monuments of Genius (eBook)

Christopher E.M. Pearson (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF

2014
544 Seiten
Parkstone International (Verlag)
978-1-78310-415-4 (ISBN)

Infos

Since the mythical Tower of Babel, humans have continuously tried to erect monuments to match their oversized egos. With ancient ziggurats, the Taj Mahal or the Empire State Building, man has for centuries demonstrated his force by raising structures for purposes both religious and profane. As international cultural statements without words, symbols of a peoples values devotion, patriotism, power symbols of a civilisationÊs grandeur, these monuments still fascinate and attract an ever-growing public who is captivated by the createvity and ingenuity of these architects and stonemasons. Their historical message goes far beyond mere art history, for they tell us of the lives and evolution of the peoples of the past, as does the Parthenon in Athens, many times destroyed, rebuilt, reused, attacked, pillaged, and restored once again today. This work, featuring 1000 monuments chosen from around the globe, retraces human history, the techniques, styles, and philosophies necessary for the construction of so many splendours over the centuries, providing a panorama of the most celebrated monuments while evoking the passion of their makers. The reader can explore the changing values of humanity through the edifices it has built and understand these structures as triumphs of humankind

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Since the mythical Tower of Babel, humans have continuously tried to erect monuments to match their oversized egos. With ancient ziggurats, the Taj Mahal or the Empire State Building, man has for centuries demonstrated his force by raising structures for purposes both religious and profane. As international cultural statements without words, symbols of a peoples values devotion, patriotism, power symbols of a civilisationEs grandeur, these monuments still fascinate and attract an ever-growing public who is captivated by the createvity and ingenuity of these architects and stonemasons. Their historical message goes far beyond mere art history, for they tell us of the lives and evolution of the peoples of the past, as does the Parthenon in Athens, many times destroyed, rebuilt, reused, attacked, pillaged, and restored once again today. This work, featuring 1000 monuments chosen from around the globe, retraces human history, the techniques, styles, and philosophies necessary for the construction of so many splendours over the centuries, providing a panorama of the most celebrated monuments while evoking the passion of their makers. The reader can explore the changing values of humanity through the edifices it has built and understand these structures as triumphs of humankind

Inhalt

Contents 5
Introduction 7
Africa and the Middle East 17
Asia and Oceania 63
Europe (including Russia and Turkey) 125
The Americas 419
Biographies 510
Chronology 526
Glossary 536
List of illustrations 538

Textauszug

Introduction

 

 

 

What is Architecture?

 

Among the major visual arts, architecture has always had something of a reputation for being difficult to appreciate. This is not solely because it would seem to require a large degree of professional skill both to design and to understand, at least in a technical sense. Unlike a painting or a sculpture, a building does not tell an easily decipherable narrative or attempt to ‘represent’ some aspect of reality in artistic terms. Rather, the nature of architecture is at least in part utilitarian, serving to shelter various human activities. At the same time, architecture dignifies our daily actions by giving them a distinctive public presence in the form of a building envelope or façade, one that in the case of many historical edifices may present us with a bafflingly complex articulation. In this sense, the busy external appearance of, say, Chartres Cathedral or the Pompidou Centre may indeed prove intimidating to the visitor who encounters them for the first time. In many cases, the means of creation of a given building, including its structural techniques and even its materials, may not be immediately evident or easily comprehended by the casual viewer. Its stylistic, historical and iconographic points of reference may be obscure and unfamiliar. Should one know, or care, for example, that the colossal Ionic columns fronting the 19th-century British Museum are based on those of the Temple of Athena Polias at Priene from the 4th century BCE? What insight might such an observation give us into the nature of the later edifice? Moreover, the very function of a building may often be inaccessible from a purely visual inspection, especially if its original purpose has been forgotten or has changed over time: what was Stonehenge used for, and what does one do inside a basilica, a pagoda or a martyrium, for instance? On the other hand, unlike our encounter with a work of art in a museum, we generally experience architecture in a state of distraction: as the German philosopher Walter Benjamin once noted, we do not see and appreciate buildings so much as we simply use them or walk past them or through them. Buildings become invisible to us. This points, however, to the major reason why the study of architecture should never be daunting to the beginner: it is the art we all use every day, and each of us has a lifetime of experience with it. In this sense, as we move from home to office to shopping mall to museum to hotel, we are all architectural experts, formed by a quotidian process of the visual assessment, navigation, tactile engagement and habitation of three-dimensional spaces that have been designed by professional builders or architects.

Most of the structures in this book, however, could not be described as everyday. Rather, they are exceptional for various reasons, and on these grounds could be designated as ‘monuments’. (The term ‘monument’ in this context does not refer simply to those constructions of a largely symbolic or commemorative character—the Washington Monument, for example, or London’s Monument to the Great Fire of 1666—but to any building of fundamental architectural distinction.) Here we are largely concerned with edifices that required much time, money, labour and ingenuity in their creation. The architectural historian and theorist Geoffrey Scott wrote that civilisation ‘leaves in architecture its truest, because its most unconscious record’, and it is a truism worth repeating that architecture is inevitably an index of power—secular, religious and economic. Architecture, by this definition, is represented by large, formal buildings, often of a showy appearance, crafted of permanent materials and dedicated to high purposes. A Greek temple, a Gothic cathedral or a palatial residence like Versailles, the Alhambra or White Heron Castle might come to mind. It is clear that the planning and construction of such impressive structures only become feasible with the emergence of large concentrations of wealth and influence, whether in the hands of a single ruler or a ruling caste. The resulting monuments, whose enduring nature has allowed them to far outlive their designers, patrons and originating cultures, bespeak an ability to marshal and deploy dozens or perhaps even thousands of workers over long periods of time, using forced, salaried or (most rarely) volunteer labour. This is as true of the Great Pyramids of Giza as it is of the latest awe-inspiring skyscraper in Beijing or Dubai. Architecture, like history, is created on behalf of those who have prevailed through the wielding of power, those who are able to command the spoils of war and to reap the profits of commerce. As with all such manifestations of power, the great monuments of the world are in this sense more often than not the products of despotic rule, inhumane value systems or an unfair division of resources, and could certainly be condemned as such. The Victorian art critic John Ruskin, for example, could even launch a contrarian attack on the ancient Greek temples—erstwhile symbols of fledgling democracy, humanistic culture and refined aesthetic sensitivity—as oppressive and dehumanising. Ruskin particularly objected to the Classical buildings’ demand for monotonously repetitive carved ornament (such as mouldings, dentils or capitals), the manufacture of which would seem to have demanded a machine-like subservience on the part of the stonemasons. Even today a visit to the Colosseum in Rome or the great Mesoamerican pyramid-temples (n° 814; n° 821; n° 823) may well arouse uneasy thoughts of the mass slaughter that occurred there over the centuries, if not the backbreaking labour that went into their creation. The world’s largest church, the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace (1985-90) in Yamoussoukro, Côte d’Ivoire, is generally seen as a self-indulgent folly on the part of that impoverished country’s onetime president rather than as an architectural masterpiece of the first order. More often than not, however, and especially in the case of the venerated relics of older civilisations, we have an understandable tendency to set aside the questionable morality of their patronage and simply to appreciate the splendour, mystery and ingenuity of their built creations. With the passage of time, even the survivals of Nazi architecture, those morally repugnant but undeniably impressive reminders of recent atrocities, have gone some distance towards being the subject of dispassionate academic interest and even a measure of professional (rather than political) admiration from some practising architects, who see in them the evidence of a continuing European debt to the still-relevant legacy of Greece and Rome. Ideologically offensive regimes, it can easily be demonstrated, do not automatically produce either good or bad results in architecture, and from a purely aesthetic or technical standpoint the question of politics might even be left out of the discussion altogether—a rationalisation that continues to allow some contemporary architects to work for politically suspect patrons. More generally, as the Maltese architect Richard England has observed: ‘When all is said and done there remains the building.’

Perhaps a more basic—though equally unsatisfactory—aspect of the ‘elite’ definition of architecture lies in its inherent bias towards monumentality: what about those cultures that, for whatever reason, chose not to build durable or extravagant monuments? Would not this definition exclude the extraordinarily skilful but often small-scale or impermanent structures of many Native American, Oceanic or African tribal groups, the domestic buildings of the ancient Greeks, or any number of localised traditions making use of fragile materials or given to humble, everyday uses? This perhaps unrealistic discrimination lies behind architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner’s famous comparison of a cathedral and a bicycle shed in his Outline of European Architecture (1943): the former was held to represent ‘architecture’ (perhaps even with a capital A) with distinct ‘aesthetic appeal’ while the latter was seen as mere ‘building’ of a strictly functional character. As this example suggests, the question is at the same time complicated by the professional divide between architecture and engineering (and indeed building and contracting). Can purely utilitarian structures, whatever their technical merits, be seen as architecture? The success of the modern movement in deliberately merging or blurring the parameters of both fields has perhaps rendered the question less pressing in the present day, but the status of ancient shelters, barns, warehouses and the like has yet to be dealt with.

Having laid out this series of caveats, we can now see that this book presents a selection of monuments that fits a more traditional definition of architecture. (The number of houses included in the later sections, reflecting a growing theoretical interest in the dwelling over the last few centuries, may represent a countercurrent.) Illustrated here are some of the most prominent examples of historical architecture to have survived above ground. Eschewing monuments that have vanished without a trace or which have left only scanty remains on the surface, the guiding principle has been to choose buildings that are still visible, even in mutilated or partial form, and which can be serviceably represented by a photograph. Apart from the fact that increasing world...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 24.11.2014
• Verlagsort: New York
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater
• Themenwelt: Technik ► Architektur
• Schlagworte: 1000 • Architecture • Architektur • Arquitectura • ART • arte • Bewegungen • Denkmäler • Edificios • Escultura • Estatuas • Genie • génie • Genio • Genius • Geschichte • Histoire • Historia • History • Kunst • maestros • Masters • Meister • monumentos • Monuments • movements • movimientos • Overview • Panorama • sculpture • Skulptur • Statues • Statue Übersicht
• ISBN-10: 1-78310-415-5 / 1783104155
• ISBN-13: 978-1-78310-415-4 / 9781783104154