Architecture

[DonRocks]

There are numerous things in this world that I *love*, but just don't know enough about to satisfy my insatiable curiosity - the amazing field of Architecture is one of them.

This thread could just as easily go in the History Forum, or the Science Forum - undoubtedly, one day it will be a forum of its own.

Two books have been sitting in my basement, virtually untouched, and right now they're sitting beside me:

"City of Trees" by Melanie Choukas-Bradley, illustrated by Polly Alexander

"AIA Guide to the Architecture of Washington, DC"

Although the former is only tangentially related to architecture, my knowledge of the subject is so limited that I don't even know if the latter is considered to be a decent reference. What it seems to be is a nice little walking tour, which is kind of what I want.

Nevertheless, one of my "projects" has been to really learn about DC's architecture and flora, using the AIA Guide (or some suitable substitute) as my starting point.

This thread - which I hope will generate enough posts to one day become a stand-alone forum - is for "Architecture In General," and anything specific can certainly merit its own topic - the closest thing we have right now is a thread on Metro's Silver Line (is that even considered Architecture?)

At Clemson University (where I went for both my undergraduate and graduate degrees), the Architecture building was fondly (and not-so-fondly) nicknamed "The Land Of The Midnight Sun" because the Architecture majors had to put in such long hours. Everyone had a genuine respect for them - I know I did.

I love architecture, consider it an incredibly underrated and unappreciated use of funds, and am hoping to learn enough about it where I can call myself something more than a layman. Right now, I can distinguish between Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns, and that's about it (my little "cheat" has been: Doric is so simple that it could have been designed by a Dork, Ionic is more elaborate, like something you'd see in the Ionosphere, and Corinthian is so fancy that it conjures up images of Ricardo Montalban and "soft Coreentheean leather" - I've often wondered if he was ashamed of doing these commercials.)

[Tweaked]

Some good links:

National Building Museum and their current exhibit Hot to Cold, which explores the architectural works of BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group (closes Aug 30, 2015).

Ghosts of DC blog, which tells the "lost and untold history of DC."  They post lots of cool archival photos of DC.

The relocated and re-opened Textile Museum, now on the GW campus, has two interesting looking exhibits which are part of the Albert H. Small Washingtoniana Collection :  The Civil War and the Making of Washington and Seat of Empire:  Planning Washington 1790-1801. Both run until Oct. 15, 2015.

[DaveO]

Wonderful topic.   I'm a lover of man made spaces, but not one to pore over and study it to the specifics of differences among classic Greek columns or other elements.

Frank Lloyd Wright needs no introduction.  Have you ever visited one of his Usonian's, small homes theoretically built for average Americans?   There is one in Bethesda occupied by one of Wright's grandchildren.  One can be visited at Woodlawn in Virginia, the Pope-Leighey House.

I had friends who purchased and lived in one in Baltimore for a number of years.  I got to visit there a few times many years ago, staying, recreating, having dinner at their home.  It was utterly serene and simply delightful, something I can rarely attribute to architecture alone.

Falling Water is an easy several hours drive from here and a remarkable place to visit.  Finally, while in Chicago take the time to visit the nearby Frank Lloyd Wright Trust in Oak Park and take the walking tour.  Its worthwhile.

In fact as a knuckleheaded kid in the NY area with no cultural leanings or inclinations at all, the only museum I loved to visit and returned to was the Guggenheim at 89th and 5th Ave, designed by Wright.   It had to be the architecture.

[The Hersch]

Some good links:

Ghosts of DC blog, which tells the "lost and untold history of DC."  They post lots of cool archival photos of DC.

Some other links: Vanished: Washington Lots of great photographs of buildings that are no more, often with "then and now" comparisons.

John DeFerrari's Streets of Washington, which I believe I've plugged before. Well-researched, well-written vignettes of Washington history and architecture, with many wonderful photographs and often postcard reproductions. A delight and a treasure.

Books: James M. Goode's books are indispensable. E.J. Applewhite's Washington Itself is an excellent little guide to some of Washington's neighborhoods and buildings. No photographs, but nice drawings.

The Historic Washington Flickr group isn't only architecture, but much of it is, and there are even a few photographs by your humble correspondent.

[ol_ironstomach]

I have both of those books too, but neither sees much use.

I am no architect, only an admirer.  But here are some reccs that I loved and you might enjoy, and which don't necessarily point you in the direction of any particular style:

"How Buildings Learn", by Stewart Brand (1994).  This one was an epiphany wrapped up in rephotography, musings on plumbing and drainage, and why the sixties turned out to be crazy after all.  I haven't looked at any old brick wall the same ever since (which is honestly something of an impediment when you're trying to walk through an old English town).  Not convinced?  Read this synopsis.
"Why Buildings Fall Down", by Matthys Levy and the late Mario Salvadori.  Salvadori also wrote a complementary volume, "Why Buildings Stand Up", but obviously it lacks the drama of its companion.
Pretty much anything drafted by Francis D.K. Ching.  His "Architecture: Form, Space, and Order" remains a popular reference textbook.

Most any title by Witold Rybczynski, especially "The Most Beautiful House In The World" (1989).
"A Field Guide to American Houses", by Virginia McAlester.  The vernacular house, American style.

Of local, if tangential, relevance:

Garrett Peck's "The Smithsonian Castle and the Seneca Quarry"
"Places from the Past", by Clare Lise Kelly, published by M-NCPPC.  A history of MoCo buildings.  Previously hard to find, but the 10th Anniversary Edition is now available as free PDF download at the link.
Any of James Goode's coffee table books, especially "Best Addresses" and "Capital Losses".

Finally, revoking what I said up top and pointing at one particular local architect, look up Robert Gurney.

[ol_ironstomach]

I did not know that in 1997, Brand partnered with the BBC on a six-part miniseries based loosely on his book.  Watch it here (includes playlist):

Apropos of Don's comment regarding campus architecture buildings, note the segment beginning at 19m12s.

[Al Dente]

Does anyone want to go to Barcelona with me in 2026 to see the completed Sagrada Familia? That will be the culmination of 144 years of work! I was amazed at how intricately beautiful that building is in the two times I've visited. The other Gaudi buildings are wonderful too, and Parc Guell is a must. Man I love that city!

[DonRocks]

Does anyone want to go to Barcelona with me in 2026 to see the completed Sagrada Familia? That will be the culmination of 144 years of work! I was amazed at how intricately beautiful that building is in the two times I've visited. The other Gaudi buildings are wonderful too, and Parc Guell is a must. Man I love that city!

La Sagrada Familia is the most incredible man-made structure that I have ever seen, and the most perfect (word chosen carefully) man-made structure I can conceive of. Obviously, this does not include "ahead of their time" structures such as the Pyramids of Giza, or even The Brooklyn Bridge (*) , because those are totally different animals.

Listen up! If you go to Barcelona, the difference between seeing La Sagrada Familia, and not seeing La Sagrada Familia, is whether or not you buy tickets online. If you buy tickets online, you won't have a wait; if you don't buy tickets online, you will wait several *hours*, and this is not an exaggeration. Fifteen minutes of time on the computer can make or break your trip to Barcelona (I consider seeing La Sagrada Familia a "make or break" tourist attraction, even though Barcelona would still be amazing without it).

Seeing this building alone is worth a trip to Europe - it's up there with visiting The Grand Canyon. I've never seen The Taj Mahal, or The Great Wall of China, but I've seen Saint Basil's Cathedral, and I suspect all of these are peers.

(*) Highly recommended: Ken Burns' first-ever work for PBS: a documentary on The Brooklyn Bridge. I watched this during the past week, and I learned things I never knew; hell, I didn't even know it was so old. What a magnificent structure - Brian, I would love your opinion of it even though I realize you're not a Civil Engineer. What is the difference, for example, between a "suspension bridge" and a "cable-stayed bridge," and why is The Brooklyn Bridge a hybrid of the two?

---

Bridges (The Hersch)

[darkstar965]

I was really fortunate to have lived in Barcelona for awhile. To say it's an incredibly fabulous city understates the case for me.

The Sagrada Familia is jarring and astounding when you first see it. It's surely incredibly unique and the story of it's never-ending construction is one of the world's most incredible construction tales. It's very easy to "lose" an entire day (or three) there once you visit; and then feel foolish for having only planned an hour or two.

"Perfect" is an interesting modifier. The Pyramids? Stonehenge? To me, many things about the SF are imperfect and just add to it's legend and allure. Conveniently, Antoni Gaudi's must-see worksites are all around the city with very interesting, colorful, and ornate examples like Parc Guell and Placa Real. Of course, the oft-heard claim that Gaudi is responsible for our usage of the word "gaudy" today is one of the better bits of urban myth. Seeing his work in person supports that mistaken assumption. I used to hear some tour guides telling tourists that.

Oh, and I love Ken Burns too. His range is fantastic. Recommending "The Brooklyn Bridge" and his multi-"inning" series of films on the history of baseball (also absolutely fabulous) really drive that point home. IMHO, he is the best American documentary filmmaker working today. He has done many films for PBS, btw.

"Ken Burns Films" on pbs.org

And, his daughter did a good job with "Central Park Five," an important story, as she finished up at Brown and then collaborated with her father to get the film made.

[Al Dente]

The other path you describe has a fantastic display of Dutchman's breeches, btw.

I had to look that up. Dicentra Cucullaria. Evidently they're good for syphilis. They're also an example of a disjunct population which brought me to the Kerry slug and then their Love Darts. I also took a side trip to find out what exactly liverworts are which then took me to the Doctrine of Signatures.

Thanks for the Wikipedia adventure!

[Tweaked]

The National Cathedral at sunset, with Venus visible in the west.

[The Hersch]

The National Cathedral at sunset, with Venus visible in the west.

I wonder how others feel about this building. I don't admire it whole-heartedly, to say the least. On the one hand, it does very impressively what it does: It simulates a great Gothic cathedral in a breath-taking way. In form and scale and materials and in many details, it succeeds remarkably well in imitating what it is not. It's not a great Gothic cathedral of the golden age of cathedral-building in one of the major centers of European Christianity; it's a 20th-century building in a middling city in a modern country where Christianity is of marginal and continually dwindling importance. One of the most brilliant professors I ever studied with remarked of it (many years ago) that, while Medieval Christians believed that Heaven was up there, and the architecture of their great churches reflected that belief in directing the attention of the faithful upward, no one today has that sort of spatial relationship with the Divine, and thus the Washington cathedral can be seen as a sort of sick joke, mocking religious sentiment.

I also object to its being called the "National Cathedral". If the Episcopal Church in the U.S. wants to call it the national cathedral of their sect, they are welcome to do so, but I don't see why the rest of us should call it by a name that implies it has some sort of official national status. This spurious title has been unfortunately reinforced by the last two funerals of former presidents being held there. (Reagan had two additional funerals, which seem like two more than allowed by good taste.)

Can we call it the National Episcopal Cathedral? Or the Washington Episcopal Cathedral? The Episcopal Church isn't even effectively the church of the ruling class in America any more, as it used to be. This is the United States of America; we don't have a national church.

[DonRocks]

I wonder how others feel about this building.

You sure you want to know?

[The Hersch]

You sure you want to know?

I think I do. I suppose I may end up being sorry I asked, but I doubt it.

[DonRocks]

I think I do. I suppose I may end up being sorry I asked, but I doubt it.

I think it's awesome, and that when you make a counter-clockwise circuit around the building, starting at the front, passing the midway point at the rear, and descending a small little flight of ugly stairs down towards an ugly parking area ... *that* view of the cathedral - which is about 2/3 of the way around, and offers the most complete view of the building - is one of the most magnificent sights I've seen in American architecture. This building is tremendous in scope, and it's hard to believe it's 20th-century architecture. The interior is magnificent as well, and makes me feel like I'm smack dab in a major European city.

Visiting the stone masons' house, just to the left of the entrance, is pretty interesting if you can strike up a conversation with one of them.

Plus, it's a good place to bone up on flying buttresses.

[As moderator - and I read your post very carefully several times - I think that with the exception of sentences #3 and #4, your post didn't have anything to do with architecture, and was pretty much of a polemic against religion. It's okay though - you've more than made up for it with your magnificent posts in this Fine Arts forum, so I have no problem looking the other way. Maybe posts like this have a place here (I'm softening on this a bit because religion and politics are an inevitable part of history), but probably not in an architecture thread. It was certainly thoughtful, and a valid, reasoned opinion. I mean, I bitched about "Unbroken" not including Billy Graham, so what's the difference?]

I asked if you really wanted to know!

[The Hersch]

As a writer, I'm pretty firm in my belief that if someone misunderstands what I write, the fault is largely mine, and not the reader's. But while I'm sure I haven't made myself as clear as I should have, I'm blowed if I can see how what I wrote about the cathedral can be understood as a polemic against religion. I fault the building as being inorganically related to the religion it purports to embody or whose character it seeks to express-- as being, frankly, a piece of fakery. That's not a slam against the religion, it' a slam against the architecture, or at least against the spirit in which it was conceived. I started quite explicitly by conceding the breath-taking quality of the edifice. It's the relation of this particular building to the religious tradition it inhabits and to the architectural tradition that underlies it that I find problematic. The great Gothic cathedrals were built by a civilization that no longer exists. My brilliant professor, whom I paraphrased, was making the point that in building these imitations of the productions of that earlier civilization, we are in a sense mocking them. We're not honoring their religious convictions, we're hanging tawdry ornaments on their graves.

But to make just one further observation on this particular church: How many great European cathedrals are on a hill miles from the center of town?

[DonRocks]

As a writer, I'm pretty firm in my belief that if someone misunderstands what I write, the fault is largely mine, and not the reader's. But while I'm sure I haven't made myself as clear as I should have, I'm blowed if I can see how what I wrote about the cathedral can be understood as a polemic against religion. I fault the building as being inorganically related to the religion it purports to embody or whose character it seeks to express-- as being, frankly, a piece of fakery. That's not a slam against the religion, it' a slam against the architecture, or at least against the spirit in which it was conceived. I started quite explicitly by conceding the breath-taking quality of the edifice. It's the relation of this particular building to the religious tradition it inhabits and to the architectural tradition that underlies it that I find problematic. The great Gothic cathedrals were built by a civilization that no longer exists. My brilliant professor, whom I paraphrased, was making the point that in building these imitations of the productions of that earlier civilization, we are in a sense mocking them. We're not honoring their religious convictions, we're hanging tawdry ornaments on their graves.

But to make just one further observation on this particular church: How many great European cathedrals are on a hill miles from the center of town?

Okay, you've redeemed yourself (in my eyes; perhaps you needed no redemption in the eyes of others). This was a good, cogent, explanatory post.

[At the risk of being called names such as "imperious," I think I should probably split this general Architecture thread up into sub-threads. I promise I'll give it the "old college try" to do it well, and not be a dictatorial douchebag.]

[DonRocks]

I'm sorry, brian, but I think this is funny as hell.

Oct 31, 2017 - "Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture (and if You Don't, Why You Should)" by Brianna Rennix and Nathan J. Robinson on currentaffairs.org

Blorp!
Rocks

Interesting counter-argument: What would Bach have thought of the fugue in the Hammerklavier? Gutteral, or Explosive? Answer: Yes.

Richter played the entire Hammerklavier Sonata (40+ minutes, which ends with a titanic fugue), and then as an encore, came out and played the fugue again!

NB - Note the example of a "false start" at the one-minute mark, for which Beethoven was famous in his fugues (which he mainly (exclusively?) included in his late period). 

This is, along with Barber's atonal fugue in the final movement of his Piano Sonata, the most powerful fugue ever written for piano (the "real" fugue starts at about 1'55", but I insist you listen to the entire beginning; otherwise, you shouldn't listen at all - you'd only be hurting yourself).