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TWO CENTS' WORTH
Building on the
lessons of history
Part 1: The towering challenge of the WTC project
By Henry C K Liu
As New York City prepares to memorialize the
September 11 tragedy on the site of the destroyed World
Trade Center (WTC), other great - and not so great -
architectural projects may serve as lessons.
The
US National Park Service describes the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial in Washington, DC, designed by Maya Lin as "a
testament to the sacrifice of American military
personnel during one of this nation's least popular
wars. The purpose of this memorial is to separate the
issue of the sacrifices of the veterans from the US
policy in the war, thereby creating a venue for
reconciliation." Would the WTC memorial have to separate
the loss of innocent victims from US policy toward the
Islamic world to create a venue for reconciliation?
The Franklin D Roosevelt Memorial competition
produced very unhappy results. The FDR Commission was
established in August 1955. In 1960 and again in 1966,
memorial-design competitions were held. Both times, the
selected designs were disgracefully abandoned as
"inappropriate". In March 1978, the FDR Commission and
the Commission of Fine Arts approved a final memorial
design by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, and in
May 1997 the FDR Memorial was finally dedicated, 42
years after the establishment of the commission. Many
felt that the original winning design by architect
Norman Hoberman was outstanding and should have been
built.
Zaha Hadid, a highly talented
London-based architect who happen to be female and
Iraqi, is not yet involved with the WTC project. Her
design of the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in
Cincinnati, the first museum in the United States
designed by a woman, is widely expected to do for
Cincinnati what Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum has done
for Bilbao, Spain. Her buildings have been described by
critics as free from any single fixed viewpoint, and
have to be experienced from different angles in
continuous movement; and she has been critically
acclaimed for breaking new grounds on spatial concepts
defined by movement. If the Lower Manhattan Development
Corp (LMDC) should find a way to have Hadid centrally
involved some aspects in WTC redevelopment, it would be
a living testament that the tragedy of September 11,
2001, is not a clash of civilizations. It would be a
healing message to the Islamic world and to Arabic
civilization, on top of gaining a very talented
architect.
Architecture always survives its
building program. In the history of human construction,
unlike animal or insect construction such as bird nests,
beehives, anthills and beaver dams, technological
ingenuity in construction is generally the result of
dictates of culturally based esthetic preference rather
than pure functional requirements. This is what makes
architecture an art. And art is uniquely a human
creation. No other species creates art besides humans.
The LMDC professes to be concerned with the
esthetics of the redevelopment effort. Esthetics, in the
philosophical sense of the term, is a branch of
philosophy concerned with the nature of art and the
criteria of artistic judgment. Architecture is concerned
with organizing space for the art of life. The classical
conception of art as the imitation of an idealized
nature was formulated by Plato and developed by
Aristotle in Poetics. Immanuel Kant, Friedrich
von Schelling, Benedetto Croce and Ernst Cassirer all
emphasize the creative and symbolic aspects of art. The
major problem in esthetics deals with the nature of
beauty, which the Greeks defined as good and just. There
are two aspects of judgment: the objective, which is
inherent in the object, and subjective, which identifies
beauty with that which pleases the observer. In his
Critique of Judgement, Kant mediates between the
two approaches by showing that esthetics judgment has
universal validity despite its objective nature, because
subjectivity is constrained by humanity.
The
dome, the pride of Roman engineering and potent
expression of imperial grandeur, was viewed by early
Christians as detestably pagan and a symbol of tyranny.
Early Christian preference for basilicas in central
Italy of triangular roof trusses was rooted in a popular
distaste for established Roman architectural motifs.
Roman esthetics was rejected because early Christians
considered it theologically heathen and socially
oppressive. Early Christian church-goers preferred, as a
gathering place for communal worship, the more neutral
form of a Roman basilica, which was a hall of justice,
with its flat ceiling, to the domical symbolism of Roman
oppression. It was only after Constantine (280-337)
founded Constantinople in 330 as his capital in the
former Greek colony of Byzantium, putting Christianity
under imperial control (caesaropapism) in 323, and the
adaptation of Christianity as the official religion of
the Roman Empire under Theodosius (374-395), that
domical churches became acceptable to Christians, first
in the east and only gradually in the west. Later,
Charlemagne (742-814) and his successors would undertake
to promote the Holy Roman Empire, reviving the concrete
Roman domical form in masonry as a prototype motif for
Romanesque Christian churches, symbolic of a propitious
union of religious piety and imperial power.
The
implication is that architectural forms have cultural
meaning. The esthetics judges of LMDC would do well to
understand this and give serious thought to the meaning
of concepts such as democracy and freedom, and avoid
reducing such noble concepts to cliches of sloganeering
and naively equating egotistic quests for height as
expressions of freedom and democracy.
During the
Renaissance, emerging from centuries of Gothic
verticality based on a longitudinal Latin cross plan,
the fascination with rediscovered antiquity brought back
domical designs, which would best fit over plans of a
Greek-cross motif, with equal lengths in all its arms.
However, the Greek-cross plan for churches conflicted
with the traditional requirement for long processional
naves in Roman Catholic ecclesiastical liturgy, to which
the Latin-cross plan, with its long vertical stem, was
more naturally disposed, as in modified basilica
churches. Renaissance architects, in proposing designs
for new church buildings, struggled simultaneously to
satisfy conflicting aims between their esthetic fixation
on the innate beauty of the dome and the functional
requirements of Church liturgy. This tortuous endeavor
never achieved total success, despite considerable
concentration of inventive genius in an artistically
rich epoch, fueled by ample opportunities for experiment
through abundant church commissions.
The design
of the greatest cathedral of Christendom, St Peter's in
Rome, was a classic example of this conflict between
form and function in Renaissance architecture. The
esthetic power of the Pantheon, a well-preserved domical
Roman structure first built in 27 BC by Agrippa (63-12
BC) to honor all gods in Roman pantheism, rebuilt around
early 2nd century AD by the emperor Hadrian (reigned
117-138), dominated the thinking of Renaissance
architects 14 centuries later. St Peter's was
commissioned in 1505 by Julius II (pope 1503-13) as a
tomb for himself, at the height of the Church's secular
power. The construction of St Peter's required so much
of the Church's resources that its financing brought
about indiscriminate selling of indulgence, the pardon
of temporary punishment due for sin, by a friar named
Tezel traveling through Germany. This abusive practice
provided Martin Luther (1483-1546) with the convenient
evidence of the mother church's decadence. Luther
exploited the decadence of the Church as a rallying cry
for overthrowing an institution the religious dogmas of
which he had came to question. Like all revolutionaries,
Luther equated the evil of the disease with the sin of
the patient.
St Peter's was finally built based
on a Greek-cross plan from a design by Michelangelo
Buonarroti (1474-1564), derived from an earlier concept
by Donato Bramante (1444-1514). Bramante's plan for St
Peter's harked back to his diminutive Tempietto in San
Pietro in Montorio, Rome, completed in 1510, which was
destined to become a giant of an architectural gem
inspired by a small circular domical Roman temple. The
peerless beauty of Bramante's Tempietto was crowned by a
dome of only 4.5 meters in diameter, as compared with
Michaelangelo's 41.75-meter-diameter dome for St Peter's
Basilica.
After Bramante's death, his design for
St Peter's was altered to a Latin-cross plan by the
sociable and accommodating Raphael Sanzio (1484-1520), a
better painter than an architect. Unfortunately for him,
but fortunately for architecture, Raphael died in 1520,
before much damage could be done to Bramante's original
plan, which ironically was protected by the heavy
investment already sunk into foundation work prior to
Bramante's death.
Michelangelo's bold design
consolidated Bramante's original concept of interlocking
snowflake-like crosses into a forceful central
Greek-cross plan defined by four massive mannerist
columns superimposed on sub-motifs of smaller crosses,
topped by a magnificent dome 41.75 meters in diameter
that, when completed in 1626, one and a quarter
centuries after its commencement, would rank as one of
the greatest achievement in Renaissance architecture.
But in 1612, Carlo Maderna (1556-1629), known to
posterity as the architect who ruined Michelangelo's
great design, succumbing to clerical pressure to satisfy
liturgical needs, made the mistake of lengthening the
nave and adding the gigantic and poorly scaled front
facade. This architectural sin obscured the perspective
view of Michelangelo's superb dome from the front plaza
14 years before the dome's completion, and in the
process made the greatest church in Christendom look
like a mundane and oversized three-story building with a
dull facade of prosaic design.
The view to
Michelangelo's magnificent dome was salvaged only by the
grand baroque piazza of Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini
(1589-1680), enclosed by a famous colonnade of 284
Tuscan columns that would inspire English poet Robert
Browning (1812-89) to write two centuries later:
"With arms wide open to
embrace
The entry of the human race."
It would also be a worthy goal for the
redeveloped WTC site.
In architecture,
engineering skills evolve tortuously from the reservoir
of technology in order to deliver the preferred shapes
idealized by man's abstract vision.
Gothic
construction, most identifiable in popular culture by
the flying buttress, is the technological response to
the medieval aspiration toward light and height being
transformed into ecclesiastical architecture. It is the
most unnatural manner of stone construction, a willful
defiance of both the natural characteristic of stone and
the immutable law of gravity, in the name of spiritual
piety.
French Gothic masons, in their religious
zeal, carried stone construction beyond its natural
limits. Their superhuman efforts culminated in Beauvais
Cathedral, constructed between 1225 and 1568, a period
of more than three centuries during which, after
repeated collapses, the builders pushed the top of its
vault to an extreme height of 48 meters, about three and
a half times its span in width, to make it the loftiest
Gothic stone church anywhere and one of the wonders of
the medieval world.
English art critic and
social commentator John Ruskin (1819-1900) would write
with awe in The Seven Lamps of Architecture:
"There are few rocks, even among the Alps, that have a
clear vertical fall as high as the choir of Beauvais."
Artists and architects worldwide have applied
themselves to the problem of proportion. Many theories
of esthetics and practical rules for pleasing design
have been adopted throughout history in art and
architecture regarding good proportions. The early
1st-century Roman architectural writer Vitruvius devoted
the opening chapter of his 10-volume De
Architectura to the matter of proportion, although
he did not formulate a coherent theory. The influential
work was unearthed in the Monastery of St Gall in
Switzerland around the early 15th century and published
in 1486. During the Renaissance, architects such as
Leone Battista Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci and Andrea
Palladio, drawing on Vitruvius' De Architectura
and Plato's Timaeus, devoted themselves to
formulating theories of proportion based on numerical
relationships of musical consonance. Later, a general
infatuation was developed with the Golden Section, with
the ratio of 1:1.618, a proportion found extensively in
living creatures in nature, including botanical forms
and the human figure. In the mid-20th century, the
French modern master of architecture Le Corbusier
(1887-1965) proposed a system of proportion called Le
Modulor, described as "a harmonic measure to the human
scale", based on the Golden Section according to the
human measure. Yet a sense of proportion refers to more
than mere physical dimension, to encompass
reasonableness, propriety, balance and restraint. It is
above all a sense of value and a concern for truth.
Significant movements in architecture are always
based on a vision of the ideal society of their times.
Greek architecture seeks to express the balanced order
of Athenian democracy. Roman architecture glorifies the
majesty of imperial power. Romanesque architecture has
grown as a focal point of communal agricultural
organization based on a spiritual humility commonly
cherished by early Christians and a need for fortified
compounds against barbarian invasion in a fallen empire.
Gothic architecture derives inspiration from the pious
vision of a medieval urban society and the collective
civic pride of competing towns. The Renaissance produces
an architecture of humanism that lends dignity to
capitalistic individualism.
The Stuart
architecture of the late English Renaissance,
particularly during the reign of Charles II (1660-85),
patron of Christopher Wren (1631-1723), with its heavy
emphasis on church building, echoes the triumph in
England of Presbyterianism and Restoration politics.
Wren, trained as an astronomer-mathematician at Oxford,
with only six months of architectural training acquired
while visiting Paris in his late youth in 1665, during
the expansion of the Palais du Louvre, kept company with
Giovanni Bernini and Jules Hardouin Mansart (or
Mansard), celebrated architects of his time. Never
having visited Italy, Wren was spellbound by French
ideas, in divergence from Indigo Jones (1573-1654), the
Italian-influenced English architect of Stuart
architecture who would introduce to England the
much-copied Palladian motif, a composition consisting of
an arch and support columns within a super order of
giant columns supporting an entablature. Andrea Palladio
(1508-80), drawing on the written work of Vitruvius,
published his influential I quattro libri
dell'architectura in 1570, translated into English
as The Four Books of Architecture in 1716.
After the great fire of 1666, Wren prepared
within a few days a great plan for the reconstruction of
London that would never be executed. Aside from the
celebrated St Paul's cathedral, reflecting the rise of
Protestantism, Wren would execute 52 other Protestant
churches in London between 1670 and 1711, at the rate of
almost one per year, most of which still stand in modern
times.
While Stuart architecture heralded the
advent of Protestantism in England, the Baroque was the
awe-inspiring instrument of the Counter-reformation,
sponsored by the Jesuits, defenders of the True Faith.
It spread quickly to all Roman Catholic countries. Louis
XIV later co-opted the propaganda effectiveness of the
Baroque and the stately legitimacy of Classicism to
enshrine the stature of absolute monarchy.
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1735-1806), the leading
architect of France immediately prior to the French
Revolution, esthetic interest in whose style of
rhetorical severity would be revived among Post Modern
Rationalist in the 1980s, found himself imprisoned by
the revolutionaries after 1789 for his role in designing
monuments and instruments of socio-economic-political
oppression, such as the monopolistic saltworks at
Arc-et-Senans, a prison at Aix, and the ring of 50
barrieres - custom toll houses - around Paris.
These barrieres, so admired by academic critics,
were so hated by the public as symbols of the oppressive
ancient regime that most of them were torn down amid
popular uprisings during the Revolution.
In
reaction, the ascetic simplicity of Neoclassicism became
the embodiment of the purist ideals of revolutionary
France. Napoleon Bonaparte, builder of empire rather
than buildings, imposed his Roman-inspired imperial
style on the decor of the French Renaissance, remodeling
the palatial rooms of the Chateau Fontainebleau with
motifs of military tents from the battlefield. He
selected the bee as the symbol for his imperial
insignia, signifying his admiration for bee-like
characteristics of hard work, loyalty, fierceness toward
enemies, and efficient organization, so evident in its
instinctive ecological roles as gatherer of honey and
facilitator of botanical fertilization. The Napoleonic
age produced the Empire style of richly adorned
neoclassic silhouette, created by architects Charles
Percier and Pierre Fontaine, which would later be
adopted by the German bourgeoisie into a style known as
Biedermeier.
Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew,
Napoleon III, the bourgeois emperor who achieved power
with speeches on the glory of his uncle's military
exploits rather than with live battles, who mongered
fear of social radicalism where his uncle promised the
vision of a new world order, resurrected the baroque
style and infested it with the cultural obesity of
vulgarity and ostentatious exhibitionism of the Second
Empire. Napoleon III's style would be imitated by every
subsequent pint-size dictator until the socially
conscious, moralist Modern Movement emerged after the
collapse of the obsolete European dynastic orders
brought about by World War I.
Modern
architecture rose from the hopes of social democratic
ideals stemming from the collapse, in the aftermath of
World War I, of the European monarchies and their
attendant social and esthetic values as constituted in
the system of court-sponsored academies. While the
cultured public welcomed the new artistic philosophy,
official suppression of the Modern Movement by both Nazi
Germany and the post-Lenin Soviet Union forced its
migration to the United States, where it was co-opted
into the service of corporate capitalism after being
sanitized of most of its social-democratic program.
Post-Modernism, with its naive fascination with
traditional motifs devoid of social content, was a
resultant stylistic development from boredom with a
Modern esthetic stripped of its radical social root. It
reflected the distorted values of the self-indulging
yuppie generation and the greed-worshipping environment
of deregulated market capitalism of the decades since
the Vietnam War that brought an end to the age of
innocence and the era of hippies and flower children.
These are issues that the LMDC needs to address
in greater depth, more than showcase public hearings,
before true architecture can emerge from a collection of
buildings constructed as commercial transactions. Among
the army of consultants advising the LMDC, there do not
seem to be any social critics, historians, philosophers
or poets. Jacques Barzun, the distinguished historian
and social critic, developed the thesis in his From
Dawn to Decadence that in the 16th century a culture
began to emerge in the West that "offered the world a
set of ideas and institutions not found earlier or
elsewhere". The following five centuries saw one of the
most creative outpourings of art, science, religion,
philosophy, and social thought in human history. But
this great era of cultural creativity appears to be
nearing an end. Western culture, once united toward a
common purpose, is now rife with moral and ideological
uncertainty, "for and against nationalism, for and
against individualism, for and against the high arts,
for and against strict morals and religious belief". Is
greed now the only functioning value?
Palaces,
temples and tombs are the three most important classes
of buildings in ancient cultures. This is true for the
ancient Chinese, Egyptians, Mesopotamians and Greeks.
The Romans were probably the first people to build
important buildings for public and private pleasure, in
the form of baths, arenas, racecourses and villas.
Religious and political buildings have occupied center
stage for most of human history. Not until the rise of
modern capitalism did buildings designed for profit
become important architecturally.
The Greeks
invented the concept of orders of architecture. An order
of architecture is a design assemblage consisting of a
pedestal consisting of a base, a die and a cap; an
upright column in the form of a shaft sitting on a base
and topped by a capital; and a horizontal entablature,
divided into architrave, frieze and cornice at the top.
The entablature in a traditional Greek building fits
horizontally below the triangular pediment that
disguises the conventional wood-trussed roof behind.
Each architectural order is governed by its own
rules of proportion and commands its own associated
molding and ornamentation. It is a formal vocabulary of
architecture as well as a standard for manufacturing of
ornamental building parts. Its proper application
provides the grammar of good design in the classical
style.
The Greek architectural orders were
originally expressions of civic pride among the
city-states of Greece, with each city-state preferring
its own. The application of architectural orders to
building in the Greek colonies implied political
allegiance to the city of its origin. As time passed,
the orders were used for purely esthetic purposes.
To the Greek orders of Doric, Ionic and
Corinthian, the Romans added Tuscan and Composite.
Egyptians and Mesopotamians used columns with capitals,
some motifs of which influenced Greeks capital deigns,
but they did not develop any formal orders of
architecture.
Eugene Viollet-le-Duc (1814-79),
the French architect and restorer of historical
buildings, asserted that the Greek orders of
architecture were not derivations in stone of earlier
timber construction, as postulated by some academicians.
He claimed instead that they were designs whose sense of
stability and permanence rested in the inherent
characteristic of stone as a building material.
The Erechtheion (Ionic, c 420-393 BC) on the
Acropolis in Athens, with an eastern hexastyle (five
bays) portico, a northern tetrastyle (three bays)
portico and a southern Caryatid portico, was designed by
Mnesicle. Caryatids, columns in the form of a female
figure, a motif of questionable taste and despicable
political symbolism, were traditionally taken to
represent the brave women of Caria, whose citizens sided
with the Persians against the Greeks in the Persian Wars
(500-449 BC) and were made slaves after their capture by
the Greeks. The women of Caria were so highly prized by
their Greek captors for their physical beauty and noble
character, and they afforded their masters such great
social prestige in the slave-owning democracy of
Athenian Greece, that statues of them in stone were
incorporated into Greek monumental buildings. The
Caryatid motif would be widely revived during the
Renaissance, and subsequently by the eclectic academic
styles of the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly
during the Classical Revival period.
Trajan's
Column of marble in Rome, built in AD 113, inspired
Napoleon's bronze imitation of it in Place Vendome in
Paris, built in 1806 of captured cannons from the battle
of Austerlitz (1805), replacing the statue of Louis XIV
designed by Francois Girardon (1628-1715), a classical
French court sculptor who became much in vogue in his
time for his Nicolas Poussin-inspired Hellenistic style
and stately composition, as expressed in his Apollo
attended by the Nymphs, designed for the Grotto of
Thetis in the Versailles gardens. Girardon championed
the classical school of innate supremacy, as opposed to
Pierre Puget (1620-92), a highly original sculptor in
the baroque tradition of human struggle, whose Milo of
Croton, viewable in the Louvre Museum in modern times,
ran counter to the official taste as dictated by Louis
XIV. Classicism as a style provided the detached
grandeur required by the political absolutism of the Sun
King (le Roi Soleil). The loss of royal favor
suffered by Puget marked the triumph of French
classicism over Italian-inspired baroque in 17th-century
sculpture in France.
Place Vendome, a
245-by-233-meter urban open space highlighted by
Napoleon's Column in the center of Paris, one of the
most celebrated examples of 17th-century French urban
design, was planned by architect Jules Hardouin Mansart
(1640-1708) to enhance the real-estate value of the
property of le duc de Vendome by combining the Royal
Library, the academies, the Mint and some embassies into
a prestigious grande ensemble. The three-story
facades of the buildings surrounding Place Vendome were
designed and constructed in 1701 to achieve a uniform
appearance of pleasing proportions, with the speculative
townhouses behind the finished facades to be built later
by different architects for different clients for
varying functions. Frederic Chopin would live at No 12
and die there in 1849. In modern times, No 15 would be
the world-famous Ritz Hotel; Nos 11 and 13, the Ministry
of Justice, formerly the Royal Chancellery, on the
facade of which the official measure of the meter would
be inlaid in 1848. Modern science would define the meter
as the distance traveled by light in
0.000000003335640952 second, as measured by a cesium
clock.
Napoleon's Column in Place Vendome was
39.6 meters in height, contrasting the 16.5-meter-high
equestrian statue of le Roi Soleil it replaced,
and around which the square had been initially planned,
thus doing visual violence to the fine proportion of
Mansart's brilliant scheme of urban design. The column
was topped by a statue of Napoleon, as Caesar, which
would be replaced by that of Henry IV after the
Restoration in 1814, and reinstalled by Louis-Philippe
of the July monarchy, but with Napoleon, as general in
military uniform. The Paris Commune of 1871 would tear
down the column as part of its violent political
protest. It was rebuilt by the Third Republic
(1871-1940) and on top of it was placed a replica of the
statute of General Bonaparte, the revolutionary soldier,
which still stands in modern times.
The model of
Napoleon's imitation, the Column of Trajan in Rome,
designed by Apolloldorus of Damascus, the emperor
Trajan's favorite military engineer-slave, who also
designed the Emperor's Basilica adjacent to his column,
still stands, 38 meters tall, optically corrected with
entasis, in the forum bearing the emperor's name before
the Temple of Trajan deified. The shaft of the column,
3.7m in diameter, consists of 17 marble drums, covered
with relief sculpture in a 1.1m-wide spiral band,
running 243.8m in length, with more than 2,500 human
figures in a continuous coil recording major events in
Trajan's wars against the Dacians. Inside the shaft is a
spiral staircase lit by small openings. It was topped
with a bronze statue of Trajan that stayed until 1787
when Pope Sixtus V had it replaced by one of St Peter.
Its square pedestal, ornamented with sculptured
trophies, serves as the entrance to a mausoleum for
Trajan, whose ashes were deposited there in AD 117 AD in
a golden urn that would be stolen during the Middle
Ages.
The urban designer of Place Vendome was
Jules Hardouin Mansart, grandnephew of architect
Francois Mansart (1598-1666), who designed the Orleans
wing of the Chateau de Blois. The younger Mansart was
made chief architect of royal buildings in 1699 after
the death of Louis Le Vau. Among his designs for
Versailles, beside the legendary Galerie des Glaces
(Hall of Mirrors), was the widely admired garden facade,
a refined continuation of Le Vau's style; the chapel;
the orangery; and the Grand Trianon, restored first by
Napoleon in 1805 and by Charles de Gaulle in 1962 as a
reception site for visiting foreign heads of state to
the Fifth Republic.
Mansart's most successful work
was the impressive Dome des Invalides (1706), considered
by many as the most elegant Renaissance form in the
Parisian skyline and indeed, in all of France.
Napoleon's body was returned from St Helena by the order
of Louis Philippe in 1840 and entombed under the Dome
des Invalides.
The 17th-century urban space,
enclosed by modest buildings and pedestrian in scale,
and accessed by unassuming, narrow streets of the
surrounding urban fabric, of which Place Vendome and
Place des Vosges are classic prototypes, were considered
by 18th-century urban-design theorists esthetically
unsatisfactory, lacking in grandeur and theatrical
perspectives. Such neighborhood urban spaces, elegant
and peaceful, an end in themselves rather than means to
something else, not being foci of monumental axes and
grand vistas, not fed by broad boulevards intended for
carriages and equestrians, were designed for pedestrian
gathering rather than grand parades, and intended to be
human rather than heroic in scale.
It was a
style shunned by the neo-Baroque visions of Louis XIV
and later by the vulgar exhibitionism of the Second
Empire (1852-70) under Napoleon III (1808-73) and Baron
Haussmann, the influential but insensitive city planner
under the imperial dictator. George-Eugene Haussmann
(1809-91), with his wholesale clearance of historical
Paris, indiscriminately wiping out ancient picturesque
quartiers of uniquely individual character and
colorful past, destroyed much of the city's old charm,
not to mention historical landmarks, and replaced them
with sterile and brassy monumental white elephants,
linked by drab and mediocre avenues devoid of human
scale. Armed with the blind zeal of a sanitation
engineer, with as much sensitivity for architecture as a
circus producer, Haussmann's baroque city planning was
also dominated by the political purpose of clearing the
rebel-infested urban quartiers in the old city,
of the ease of effectively deploying troops on the new,
broad boulevards against much-feared popular uprisings,
and of preventing the easy erection of revolutionary
barricades on narrow streets that had once frustrated
government authority in the "Bloody June Days" of the
democratic uprisings of 1848.
Unfortunately,
Haussmann has since been much imitated by many egomaniac
city planners worldwide in modern times, just as his
patron, Napoleon III, has been imitated by every
pint-size dictator. Victor Hugo (1802-85), the towering
figure of French literature, poetry and drama, son of a
general under Napoleon Bonaparte, opposed the regime of
Napoleon III's Second Empire and lived in exile in
protest until after its downfall in 1870. Emile Zola
(1840-1902) documented in his series of social-realism
novels the abuses suffered by the poor in France during
the Second Empire, as Charles Dickens (1812-70) did with
the Industrial Revolution in England. The sensational
novels of Alexandre Dumas the younger, son of Dumas
pere, the best-known of which being
Camille, mirrored the pitiless emptiness of
Parisian life, while the operettas of Jacques Levy
Offenbach, though popularly acclaimed by society during
the Second Empire, satirized the mundane values of their
naive, applauding audiences.
The Paris Opera
(begun in 1861 and opened in 1875), the crown jewel of
the Second Empire, the piece de resistance de la
Belle Epoque of the bourgeois emperor, was designed
by Charles Garnier (1825-98), star student of the
state-sponsored Ecole des Beaux-Arts, winner of the
Grand Prix de Rome. The building, which would become the
model for architecturally mundane opera houses all over
the world, failed to herald any worthwhile movement of
architecture. With its unabashed flaunting of banal
stylistic ostentation, devoid of originality, mindlessly
confusing conspicuous consumption with sophisticated
elegance, oozing with the vulgarity of the nouveau
riche, it was a bourgeois caricature of the much-admired
style of the exquisite east facade of the Louvre
designed by Claude Perrault (1613-88). Functionally, the
horseshoe plan of the Paris Opera House condemned a
disproportionately large portion of the audience to
obstructed sight lines and inferior acoustics while
affording a few boisterous celebrities in the side
parterres to compete with the stage for
attention. The New York Metropolitian Opera House adopt
a horseshoe plan, modified to accommodate 3,700 seats,
more that twice the capacity of the Paris Opera,
magnified the faults of the Paris Opera while diluting
the intimate spatial quality of the horseshoe plan by
its oversize.
Richard Wagner, in 1875, upon
visiting the gaudy new Paris Opera House 14 years after
the French version of his Tannhauser had received a
humiliating rebuff in Paris in 1861, was rumored to have
suggested, with typical sarcastic rendition, that the
new building was of a design more fitting for a casino
than an opera house. Incidentally, Garnier also designed
the Casino in Monte Carlo. Wagner went on to build his
dream opera house in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth
(completed in 1876) in which the requirements for
innovative staging of musical drama, perfect sight lines
and balanced acoustics were the guiding design
considerations. The sunken orchestral pit, a standard in
modern opera houses, was first introduced by Wagner at
Bayreuth.
Claude Perrault (1613-88), architect,
scientist, physician and a leading scholar in his time,
collaborated between 1667 and 1670 with Le Vau and
Charles Le Brun in the design of the east facade of the
Louvre, popularly known as the Colonnade, and
established a standard for classical balance and order
in French Renaissance architecture. He also designed the
Paris Observatory, which is still in use. In 1673,
Perrault translated from Latin to French, at the request
of prime minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the monumental
work of Vitruvius, the Roman writer on architecture.
Perrault also wrote a treatise on the five orders of
architecture, which would help to disseminate correct
information and proper application of standardized
conventions of architecture that would elevate the
general quality of French academic design.
Louis
Le Vau (1612-70), architect of Louis XIV, succeeded
Jacques Lemercier as architect for the Louvre, on which
he collaborated with Perrault and Le Brun, the
painter-decorator. His design for Versailles, with
collaboration from Le Brun, created the basic scheme
that would later be completed by Jules Hardouin Mansart.
While a symbol of royal absolutism in politics,
the design of Versailles was based culturally on the
rationalist creed of Rene Descartes (1569-1650): the
imposition of the intellect over matter and the mastery
of human intelligence over nature, and of order over
atrophy. It was the opposite of English romanticism,
with its adoration of picturesque nature and infatuation
with decadence in the form of simulated ruins.
Among Le Vau's other designs are the Chateau de
Vaux-le-Vicomte; the College des Quatre Nations, now the
Institute de France; and the Church of St Sulpice, the
facade of which would be designed later in 1733 by
Giovanni Servandoni, who would win a competition with
his Antique style.
The Chateau de Vaux le
Vicomte was built in 1661 by Nicolas Fouguet, the
finance minister who invoked the envy of the Sun King
during the elaborate house-warming party that turned out
to be his own farewell party, followed by jail for
crimes of insolent and audacious luxury inappropriate
for a finance minister. It has been speculated by
historians that the concept of Versailles first occurred
to the young Louis XIV during that fateful party at Vaux
le Vicomte when his admiration for the architecture of
his powerful minister's chateau was eclipsed by his
annoyance at the politics of ostentatious consumption as
practiced by anyone else except the absolute monarch.
Charles Le Brun (1619-90), strongly influenced
by Poussin, the very embodiment of French classicism,
with the support of Colbert, was the Sun King's favorite
painter in 1662. Le Brun was appointed head of the
Gobelins works in 1663, the renowned factory of the
famous Gobelins tapestries and other furnishings for
Versailles. He later became director of the Academie
Royal de Peinture et de Sculpture, responsible for the
design of royal objets d'art.
Overseeing
a large corps of painters, sculptors, engravers and
weavers, Le Brun controlled artistic production in
France for more than two decades. Though not a designer
of originality, Le Brun's skill in administration
enabled him to provide an atmosphere of high-quality
richness and splendor consonant with the age of le
Roi Soleil. Under the direction of Mansart's genius,
Le Brun decorated several rooms in Versailles, the most
famous of which was the Galerie des Glaces.
The
record of socialist art has been mixed. The relationship
between revolution and art has never been fully
resolved. Part of the problem may be that while
creativity is art is perpetually revolutionary,
political revolutions tend to ebb and flow in phases.
From counter-reformation Baroque promoted by the
Jesuits, to the revolutionary art of the French
(neoclassicism) and Soviet (social realism) revolutions,
the basic conflict between fixed ideology and continuous
creativity has led to very dissatisfying results. In
life, one can be quite comfortable with the notion of
politics in command, yet in art, the issue is not as
clear.
Jacques-Louis David (1748-1845) was a
member of the Academie and court painter to Louis XVI,
yet he was a fervent revolutionary, elected to the
Convention and voted for the regicide and the repression
of the Royal Academie and the Academie de France. He
painted the Assassination Murat, a portrait of Mme
Recamier, and Napoleon's coronation. During the Reign of
Terror, he routinely repainted group portraits with
purged politicians removed. In reaction to French
Baroque, the rational ascetic simplicity of
Neoclassicism became the embodiment of the purist ideals
of revolutionary France. One can see a continuity of
neoclassical idealism in socialist social realism.
This is part of a larger issue of the
relationship art to political philosophy. The entire
Renaissance was supported by a political ideology that
is of dubious acceptability by modern standards.
Despotism was a boon to Italian Renaissance art and
architecture. A case can be made to condemn the Italian
Renaissance as a movement of courtly pretension and
elitist taste prescribed by theme, content and form to
the questionable needs of secular potentates and
ecclesiastical mania. The noblest social art, one can
argue, is that which the contribution of multitudes
create for themselves a common gift of glory, such as
the Gothic cathedrals and the temples of ancient Greece.
Critics almost universally denounce the low
esthetic value of the Milan cathedral, begun by Gian
Galeazzo Visconti (1351-1402), a warlord with a vision
of a united Italy, on a scale befitting that vision.
After Gian's death due to the plague, Lodovic Sforza
(1451-1508) summoned Bramante and Leonardo to design a
cupola that the people of Milan, in their love for
Gothic fidelity, rejected. Building of the cathedral
went on for three centuries, halting whenever funds were
exhausted. The final facade was finally completed only
by the imperial command of Napoleon in 1809.
Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72), the model
Renaissance man, was discovered by Cosimo de'Medici
(1380-1464), merchant prince of Florence, betrayer of
the Republic, head of Europe's first banking dynasty,
champion of the moneyed middle class, who helped the
Sforza clan to seize Milan. Cosimo also employed
Brunnelleschi, Donatello, Gilberti, Lucca della Rubbia,
Massaccio, Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi and, most
important, the Humanists. Alberti also worked for the
Malatestas - Evil Heads of Rimini, whose despotic rule
was laced with incest and murder. The Baroque was the
propaganda vehicle for the Jesuits in their
counter-reformation campaign and the architecture of the
Inquisition.
By contrast, Tatlin's monument for
the Third International was an attempt to unite artistic
expression with the new socialist ideal as the Eiffel
Tower did for industrialization. The Productivist Group
maintained in their polemic that material and
intellectual production were of the same order. Leftist
artists devoted their energy to making propaganda for
the new Soviet government by painting the surfaces of
all means of transport with revolutionary images to be
viewed in remote corners of the collapsing czarist
empire. Constructivism declared all out war on bourgeois
art. Alas, the movement met its demise not from
bourgeois resistance, but from internal doctrinal
inquisition. Much of Constructivist esthetic creativity
was subsequently co-opted by bourgeois society.
Thus it is clear that the complexity and
difficulty of achieving architectural triumph for the
WTC site redevelopment and for creating a fitting
memorial are not as simple as issuing a politically
correct mission statement, or running a routine design
competition. To succeed, it needs above all
soul-searching introspection, of which the tragic events
of September 11, 2001, do not seem to have engendered
enough. It is a legitimate question whether rebuilding
the same, except bigger and better, is an appropriate
response for enhancing American value.
Henry C K Liu is chairman of the New
York-based Liu Investment Group. He is also an architect
and urban designer, recipient of Progressive
Architecture Awards in both Architecture and Urban
Design, and was head of the Graduate Urban Design
Program at the University of California at Los Angeles
and a visiting professor at Columbia and
Harvard.
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