THE CLASSICIST NO-8 THE CLASSICIST o Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America n 8: 2009 20 West 44th Street, Suite 310, New York, NY 10036-6603 - telephone (212) 730-9646 facsimile (212) 730-9649 [email protected] WWW.CLASSICIST.ORG The Classicist at Large 6 : Towards a Renewed Architecture Editor Richard John Designer Essays Tom Maciag 10 : Whitmore’s Palace by Richard Economakis Dyad Communications design office 28 : Albert Simons by Ralph Muldrow Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 34 : The Splendid Inheritance of the Past by Katherine J. Wheeler Production Manager Henrika Dyck Taylor Printer Pimlico Book Company Portfolios Manufactured in China 46 : From the Offices by Richard W. Cameron ©2009 Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America 84 : Imagination and the Sketch All rights reserved ISBN 978-0-9642601-2-2 ISSN 1076-2922 From the Academies by Elizabeth Meredith Dowling Front Cover: Carl Laubin, Architecture Parlante, 2006, Oil on Canvas, 117 x 204 cm. Private Collection. Back Cover: Carl 94 : Founding Principles at Georgia Tech Laubin, Verismo, 2007, Oil on Canvas, 58 x 121cm. Collection of the Artist. End Papers: Details from Michel Etienne 100 : Notre Dame, Yale, Judson, Prince’s Foundation, Miami, ACBA, and ICA&CA Turgot, Plan de Paris, (Paris 1739). Pages 8–9: J. M. Gandy, A Composition of Various Designs (by courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum). Pages 44–45: Duncan Stroik, Detail of Thomas Aquinas College, Santa Paula, California. Pages 92–93: Tim Kelly, YMCA for Manila Naval Base, Georgia Tech MS in Classical Design 2008. Pages 116–17: Leonard Porter, Tai-Yu Burying the Flower Petals, 2002. ©Leonard Porter MMII. Pages 134–35: Schauspielhaus, Berlin. Photograph by Wolfgang Staudt. Pages 166–67: Temple of Artemis, Jerash, Jordan. Photograph by Askii. The Allied Arts 118 : The Dangerous Path by Denis McNamara The generous contributions of individuals and institutions who provided images for publication and the invaluable assistance of the anonymous peer reviewers of the academic articles in the Essays section are very gratefully acknowledged. 128 : Grand Central Academy of Art Miscellanea 136 : The Poetics of Architectural Form by Charles A. Barrett 146 : The New Canon by Andrés Duany The Classicist no. 8 is made possible in part with support from 148 : In Pursuit of the Antiquities of Athens and Ionia by Richard Chandler and William Pars Marshall G. Allan and Karen LaGatta. 160 : Book Reviews 168 : ICA&CA Administration, Membership, and Sponsors The Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America gratefully acknowledges the support of The Beehive Foundation, making possible the publication of this eighth issue of The Classicist. Beehive is publisher of Architecture of the Old South, the pioneering ten-volume series by Mills Bee Lane IV—scholar, historian, preservationist. It surveys, state by state and then in summary volumes, historic buildings throughout the region. In an age of homogenized culture created by cults of technology and bigness, speed and greed, it is a small triumph for one person, working more or less single-handedly from the basement of an old house in Savannah, to have plodded along for years to document, record and, in a sense, preserve an important aspect of the American South’s fast-disappearing culture. “Buildings,” said Lane, “are three-dimensional history books that reflect the comings and goings, successes and failures, aspirations and follies of real people.” www.beehivefoundation.org The Classicist at Large TOWARDS A RENEWED ARCHITECTURE By Richard M. Economakis ne often hears attempts to sway public opinion Constantine’s emulation of Rome in his new imperial capital at against a proposed classical building with the Byzantium. This core concept of the classical tradition, that there is a claim that such buildings are not of “our time.” limitless capacity for reinvention and rediscovery by returning ad fontes, The suggestion, somehow, is that if this library / to the sources, is also illustrated by the numerous later attempts to lay courthouse / town hall is built according to classical principles, derived claim to the glory of Rome: from Charlemagne’s coronation in 800 AD Ofrom a millennial tradition, then the activities within should only be through the medieval notion of Translatio Imperii to the evocation of an conducted while wearing togas, sporting periwigs, or writing with quill Augustan Age in Georgian Britain and beyond. pens. Yet no one ever seems to impute a similar anachronism to the In the sixteenth century a circular historiographical framework was practice of democracy, the study of philosophy, or the use of rhetoric applied by Giorgio Vasari to his account of the progress of painting, —not to mention the writing of history, acting sculpture, and architecture, so that the develop- of tragedies, or the application of mathematics ment of a style or artistic movement traced a —though these are all equally historic fields of trajectory like that of the lifecycle of an organ- human endeavour that owe their first flowering ism—birth, youth, maturity, and, finally, to Classical Greece. Like all other traditions of decay. This interpretative structure, founded learning and scholarship, classical architecture on a cyclical vision of history, endured in pop- has been repeatedly buoyed by periods of resur- ular thought through the first decades of the gence and constantly reinvigorated by innova- twentieth century as witnessed by the success of tion and new knowledge. books such as Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang Human beings, when they have thought des Abendlandes (1918) and Arnold J. Toynbee’s the major Renaissance revival of the all’antica style—but also smaller an ancient Roman reborn. In turn, Palladio provided inspiration for about it, have generally envisaged the path of A Study of History (1934). By then, however, a cycles and eddies within the larger tradition. In 121 AD, on Rome’s Inigo Jones (1573-1652), then Lord Burlington (1694-1753), and history as following one or other of two forms: linear vision of progress was already being birthday, 21 April, Hadrian renamed its celebratory games later, John Soane (1753-1837), C. R. Cockerell (1788-1863) and cyclical or linear. The rhythmic alternation of increasingly embraced, powered by the inde- the Romaia, ceremoniously renewed the boundary (pomerium) of the city Raymond Erith (1904-1973). Each of these, though sharing a wide Golden Ages with periods of darkness is a stan- fatigable twin engines of scientific positivism in conscious imitation of Romulus, and vowed his new Temple of range of common sources, made the tradition notably their own. dard trope in the mythistory of ancient cultures. and historical determinism. As the twentieth Venus and Roma. This ambitious building, on a vast platform Classicism is not eternally young or eternally old, but rather Evidence for a cosmic clockwork was found by century unfolded and the unimaginable overlooking the Colosseum, deliberately recalled in its form the constantly renewed. As the contributions to this eighth volume of the pre-modern mind in the diurnal rhythm of cataclysms of two World Wars came to pass, peripteral temples of ancient Greece and particularly the sanctuary of The Classicist demonstrate—from Schinkel’s nuanced details at the night and day, in the waxing and waning of the this approach, replete with such fallacies as Olympian Zeus in Athens. For Hadrian, his Pax Romana was the Age of Schauspielhaus and Blomfield’s advocacy of the “Grand Manner” to moon, and in the irresistible sequence of the sea- the Zeitgeist, became so commonplace that by Pericles reborn. Leonard Porter’s Christ in Majesty (2007) and Robert A. M. Stern’s sons. Each cycle had, of course, its mythological justification, generally 1989 Francis Fukuyama could ponder if we had reached “The End Similar acts of conscious revival can be observed echoing down the Jacksonville Public Library (2005)—this is a living tradition, associated with the deities of life, death, and rebirth. The onset of win- of History?” corridors of history. In the service of Charlemagne’s explicit quest for coruscating with creative energy and universally understood. What ter, for instance, was explained for the Greeks by Persephone’s periodic The contrast between these two opposed interpretations of history a Renovatio Romani Imperii (Renewal of the Roman Empire) his architect, better way to embark on the architectural challenges of the twenty- return to Hades—drawn back to the underworld by the pomegranate is crucially important. With a linear world view coming to Odo of Metz, referred to the sixth-century masterbuilders of Ravenna first century? —RTJ seeds she had consumed during her first visit. These deities were predominate in the twentieth century, it is not surprising that historians in designing the palatine chapel at Aachen. Six centuries later, Filippo central to mystery cults that led their initiates through cyclic rituals of of architecture increasingly explained the succession of styles and Brunelleschi turned to the proto-Renaissance forms of San Miniato and the Baptistery as models for his Ospedale degli Innocenti to cele- death and rebirth. The concept of renovatio (renewal)—perhaps theories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as simply so many (opposite): C. R. Cockerell, Taylorian Institute, Oxford. Photo by Br Lawrence Lew, O.P. internalized through the popularity of mystery religions like steps up to the temple mount of Modernism. brate quattrocento Florence as the New Rome. Andrea Palladio (1508- Mithraism—fuelled a belief that political rejuvenation could be But the history of Western architecture, which has been suffused 1580) looked back not just to antiquity but also to the work of his (above): Temple of Olympian Zeus, Athens with a view of the Acropolis in symbolized through architectural and urbanistic revivals such as by the koiné of the classical tradition, is unquestionably cyclical. Not just immediate predecessor Donato Bramante (1444–1514), crowning him the background.