Architecture in the Twentieth Century [antikvár]

Prologue New aesthetic potentiel was releosed at the end of the eighteenth century in the wake of the Enlightenment. The natural sciences were declared a recognized means of explaining the world, and geometric axioms competed with anatomic rules of proportion. The definition of units of measurement based on natural constants was one of the products of the French Revolution; the metre became a valid unit of measurement when the standard metre, one forty-millionth of the earth's circumference, was stored in the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris on 22 June 1799. Etienne-Louis Boullée, architect and member of the Academy, also paid homage to the primacy of geometry in his design work. He prized the sphere highest among the "regular bodies" because, in its all-round symmetry and visual uniformity as well as the "tender and flowing " grace of its contours, it contained all the advantages of a volumetric form. He thereby fell within the tradition of Andrea Palladio, the Renaissance architect who praised the sphere in a similar way: "It is suitable to the highest degree for illustrating the unity, the infinite essence, the constancy and justice of God". The earth goddess Vesta was already associated with the round temple in the ancient world. In his Cenotaph for the English physicist, mathematician and astronomer Isaac Newton, Boullée employed the analogy in a symbol of the globe; the sphere alone seemed an appropriate means of expressing the All in architectural terms. The sphere also hod specific contemporary relevance for Boullée. The Mont-golfier brothers made their first flight in a hot air balloon in 1784; limits believed impossible to overcome had thus been exceeded, gravit/ surmounted. The Cenotaph also attemped to communicate weightlessness. The tiered sequence of hoops within which the large rotunda was set was interrupted at the entrance. Unlike previously seen dome structures, the sphere was thereby exposed below as well as above the meridian and seemed to rest only lightly on the ground. The wish to control nature is also evident in the starry firmament inside. Boullée wanted to "paint with nature" by including her in his work. A relationship with the world, put into concrete terms through "working with the light", takes the place of subjection, of being at the world's mercy. Boullée and his contemporary Claude-Nicolas Ledoux appear progressive solely in their love of geometry; in their built works, however, they fall neatly in line with the classicism of the years around 1800. The old concepts of support and load, the wish for monumentolit/ and reverence were in no sense overcome, even when Ledoux formally reduced the basic building blocks to "circle and square; these ore the letters of the alphabet". The basic problem of modernism was evident even here: although new goals could be named in abstract terms, and the rejection of outdated style forms agreed upon, no coherent new system appeared to replace the classic canon of aesthetics. With the advent of industrialization, the academic architect found new competition in the person of the engineer - a title commonly used tor officers of the arts of Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc "Maçonnerie", 1864 Drawing from the Atlas "Entretiens sur l'Architecture" Bibliothek der Landesgewerbeonstolt Nuremberg