604 THEORY OF DESIGN

LECTURE 1 PICTURESUE & NEO-CLASSICAL ARCHITETURE

DHRITI DHAUNDIYAL

PICTURESQUE : THE PHILOSOPHY

For Neo-classical theorists like Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Abbe Laugier, ideal beauty

was the highest goal of the artist: this was a beauty from which all particular and

characteristic features had been purged. The painter who aimed at the highest style of art

must said Reynolds Correct nature by herself, her imperfect state by her more perfect and by

what may seem a paradox, he continues, he learns to draw naturally by drawing his figures

unlike to anyone object. The rules were old, and were not originally based upon works of art

at all, but upon the philosophical idealism of Plato, for whom there was nothing so beautiful

as the idea of beauty: which, however, could only be thought about and not seen. It as such

an ideal type of beauty that Raphael sought after, as in our first slide,* and which Albert

defined as a beauty to which nothing could be added and nothing taken away

BEAUX ARTS

The Picturesque style remained popular from the 1840s well into the early 20th

century. As part of the Beaux Arts era, however, it continued to thrive until the 1940s as the

larger landscape setting for many estate-scale Neoclassical dwellings and associated formal

garden complexes. This use of the Picturesque followed the lead of the late 18th c. British

landscape gardener Humphry Repton, who added formal gardens and terraces around the

perimeter of large country houses to moderate the transition from the Neoclassical

architecture to the surrounding parkland. Thus American designers often placed formal

gardens (as well as tennis courts, swimming pools and other amenities) adjacent to the

house (or linked to it by terraces and pergolas), locating these Beaux Arts features within a

greater Picturesque naturalistic designed landscape context.

PRINCIPLES OF THE PICTURESQUE

From painting and landscape gardening architecture was affected eventually by the principle

of irregularity and asymmetry. This was a most important event in the history of architecture,

because the assumption behind all previous architectural planning whether Greek, Roman,

Byzantine, Gothic and Baroque had been based upon the idea of regularity and symmetry.

The desire for irregularity in building stems, apparently, from the artistic delight in ruins and

ancient edifices which we see in the paintings of Claude, Poussin and Ruisdael* in the seventeenth

century. Now the artistic enjoyment of ruins and ancient buildings is an enjoyment which is not

confined to the building itself but also embraces the buildings history and its setting. We think of

the purpose the building has served, the historical associations it arouses, its historical and

aesthetic relationship to its rural or urban setting.

THE PICTURESQUE

The new delight in asymmetrical informality in building was the product not so much of

professional architects but of men of letters interested in literature, gardening and painting. Vanburgh

was a poet and dramatist before he became an architect and unlike other architects of the time was

interested in English medieval architecture because of its historical associations. The first man to sit

down and deliberately plan an asymmetrical building at one go was another connoisseur, Greek scholar

an collector, Richard Payne Knight. In Downton Castle, Payne Knight designed a casellated gothic

reminiscent of the real medieval castles of the Welsh borderlands. The asymmetry is apparent: square

and octagonal towers abut from the walls, in the form of huge irregular bastions, some windows are flat,

some crowned with pointed arches, there are some oriels, and so on. Payne Knights Downton Castle of

1774 together with his writings on the Picturesque were enormously influential in determining taste in

domestic architecture at the end of the 18th and throughout the greater part of the 19th century.

INTERIORS

The picturesque principle even influenced the internal architecture of

buildings. Both John Summerson and Nicholas Pevsner claim to see the working of

Picturesque principles in the architecture of Sir John Soane, especially in his own

house at No 13, Lincholns Inn Fields. In the breakfast parlour for example the

shallow arches detach the dome from the walls, there are unexpected twists and

turns. Here is the Library and Dining Room. The master of surprise in internal

spaces is Sir John Soane writes Pevsner. His own house is full of unexpected and

not easily comprehended effects of concealed lighting, concealed structure and

unexpected changes of level.

Artistic concept and style of the late 18th and early 19th centuries characterized by a preoccupation with the pictorial values of architecture and landscape in combination with each other.

Enthusiasm for the picturesque evolved partly as a reaction against the earlier 18th-century trend of Neoclassicism, with its emphasis on formality, proportion, order, and exactitude. The term picturesque originally denoted a landscape scene that looked as if it came out of a painting in the style of the 17th-century French artists Claude Lorrain or Gaspard Poussin. In England, the picturesque was defined in a long controversy between Sir Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight as an aesthetic quality existing between the sublime (i.e., awe-inspiring) and the beautiful (i.e., serene), and one marked by pleasing variety, irregularity, asymmetry, and interesting textures. For example, medieval ruins in a natural landscape were thought to be quintessentially picturesque.

The picturesque never evolved into a coherent theory, but various works of architecture and landscape gardening display its influence, particularly in an emphasis on the relation between buildings and their natural or landscaped setting. Price was the foremost exponent of the picturesque in landscape gardening. The English architect and town planner John Nash produced some of the most exemplary works incorporating the concept.

Stourhead House and Gardens, Stourton, Warminster

Kew Gardens, Surrey Chinese Pagoda, 1763 Sir William Chambers

NEOCLASSICISM

Neoclassicism was a revived interest in classical forms and ideas that saturated European

and American intellectual thought, fine arts and politics during the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries. Neoclassicism was a transatlantic phenomenon. American

neoclassicism was at first a channel of English antiquarianism. Americans had extremely

close cultural and literary ties to London. Economical mass printing, affordable books

and engraved drawings helped to stimulate interest and spread neoclassical taste.

Academies, publishers, libraries and museums moved neoclassical ideas forward with

accelerating velocity and at all levels of culture.

THE PHILOSOPHY

Neoclassicism admired order, simplicity, clarity, and reason set in a mood of quiet grandeur. It used classical exempla as guides. It left a plentiful record of observations, reflections, and designs in books, essays and folios. It asserted its intentions in clear, detailed, and often majestic prose. It conveyed in precise and elegant language its theory and practice, its means of thought and execution, and its progress as an idea and institutional force. With profound enthusiasm for what they were doing and the new aesthetic they were creating, eighteenth-century scholars examined newly discovered artifacts, not only manuscripts but also old pottery and coins, for example, looking for historical clues to what made a great civilization and culture. There is but one way for the moderns to become great, and perhaps unequalled by imitating the ancients, the German historian Johann Winckelmann declared in his influential 1755 book, Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture.

NEOCLASSICISM

The theme of neo-classicism:

(1) History

(2) Purity

(3) Rationality

(4) Education

NEOCLASSICISM

Neoclassicism represents simplification after Baroque and Rococo:

straight lines are favored over curves,

volumes are less often contrasted,

adornments are fewer,

symmetry becomes a must

columns and lintels are more frequent than arches,

triangular pediments than semi-circular ones.

balustrades crown buildings

Indoors, neoclassicism made a discovery of the genuine classic interior, inspired by the rediscoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum. These had begun in the late 1740s, but only achieved a wide audience in the 1760s, with the first luxurious volumes of tightly controlled distribution of Le Antichit di Ercolano (The Antiquities of Herculaneum). The antiquities of Herculaneum showed that even the most classicizing interiors of the Baroque, or the most "Roman" rooms of William Kent were based on basilica and temple exterior architecture turned outside in, hence their often bombastic appeatrance to modern eyes: pedimented window frames turned into gilded mirrors, fireplaces topped with temple fronts.

The new interiors sought to recreate an authentically Roman and genuinely interior vocabulary. Techniques employed in the style included flatter, lighter motifs, sculpted in low frieze-like relief or painted in monotones en camaeu ("like cameos"), isolated medallions or vases or busts or bucraniaor other motifs, suspended on swags of laurel or ribbon, with slender arabesques against backgrounds, perhaps, of "Pompeiian red" or pale tints, or stone colors. The style in France was initially a Parisian style, the Got grec ("Greek style"), not a court style; when Louis XVI acceded to the throne in 1774, Marie Antoinette, his fashion-loving Queen, brought the "Louis XVI" style to court.

NEOCLASSICISM

Neo--classical, or "new" classical, describes buildings that are inspired by classical architecture , particularly of ancient Greece and Rome.

A Neo--classical building is likely to have some or all of these features:

Symmetrical shape

Triangular pediment

Domed roof

The use of Greek & Roman Orders

Tall columns/ order that rise the full height of the building

OsterleyPark Hounslow, London, Robert Adam

Etruscan Room, Osterly Park

United States Capitol Washington, D.C., 1793, Washington, D.C., 1793--present

Church of St.Genevieve/ The Pantheon/ The Pantheon Paris, 175790, Jacques-Germain Soufflot (171380).

Church of St.Genevieve/ The Pantheon/ The Pantheon Paris, 175790, Jacques-Germain Soufflot (171380).

INSPIRATION

Architects of the time drew inspiration from a number of architectural building types taken from antiquity:

Most common resources are

(1) The Roman triumphal arch.

(2) The Greek / Roman temple.

ARC DETRIOMPHE CARROUSEL, PARIS

(1806-08) Charles Piercier and Pierre Francois and Pierre Francois--Leonard Fontaine

Copied the detail of Arch of Constantine

Massive rectangular slab of masonry with three holes in the center hole is the main arch, the other two are lower and narrower subsidiary arches.

Four columns, dividing the arches, that stand on pedestals and rising to an entablature, which breaks out over each column and at each of those separate columnt carries a carved standing figure.

MAISON CARREE ( 130 AD )

Temple architecture were used widely as an antique model for architecture.

The best preserved of all Roman temples is the Corinthian Maison Carree at Nimes (c. AD 130).

A typical temple -a rectangular building with an open portico and pediment in front with columns all round -was

Used as a model for churches widely in the eighteenth century.

Attracted such bored epithets as 'mere copy ism and 'cold imitation' to the Neoclassical movement

BRANDENBURG GATE (1789--93)LANGHANS

Distantly inspired by the propylae on the Acropolis in Athens,

It was the first of the ceremonial Doric gateways to rise in modern Europe.

The Greek revival in Germany was linked with the growth of Prussian nationalism and imbued with the supposed moral virtues of the Doric order.

BANK OF ENGLAND, LONDON (1788-1833) SIR JOHN SOANE

Evident are the basic geometric shapes of the composition.

Flat surface expression stressing the crisp outline.

Pilasters, entablatures and coffers reduced to a thin diagrammatic pattern of grooves and fretwork.

Rigorist tendencies evident.

CENOTAPH & MONUMENT FOR SIR ISAAC NEWTON (1784)

Huge hollow sphere as metaphorical tribute to the scientists work.

Monumental scale with stripped down classicizing elements

Building to house a planetarium and shrine.

Exterior View: note rows of cypress trees ringing the sphere

Interior View -Night: Internal illumination system to simulate the solar system.

FURTHER READING

Albert Boime, Art in an Age of Revolution, 1750-1800, Chicago, 1987. Lorenz Eitner, ed. Neoclassicism and Romanticism, 1750-1850: Sources and Documents, vols. 1and 2, Prentice Hall, 1970. George Heard Hamilton, Romantic Classicism, Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Art, Abrams, 1970. Hugh Honour, Neo-classicism, Penguin, 1977. David Irwin, Neoclassicism, Phaidon, 1997.