The Grand Tour
Travelling the World with an Architect's Eye. Excerpt from the book 'The Grand Tour' by Harry Seidler. Edited by Peter Gössel.
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Italy
If there is one country and its people that have contributed most to western civilisation's man-made world continuously for the last 2000 years, it must surely be Italy. Starting with the vast Roman Empire, ist colonising tentacles reaching most of Europe, there are the daring engineering structures: the architectural form language was inherited from the ancient Greeks, but the application into huge structures that bear testimony to their intuitive engineering, are handed down to us, mostly intact to this day. The Romans were not inventors of the supporting arch, but its extended use in vaults and intersecting barrel shapes and domes is theirs. Structures such as the Pantheon in Rome or the impressive aqueducts they built, the Pont du Gard in France and at Segovia in Spain, the huge public baths, stadia and theatres, boggles the mind today, just to think that they were based on experimental, empirical knowledge without the mathematical systems of analysis that we know today.
In the Middle Ages, Italian towns grew not with a clear devised plan, but an organic assembly of tightly packed environments with narrow streets that burst open into most delightful public plazas that are the joy of inhabitants as much as to the envying hoards of tourists that frequent and travel through Italy, it seems continuously. After about the first Millennium, Italy was the cradle of Romanesque architecture, which spread throughout Europe, much of it extending the structural daring with minimal visual elaboration.
Borne out of this, starting around the 17th Century was the Baroque era. It is my view that it is one of the architectural peak periods in western civilisation. The structural scheme of domed support was refined into spatially complex and daring backgrounds for the visual exuberance of painting and sculpture that adorn the period's celebrated works.
My favourite is Borromini and his masterful Quattro Fontane and St. Ivo church interiors that combined a structural virtuosity achieved with geometrically minimal means in contrast to his exuberant rival Bernini, best known for his brilliant sculptures and elaborate fountains which are dotted throughout Rome - or Guarini's buildings in Turin. It is still Borromini's structural inventions that have most to say to us to this day in that they show arched interiors whose ribs elements narrow and deepen toward the top of domes, recognising intuitively that greater stiffness is needed there. This is confirmed by today's method of structural analysis.
However, the mode of the Baroque era, aside from structural innovation, were the decorative embellishments which endear that time and have never ceased to fascinate and delight the visitor, such as Pozzo's magnificent frescos in St Ignacio. He remained in demand beyond Italy, as was the muralist Tiepolo. The period's structural inventiveness bore fruit, was repeated and extended by the great engineer-architect Balthazar Neumann in 18th Century Germany (see Germany photos 13-15).
The late Pier Luigi Nervi, in our time, is Borromini's structural descendent. He represents the highpoint of 20th Century expressive engineering. His structures are not only mathematically and constructionally logical, but deeply satisfying aesthetically in that the static laws of nature are made evident and are given form without any painterly or sculptural embellishments - such as in his Olympic Stadia structures of the 1960s.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4]
Page [1] [2] [3] [4]
Italy
If there is one country and its people that have contributed most to western civilisation's man-made world continuously for the last 2000 years, it must surely be Italy. Starting with the vast Roman Empire, ist colonising tentacles reaching most of Europe, there are the daring engineering structures: the architectural form language was inherited from the ancient Greeks, but the application into huge structures that bear testimony to their intuitive engineering, are handed down to us, mostly intact to this day. The Romans were not inventors of the supporting arch, but its extended use in vaults and intersecting barrel shapes and domes is theirs. Structures such as the Pantheon in Rome or the impressive aqueducts they built, the Pont du Gard in France and at Segovia in Spain, the huge public baths, stadia and theatres, boggles the mind today, just to think that they were based on experimental, empirical knowledge without the mathematical systems of analysis that we know today.
In the Middle Ages, Italian towns grew not with a clear devised plan, but an organic assembly of tightly packed environments with narrow streets that burst open into most delightful public plazas that are the joy of inhabitants as much as to the envying hoards of tourists that frequent and travel through Italy, it seems continuously. After about the first Millennium, Italy was the cradle of Romanesque architecture, which spread throughout Europe, much of it extending the structural daring with minimal visual elaboration.
Borne out of this, starting around the 17th Century was the Baroque era. It is my view that it is one of the architectural peak periods in western civilisation. The structural scheme of domed support was refined into spatially complex and daring backgrounds for the visual exuberance of painting and sculpture that adorn the period's celebrated works.
My favourite is Borromini and his masterful Quattro Fontane and St. Ivo church interiors that combined a structural virtuosity achieved with geometrically minimal means in contrast to his exuberant rival Bernini, best known for his brilliant sculptures and elaborate fountains which are dotted throughout Rome - or Guarini's buildings in Turin. It is still Borromini's structural inventions that have most to say to us to this day in that they show arched interiors whose ribs elements narrow and deepen toward the top of domes, recognising intuitively that greater stiffness is needed there. This is confirmed by today's method of structural analysis.
However, the mode of the Baroque era, aside from structural innovation, were the decorative embellishments which endear that time and have never ceased to fascinate and delight the visitor, such as Pozzo's magnificent frescos in St Ignacio. He remained in demand beyond Italy, as was the muralist Tiepolo. The period's structural inventiveness bore fruit, was repeated and extended by the great engineer-architect Balthazar Neumann in 18th Century Germany (see Germany photos 13-15).
The late Pier Luigi Nervi, in our time, is Borromini's structural descendent. He represents the highpoint of 20th Century expressive engineering. His structures are not only mathematically and constructionally logical, but deeply satisfying aesthetically in that the static laws of nature are made evident and are given form without any painterly or sculptural embellishments - such as in his Olympic Stadia structures of the 1960s.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4]
Pompeii, Patrician's House, 2nd Century AD
Tokyo, The Imperial Hotel, 1916-1922 (demolished 1967)