Rediscovering architecture : paestum in eighteenth-century architectural experience and theory, by Sigrid de Jong

Book review of: Sigrid de Jong, Rediscovering Architecture: Paestum in Eighteenth-Century Architectural Experience and Theory. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015, 352 pp., 100 color and 185 b/w illus. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978030019575

Growing an island: Okinotori

The UN Law of Sea defines an island as “a naturally formed area of land, surrounded by water, which is above water at high tide.” However, according to the same international law, not every kind of island engenders the same legal effects: “rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own shall have no exclusive economic zone.” In the Pacific Ocean, some 1750 kilometers south of Tokyo, the governor of Tokyo raised the Japanese flag, and placed an address plaque “1 Okinotori Island, Ogasawara Village, Tokyo” on a rock, or actually two rocks. The first one is roughly the size of a small room, the second one that of a twin bed. The smallest pokes some 7 centimeters out of the ocean, the bigger one arrives at double this altitude. In order to continue claiming territorial rights and assert exclusive economic control and fishing rights in a two hundred nautical mile zone around the rocks — i.e. in a part of the ocean larger than the surface of Japan’s mainland — these rocks need to be protected against the effects of global warming and typhoons. What is more: they need to naturally grow, in order to change status from mere rock into “a naturally formed area of land”. According to the New York Times the Japanese government has already spent over 600 million dollars to keep the barren islets above water. It encased the tiny protrusions in 25 meter thick concrete, at a cost of 280 million dollars, then made slits across the concrete, so it would comply with the UN law that an island be surrounded by water. Since then, Japanese scientists are developing genetically modified species of coral with the aim to grow the rocks into a small but internationally recognized archipelago: the Okinotori Islands

Highbrow and popular: liturgy, devotion and design in Santini Aichel's Nepomuk Church in Zd'ar

By the late 17th and early 18th centuries the techniques of re-Catholicisation in Bohemia and Moravia turned more subtle, after the often harsh and mostly foreign, Jesuit-led Counter-Reformation. Cistercian and Benedictine monasteries, with their century-old autochthonous establishment in the region, would be at the heart of the new approach. The abbots’ prestigious publications and building campaigns complemented refined methods for promoting the resurgence of Catholicism rooted in local traditions, both liturgical and architectural. With his hybrid architectural fusions and spatial compositions, which combine Italianate Baroque with Bohemian late-Gothic references and regional traditions, the Prague architect Johann Santini Aichel could become a principal actor of their campaigns. In 1719, he designed the pilgrimage church of Saint John of Nepomuk for the Cistercian abbey of Zd’àr (now in the Czech Republic). It expressed the abbot’s determination to reinstate the medieval importance of his monastery by preserving local traditions of devotional practice as well as building typology — while incorporating his fascination with exuberant baroque allegory. At the time of a growing demand for the canonisation of the Bohemian martyr, the building’s expressive forms and star form shape were intended to appeal to both erudite clerics and to large sections of the local populace. The church is the result of an intense and life-long collaboration between the abbot and his architect. A number of eighteenth-century documents indicate that the abbot’s contribution extended beyond the usual drafting of an iconographic programme into the conception of the overall form of the church. Furthermore, the sermon given at the consecration of the church, with its meticulous descriptions, is an exceptional document of liturgy and emblematic Baroque thinking in Central Europe. Based on research in libraries and archives in the Czech Republic, and supported by various written sources, including letters, the arguments for the canonisation of Nepomuk, up to remarkable memorabilia such as chronostic birthday greetings sent by the abbots, this paper will expose the multiple layers and possible keys for an understanding of this small pilgrimage church: a formal experiment that originated in local building traditions and in an abbot’s learned divertissements; that was intended to fuel a thriving Nepomuk devotion, and to captivate both erudite interest and popular imagination – for which it recycled practices taken from Counter Reformation liturgy, popular devotion and pagan traditions

Mannerism, modernity and the modernist architect, 1920-1950

Criticized for its artifice and stylization, and loaded with negative connotations as manieroso, the art of the sixteenth century nevertheless became, in the 1920s, a new historical and stylistic periodization and an intensely studied subject. Some aspects of that construction of Mannerism as a distinct category are intimately linked to the contemporary development of modernity, and modernism. Mannerism’s ‘discovery’ was closely related to pioneering developments in art and architecture. Furthermore, while Mannerist art was offering up captivating case studies, research on Mannerism adapted models from psychoanalysis, which was maturing in those same years and was crucial to understanding the structure of the modern self and of modern society. Finally, as we will show, the resulting image of the Mannerist architect was seminal in the styling of the figure of the new, modernist architect

Catastrophe and its fallout: notes on cataclysms, art and aesthetics, 1755-1945

While ruins are the disquieting vegetation of the mental forest of the eighteenth century, and while destruction is an essential, inherent component of modern art — at least since the late nineteenth century’s definition of the artist as a genius destined to transgression of aesthetic and social rules —, the eerie fascination for terryfing catastrophes is of another category. Focusing on some natural and man-made historic catastrophes that struck major cities, from the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, over the Paris Commune to the air raids of the Second World War, the lecture will discuss the represention of catastrophe. It will show how catastrophes tickled men — artists and philosophers — to change philosophical insights and aesthetic theory, and eventually develop early post-apocalyptic thinking; how it stimulated the development of new art forms and altered their scale of enterprise, how its representation borrowed from older art forms and eventually developed new iconographies

Ontwerpstudio C

Working in Venice means working in a context that is geographically, hydrographically and historically strongly defined. A city where it is nearly impossible to intervene without positioning oneselves with respect to its cultural context, its history, its building traditions. A city where the introduction of modernity not only has a long history of resistance, but is also a necessity for its survival. Hence, Venice is a good place to reflect upon issues at stake in current architectural practice world wide, in particular the many problematic aspects of globalization in architecture and urban planning. Venice is a good context to think about what remains of the the power of the project within an architectural production of ‘a world without qualities’; a good context to reflect upon possible resistances against a world of non-lieux (Marc Augé, 1992). This text explains the aims of our Master Studio, 'Ontwerpstudio C', and illustrates its intentions with three student projects, made during the second semester of 2012-2013

Jan Kempenaers: the picturesque

At first glance Jan Kempenaers’ photographs may not reflect the traditional ideas we have about an everyday picturesqueness. To better understand the relationship between his compositions and the aesthetic category of the picturesque, we need to look more closely at some of the original eighteenth-century aspects of the picturesque. When we leave aside this popular genre’s legacy – which has been significant though not highly prized, for at one point the picturesque even became synonymous with conventionally beautiful scenery – we will be able to discover its astounding modernity and topicality. The picturesque conceived as such, I will argue, fits perfectly with our contemporary way of looking at and appreciating natural and urban environments, and is also firmly entrenched in contemporary practices of representation. Viewed from this perspective, Kempenaers’ photographs can be understood as an exploration of the continuing relevance of the picturesque in the contemporary visualization of our environment