Architecture and History

[eredien]

I've just finished reading about two hours' worth of stuff in the library for my Western Architecure Course. My thoughts follow. Sorry to leave out places that aren't American or European in the traditional sense, but I don't know enough about them yet to comment on them knowledgeably.

I really think you need to understand the history of architecture to understand the 'revolutionary' part of the Revolutionary War, and why America is really the younger child of Europe.

Why is this?

The history of architecture (hereafter abbreviated to arch., because I have about 300 more pages of reading to do this weekend, not counting thesis stuff) is largely the history of how humanity has used its power--mechanical, political/religious, and monetary--to shape the raw materials of the environment into forms which reflected the states of those powers at the time.

The power in Ancient Greece, for instance, rested in the hands of a small, wealthy elite (no matter what your elementary school teachers told you about ancient Democracy. Sorry, Earis). This elite built colossal buildings of a staggering size and overwhelming power.
Whenever anyone wanted to refer back to that particular brand of power later, they built a building using Grecian styles, columns, or elements.

Another example: the power behind arch. innovation in 19th century France was the Ecole de Beaux-Arts in Paris (funded by a combination of political and monetary power, a chain stretching back two centuries before). Their ideas about how architects should learn arch. influcenced an entire century's worth of design--good, bad, indifferent, and rule-breaking.

The roots of each "new" style grow out of trends found and interpreted (or reinterpreted) in the old. If you study arch. history, you get the sense of arch. being a thing moving slowly, but constantly changing, like a glacier. They've both been around for thousands of years before you even bothered to think about them.

America had no culture and arch. to speak of in 1776, at least nothing that Europeans would (or would bring themselves to) really recognize as such. Perhaps a few bad knockoffs, but that was basically it.

100 years later America hosted a World Exhibition.

Look at the span of time--100 years--that it took America to go from being a rebellious little colony (give each word its full due, please) on the outskirts of nowhere to a relatively modern place, intent on bringing the rest of the world to its doorstep to showcase the best of what it, as a country, had to offer.

America hosted an Exhibition: to the eyes of America, this meant that America had reached a status where its technology, lifestyle, and culture were on a par with that of 'The Continent.'

To the Europeans, this meant that a culture had sprung up from nothing in an incredibly short time: it had taken longer to finish the construction of Notre Dame (1163-1330) than to bring the new American society up to the same general standard of living as Europe.

We shaped our own built forms out of our own power to make a new idea of history and country almost instantly, instead of relying on someone else's power to shape our built forms and idea of country over a long period of time.

In Europe, there's buildings made in the 1900's that refer back to buildings made in the 1500's that refer back to architectural detailing in the 1100's that derives from the Pantheon.
In America, I think we don't feel as boxed-in: we don't feel like we have to refer to the 1100's or the 1500's--or the ideas of power embodied in those buildings--to make a valid architectural statement. But we don't have the Pantheon, either.

That's an amazing thing, and humbling from either perspective.

Comments

[a4yroldfaerie.livejournal.com]

but look at the pillars of the white house, the cute dutch style houses in upper new york, the...other examples i may think of later because i am evry tired now
alo, I never thought of political implications of arch. before. Interesting. Thank you.