A Vesica Piscis design in a garden of Glastonbury. The intersection of spheres plays a thematic role in much of baroque architecture, which we discussed later in the program - see below.
Pozzolith, the Roman concrete, as used in the dome of the Pantheon:
Pozzolith, the Roman concrete, as used in the dome of the Pantheon:
Le Corbusier's monastery at La Tourette:
The Templar fortress Convento de Cristo in Tomar, Portugal –
The Convento de Cristo was in use to well after Friday October the 13th - 1307, when the Knights Templar in France were executed; in fact this fortress/monastery was in religious use until occupied by Napoleonic forces in 1810 for barracks.
and which certainly owes a lot to La Tourette, dontchathink?
Representative of Felix Candela's thin-shell structures are these hyperbolic paraboloid arches:
Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal owes much to Candela's work, as you can see in these images:
- above, a cheery illustration from 1961, and below a recent photograph of the terminal's interior:
Whereas "Black Rock" is not as severe as the monoliths or stellae in Kubrick's 2001:
- certainly the entrance to the CBS building is much harder to identify than, for instance, the Chrysler Building's entrance:
We argued a bit over the notion that concrete should be expressed in progressively thinner profile as the structure rises and bears less weight. Here is a Mies van der Rohe building that Professor Knox uses to illustrate his point:
To which I retort that to step back a structure for structurally expressive purposes might lead one to something like Raymond Hood's Chicago Tribune Building:
- a pure expression of steel structure: all grid, all lattice. Completely unlike Saarinen's CBS building, which is a concrete structure.
Here is a closeup view of the plinth on which these Mies towers perch:
Another work that is representative of the worst of Brutalist architecture is Paul Rudolph's Lindeman Center, which happens to be a neighbor of Boston City Hall:
The Jaoul Houses – Neuilly:
and the exposed concrete wall (to the right) that Madame Jaoul patted as I toured the house with her in June of 1974:
Note the flat Catalan arches.
Corbu's Modulor Man:
and his trademark open hand in this monument at Chandighar:
The famous
Rudolf Steiner's Goetheneaum:
and a marzipan cake:
Adolf Loos' – Müller House, Prague
Examples of unified art, or Gesamtkunstwerk - as practiced by Frank Lloyd Wright in his prairie school houses:
- in which the architecture, the furniture and the furnishings have all been designed or selected by the architect.
Borromini's San Carlo alle Quatro Fontana – Rome 1646:
in plan
in elevation
and in reflected plan (ceiling view). Absolutely gorgeous.
Bernini's Sant' Andrea al Quirinale, of which we also spoke, in passing:
And - not to be overly self-serving - apropos of how collaboration can result in a work far better than what would result if the client gave us carte blanche, a few details from my own Bridgehampton National Bank, on Montauk Highway in Bridgehampton, NY (1993 - 97):
A design sketch for the cupola (which the clients insisted upon, and which I insisted be useful to introduce daylight into the interior of the rather large volume of the building):
And how it turned out in the end:
Not at all what I would have designed for this bank, had I been left to my 'druthers, but certainly exactly what the bank wanted.
Well - here we are at the end of images for our conversation of November 11th.
Our musical breaks were:
Ludwig van Beethoven: Fifth Symphony - 4th movement
Richard Wagner: Die Meistersing von Nurnberg
Sergei Prokofiev: Romeo & Juliet (ballet) - Dance of the Knights
Philip Glass: Satyagraha - Act 3 Scene 3
Speak with soon, and thanks for listening.
Curtis B Wayne,
Architect
