1 MODERN ARCHITECTURE A CRITICAL HISTORY

One of the first tasks to be faced in attempting to understand a history of

modern architecture is to establish the beginning of the period. The more
rigorously one searches for the origin of modernity, however the further back it
seems to lie.

One tends to project it back, if not to the Renaissance, then to that moment
in the mid 18th century when a new view of architects to question the classical
canons of Vitruvius and to document the remains of antique world in order to
establish a more objective basis on which to work.

This together with the extra ordinary technical changes that followed
throughout the century, suggests that the necessary conditions for modern
architecture appeared some time between the physician-architect Claude
Perraults late 17th Century challenge to the universal validity of Vitruvian
proportions and the definitive split between engineering and architecture which
is sometimes dated to the foundation in Paris of the Ecole des Pontset
Chaussees, the first engineering school, in 1747.
 The development of modern architecture after the Enlightment seems to
have been divided between the utopianism of the avant garde, first
formulated at the beginning of the 19th century in the ideal physiocratic city
of ledoux, and that anti-classical, anti-rational and anti-utilitarian attitude of
Christian reform first declared in Pugins Contrasts of 1836. Ever since, in
its effort to transcend the division of labour and the harsh realities of
industrial production and urbanization, bourgeois culture has oscillated
between the extremes of totally planned and industrialized utopias on the
one hand, and on the other, a denial of the actual historical reality of machine
production.

The success and failure of modern architecture to date, and its possible role
in the future, must finally be assessed against this rather complex
background. In its most abstract form, architecture has, of course, played a
role in the impoverishment of the environment particularly where it has
been instrumental in the rationalization of both building types and methods,
and where both the material finish and the plan form have been reduced to
their lowest common denominator, in order to make production cheaper and
to optimize use.
In its well-intentioned but sometimes misguided concern to assimilate the
technical and processal realities of the 20th century, architecture has adopted a
language in which expression resides almost entirely in processal, secondary
components, such as ramps, walkways, lifts, staircases, escalators, chimneys,
ducts and garbage chutes.

Nothing could be further from the language of classical architecture, where such
features were invariably concealed behind the faade and where the main body
of the building was free to express itself a suppression of empirical fact that
enabled architecture to symbolize the power of reason through the rationality of
its own discourse. Functionalism has been based on the opposed principle,
namely the reduction of all expression to the utility or to the process of
fabrication.
2 CULTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS:
NEO-CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE 1750-1900

The architecture of Neo-classicism seems to have emerged out of two

different but related developments which radically transformed the
relationship between man and nature. The first was a sudden increase in
mans capacity to exercise control over nature, which by the mid-17th
century had begun to advance beyond the technical frontiers of the
Renaissance. The second was a fundamental shift in the nature of human
consciousness, in response to major changes taking place in the society,
which gave birth to a new cultural formation that was equally appropriate to
the lifestyles of the declining aristocracy and the rising bourgeoisie.
What is Neo-Classical Architecture ?

Neo-classical architecture or rather new classical, architecture describes

buildings that are inspired by classical architecture of ancient Greece and
Rome.

A Neo-Classical building is likely to have some ( but not necessarily all ) of

these features:

Symmetrical shape

Tall columns that rise to the full height of the building

Triangular pediment

Domed roof
Jacques German Soufflot , who in 1750 had been one of the first architects
to visit the Doric temples at Paestum, was determined to create lightness, the
spaciousness and the proportion of the Gothic architecture in classical ( not to
say Roman ) terms.

To this end he adopted a greek cross plan, the nave and aisles being formed by
a system of flat domes and semi-circular arches supported on a continous
internal peristyle.

Soufflots church of Ste Genevieve in Paris begun in 1755.

J.F. Blondel who, after opening his architectural school in Rue de La Harpe in
1743, became the master of that so called visionary generation of architect
that included Boullee and probably the most visionary of all, Claude-Nicholas
Ledoux.

Works of Etienne Louis Boullee:

In addition to representing the social character of his creations in accordance
with the teachings of Blondel, Boullee evoked the sublime emotions of terror
and tranquility through the grandeur of his conceptions. More than any other
enlightenment architect, Boullee was obsessed with the capacity of light to
evoke the presence of the divine. This intention is evident in sunlit diaphanous
haze that illuminates in interior of his Metropole.

A similar light is potrayed in the vast masonry sphere of his projected cenotaph
for Isac Newton, where by night a fire was suspended to represent the sun,
while by day it was extinguished to reveal the illusion of the firmament produced
by the daylight shining through spheres perforated walls.
Many of Boulles designs are monumental visions of neoclassical grandeur
that often cross over into outright bombast. The following design, for a
cenotaph in honour of Isaac Newton, is particularly striking: a greatly-magnified
version of the Mausoleum of Augustus in Rome, but built around an enormous
spherical planetarium
The following designs are for another projected cenotaph, this one a truncated
cone atop a pair of concentric circular platforms, ringed around with funerary
cypresses. If that werent monumental enough, Boulle envisaged this structure
as just the centrepiece of a much larger whole.
 Aerial view:

Ledoux,
ideal city of
Chaux, 1804.

The saltworks of Chaux as

they exist today.