During the next century, mainly in the limestone region of northern France called the Paris Basin, five crucial inventions set the stage for all the architecture of the next three centuries. Firstly, shafts which had once been thick enough to support the load over them were transformed into decoration by being made incredibly thin (as at the Abbey of Braine). Like the rib-vaulted ceiling, the whole wall was now turning into a bundle of energy rather than mass. Secondly, thinness was emphasized by making buildings taller. Separated from their supporting role, these elegant ribs and shafts transformed the upper part of the interior into a suspended canopy. These churches were no longer safe citadels or even symbols of Paradise; the people of the 12th century held to a mystic faith that the church was not just like Heaven, it actually was God’s promised world. Thus the vault was suspended from His realm, while the emaciated shafts became the tassels that hung from the corners of this Holy Tabernacle. No wonder the master mason, who was capable of creating this Paradise on earth, was so highly regarded.

The third innovation was stained glass. By replacing the painted wall with glass, previously inert matter became translucent. Although the glass was dark, and the weak light shed little illumination inside, it completely transformed the walls. The light seemed to come from within the very core of the stone, making it glow as though in proof that the church was the Celestial City.
As the mass of the inner wall surfaces was obliterated, the solidity of the outside was also broken up. The buttress, which had given additional support to the wall where it was most needed, was moved away to the perimeter of the building, and arches set between the two to transmit the loads to the outside. By moving the massive stonework needed to support the roof away from the windows, the amount of stone around the thinning shafts that hung from the vaults could be reduced and vast windows installed.

Tracery, first invented at Rheims around 1220, finally turned the window itself into another surface pattern. The combination of the canopied vaults, the thin elements ranging over the surface, the stained glass set in, the traceried windows and the flying buttresses, had the effect of dematerializing the masonry so the entire building appeared to belong to another mystic universe. All these inventions stretched technical expertise to the limits, and compelled masons to improve their skills greatly.

Italy did not present a particularly creative panorama in terms of new ideas – indeed, French art exercised a great deal of influence there through a paradoxical kind of ‘reverse’ flow – until once again Rome and its monuments furnished the models for a new architecture. The circular temple derived from the Pantheon took on new meanings and was used in both religious and secular architecture; examples are the secular and celebrative temple by Canova at Possagno (1819-30) and the church of S Francesco di Paolo at Naples by Pietro Bianchi (1817-31). In the same way the villa was revived by way of the Palladian tradition, and the triumphal arch was rediscovered to celebrate Napoleonic pomp, such as the Arco della Pace by Luigi Cagnolo in Milan (1807-38). Thus the neo- classical involved no ’state architecture’ in Italy. From the Venice of Gian Antonio Selva to the Rome of Piranesi, Marchionni, Stern, and Valadier, from the Borgo Teresiano, the grid-pattern neo- classical district of Trieste built under Empress Maria Theresa, to Austrian Milan – with Piermarini and Pollack – and then to Napoleonic Milan – with the wonderful city- planning of Cagnolo and Canonica – Italy was home to a thousand neo-classicisms, exactly as many as were the centres of artistic creativity.

The basic style of building did not change. St Etienne in Nevers, like Germigny-des-Pres, was assembled from the same cubes, cylinders and spheres, though it was considerably larger. The wall was still the predominant architectural element. Its impervious surfaces were emphasized by paintwork. The interior was dark and peaceful. Lighting came from hundreds of candles that threw uneven and mobile shadows onto the painted walls, a flickering light that brought the figures of saints and sinners to life.

It was in Durham, England, one of the most northerly towns in Christian Europe, that the first real move was made towards a new kind of architecture. Previously all stone vaults covering public spaces had been as plain surfaced as the walls, and the junctions between the curved surfaces were marked by a crease or groin. A year or two before 1100, ribs were laid under these groins for the first time. These transformed the ceiling from an undecorated plane into a patterned surface that was to trigger the most profound changes in architecture over the years. What had begun as a builder’s device eventually became the inspiration for the whole building.

The rib is a line, whereas the groin vault and the walls below are surfaces. Sinuous and fluid, the presence of the rib encouraged builders to feel the space in a more graphic way. In time the shafts became thinner, the number of ribs were multiplied and the structural elements reduced until the interior became a playful web that both enlivened the surface and denied its mass. This turned out to be one of the most important characteristics of the later Gothic style.

Meanwhile, in the Greek Orthodox East, centralized domical and wall-based architecture had become firmly established, and was to continue up to our own day.

As prosperity grew trade increased, and a new class emerged ? the merchants who lived in walled towns to protect their goods. Gradually their growing wealth enabled them to seek political independence from the bishops and princes who had ruled them. Municipal and democratic government was born in the medieval towns.

Man’s final judgement at the hands of the all-male Trinity was expected to be severe, masculine and impartial, unsoftened by forgiveness, as the austere sculpture of Moissac shows. People were terrified by the belief that, no matter what one did, there was little chance of salvation for most.

At the same time, the classical idea of beauty as harmony and balance was renounced by Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), which laid the basis for an aesthetics of sentiment that distinguishes the beautiful from the sublime, the latter understood as the response to whatever is terrible and emotionally disturbing. This concept, together with that of the ‘picturesque’, drew attention to whatever was different, dangerous, surprising, even decadent; the ideal of symmetry was abandoned in favour of asymmetry and irregularity. Ruins became a popular subject because of the emotions they inspire.

In this context, the asymmetrical layout of Strawberry Hill set in motion the so-called castellated Gothic, in which the country house is turned into a medieval castle placed in the midst of nature, if possible atop a rocky crag. Thanks to its association with the picturesque and the sublime, this strongly visionary style soon reached great popularity.

During the years 1810-20 the eccentric Gothic reveries, having reached a kind of culmination in the romantic concept of Fonthill Abbey, gave way to the demand for the accurate imitation of medieval forms combined with a return to medieval craftsmanship. The Gothic revival thus left the sphere of the country house and took its place as a style in competition with neoclassicism, and since Gothic was considered a Christian style by definition, it immediately conquered the sphere of church building, attaching itself directly to the late Perpendicular Gothic, considered a completely autonomous and original English creation.

Military constructions, most of all fortifications, presented one of the major expenses faced by a baroque state in Europe, and the military geography of modern Europe came into being in part because of the varying ability of states to pay their bills. The more or less constant pressure of warfare between the emerging powers of the young modern Europe induced many cities to pay for avant-garde fortifications. Excellence in planning such fortifications was originally an Italian monopoly, but it shifted northward in the wake of the conflicts.

In 1667 King Louis XIV of France began a series of aggressive campaigns against the Spanish Netherlands and the Rhineland, thus providing the opportunity to make an ambitious programme of fortifications along France’s northern and eastern borders. The pre-eminence of French military architecture results as much from the munificence of its sovereign as from the excellent qualities of its greatest military architect, Sebastien Leprestre de Vauban, who designed a series of revolutionary and ingenious fortifications, along with new cities, using ideas dictated by the pragmatic breaking of academic rules. He worked out an easy compromise between the 16th-century Italian obtuse- angle bastion and the 17th-century Dutch acute-angle bastion and reintroduced, in the Alps and the Pyrenees, the citadel, bastioned towers with blockhouses.

In England the solid Norman architecture was replaced with much lighter structures. Sometimes whimsical, seldom pompous, the new style appealed to the people over the Channel. The great traceried windows were so beguiling that whole walls of earlier churches were ripped out in order to make those glorious fantasies in thin stone and stained glass as large as possible.

Unlike their prototypes in France, little sense of structure permeates English Gothic. The thin ribs and shafts in the Paris area, although decorative, always relate to their structural purpose, with ribs running from one support to another and arches remaining as arches without being disguised by heavy decoration. In England, however, the master masons often let pattern run its own course with little regard for the purpose behind it; the French called it cosmetique.

The French style hardly touched Italy, as that region was so pervasively influenced by the many Roman remains. Milan cathedral was built only after a long controversy between French and German masons who had been brought in to advise the locals who had no experience of or even interest in the new style.

It is symptomatic of the times that the quantity of construction throughout the whole of Europe in the century before the Black Death of 1348 was hardly more than that in the Paris Basin alone during the previous century. The Black Death marks a crucial watershed in architectural development. The population had trebled since the turn of the millennium, yet there was still no shortage of virgin lands to till. The plague killed one in three people within a few short months, and the style of architecture changed to suit.

The Abbasid caliphate that supplanted the Umayyad was centred in Baghdad (AD 754-1258) and saw a flowering of building activity including the circular city in Baghdad in AD 762; the city of Samarra, in Al) 836; the Friday Mosque of Al Mutawakkil, Samarra, in AD 847; and the Al Mustansiriyah Madrassah, Baghdad, in 1233. Architecture was mainly brick with carved terracotta and stucco decoration.

A characteristic of Islamic architecture in the history of architecture is the importance given to the expression of enclosed space; mosques, madrassahs, houses and palaces were designed around courtyard spaces. Formal elements such as domes, iwans (vaulted porches), arcades, arches and minarets were used on many different types of building to define and connect interior space. During the 9th century a typical North African style of mosque architecture evolved, consisting of arcaded aisles surrounding an open rectangular courtyard, one side of which was developed as a horizontal prayer hall (as in the mosque of Kairouan, AD 836, and at Ibn Tulun, Cairo).

The weakening of the Abbasid caliphate led to converted nomadic Turkish tribes from Central Asia setting up independent Seljuk states in Persia (1038-1194) and Anatolia (1070-1308). The iwan (large vaulted porch), the monumental tomb-tower and the cylindrical minaret were introduced. An important development in the history of architecture was the introduction of the four-iwan courtyard plan, which became universal for mosques and madrassahs. There was an emphasis on large domed interiors, complex brick patterning (as in the Tomb of the Samanids, Bukhara, 10th century) and carved terracotta and turquoise glazing. These elements were interpreted in stone in Seljuk Anatolia (at the Mosque of Ala-ad-Din, Konya, 1156).

Young architects took out the old texts on classical composition and began to relearn the principles of proportion, the orders, and traditional tectonics. Koolhaas referred to Leon Krier and “his half” of a generation, he was acknowledging the existence of a design orientation dramatically different from the one highlighted by the Museum of Modern Art’s review of contemporary developments in its Deconstructivist architecture exhibition. Koolhaas, however, was too generous in his description of the new classicists as representing half of his generation. The actual number of committed classicists constituted only a small minority of the generation coming to professional maturity in the last quarter of the century. Numbers, however, are not the critical issue since emerging movements initially represent, by definition, a minority within the dominant professional culture.

Classicists were, of course, not the only ones to point out the manifest failures of modernism; modern architecture was being assailed from many different quarters during the 1970s and 1980s. The Neo-Rationalist critique of modernist urbanism outlined by Aldo Rossi in his The Architecture of the City, for example, stimulated interest in traditional typologies which, in turn, led at least some young architects to investigate the enduring heritage of classical design. But neither Rossi nor post- modernists such as Charles Moore ever embraced classical models as literally as the new generation of classicists, represented here by the European polemicist Leon Krier and the American architect and educator Thomas Gordon Smith.

St Petersburg Evening

The strict hierarchy of the spaces and the obsessive repetition of architectural elements are accompanied by an uninterrupted variation in the profiles of the elements themselves. In his first mature work, the Strogonov Palace (1750-54), Rastrelli defined his personal style, presenting a giant order of strongly plastic engaged columns above a rusticated base mixed with curved cornices similar to those found on old Russian churches.

Architecture has always been a central cultural institution valued above all for its provision of stability and order. These qualities are seen to arise from the geometric purity of its formal composition. . . . The projects in this exhibition mark a different sensibility, one in which the dream of pure form has been disturbed.
(Johnson & Wigley, p. 10)

Whitley employed the term Deconstructivism to label this sensibility. Deconstructivism is the conflation of two words: deconstruction and Constructivism. Deconstruction is an approach to reading and language that seeks to uncover the multiple and often conflicting levels of meaning inherent in texts of all kinds. In the 1970s, the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida served as the primary source for many architectural theorists interested in the application of deconstruction to architecture. Constructivism is one of the terms used originally to describe Soviet avant-garde architecture of the immediate post-Revolutionary years in Russia. In Deconstructivist designs, Wigley argued, architects employ the radi?cal forms of the early-twentieth-century Soviet avant-garde to represent some of the theoretical ideas of deconstruction. Nevertheless, some of the architects categorized as Deconstructivist were reluctant to explain their work solely as the conjunction of late twentieth-century literary theories with early-twentieth-century avant-garde designs.
In contrast to the epigrammatic clarity of early-twentieth-century architectural programs and manifestos, the literature on Deconstructivism displayed a convo?luted and abstruse writing style characteristic of the worst in academic prose. Ironi?cally, language became a barrier rather than a bridge between architectural form and public comprehension. Reviews of the exhibition were mixed and even the exhibit’s organizers acknowledged the tenuous quality of the concept of Decon?structivism. In his catalog essay, Wigley refused to claim the status of an organized movement for the work selected. Instead he described the exhibition in the following terms:

It is a curious point of intersection among strikingly different architects moving in dif?ferent directions. The projects are but brief moments in the independent programs of the artists.
(Johnson & Wigley, p. 19)

In 1932 the Museum of Modern Art’s “International Style” exhibition established a popular definition of modern architecture that would endure for decades. By the late 1980s however, there was less enthusiasm for defining normative conditions in the arts or anointing a limited selection of work as canonical. It was challenging enough for cultural institutions to illuminate “brief moments.”

Projects by seven different architects were included in the Deconstructivist exhibition: Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind (b. 1946), Rem Koolhaas (b. 1944), Peter Eisenman (b. 1932), Zaha Hadid (b. 1950), Coop Himmelbau (the name for the joint practice of Wolf Prix [b. 1968] and Helmut Swiczinsky [b. 1944]), and Bernard Tschumi (b. 1944). Zaha Hadid’s design for The Peak, an exclusive Hong Kong club, conveys the formal qualities that characterized work selected for the exhibition. Conceptually, the building consists of a horizontal stack of tubes. No clear hierarchy among the parts is apparent and the complexity of the scheme defies quick comprehension. Each level is skewed in its relationship to adjacent levels in an effort to negate any hint of orthogonal order. Hadid presented the building as a sequence of knifelike forms that appear to shred rather than compose the site as they slice into the hillside setting. While the lack of conventional order is at first unsettling, the intricate layering of the scheme and the manic intensity with which it was rendered is a compelling demonstration of architecture’s ability to function as a form of philosophical speculation. Indeed, many of the buildings designed by Hadid and the other architects included in the exhibition possess an eloquence that their writings unfortunately lack.
The Deconstructivist architecture exhibition represented a preliminary attempt to label a new design orientation in the history of architecture. Despite the awkwardness of the word, “Decon” entered the vocabulary of contemporary criticism because it answered the need for a term to describe a body of work that could neither be considered modern in the conventional sense nor postmodern in terms of its visual imagery and cultural references. Two architects whose work proved to be central to the crystalization of a new architectural approach were Peter Eisenman and Rem Koolhaas. Both archi?tects effectively combined writing and designing to establish international repu?tations. Their work called into question the continued viability of classical and modernist design strategies and suggested the outlines of a new architectural aesthetic in the history of architecture.