Point: Alternatives

From my first day as an interior architecture student I have been taught that if you’re going to break the rules, break them with purpose. Breaking the rules and testing boundaries is an essential part of innovation. Stretching materials and structural systems to their absolute limits in order to reach the maximum desired effect.

Alternatives can be described as employing or following nontraditional methods are how we break the rules, and test the boundaries in architecture. For example, Amiens Cathedral in France is one of the clearest examples of testing boundaries, and breaking the rules with a purpose. Amiens Cathedral has the largest windows of most gothic cathedrals. In order to fit windows of this size into a stone structure some changes had to be made. In order to keep the walls up, the buttresses had to be pulled away from the wall while staying connected through stone “flyers”, thus creating the “flying buttress”.

Most often successful innovation comes from trial and error. Despite it’s negative connotation, failure isn’t always a bad thing, it is how we learn from our past experiences. A subject of humor, and an example of this is the front façade of the Ospedale Innoconti by Brunelleschi. The facade has a series of springing arches, each placed evenly down the row until you reach the one awkward column at the corner. The reason it’s there is for structural support but nonetheless it disrupts the rhythm across the façade. This is similar to an error I made while folding one of my models in studio. I was folding my ridges, and I realized I had this one big awkward ridge in the center with a tiny one next to it. But its through errors like these that we learn to be successful.

As architecture changes through out history we are able to observe how new methods change and improve the architecture of before. Observations of cultural/intellectual opinion can also be made by looking at the architecture of the day. Millennial observations can be drawn from the changes between Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque architecture.

Before the Renaissance, Europe had been in s period of feudal conflict marked by pillaging of neighboring tribes. Because of this protection was key, and castles were also the neighborhood fortresses in times of turmoil. This is why the afterlife and religion were essential to the people of this period. Heaven was a paradise away from the war, famine, and disease of the middle ages. Gothic cathedrals sought to emulate this paradise reaching heavenward through vast vertical spaces, an embodiment of light (a symbol of divinity) through glass and stone, and pictorial carvings to tell stories of the bible (loss of education caused illiteracy).

The renaissance, how ever, was a rebirth of what had been lost in the Middle Ages. Values were placed on education (especially in the classics), replication and improvement upon classicism, and measuring the world according to the individual. Religion was still a key aspect of society, but was practiced on a more individual basis, rather than in large groups. The Pazzi Chapel is one example. It is a small chapel built to house one individual family.

The Pazzi chapel also shows the emphasis placed on the use of classical forms in architecture. Like what the Romans did to Greek symbolism in architecture, the Renaissance architects took religious geometry from Roman ruins and stripped it of its meaning by using it for decoration. What was special has yet again become ordinary.

Baroque architecture made use of symbolism to convey a message in the same way that gothic architecture used light to symbolize divinity. Water was often a symbol for knowledge, and a flowing of ideas through society. As a symbol of knowledge it would make sense that a water motif would be used in a library. The Laurentian Library Vestibule by Michelangelo is a chief example of this embodiment of water in stone. The wave motif on the staircase symbolically represents knowledge pouring out from the library.

Even in today’s modern world classical subjects such as the Madonna and child are being reinvented in unconventional ways. “The Madonna of Port Lligat” by Salvador Dali is a perfect example of this classical subject reinvented. The figures are painted with rectangular holes in their torsos to represent their transcendent nature. Thus creating the art of alternatives.