Grids and Greeks

Grids and Greeks Lecture Notes

Spectacle, Civilization, Body, and Tectonic Dichotomy

  • Spectacle: Defined by the act of looking. Consider what can and cannot be seen in an image.

    • Ruinenfigur: A compositional strategy capturing a figure reflecting on a view, often in the context of wandering. Examples include:

      • Stills from "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert."

      • Caspar David Friedrich's "Wanderer Above a Sea Fog".

  • The photograph is staged.

  • Classical Greek architecture's unifying principle is spectacle.

Civilization

  • Why is classical Greece identified with cultural and technological advancement?

    • They received a lot of attention in the scholarly record, mainly in the West.

    • The Greeks were masterful advertisers of their own brilliance.

    • We feel more at home with the Greeks; there is a kind of simpatico or similarity.

Statuary Comparison

  • Ramesses II vs. Doryphoros (Spear-Bearer):

    • Ramesses II: Colossal, monumental, architectural.

    • Doryphoros: Naked, less architectural; the "S-bend" posture suggests vitality.

  • We align Greeks with the beginnings of civilization because we discern similarities in bodies and cultural production.

  • Greek temples remind us of banks or museums.

  • Architectural history looks for continuity and change (similarity and difference).

Key Projects

  • Theatre of Epidaurus (Polykleitos):

    • Located in Epidaurus, connected to the Greek mainland by an isthmus.

    • Visual connection to Athens.

  • Parthenon (Ictinus and Callicrates, overseen by Phidias):

    • Sited on the Acropolis, overlooking the Agora and Athens.

    • Completed between 447-432 BCE.

    • Associated with democracy.

    • Designed from the perspective of a sculptor.

    • The sculptures were removed by Lord Elgin in the nineteenth century.

    • The Acropolis Museum (2009) by Bernard Tschumi.

Tectonic and Tectonic Dichotomy

  • Underground vs. aboveground design strategies.

  • Subtractive (Thonic) vs. Additive (Tectonic) design strategies.

  • Remy Koolhaas's National Library of France competition entry: A solid mass carved out to create voids versus articulating board.

  • Ancient Egypt: Thonic and tectonic strategies are evident in one object.

Obelisk

  • Created by digging into the Earth, with the obelisk carved out of the stone.

  • The mountain is real, and there are a series of underground spaces and shrines for kings and queens, with the body in a tomb on an axis into the landscape.

Context

  • Greek civilization was dubbed by the Enlightenment from which they believed their own culture progressed.

  • Greek civilization is not confined to Greece but spread around the Mediterranean.

  • Greek civilization is not an empire but a collection of city-states joined by a trading network.

  • The modern theatre begins in ancient Greece.

Amphitheatre

  • Originated from phonic strategies.

  • Derived from a hole (koilon) or done into the side of a hill.

Parts of a Greek play:

  • Theatron: Viewing place.

  • Orchestra: Dancing place for the chorus.

  • Proscenium: Performing area.

  • Skene: Scene (from Greek meaning tent).

Types of Plays

  • Tragedies: Explored human futility, morality (9 hours).

  • Satyr Plays: After 9 hours of tragedy, satyrs are hybrid creatures that are half human, half goat with a sizable phallus.

  • Comedy: Focused on absurdities and incongruous settings (e.g., Lysistrata).

Dionysus vs. Apollo

  • Dionysus: God of wine, ritual madness, fertility, sexuality, earthly delights.

  • Apollo: God of reason, music, truth, poetry, sunlight, healing.

  • Two sets of aesthetic principles: Dionysian and Apollonian.

Dichotomy

  • Plato's chariot allegory from the Republic: Ego, morality vs. appetite.

  • Judeo-Christian tradition: Heaven and hell.

  • Freud: Ego, it, and superego.

  • The Greeks lived with both principles without hand-wringing.

Temple

  • Designed to be looked at.

  • Contains a naos or cello with a statue of the deity.

  • Action occurred in front of the temple.

  • A modular system calculated from the diameter of the column.

Tectonic Structures

  • Heirs to timber construction. Tecton means builder or carpenter.

  • Metopes and triglyphs are the remains or the representation of timber construction.

Basilica vs. Gothic Cathedral

  • A modular system applied but inverted.

  • Columns are enclosed by a wall, making it an interior process of ritual and devotion.

  • Different temple orders: Doric, Ionic, Corinthian. They are called orders rather than styles because each one is implied by a distinct set of proportions.

Columns

  • Base, Shaft, & Capital.

  • Doric: Thicker shaft, unadorned capital.

  • Ionic: Simpler proportions, volutes (Princess Leia).

  • Corinthian: Acanthus flower.

  • Orders and propulsion systems allowed knowledge transfer around the Mediterranean.

  • Elephants capital (derivation of Ionic order) picks up on the dynasty and mysteries that directs the gods' trip to India.
    *Every colony or Greek city state had an Acropolis (a place above or at the extremes or edge of a city) which referred to a place above or at the extremes or edge of a city.

Acropolis

  • Erected as high as possible to be seen from the city and the sea.

  • The Athenian state asked for money from the other Athenian states. The Athenians became really rich this way and funneled all of that funds into a reconstruction of the Parthenon.

  • Devotees carry a sacred tunic woven by noble maidens, which wraps the Athena Parthenos inside the temple.

Key innovation: Erechtheion Caryatids

  • Debate about what the carotids represent.

  • Show the structural tectonic, load-bearing facility of the column.

Structure Distribution

  • Distribution seems random, forming an equilateral triangle emphasizing spectacle on entering the Acropolis.

Entasis of the Parthenon Columns

  • Swelling or curvature in the column.

  • Corrects the appearance of sagging or expresses the weight-bearing function.

  • No single stone in the Parthenon is completely straight; no line is absolutely rectilinear.

Perpective in the Parthenon

  • The Greeks believed that distortion occurred because most humans had two eyes.

  • Retina image is upside down, and our brain corrects it.

  • Structures had to be distorted because of the way human beings see.
    You can find the same thing that is if you cover one eye and look at an object and then cover another eye and looking at that object and it will move a little bit.

Examples of perspective

  • Zaha Hadid used ship rulers to conceptualize the competition designed for Carton Bay Opera House.

  • the author experiments with grasshopper.

The Grid and Three Different Times

General Points About The Grid

  • What are we seeing? What's the place? What's the atmosphere of this thing?
    *What are we seeing? Do we want to be here?
    *How was the image made?
    *Who is this image made for?

  • A mode of organization, a way of analyzing, and in some cases, a manner of projecting.
    *The grid is inevitable susceptibility to disruption.

Superstudio Continuous Monument

  • Provocation by Italian architects for a continuous monument spanning the world.

  • The grid is three-dimensional and found on a number of scales.
    *Series of photo montages of urban phenomenon

Line Types in Architectural Drawings
**Solid Line:** Indicates things that have cut through in plan or section.
**Lighter Solid Line:** Indicates stuff beyond the cutting plane (in elevation or section).
**Long Dashed Line:** Shows elements above the cut.
**Short Dashed Line:** Shows things below the plan cut (hidden).

*Shows elements

Francis Ching’s Architectural Graphics

  • Heavy Line: Indicates plane that are painted through with the laser point.
    *Dotted Structure above.
    *Shows what's above and below.

Long Dash Line Shows objects above
Short Dash Line Shows objects below.

Grid: Loaded with Similarity in History

  • Origin, order, system, utopias, dystopias.
    *Sets out a kind of order but can also be disrupted. (disruption is obvious.)
    *Organization/Analysis Projection
    *Very Important in 20th-century architecture
    *Concrete matter (drawing on paper) Spiritual realm.
    *Each building a slight variation on the cube.

Urban Grid, Renaissance Grid, Neoclassical Grid Three Notions of Grid

Kalgoorlie, Western Australia

Colonial Grid

*Irrespective of topography
*The gold mining leases are determined by the bearing low to the ground but their form starts to make them strange in the suburbs that then disappear after a couple of years.

Greeks

  • City-States that are not conquired

  • Pieter Aureli talked about these amazing grid worker cities that the Egyptians constructed up and down in Ireland.
    Workers Housing for festivals.

Milletus

  • Now on the Aegean Coast of Turkey.

  • Layed out by Hippodamus without regards to topography.

Colonial Greece

*Reproduce the standardized elements to have the theatre, the bath, the aboras 2 of them. stadium, the temple, the big public zone in the middle.
*Maintaned the public Zonal/ Hierachy
*Greek Temples Organized in the grid around open area's.

Romans

  • Not uses as a kind of card.

  • Starts with a too man axis.

  • Crossroads organizing principle. And organizing the excess extend into the countryside.

Renaissance Grid

  • Greek Texts rediscovered in the Renaissance
    Lapedo Alberti: Artificial principles of age of humanism. Gridded paper used in famous drawings by the architect Bramante.

Andrea Palladio

  • Most influential Western Architect who documented his work in a book documenting work and arguments on the role of the architecture in the world.

  • Palladio has the sun that's son of a carpenter

  • After death tracing back can of movement drawings and influenced and work with work in Euro and America.

Witkova

  • Analytic Grid used to make the since thing's to tease out and find the order.
    *Geometric Pattern using ABCBA
    *Distill the pattern for the design from this to the villas.

  • Palladio has a series of killing importance and the villa relies in for the surplus in the city. And requirements Retreats pleasure panoramas views the views that fashion organizing views and working farm.

Villas are 2 Elements

*Wealthy events by the farm and building the land a symmetrical Axis and the Villa Barbera.

Conclusion: Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand

  • Used a way of an architectural experiments in buildings by combining Modular Grid to combine the building together to make a quick building to building series.

  • Teacher in post revolutionary France. with engineering as well as Architecture.
    *Reduce down the Architecture to making Portico's, walls, columns and all the elements combining it and make a structure with a quick process.
    *Building by Nunubuts - and reducing those architectural functions with the loss of an eye's potential to feel the details and the form becomes dead.