Section 2:
1st Millennium(ish) European - Early Christian
Why is mythology/religion relevant to architecture?
ORNAMENT – Religious/mythic stories are often expressed and revealed through art and decoration. In societies where most of the population is illiterate (most of human history), ornament/art becomes a primary means of communicating continual religious understanding. What is, and is not, allowed can vary greatly.
HIERARCHY – These stories can be well hidden to the casual viewer and are often built into the conceptual design of the architectural statement. The overall FORM can relate to narrative (e.g. reaching to heaven). The organizing GEOMETRY can relate to social structure (e.g. circle as sacred perfection, solar orientation symbolism).
RITUAL – These stories establish PROCESSIONAL relationships of movement embedded in and/or facilitated by the architecture (e.g. linear procession down central aisle).
It is only when Rome becomes Christian that we get relevant Christian architecture.
Constantine became the principal patron of Christianity. Rome would become Christian, and Christianity would take on the aura of imperial Rome.
312 CE Constantine
325 CE declares Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire
Early Christian architecture put greater emphasis on the interior. Christian churches needed large interior spaces to house the growing congregations and to mark the clear separation of the faithful from the unfaithful.
This leads to the architectural form that would become the core of western Christian architecture up to our own time: the Christian Basilica.
Typically more utilitarian in general layout and decoration than the temples. Basic brick and arch construction, usually timber roofs.
This building type becomes a) appropriated for use as, and b) the model later for, early Christian churches.
Early Christian basilica in its purity and simplicity of its design. An austerity in decoration is seen early on (in the west).
Churches divided into two types: the Basilica church (Roman basilica) and the Central-Plan church (Roman Pantheon).
The Basilica becomes the dominant WESTERN church form.
The Central-Plan becomes the dominant EASTERN church form.
However, both are used, their popularity changing in different periods.
Basic church terminology of spaces:
Apse = a semi-circular or polygonal projection serving as the termination of the main building axis, containing the altar.
Nave = The main space of the basilica church, where the congregation sits/stands during worship service. Has higher ceiling than the aisles, usually with clerestory windows.
Aisle = ambulatory / circulation space on the side perimeter of the nave.
Narthex = An enclosed porch or narrow meeting area at the entrance to a church.
Atrium = An open courtyard at the entrance of a church, usually surrounded by covered aisles. The atrium of the Early Christian church was originally a place for the congregants to wait and prepare for worship.
Columns were likely SPOLIA (the re-use of earlier building material or decorative sculpture on new monuments).
Santa Sabina
Oldest surviving ecclesiastical basilica, meaning built specifically to be a Christian church.
Its decorations have been restored to their original restrained design.
Central Plan church: Main form is a centralized symmetrical shape (square, circle, octagon), topped by a dome.
Basilica of St. Apollinare in Classe
Campanile = A bell tower, usually built beside or attached to a church.
“An outstanding example of the early Christian basilica in its purity and simplicity of its design”
Byzantine Architecture
Traits of Byzantine Architecture:
Central-plan churches most common
Use of multiple domes, half-domes, towers, and vaults
Exterior – ornate decoration. Often brickwork. Striped arches and patterned walls
Interior – colorful mosaics and giltwork (gold)
Basilica of San Vitale
A squinch in architecture is a piece of construction used for filling in the upper angles of a square room so as to form a
proper base to receive an octagonal or spherical dome.
Mosaic - decoration of a surface with designs made up of closely set, usually variously colored, small pieces of material such as stone, mineral, glass, tile, or shell.
Mosaics are very typical of byzantine architecture
Hagia Sophia
Pendentive
The pendentive is a concave triangular area which enables the dome to transition gracefully into the square shape of the piers below.
Minarets: are a distinctive architectural feature of Islamic mosques, generally a tall spire with an onion-shaped or conical crown, usually either free standing or taller than any associated support structure. These were added AFTER the conversion to a mosque, 16th century. Also, the interior mosaics depicting Christianity were covered or destroyed.
Byzantine capitals -- highly ornate, with deep recesses for a tracery effect
St. Mark’s Cathedral
Exterior – ornate brickwork. Striped arches and patterned walls.
Scalloped arches around domes
Cathedral of St. Basil
Heavy Order - Romanesque Architecture
Churches sprang up all over the Christian world to accommodate a population increase enabled by relative stability and prosperity.
Pilgrimage was the medieval equivalent of tourism. Pilgrimage routes developed along the major roads, and these routes included numerous relic-holding churches to visit along the way. Relics brought in donations, so they were big business for the cathedrals and monasteries who owned them. Therefore, these churches needed to be large enough to accommodate flocks of the faithful.
Romanesque architecture is the style of architecture prevalent in Medieval Europe in the late middle ages, approx. 1000 – 1200 CE; characterized by heavy mass and round arches, similar to earlier Roman construction as filtered through Early Christian and some Byzantine sensibilities.
The basilica form of Early Christian churches is the norm, Now transformed into a cruciform (cross-shaped) plan with the addition of the → Transept.
Transept = a linear space set crosswise / perpendicular to the main nave, creating a cruciform church plan.
Key Characteristics:
Round arches - used in great abundance; as structure, to define openings (windows/doors), in arcades, as barrel and groin vaults, and also as decoration (blind arcades and blind arches).
Arcade = a succession of contiguous arches, with each arch supported by a colonnade of columns or piers. Exterior arcades are designed to provide a sheltered walkway for pedestrians.
Blind arcade = an arcade that is composed of a series of arches that has no actual openings and that is applied to the surface of a wall as a decorative element. Can be made with pilasters or engaged columns.
Blind arches = Arches attached to wall or other surface, for decorative purposes. (usually used in a repeating line on wall)
Heavy Mass – Thick masonry walls with small openings; and thick structural piers, pilasters, and buttresses to support the outward thrust of high arched forms
Stone vaults are extremely heavy and difficult to construct. To support them, Romanesque churches have massive piers or compound columns and thick walls that could only be interrupted by small windows. External buttresses helped as well.
Pier = A structural pier in Romanesque architecture is a massive vertical masonry support designed to carry the heavy weight and outward thrust of rounded stone arches and vaults.
A Compound Pier is a clustered masonry support made of a central core with attached vertical shafts, half-columns, or pilasters.
Buttress = a projecting structure for supporting or giving stability to a wall or building.
Pilaster = a shallow, rectangular architectural element that projects slightly from a wall, giving the visual appearance of a supporting column.
Decorative Masonry – ornamentation is primarily done through the elaboration of the brickwork or stonework, and as bas-relief sculpture.
Horizontal Banding – articulation of decorative layers of the building in contrasting lines of material. We see this in banding of main walls and contrasting voussoirs of arches.
Towers – large and solid, serving as landmarks for the city. Often paired on a façade, and/or located at the crossing of transept and nave.
Cylinders – Multiple cylindrical forms around building (multiplying the apse).
Increased height / verticality compared to earlier churches
Romanesque buildings gain their impact through their monumentality and simple, horizontally-focused arrangement of architectural forms.
Early Romanesque – The beginning of the style, where the structures have more of the austerity of Early Christian churches, but bigger and more masonry articulation. Basically, a grey zone of overlap.
“Main” Romanesque – The main body of what we call Romanesque, with all the traits we associate with the style.
High Romanesque – Where the style becomes more elaborate in decoration, with layering, arcading, more decorative contrast, and more external sculpture.
The Basilica of Saint-Sernin
A spire is a tapering conical or pyramidal structure on the top of a building, particularly a church tower.
Apsidiole Chapels: smaller projecting apses around the transept and main apse for the display of relics.
Le Puy Cathedral
CLOISTER: a covered walk in a convent, monastery, college, or cathedral, typically with a wall on one side and a colonnade open to a quadrangle on the other. A cloister is usually the area in a monastery around which the principal buildings are ranged, affording a means of communication between the buildings.
Common Italian church layout:
• Main church basilica
• Round or octagonal baptistery
• Detached or semi-detached campanile
Limburg Cathedral
Polychromatic decorative masonry
Elaborate blind arcades holding sculpture becomes more common in High Romanesque
Florence Baptistery
Decorated with bands of white and green marble.
Church of San Michele
Elaborate arcades with a wide variety of columns also more common in High Romanesque.
The Leaning Tower of Pisa
Siena Cathedral
Reaching for God - Gothic Architecture
Gothic architecture is an architectural style that was popular in Europe from the late 12th to the 15th century, during the Late Middle Ages. It is noted for its lightness, intricacy, and verticality.
Gothic architecture was known during the period as opus francigenum ("French work")
Basilica of Saint-Denis
The Abbot rebuilt portions of the abbey church using innovative structural and decorative features. In doing so, he is said to have created the first truly Gothic building.
Key Characteristics:
Verticality – Having a strong or exaggerated sense of rising upward to the sky. In Gothic architecture, this is done through the building height and its proportions (achieved with flying buttresses), as well as through the upward thrust of the other elements: spires, towers, pinnacles, pointed arches, vertical buttresses, etc.
Flying Buttress – is a specific form of buttress composed of an arch that extends from the upper portion of a wall to a pier of great mass, in order to convey to the ground the lateral forces that push a wall outwards. The defining, functional characteristic of a flying buttress is that it is not in contact with the wall at ground level
Allows for thinner, more skeletal, inner wall
Pointed Arch – is an arch with a pointed crown, whose two curving sides meet at a relatively sharp angle at the top of the arch.
Spires and Pinnacles:
Spire = a tall, slender, pointed structure on top of a roof or tower, especially at the summit of church steeples.
Pinnacle = is an architectural ornament originally forming the cap or crown of a buttress or small turret, later also used on parapets, at the corners of towers, and in many other situations. The pinnacle looks like a small spire
Rib Vault (or ribbed vault) – A variation on a groin vault, where a framework of crossed or diagonal arched ribs conceal the groins, the intersections of the panels. These ribs are all the structure, with thin stone panels filling the spaces between the ribs, thus greatly reducing the weight and thus the outward thrust of the vault.
Tracery – is an architectural device by which windows (or screens, panels, and vaults) are divided into sections of various proportions by stone bars or ribs of molding. Most commonly, it refers to the stonework elements that support the glass in a window.
Rose Window – A decorated circular window, with radial stone tracery, usually glazed with stained glass.
Stained Glass Windows – windows infilled with portions of colored glass, used to form decorative or pictorial designs, both by painting and especially by setting contrasting pieces in a framework
Notre-Dame de Paris
Gargoyle = a spout in the form of a grotesque human or animal figure projecting from a roof gutter to throw rainwater clear of a building.
Chartres Cathedral
Sainte Chapelle
Dematerialization:the loads normally carried by load bearing masonry walls were transferred to the buttresses thereby enabling a greater use of glass and opening the space to light and the sky above. The walls became thinner, more transparent, and as a result.
Flamboyant Gothic:
Flamelike curving tracery
Addition of decorative ribs to interior vaults (fan vaults, tracery ribs)
Spires increase in visual detail, becoming skeletal and/or spikey
King’s College Chapel
World’s largest fan vault
Venetian Gothic - used not much for religious structures, more for important secular buildings like palaces. So we see primarily the pointed arch and tracery as attributes.
Doge’s Palace (Venetian Gothic Architecture)
Islamic Architecture
Three basic mosque types:
Hypostyle
Four-Iwan
Ottoman
Qibla Wall: The wall of the mosque that faces Mecca.
Mihrab: A wall recess, mostly in the form of arched niche, in the qibla wall, indicating the position of the prayer-leader facing the direction toward Mecca.
Prayer Hall: The main space for male worshippers to kneel and pray.
Minaret: A tall slender tower, built next or in a mosque, from which the Muslims are called to prayer. Mosques may have one up to six minarets.
Sahn: A large central courtyard, which is surrounded by an arcade on all sides. The atrium/cloister is its equivalent in European medieval architecture.
The Hypostyle Mosque: Mosque in which the prayer hall is formed of rows of vertical supports / columns, that can multiply indefinitely. Dominant type in the early period.
The Great Mosque of Damascus
Prayer hall which is rotated so the space is wide instead of long.
The Great Mosque of Samarra
Famed even at the time for its distinctive spiral minaret.
Aniconism is the avoidance of images of sentient beings in some forms of Islamic art. Religious Islamic art has been typically characterized by the absence of figures and extensive use of calligraphic, geometric patterns, and arabesque (abstract floral patterns).
Three main non-figural principles of Islamic decoration:
Arabesque = a form of artistic decoration consisting of surface decorations based on rhythmic linear patterns of scrolling and interlacing foliage, tendrils, or lines.
Calligraphy = beautiful writing. Artistic, stylized, or elegant handwriting or lettering.
Geometric pattern = A pattern involving the use of precise mathematical shapes which repeat themselves across a surface. In Islamic art, these patterns are usually quite intricate and often based on radial symmetry.
Islamic Arches:
Horseshoe Arch / Keyhole Arch: an arch having an intrados (the lower or inner curve of an arch) that widens above the springing before narrowing
4-center Arch: an arch whose intrados curve is described from four centers, usually with tight radii at springer and larger radii at top, intersecting in a point
Ogee Arch: an arch with two ogee (S-shaped) curves meeting at the apex.
Multifoil Arch / Polylobed Arch: an arch having an intrados composed of more than five foils (indentations between cusps) or lobes (a curved or rounded projection or division)
Great Mosque of Córdoba
Main Prayer Hall
Piers and double-arches set atop columns to raise hypostyle ceiling.
Columns are SPOLIA (the re-use of earlier building material or decorative sculpture on new monuments).
The Alhambra
Especially known for its intricate geometric tilework and carved arabesque decoration
Muqarnas: Three-dimensional decorative device used widely in Islamic architecture, in which tiers of individual elements, including niche-like cells, brackets and pendants, are projected over those below. Can be understood as the three-dimensional realization of the related 2D geometric patterns of decoration.
The Iwan Mosque: Mosque in which up to four iwans surround a courtyard. The prayer hall is the largest iwan. It was the most popular type in the medieval period, and remained dominant in Iran.
Iwan: A rectangular hall or space, usually vaulted, walled on three sides, with one end entirely open.
Like a hypostyle mosque, the layout is arranged around a large open courtyard. However, in the four-iwan mosque, each wall of the courtyard is punctuated with a monumental vaulted hall, the iwan.
The Ottoman Mosque: Mosque in which the prayer hall's space is dominated by a central dome surrounded by smaller and lower semi-domes. It was introduced by the Ottomans in the 15th century.
Strongly influenced by Hagia Sophia
The Blue Mosque
Blue is the dominant color in the stained glass windows ,reflective mosaics, and paint; creates a ethereal blue light in the space.
The Taj Mahal
White marble mausoleum