World Architecture Week 9

After the year 1000, a new sense of cultural and economic openness encouraged the journeys of Christian pilgrims. They traveled from England, Germany, and France either to Jerusalem, Rome, or Santiago de Compostela, Spain. The protection of pilgrims became a pretext for the military exploits of the Crusaders, who reclaimed Jerusalem as their “Holy Land.”
Charlemagne’s palace and chapel at Aix-la-Chapelle, now called Aachen, remained a key project in his far-flung efforts to revive the Roman Empire.

The architect borrowed liberally from the Byzantine works in Ravenna. The palace derived its organization from Theodoric’s palace in Ravenna, which had been inspired by the imperial palace in Constantinople. The Palatine Chapel is the only piece of the imperial complex in Aachen that remains intact.

The architect attempted to copy San Vitale in Ravenna for the emperor’s mausoleum, producing a stiff approximation of the two-storied octagon supporting a dome on a drum. Above the main entry to the Aachen chapel rose the two towers of the castellum, or fortress.

Throughout the 9th century, Viking raiders from Scandinavia menaced the stability of much of Europe. They became enthusiastic sponsors for rebuilding monasteries. Their circular layout probably derived from Viking camps such as Trelleborg, built in 9th-century Denmark.

The Normans shipped the limestone from Caen to execute the ashlar construction of Westminster Abbey and many other convent churches. Durham cathedral, the northernmost Norman outpost, rose as their most ambitious commission. The impressive architectural output under the Norman rulers relied on local Muslim craftsmen and Byzantine artists for its vigor.

When the Crusaders finally took Jerusalem in 1099, they massacred the entire population of Jews and Arabs. The Kingdom of Jerusalem broke into four feudal states, and soon the new European overlords constructed over fifty castles to control the region. They hoisted a golden cross over the Dome of the Rock, now called the Temple of the Lord. The geometric rigor of Frederick II’s fortresses in Sicily and Puglia were without equal. Frederick II’s synthesis of religious and secular forms at Castel del Monte resulted in the highest expression of the idealism that began with Charlemagne for the revival of the grandeur of imperial Rome.

Around the year 1000, four Italian ports, Amalfi, Pisa, and Genoa on the western side of the peninsula, and Venice on the east, emerged as key shipping powers around the Mediterranean. The merchant regimes fostered a new civic consciousness leading to the construction of impressive public and religious monuments. The contact across the Mediterranean affected the development of European taste. The stilted arch windows of Byzantine Constantinople reappeared on the facades along the Grand Canal in Venice.

Pisa’s Duomo complex setting proved unusual, standing in open space planted with grass, remained outside of the old city limits. By the mid-13th century they had added the marble-clad Campo Santo cemetery on the north side and the long elevation of the pilgrims’ hospice to the south, further defining the area as an enclosed temenos. By the 1150s, the dome was complete, rising from an oval plan to a section that followed the profile of a pointed arch, similar to contemporary domes in the eastern Mediterranean area.

The Fatimids built their first Great Mosque, the al-Azhar, toward the end of the 10th century inside the walls near the eastern palace. It became the principal Islamic study center and basis of the university. Fatimid arches and niches had a distinct style, like triangles with rounded corners.

The groundswell of medieval European urbanism coincided with the birth of Gothic architectural style. The new prosperity of the cities encouraged the expansion of city walls, gigantic cathedrals, and impressive civic buildings, such as town halls, covered markets, and hospitals.

In the mid-13th century the French king Louis IX conducted a campaign in the south of France against renegade Christians of the Cathar sect. One of the prime rebel forts, Carcassonne, fell to Louis IX in 1240. He rebuilt it as a fortress. On a flat site adjacent to the fortress of Carcassonne, the king commissioned a polygonal new town with an approximate grid of square blocks for the resettlement and control of the population of Cathar origin.

The building boom in European cities during the 13th and 14th centuries nurtured the new Gothic style in church building, architecture as distinct in its details as the classical style of the Romans. The designers experimented with slender structural members to accentuate verticality, progressively eliminating the mass of the walls to fulfill an underlying goal of creating “heavenly” interior light. The master builders of the cathedrals greatly advanced the technical possibilities of construction using three structural expedients: pointed arches, ribbed vaults, and flying buttresses. While none of the three was a new invention, together they comprised an architectural theory that served the symbolic nature of light.

World Architecture | Week 8

Premodern societies in Asia considered the political order a reflection of a greater hierarchy in the cosmos. The creators of the immense temples constructed between the 9th and 12th centuries in Indonesia, Cambodia, and India regularly turned to the geometric order of a mandala to generate landscapes that mirrored their royal power as a religious necessity.

In India both Buddhists and Hindus used the mandala, a layered series of geometric patterns, to create images and forms for religious devotions. Temple designers based their plans and elevations on them. As Indian culture spread throughout Southeast Asia, it inspired ever grander structures in places such as Cambodia and the island of Java in Indonesia.

A consummate realization of a mandala in three dimensions, it presented a concentric succession of geometric figures leading from the redented squares of the five outer platforms to the three oval rings of stupas on the upper terraces, terminating in a giant stupa at the summit. The base covered about the same area as the small pyramid at Giza. The designers showed little concern for structural invention other than finding a way to brace the mass of the outer terraces from sliding outward.

The Khmer dynasty in Cambodia went even further toward designing representations of the cosmos so engrossing they could almost replace the real world. Angkor, with its dozens of temple complexes, oblong reservoirs, canals, and sculpture-lined causeways, comprised the largest monumental setting in the world.

The first few generations of Khmer rulers at Hariharalaya sponsored three basic architectural programs:

• to supply a grand water work,

• to build an ancestor temple,

• to create a pyramidal state temple as a mausoleum.

The scale and complexity of Khmer hydrological engineering, which included great basins, paved roads, canals, and formidable dams and bridges, revealed the advanced organizational capacity of its highly centralized and hierarchical society.

While the models for Indonesian and Cambodian temple builders originated in India, Indian patrons did not achieve works of comparable scale and refinement until the eleventh century. Like the Khmer in Cambodia, the Chola boosted their political authority through the distribution of land grants to hundreds of monastic communities.

During the 7th century, Islamic rule spread across the southern coasts of the Mediterranean and into Spain, or al-Andalus. Here the exiled branch of the Umayyad dynasty consolidated its rule over the Iberian Peninsula and Morocco and sponsored an exuberant style of architecture.

Few traces of Roman Cordoba survived aside from the magnificent 16-arched bridge and the ruins of an amphitheater. A dense urban fabric enveloped the Umayyad capital with narrow, winding streets and closed structured on blind alleys, much like those in Damascus and Cairo. The principal monument of the city, the Great Mosque, rose next to the Alkazar, the prince’s urban palace, offering a unique patch of orthogonal order.

The mosque was expanded over the course of two centuries as an ongoing architectural project in four or five campaigns. Its wondrous multitude of columns, capitals, arches, and ceiling decorations folded into the endless repetition of more than 500 arcuated bays, infusing the whole with a compelling sense of unity like the waves at sea.

World Archihitecture | Week 7

  Islam, the religion that developed around the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, began in the semi-nomadic setting of the southern edge of the great Arabian Desert. Within a century of the Prophet’s death, Islamic rulers amassed an empire through military conquest and conversion that included most of the southern half of the Roman Empire plus all of the Persian Empire.    Mecca had long been a major cult site for the nomadic tribes of Arabia, attracting religious pilgrims to the Kaaba, a cubical granite house containing many idols. After many battles, Muhammad conquered Mecca and stripped the Kaaba of its pagan iconography. He taught that the angel Gabriel had given the sacred black stone to Abraham and that both Abraham and Ishmael participated in building the original structure. As the focus of Muslim prayers, the Kaaba represents the unity of the faithful.
          

  The Mosque of the Prophet in Medina probably resembled a small trader’s caravansary. The first Muslims rejected the form of pagan temples, preferring to base their cult buildings on secular structures. The first mosques provided simple architectural settings without apses, side chapels, ambulatories, crypts, baptisteries, or choirs.  

  The first two generations of Islam requisitioned diverse structures to be transformed into mosques. The three most common plans:

    * the basilica with longitudinal aisles directed to the qibla;

    * the transverse basilica with lateral exposure to the qibla wall;

    * the isotropic hypostyle hall.

  After the victory against the Persians, the Arabs founded Kufah in 638 on a site not far from ancient Babylon. The architect followed Greco–Roman precedents, learned through the Byzantine towns that had been founded in the region. He structured the new city on a grid with two broad cross streets.
  After several centuries of feudal division in China, the Sui dynasty (580–618) reunited the north and south of the empire. The most radical innovation involved the redistribution of agricultural land. The Sui created China’s grandest work of infrastructure: the Grand Canal, which remains the world’s longest artificial waterway. They began to rebuild the capital city of Chang’an.
  The legendary Silk Road to the west acquired new importance. Chang’an (modern Xi’an) lay at the eastern terminus of the Silk Road, welcoming traders who came via the Himalayas from India. In Chang’an the trading communities built Buddhist temples, mosques, Nestorian Christian churches, and Zoroastrian fire temples. The strong influence of Islam became apparent with the construction of Chang’an’s Great Mosque in 742, designed with Chinese-style roofs.
  The Sui dynasty relied on the architect Yuwen Kai (555–612), who produced the new plan of Chang’an, conceived the Grand Canal, and designed the segmental arch bridge of Zhaozhou, or Anji, across the Nanjiao River. 
    The architect’s scheme for Chang’an followed the long-standing grid traditions of the wangcheng_diagram, with three axial streets intersected by three cross-axial streets and the palace placed in the center. The breadth of Chang’an’s streets has never been matched: the central avenue, at 508 feet across, stretched considerably farther than the widest of Haussmann’s nineteenth-century boulevards in Paris. Chang’an’s grid contained a total of 108 blocks, known as fangs, or “wards,” larger in area than a city block.

  Buddhism, which arrived in China with Indian merchants and monks during the first century BCE, became the most important foreign influence during the Sui and Tang periods. Contact with Tibet may explain the appearance of the most distinctive building type of Chinese Buddhism: the pagoda, a layered wooden structure that protected a stupa memorial for a relic or act of the Buddha. 
    The Great Wild Goose Pagoda built in 652 in the Ci’en monastery, offered a fine example of the multistoried louge type. The Small Wild Goose Pagoda, with many rows of projecting eaves, corresponded to the miyuan_type.

Topography model of Meke Maar

This is the 1/1000 scaled model of Meke Maar. 

Trip to Konya

We had a trip to Konya with our instructors and we visited Meke Maar, Taşkale and Çatalhöyük. We analysed topography in Meke Maar and study the spatial organizations and their relations with landscape in Çatalhöyük and Taşkale. Our experiences was important in terms of human scale. We assigned to made an ADS about those things. 

Those are the photographs of the places which we visited.

This is the ADS of those places which produced by me.

Photography in Konya

Taşkale:

Meke Maar:

Case Study

We are assigned to analyse the spatial configurations and relations achieved by the integration of architectural space and landscape. We tried to understand structural and material qualities of the spaces as we analyse in each project. Documented our observations through drawings, diagrams & sketches in our ADS.

World Architecture| Week 6

By the late second century the Pax Romana began to falter due to internal and external conflicts. By the mid-third century Rome began to lose its political primacy. The emperors rarely resided there, preferring more strategically located cities such as Milan, Trier, Nicomedia (modern Izmit, Turkey), and Salonika in northern Greece.Rome acquired some of its most magnificent buildings in terms of scale, technique, and decoration.

Emperor Diocletian, who had proposed a four-man executive system for the empire, retired in 305 to Spalato, or the “little palace,” on the Dalmatian coast. The palace was organized like a military castrum on a cross-axis inside a nearly perfect square set of walls. The predominantly defensive appearance of Diocletian’s palace set the precedent for the fortified castles of medieval Europe. Diocletian’s abdication ushered in a decade of dynastic infighting, with violent succession disputes. In the northern capital of Trier, in southwestern Germany, Constantine erected new city walls, one of the largest bath complexes outside of Rome, and, adjacent to the stadium, an imperial palace with a formidable basilica.

As the most important crossroads city in the middle of the plains of Northern Italy’s Po valley, Milan replaced Rome for most of the fourth century as the capital of the western empire. Waves of invaders devastated Milan in the early fifth century, erasing most of its Roman fabric. When the barbarians began to infiltrate Italy as settlers, mercenaries, and eventually rulers, the new power of bishops dominated the Italian cities. After Constantine began his great churches in Rome, he transferred his political capital east to Byzantium. Constantine installed Christianity as the principal religion of the Roman Empire and imposed the major types for its principal cult buildings. 

Indian temple builders from the first to the eighth centuries carved into stone cliffs or out of piled rocks, making an art of subtraction. The tradition of rock-cut works reached its zenith during the Gupta period in the fourth and fifth centuries. The ancient empire of the Mauryan dynasty fell apart in the early second century BCE, and India reverted to feudal fragmentation. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism remained nonhierarchical, permitting a multiplicity of divinities and varied strains of dogma. Buddhism, which tended to appeal to the wealthier patrons, produced the earliest architectural prototypes, later reworked for Hindu and Jain buildings.