: Andrew Ballantyne
: Classical Architecture
: The Crowood Press
: 9780719841668
: Architecture
: 1
: CHF 22.50
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: Architektur
: English
: 160
: Wasserzeichen
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: ePUB
Lavishly illustrated and accessibly written, Classical Architecture takes the reader on a journey through the history of this iconic architectural genre, starting with an introduction to its origins in ancient Greece, through its resurgence across Europe during the Renaissance, to its influence on modern-day architectural design in locations as diverse as Shanghai and Washington DC. Written by Professor of Architecture and established author Andrew Ballantyne, and illustrated with over 100 photographs, this book will prove invaluable to anyone wanting to explore and understand this important and pervasive architectural style. Classical architecture has developed through many styles to become the backbone of western architecture. It was refined in ancient Greece mainly in sacred places. This architecture of finely modelled columns was taken up by the Romans and spread across their empire, changing on the way, so by the time the Roman empire collapsed it had become an architecture of arches and vaults. The monuments were impressive, even as ruins, and inspired imitation in later ages.

Andrew Ballantyne originally trained as an architect, but then found his way into research and writing. He has worked mainly at Newcastle University in the UK, but his interests range widely and he has worked with philosophers and archaeologists, as well as architects and architectural historians. He has chaired the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain and surveyed Paliochora on Kythera, a long-abandoned settlement in Greece, and wrote a monograph about Richard Payne Knight, who was an early benefactor of the British Museum. Andrew's books include Architecture: a Very Short Introduction, Key Buildings from Prehistory to the Present, Tudoresque: in Pursuit of the Ideal Home and John Ruskin: a Critical Life.

Chapter One

Ancient Greece

Starting in Athens

Any building put where the Parthenon is would look important. Held gloriously aloof from the everyday parts of the city, it is on a rocky plateau, the Acropolis, set apart from the rest of the city by cliffs (seeFig. 1). The building itself is a wreck. It can be seen from a great distance because of the lie of the land, and these days it is floodlit at night. From far away it makes a good impression, but when we get closer it is obviously no longer in use. The roof is missing, and so are most of the sculptures that used to embellish it. In the digital reconstruction, an idea of the building’s shape is restored, but the life is missing (seeFig. 2). Nevertheless it has a reputation as one of the world’s most beautiful buildings. In part that is because it has the status of a classic. Its beauty is not in doubt. If you do not find it beautiful, then it is your judgement that is at fault, not the building. We are educated to appreciate it.

Fig. 1 The view shows the Acropolis with the city of Athens in the background. On the Acropolis the ruined Parthenon is clearly visible on the right. The group of sunlit buildings to the left is the Propylaeion – the gateway building – with the small temple of Athena Nike in front of it. Further away, looking smaller and harder to distinguish, the Erechtheion is also visible.

Fig. 2 The Parthenon, Athens, 447–438BCE. Digital reconstruction of the most prominent classical temple.

The Parthenon is one of quite a small number of classical Greek temples to have survived – no more than fifty – some of them with just part of a single column upstanding in place. They are spread across the region that used to speak Greek, but modern national boundaries put them in different countries – the southern Italian mainland, Sicily and western Turkey, as well as the mainland and islands that are now in modern Greece. There are no surviving classical temples on Crete, although the father of the gods, Zeus, was supposed to have been born there.

Not all temples were classical in style. For example there are caves in the cliffs of the Acropolis that were used as temples. This book is about classical architecture, but not all the architecture of ancient Greece and Rome, which under a different heading might be seen as classical periods. Really we know very little about the everyday architecture of the ancient world because it has vanished, but the monumental buildings were more enduring – as they were intended to be. A classical building has columns, or – later – representations of columns. The façades of the Parthenon have columns going all the way round on all four sides. Within the space marked out by these rows of columns there is a closed building with walls that are solid except for a doorway at the end, thecella.

Fig. 3 The First Temple of Hera, Paestum, c.550BCE. An archaic temple – the oldest one illustrated in this book.

Le Corbusier was the most influential architect of the twentieth century. In his bookToward an Architecture there is a famous double-page spread with four illustrations that show two Greek temples paired with two vintage cars. The captions explain that we are looking at a temple at Paestum 600–550BCE (a Greek temple, built on land that is now in Italy,seeFig. 3) and the Parthenon 447–434BCE, and below them a Humber from 1907 and a Delage ‘Grand Sport’ of 1921. Le Corbusier’s book first came out in 1922 when the second car was brand new and would have looked spectacularly sleek compared with the old Humber, which is a very early car, dating from the year in which Henry Ford produced his first Model T. The idea with the pictures is to notice that the temples differ from one another in the same way as the cars. The older one establishes the type, while the newer one is much more sophisticated and refined.

The temple at Paestum (which the