The Architectural Imagination [Part-3]

How the beginnings of architecture could influence and help conceptualize architecture practices in the present?

Gottfried Semper

Architect and historian Gottfried Semper's primary interest was to study the very beginnings of architecture.

To study those beginning he visited the great exhibition of 1851, in London, housed in the Crystal Palace.

There he saw a full-scale replica of a primitive hut from the Carribean Islands.

Elevation of the hut

Plan of the hut

The empirical fact of this primordial shelter exhibited the most advanced building of that time and it sort of prompted Semper to turn to a kind of materialist but also an anthropological model of architecture's beginnings, and a kind of model of how architecture could move from those beginnings to the present.

The four elements of a building that he devised were-

1. Fire (Ceramics,Metal)- It is a social and cultural equipment that provides both a formal centering device, but also the warmth. The protection that the group can gather around and form itself. Form like a bowl, a pot or a hearth is required to contain the fire. 
2. Base/Stereotomy (Masonry)- To hold this material a base is required. It has an inherent weight, a kind of inherent attachment to the Earth which bears on the Earth with compressive forces. 
3. Tectonics (Carpentry)- It a system composed of walls and the roof considered as an elastic frame. These elements have tensile strength connected by a knot or by tying the elements together.
4. Enclosure (Weaving)- Cloth, tapestry or some sort of woven material varying in thickness to accomplish different needs.

The Architectural Imagination [Part-2]

The development of technologies that allow the production of large sheets of glass and the materials with tensile strength like steel enormously changed the way the buildings were made shifting the architecture from heavy compressive forces in masonry to lightweight and thin structures.

Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft

In some ways, this advent of new materials resulted in architecture beginning around the end of the 19th century, and intensifying in the 20th century began to be used for commercial purposes.

One of the seminal examples of this movement is the General Electric Company, in Germany whose headquarters were on a prominent Urban site in Berlin.

Factories at this period were considered under perfunctory building type and the materials like steel and glass were basically used such that building could span large distances.

Peter Behrens was clear about his ambition to raise the factory architecture to the status of serious, profound architecture.

Bird's eye view

Interior view

In order to conceptualize this representational role that this new architecture to play, Behrens devised an architectural theory.

It has to do with the way architecture appears in history as a representation of a sort of cultural ethos, and that representational role of architecture has to change through time as history, itself moves forward.

It was clear from his work that industrial capitalism was a new authority. The architectural paradigm that was adequate to this new ethos was the factory.

The Architectural Imagination [Part-1]

Soul never thinks without a Phantasm

Architecture is not just a need for shelter or building but is one of the most complexly negotiated cultural practices. It is very important to understand the radical meaning of these terms before proceeding to make some concrete statements.

Some concept like imagination is important if we want to test architecture as a mode of knowledge

Imagination bridges the gap between perception/institution and understanding and is the mental capacity to create images/scenes.

Rudolf Whittkower

(click here to refer architectural principles in the age of humanism- by Whittkower)

Palladian Villa Types

We get the raw sensory data like the site, material, etc. from our architectural surveys and imagination schematizes it which might have universal validity to create an understanding of Architecture.

Understanding is passive, Imagination is active

Quatremere De Quincy

Building types is a part of Typology in Architecture which literally just means logic of types.

Building Typology focuses on functional aspects like Residential, Educational, Industrials etc. This approach is limiting as conversions within these types are possible.

Quatremere de Quincy's definition of the architectural type- "The word 'type' does not represent so much the image of something that must be copied or imitated perfectly, as the idea of an element that must itself serve as a rule for the model... the model, understood from the point of view of the practical execution of art, is an object that must be repeated such as it is; type, on the contrary, is an object on the basis of which everyone can conceive of works that may not resemble each other at all."