Firth of Forth Railway Bridge

Firth of Forth Railway Bridge

Scotland

Nine miles west of Edinburgh, Scotland, the mouth of the River Forth is spanned by Europe’s first all-steel, long-span bridge. Completed in 1890 it was then the longest bridge in the world. Until 1917 it was also the largest metal cantilever, and at the beginning of the twenty-first century it remains the second largest ever built. It was a major accomplishment of Victorian engineering.

The extension of the railroad along Scotland’s east coast, to complete the direct route between Edinburgh and Aberdeen, was hampered for most of the nineteenth century by two broad inlets of the North Sea: the Firth (mouth) of Tay and the Firth of Forth. The River Forth rises near Aberfoyle and widens into its firth about 50 miles (80 kilometers) from the ocean.

Vessels up to about 300 tons (270 tonnes) could navigate as far as Alloa, about 16 miles (26 kilometers) inland; those up to about 100 tons (91 tonnes) could reach Stirling, a little further on.

After earlier aborted proposals—a tunnel in 1806 and a bridge in 1818—for crossing the firth, little more was attempted for fifty years. In 1865 an act of Parliament sanctioned a bridge across the Queens-ferry Narrows, where the river passes between steep banks at the neck of the firth. Four railroad companies—North British, North Eastern, Midland, and Great Northern—formed a consortium in 1873 and commissioned Thomas Bouch, engineer for North British, to design the bridge. He proposed a suspension structure with twin spans of 1,600 feet (480 meters). The project was delayed for five years because of lack of funds; by spring 1879 only one pier had been started.

When the much-vaunted Tay Railway Bridge, also designed by Bouch and less than two years old, collapsed in a gale on 28 December 1879 with the loss of seventy-five lives, work on the Forth bridge was immediately suspended by another act of Parliament. In January 1881 a British Board of Trade inquiry found that the Tay disaster was caused by inadequate design and poor supervision. Bouch’s Firth of Forth scheme was abandoned. Within months the engineer died, a broken man. The engineers of the Forth consortium’s member railways, Thomas Harrison, William Barlow, John Fowler, and Benjamin Baker, had to develop a new design. In May 1881 Fowler and Baker submitted a plan for a continuous girder, or balanced cantilever, structure. In July 1882 yet another act authorized construction. The Tay bridge affair had so undermined public confidence in railroads that the legislation insisted that the Forth bridge should “enjoy a reputation of being not only the biggest and strongest, but also the stiffest bridge in the world.” There was to be no vibration, even as trains passed over it. Consequently, it was greatly over-engineered.

Before 1877 steel bridges had been banned by the Board of Trade because the Bessemer conversion process produced steel of unpredictable strength. The Siemens-Martin open-hearth process, developed by 1875, bad changed that, yielding material of consistent quality. That kind of steel was used in the Forth bridge, heralding the transition from cast and wrought iron in such structures. A smaller steel cantilever bridge had been built in Germany, but the Scottish project was on a larger scale than had been seen before. There is little doubt that its designers owed much to a U.S. model of several years earlier. Between 1869 and 1874 James B. Eads had designed and built the world’s first steel bridge, over the Mississippi at St. Louis, Missouri. Its three-arch superstructure, with a center span of 520 feet (156 meters) and side spans of 502 feet (150 meters), supported by four massive limestone piers, carried a railroad and a road for other traffic on two levels. Other pioneering features of Eads’s bridge were adopted by the British: the use of pneumatic caissons (large diving bells fed with compressed air) to excavate the foundation, tubular steel structural members, and a balanced cantilever design that allowed construction to proceed without temporary supports that would have obstructed the waterway.

In December 1882 the contract for the Forth bridge was awarded to a consortium led by Tancred Arrol, an experienced and respected company headed by William Arrol, which already had contracts for the Caledonian Railway Bridge over the Clyde and the replacement Tay bridge. At the height of building activity, there would be 4,600 Britons, Italians, Germans, and Austrians working shifts around the clock. The construction of the foundations and piers took until the end of 1885. Each of the bridge’s three cantilever towers stands on four 70-foot-diameter (21-meter) granite piers, founded on the bedrock. Eight of the piers are in water, and their foundations were excavated by men working in wrought-iron pneumatic caissons, sunk up to 90 feet (27 meters) below the river surface. The massive cylinders were prefabricated in Glasgow, then dismantled and taken to Queensferry, where they were reassembled. Once excavation was complete, the air shafts and the working spaces were filled with concrete, and the granite piers rose above them.

Work on the superstructure began in 1886 using 64,800 tons (54,860 tonnes) of steel from two steelworks in Scotland and another in Wales, fixed with rivets from a Glasgow foundry. All the structural

members were fabricated in on-site workshops, pre-drilled, test-assembled—exact dimensions were needed in a riveted structure—and then dismantled to be painted and carried to the site for erection. Each of the 331-foot-high (99.3-meter) cantilevers consists of two inward-sloping trusses fabricated from huge, internally stiffened tubular members up to 12 feet (3.6 meters) in diameter. They support 680-foot-long (204-meter) cantilever arms that are linked midspan by suspended girders of about half that length, making the distances between the towers about 1,700 feet (540 meters). The length of the bridge between the end piers is about 5,300 feet (1,600 meters). Together with the approach viaducts and arches at each end, the bridge carries the double-track railroad for 2,765 yards (2,490 meters), 150 feet (45 meters) above the surface of the Firth of Forth. The central gap was closed on 14 November 1889, and the Prince of Wales ceremonially opened the bridge on 4 March 1890.

Engineering Building | Leicester University, England

Engineering Building

Leicester University, England

The Scots architect James Frazer Stirling (1926–1992) formed a partnership with James Gowan (b. 1923) in 1955 after winning a commission for a low-rise housing development in Ham Common, Middlesex (1955–1958). The design started a trend in England for broadly finished brick and exposed concrete. There followed a couple of domestic scale projects, and in July 1959 their more influential work: the Engineering Building at Leicester University (completed 1963), which has been called the “pinnacle of their mutual achievement.” The seminal building, which juxtaposes a glazed office tower with red-tile facings on the massive cantilevered lecture theaters and a single-story workshop, was unlike any postwar architecture elsewhere and broke the hold of Le Corbusier upon British architects. The critic Reyner Banham coined the name “New Brutalism” to describe the new style, which exposed concrete, steel, and brick and rejected the polished and elegant finishes and geometric regularity of the International Modern Movement. The character of the Engineering Building was quickly and widely emulated in Britain; its influence persisted even longer in Japan.

Leicester University was founded as a university college in 1921 and granted its Royal Charter in 1957. The administration appointed the Cambridge engineer Edward Parkes to set up a new engineering faculty, to commence with 200 students. The university also commissioned Leslie Martin to produce a master plan for developing the 9-acre (3.6-hectare) campus; Stirling and Gowan’s building was its first major postwar facility. By the end of 1959 they had produced two alternative preliminary designs. The final scheme was approved in March 1960, although the two architects disagreed over the glazing of the tower block. In fact, their partnership was dissolved as soon as the building was completed.

The building has two main elements: a complex, multistory main building that houses two lecture theaters, laboratories, and offices, and a lower level housing workshops. Two cantilevered reinforced concrete lecture theaters (attributable to the structural engineers), their sloping seating expressed on the outside of the building, are set at right angles to each other and are joined by a diagonal ramp. Four stories of laboratories rise beside the smaller theater on tall concrete columns; surfaces are faced with deep red Accrington brick and red Dutch tiles. Above the larger theater—also brick and tile clad—is a six-story, fully glazed office tower, its narrow rectangular form modified by cut-off corners, crowned by a water tank. The spiral staircase that serves it penetrates the cantilevered block. The adjacent ground-level heavy-machinery workshops, covering over two-thirds of the site and designed mainly by Gowan, are clad in part with translucent glass and roofed with long, diagonal, north-facing glass trapezoidal prisms. One historian has commented that “a mannerist taste for distortion and paradox” permeates the building, and that the “diversity of forms 1/4 is a pretext for the liveliest interplay of masses.” Such a cynical view undervalues the work of one of Britain’s—the world’s—greatest twentieth-century architects; indeed, a winner of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize (1981) and “a leader of the great transition from the Modern Movement to the architecture of the New.”

Ditherington Flax Mill

Ditherington Flax Mill

Shrewsbury, England

The Industrial Revolution gave rise to a new building type: the factory, where a managed workforce could operate machines that were driven by steam power. The advent of machines also created a demand for iron to be produced on a large scale; in addition to being used to build machines, it soon became apparent that iron could be used to construct industrial buildings. The forerunner was the prefabricated cast-iron bridge at Coalbrookdale, England, of 1775–1779. But the factories, especially textile mills, involved problems other than the structural ones. Because they handled large quantities of cotton, flax, and wool, and because their wooden floors were quickly saturated with the oil used to lubricate the machines, they presented a fire hazard. The earliest textile mills had timber floor and roof framing and solid masonry external walls. Cast iron was non-combustible, and it was believed that it offered, as well as greater strength, a measure of fire resistance. Designed in 1795 and built the following year by the

engineer Charles Bage of the milling firm of Bennion, Bage, and Marshall, the Ditherington Flax Mill, in the Shropshire town of Shrewsbury, was the world’s first iron-framed building, the predecessor of most modern factories and even office blocks.

Ditherington was the largest flax mill of its day and one of the largest textile mills of any kind in Britain. The five-story building has conventional load-bearing masonry external walls with very large windows. Internally, it is divided into four bays by three rows of slender, cruciform-section, cast-iron columns, extending for eighteen bays on a north-south axis. Each bay measures about 10 feet (3 meters) square, and the average ceiling height is about 11 feet (3.4 meters). The columns support cast-iron beams spanned by the brick vaults that form the floor above.

The nearby warehouse and cross mill, also iron framed, were built soon after. In 1846 Professor Eaton Hodgkinson published Experimental Researches on the Strength … of Cast Iron, a definitive work that established a design methodology for cast-iron structures; together with Sir William Fairbairn he made a major contribution to the theory of nineteenth-century bridge construction. Cast iron is not fireproof; in fact, it fails structurally and rather dramatically at relatively low temperatures. Consequently, the designers of later iron-framed buildings found ways to protect the columns, often by encasing them in non-load-bearing masonry.

The Ditherington Flax Mill survives, reasonably intact. In 1886 the mill ceased operations, and the building was vacant for ten years. For another century, probably because it had large expanses of open floor space, it was converted to maltings for a brewery. It was empty again from 1987, when the brewery closed down, and has been quite badly vandalized since. In the mid-1990s proposals were put in hand for the refurbishment of all the buildings on the site, with the help of a grant from English Heritage. The project included the creation of shops, restaurants, a heritage information center, leisure facilities and offices, an art gallery, and some housing. In March 2000 Advantage West Midlands announced a £2.8 million (U.S.$4.1 million) grant for the restoration of the mill.

De Re Aedificatora

Leon Battista Alberti’s theoretical treatise on architecture, titled De Re Aedificatoria (About Buildings), was dedicated in 1452 but not published until 1485. What qualifies it as an architectural feat? It changed the understanding and practice of architecture in much of Europe and continued to influence developments there and in the New World for about 400 years. Although he was gathering the ideas for the book, Alberti (1404–1472) was not an architect but a Catholic priest.

Alberti was born in Genoa, the illegitimate child of Lorenzo, an exiled Florentine from a family of bankers. When he was about ten years old, Battista (he added “Leon” later) entered a boarding school in Padua to receive a basic classical education. Several years of legal studies at the University of Bologna led to a doctorate in church law in 1428, after which he went to Florence. He soon began writing. His first published anthology of poems, Il cavallo (The Horse) of 1431, was quickly followed by Della famiglia (About the Family)—the first of many philosophical dialogues—and La tranquillità (Composure), a collection of essays, short stories, and plays, both in 1432. By then he was employed as a secretary in the Papal Chancery in Rome and was about to undertake a lives of the saints and martyrs, written, as was fashionable, in classical Latin. Living in Rome opened Alberti’s eyes to classicism, although the city was to remain neglected for another fifteen years. In 1434 he wrote a study about urban design entitled Descriptio urbis Romae (Description of the City of Rome), in which he first explored the classical notion that beauty existed in harmony, achievable through mathematical rules.

Alberti’s future lay not in the law but in the church. Taking holy orders, he would eventually become a canon of the Metropolitan Church of Florence in 1447. Other clerical offices and their benefits followed: abbot of San Sovino, Pisa, Gangalandi Priory, Florence, and the rectory of Borgo San Lorenzo in Mugello. In 1436 he completed his first major book, written in classical Latin, that touched upon architecture: De pictura (About Painting) was an attempt to bring system to perspective and set down rules for the painter to achieve concord with cosmic harmony. An Italian translation appeared in the same year.

From about 1434 Alberti traveled through northern Italy in the retinue of Pope Eugenius IV, visiting Florence, Bologna, and Ferrara, where, in 1438, under the patronage of Marchese Leonello, he began a more careful study of classical architecture, delving into the ten-part book De Architectura, written by one Marcus Vitruvius Pollio around 20 b.c. Alberti returned to Rome six years later and extended that study among the ancient buildings. When Nicholas V succeeded to the papacy in 1447, Alberti was appointed inspector of monuments, an office he held

until 1455. De Re Aedificatoria, written in classical Latin and structured in ten parts like Vitruvius’s De Architectura, was completed in 1452. Vitruvius’s book was its principal source and model, but Alberti also drew upon Plato, Pythagoras, and the Christian fathers; his own archeological studies; and, importantly, the consensus of contemporary architectural thought. Vitruvius had summarized the architectural practice of his day; Alberti went further to lay down universal rules.

As Italian society and fashions changed, from around 1420 the mason-architect had begun to be displaced, first by the artist-architect and then the courtier-artist-architect. With training in neither building nor art, Alberti wrote a book about the art of building that completed the metamorphosis of the architect into a dilettante-scholar; that made “design distinct from matter,” as he put it, and turned the art of architecture into an academic pursuit in which creativity and design skill could be honed to perfection simply by obeying a set of rules. Intuition was replaced with measurable absolutes. It gave architectural design a thoroughly developed theory of harmony and proportion and made it simple—at least in theory. According to some sources, the last Latin edition was a folio version in Bologna, of 1782. Translations and many derivative works found their way through western Europe.

Book I of De Re Aedificatoria defined design, set down the criteria for good architecture (convenience, stability, and delight), and discussed the basis of composition and proportion. Book II dealt with matters of professional practice and building materials. Book III addressed practical building construction. Book IV covered many aspects of civic design, and Book V dealt with plans for various building types. The next book explored the esthetic dimension of architecture, defining beauty as “a harmony of all the parts in whatsoever subject it appears, fitted together with such proportion and connection, that nothing could be added, diminished or altered, but for the worse.” It also included a section on mechanical and technical details. Alberti’s strong attachment to antiquity was revealed in Books VII and VIII, that took up the subjects of ornament in religious buildings and Roman urban design, respectively. In Book IX the axiomatic principle underlying Renaissance architecture was restated: that beauty is an innate property of things, achieved by following cosmic rules. Then there was an assortment of chapters about mostly practical issues. Book X descended to the pragmatic: water supply, engineering, repairing cracks, and even how to get rid of fleas.

Alberti applied his theories in only a few buildings, mostly unfinished renovations or extensions. They included the facades of the Church of San Francesco (otherwise known as Tempio Malatestiano) of 1450, in Rimini; the facades of the Palazzo Rucellai (1446–1451) and Santa Maria Novella (1458–1471), both in Florence; and San Sebastiano (1459) and Sant’Andrea (1470–1472), both in Mantua. His biographer Giorgio Vasari wrote in 1550, “His writings possess such force that it is commonly supposed that he surpassed all those who were actually his superiors in art” and added, “He was a person of the most courteous and praiseworthy manners … generous and kind to all.”

Chek Lap Kok International Airport | Hong Kong

Chek Lap Kok International Airport

Hong Kong

Hong Kong’s new international airport at Chek Lap Kok is the product of what was at the time the world’s largest engineering and architectural project—a logistical marvel that developed designs in only twentyone months and managed a workforce of up to 21,000 to build the airport facilities as well as the island on which they stand and the extensive ground transport links, in only five years. In 1999, a convention of U.S. construction executives and editors named it

one of the top ten architectural and engineering achievements of the twentieth century.

Anyone who flew into Hong Kong before mid-1998 will always remember the unnerving experience of looking directly into apartment buildings that seemed almost to touch the wingtips as the plane descended to Kai Tak Airport—a dubious thrill that is no longer part of a visit to the crowded island. Kai Tak airfield commenced operations around 1924, becoming a Royal Air Force base three years later. In 1935 it was upgraded to suit growing commercial traffic, and two more runways were added over the next twenty-five years. It was renamed Hong Kong International Airport in 1958 and underwent continual extensions and improvements as the number of flights increased at a dizzying rate. Shortly before it closed in 1998, Kai Tak was processing nearly 30 million international passengers and over 1.5 million tons (1.36 million tonnes) of international cargo every year.

There had been discussions about an out-of-town airport since the 1960s, within an international transport strategy that also included shipping; a plan to construct a new airport was announced in October 1988. Although well down the government’s list of preferred sites (after Nim Wan, Lamma Island, and Clearwater Bay), Chek Lap Kok was chosen, but not unanimously. When it opened on 6 July 1998 the new airport had an annual capacity of 2.76 million tons (2.50 million tonnes) of cargo and 35 million passengers, planned to rise to 87 million by the year 2040. The Provisional Airport Authority, charged with planning and realizing the facility, was established in April 1990. The contract, estimated at almost HK$50 billion (then equivalent to U.S.$6.4 billion), was awarded to the Mott Consortium, comprising Mott. Connell, Ove Arup and Partners; Fisher Marantz, Renfro Stone, O’Brien Kreitzberg and Associates; Wilbur Smith Associates; and the architectural firm of Norman Foster and Partners, which undertook the design of the terminal building.

The first construction stage project was the recreation of the site. In 1992 Chek Lap Kok was a 330-foot (100-meter) hilltop rising from the sea; by June 1995 dredging and reclamation had reshaped it into a 3.7-by-2.2-mile (6-by-3.5-kilometer) flat platform—about four times its original area—23 feet (7 meters) above sea level. For the first year the airport operated with a single runway. Now known as the South Runway, it is used mostly for landings; the North Runway, put into service late in August 1999, is used principally for departures. Handling an average of 450 flights a day, Chek Lap Kok has forty-eight frontal aircraft gates at the terminal, twenty-seven on the apron, and thirteen cargo gates.

The 1,400-yard-long (1.27-kilometer), nine-level terminal building, under 45 acres (18 hectares) of 120-foot-wide (36-meter) steel barrel vaults, is the largest enclosed public space ever built. An indicator of the logistical achievement of the entire project, the superstructure of the vast Y-shaped building was completed in only three years. Its design was constrained by off-site fabrication of components that could be site-assembled, in much the same way as Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace 150 years earlier. The air-cooled central terminal space, over 1,000 feet (300 meters) wide, houses the usual airport functions. More than 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) of moving walkways carry incoming passengers along the 2,400-foot (720-meter) concourse, through the baggage hall, to 124 immigration desks and seventy-six custom positions. Departing passengers are served by 288 check-in desks. Dimensions are difficult to convey; suffice it to say that the baggage hall alone is as big as New York’s Yankee Stadium, and the fully automatic baggage-handling system can process 19,000 items an hour. There is also the inevitable shopping area—the “Hong Kong Sky Mall”—in five zones and comprising 154 specialist retail, food, and drink outlets. Nearby, the twelve-story Regal Airport Hotel, with 1,100 rooms and connected to the passenger terminal by a covered walkway, completes the facility. Internal shuttle trains run through a 20-foot-high (6-meter) tunnel, 106 feet (32 meters) wide, beneath the building. The design of Chek Lap Kok allows for expansion that will include an additional concourse and passenger terminal, as well as additional air cargo, catering, and maintenance facilities.

Chek Lap Kok was complemented by a complex Airport Core Project involving several elements and costing HK$ 155.3 billion (about U.S.$20 billion). The high-speed Airport Express Railway, part of Hong Kong’s mass-transit rail link, and 21 miles (34

kilometers) of 3-lane highway across the Tsing Ma Bridge (the world’s longest road-rail suspension bridge) provide alternative routes between the airport and Kowloon and further through the new Western Tunnel to Hong Kong Island and the central business district. The scheme also includes a new town for 150,000 people, because height restrictions, so necessary for Kai Tak Airport, have now been lifted. And, of course, the 2,350-acre (940-hectare) Kai Tak site became free for redevelopment. Plans are in hand for mixed commercial and recreational uses among residential towers accommodating 300,000 people. Work should be completed by 2003.

Chartres Cathedral (Cathedral of the Assumption of Our Lady)

France

Chartres, capital of France’s Department of Eure-et-Loir, stands on the Eure River, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) southwest of Paris. An important center in pre-Roman Gaul, it was one of the sacred places of the Druids. Overrun by the Normans, the region later settled down, and late in the thirteenth century it became the appanage of Charles de Valois, who was briefly (1284–1290) king of Aragon and Sicily. François I made it a Duchy in 1528. Louis XIV granted the Duchy of Chartres to the House of Orléans, an arrangement that lasted until about 1850.

Chartres prospered in the Middle Ages because it possessed a precious relic—a piece of oriental silk believed to be the veil worn by the Virgin Mary during the birth of Christ. Chartres therefore became an important pilgrimage site, and the chapter of the cathedral established trade fairs to coincide with the four annual feasts of the Virgin. The late-twelfth-century Cathedral of the Assumption of Our Lady at Chartres, recognized, as “a reference point of French Gothic art,” is a milestone in the development of Western architecture because it employs all the elements of a new structural system: the pointed arch; the rib-and-panel vault; and, most significantly, the flying buttress.

Only the Royal Portal on the west front (1150–1175) and the crypt remain of the Romanesque cathedral commenced on the site of an earlier church in 1145. The remainder was destroyed by fire in 1194, and, not least because religious fervor was running high in France, construction immediately commenced on a new cathedral, a “turning point in Gothic architecture” that rose upon the foundations of the old. Financed by all levels of local society (which also provided much of the voluntary labor), most of the building was finished by 1223. The cathedral was consecrated in 1260

This Chartres was architecturally radical because the upper part of the walls above the arcades that separated aisles from nave was essentially stone frames for the expansive colored stained-glass windows, punctuated by the piers that carried the 112-foot-high (34-meter) quadripartite vaults. The lateral stability of earlier churches had depended upon massive masonry walls with frugal openings; here, there were diaphanous, luminous walls because the stability was provided by flying buttresses, used in a way previously unseen.

Flying buttresses, derived by the master masons by persistent experiment, are masonry arches that transmit the sideways thrusts of the stone roof vaults to vertical buttresses—in effect, very thick but very narrow walls at right angles to the building—constructed, against the outside walls of the aisles. The resultant force of the thrust and the tremendous selfweight of the towering buttresses created a stable structural system. Once hidden beneath the roofs, at Chartres the flying buttresses were exposed and decorated as a feature of the architecture. There was now available a construction system in which rib-and-panel vaulting (employing the pointed arch) was carried by piers and buttresses whose stability was ensured by the dynamic balance of thrust and counterthrust. These had been used in Durham Cathedral, completed around 1133, and the pointed arch had been exploited in Suger’s St. Denis a decade later. They reached a mature synthesis at Chartres in 1194, where, as one historian has observed, the master mason—sadly, he remains anonymous—“outlined new principles which would inspire all the great architects of the thirteenth century.” After Chartres, the builder-architects of northern Europe further developed the structural skeleton whose columns, arches, and flying buttresses liberated the wall from its load-bearing function. The inevitable result was that the interiors of the Gothic cathedrals became loftier and lighter, illuminated by vast expanses of stained glass. Of those transcendent spaces, Chartres was the forerunner.

The cathedral is celebrated for its 152—originally there were 186—stained-glass windows, dating from about 1200 to 1235, with a total area exceeding 21,500 square feet (2,000 square meters). Used to instruct the illiterate masses, most are replete with figures from Bible stories and religious legends; others propagandize the trade guilds and organizations that paid for them. The architecture of Chartres is also enriched with sculpture; in all, there are about 2,000 figures, some dating from the Romanesque church. These figures, too, are remarkably innovative, because they are among the earliest medieval carvings to depart from the iconographic renderings of human beings to impart individual features, the reawakening of a naturalism that foreshadows the rise of Christian humanism in Europe.

Chartres has altered only a little in its 800-year lifetime. Another fire damaged it in the twelfth century, and the northwest spire was hit by lightning and replaced between 1507 and 1513. The church survived the political and religious conflicts of the sixteenth century and, remarkably, those of the French Revolution (1787–1799). The roof was damaged by fire in 1836, necessitating replacement. The current problem is more insidious, and preservation programs are in hand to guard against air-pollution damage to the historic stained-glass windows.

Charlemagne’s Palatine Chapel - Aachen, Germany

The city of Aachen stands 40 miles (64 kilometers) southwest of Cologne on the River Wurm, a tributary of the Roer, in the German stare of North Rhine-Westphalia. The Romans knew the place as Aquisgranum, famous for its health spas since the first century a.d. The Merovingian kings, who ruled the Franks from a.d. 481 to 751, held court there, but the town enjoyed great eminence during the Carolingian dynasty, especially under Charlemagne (reigned 768–814). His Palatine Chapel, now the central element of Aachen Cathedral, is the finest surviving example of Carolingian architecture. This architectural jewel copied the centrally planned Byzantine church of San Vitale at Ravenna, Italy (525–548), clearly demonstrating one way in which building ideas are transmitted between cultures. The ability of its northern builders to assimilate a southern European style was in itself a considerable achievement.

Charlemagne succeeded his father, Pepin the Short, as king of the Franks in 768. The first strong secular ruler in Europe since the ancient Roman Empire, he was in theory—but only in theory—subordinate to the pope, a relationship symbolized by his coronation by Pope Leo III as Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day 800. Six years earlier he had established his residence and Court at Aachen, the town where he was born. In 792, he commissioned Bishop Odo of Metz to design and build the royal complex, 50 acres (20 hectares) in area: the palace, law court, and, of course, the Palatine Chapel. Einhard (who was also Charlemagne’s biographer) was appointed as works supervisor. Wanting to imitate the grandeur of the imperial Roman rulers, the king had looked for precedents. Historians have suggested that his palace was based on several models, Constantine’s palatine court (ca. 310) in Trier, Germany, among them. Charlemagne also had been to Ravenna on Italy’s northern Adriatic coast, where he had been dazzled by the glorious Byzantine buildings. Kenneth Clark opines that, when the Frankish king saw the scintillating mosaics in San Vitale, he “realized how magnificent an emperor could be.” Returning to Aachen, Charlemagne gave instructions for a replica to be built as his private chapel.

Constructed at the southern end of the palace complex on the site of an earlier church, the domed octagonal Palatine Chapel was built between 796 and 804. It was consecrated by Pope Leo III in 805 to serve as Charlemagne’s chapel, a reliquarium for his collection, and a church for members of the royal court. It is 54 feet (16.5 meters) in diameter and 124 feet (38 meters) high—at the time the largest dome north of the Alps. Of course, beautiful as it is, in the circumstances Odo’s building could never have been a perfect replica. Architectural ideas are transmitted by several means: traveling architects, craftsmen, or patrons; images of buildings; and published theories. None is ideal. Images cannot convey the spatial aspects of buildings, and a visit to a building, no matter how perceptive and prolonged, leaves the visitor with mere impressions only. For those reasons, San Vitale lost a good deal in the translation, so to speak, even if Charlemagne imported columns and marbles from Ravenna and Rome and Byzantine craftsmen to assist with the work. Moreover, the refinement of the Italian church had been achieved after years of experiment with indigenous structural and decorative systems. Nevertheless, the Palatine Chapel at Aachen is an extraordinary advance upon preceding Carolingian buildings.

It is much sturdier than San Vitale, having an unmistakably Roman structure. Like early Roman churches, it was approached from the west through a huge symmetrical atrium (said to have held 7,000 people), the well-defined entrance to the octagon flanked by towers with turret staircases leading to an upper level. Above the entrance was a place from which the emperor could appear to his people. None of the atrium survives. The octagonal central space of the original chapel is crowned with a lofty mosaic-faced dome constructed as a series of groin vaults: opposite the entrance, on both levels, was the sanctuary. The octagon is surrounded at the lower level by an ambulatory with a groin-vaulted dark sandstone ceiling. Those vaults, remarkable for the absence of transverse arches—Odo’s own innovation—are supported at the angles of the octagon on large piers that also carry a semicircular dividing arcade. The upper level of the ambulatory is roofed with an annular barrel vault and separated from the octagon by a screen of two pairs of superimposed marble, porphyry, and granite columns within wide arched openings. At right angles to the main axis of the chapel, and reached at both levels through the sanctuary, were once mirrored north and south annexes.

On the decision of the members of the court, although he wished to be buried at St. Denis, Charlemagne’s remains were interred in the Palatine Chapel in 814. Thereafter, until 1531, it became the imperial coronation church. From 1355, to accommodate the enormous traffic of pilgrims, the choir was rebuilt in the Gothic style, several chapels and a narthex were added, and the building became Aachen Cathedral. It was dedicated in 1414. The original mosaic on the interior of the dome was replaced by one Salviati, a Venetian, between 1870 and 1873. The cathedral was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1978. A restoration program began in 1995.

Brasília

Brazil

Brasília, the inland capital of Brazil, stands in a largely isolated region nearly 750 miles (1.200 kilometers) northwest of Rio de Janeiro. The design and construction of the city in such a remote place, uninhabited before 1956, was a major logistical achievement in planning and urban design. Conceived on the scale and in the grand manner of L’Enfant’s Washington, D.C., of 1789–1791, it followed in the tradition of such cities as New Delhi, India (Lutyens and Baker, 1911–1931), and Canberra, Australia (Walter arid Marion Griffin, 1913–1920). With its tall blocks in expansive landscaped parks, Brasília translated into reality for the first time the radical urban theories only envisioned in H. Th. Wijdeveld’s Amsterdam 2000 (1919–1920) and a little later in Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse.

The plan to move Brazil’s capital from Rio de Janeiro to an inland site, secure from naval attack, had been mooted first around 1789, and it was continually revived for the next thirty turbulent years. In 1823, soon after independence from Portugal was proclaimed, José Bonifácio presented the Constituent Assembly with a bill to fulfill the intention and to name the new city Brasília. Social and political upheavals dotted the rest of the century: burgeoning population; rapid economic growth; the spread of railroads; revolts and insurrections; civil and foreign war; the rise and fall of the Brazilian Empire; and, over thirty-five years, the abolition of slavery. The republic was proclaimed at the end of 1889, and the constitution of the United States of Brazil was adopted in February 1891.

That document defined the general location of the future Federal District: somewhere within the state of Goias on the sparsely inhabited 3,609-foot-high (1,200-meter) Central Plateau. The Exploring Commission of the Brazilian Central Upland was appointed, and it selected a 5,700-square-mile (14,400-square-kilometer) area—the “Cruls Quadrilateral” (named for the commission’s Belgian leader, Louis Cruls). In 1953 a 2,300-square-mile (5,800-square-kilometer) section of it was chosen as the general site for the new capital. The announcement was expected to encourage a population movement westward into what was largely unused land, relieving urban congestion in Rio de Janeiro.

In September 1956 President Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira, promising Brazilians an economic development plan that he ambitiously called “Fifty Years in Five,” initiated the foundation of Brasília. A design competition for a Plano Piloto (pilot plan) attracted forty-one entries from twenty-six architects and urbanists, and in March 1957 that of the Brazilian Lúcio Costa was announced as winner. His design was described by the president of the competition jury. British architect-planner William Holford, as “a work of genius and one of the greatest contributions to contemporary

The importance of Costa’s plan has been largely eclipsed by the beautiful, even spectacular, public architecture of another Brazilian, Oscar Niemeyer, who had been his student at the Escola National de Belas Artes early in the 1930s. They had collaborated before, and Niemeyer had also worked on urban design commissions for Kubitschek, when the latter was mayor of Belo Horizonte. For Brasília, Niemeyer designed the Congress Building; the law courts; the cathedral; the university; the National Theater; the Palácio do Planalto; the Palácio dos Arcos; and the president’s residence, Palácio da Alvorada (Palace of the Dawn). It is interesting to note that construction of this presidential residence, and the airport, began in 1956, before Costa’s success became public. The internationally reputed Brazilian landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx, who had previously worked with both Costa and Niemeyer, planned the major landscaping elements, a critical aspect of the capital.

Despite the general popularity of the vision, partly whipped up by the media, there was also strong dissension. But Kubitschek was determined to continue. Under the direction of Novacap, the corporation created to manage the project, the center of the city was built in the remarkably short period of three years. On 21 April 1960, Brasília was officially inaugurated as the capital. Soon after, Kubitschek was briefly replaced by Jânio da Silva Quadros, who solved national economic problems with draconian spending cuts, including projects at Brasília. That hiatus continued under the next president, reformer João Goulart. Then in March 1964 Goulart was overthrown in an army coup that brought military rule for the next twenty years. Although pressure would persist through most of the decade to return the seat of government to Rio, Brasília was confirmed as the national capital during the 1964–1966 presidency of General Humberto Castelo Branco.

The public cost of building the city remains unknown; some sources put it as high as U.S.$100 billion. The ways in which the money was raised and the efficiency with which it was spent are also under a cloud. It is claimed, for example, that the Banco do Brasil simply printed money for Novacap, almost on demand, and there were rumors that, at the start of the project, Brazilian air force transport airplanes carried equipment and building materials for the Palácio da. Alvorada. Soon, a massive road-building program was initiated and highways were constructed to São Paulo and Belo Horizonte in the south, Belém in the north, and eventually westward to the Mato Grosso.

What of the urban form? In presenting his Plano Piloto, Costa explained that he intended to make a city that was monumental yet comfortable, efficient yet welcoming and intimate, spacious yet neat, rustic yet urban, and lyrical yet functional. The cruciform layout—some critics have compared it to a swept-wing aircraft, an analogy accepted by the planner—has its framework defined by “two axes, two terraces, one platform, two broad highways running in one direction, one super highway in the other.”

The Monumental Axis runs east-west. At its eastern end, on the shores of Lake Paranoá (formed by damming the Paraná River), is the Plaza of the Three Powers. Around it are located the Supreme Court and the Congress Building with its twin twenty-eight-story towers and two striking hemispheres housing the Senate in a dome and the Chamber of Deputies in a bowl. The group is completed by the Palácio da Alvorada, surrounded by an inverted colonnade of white marble. The startling cathedral, redolent of a crown of thorns, and the university, are nearby. The lake wraps around the Plano Piloto, its shores dotted with embassies, private clubs, and sports facilities. From this grand focus, the broad Esplanade of the Ministries, flanked with buildings housing the bureaucracy, leads west to the central business district at the intersection of the main axes.

Each arm of the sweeping north-south Residential Axis is surrounded by nine bands of subdivision flanking an elevated highway. Those closer to the city core accommodate 780-foot-square (240-meter) residential superquadras (superblocks), most of which contain between eight and sixteen rectangular concrete-and-glass apartment buildings, usually six (but sometimes three) stories high, set in traffic-free parks. Each group was designed as a self-contained, middle-class neighborhood unit for an average of 3,000 residents, with shops, churches, schools, and playgrounds. Other recreational facilities serve a number of adjacent superblocks. The taller apartment buildings are raised on pilotis, so that at ground

level the parks are uninterrupted. Open green space makes up about 60 percent of Brasília’s total area—about five times as much per capita as, say, São Paulo. As elsewhere in the world, the imposition of an international modernist ideal on house form has not been socially successful; while doubtless well intentioned it is not well received because it denies the tradition of household organization developed over centuries. The extensive, more upmarket residential developments, mostly one-family houses, are on the peninsulas known as Lago Norte and Lago Sud, across the lake.

Most of the people who work in support industries—domestic servants and others—live in one of the fifteen nearby satellite towns within the Federal District and commute by bus to the Plano Piloto. Some of the satellites are planned developments; others have grown laissez-faire. They have very little open space, and some have social problems stemming from high unemployment. Of course, government is Brasília’s primary function, but it was inevitable that banking and commerce would flourish. Mainly because of the famous plan and architecture, tourism has also developed. Construction is an important part of the industrial infrastructure, but apart from that, only light industry is permitted.

Originally designed for 500,000 people. Brasília has grown rapidly. The 1960 population was around 90,000, and by 1980 it had increased to more than 411,000. A 1996 census showed that it had reached just over 1.8 million, and it probably rose to 2 million—mostly civil servants and businesspeople—by the turn of the century. Since about 1990 traffic problems such as gridlock and inadequate parking space have arisen in Brasília. A Y-shaped, partly underground rail system was started in 1992. Linking the south wing of the Plano Piloto with five of the satellite towns and with a total length of 26 miles (42 kilometers), it was designed to cater to two-thirds of the population. Commercial operation has been promised several times, but it still had not begun by 2001.

In 1987, Brasília was inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. According to some residents, that was a mixed blessing for a living city: while it certainly increased tourist revenue and helps preserve the quality of life (for some), at the same time it inhibits the character of future expansion.

The Bauhaus - Germany

The German design school known as the Bauhaus (literally, house of building), that functioned between 1919 and 1932, laid the foundation of a different kind of architectural education, one that was eventually adopted throughout the world. It restored the links between design and making that had been undermined during the Renaissance and virtually destroyed by the European academies. Much of the Bauhaus’s significance lies in the fact that some of its leaders migrated to the United States in the 1930s to head up the schools of architecture at Harvard and the Illinois Institute of Technology; other members also became teachers and practitioners in America.

The Bauhaus was conceived by Walter Gropius (1883–1969). After reluctantly commencing architectural studies at Berlin-Charlottenberg in 1905, between 1907 and 1910 he worked in the office of Peter Behrens before forming a partnership with a fellow employee, Adolf Meyer. During World War I Gropius served as a cavalry officer, and following the November 1918 armistice he was appointed director of two separate institutions in Weimar, Saxony, Germany:
the Grand Ducal Academy of Arts and the Grand Ducal Academy of Crafts. He immediately proposed that they should be combined, and in April 1919 courses started at Das Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar. Gropius’s 1919 Manifesto called for “the unification of all the creative arts under the leadership of architecture”; building on the doctrines of nineteenth-century English reformers, Gropius sought to improve design standards by combining art and production.

Architecture was not in the curriculum of the Bauhaus’s first phase at Weimar (1919–1923). Because he believed that good art, architecture, and design were more the result of collaboration than of individual virtuosity, Gropius’s formal program was based upon the proposition that one cannot design without understanding the process by which the design is realized. The designed object must be “by systematic practical and theoretical research into formal, technical, and economic fields” derived from “natural functions and relationships”—in short, the Bauhaus provided an applied design education based on Marxist materialism. Under Johannes Itten students were introduced to elements of design—shape, line, color, pattern, texture, rhythm, and density. There were also workshops for stone, wood, metal, pottery, glass, painting, and textiles. Every course was conducted by a team: a craftsperson and an artist.

The aims of the Bauhaus were maintained through the three phases of its existence in three different places and despite several changes in its direction. They were: first, “rescue all of the arts from the isolation in which each then found itself”; second, raise the status of craft to that of the so-called fine arts; and third, link the designer with emerging industrial production. Those ideas are taken for granted now, but they were first spelled out by the Bauhaus.

In spite of Gropius’s ostensible nonpolitical stance, the unfamiliar ideas, left-wing beliefs, and eccentric ways evident at the Bauhaus unsettled the government and brought opposition. Objecting to official

insistence upon an exhibition Art and Technics in 1923, immediately afterward the staff resigned. Gropius was swamped with offers to relocate, and accepted one from Dessau. To house the school he designed a group of connected blocks (1925–1926): administration, classrooms, studios, workshops, and accommodations for staff and students. Although Gropius often denied any such intention, the need for modem architecture—a tangible expression of the spirit of the age—meant that the Dessau complex would be adopted as a model internationally.

Architecture was introduced into the curriculum at Dessau. Just then, groups of European architects, mostly socialists, were searching for a pure form of architecture, liberated from the historical styles that they associated with a decadent aristocracy or (worse in their eyes) with the rising industrial bourgeoisie. The architects included English Arts and Crafts, Italian Futurists, Dutch De Srijl, and German Expressionists. Buildings inevitably became expressions of their beliefs, and their response to Europe’s widespread housing crisis of the 1920s was an austere form of workers’ housing with open floor plans, white interiors, and furniture that “worked,” whatever that meant. For them, a building must have a flat roof and flat walls, devoid of all ornament and decoration. And because color was bourgeois, the exteriors of houses must be white, gray, or black—in fact, just like the Dessau Bauhaus. It is not surprising that by 1932 the Americans Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson recognized in all this what they (inaccurately) dubbed an International Style. It was soon imitated throughout the world, frequently with no heed to the underlying sociopolitical theory.

Gropius resigned the Bauhaus directorship in April 1928, not only to concentrate upon his architectural practice but also in an attempt—futile, as it happened—to stem the growing National Socialist (Nazi) Party’s propaganda attacks upon the school. He recommended the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer as successor. But because Meyer was overtly Communist, the mayor of Dessau dismissed him in 1930, appointing in his place a German architect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Under mounting pressure to close altogether, Mies moved the Bauhaus to Berlin in 1932. A year later he disbanded it.

Although its ideas were spread internationally by many publications—not least the Bauhausbüche series after 1925—and exhibitions, the Bauhaus became more influential through the diaspora of staff and students: for example, Gropius went to head up the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, Mies became dean of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and László Moholy-Nagy established the “New Bauhaus” in Chicago. A Bauhaus archive, originally at Darmstadt, moved to Berlin in the 1970s; another is housed at Harvard. The design philosophy and the educational philosophy of the Bauhaus continue to have impact on the teaching and practice of architecture and design