1000 Monuments of Genius. Christopher E.M. Pearson

1000 Monuments of Genius

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Credits:

Parkstone Press International would like to thank Klaus Carl for graciously letting us use his picture library.

For the other photographers:

Casa Mila, La Pedreda (Barcelona). Thanks to Fundació Caixa Catalunya (n° 629)

Jacques Evrard and Christine Bastin for the photographs of pictures n°606, 607, 608

Introduction

What is Architecture?

Among the major visual arts, architecture has always had something of a reputation for being difficult to appreciate. This is not solely because it would seem to require a large degree of professional skill both to design and to understand, at least in a technical sense. Unlike a painting or a sculpture, a building does not tell an easily decipherable narrative or attempt to ‘represent’ some aspect of reality in artistic terms. Rather, the nature of architecture is at least in part utilitarian, serving to shelter various human activities. At the same time, architecture dignifies our daily actions by giving them a distinctive public presence in the form of a building envelope or façade, one that in the case of many historical edifices may present us with a bafflingly complex articulation. In this sense, the busy external appearance of, say, Chartres Cathedral or the Pompidou Centre may indeed prove intimidating to the visitor who encounters them for the first time. In many cases, the means of creation of a given building, including its structural techniques and even its materials, may not be immediately evident or easily comprehended by the casual viewer. Its stylistic, historical and iconographic points of reference may be obscure and unfamiliar. Should one know, or care, for example, that the colossal Ionic columns fronting the 19th-century British Museum are based on those of the Temple of Athena Polias at Priene from the 4th century BCE? What insight might such an observation give us into the nature of the later edifice? Moreover, the very function of a building may often be inaccessible from a purely visual inspection, especially if its original purpose has been forgotten or has changed over time: what was Stonehenge used for, and what does one do inside a basilica, a pagoda or a martyrium, for instance? On the other hand, unlike our encounter with a work of art in a museum, we generally experience architecture in a state of distraction: as the German philosopher Walter Benjamin once noted, we do not see and appreciate buildings so much as we simply use them or walk past them or through them. Buildings become invisible to us. This points, however, to the major reason why the study of architecture should never be daunting to the beginner: it is the art we all use every day, and each of us has a lifetime of experience with it. In this sense, as we move from home to office to shopping mall to museum to hotel, we are all architectural experts, formed by a quotidian process of the visual assessment, navigation, tactile engagement and habitation of three-dimensional spaces that have been designed by professional builders or architects.

Most of the structures in this book, however, could not be described as everyday. Rather, they are exceptional for various reasons, and on these grounds could be designated as ‘monuments’. (The term ‘monument’ in this context does not refer simply to those constructions of a largely symbolic or commemorative character – the Washington Monument, for example, or London’s Monument to the Great Fire of 1666 – but to any building of fundamental architectural distinction.) Here we are largely concerned with edifices that required much time, money, labour and ingenuity in their creation. The architectural historian and theorist Geoffrey Scott wrote that civilisation ‘leaves in architecture its truest, because its most unconscious record’, and it is a truism worth repeating that architecture is inevitably an index of power – secular, religious and economic. Architecture, by this definition, is represented by large, formal buildings, often of a showy appearance, crafted of permanent materials and dedicated to high purposes. A Greek temple, a Gothic cathedral or a palatial residence like Versailles, the Alhambra or White Heron Castle might come to mind. It is clear that the planning and construction of such impressive structures only become feasible with the emergence of large concentrations of wealth and influence, whether in the hands of a single ruler or a ruling caste. The resulting monuments, whose enduring nature has allowed them to far outlive their designers, patrons and originating cultures, bespeak an ability to marshal and deploy dozens or perhaps even thousands of workers over long periods of time, using forced, salaried or (most rarely) volunteer labour. This is as true of the Great Pyramids of Giza as it is of the latest awe-inspiring skyscraper in Beijing or Dubai. Architecture, like history, is created on behalf

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