Nature in Words and Buildings

TITLE: NATURE IN WORDS and BUILDINGS AUTHOR: ADRIAN FORTY Quotations in architecture and nature (see the text)
Starting from Raymond Williams quotation, the same rule applies to architecture. There was a gap in architects valueing nature (from the mid-20th century to the 1960). The distinction between culture (man-made) and nature applies to architecture, too. Architecture follows the same rules as nature, provides humans with shelter. The 20th century architects respected this theory. 1. Nature as the source of beauty in architecture It originates with neo-Platonic philosophers on the principle that all things in nature are governed either by numerical relatives or by geometry (see Leon Battista Alberti De Re Aedificatoria-15th century). The theory of concinnitas (the principle of harmony) see quotation. Alberti also acknowledged Aristotles notion of art as inherentty different from nature. Alberti argued for artifice and skill as the nurse of beauty => architecture = art of the artificial. In the 17th century, Claude Perrault in his Ordonnance of the Fire Kuids of Columns denies the authority of nature (see quotation). 2. The origin of architecture The origins a long rimming question, starting from Vitruvius, to Renaissance and post-Renaissance theorists. In Filaretes treatise (1460-64) he proposed that the first buildings were huts built of tree trunks => the column. This idea became obsolete in the 18th century => a whole theory on this written by Marc-Antoine Laugier in Essais fur Architecture (1753). He became the creator of the great principle from which architecture starts. 3. The valorization of architecture mimens or the imitation of nature. an essential qualify of art, according to Cicero and Horace. This pursuit is evident in, for e.g. L. da Vincis works. Unless other forms of art, architecture neither natural objects nor human emotions => a preoccupation within architectural thought. 2 trends: - 1. Architecture imitates its own natural model (Diderots Encyclopedie) - 2. Architecture could represent the principles of nature (de Quincys Encyclopedie Methodique) see quotation He confronted the question of whether the nature referred to the world of physical matter, and the question of whether architectures imitation of nature was literal or metaphorical. He attached importance to the imitation of the timber construction of the hut.
He regarded the artifice involved in the process of transmutation as a quasi-natural process. According to him, the absence of verisimilitude to nature makes architecture the most ideal of the arts. 4. Nature invoked to justify artistic licence Italy, 16th & 17th centuries Michelangelo, Vasari Bernini the notion that nature was imperfect in its products. Felibien states that art surpasses nature, with little impact on architecture. The English architect Sir William Chambers continued this idea, which was also considered a political attack. 5. As a political idea nature as freedom This idea was developed by the British philosophers as a reaction to the denial of rights, especially against Louis XIV, John Locke and Lord Shaftesbury The Moralists (1709). These literary ideas are applied to gardening, setting of comity houses, etc (Stephen Switzeds Ichonographia Rustica(1718) ). The link between political liberty and freedom are visible at Stowe (see illustrations). 6. Nature as a construct of the viewers perception Claude Perrault shifted from the notion that the cause of beauty lay in the objective would of malter to the view that the source of beauty lay not in the physicality of the objects. As a measure of arts, nature could no longer be external objects or phenomena, but to include the quality of human experience. Edmund Burke dismissed the notion that proportions of beautiful architecture were derived from natural objects or the human form (A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful - 1751) see quotation. Burkes main argument -> aesthetic sensations are induced by the sight of natural objects. In France and England -> the notion that it is the task of the architect to stimulate in the subject the same sensations as he or she might experience from natural objects (J.D. Le Roy Histoire de la Disposition-1764 and Le Camus de Mezieres The Genius of Architecture-1780). Boulbees theory 1790 to study the natural forms with the aim of creating the poetry of architecture. Sir John Soane architecture- an art of invention. 7. Art as a second nature Goethe Early 19th century the study of nature, instead of art -> Goethes conversations with Schiller. Goethe believed that nature should be represented from the whole to the parts. The quality of works of art the outcome of a living spirit, so art was like nature both in formation and in its appreciation. He put these ideas in On German Architecture an attack on Langiers rationalist conception of nature. Gottfried Semper (German architect) & John Ruskin (English critic) accepted the distinction made by Goethe that architecture is not itself nature.
Semper 3 arguments 1) Technical arts preceded the art of building 2) Mans desire for enclosure preceded his knowledge of the means to achieve it 3) It is an inherent characteristic of architecture to mask the reality of the materials of which it is made. Ruskin saw nature as Gods work, so nature was the only source of all beauty. All that was noble in architecture came from the expression of mans delight in Gods work. 8. Nature as the antidote to culture R.W. Emerson inspired by Goethe and by the English Romantic poets. He saw nature as the quality of things revealed by the power of mans mind. He suggested that Americans seek inspiration from direct experience of the everyday and of nature. Sullivan was clearly inspired by Emerson. 9. The rejection of nature The 2nd half of the 19th century -> a decline in seeing nature as a putative model for arts (due to Darwin) and reflected by Bandelaire and Mietzsche. Nature had nothing to offer. Otto Wagner considered architecture as an art that makes forms that have no model in nature, a characteristic of modern architecture. W. Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy-1908 saw art as neither representing nature nor being a second nature. The question What would replace nature? answered by Italian Futurists => in technology. But Blamefield and Scott considered that the study of buildings and materials should be, to the architect, what the study of anatomy is to the sculptor. Only two architects of the 20th century did not negate nature: Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. 10. Environmentalism nature as ecosystem Nature and culture are part of a single system, with the purpose to make nature once again a powerful concept (Richard Rogers, 1977-1978) -> Bordeaux Lane of Courts. This movement originates: 1) its intellectual foundation political philosophy of the Frankfurt Schvol the exploitation of nature by man 2) the potentially destructive effect of technology Rachel Carsons Silent Spring of 1962 Sustainable or green architecture a very broad church => a lot of arguments on what means to work buildings into the cycle of nature and on what are the proper materials for a green architecture thus nature remaining an active and disputed category within architecture.

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TITLE: NATURE IN WORDS and BUILDINGS AUTHOR: ADRIAN FORTY Quotations in architecture and nature (see the text)

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