September 25: The Taste

On this day in 2009 the Matters of Taste blog was unleashed to a desperately waiting and needy world.

Ever since–well, except for the recent hiatus–MoT’s apparently extensive, virtually worldwide, and expertly comprehensive staff has peered into the most pressing matters of architectural practice, education and design, critiqued buildings, museums and exhibits, sneered at Barbiexplotation, celebrated fine films and good dogs, prepared lavish meals for dead architects, fawned over nineteenth-century designers, and basically kept an eye out for people, events and activities that fulfill the essential standards of the social contract known as taste, and skewered those that fail.  Vive la Taste.

It’s also Francesco Borrimini’s birthday (no coincidence), so there’s that, too.

Image: the premiere (from this source)

September 06: Salem for Some

On this day in 1628 colonists settled Salem, Massachusetts.

The Puritans who organized here, originally an independent place later swept into the Massachusetts Bay Colony, sought their own devotional peace but were not too concerned about extending it to others.  Outwardly hostile to other faiths, their brethren in Boston hanged three Quakers in the mid-seventeenth century.  Most infamously, Salem itself is the site of the eponymous witch trials that began in 1692 that led to the death of two dozen people, nineteen of them by hanging.  If that history was not enough to ensure its position as one of America’s creepiest places, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s book The House of the Seven Gables (published in 1851 and given cinematic treatment in 1940, with Vincent Price, natch) sealed the deal.

To what extent are the seventeenth-century structures of Salem sullied by these associations, or is there something in their character that enhances the historically menacing quality of this place?  The houses built in Salem (and elsewhere) during the seventeenth century have a brooding, ponderous quality,enhanced by their sharp edges and massive scale and generated by their heavy timber framing and foreboding darkness of tone.  They possess a kind of architectural reticence generated by the retiring quality of big buildings with tiny windows, buttoned up with tight clapboard to stave off the winter wind, the examinations of neighbors and passers-by, and maybe other less evident, more nefarious threats in the air.  They examine us too, like dark-clad critics peering from tiny eyes in those portraits that so define our ideas about the harsh, ascetic Puritans themselves.

In actuality the early buildings of Salem are simply vernacular, Tudor-era traditions of house design imported with the colonists, adapted to their new setting and built of easily available local materials.  And yet by this specificity to the place, and no doubt given the legacy of the first settlers, Salem’s early architecture is awash in a kind of menacing dread that certainly was not the intention of its settlers, who named their town with a derivation of the Hebrew word shalom, “peace.”

Image: the “House of the SEven Gables” (from this source)

September 02: Why London Gives The Weird Sensation of Arranging Classical Buildings On A Medieval Plan

On this day in 1666 the Great Fire of London broke out.

In the mid-seventeenth century, London (here it is in 1593) had grown to a size of some half-million residents, most of them crammed into tottery wooden structures pushing up  against their neighbors and jutting out over the highly irregular pattern of streets that had been tramped out during the Middle Ages.  Wise rules prohibiting construction in timber and thatch, and regulations condemning the mix of trades that depended on the stockpiling of highly flammable materials, were both regularly ignored.

Late on a Sunday night a fire broke out in a bakery on the east side of town; clumsy firefighting protocol and environmental conditions conjoined to create the ideal situation for the blaze to become unstoppable.  Only on the following Tuesday did the wind peter out, allowing for fire breaks to do their job, and the fire was finally suppressed.  Tens of thousands were left homeless and, given the tradition of living house-above-the-shop, had lost their livelihood.  Dozens of civic structures had burned; eighty-seven parish churches fell in the flames as did the central monument of the Church, St. Paul’s Cathedral.

No doubt, a catastrophic citywide fire is not a thing to be wished upon a place and its people; at the same time, the distance of time allows a certain accommodation of urban conflagrations as sparks to architectural and urban development.  In other words, behind those clouds of smoke one might find the silver lining of a better-planned city and a renewal in architectural design.

Like 64 AD Rome, 1871 Chicago and 1906 San Francisco, 1666 London had its opportunity to start over from a tabula rasa–a smoldering, stinky, cindery tabula rasa, but a tabula rasa none the less.  Just a generation or so after Inigo Jones, working for the Stuarts (and on projects like the Banqueting House), introduced Classicism in England, contemporary architects set out to rebuild in the new style.  Foremost among them, of course, was Jedi Master of English Baroque, Sir Christopher Wren, who rebuilt dozens of the parish churches as well as the great domed cathedral, which is such an integral and essential part of the city’s skyline.  Although the ascent of Classicism would be challenged from time to time (and in very significant settings) by architects who believed the lost medieval heritage was the “real” English architecture, Wren’s work set a new standard for many later architects of public and private buildings, either to emulate or refine (especially among the Neo-Classicists who showed up about a century later).

Other legacies of the Great Fire include the strengthening of building codes that would prohibit such a disaster again.  While these were enacted by the government with relative ease, encouragement to redesign the city met greater opposition.  Baroque plans were put forward by architects like Wren and Sir John Evelyn.  Had they been adopted, the city streets would have been regularized and widened while the impression would have looked more like the Rome of the sixteenth-century popes or Paris under Napoleon III (or what was to come in Paris a few centuries later).  However, political turmoil prompted by landowners disinclined to have their holdings redefined carried the day, and nothing happened.  London was rebuilt with lots of  fancy new buildings on the decidedly old-fashioned and un-planned city plan that had grown and expanded across centuries.  Visitors have the interesting sensation here–perhaps unique among European capitals–of walking through a city whose architectural character is informed by developments that follow the Renaissance while their feet trod the paths put in place long before it.

Image: painting of the Great Fire by Lieve Verschuier, 1666 (from this source)

August 03: A Violent End to a Fiery Career

On this day in 1667 Francesco Borromini died from self-inflicted wounds.

The specific conditions surrounding Borromini’s dramatic suicide are somewhat speculative, at least in terms of what drove him to the nervous despair that contemporaries describe in his last hours.  He may have had a personality disorder; he may have been distraught over having his drawing instruments taken away and no light by which to write.  No one knew or can know for sure.  What is certain is the fact that early in the morning Borromini positioned a sword so that he could fall upon it.  After several agonizing hours, he died.

Borromini died as he lived, in difficulty and pain.  His personality and the political environment of seventeenth-century Rome conspired to ensure that he had charge of only a few, and relatively small, projects in comparison with his great rival, Gianlorenzo Bernini.  Bernini, darling of a succession of popes, had ample opportunity to exercise his great gifts in architecture and sculpture during a long career that included an invitation to attend to a new wing for the Louvre.  (This project did not go well, but an invitation from the King of France reveals his great international standing.)  Borromini’s career was much less stellar.  The Muse’s friends at Matters of Taste have paid tribute to Borromini’s life, and we invite you to visit their post written for his birthday, for insight there.  He was laid to rest in S. Giovanni dei Fiorentini in Rome, in the tomb of his uncle Carlo Maderno.  No inscription marked the site for centuries; it was Borromini’s preference to have an unmarked grave, nor did the church seek to celebrate a suicide.

It is tragically and painfully appropriate that Borromini, after the struggle of life, found death to come so difficult as well.

Image: Sant’Ivo della Sapienza (Clio’s)

June 17: Paradise on Earth

On this day in 1631 Mumtaz Mahal died.

Her name, which “the chosen one of the palace,”  was bestowed upon her by her husband, Shah Jahan of the Mughal Dynasty.  Theirs was no simple, mutually advantageous arrangement between aristocrats, but by all accounts recorded by court chroniclers and Mughal poets, they enjoyed a true partnership and loving marriage.  Mumtaz Mahal (b. 1593) inspired absolute devotion and confidence in her husband, and he unquestioningly supported whatever endeavors caught her fancy.  So inseparable were they, that she accompanied him on the long treks into war-torn regions of the empire, even when pregnant (and she spent a lot of her life pregnant).

She died giving birth to their fourteenth child.  Shah Jahan found little consolation in anything left to him in the world, and poured himself into planning the extensive garden and mausoleum that, twenty-two years later, would become her final burial site.  This is, of course, the Taj Mahal (1632-53).  One of the traditions of Mughal architecture is the construction of extensive and elaborate mausolea, often in context with gardens, but none was so perfect, nor so expensive, as this one.  Shah Jahan directed the architects to design the grandest version of a centralized domed structure, and to reverse the regular use of ornaments: the precious materials were made predominant, and the more regularly used red sandstone shrank by comparison.  The architectural composition maintains exacting proportions and absolute symmetries–to the point that a small mosque behind the mausoleum is balanced by an origianlly non-functional “answer” building.  Rich materials are employed in delicate ornament on the exterior and interior within acres of white marble.  Inside, where lapidary art (the inlay of gemstones) predominates, the sarcophagi are visible on the first floor; the actual burials of Mumtaz Mahal and Shah Jahan are in the lowest level, following the Persian tradition adopted by the Mughals.  She is in the center; the emperor rests to her side.

Splendid as the building is, it does not project its full meaning without its context, the expansive garden that recent archaeology has revealed extends beyond the Yamuna River.  It is a strictly symmetrical garden, with broad expanses of plantings divided into even four-square units.  This is another Persian/Mughal motif, one that refers immediately to the Muslim vision of Paradise as being watered by four rivers.  Thus the burial site is in an earthly interpretation of Heaven; doubly appropriate for this mausoleum dedicated to one man’s great love.  There is no greater love letter standing on earth.

June 07: The Sun King Rises

On this day in 1654 Louis XIV was crowned King of France.

Louis (1638-1715) was actually boy-king as of his father’s death in 1643; 1654 was the year of the coronation, and in 1661 he declared himself L’absolu. Louis perfected absolute rule, and, as history’s most diabolical patron of architecture, used his new palace to dazzle and control his subjects.  He moved the seat of government from the capital, Paris, to the little village of Versailles, where he expanded a hunting lodge built by his dad in 1624.  This respectable château was gobbled by the massive–seriously, truly, gigantically behemothian–project that expanded it with sweeping wings set within an enormous garden to become Europe’s grandest palace.  Louis, who laid his head on a pillow on the central axis within a room from which could see no horizon that he did not own, thus could envision the whole world  laid out before him, the sun orbiting not just the globe but his very cranium.

The exceptionally skilled team of Louis Le Vau (architect), André Le Nôtre (landscape) and Charles Le Brun (interiors/decorative arts) joined to celebrate the brilliance of Louis and his reign while ensuring that his subjects were kept strictly in line.  The symmetrical garden and palace enforce the central axis, display the king’s extraordinary wealth, and through varied spaces accommodate larger or smaller groups, ensuring the jockeying for position among subjects.  All of the art, from the garden fountains to the salon paintings, enforced Louis’ godlike status and absolute power to crush dissent.  The ugliest form of human oppression is thus cast in untold tons of marble, pounds of gold leaf, acres of oil paintings.  By the time he was done with Versailles, Louis had spent an untold fortune expanding the most glorious palace in Europe into its most sumptuous prison.  By the time Thomas Jefferson got there in the 1780s he pronounced it “the pit of depravity.”  And, as with most things, he was right.

Image: somewhere in Versailles (Clio’s)

April 23: Sumus Primi

On this day in 1653 the first public school in North America was founded.

The primacy of the Boston Latin School is echoed in its motto: Sumus Primi (“we are first”).  But it also underscores the nature of first things, in particular, the first things in education: namely, the Classics, which remain the foundation for the curriculum of the centuries-old institution.

The first classes were taught in the home of the master, until a purpose-built school house was built by the mid-1640s (above).  “Purpose built,” but, like most Colonial buildings for institutions (like buildings for governance, hospitals, and prisons), the basic architectural image was that of a house.  But this humble pile should not be seen as a dodgy shack, unfortunately selected to house the glorious traditions that its inmates studied by lamplight.  It too is expressive of the aim of what is still a  public school, one with the highest intellectual standards and, ideally, the widest social reach.

The little building stood until the early eighteenth century and was replaced by a new building to accommodate a growing student body in 1704.

Image: sepia from their website (from this source)