It is indeed unfortunate that human society should encounter such burning problems just when it has become materially impossible to make heard the least objection to the language of the commodity; just when power – quite rightly because it is shielded by the spectacle from having to take responsibility for its delirious decisions – believes that it no longer needs to think; and indeed can no longer think.1

Note: frampton opens with debord; arch as owned by capitalism

Location 172

While the level of professional talent and skill in the field is higher today, worldwide, than at any other moment in history, at the same time the world enters ever more deeply into a confused state of total political paralysis, so much so that one is reluctantly drawn to conclude that the human species no longer has the capacity to act in its own best interests. At the micro-level, the techno-scientific division of labour is such that we are able to penetrate ever more deeply into the mysteries of nature, but simultaneously we are the perennial victims of a triumphant globalized capitalism through which, at the macro-level, we are locked in a titanic struggle with a rebarbative nature, which is now already beyond our control.

Note: misalignment and loss of control

Location 177

Of course, there is no absolute history, for, as E.H. Carr made clear in his book What is History?, each age writes its own history and in this sense creates a purview with which we may hopefully proceed in a culturally significant way.

Note: potentials and limits oh historical theses

Location 249

The first was a sudden increase in man’s capacity to exercise control over nature, which by the mid-17th century had begun to advance beyond the technical frontiers of the Renaissance. The second was a fundamental shift in the nature of human consciousness, in response to major changes taking place in society, which gave birth to a new cultural formation that was equally appropriate to the lifestyles of the declining aristocracy and the rising bourgeoisie. Whereas technological changes led to a new infrastructure and to the exploitation of an increased productive capacity, the change in human consciousness yielded new categories of knowledge and a historicist mode of thought that was so reflexive as to question its own identity.

Location 281

The over-elaboration of architectural language in the Rococo interiors of the Ancien Régime and the secularization of Enlightenment thought compelled the architects of the 18th century, by now aware of the emergent and unstable nature of their age, to search for a true style through a precise reappraisal of antiquity. Their motivation was not simply to copy the ancients but to obey the principles on which their work had been based. The archaeological research that arose from this impulse soon led to a major controversy: to which, of four Mediterranean cultures – the Egyptians, the Etruscans, the Greeks and the Romans – should they look for a true style?

Location 290

In one set of etchings after another he represented the dark side of that sensation already classified by Edmund Burke in 1757 as the Sublime, that tranquil terror induced by the contemplation of great size, extreme antiquity and decay. These qualities acquired their full force in Piranesi’s work through the infinite grandeur of the images that he portrayed. Such nostalgic Classical images were, however, as Manfredo Tafuri has observed, treated ‘as a myth to be contested … as mere fragments, as deformed symbols, as hallucinating organisms of an “order” in a state of decay’.

Location 308

Piranesi abandoned architectural verisimilitude and gave his imagination full rein. In one publication after another, culminating in his extravagantly eclectic work on interior ornamentation of 1769, he indulged in hallucinatory manipulations of historicist form. Indifferent to Winckelmann’s pro-Hellenic distinction between innate beauty and gratuitous ornament, his delirious inventions exercised an irresistible attraction on his contemporaries, and the Adam brothers’ Graeco-Roman interiors were greatly indebted to his flights of imagination.

Location 313

In addition to representing the social character of his creations in accordance with the teachings of Blondel, Boullée evoked the sublime emotions of terror and tranquillity through the grandeur of his conceptions. Influenced by Le Camus de Mézières’ Génie de l’architecture, ou l’analogie de cet art avec nos sensations (1780), he began to develop his genre terrible, in which the immensity of the vista and the unadorned geometrical purity of monumental form are combined in such a way as to promote exhilaration and anxiety. More than any other Enlightenment architect, Boullée was obsessed with the capacity of light to evoke the presence of the divine. This intention is evident in the sunlit diaphanous haze that illuminates the interior of his ‘Métropole’, modelled partly on Ste-Geneviève. A similar light is portrayed in the vast masonry sphere of his projected cenotaph for Isaac Newton [3], where by night a fire was suspended to represent the sun, while by day it was extinguished to reveal the illusion of the firmament produced by the daylight shining through the sphere’s perforated walls.

Location 361

After fifteen years of millennial disarray the Napoleonic era required useful structures of appropriate grandeur and authority, on the condition that they be achieved as cheaply as possible. Durand, the first tutor in architecture at the Ecole Polytechnique, sought to establish a universal building methodology, an architectural counterpart to the Napoleonic Code, by which economic and appropriate structures could be created through the modular permutation of fixed plan types and alternative elevations. Thus Boullée’s obsession with vast Platonic volumes was exploited as a means to achieve an appropriate character at a reasonable cost. Durand’s criticism of Ste-Geneviève, for example, with its 206 columns and 612 metres (2,008 feet) of wall, involved him in making a counter-proposal for a circular temple of comparable area that would require only 112 columns and 248 metres (814 feet) of wall – a considerable economy, with which, according to him, one would have achieved a far more impressive aura.

Note: origins of commodifcation; kit of parts

Location 379

The finite city, as it had come into being in Europe over the previous 500 years, was totally transformed in the space of a century by the interaction of a number of unprecedented technical and socio-economic forces, many of which first emerged in England during the second half of the 18th century. Prominent among them from a technical point of view must be counted such innovations as Abraham Darby’s mass production of cast-iron rails, from 1767,

Location 495

Such productive innovations had multiple repercussions. In the case of metallurgy, English iron production increased forty-fold between 1750 and 1850 (rising to two million tons a year by 1850); in the case of agriculture, after the Enclosures Act of 1771 inefficient husbandry was replaced by the four-crop system. Where the one was boosted by the Napoleonic Wars, the other was motivated by the need to feed a rapidly growing industrial population.

Location 501

This process of uprooting – enracinement, as Simone Weil has called it – was further accelerated by the use of steam traction for transport. Richard Trevithick first demonstrated the locomotive on cast-iron rails in 1804. The opening of the first public rail service between Stockton and Darlington in 1825 was followed by the rapid development of a completely new infrastructure, Britain having some 10,000 miles of track in place by 1860. The advent of long-distance steam navigation after 1865 greatly increased European migration to the Americas, Africa and Australia. While this migration brought the populations needed to expand the economy of colonial terrirories and to fill the growing grid-plan cities of the New World, the military, political and economic obsolescence of the traditional European walled city led, after the liberal–national revolutions of 1848, to the wholesale demolition of ramparts and to the extension of the formerly finite city into its already burgeoning suburbs.

Location 510

Even these six- to eight-fold increases are modest compared with New York’s growth over the same period. New York was first laid out as a gridded city in 1811, in accordance with the Commissioners’ Plan of that year, and grew from its 1801 population of 33,000 to 500,000 by 1850 and 3½ million by 1901. Chicago grew at an even more astronomical rate, rising from 300 people at the time of Thompson’s grid of 1833 to around 30,000 (of whom something under half had been born in the States) by 1850, and going on to become a city of two million by the turn of the century.

Location 522

Throughout the 19th century the effort of industry to take care of its own assumed many forms, from the ‘model’ mill, railway and factory towns to projected utopian communities intended as prototypes for some future enlightened state. Among those who manifested an early concern for integrated industrial settlements one must acknowledge Robert Owen, whose New Lanark in Scotland (1815) was designed as a pioneering institution of the co-operative movement, and Sir Titus Salt, whose Saltaire, near Bradford in Yorkshire (founded in 1850), was a paternalistic mill town, complete with traditional urban institutions such as a church, an infirmary, a secondary school, public baths, almshouses and a park.

Location 550

The squirearchical concept of the Neo-Classical country house set in an irregular landscape (an image derived from the Picturesque work of Capability Brown and Uvedale Price) was thus translated by Nash to the provision of terraced housing on the perimeter of an urban park. This model was first systematically adapted to general use by Sir Joseph Paxton, at Birkenhead Park, built outside Liverpool in 1844. Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park in New York, inaugurated in 1857, was directly influenced by Paxton’s example, even down to its separation of carriage traffic from pedestrians. The concept received its final elaboration in the Parisian parks created by Jean Charles Adolphe Alphand, where the circulation system totally dictated the manner in which the park was to be used. With Alphand, the park becomes a civilizing influence for the newly urbanized masses.

Location 587

Sitte’s remedial concern cannot be better characterized than in his critical comparison of the traffic-ridden ‘open’ city of the late 19th century with the tranquillity of the medieval or Renaissance urban core: During the Middle Ages and Renaissance public squares were often used for practical purposes … they formed an entirety with the buildings which enclosed them. Today they serve at best as places for parking vehicles, and they have no relation to the buildings which dominate them .... In brief, activity is lacking precisely in those places where, in ancient times, it was most intense, near public structures.2

Location 642

In 1859 Cerdá projected the expansion of Barcelona as a gridded city [11], some twenty-two blocks deep, bordered by the sea and intersected by two diagonal avenues. Driven by industry and overseas trade, Barcelona filled out this American-scale grid plan by the end of the century. In his Teoriá general de la urbanización (‘General Theory of Urbanization’) of 1867 Cerdá gave priority to a system of circulation and, in particular, to steam traction. For him transit was, in more ways than one, the point of departure for all scientifically based urban structures. Léon Jaussely’s plan for Barcelona of 1902, derived from Cerdá’s, incorporated this emphasis on movement into the form of a protolinear city where the separate zones of accommodation and transportation are organized into bands. His design anticipated in certain respects the Russian linear city proposals of the 1920s.

Location 649

By 1891 intensive exploitation of the city centre was possible, due to two developments essential to the erection of high-rise buildings: the invention in 1853 of the passenger lift, and the perfection in 1890 of the steel frame. With the introduction of the underground railway (1863), the electric tram (1884) and commuter rail transit (1890), the garden suburb emerged as the ‘natural’ unit for future urban expansion. The complementary relationship of these two American forms of urban development – the high-rise downtown and the low-rise garden suburb – was demonstrated in the building boom that followed the great Chicago fire of 1871.

Location 658

Thus the last decade of the century saw radical changes in both the methods of town building and the means of urban access – changes which, in conjunction with the grid plan, were soon to transform the traditional city into an ever-expanding metropolitan region where dispersed homestead and concentrated core are linked by continual commuting.

Location 676

The railway terminus presented a peculiar challenge to the received canons of architecture, since there was no type available to express and articulate adequately the junction between the head building and the train shed. This problem, which saw its earliest architectural resolution in Duquesney’s Gare de l’Est, Paris, of 1852, was of some concern since these termini were effectively the new gateways into the capital city. The engineer Léonce Reynaud, designer of the first Gare du Nord in Paris (1847), was aware of this issue of ‘representation’ when he wrote in his Traité d’architecture (1850): Art does not have the rapid progress and sudden developments of industry, with the result that the majority of buildings today for the service of railroads leave more or less to be desired, be it in relation to form or arrangement. Some stations appear to be appropriately arranged but having the character of industrial or temporary construction rather than that of a building for public use.2

Location 851

The British abandonment of the international exhibition field, after the triumph of 1851 and a further exhibition in 1862, was at once exploited by the French, who mounted five major international exhibitions between 1855 and 1900. The degree to which these displays were regarded as national platforms from which to challenge the British command over industrial production and trade may be judged from the emphasis placed each time on the structure and content of the ‘Galerie des Machines’. The young Gustave Eiffel worked with the engineer Jean-Baptiste Krantz on the most significant exhibition building to be erected after 1851, that for the Paris World Exhibition of 1867. This collaboration revealed not only Eiffel’s expressive sensibility but also his capacity as an engineer, since in detailing the Galerie des Machines, with its 35-metre (114-foot) span, he was able to verify the validity of Thomas Young’s modulus of elasticity of 1807, a hitherto solely theoretical formula for determining the elastic behaviour of material under stress. The whole oval complex, of which the Galerie des Machines was merely the outer ring, was itself a testament to the conceptual genius of Pierre Guillaume Frédéric Le Play, who had suggested that the building be arranged as concentric galleries exhibiting machinery, clothing, furniture, liberal arts, fine arts and the history of labour. After 1867 the sheer size and diversity of the objects produced, and the independence demanded by international competition, seem to have demanded multiple exhibition structures. By the time of the International Exhibition of 1889 no pretence was made of housing the exhibits in one self-contained building. This penultimate exhibition of the century was dominated by two of the most remarkable structures that French engineering was ever to achieve – Victor Contamin’s vast Galerie des Machines [18], 107 metres (350 feet) in span, designed with the architect Charles Louis Ferdinand Dutert, and Eiffel’s tower, 300 metres (984 feet) high, designed in collaboration with the engineers Nouguier and Koechlin and the architect Stephen Sauvestre. Contamin’s structure, based on statical methods perfected by Eiffel in his hinged viaducts of the 1880s, was one of the first to use the three-hinged arch form in the achievement of a large span. Contamin’s shed not only exhibited machines: it was itself an ‘exhibiting machine’, in which mobile viewing platforms, running on elevated tracks, passed over the exhibition space on either side of the central axis, affording the visitor a fast and comprehensive view of the entire show.

Location 892