CARTHA
APPROPRIATION The action of appropriating something. The deliberate reworking of images and styles from earlier, well-known works of art. Take (something) for one’s own use, typically without the owner’s permission. According to the Oxford Dictionary In 1980, the American architect Steven Izenour started designing a vacation house for his father. In this small house, […]
APPROPRIATION
The action of appropriating something.
The deliberate reworking of images and styles from earlier, well-known works of art.
Take (something) for one’s own use, typically without the owner’s permission.
According to the Oxford Dictionary
In 1980, the American architect Steven Izenour started designing a vacation house for his father. In this small house, Izenour takes a seemingly common Connecticut cottage and mixes it with elements from classical architecture in a playful interpretation of what he thought his father’s house should be. The specificity in this act of appropriation lies in the freedom Izenour allows himself in the process. For instance, he deprives columns of their materiality, of their structural function, keeping their form—in the case of the porch columns, only their outline—in order to distill these elements to an almost comedic state where they are but an ironic nod to the “real”. Throughout the project, the same exercise is repeated, appropriating elements and giving them new functions, proportions, and scales whilst keeping their defining traces. Izenour proposes an original building which feels uncannily familiar but is in fact an empty vessel, waiting to be filled anew. We thus define Appropriation as this condition of simultaneity produced through the co-option and re-articulation of architecture for unanticipated agendas, alternative expectations, and unintended identities.
The haunting photographs Hélène Binet took of Cairo’s City of the Dead, where more than half a million people permanently dwell, speak to us of the unforeseen use of the spaces while whispering about the intrinsic relation between time and perception. Andreas Papadantonakis discusses Schinkel’s proposal for Athens’ Parthenon as the epicenter of cultural appropriation in the XIX century. Brittany Utting and Daniel Jacobs frame Appropriation through the political and urban ambitions of Pouillon’s Climat de France housing project in Algiers’ Casbah. Ibai Rigby analyses the appropriation of the Ottoman mosque typology as a geopolitical tool, and Dennis Lagemann opens a new chapter on his four-part reflection on Identity, describing Nicolaus Goldmann’s methodology of abstraction and appropriation in developing a grammar for Renaissance architecture.
It is then clear that, within the scope of architecture, Appropriation takes on multiple shapes: the blunt repurposing of structures, the knowledgeable, subtle borrowing of elements, the ill-informed replication of structures or typologies, or simply straightforward copying of whole buildings into a different context. With this issue, beyond the identification of case studies, we intend to look into both the motivations and consequences of Appropriation, suggestive of an old method but new framework for architectural design and research.
Hélène Binet, text by João Coles
The City of the Dead in Cairo (El-Arafa) is one of the largest necropoleis in Egypt, founded in 642 by Amr ibn al-As the day after conquering the city. Traditionally, it was a burial ground for Arab conquerors and their families. The crypts in which they were buried, had a guard living in loco to […]
The City of the Dead in Cairo (El-Arafa) is one of the largest necropoleis in Egypt, founded in 642 by Amr ibn al-As the day after conquering the city. Traditionally, it was a burial ground for Arab conquerors and their families. The crypts in which they were buried, had a guard living in loco to protect the tombs, and were originally constructed as small houses in order to accommodate relatives who would come to visit and pay their tribute to the dead. Thirteen centuries later, the graveyard was occupied by a wave of desperate people who ended up inhabiting the space between tombstones. It is estimated that between 500 and 800 thousand people live in the necropolis.
Appropriating the space that was once destined only for the dead, walking over the ground that covers the bones of past generations, and breathing the air mingled with the dust of their ancestors’ bones during their daily chores, are situations to which the inhabitants of El-Arafa are accustomed. It seems that living with the dead has brought them to be in good terms with their own mortality. Nevertheless, these people do struggle to survive, and it was surviving their condition in Cairo that brought them to occupy these spaces, appropriating them as permanent homes for the living. Some find work as guardians of the tombs for a trifle, some perform funerary services or clean the courtyards for money. These spaces in which they live underline their condition in a society that drove them to sunset, of human beings in a limbo between two worlds: the one of the living, to which they cling on to, and the one of the dead, that allows them to live and to cling on to the latter.
Visiting these homes is overwhelming, mainly during working hours, because it is possible to find some house-crypts empty. The sense of emptiness and occupation of space one can find in these photographs, the desolation and occupation that contrast in such places bring to mind more than ever the remembrance of death, of one’s own mortality – the frail condition of humans, how everything can go too quickly, how the transition from the living to the dead can be depicted from the relationship between an amphora and small pots or a sofa with the space they are occupying, as if telling us that the boundaries between the living and the dead are non-existent, of how survival can depend on the dead, of how the word survival, bared so lightly in language sometimes, is everything.
P.S. – These photographs were taken during a walk when Hélène was visiting her daughter Saskia in Cairo – January 2018.
Andreas Papadantonakis
In January 1833 the English frigate HSM Madagascar anchored in the bay of Nauplia and amid a scene of extraordinary spectacle, the 17-year-old Otto von Wittelsbach disembarked on Greece. A widely enthusiastic crowd welcomed the young Bavarian aristocrat whom the National Assembly had declared “King of Greece”. During Otto’s early reign and specifically in 1833, […]
In January 1833 the English frigate HSM Madagascar anchored in the bay of Nauplia and amid a scene of extraordinary spectacle, the 17-year-old Otto von Wittelsbach disembarked on Greece. A widely enthusiastic crowd welcomed the young Bavarian aristocrat whom the National Assembly had declared “King of Greece”.
During Otto’s early reign and specifically in 1833, five years after the establishment of the Hellenic State at the Third National Assembly at Troezen (1827), Athens was assigned as the capital city. In these first stages of development after the secession from the Ottoman empire, Greece formed its national identity as a constructed narrative; a self-evident continuation of the ancient past. Athens was the epicentre of this cultural appropriation.
The task of composing a master plan that would transform a village of 20,000 inhabitants into a modern capital was entrusted to two graduates of the Berliner Bauakademie: Gustav Eduard Schaubert and Stamatios Kleanthes. The young architects proposed a new urban nucleus, a neoclassical garden city at the North side of the Acropolis’ hill with a triangular urban form. The masterplan was meant to connect prominent buildings, such as the New Royal Palace and the Academy of Athens with the ancient ruins of Acropolis, while proposing new urban axes. The significance of the strong urban form could simultaneously serve as a guarantor of the new political order and as a flexible spatial framework. Schaubert and Kleanthes’ plan was ratified in July 1833 and until its abrogation one year later, due to the interpolation of various landowners, faced several alterations. The royal palace was then the focal point of most alternative plans.
In this struggle, the King of Prussia Friedrich Wihlem III, recommended Karl Friedrich Schinkel, to his friend Maximilian, Crown Prince of Bavaria. Schinkel was very much admired by both Kleanthes and Schaubert, being additionally their professor at the Bauakademie of Berlin. Maximilian, the older brother of Otto von Wittelsbach, solicited Schinkel’s advice regarding the design of the Royal Palace of Athens. The project’s brief addressed the creation of a modern palace for the new monarchy, very well defensible and able to incorporate within it the Parthenon and the rest of the surviving ancient monuments on site. In 1834, Schinkel rose to the task with a design which was expanding over the entire hill. In lieu of a singular building he designed a sequence of one-story high chambers and four courtyards at the Eastern and Southern edge of the Acropolis. The entrance to the complex was, as in the ancient Acropolis, through the Propylaia. Immediately to the east of the paved entrance court was placed a sunken hippodrome between two large landscaped areas with planting, fountains, and seating offering cool and gracious locations from which to view and contemplate the Erechtheion and the Parthenon. The hippodrome was leading from the Propylaia to the entrance hall of the royal chambers. While most of the palace follows Parthenon’s orientation, the northern part of it is aligned to Erechtheion. Both geometries are abruptly cut on the edges of the hill’s fortification. In that way the royal palace completes the periphery of the site and together with the existing Propylaia creates a large courtyard in the middle. The Parthenon would have been the highest and only building existing in that open space. Elements that approached that height, such as the rotunda of the queen’s apartment, were kept at a sufficient distance in order to considerably diminish their apparent size. Luxuriant landscaping softened the contrast between the different parts and helped to unify the whole complex. Schinkel’s proposal balanced a need of monumentality with a smaller scale, making sure that the royal chambers framed the ancient ruins without typologically competing with them.
The architecture of the Royal Palace focuses on a rich sequence of individual interior spaces that reinterpret the classical language reducing it to rich volumes and simplified ornamental themes. Some of the rooms, like the Repräsentationssaal2, reveal as majestic peristyles with direct relation to the exterior and with references to classical themes of decorations. Schinkel produced a complex plan that combines ease of circulation and access with clear functional distinctions. The design had labyrinthian qualities very much alike those of the Bank of England by Sir John Soane and English Neoclassicism in general. Indeed, in 1826 Schinkel made an important tour of Britain, however the assertion with the British architect is not confirmed. Still, the idea to base his architectural composition on a cellular plan allowed his design to fit on Acropolis’ plateau and relate with the existing antiquities. Schinkel who through his career had been repeatedly challenged to accommodate his designs to the difficulties of a specific site3, selected first and foremost to highlight the immensity of the context rather than restore a historical image. The plan would be thus understood as a topology more than a typology. The appropriation of the existing site would gain a self-sufficient completeness through the coexistence of old and new.
The use of a greek-inspired architectural style in the specific context allowed Schinkel to evoke the idea of the past; an act both oblivious and fascinating. Oblivious because it consciously ignores the hundreds of years of cultural fermentation that interpolated the end of the ancient Greek civilization and the birth of the Modern Greek State. Fascinating because it can be viewed from a distance as an aesthetic phenomenon. The ancient past turns into a spectacle and the Parthenon the centre of a composition, remnant of an era that is overcome. In central Europe of the 19th century the Greek ideal was already enlisted in the service of a well-ordered society. Neoclassicism, as a movement, offered the idiom of the high art of antiquity and Prussia’s middle class was expected to conform willingly to the post-Napoleonic, anti-revolutionary order. The Art of Bildung4, a key concept on the formation of the Prussian State promised first and foremost a key role to the bourgeois society. Neoclassicism as a nostalgia for past civilizations and an attempt to re-create order and reason through the adoption of classical form paradoxically turned into a romantic movement. Schinkel – a master of stylistic eclecticism that could simultaneously propose a project in gothic and in classic architecture – by designing a palace next to the most prominent Greek antiquity, transcended the neoclassical style.
If 18th century very famously is the period of the cultural Grand Tour; a desire to know the Italian and ultimately the Greek landscape, in 19th century this tradition was rivalled by a culture of observation tours to the industrialised countries of Europe. The intense quest of national identities in the post-Napoleonic world would lead to an increased interest in the destiny of nations and their historic evolution. A new approach to history would be suggested by architects as Henri Labrouste5, who defended a rupture with the past and questioned the restoration studies of the ancient Greek and Roman antiquities. In Schinkel’s case the departure from neoclassicism, already visible in his design for Friedrichswerdersche Kirche, would also mark a different approach to history. Schinkel himself did numerous travels due to his need to visit cities that were rapidly changing and observe their evolutionary process. The beautiful set of water-coloured plans, sections and elevations6 that he submitted in 1834 to Maximilian, reflected the mutability of form and change. Unlike the dioramas that the young Schinkel produced for the reconstruction of ancient sites, including the Temple of Diana at Ephesus and the interior of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, the delicate coexistence of unrestored ancient ruins with the new royal residence, suggests that the entire setting can be read as a palimpsest of change. Thus, Schinkel was engaged consciously in inventing a fictitious archeology.
When Leo von Klenze, the appointed successor of Kleanthes and Schaubert in the urban planning of Athens, received the plans of Schinkel he referred to them as “a wonderful and lovely midsummer night’s dream of a great architect”. Klenze’s damning with faint praise was based on the assessment that Schinkel’s proposal couldn’t meet the expectations of modern court life. Needless to say, Schinkel’s plan was rejected mainly because of the lack of funds and partly because it endangered the classical ruins. Illusory or not, it is pointless to judge Schnikel’s unbuilt proposal from a pragmatic point of view. It is substantial to approach it as an architectural study that suggests a productive blurring of two asynchronous, yet associated, architectural styles with the scope of framing the identity of a monument and consequently that of a whole state. It is therefore, an act undoubtedly historical.
“The only art that qualifies as historical is that which in some way introduces something additional in the world, from which a new story can be generated”7 wrote Schinkel. For this reason, Karl Friedrich Schinkel perceives history as a laboratory of change and detects its dynamic in the possibility of architecture to redefine identities. In this sense, architecture is not only a built object; architecture is also the very idea of appropriation.
Brittany Utting & Daniel Jacobs
French Protectorate architects and urbanists in the early twentieth century—participants in the administrative bureaucracies of North African colonial rule—were confronted with the task of housing populations they saw as living under conditions antithetical to Modernism. To consolidate control over its colonies, France asserted its political and cultural dominance, continuing the inherited myth of the “civilizing […]
French Protectorate architects and urbanists in the early twentieth century—participants in the administrative bureaucracies of North African colonial rule—were confronted with the task of housing populations they saw as living under conditions antithetical to Modernism. To consolidate control over its colonies, France asserted its political and cultural dominance, continuing the inherited myth of the “civilizing mission”1 by overlaying these Protectorates with the urban visions of its Modernist utopias. The Climat de France, an Algerian social housing project built by French architect Fernand Pouillon in 1954, is paradigmatic of this effort. Although conceived by its designer as “an architecture without contempt,” it was commissioned by the French authorities to house and pacify Algiers’ colonial subjects. While the housing project was used as a biopolitical instrument of subjugation and control, architects like Pouillon earnestly sought to transform the agendas of France’s Modernist project to adapt to the aesthetic, ideological, and formal terrains of North Africa. Despite these intentions, the tenants of the Climat have continuously appropriated its spaces through informal occupation and unintended use, transforming it into an important staging ground for protest and revolution. In an era where the lingering stresses of neocolonialism are re-politicizing urban spaces, the history of the Climat is instructional in how Modernism’s legacy can be re-adapted to new ways of life, occupation, and identity.
By the early 1950s in Algiers, local Arab populations had grown in size from 70,000 in 1926 to nearly 300,000 in 1954, rapidly filling up the already overpopulated Casbah and expanding bidonvilles (informal settlements). Due to the increasing hostility of the local populations against the French Protectorate, the Mayor of Algiers, Jacques Chevallier, ordered the planning of several large scale urban housing projects with the intent to relocate, integrate, and disperse Muslim groups. As Protectorate architecture was often used as much for statecraft as urban planning, Chevallier saw this increased modernization as a solution to the situation he saw as “a new and deadly battle, a battle for housing.”2 These colonial projects negotiated a continuous conflict between an offer for improved living conditions in exchange for the inevitable deferral of Algerian self-government, instrumentalizing urbanization “which signified at one and the same time oppression and modernization … yet which also brought hope of other potential ways of living.”3 This ethical and political ambiguity created a fertile new ground for appropriations of these spaces by its colonial subjects, leveraging the monumentality of these architectural prototypes into a later staging ground for revolution.
As the Protectorate witnessed increasing unrest in Algiers’ bidonvilles, Mayor Chevallier and the French army began to build housing projects for Algerian populations as a tactic to control the urban spaces of the city and implement social reform in order to “ensure the survival of the colonial system.”4 Of the architects in Chevallier’s “battle corps,”5 Fernand Pouillon, the newly appointed Chief Architect of Algiers was the vanguard against increased hostility. From 1953 to 1959, Pouillon designed and oversaw the construction of three major projects, each intended to house a different colonial subject: Diar es‐Saada or “Land of Happiness” was exclusively for Europeans, Diar el‐Mahsul or “Land of Plenty” combined both European and Muslim dwelling types in distinct structures, and finally the immense Climat de France, retaining the name of its district, to house an exclusively Muslim population in the lowest-cost and most compact dwelling units.
On November 1, 1954, just prior to the start of construction of the Climat de France, the political situation shifted dramatically when the National Liberation Front of Algeria staged a series of armed attacks and publicly demanded the dismantling of the colonial state, marking the start of the Algerian Revolution. These events forced the French militarization of Pouillon’s projects; as noted by Zeynep Çelik, “the War of Independence transformed the social atmosphere of the settlement, turning the public squares and gardens into proper battlegrounds and army stations.”6 However, it was in fact the inhabitants of these projects that appropriated these colonial tools, transforming what were once spaces of oppression into an arena for political action and independence.
Documented in the famous concluding scenes of the 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers, the Climat de France serves as one of the backdrops for this revolution. The guerilla strategies of France’s army tactically deployed their troops into the streets of the city, infiltrating these new housing complexes to suppress Algerian freedom fighters while also blockading the entry points of the Casbah, preventing the free movement of its residents to and from the fortified quarter. The Climat, constructed in the midst of these uprisings and completed just three years before Algerian independence, became a scenographic stage for the revolution; as the most emblematic of the three projects in both scale and ambition, its iconicity became inextricably linked to the Battle of Algiers. It was among the largest housing projects constructed in North Africa at the time, containing 4,500 dwellings to house over 30,000 inhabitants. The 25 hectare urban plan was conceived as a small, autonomous city with its own hierarchy of streets, squares, schools, services, monuments, and residential blocks, occupying a mostly uninhabited hill to the west of the Casbah. The imbrication of this housing complex and the urban conditions of the impending revolution was paradigmatic of the confrontations between the agendas of modernisation and the emerging identity of the Algerians, notwithstanding Pouillon’s claim that:
“This architecture is without contempt. For the first time perhaps in modern times, we men installed a monument. And those men who were the poorest of the poor Algerians understood it.”7
Nor did the project reflect contempt for its own monumentality. While Pouillon broke down the scale of the site into an aggregation of smaller housing blocks of varying heights—referencing the roofscape of the old Casbah—he cleared away the center of the plan with a monumental courtyard structure, named by its inhabitants as “The Place of 200 Columns,” or 200 Colonnes. This 233 by 38 meter central square was lined with massive three-storey high stone columns and surrounded by ground floor shops and exclusively one-bedroom dwelling units above. These modest units, containing a living room, a bedroom, kitchenette, bathroom, and balcony facing the interior of the monumental courtyard, were united by a public walkway also facing the interior. Pierced by small windows and ventilation holes, the exterior facade of the 200 Colonnes simultaneously evoked a woven tapestry and a fortification. The cloistered interiority of the 200 Colonnes project combined with its overtly fortified exterior, its exclusively Muslim population, and its centrality in the massive Climat de France masterplan, generated a condition ideal for both French Protectorate surveillance and also revolution. Despite claims by the colonial administration that “the settled, well-housed population of ‘Climat de France’ is less fidgety than that of the neighboring casbah,”8 it was from within these same housing projects that the resurgent nationalist protests of 1960 emerged. In his critique of End of Empire cinema, Alan O’Leary writes that “the Algerians may have lived inside the buildings of the Climat de France, but they rejected the designs that its architecture had upon them.”9
While these housing projects were used to symbolically transplant the Western way of life into Algeria, consolidating France’s geopolitical presence and socio-cultural hegemony, these architectural backdrops were in fact co-opted by the same populations they were meant to control. In 1962, just three years after the completion of the Climat de France, the Algerian Revolution successfully overthrew the French colonial regime and France withdrew from Algeria.
Postscript: A Second Appropriation
“They seemed perfectly calm and almost content. Our coming changed nothing.”
– Albert Camus, The Stranger
In the years following the Algerian revolution, tenants of the Climat de France began constructing informal settlements between the housing blocks and on the roof of the 200 Colonnes. Due to the overpopulation and deterioration of Pouillon’s new Casbah, the Climat once again reasserted itself as a prime location for revolution in the 2011 Arab Spring. During the riots, Algerian Police entered the complex to demolish the informal settlements, resulting in clashes that left seventy people wounded. Even today, these housing complexes are still spaces of protest and unrest, inheriting the legacies of neocolonial oppression and daily hardship. While on the one hand it is the inadequacies of these projects as both urban solutions and socio-political programs that produce the struggles of daily life—insufficient housing, urban infrastructures, and scarcity of resources—it is this same architecture that is used by its occupants as a symbolic frame for political resistance. Coupling a nostalgia for a radical past with an ongoing revolutionary necessity, the monumentality of the architecture provides an aesthetic ethos for these recurrent projects of dissent and defiance. This recursive history of the Climat and revolution exposes how French colonial intentions in Algeria and Pouillon’s specific vision were opportunistically appropriated to enact new forms of life and stage new models of protest within the contemporary city.
“It’s hard to start a revolution. Even harder to continue it. And hardest of all to win it. But, it’s only afterwards, when we have won, that the true difficulties begin.”
-Ben M’Hidi, The Battle of Algiers
Ibai Rigby
A large number of mosques have been built in Kosovo since its independence from Serbia in 2008. Some of them substitute old historic mosques that were specifically targeted for destruction by the Serbian army, with the idea of erasing all evidence of the historical presence of Muslim Albanians in the territory. However, most of them […]
A large number of mosques have been built in Kosovo since its independence from Serbia in 2008. Some of them substitute old historic mosques that were specifically targeted for destruction by the Serbian army, with the idea of erasing all evidence of the historical presence of Muslim Albanians in the territory. However, most of them are built from scratch, in what could be understood as a process of reterritorialising the landscapes of Kosovo following Milosevic’s attempt of genocide.
The vast majority of these newly built structures stylistically reject modernism, and follow the tradition of the classical Ottoman mosque, featuring large domes and tall minarets nevertheless built with contemporary building techniques such as reinforced concrete and prefabricated elements. The arguments behind such stylistic decisions are multiple. Modernist architecture arrived with the Yugoslavian state, today remembered for the oppression exerted by the Serbian regime. Recurring to the Ottoman domed mosque with pencil-shaped minarets, on the other hand, establishes a continuity with a more “suitable past” from which a new national narrative can be built. However, the main reason, as it is merely put by most clients, that is, community leaders, imams, and mostly, their international sponsors from the Gulf countries, prefer tradition.
Following an orthodox interpretation of the hadiths, that is, the sayings of the Prophet, innovation (bid’ah) could be interpreted as creation in the divine sense, an argument used mostly against changes in religious custom, that could eventually be applied also to religious architecture. Appreciating buildings for their specific formal beauty may also be considered idolatry, an argument that has already been used to destroy monuments such as the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan or historical structures in Saudi Arabia. Moreover, the fact that Islam lacks a central authority such as the Vatican leaves decision making in the consensus of the Ulema, the community of scholars, giving a particular preference to “the ancestral precedent” or “the custom of the tribe” (Sunna). All these arguments would justify the perpetuation of tradition when building mosques.
Nevertheless, a brief look into the history of mosques would reveal that minarets and domes, the main features of what is today considered the “traditional” mosque, were innovations at some point. In the times of the Prophet, the call to prayer was done from the roof of the mosques, and Ali, the son-in-law of the prophet and fourth caliph, had a tower turned down as the muezzin could violate the privacy of the houses surrounding the mosque. Minarets only started to appear consistently as from the 12th century, and the many different interpretations of their origin, taking as reference the lighthouse in Alexandria or the victory columns of the Byzantine empire, point towards their importance as a symbol rather than religious necessity.
The same applies to the dome; while the first mosque employing one is the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, built after the Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik took over the city, it did not become a recurring feature in mosque design until the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453. In both cases, the appropriation of domical architecture was more related to the ambition of the new rulers to be measured against the imperial splendour of the Byzantine empire than anything related to Islam as a religion.
On the other hand, while there are a few imperial domed mosques in Kosovo built during the Ottoman period (now being carefully rebuilt and restored by the Turkish government), the traditional village mosque in Kosovo was usually covered with a hip roof.
Considering all these historical facts we could elucidate that the so-called “traditional” style of the newly built mosques of Kosovo has, in fact, little to do with tradition. By appropriating the classical style of the longest-ruling and most powerful Muslim empire, the Ottoman empire, the contemporary mosque builders of Kosovo attempt to gain political and ideological support as well as legitimacy. Their domes and minarets are less about customary religion but about marking a landscape in a way that can be only imagined through religious ideology.
Dennis Lagemann
Introduction Initially emerging in Northern Italy, the Renaissance displayed an elegance and an impetus for progressiveness that European powers were eager to seize for themselves. An example for this desire can be found in Juan Bautista Villalpando, who referenced the ancient motifs as an expression of imperial power for the Habsburg Empire. This usage, however, […]
Initially emerging in Northern Italy, the Renaissance displayed an elegance and an impetus for progressiveness that European powers were eager to seize for themselves. An example for this desire can be found in Juan Bautista Villalpando, who referenced the ancient motifs as an expression of imperial power for the Habsburg Empire. This usage, however, uncoupled the new architecture from its regional context: without this relation to a regional imprint, the use of the ancient motifs entered into a self-referential context. As a result, Renaissance architecture could be appropriated to convey imperial power as well as to perpetuate the Dutch Republican identity. For example, in the Dutch Republic, growing in power after the rebellion against the Catholic King Philip II, it seemed to be more appropriate to display personal success in a civil society than to subjugate oneself by paying for construction projects as representations for the splendour of the King or pompous sacral buildings. This aspiration raised the demand for a method that would generate buildings that are equal in kind and yet differentiated in form and ornament to signify the social status of any single member of society.
To exemplify this, Nicolaus Goldmann and the method he devised will be chosen as a role-model for architectural appropriation. Goldmann, originally a legal scholar and mathematician, was born in today’s Wrocław. But he was given the opportunity to move from Silesia, severely affected by the turmoil of the Thirty Years War, to the University of Leiden, which had recently been founded under the motto “Praesidium Libertatis” and accepted scholars regardless of nationality or denomination. In Leiden, Goldmann devoted himself to studying architecture, and although he is almost forgotten nowadays, his work Vollständige Anweisung zu der Civil-Baukunst (Complete Manual for the Civil Art of Building) is particularly interesting as a methodology for appropriation for several reasons.
One of these reasons may be that Goldmann, although he undertook several journeys, stayed at the University of Leiden from his beginnings as a student in 1632 until his death in 1665. This fact supports the assumption that he continued updating his Complete Manual as the basis of his teaching and as a mirror of the prevailing zeitgeist until it was published posthumously.
Another reason may be that the Complete Manual presents itself with an extremely rigid and disciplined structure, which makes it most likely that Goldmann had been influenced by a man who was enrolled in Leiden from 1630 on to study mathematics. This man, who anonymously published a book seven years later while he was still in Leiden, was René Descartes, and the book was entitled “Discours de la Methode”. One indication that Goldmann indeed was influenced by Descartes appears in Goldmann’s explicit claim to teach architecture “in a scientific way,” developing what he called a “synthetic approach.”
But of course he did not start synthesizing on a blank sheet. He instead neutralized the contextual elements of Renaissance architecture, such as regio (the region), area (the plot), partitio (the partition), paries (the walls), tectum (the slab), and apertio (the openings), which often reference local conventions, by abstracting them for a self-referential methodology. The architectural elements are split up in a dualistic manner; their intrinsic properties enter into a fourfold method, abstracted from their particular contexts. Goldmann conceived from the outset that buildings were hypothetical and context-free.
He begins his first book with the “Definitiones,” which he considers to be an exhaustive list of components. These components bear the extrinsic attributes of elements: the motifs that can be described through geometry. To achieve stability in the definitions, Goldmann was identifying for each one the equivalent terms in Latin, Italian, French, and Dutch together with a short description [Figure 1]. Second, he begins to formulate postulates, stating that the mathematical sciences reach out to each other in such a way that the tenets on which they are based can be considered as true and established. His first and most important postulate is that it is possible to utilize the “art of measurement” to draw plans with sufficient precision to build from. In the third place are his “Axiomata,” in which he summarizes the rules of building technology. Finally, in the fourth part, Goldmann lists and describes thirty-three different “whole works:” churches, schools, hospitals, etc., categorized by utilization: sacral-secular; private-public; “for coming together, for contingency, for splendor.”1
Figure 1 Excerpt from Goldmann’s “Definitiones“
Only after these idealized types have been defined, does he describe how to adapt them to a particular situation in as many steps as necessary for the specific building. He also pointed out that this method has to be understood as a self-contained order, relying on the reader`s willingness to accept its contingencies and consistency and not to tamper his definitions with different interpretation.
However, the residential building was the only type for which Goldmann goes through the motions of design. In the first step, neither the location of this building nor its appearance are considered. In this respect one, can speak of an ideal that exists detached from any context. Before a plan is drawn, before the actual design is taken into account, Goldmann determines exactly where each room is to be located in the layout of the building as a whole according to functional requirements. In order to further substantiate this general type, he suggests that regional aspects might influence the specification of the building and thus allow for the formation of variants.
The first step in the appropriation for a specific identity happens at this moment in the design process by indicating that arcades in Italy, foyers in France, or heated parlors in Germany would correspond to regional habits. Goldmann treats individual rooms similarly, but here it is less a question of regional or local imprint. He lists several types for the “main hall,” that are mutually equivalent to each other and remain interchangeable by taste or fashion [Figures 2a & 2b].
Figure 2a The “Asian Main Hall” as described be Goldmann and il- lustrated by L.C. Sturm (ed.).
Figure 2b The “Main Hall with four Columns” as described be Goldmann and illustrated by L.C. Sturm (ed.).
He also suggests that the interior paintings should reflect the identity of the client. He proposes to indicate the social status of high lords with depictions of epic adventures, while landscape paintings would be more suitable for common people. For the ornamentation of a building, he argues that skulls of oxen could be placed over the frieze of a meat market as an emblematic signification for the purpose of the building. Thereby, the building becomes increasingly qualified, while the option of creating variants is kept open for as long as possible. With the Dutch Republican identity in mind, Goldmann refuses ornamentation for the sake of decorating. Unlike his predecessors, he keeps a critical distance towards ancient architecture, critiquing the ostentation of his own epoch. Goldmann demands ornament to function as a kind of appropriation by signification that not only serves to individualize the building but also to identify the purpose or person it was built for.
The Interface
There is one last point to bring up, which may be the most indirect and yet most relevant for the methodology. It is introduced by Goldmann as the “main sketch”:
“Lastly, it is not to be denied that the builders do not speak a word about the main sketch / because they have considered it to be a part of the floorplan: but this separation of the names and inventions will be thankfully accepted / by all those who prefer good instruction and easy inventions.”2
Namely, these “builders” are Vitruvius, Palladio, and Scamozzi, from whom he wants to differentiate his conception. He defines the “main sketch” as a plan so simple that the depicted objects appear only as a footprint. Thereby, it acts like a boundary between levels of scale, working like a symbol to encapsulate whatever it should represent. A house to the city or rooms to the house appear as black-boxes only defined in terms of their type.The main sketch draws a reference to another set of plans spelling out what it actually shows and where the process of variation or specification is kept open. Every part of the building behaves like a variable in a mathematical equation, embedded in a formal set of rules. This “boundary” functions at each scale as an interface between entities of planning.
Goldmann exemplifies this design process not only by means of an exemplary house, but through multiple the levels of scale; starting with a detailed instruction of how to execute a Corinthian capital and ending with his ideas for an ideal city. In the sense of a context-free pre-specification, there is no uniform principle or grammar, but instead, a formal method to treat the entities of planning as variables, capable of including objects of the same category but of different characteristics, like the various “main halls”. These variables are identified with each other and therefore conceived as interchangeable, without affecting the overall layout of a building. At the same time, every encapsulated entity can have its own set of rules and expose the same internal capacity for sophistication.
In Goldmann’s abstract model, this same method could be appropriated for many identities. Or, as Descartes might have put it: the identification of interchangeable entities made it possible to relate equivalent terms to one another3. The abstract idealization of a building with no form or appearance can successively undergo several steps of appropriation to take on the required identity: asa regional adaptation, signification of usage, or reflection of the taste and status of a client. The advantage being offered by the underlying model is that it provides a robust architecture for the specification and differentiation of the final design. Goldman, adapting Mediterranean motifs of antiquity to the particularities of the Dutch built environment, created a model for constructing European identity, devising a method of architectural abstraction and appropriation.