Architectural history

University of Minnesota Press

Chapter Title: INTRODUCTION

Book Title: Architecture since 1400 Book Author(s): Kathleen James-Chakraborty Published by: University of Minnesota Press. (2014) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt9qh39w.4

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T he tomb of Timur, known as the Gur-i-Mir, erected in Samarqand in what is now Uzbekistan, and the Glass House in the suburbs of São Paulo, Brazil, would at first appear to have little if anything in common (Figures I.1 and

I.2). The tomb was constructed around 1404 out of load-bearing baked bricks. These are techniques and materials that have been used since prehistoric times. The front of the Glass House, designed in 1950 and completed the following year, is a glass-filled reinforced concrete box. The steel pillars upon which it is perched run through the interior of the cantilevered reinforced concrete floor slab, minimizing the scale of the mullions that hold the vast windows in place. Such construction has been possible for little more than a century. Glazed tile ornament encrusts the most important exterior surfaces of the Gur-i-Mir; the interior of the tomb features a stunning net of muqarnas (ornament derived from the sections of the sphere that can be used to support a dome) executed in papier-mâché atop onyx wall paneling (Figure I.3). This ornament helps to establish a hierarchy within a composition focused on the iwans (vaulted openings framed by pointed arches) of the forecourt and entrance, the flanking minarets, the fluted dome resting on a high drum, and the two layers of domed chambers located under it. By contrast, the Glass House exhibits only the facts of its construction; there is no added deco- ration. The purposes of the buildings differ, too. The Gur-i-Mir was intended by a great conqueror to be the burial place of a cherished son, although he was laid to rest there as well; the Glass House served as the dwelling of an upper-middle- class couple who were active in the arts (Figure I.4). Finally, there is a distinction in how these buildings were designed. The patron probably played a major role in the case of the tomb; the name of his master builder does not survive. A profes- sionally trained architect, Lina Bo Bardi, designed the house in which she and her husband lived.

INTRODUCT ION

xi

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Figure I.1. Gur-i-Mir, Samarqand, Uzbekistan, 1404.

Figure I.2. Lina Bo Bardi, Glass House, São Paulo, Brazil, 1951.

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Figure I.3. Interior of dome, Gur-i-Mir.

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xiv Introduction

For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many architectural histori- ans focused on the history of style—in other words, on the formal characteristics of a building that enabled it to be identified with a particular time and, very often, a particular place. A history of architecture organized entirely around style empha- sizes these differences. In such an account the details of the forms, materials, and technologies used to convey these messages matter enormously. Baked brick and tile revetment, large iwans, and muqarnas decoration identify the Gur-i-Mir as an Islamic building; expansive windows, exposed reinforced concrete, and bare sur- faces demonstrate that the Glass House exemplifies the International Style from the middle of the twentieth century.

Style can also help to explain what those who designed and commissioned a building intended to communicate, as well as affect how later audiences understand a building. Timurid (the adjective derived from the name of Timur) architecture in central Asia and modern architecture in Latin America can both be presumed to re flect significant aspects of the cultures that erected them. The Gur-i-Mir, for instance, illustrates the ambitions of individual medieval rulers at a time when polit- ical units were defined more by the extent of territory a ruler could conquer and control than by a strong sense of national identity. Its impressive scale correlates

Figure I.4. Living room, Glass House.

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with the ambitions and achievements of Timur, also known as Tamerlane, the most successful warrior of his day. From Samarqand, he raided cities from Damascus in the east to Delhi in the west; the empire he founded stretched from the shores of the Black Sea to the edge of the Himalayas and from the Persian Gulf north to the shores of the Caspian and Aral Seas. The Timurids ruled Iran from Herat in mod- ern Afghanistan for a century after his death. In such an account the much more modest Glass House serves as an example of the search for individual expression mounted, especially since the beginning of the nineteenth century, by members of the educated upper-middle classes, often in opposition to such autocratic rule. Rather than demonstrating their wealth or power, the Glass House was primarily a testament to the advanced taste of the Bardis. Its publication in the European architectural press enhanced their standing in Brazil, where Bo Bardi designed Latin America’s leading art museum, the São Paulo Museum of Art, of which her husband was the founding director.

Many such histories have also implied that style was relatively constant in most parts of the world but in almost constant flux in Europe and in territories settled by people of European descent. In such an account the Gur-i-Mir might stand for buildings erected from the seventh through the eighteenth centuries in territories governed by Muslims, or, at the least, be seen as emblematic of central Asia for this entire period. The modernism of the Glass House, on the other hand, would be seen as a way station between, for instance, art nouveau and postmodernism within a progression of styles stretching from ancient times to the present. It might be compared with similar buildings in France and the United States as an example of a homogenizing globalization or—particularly if the emphasis is shifted from the architecture to the remnants of rain forest that eventually almost enveloped it (as Bo Bardi always intended that they do)—of a specifically Brazilian modernism.

For more than a century, analyses of style have included discussions of how structure shapes space; more recently scholars have focused on the ways in which space structures experience at the multiple levels of buildings, cities, and even land- scapes. This newer approach has been particularly useful in shifting architectural history away from a preoccupation with aesthetics—a major purpose of the field has always been to train architecture students by introducing them to exemplary build- ings cherished for their beauty—toward a deeper engagement with social history. The differences between the courtyards of the Gur-i-Mir and the Glass House can thus be explained in relation to both style and purpose (Figures I.5 and I.6). The presence of a forecourt at the Gur-i-Mir emphasizes the importance of the tomb chamber and the room above it by creating a space that buffers them from the main road; supplementary complexes also open off this forecourt. The interiors are not private spaces but the focal point of the ensemble, above which the double-shell dome rises as an exclamation mark. In the Glass House, the first courtyard injects the landscape into the house. This heightens the effect of a transparent tree house by minimizing the distance from the surrounding flora and fauna. While the purpose

Introduction xv

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Figure I.5. Plan, Gur-i-Mir.

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Introduction xvii

of a visit to the Gur-i-Mir is to penetrate to the rear of its site, this is not the case at the more private Glass House. A second, larger courtyard separates the reception and bedroom areas from the service areas to the rear, which were occupied primarily by servants.

As this comparison of a fifteenth-century central Asian and a twentieth-century Latin American building indicates, on close inspection buildings erected more than five centuries and thousands of miles apart can have a great deal in common. Both the Gur-i-Mir and the Glass House enabled the clients, who in the case of the Glass House doubled as the architect, to make statements about their identities and about their relationships to the places in which the buildings were located. Fulfillment of the purpose of this book—to reconstruct the story of how environments are created that shape experience and communicate identity through the ways in which spaces are formed and surfaces are decorated—thus requires much more than just the identification of style or even the analysis of space.

This book detours from this familiar path in three further ways. A basic premise is that since at least 1400, many builders and architects, as well as their clients, have used either the history of local architecture or an awareness of past and present architecture elsewhere, and often both, to create novel structures that shaped the ways in which they and their societies were perceived. The convenient date of 1400

Figure I.6. Plan, Glass House.

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has been chosen because both the clearly antiquarian character of architecture in many different parts of the world and the extent of contact and interaction between geographically disparate cultures quickened at about that time. New, too, was the scale of the distances across which architectural ideas traveled with increasing speed. Long before the Industrial Revolution transformed the technologies out of which buildings were constructed, new trading links had already affected the appearance of the dwellings, workplaces, leisure environments, and houses of worship in cities around the world. Timurid architecture can stand for Islamic architecture as a whole not because Muslims from Morocco to Bangladesh shared a single approach to architecture—monumental tombs, for instance, remained almost unknown out- side central and South Asia—but because Timur compelled skilled artisans from the vast range of territory he either raided or controlled to come to Samarqand, where their combined talents produced new syntheses of previously diverse local forms and motifs. Bo Bardi, who emigrated from Italy to Brazil after World War II, was well aware of contemporary architecture in Europe and North America, as well as enthusiastic about her new home.

There is no reason, moreover, to believe that western Europe, joined later by the United States, has consistently been in the forefront of developing or popularizing new styles or construction technologies. The double-shell dome was used in Iran and central Asia before it was employed in Renaissance Italy. Reinforced concrete housing with little ornamentation was more popular in upscale neighborhoods like Bo Bardi’s across the developing world during the 1950s than in most of their Euro- pean and North American counterparts. Thus the chapters that follow balance tar- geted discussions of environments around the world, not privileging one continent over another as the locus of modernity or of modernism, the aesthetic expression of modernity, at any particular time.

The second point reiterated throughout the pages that follow is the importance of recognizing the large number of people who share responsibility for the creation and maintenance of buildings. The history of architecture since 1400 has usually been told in terms of the architects who since the Renaissance have designed many of Europe’s most aesthetically ambitious buildings and, since about 1800, an increas- ing share of those in the rest of the world. Patrons have also regularly appeared in the pages of these accounts when they were powerful men. A wider range of clients and construction workers, not to mention generations of users, should properly share credit for building and maintaining the structures that surround us. The activ- ities of Soviet authorities in the case of the Gur-i-Mir, for instance, and the institute devoted to the lives and careers of the Bardis in that of the Glass House have been crucial to the restoration and preservation of these sites.

Even the assumption that the Glass House is modern specifically because of the involvement of a woman in its design falters when one considers the activities of Timur’s daughter-in-law, Goharshad. In addition to serving as regent for her grandson, she was an important architectural patron. Her commissions included a

xviii Introduction

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celebrated mosque in Mashhad, in what is now Iran. Nor are there any grounds for believing that although most professional architects have been men, women have not always played an important role as designers, builders, patrons, and users of buildings. This book repeatedly draws attention to women’s as well as men’s chang- ing relationships to the ways in which buildings have been designed, constructed, and used.

Finally, architecture has always allowed individuals as well as societies, respond- ing in many cases to external forces beyond their control, to project realities that are as often aspirational as actual. Timur was indeed one of the most important fig- ures of his day, but the scale of his tomb is no indicator of this; that of his descen- dant the Mughal emperor Humayan, who died in Delhi in 1556, was even larger and more splendid, despite Humayan’s relative ineffectiveness. The transparency of many modern buildings was often equated with democracy. Although during the 1960s and 1970s Bo Bardi was critical of Brazil’s military dictatorship, before the couple immigrated to Brazil her husband had been a prominent supporter of Benito Mussolini; Philip Johnson, another prominent architect who lived in a glass house he designed for himself, also flirted with fascism.

Architecture does not allow one to try on identities with the same ease as cloth- ing, although both can be strongly influenced by fashion. It can, however, give sub- stance to the ambitions of those individuals and groups with enough wealth and clout to build. Rather than merely reflecting culture, architecture contributes to crafting it. Timur’s tomb speaks of his political power and personal taste; the visitor transfixed by the elegance of its decoration momentarily loses consciousness of the brutality of many of his military campaigns. In the Glass House Bo Bardi presented her husband with the perfect stage set from which to rehabilitate himself as a major figure in the postwar art world. Unlocking this persuasive, rhetorical power of buildings, which can fade or change over time, is the third point of this book.

No single volume, however, can come close to doing justice to the complexity and variety of architecture around the world over the course of more than six cen- turies. This one is no exception. It focuses on a relatively small number of examples, chosen to illustrate the range of ways that architects, builders, and their clients have built and occupied structures that in more cases than not were in their day in the forefront of change. A separate—and much longer—volume could be devoted to a more comprehensive survey of the dwellings and sacred structures erected by people with less awareness of the wider world but with similar aesthetic discernment, on farms and in villages and towns around the world. More countries are left out than included; two continents are entirely absent, as are an enormous number of cele- brated buildings and their architects. Nor can any book of this relatively modest size illustrate each building that is included in adequate detail. Even on the Internet, it can be difficult to locate the plans, sections, and elevations that give those trained to read them far more information than a single shot of a facade and perhaps a general view of an interior can possibly provide. A bibliography of recent scholarly

Introduction xix

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literature follows each chapter; the books and articles listed and the ones they in turn cite provide the detail that cannot possibly be included here.

One book can help, however, to encourage an awareness and an appreciation of the desires, meanings, and experiences embedded in buildings and of the multiple ways that they have been communicated. More than simply sheltering the living and the dead from sun and rain, wind and cold, the Gur-i-Mir and the Glass House are examples of the ways in which buildings, humble as well as monumental, con- vey the force of personality, the wonder of technology, and the daunting power of imagination.

FOR FURTHER READING

On the Gur-i-Mir, see Markus Hattstein and Peter Delius, eds., Islam: Art and Architecture (Potsdam: h.f.ullmann, 2007); on the Glass House, Marcelo Carvalho Ferraz, ed., Lina Bo Bardi (São Paulo: Instituto Lina Bo Bardi e P. M. Bardi, 1994). For discussion of Timur as a point of departure for early modern history and the history of globalization, see John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire since 1405 (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008).

xx Introduction

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