In This Issue

Abstract

The history of Notre-Dame in Paris is well understood thanks to the work of scholars using documentary and archaeological evidence, but the overall logic of the cathedral’s evolving design has received surprisingly little systematic attention. To provide a complementary perspective on Notre-Dame’s development, Robert Bork applies geometrical analysis to precise laser scans of the building’s fabric. In The Design Geometry of Notre-Dame in Paris he argues that the original designer developed a master plan for the whole cathedral, based largely on the geometry of equilateral triangles. Subsequent modifications to this scheme evidently involved increasing the vault height and flying buttress steepness in the choir and subtly altering the proportions of the nave and façade, but the original design continued to be respected in its broad outlines. This analysis thus sheds new light on the tension between innovation and conformity that characterized work on Notre-Dame in the first century of its history.The dominance of civil architectural paradigms in the analysis of the design of the Vatican Borgo fortifications, including the Castel Sant’Angelo, has generated a scholarly narrative that focuses on the design decisions of individual architects. However, such an approach cannot adequately address the complexity of a large-scale military project with unique site-based limitations. In The Longue Durée of the Borgo Fortifications, Ian Verstegen presents the fortification of the Borgo as a collective, military problem, where the site dictated the solution. Through a review of payments and drawings, this essay reveals that the majority of work occurred under Paul III and his engineers, Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, and Giacomo Fusti Castriotto, who not only determined most of the Borgo’s design but also concluded trenchwork much earlier than previously supposed. Moreover, rather than focusing on individual designers, the article underscores the importance of military engineering site requirements and the contributions of anonymous soldiers to this project.Beginning in 1963, tourists yearning to experience the world of Gone with the Wind could finally visit the Old South outside Atlanta, Georgia. The Antebellum Plantation was one of the first attractions to open at the state’s new Stone Mountain Park, constructed around the world’s largest Confederate monument. But while the state of Georgia created the park and finished the memorial as part of its campaign against racial integration, it outsourced the plantation to private investors as a for-profit concession. Motivated by personal agendas, these citizens—led by Christie Bell Kennedy, founder of Stone Mountain Plantation Inc.—brought together vernacular historical buildings from across the state, transforming them to create a polished fantasy of White leisure. In The 1960s Antebellum Plantation at Stone Mountain, Georgia, Lydia Mattice Brandt and Philip Mills Herrington provide a careful examination of the history, architecture, and decoration of the Antebellum Plantation, still remarkably unchanged more than fifty years later. Their study reveals a fraught, ad hoc design process long disguised by the graceful big house at the center of the state-owned attraction.In the late 1940s, the U.S. architectural firm Town Planning Associates produced a master plan for Chimbote in Peru as part of a regional development scheme centered on a new steel mill. The plan included designs for housing for the city’s workforce of rural–urban migrants, with proposals ranging from patio houses to provisional dwellings based on the vernacular self-built housing prevalent in Chimbote’s barriadas (squatter settlements). However, the influx of migrants vastly exceeded estimates, resulting in extensive unregulated urban growth. In an effort to remediate this problem, the Peruvian government selected the city as a key site for aided self-help housing projects beginning in the late 1950s. In Chimbote, Projected: Urbanity from Up Above and from Down Below, Helen Gyger explores the intertwined nature of authorized and unauthorized urbanisms in postwar Chimbote and employs a close reading of visual and textual sources to advance a comparative analysis of contrasting proposals that architectural history has previously separated into distinct categories.