Architectural Idioms Research Articles

The Early Urartian Kings Ishpuini and Minua’s Search for a Royal Architectural Idiom as Reflected in the Lower and Upper Anzaf Fortresses

The Early Urartian Kings Ishpuini and Minua’s Search for a Royal Architectural Idiom as Reflected in the Lower and Upper Anzaf Fortresses

Light, Air, and (No) Sun. Negotiating Illuminance, Ventilation and Insolation Through Architectural Form To Achieve Energy-Efficiency and Comfort in Residential Buildings in Very Hot Climates: Two Case Studies from Muscat, Oman

The discourse on energy-efficient buildings tends to shift out of the realm of architecture and into engineering and programming. In the latter disciplines, sophisticated solutions are developed and introduced to the green building industry. However, such solutions require financial and technical capacities that are only found in technologically highly developed countries. In developing countries and their ever-growing metropolises, a much more robust approach seems appropriate. This paper explores how the energy-demand for creating comfortable interior environments in very hot climates can be significantly reduced by promoting simple and straightforward architectural means. It seeks to relocate the discourse back into the realm of design, where less costly, more feasible and long-lasting solutions can be found. The paper presents two case studies of residential architecture in Muscat, Oman. Through simulations of solar insolation as well as daylight studies, it shows how architectural form can respond to two solar phenomena - heat and light – in such a way that insolation on glazed facades is minimized, while illuminance of interiors is optimized. It claims that this can lead to a new regional architectural idiom that puts the famous modernist credo on its head by stating that energy-efficient buildings in a hot climate zone require “light and air, but no sun”.

Bosanski slog u komparativnom diskursu nacionalnih arhitektonskih stilova na području Balkana / Bosnian style in the comparative discourse of national architectural styles

The article analyzes the Bosnian style in architecture by reflecting upon the phenomenon of the national architectural style, its role in the construction of national identity, political and ideological instrumentalization. The issue of the relationship betwee tradition and modernity and the position of architectural heritage in the contemporary context arises. Interpretative framework of the specificity of the national architectural idiom also includes a discursive view of the relationship between the periphery and the center. Through a comparative analysis of national styles in architecture of the Balkan countries such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Turkey, Croatia and Serbia, their character, distinction and mutual connections are defined. The Bosnian-style in architecture is viewed in its development as an architectural idiom of the national origin, but also as an authentic stylistic determinant created in the process of a creative research of architectural heritage that will ultimately result in new spatial-design and aesthetic values consistent with modernist architectural concepts. In this sense, the position of the Bosnian style as a national style in the history of European modernism is questioned, its connection with the aesthetics of modernism based on the principles of reducing excessive decorativeness, formative purism and functionalism.

Review: The New Farm: Contemporary Rural Architecture

Review: <i>The New Farm: Contemporary Rural Architecture</i>

Review: Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul, by Ünver Rüstem

Review: <i>Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul</i>, by Ünver Rüstem

Unique Features of Dravidian Architecture in India: A Retrospect

Indian architecture progressed time to time with the assimilation of many influences that occurs as a result of India's global discourse with other regions of the world throughout its millennia-old past. The architecture of India is rooted back in its ancient civilization, culture and religion. Architectural methods practiced in India are a result of examination and implementation of its established building traditions and outside cultural interactions. The traditional Vastu Shastra remains influential in throughout India's architectural styles during the contemporary era. Dravidian architecture is an architectural idiom in Hindu temple architecture that emerged in the southern part of the Indian subcontinent or South India, reaching its final form by the sixteenth century. It consists predominantly of Hindu temples where the feature is the high gopura or gatehouse and large temples. All the majority of structures are located in the Southern Indian states of Karnataka, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Various kingdoms and empires which ruled south India such as the Cholas, the Chera, the Kakatiyas, the Pandyas, the Pallavas, the Gangas, the Rashtrakutas, the Chalukyas, the Hoysalas, and Vijayanagara Empire among others have made substantial contribution to the evolution of Dravidian architecture. This style of architecture can also be found in parts of North India of Teli ka Mandir Gwalior, Bhitargaon Baitala Deula, Bhubaneshwar, Northeastern and central Sri Lanka also, having unique features of architectural styles in India.

Bringing Order Out of Chaos: Stanisław August Poniatowski’s Political Patronage of Architectural Classicism in the Late Eighteenth-Century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

ABSTRACTThis article examines the political uses of classical architecture in the late eighteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It focuses specifically on the direct connection between the rise of the classical idiom on the eve of the collapse of the Commonwealth and the ill-fated idea of political recuperation of the deteriorating and dysfunctional state under the aegis of King Stanisław August Poniatowski (r. 1764–95). In particular, it outlines the extent and character of Polish-Lithuanian architectural classicism’s political engagement in the last decades of the eighteenth century. It also underscores the specific role of this architectural idiom as a political symbol and instrument of propaganda, which served to represent the idea of restoring political order to the Commonwealth and building a strong and self-sustaining political community headed by the king. Finally, it presents a selection of characteristic buildings and publications that contributed to this political discourse, and examines the ways classical architecture retained a political importance in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795.

Between Istanbul and Gujarat: Descriptions of Mecca in the Sixteenth-Century Indian Ocean

In 1543, a quarter century after the Ottoman conquest of the Holy Cities, the Meccan jurist, hadith scholar, and chronicler Jar Allah Muhammad Ibn Fahd (d. 1547) completed a short work devoted to the construction projects undertaken in the city by the Ottoman sultans Selim I (r. 1512–20) and his son Süleyman (r. 1520–66). The work is highly unusual from the perspective of the Arabic historiographical tradition and constitutes the first comprehensive response by an Arab chronicler to the emergence of an Ottoman imperial architectural idiom around the turn of the sixteenth century. The article situates Ibn Fahd and his work in three interrelated contexts: (a) the incorporation of Mecca and Medina into the Ottoman domains; (b) the emergence of an Ottoman architectural idiom and visual interest in the description of the Holy Sanctuaries across the Indian Ocean, from Istanbul to Gujarat; and (c) the competition between the new Custodians of the Two Holy Sanctuaries and other Islamic rulers, past and present. In particular, the article focuses on the challenges posed by the sultans of Gujarat, who were also quite interested in the Holy Sanctuaries. This interest is captured in Muhyi al-Din Lari’s (d. 1526–27) description of the pilgrimage and the Haramayn, which was written for the Gujarati sultan Muzaffar Shah II (r. 1511–26).

Benjamin’s Dialectical Image and the Textuality of the Built Landscape

In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin describes the architectural expression of nineteenth century Paris as a dialectical manifestation of backwards-looking historicism and the dawn of modern industrial production (in the form of cast iron and mass produced plate glass). Yet in the same text, Benjamin refers to the dialectical image as occurring within the medium of written language. In this paper, I will first discuss the textuality of the dialectical image as it emerges from Benjamin’s discussion of allegorical and symbolic images in his Trauerspiel study and the ‘wish symbol’ in The Arcades Project. I will then discuss the ‘textual reductionism’ implicit in Benjamin’s theory of the dialectical image, in which the dense pluralities of urban space are reduced to a finite script to be pieced together through Benjamin’s constructivist method of historical observation. The textuality of the dialectical image will be elaborated on by discussing it in relation to the practice of translation. This discussion will be further contextualised by discussing a cadre of German/Austrian planners and architects who attempted to translate architectural idioms between cultural identities in Kemalist Era Turkey. The article concludes with a short recapitulation on the dialectical image as both an object of scrutiny and a method of observation, one which also takes into consideration the specific historicity of the observer.

Multiple Modernities

ABSTRACTMeaning is inscribed in the material/built environment and this article considers the materiality of change in urban Africa, focusing particularly on the kitchens of a group of first-generation professionals from northern Ghana who have “made it” and now live in the suburbs of Accra, Ghana. In the hometown area, they live in or are surrounded by the architectural idiom of mud and wattle round huts, whereas in relocation, as these Ghanaians become “modern,” they create modern housing designs. The new aesthetic is performative of their cosmopolitanism, as it speaks to their aspirations for new identities and status. At the same time, members of this new elite perpetuate old practices that are tied to an old materiality. To explore the change in identity and status that is embedded in design, and the accommodation of old and new practices, I focus on the change in the kitchen as it becomes representative of a supremely modern ideal.

Review: Renaissance Gothic: Architecture and the Arts in Northern Europe, 1470–1540, by Ethan Matt Kavaler

Ethan Matt Kavaler Renaissance Gothic: Architecture and the Arts in Northern Europe, 1470–1540 New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012, 344 pp., 80 color and 210 b/w illus. $75, ISBN 9780300167924 Ethan Matt Kavaler’s beautifully produced new book makes an extraordinary contribution to the growing discourse on “Late Gothic” artistic production in the last decades of the fifteenth and first decades of the sixteenth century. The very title chosen by the author—a “provocative oxymoron” (22)—complicates old notions of Gothic as a style that “develops” continuously over three centuries, entering into a period of “decline” before being swept aside by the Renaissance. The unruly and provocative material Kavaler deals with in this book is hard to cram into a traditional structure of chapter headings, and it has to be said that the introduction is disturbingly multifarious in its content. Yet the author’s argument is, for the most part, well served by the thematic organization into five chapters—“Ornament and Aesthetics,” “Flamboyant Forms,” “Microarchitecture,” “Natural Forms,” and, finally, “Deconstruction and Hybridity”—a sequence that conveniently allows the author to reserve his most original thinking for the later parts of the book. The introduction provides an overview of problems of taste and historiography: older historians of Gothic often professed a real dislike for this mode, which they considered to be “overcharged” with ornament of a kind that had broken loose from its old role of expressing architectural behavior. A few carefully chosen juxtapositions make the point: the “rational” forms of Saint-Maclou of Rouen (ca. 1440), in which slender filleted piers run smoothly into arches and ribs, is contrasted with the “jungle of overlapping shafts” (11) in the church at Brou, built some seventy-five years later for Margaret of Austria. Similarly juxtaposed, we see an austere geometric window (ca. 1300) from the nave of the minster at Freiburg im Breisgau with a window from the sixteenth-century choir where “designs have become fully emancipated from the mundane task of supporting the glass” (12). The coexistence of elements of …

Changing places: New Zealand Houses by Winkler & Eisenhofer 1958 to 1969

The Austrian-born architects Erwin Winkler and Fritz Eisenhofer immigrated to New Zealand during the 1950s. After working at the Housing Division of the Ministry of Works, they established a joint architectural practice in 1958 when the growing New Zealand economy and governmental efforts, such as the Group Housing Scheme, increased the building of homes. At the same time the repetitive appearance of English Cottage Style state houses, that had been built in reaction to a severe housing shortage after the Second World War, led to a demand for architecturally designed homes. In reaction to this,Winkler & Eisenhofer established a reputation as a non-conformist practice in creating homes that not only offered modern open-plan living, but also featured unusual features, murals or sculptures. After New Zealand had overcome the housing shortage by the early 1960s, and during an economic upsurge, the practice received commissions from wealthy clients and was no longer competing with builders who offered standardised homes. Winkler & Eisenhofer now oriented their houses towards contemporary American precedents created for a clientele who wished their homes to reflect individuality, internationality and modernity. A number of architectural practices sought at the same time to develop a distinct New Zealand architectural idiom. This paper investigates how the careers of Winkler & Eisenhofer developed at a time when the demand for homes that were designed to overcome a housing shortage, shifted to a demand for modern houses that reflected a newly developing life-style. Within the complex discourse on architectural modernism in New Zealand, Winkler & Eisenhofer's houses were created outside of the ongoing search for a distinct New Zealand style.

Design with Climate in Africa. The World of Galleries, Brise–Soleil and Beta Windows

In the twenty–five years after World War II, Angola and Mozambique were fertile territories for the inception of new urban and architectural projects, in keeping with the principles of the Modern Movement. In the earliest works designed by the architects who moved there in the late 1940s, one can already witness a serious concern with the adjustment to the particularities of the hot and humid climate of the tropics. The Modern architectural idiom was particularly well suited to the local climate building requirements such as solar control and provision of adequate ventilation. Moreover, these architectural solutions were underpinned by sustainable procedures that ought to be re–established in the restoration of Modern buildings of the type presented here.

S. J. Makielski: Designer of African American Schools for the Episcopal Church in the Rural South, 1930–1944

S. J. Makielski: Designer of African American Schools for the Episcopal Church in the Rural South, 1930–1944

The People's Glass House

“The People’s Glass House” tells the story of the Giuseppe Terragni Casa del Fascio project in Como. Long acknowledged as one of the masterpieces of twentieth century architecture, the building in question represents an effort to elaborate a distinctly national, even nationalist, architectural idiom that, nonetheless, fulfills the highest aspirations of the modern movement. The essay situates the elaboration of this key project within its historical context, analyzes its relationship to the regime’s autarchic themes, and explores Terragni’s attitudes towards both modern and ancient materials from the standpoint of their ideological resonances.

The museum and the public:

ABSTRACT In a 2005 issue of Art in America, David Galloway draws our attention to the Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengladbach: architect Hans Hollein's ‘postmodern extravaganza seemed more intent on showcasing the architecture than the art it contained’, he states (140). Zoë Wicomb's novel, David's story, similarly calls deliberate attention to its elaborate structures, creating anxiety about the issues surrounding memorialisation. David's story, though I argue that it is a ‘site of conscience’, simultaneously presents iconic figures and questions their validity, though she refuses to work solely on the premises used by traditional memorial structures. Wicomb also comments on the ultimate unrepresentability of the memory of terror, and the ‘unpronounceability’ of certain portions of national history. David's story could signal the genesis of a new era of literature in South Africa, but rather than severing the link between textual difficulty and exclusiveness – thereby allowing readers to arrive at the mutually constitutive relationship between the struggle to ‘read’ and the pleasure in comprehending the story – the ‘theatricality’ of the novel's structure may create such an ‘insider's story’, requiring so much knowledge of the ‘architectural idioms’, that it may prove to be inaccessible to many readers.

Writing Multiculturalism? Planning for Culturally Different Identities in the City of Birmingham

This article presents a case study of a multicultural planning epistemology at work in the everyday landscape of a city. It draws on insights in cultural geography and the planning archive on Birmingham's Chinese Quarter, to show that the epistemology in play weaves together claims of a factual, authentic multiculturalism based on particular presences with an implicit planning imaginary of cultural identity. It then demonstrates that the planning imaginary in question is structured like a text with a signifying system containing mimetic and disseminative properties. The article concludes by proposing a number of implications from the case study for the planning of Birmingham's multicultural future. When postmodern architectural ‘historicism’ borrows architectural idioms from far-flung periods without any regard for idiomatic coherence or reproduction of appropriate context, this … can be seen as a foregrounding of radical citationality, of the suggestion that the ‘aura’ of the original cannot be structurally privileged. (Spivak, 1999, p. 331)

On the diffusion of sound in an auditorium

A condition of perfect diffusion of sound is said to exist in an auditorium if, at any point within it, the reverberant sound travels in all directions with equal probability, and if the level of the reflected sound is everywhere equal. In deriving the reverberation time formula, which predicts how long sound will bounce around an enclosed space after the source has stopped, W.C. Sabine assumed perfect diffusion within it. When this is not the case, his formula may predict inaccurate results. For example, the Sabine equation will not give correct results in an auditorium with poor diffusion, as when there is a large overhanging balcony, or if one of the dimensions of the enclosed space is very much greater than the other dimensions, or if the auditorium is divided into spaces having different acoustical properties. An auditorium with excellent diffusion beneficially affects the uniformity of decay of sound within the space and pleases the listener’s ear. Among techniques that contribute to good diffusion are the surface irregularities found in the elaborate styles of architecture of the past. Illustrations will be presented showing some approaches within the modern architectural idiom that have yielded successful results.

Ottoman Expressions of Early Modernity and the "Inevitable" Question of Westernization

Architectural transformations in the eighteenth-century Ottoman capital Istanbul are usually interpreted as expressions of an overarching process of cultural westernization that began in the wake of Ottoman military defeats against European powers in the late seventeenth century. In this article, I reevaluate the extent and significance of Ottoman westernization against visual and architectural evidence, and against two diverging discourses that emerged among contemporary Ottoman and European observers of architectural change. I argue that the architectural idiom of the eighteenth century was far more hybrid and culturally uncommitted than the notion of westernization implies. Based on a close reading of Ottoman poetry and narratives and European travelers' accounts, I show that although the rhetoric of westernization was dominant in the latter's descriptions of the built environment, Ottoman perceptions centered instead on notions of innovation and originality of expression, reflecting a new attitude toward change, novelty, and the canons of a long-established architectural tradition.

The Neurdein Fréres and the photography of medieval architecture

For those engaged in the study of historic architecture, nineteenth-century photography has been an essential avenue of research. For many scholars nineteenth-century photographs continue to be documents of choice for publication and research, both for their frequent superiority to modern photographs and for the evidence they supply of buildings and their structural features that have been altered or obliterated. The superiority of early photographs of historic architecture has a foundation, apart from their technical excellence, in their makers' knowledge of the buildings and in the cultural centrality of these structures that have no real equivalent in photography today. From the beginning the first generation of photographers in Paris elevated architecture to a distinguished category, in part because the technical capabilities of photography in the first two decades of its development were ideally suited to the photographing of still subjects in wide-angle view. More important, there was a very early association of photography with efforts to classifY, preserve and revere the monuments of France. 1 The revival of interest in the Middle Ages, initially an expression of romantic nationalism, corresponded almost precisely to the advent of photography in France. Much of the pioneering work was done in the service of recording monuments of the Romanesque and Gothic styles, together seen as the pure expression of a native French architectural idiom. The experimental photographers who created and recreated the medium in its infancy all produced master series of national monuments — Henri le Secq at Chartres, Reims and Strasbourg, Charles Nègre at Chartres and in Romanesque sites in Provence, Edouard Baldus in his albums of Romanesque architecture in Burgundy and the Rhone Valley, Charles Marville in Paris, and the Bisson freres in Gothic monuments of Paris and Rouen.