Sculptural Quality Research Articles

The Porta speciosa of Esztergom •

This essay was carried out in the framework of a research programme (Thesaurus Mediaevalis, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, 2017–2022) funded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and deals with one of the most complex but hardly accessible works of the Árpád period, the former main portal of the Esztergom Cathedral, which was decorated with sculptures and inlaid marble images. It was built in the last decade of the 12th century under King Béla III (1172–1196) and survived the Turkish invasion, but its remains were destroyed during the 19th century construction works. Since then, it exists only in textual sources, depictions and museum fragments. The present work aims primarily to collect and catalogue the fragments, but also to examine the structure of this work of exceptional quality, the artistic orientation of its workshop and the content of the images. It examines questions such as the history of the construction of the building, the sculptural quality of the fragments, which European art centres are related to them (including, in addition to the dominant role of the centres in northern Italy, the Byzantine influence conveyed by the various forms of transport), the circumstances under which the artists could have arrived in the Kingdom of Hungary, the inspiration for their art, what their knowledge and the needs of their clients reveal, and whether there were any interruptions, changes of plan or new beginnings during the construction.

I will not find this image beautiful I will not find this image beautiful I will not find this image beautiful (An unfinished monument)

Abstract During the summer of 2014, I scrolled through the images of the Israeli bombings of Gaza, mesmerized behind the computer screen by their beauty. They were stunning and my engagement with them, so far away from the event, was based on purely flat aesthetic grounds– which is uncannily perverse. Attempting to deface the image, I insert the names of the victims of the attack into its script code. Each name typed into the script alters the photograph and leaves its mark. While trying to defile the visual, to escape from the beauty of this violence, a different aesthetic transpires, that of the glitch. With naming the dead, the notion of a monument emerges, reinforced by the sculptural quality of the smoke cloud. The resulting video is entitled I will not find this image beautiful, I will not find this image beautiful, I will not find this image beautiful (An unfinished monument) (11h 43min). Keywords Aesthetics, conflict, Palestine, glitch, monument

Design, Control, and Evaluation of Mixed-Order, Compact Spherical Loudspeaker Arrays

Abstract Beamforming on the icosahedral loudspeaker (IKO), a compact, spherical loudspeaker array, was recently established and investigated as an instrument to produce auditory sculptures (i.e., 3-D sonic imagery) in electroacoustic music. Sound beams in the horizontal plane most effectively and expressively produce auditory objects via lateral reflections on sufficiently close walls and baffles. Can there be 3-D-printable arrays at drastically reduced cost and transducer count, but with similarly strong directivity in the horizontal plane? To find out, we adopt mixed-order Ambisonics schemes to control fewer, and predominantly horizontal, beam patterns, and we propose the 3|9|3 array as a suitable design, with beamforming crossing over to Ambisonics panning at high frequencies. Analytic models and measurements on hardware prototypes permit a comparison between the new design and the IKO regarding beamforming capacity. Moreover, we evaluate our 15-channel 3|9|3 prototype in listening experiments to find out whether the sculptural qualities and auditory object trajectories it produces are comparable to those of the 20-channel IKO.

Assessing the Efficiency of Sunscreens in University of Baghdad Campus

Sunscreens play an important role as exterior solar shading devices that block a certain amount of the sun radiation from entering the building. Thereby, they improve indoor environmental qualities by reducing heat gain, controlling glare and decreasing contrast ratios leading to increased human comfort, satisfaction and productivity. In University of Baghdad campus design, Gropius’s main aim was “Let climate control dominate the university architectural motif”. Sunscreens were thus essential features and functional both from the practical point of view to protect windows, and as a prominent design element of sculptural quality. The campus, over the past decades, was subjected to many changes and new buildings were added to the master plan. Sunscreens were imposed on the new buildings’ elevations as unifying design elements without considering the climatic and orientation aspects, causing excessive heat gain in interior spaces. The paper aims to explore and evaluate the efficiency of sunscreens in University of Baghdad campus, in both the original and new buildings, to determine the optimal building orientation and the effective sunscreen design that improves the passive energy performance of the buildings.

Evaluation of Three Auditory-Sculptural Qualities Created by an Icosahedral Loudspeaker

The icosahedral loudspeaker (IKO) was previously established as an electroacoustic instrument enabling the musical creation and orchestration of sculptural sound phenomena in the room. This is technically achieved by manipulating the strengths of the available acoustic reflection paths by using the IKO’s acoustic beamforming capabilities. In its use, listeners perceive auditory sculptures whose characterization needs investigation. We present a proposed set of sculptural quality attributes directionality, contour, and plasticity and a series of listening experiments investigating them. The experiments employ documented beam layouts using a selected set of sounds as conditions, and they evaluate the recognizability, perceivable grading, and discernibility of the proposed sculptural qualities.

Sculptural Qualities in Yeats’s Later Poetry

Sculptural Qualities in Yeats’s Later Poetry

Juxtaposition, repetition, dance

This essay, approaching Richard Serra’s works exhibited at Instituto Moreira Salles in Rio de Janeiro, in 2014, discusses the remarkable interplay between sculpture and drawing in the artist’s production, this interplay having frequently resulted in drawings marked by such sculptural qualities as solidity, mass, weight, lightness, fluidity and, converselly, in sculptures and installations addressing architectural and structural issues. The text also points out to the cezannesque procedure which mark several drawings of Serra, where two dimensional surfaces usually basculate in steep angles, favouring a continuous switching back and forth between horizontals and verticals, flat and receding planes. From this relationship to drawing, as is argued, derives the crucial role gestures and action on materials play in this work, assigning to it a bodily plasticity.

The sociological dimension of concrete interiors during the 1960s

Almost all architects today have abandoned making prescriptions for how people should live. They have learned from the mistakes of Modernism, when architects sought to construct the ideal home for the family. The now nearly universal judgment is that they inhibited the very thing they promised because their ideals failed to understand that living is a continual process of growth and adaptation. Nevertheless, many modernist homes still exist, and many are strikingly beautiful, with unique aesthetic and sculptural qualities. Of particular note are homes built in the 1960s, when a series of architects used the booming trade in concrete to create buildings of the most imaginary shapes and forms. But how can the modern family make their everyday lives in a space that is itself a work of art? How are inhabitants making homes in these complex, concrete structures? How did the family unit grow and evolve in them? To answer the questions, the most proscriptive designs are the most interesting to study. They take us beyond formal analyses and into the praxis of art, where we must rely on sociology and psychology as much as aesthetics. This article will engage these broader questions through a specific focus on homes designed by Juliaan Lampens. The research draws from archival work, literature study, on-site visits and interviews. Lampens is significant not only for the boldness of his forms but for his insistence on limiting walls and creating extremes of openness within the home. This article argues against a pure ideological critique of Lampens’ homes and focus instead on an understanding of how the homes were actually inhabited. In this way this article seeks to restore to modernism its complexity as a lived reality rather than criticize it in terms of its own formalism. These are considered alongside other architects, contemporary to Lampens, who shared similar ideas about living and building. Together these dwellings constitute a constellation that highlights the international scope and variation of Brutalism and, furthermore, brings to light the often overlooked unique sculptural qualities, forms and characteristics that emerged within Brutalist architecture. The essay focuses on two homes: the Vandenhaute home, built for a family of six, and the Vanwassenhove home that had a solo inhabitant. Lampens proposed strict regulations for those in his homes. The essay traces how Lampens developed this position to the extreme, and, in so doing, really did change how people lived. At the same time, this paper insists that architecture is part of a social world, and we need to evaluate both its successes and failures in order to better understand the potentials for future utopian design. This article is published as part of a collection on interiorities.

Highlighting the Build: Using Lighting to Showcase the Sydney Opera House

Highlighting the Build: Using Lighting to Showcase the Sydney Opera House

Artifice and Stability in Late Mantegna

This essay examines Andrea Mantegna's later stylistic preoccupations in light of late fifteenth -and early sixteenth- century debates both on the arts (the paragone) and on literary language (the questione della lingua). It is argued that the particular hardness or sculptural quality remarked upon by his contemporaries, as well as by later critics and historians, may be seen as both an affirmation of art's capacity to endure, and as a deliberately artful (artificial) pictorial language. In this way it is comparable in function and effect to the classic model of Tuscan prose advocated by Pietro Bembo. The visible artifice of Mantegna's style thus places it in opposition to the universally pleasing, 'natural' language of art advocated by Leon Battista Alberti in the earliest years of Mantegna's life, and by Leonardo da Vinci during his final decades.

‘Feeling Seeing’: Touch, Vision and the Stereoscope

Oliver Wendell Holmes and David Brewster both described stereoscopy in terms of its sculptural quality as a way of emphasising the haptic quality of viewing stereoscopic photographs. The phenomenal realism of the device augmented the indexical realism of photography. This article details the way that the stereoscope intervened in longstanding philosophical and scientific debates concerning the relationship between vision, touch and depth perception. It also unpicks the popular reception of the stereoscope in so far as explanations of its working became the subject of conflicting claims by opposing groups of scientists drawing on nativist and empiricist accounts of depth perception. Debates over the meaning of the stereoscope in the 1840s and 1850s caution against locating it simplistically as a new, disruptive way of seeing; rather, Brewster’s influence on popular explanations, achieved through his relentless work for the periodical press, suggests its pleasure drew heavily on traditional paradigms from optics and natural theology.

Between the Abject and the Sublime: Excessive Bodies in Mercè Rodoreda's El Carrer de Les Camèlies and Mirall Trencat

This article traces vestiges of Noucentista iconography in the construction of the female body in Merce Rodoreda's El carrer de les Camelies and Mirall trencat. It argues that an analysis of Noucentista representations of the female form in the plastic arts provides an invaluable insight into the political, social, and aesthetic principles that underpin the movement, thus ultimately informing the reading of Rodoreda's formulation of the female body of contextual as well as intertextual detail. Eugeni d'Ors's concept-novel La Ben Plantada featured a mythic female character of classical attributes and proportions. This literary figure had a sculptural quality that conformed to the concepts of form, volume, and structure applied by Noucentista plastic artists in their representations of the female nude. However, whereas Noucentista sculpture best expressed the ideology's investment in notions of measure, balance, and order, it also betrayed a concern with bodily limits and the problems of the body's containm...

Experiências em concreto armado na áfrica portuguesa: influências do Brasil

There is a similarity between modern brazilian culture and Portugal that is identifiable in regards to the influences of the former on portuguese architectural output. Generally speaking, the relationship began with Brazil builds - Architecture new and old 1652-1942, a book the portuguese became acquainted with from the 1940s onwards. This relationship progressed until the inauguration of the new Brazilian capital of Brasilia, which marked the beginning of a decline in portuguese interest in the architecture of Brazil. The sculptural qualities of brazilian architecture - a result of the experimentation and use of the potentials of reinforced concrete - can be identified in some examples built in Portugal in the 1950s. The decisive influence of Oscar Niemeyer is the most documented. A similar phenomenon in terms of brazilian influences extended to the former colonies in Africa, which remained under portuguese control until 1975. Here, however, the interest in brazilian output persisted longer than it did in Portugal. Both Angola and Mozambique experienced something of a construction boom during the 1950s and 1960s, extending into the 1970s, where the use of reinforced concrete gradually established itself as the dominant practice. In some cases, the use of this material produced some highly original sculptural creations. The practice of architecture in the former portuguese colonies in Africa benefited from a certain degree of conceptual freedom and, in general terms, the quality of workmanship was no different from that in Portugal itself. In the aforementioned context, the current author will present three architects with a relevant body of work in Angola and Mozambique who built in concrete and, at the same time, had or showed affinities with the brazilian architecture of the same period. In Angola, this article highlights the career of Francisco Castro Rodrigues, who lived in Lobito from 1953 to 1987, and Fernão Lopes Simões de Carvalho, who lived in Luanda from 1960 to 1967. In Lourenço Marques (present Maputo), Mozambique, this article looks at the work of Amâncio d'Alpoim Miranda Guedes, who was known as Pancho Guedes and worked in the city from 1951 to the year of independence from Portugal, when he moved to South Africa. Given that this is an area in which little research has been conducted, this first approach is based primarily on accounts by the three architects. The first two are currently living in Portugal and the last resides in Lisbon and South Africa.

The Relocation of Ambient Sound: Urban Sound Sculpture

The author describes his sound sculptures which explore how various instances of sound possess musical form. He explains the sculptural qualities of sound and the aesthetic act of arranging sound into art. Detailed descriptions of three recent works illustrate how relocating sounds from one environment to another redefines them, giving them new acoustic meanings.

The Structure of Stadia – from Exoskeletons to Haute Couture

Through this paper the author will illustrate the progression of stadia from the mid eighties through to today, from exoskeleton; independent truss cantilevers through mast and cable solutions, to haute couture; three dimensional cable nets and completely wrapped stadia. The stadia examined in the paper are those that the author as helped to design. Sydney Football Stadium, also known as Aussie Stadium was constructed in the mid eighties and seats 40,000. San Nicola Stadium, Bari, constructed in the late eighties and seats 55,000. The focus for this stadium was sculptural quality. Asian Games Stadium, Bangkok, constructed in the early nineties and seats 25,000 this stadium sees the introduction of lighting masts. Lang Park, constructed in the late nineties with the desire to keep the overall height as low as possible whilst providing perfect sightlines for 50,000 spectators. City of Manchester Stadium, constructed during the millennium for the Commonwealth Games, then converted into a soccer stadium within a six month programme. Melbourne Cricket Ground North Stand constructed in the early noughties for the 2006 Commonwealth Games had to deal with the problem of a fairly aggressive wind climate. Khalifa Olympic Stadium constructed in the early noughties for the 2008 Asian Games. This stadium has been likened to a ‘jewel in the desert’. Beijing Olympic Stadium constructed in the mid noughties for the 2008 Olympic Games. Developed using Catia, CAD/CAM software developed for the aviation and auto industry. Beijing National Swimming Centre constructed in the mid noughties for the 2008 Olympic Games. Also known as the Watercube

Sand, Water, and Universal Form in Sandplay and Art therapy

Sandplay's Jungian origins have demonstrated its use as an invaluable tool for symbolic expression. In sandplay literature, much emphasis is placed on the symbolism and placement of the miniature objects used to create a sandworld. The sandplay process is less often tied to the sculptural qualities of sand and water and the universal forms that are created in play with them. The therapist's central focus might be to provide a place to create sand forms as well as to select and place objects in the sand. Early experience with sand or earth is the first “environmental art” which children produce naturally. Universal forms such as paths, imprints, holes, mounds, tunnels, and drips occur in beachplay and sandtray spontaneously. In the art therapy setting their meanings are used to help indicate the client's stage of development and stage of therapy.

Rethinking the Forms of Visual Expression

Robert Sowers begins this book by questioning our conception of the visual artspainting, sculpture, and architectureas autonomous, archetypal entities that can be defined independent of one another in terms of their materials and techniques. He cuts through the limits of categorization we have come to accept to lay the groundwork for a coherent theory of the relation between the visual arts. He proposes that we treat the pictorial, the sculptural, and the architectural not as palpable physical things but as activitiesthe basic forms of visual expression employed to create such distinct artifacts as paintings, statues, and buildings. By defining the expressive function of each art, Sowers helps us to understand what we mean when we speak of the sculptural qualities of architecture or the pictorial qualities of sculpture. The world of visual art then is a structured whole, a world in which the arts can meet, merge with, and mutually reinforce or swear at one another, often in unexpected yet compelling ways.

Replicating Mysteries of the Passion: Rosso's Dead Christ with Angels

During his sojourn in Rome from 1524 to 1527, Rosso painted a panel of a dead Christ with angels for his friend Leonardo Tornabuoni, bishop of Borgo San Sepolcro. Vasari saw the painting in the house of Giovanni della Casa at mid-century, but subsequently it was lost from general sight until the 1950s, when it was acquired by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (Fig. 1). The panel has been assessed by art historians as one of signal importance, at once a high water mark in Rosso's own work and masterpiece of the early Romanmaniera,a painting remarkable for its great beauty and artfulness, composed after long study of Michelangelo and the antique. The first considered estimation of the work emphasized its sculptural qualities, its formal tensions in pose and color, and its artistic virtuosity, suggesting that the subject was a version of theimago pietatis,reworked into a resurrecting Christ, emblematic of the patron's titular see. Although still impressed with the suavity of the panel in relation to Rosso's previous work, a subsequent critic was more conscious of its ambivalences, discerning a continuity with the young Rosso's individualistic and eccentric sensibilities, finally identifying the subject as an assertion of the eucharistic real presence. Analogies with language have been advanced, among them an allusion to the intensely equivocal nature of the painting. For one scholar the artfulness of the panel and Rosso's artistic attitudes were separate from their religious purpose; for another, they were absolutely at odds.

Rethinking the Forms of Visual Expression

Robert Sowers begins this book by questioning our conception of the visual artspainting, sculpture, and architectureas autonomous, archetypal entities that can be defined independent of one another in terms of their materials and techniques. He cuts through the limits of categorization we have come to accept to lay the groundwork for a coherent theory of the relation between the visual arts. He proposes that we treat the pictorial, the sculptural, and the architectural not as palpable physical "things" but as activitiesthe basic forms of visual expression employed to create such distinct artifacts as paintings, statues, and buildings. By defining the expressive function of each art, Sowers helps us to understand what we mean when we speak of the sculptural qualities of architecture or the pictorial qualities of sculpture. The world of visual art then is a structured whole, a world in which the arts can meet, merge with, and mutually reinforce or swear at one another, often in unexpected yet compelling ways."

Casa para la playa, New Jersey

The McMullan house, built on the beach, has been designed to be inhabited all the year round. Basically this building is a rectangular block, lifted above the dunes on a framework of timber columns and beams. The ground floor contains the entrance hall, the guest room or servant's quarters, including a bath room, and a shower room which can be reached separately from the beach. The second floor is taken up with the main living quarters, and the second floor contains the bedrooms. The northern and southern sides have few windows, whilst the eastern and western sides have balconies protected with sliding and Venetian blinds, which in addition to supplying an effective protection against the sun, give the house a pleasant sense of secluded intimacy. The blinds are made of wood, and are painted dark brown. Doors and windows are also made of wood, but painted white. This beautiful house on the New Jersey coast exhibits in a marked degree the sculptural quality of architecture, a three dimensional plasticity, which is often neglected in many buildings of the more simple kind. Marcel Breuer has succeeded in making each of the facades of this elementary boxlike design have an interest of its own, by playing with their colour, light and shade effects, texture and combination of materials.