Impressive isn't it.
Mirroring this is the unbroken chain that links present day Eurocentricsm to it's democratic inheritance, or so this seems at first until one looks a little more closely. I don't know why but the 'shallow banks' of this 'second stream' lose their definition more readily under scrutiny. Maybe it's because there are no 'images' as such of democracy in ancient Greece. Ancient Rome we know from TV and movies was a blood thirsty affair quite a lot of the time. Alberti's Italian provinces were places of inequality, corruption, insincerity and intrigue. Germany was unfortunate enough to learn the hard lesson for itself and the rest of Europe that there is a thin line between Nationalism and Fascism, but quite a while before that much of Georgian England was being built from the proceeds of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.
Not quite as impressive as it's architectural corollary.
But lets scrutinize the architectural side of things.
Phidias' Parthenon with it's Doric Orders carved out of stone is where it all began, and it's a beginning as mystical as the meaning of Stone Henge. Many explanations have been put forward as to the meaning of the form of this most archetypal of architectonic constructs. Scholars such as Kenneth Frampton suggest it is representative of timber construction, being it's 'petrified form'. Some still allude to it's almost 'divine' status as the revealed law of architecture. For perhaps many more people, the fact that it was the produced by the Ancient Greeks is reason enough to place it on a pedestal.
Whatever it's importance/foundation, Classical language as contained in the ruins of the Parthenon is where it all began. It was however a false beginning because we now know that the structure in it's pristine condition would have been painted bright colours. This however was a fact unknown to the Romans and to the Renaissance architects, so they misinterpreted the 'divine law' and set us all down the wrong path.
However, during the last 500 years or so we have never looked at the architecture that was spawned by that ruin and thought "There is something missing", or "bit drab ain't it?". No, on the contrary, we have accepted and celebrated the bare hewn stone clad buildings that have resulted, enjoying the heightened awareness of the carving, massing, modelling and form that a lack of colour gives.We now could not tolerate colourful classical architecture, so used to the lie have we become, but does this matter?
Should it bother us that our conceptions of beauty are built on such shakey ground? Through the accidental text of Vitruvius and the creative archaeology of Alberti came apparently solid foundations on which to build. The real work in this regard was done by Alberti , living at a time when courtiers and scholars were as adept at counterfeiting history as modern day bankers are at creating money out of thin air, Alberti's commentary on Vitruvius shored up any 'cracks' that might have been noticed later on so that the likes of Palladio and then Schinkel would be none the wiser. The blind spot created by the belief in Europe's inherent supremacy over all other continents, which itself was fuelled by a belief in the unassailable authority of the Ancient Greeks and Europe's sole birthright to this legacy, has always been essential to guaranteeing the successful effect of the skilfully wrought artifice.
By the time we get to Mies, who was inspired by the dignity, austerity, and intrinsic order of Schinkel's buildings (how dignified and orderly would colourful versions be?), the methodology employed by Alberti (of exhaustively measuring and recording raw primary data, such as the dimensions of capitals, and architraves) to establish the authority of precedents is a distant memory. We had now entered the arena of the image.
One arresting image was enough to make one's argument, and this is a legacy which is still very much with us. Mies used photo-montage and hand rendering to great effect in order to convince a wider audience of the 'rightness of his designs'. He then executed one, the Barcelona Pavilion, a building with no function, nothing more than a full size 3-D image, but what an image and what an argument! It was this building that eventually catapulted him to worldwide fame. What is notable about the effect of this building is that very few people saw it first hand. It was known by most only in photographic form.
The photography promised much. It promised simple, perhaps even cheap, elegant architecture. Easy solutions such as those that were being happened upon in the scientific and industrial world. It promised nothing less than that man had finally reached the end of the journey that started in the Renaissance, the heritage bequeathed by Aristotle, Plato and the rest. Man had finally become the measure.
So why today does David Chipperfield, for example, employ an altogether more compromised (if elegant) version of the modern masters lexicon? Why is he in the minority in taking the batten from Mies, why is there not more consensus?
Well, the rot set in not long after Mies built his first building. He himself elaborated the great constructional gymnastics that had to be employed to achieve his aesthetic, particularly in America. His Buildings, though elegant were not the cheapest and were not the most comfortable to live in, as Dr Edith Farnsworth, or any School of Architecture professor will testify.
A generation of people have experienced the reality of the built works of the great modern masters at closer quarters than the captured image had once allowed, and the result has been building codes, regulations and standards (hallelujah). For most, Mies's buildings survive as servants to our history lessons rather than as forerunners to the bright future we should have attained by now.
The World Wars that interrupted Mies's career, also put paid to any notion of Man having reached the apogee of his evolution, and so robbed Mies's aesthetic of one of it's main supports.
Perhaps in the end, you need to have solid foundations.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6430519.ece
