Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, Vera Mukhina. Soviet Pavilion, Boris Iofan. Paris, 1937.
Architecture is a tool that, throughout its development over the past several millennia, is built for both utilitarian and figurative purposes. The art of building came in stride with the development of agriculture, where man no longer wandered from place to place, but was able to envision and realize a place for himself. Architecture has thus not only fulfilled its purely utilitarian function, but in a way, has defined the human experience through the bringing together of people in a civic, cultural, and political act. For this reason, architecture has been extolled by those who build it. So as Genesis says that "God made man in the image of himself", the creations of man, too, are often made in the image of mankind. As the work of human hands, architecture is a way for man to come to grips with nature's infallible laws of life and death, building in our own image to immortalize ourselves.
Building using the human form is, par excellence, the method in which a society may relate to a building empathetically; to visualize the lore, the heros, and the aspirations of the collective whole. Generally, there are two methods of using the human body as a symbol in architecture: portraiture and abstraction. In the instance of portraiture, I refer specifically to pieces of sculpture that are absolutely integral to the understanding of the architectural intention in a built work. Each of these two methods is perfectly justifiable, yet both the decreasing number of artisans and increasing cost of fine art has contributed to the dilution of portraiture as, say, the Egyptians would have known it. By analyzing the history of the two methods through to present day, one could study how reverence to heros, aspirations, and stories has evolved through the art of architecture.
We begin the critique of portraiture in Egypt at the Great Temple of Abu Simbel, located just north of modern day Sudan, and fronting the west bank of the Nile. Abu Simbel is the most magnificent of the six Nubian temples carved directly out of the hillside during the reign of Ramses II in the second half of the 13th Century BC. The temple honors the Sun Gods Amun-Re and Re-Horakhte, and is also dedicated to Ramses himself, as the pharaoh was, too, deified.
The facade of the Great Temple, recalling the form of a pylon, is dominated by four colossal statues of Ramses II donning the pschent, each twenty meters high. Between each of these statues stand statues of Nefertari and Queen Tuya, the mother of Ramesses, as well as the first two sons and first six daughters of the pharaoh. In this way, Ramses immortalizes himself and his family by shaping the earth into a family portrait of sorts. The images of Ramses II as the pharaoh of a united Upper and Lower Egypt, along with the sheer scale of the project, are symbols meant to intimidate the southern neighbors. This is also most likely why the temple is sited in such a remote location. Above the central portal is a relief of the pharaoh worshipping the sun god Ra-Harakhti and thus promoting a set of religious beliefs. In one facade, in one glance, we are told a story about the period, the land, and the culture of the Egyptians.
The Greeks excelled in using the human form in both portraiture and abstraction. Almost one thousand years after the construction of Abu Simbel, the Temple of Olympian Zeus was built in the Greek city of Akragas in Sicily. The Doric temple was to be the largest of its kind, but was never completed. Construction started in 480 BC following the victory of Akragas and Syracuse over the Carthaginians at the Battle of Himera. The temple, measuring six bays by twelve bays, and at an enormous 56 meters by 113 meters, is peculiar in that the lower half of the intercolumniation is walled, while the upper half is left as void. In these voids stand statues of Atlas, struggling to support the enormous weight of the entablature. The statues, like the columns themselves (which will be discussed during the piece on Abstraction), emote an awesome, active force pushing upward rather than buckling under the enormous load, and thus embody the human qualities of Zeus. Atlas is bound to the building, a servant to the Greek cause, and can also be seen in relation to the Carthaginian slave labour used to build the temple.
The Greeks use this same technique in the Erechteum, though in a much different way. The caryatides, statues of Athena's maidens, delicately take a step into the axis between Hymettos and the sea. They face the Parthenon and Athena herself. The maidens seem to be bearing no weight whatsoever and the entablature above is just
there. These two works show how the Greeks viewed their gods, how their gods viewed each other, and how the gods viewed their creations; the Greeks. Perhaps most inspiring of all the Greek portraitures is the relief (though really sculpted in the round) on the eastern pediment of the Parthenon. The gods here turn from the sea, from where the great Battle of Salamis with the Persians
took place, in fear that they might catch a glimpse of a human dying.
Even since the time of the Etruscans, the Italians have been instrumental in the promotion of the use of anthropomorphics in architecture, yet one of the most illustrative examples of portraiture is found on the Capitoline Hill. The equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius at Michaelangelo's Campidoglio is really the first development in what would become the Baroque idea of space. Though the statue was not intended by Michaelangelo, the act performed by Marcus Aurelius enhances the clarity of the architectural intention. At a time when the Papacy became the seat of both religion and government, the focus of the city shifted from the Roman Forum towards the Vatican and San Pietro. In accordance with this shift, the statue rides forward with his back to what is, in effect, old Rome, and rides toward the Campus Martius and New Rome. The gesture he makes with his right hand exerts a force on the buildings, pushing the Palazzo Nuovo and Palazzo dei Conservatori slightly outwards and opening towards Rome's future.
Moving forward and into the modern age, one finds that the image of Lady Liberty is not only perhaps the first skyscraper in New York City, but one of the most iconic uses of portraiture in architectural history. Though the body was sculpted by Bartholdi, in many ways the Statue of Liberty is, more than sculpture, a work of architecture. The interior supports were designed by the engineer Eiffel, the copper cladding was chosen by Viollet-le-Duc, and the pedestal was designed by Richard Morris Hunt. As Abu Simbel signifies an arrival into the land of a unified Egypt, the Statue of Liberty signifies an arrival to the land of freedom and liberty. She steps forward, like the caryatides of the Erectheum, from the harbor towards the New World with a torch of enlightenment guiding the way. From the base of the Statue of Liberty, where she stands atop shattered shackles, reads the inscription:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Her message is as clear as her gestures. Once upon a time, she was the first thing one would see in the morning mist after weeks at sea; and although the world around her has changed in ways no one could predict, from the advent of the jet age removing her from the procession into America to the advancement of the skyscrapers which are now ten fold her once colossal size, the inspiration that she rouses has not lost any of its potency.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a German architect of the Werkbund tradition, the Bauhaus, and later, the International Style, is one of only a few modern architects who was able to incorporate the human form into his designs. As the machine aesthetic took over in the first twenty years of the 20th Century, the use of ornament in architecture was maligned. The vilification of ornament (including portraiture) in modern architecture came with the texts of architects like Adolf Loos comparing the art of decoration to sexual deviation, demanding purity and restraint (which even he, at times, would ignore) as a reactionary force to the decadence of the Art Nouveau. Another quarrel with portraiture was that the arts and crafts of yester-year were no longer expressive of the condition of the modern man; that the beauty inherent in the use of geometry and naked, machined materials was most satisfying; that architecture should be built according to the romantic view of industry shared by the younger generation of European poets and revolutionaries. Satisfying though they may be, the works of the 1920's and the machine aesthetic distance themselves from being related to empathetically. Rather, the associations drawn from the buildings of de Stijl, of the Bauhaus, of the Futurists, are more intellectual in nature. In the German Pavilion for the 1929 World's Fair in Barcelona, and many of his buildings thereafter, Mies used a piece of sculpture to activate the space much like the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius at the Piazza del Campidoglio. In the German Pavilion, he creates a wonderful procession for the King and Queen of Spain, the scene never contained by four walls, but staged as a dance through what is, in effect, the temple of the International Style. Mies understands that in the abstract world created only by intersecting, flat planes, that the human figure by Kolbe is necessary to define the architecture as environment and the sculpture as acting body. It would have been impossible to consider placing a work by one of the abstract sculptors of the period in the reflecting pool because the 'constructivist' structure; minimal, flat, abstract; needs the classical figure gently pushing out and creating the space. It is just enough to energize the building in Barcelona. In other buildings of his, the figure is just enough to show the reality of a man in the modern world. He is alone and free in unlimited space.
The most recent example of portraiture that I would like to talk about is a rare, contemporary use of vivid and literal human form; the Eberswalde Library of 2000 by Herzog and de Meuron, located just north of Berlin. Known for their innovation in materiality, the pair expose materials to new treatments and juxtapositions to produce unprecedented building exteriors. In the case of the Eberswalde Library, the entirety of the concrete and glass facade is silk-screened with acid to produce numerous images, selected from the newspaper in collaboration with photographer Thomas Ruff, which scroll across the elevation like a movie reel. These two dimensional portraitures are unlike a painting hanging in a side chapel, and unlike a billboard plastered onto the surface of a building. These images are made integral to the materiality of the building itself. The image on the lowermost concrete panel is the same as that which is on the uppermost panel, but on the top 'reel', the image of German women lounging on a roof garden is double the scale. In this way, we can see an appreciation for the vantage point of the pedestrian much in the same way that Michaelangelo had sculpted the head of Moses much larger than proportionally sensible. Another of the images is that of a family happily gazing at a train set, indicative of the German fascination with the machine in the 1920's. Yet another is of Alexander von Humboldt, the German naturalist famous worldwide for his studies in Latin America. The most inspiring set of images are juxtaposed against one another just above the first ribbon window and are that of a pair of German men trying to pull a woman from the second story of a building in East Germany as she attempts to flee, and the image of the reunification celebration at the Brandenburg Gate. These images, amongst others on the facade, cleverly turn the entire building into a readable frieze as if on a Greek temple, illustrating the pieces of history which form the foundations of the contemporary German academy. The textured facade beckons to be touched, bringing these German youths closer to the places and ideals which shape them. The building successfully defeats the modernist stigma by embracing both minimalism
and ornament, by designing at once the concrete box
and the pictorial facade, and by articulating an architecture of both space
and surface.
I would like to conclude with a building by Karl Ehn in Vienna, roughly contemporary with the previously discussed German Pavilion. After the first World War, as Austria had really lost everything other than Vienna and the mountainous region beyond, the people were fed up with the church and with the crown. They consequently soon voted socialist and spent the state money on public housing. Unlike the Germans, who placed their Siedlungen (literally, settlements) outside the city, the Austrians voted to put their housing blocks within the city. Ehn's public housing project, outrageously titled Karl Marx Hof, is charged with political imagery. One can imagine how the words 'Karl Marx Hof', alone, would drive the right wing absolutely mad as they rode past on their streetcars or into the train station behind the seemingly mile-long complex. And it is here, where in 1934, the right wing army attacked these houses to assassinate Svoboda and other political figures. Commemorating this event, there is a plaque which reads:
When first in Europe stepped forward the working men of Austria on the 12 February 1934,
Courageously opposed to fascism, they fought for liberty, democracy and the republic.
Never forget the socialist riots.
It was the rich against the poor. As the most literal symbol of their solidarity, standing in front of Karl Marx Hof, is a statue of Spartacus, leader of the Roman slave uprising against the Roman Republic against a backdrop of the red fists, holding flagstaffs and marching down the street to the steady beat of a drum seen in the blip reminiscent of a heart monitor. Combined, the portraiture and the abstracted symbols form an ultimate act of defiance that is second to none.
And it is the abstraction of the human form that I will talk about next time.
