SCHINKEL, ALTES MUSEUM, 1823-1830
LABROUSTE, BIBLIOTHEQUE NATIONALE, 1854-1875
CHARLES GARNIER, OPERA DE PARIS, 1861-1875
PAXTON, CRYSTAL PALACE, 1850
CENTRAL PARK, NYC 1857-1876
WORLD FAIR, CHICAGO, 1893
WORLD FAIR, PARIS, 1889
GALERIE DES MACHINES, 1889
GRAND CENTRAL STATION, NYC 1903-1913
CURTAIN WALL SYSTEMS
Altes Museum, 1823-1830, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Berlin’s first museum and the nucleus of the Museum Island
Altes Museum, 1823-1830, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Berlin’s first museum and the nucleus of the Museum Island
Henri Labrouste. reading room, Bibliothèque nationale, Paris. 1854–75……Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light is divided into three sections: The Romantic Imagination; Spaces of Knowledge; and Prosperity and Affinities. The exhibition’s first section covers the period from 1818, the start of Labrouste’s artistic training, to 1838, tracing the development of Labrouste’s philosophy of architecture and practice in two settings—ancient Rome and modernizing Paris—which Labrouste conceived of as architectural laboratories. During the five years Labrouste spent at the French Academy in Rome, he began to explore a notion of architecture as the product of layers of history, societies in evolution, and of historical change, and he proposed a new approach to architecture’s capacity to carry social meaning.
Henri Labrouste is the best known of a generation of architects in France who placed the understanding of history as a dynamic process at the heart of debates over rules, standards, and style in architectural practice…..In 1828, the year the term avant-garde entered vocabularies as an artistic stance rather than a military practice, Labrouste proposed a new understanding of classical architecture and its relationship to the present — and to the very idea of rules, as well as the notion of imitation vs. invention. In his two most famous designs, the Bibliotheque Ste. Genevieve and the Bibliotheque Imperiale (today Nationale), he offered at once a synthetic view of historical sources for architectural design and a radical new way of incorporating the materials — iron and ceramics — of the industrial age.
A Lecture by Barry Bergdoll From the Soane Lecture Series 2021-2022: Rule and Invention
opera de paris, charles garnier, 1861-1875
crystal palace, joseph paxton, london, 1850
…………..The creation of a large park in Manhattan was first proposed in the 1840s, and a 778-acre (315 ha) park approved in 1853. In 1857, landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won a design competition for the park with their "Greensward Plan". Construction began the same year………..the park's first areas were opened to the public in late 1858. Additional land at the northern end of Central Park was purchased in 1859, and the park was completed in 1876.
The New York City Evolution Animation.
Here Grows New York visually animates the development of this city’s street grid and environment from 1609 to the present day, using geo-referenced road network data, historic maps, and geological surveys. The resulting short film presents a series of “cartographic snapshots” of the built-up environment at intervals of every 20 to 30 years in history. This process highlights the organic spurts of growth and movement that typify New York’s and most cities’ development through time. The result is an abstract representation of urbanism.
……….World’s Fairs — later defined as International Expositions — are specific types of urban events with a long tradition. World’s fairs introduce to their public a new vision displayed through images, representations and spectacles……….A genealogy of international exhibitions might begin with medieval fairs, half–religious and half–carnivalesque. Fairgrounds became in–between places and out of ordinary situations where the exchange of luxuries and exotic goods took place once or twice a year. Within fairgrounds, strangers met and set up an economic performance, acting as functions of buyers and sellers outside the ordinary social context. Medieval fairs were a temporary break of medieval city and village life tempo………
The Chicago World’s Fair marketed and shaped an imaginary of the city and of urban everyday life adequate to the new economic and social conditions of America. The exact manner by which organizers of the Fair tried to accomplish this task had a lasting effect on the content of that very imaginary, as ‘the spectacle of the city’ contributed to promote the ‘city as spectacle’.
grand central station, 1903-1913
The story of the curtain wall: new developments in metal framing, glass production, and glass mounting and sealing technology had resulted in increasingly daring innovations throughout the second half of the 19th century. Greenhouses, exhibition halls, train sheds, department stores, factories, office buildings and collieries all capitalized on the new developments.
