080030 SE Seminar: Sacred Architecture of the 17th and 18th Centuries in Europe (2016W)

The profound visual impact of baroque buildings has had the general effect that their architecture is primarily judged by sensual and stylistic criteria (movement, emphatic articulation, loosening of structure, richness of decorative elements, drama of light and color effects, etc.). This tendency has led field research to neglect conceptual matters. This means, in terms of sacred buildings, aside from the question of their integration into the urban or rural landscape, above all the shaping of the church interior. External factual circumstances, the aims that motivate a client’s ostentation, and similar considerations determine any building program and thus, to a high degree, its spatial concept. Its individual rendering, however, grows mainly out of the rhetorical approaches so essential to a poetics of the Baroque: imitatio, aemulatio, and superatio (the adoption of an ideal as a manifestation of cultural legitimation or, alternately, competition with that ideal and the desire to outdo it). Consequently, architectural invention finally arises out of the following possible methods: variatio (modification for the sake of variation), contaminatio (the adding of heterogenic elements), and combinatio (combination of two or more prototypes). Exceptional cases may achieve a synthesis and – optimally – bring about the creation of an in itself exemplary new solution.
The rules of classical architectural theory, established during the Renaissance, remain in effect for the architectural culture of the 17th and 18th centuries, even as they undergo new and non-dogmatic interpretation. Aside from the Vitruvian decorum (appropriateness of form) and Alberti’s concinnitas (beauty through symmetry), additional more subjective expressional patterns are applied: argutezza (the acuteness of interpretation) and bizzarria (wilful implementation) become universal canons of architectural creativity.
This course seeks to stimulate analytical abilities in observing architecture and to enable a didactic approach to the more complex discourses of connections within typological evolution. Selected case studies from all across Europe will be discussed. Drawing from each of the monographic assignments, participants should prepare, through individual study of the subject matter, a more extensive thematic focus. Simultaneously, by means of group discussion of all the course presentations, students will gain an extensive insight into the artistic issues of sacred architecture of the late 17th to the late 18th centuries.