CATHOLIC EUROPE

During the seventeenth century, Spain and France became the dominanr power in Europe however, still models came from Italy. Being the most catholic nation was pride of Spain in that era.

Habsburg Spain, The Catholic Mandete for Classical Rigor:

Habsburg dynasty in Spain offered an austere counterpoint and that period was chacterized by theatricality and decorative excess. The new successor moved the capital to the Madrid which was a small town in that way he could remain free of the feudal politics. That new king preferd classical style of early Roman Empire. As his biggest architectural project, he developed the monastery of San Lorenzo at Escorial, the north of the capital. He also built other palaces, gardens, renewed the plazas and public buildings in a few major cities and those constructions were well balanced design of the Escorial. He believed that, the correct usage of classical architecure will also encouraged the correct behaviors in religion and government.

The Italian trained architect, Juan Bautista de Toledo design the convent’s gridded plan that covered roughly the equivalent of the Süleymaniye in Istanbul. The Escorial had a complex program that provides a grand domed church, a mausoleum, a monastery, a religious college, a palace for the king’s court, the royal apartments, a hospital, a grand plaza and three blocks of office buildings.

After the death of the architect, his assistant, Juan de Herrera took the charge of the design. He worked the create a distinctive pure style. To leave an impression, he built solid block of granite and stripped the facades to a bare minimum. And a long, unbroken plane  was overlooking terraced gardens and fish pond. It has repeated with never stopping and without the variation.

 

For the western entry facade, he designed a central portal, two levels of colossal paired half columns, the lower set supported a Doric entablature and the narrower upper level joined by simple volutes to Ionic orders carrying a conventional triangular entablature. And the most decorative part of exterior is the roof above the corner towers; steeply pitched, slate covered pyramids topped with pointed spires as the sytle of Burgundian castles. That roof unusual for Spain so it became a signature element of Habsburg dynasty.

The entry of Escorial leads to a court. On the left stood the seminary and on the right, the convent which subdivided by a cruciform of long wings enclosing four square courts.

The nephew of Herrera, Juan Gomez de Mora, brought a similar sense of order and minimal decoration to numerous royal and municipal projects. His most significant public project was the Plaza Mayor in Madrid. The design was influenced by a clean rectangular void with uniform arcades. The plaza served as the model for he ideal square in Spanish colonial towns. It sets in a sloping part of the town. It was leveled and enclosed by regular arcades, Also, lacked a major monumental focus unlike Italian precedents.

 

CONSTANTINOPLE BECOMES ISTANBUL

The young sultan known as the Fatih the Conqueror’s fortifications showed the influence of Italian engineering. The round towers of Rumeli Hissar and the star shaped fort of Yedikule, built of the Golden Gate after the conquest of Constantinople.

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He considered the Hagia Sophia as his great prize and he converted the church into a royal mosque by adding minarets, inserted into its eastern apse a mihrab slightly askew from the main axis to the Mecca and also built a new mosque inspired by the great Byzantine church, Fatih Cami had an extensive imaret that the new mosque and the tombs displaced ruins of the Apostoleion. He also used the title of caesar of Rome in the new Islamic version. His new mosque rose over the city with a hemispherical dome only a few meters less than the Haiga Sophia and had three smaller rounded domes, two slender minarets which stood at the front corners of mosque. It has a rectangular forecourt and small cupolas topped each bay of the courts arcades. The pointed arches supported by the ancient granite columns. The Fatih Cami is a perfectly square plaza which occupied the center of a vast. In perfect bilateral symmetry, eight madrasas were serving for studies.

He decided to move the palace to the center of the city in 1459. Topkapı palace complex offered a secluded residence with fortified walls. The strong connection to natural features and the framed views of Bosphorus landscapes made palace closer to Chinese scholars garden compared to the geometrically coordinated Italian palazzo. It was organized on a three courts. The imperial gate in to the first stood a few steps from the apse of Hagia Sophia. Various freestanding pavillions to the middle gate flanked by octogonal towers. The imperial hierarchy gathered for formal ceremonies in this court which wrapped the edges of it with an arcade of pointed arches.

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HUMANIST ITALY

Renaissance effects the architects in Florence as the epicenter of this movement. They discovered the harmonious proportions linked to the classical orders. The new constructions influenced by humanism with giving them a more uniform scale and geometric basis and it changed the character of Italian cities.

The Dome of Florence and Its Architect, Filippo Brunelleschi:

In late fourteenth century of Florence, the most of the public works used rounded arches, symmetrical placed bays and harmonious proportions based on numbers. Florentines added a new way as freestanding objects in proportional space and the perspective vision accompanied the development of the principal public space of the city which is the L shaped Piazza della Signora that surrounded Palazzo Vecchio. In 1356, as a final patch of houses, they connect the initial rectangular piazza on the north to the second piazza that served the new southwest entry. A grid of flagstones and brick pavers had brought the enlarged spaces together and allowed to view the formidable volume of the city’s public palac and bell tower in relation to its surroundings.

The greatest civic project, the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, began in Florence. The design was entrusted to Arnolfo di Cambio who proposed a simple Gothic style. Few years later Francesco Talenti extended the lenght of the nave an extra bay and outlined the area for a huge octagonal dome over crossing the domes of Pisa and Siena. In the 1380s the urban magistrates used eminent domain to clear the surrounding buildings. The houses be rebuilt with stone cladding and round arched doors to echo the unusual outline of the dome.

The structural concept for Fioravanti’s dome derived from Baptistery of San Giovanni. Its unprecented size posed tremendous logistical problems for its construction. After a competition, Filippo Brunelleschi took the charge of that project and proposed to build a new dome without falsework and during the construction process added a structure that supported itself. The secret of it is the techniques and a ribbed skeleton girded by nine horizontal supports concealed between two layers. He also added several all’antica motifs the exterior and he inserted rounded tribunes between the three apses to help absorb the outward thrust of the dome at the base of octagonal drum.

Each of these marble cylinders had five shell capped niches, flanked by pairs of Corinthian half columns. And it is demonstrating the familiarity with ancient monuments. After the architect’s death, the latern crowing the dome had buttresses made with classical fluted pilasters and reserved curve volutes, had completed.