Alternatives - Unit Summary

The alternatives unit began with the chaos of the largest empire of the known world, Rome crumbling away, leaving behind uncertainty and disrepair. Without a central governing system, with wealth in its coffers, only a small amount of construction was done during the early period of the dark ages, mostly financed by the church. The rise of Charlemagne gave birth to Carolingian style of architecture, but this was a crude attempt at best for most of the information from past construction had been lost or forgotten. Charlemagne’s Odo of Metz, his private chapel, was almost directly copied from the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna
Domestic architecture became the dominate building being constructed at that time. Castles, with their heavily reinforced walls and moats kept out the roaming hoards of attacker that traveled through countries pillaging. The architecture style of these castles was crude and utilitarian to serve a purpose of safety and security.

The High Middle Ages began with a more stable feudal system, cities began to become culturally important again, and traveling through Europe was somewhat safer and therefore more possible. With the church rising as the dominate power in Europe, the construction of large scale churches and monasteries began to take place. At first, Romanesque architecture around 1000 A.D., financed by the church with its extensive land holding, was heavily based on the memory of the Roman style of architecture. This was not a stable time in history, so even the churches build had small windows and were fortified with the structure dominating the landscape, as in the case of St. Michael’s Hildeshiem in Germany. The common people of the era were starting to be more aware of a better life after this one; the church took advantage of this fear and began extracting money to begin a building campaign for itself.

This influx of money allowed the church to grow in scale and power. Gothic architecture rise in the High Middle Ages began to employ designers and construction specialist to reach for the heavens to impress the commoners. The idea was to implement as much stained glass on the outside of a church so that once entered, the lighting effect was overwhelming or heaven like. The Gothic movement focused on a positive life here on earth, many of these Gothic churches had a scale so large that multiple generations of labors worked to finish them. The Gothic Cathedral was an exploration of this new way of thinking, the Church of Notre-Dame is an example of introducing large amounts of glass into the walls, which require large support “wings on the outside of the structure to sustain it upright. The floor plans of the Gothic Cathedrals were independent from one another depending on Geographic location. The Catholic Church wanted to establish itself in Italy, and with this idea of permanence, raised the need for beauty on earth to match the beauty of heaven. This led to the Renaissance.

The rise of the Renaissance in Florence was a new way of thinking of the past and changing the future of architecture and art. The Renaissance movement was based on the limit of human potential to create and not repeat history. The Church was still the wealthiest contributor to this new movement, but the rising merchant class also became patrons for artist and architects alike. The Humanist began to reinterpret the written information from the past and to understand that the spirit of the words had more meaning than following the exact rules or standards set in the past. Brunelleschi’s Dome desired to out achieve the past and look forward at a new world of ideas and possibilities. Larger than the Pantheon, his dome set a president, that the only limit to design is ones imagination. The basis of this new style was borrowed from the past and changed; the Ten Books on Architecture by Vitruvius became the bible for the Renaissance. Residential and civic architecture became important and necessary in this time. Palazzo’s or city homes for the wealthy gained popularity and increased in size during the Renaissance. Borrowing again the forms of the past, but changing the ways in which order and placement were used, these grand homes became dominant over the cities they were in.

The ideas of the Renaissance led to the Baroque and Rococo movements in the 1600’s. The wealth of the merchant class led to a cultural revolution away from the church and focused more on the individual. Architecture, both interior and exterior became more dramatic and heavy with detail. The need to entertain changed the floor plans of the structures build during this time, rooms were added and changed uses as an individual’s home reflected his stature in the class he was in. These new classes of people wanted a variety of options in which to decorate the interior and to separate the façade of their home from their neighbors. The grandest example of this is Versailles; build by the King of France, added to the dramatic effect of the structure by having large scale gardens as an extension of the architectural buildings themselves.

The alternatives unit was filled with despair and grandeur, a long period in history where humans proved that through necessity comes invention and reinvention.