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Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics

by Gottfried Semper; introduction by Harry Francis Mallgrave
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2004
992 pp., illus. 359 b/w, 19 col. Trade, $80.00
ISBN: 0-89236-597-8.

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium

stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be

Style is the long overdue translation of the classic text by the nineteenth-century architect and scholar Gottfried Semper. Before anything else it must be said that this is a magnificent translation, a beautiful book and the result of a bold and adventurous editorial enterprise. Applause from all ranks for the Getty Research Institute, which has once again proven to be unfailing in its endeavour to make important artistic sources available to a wider English-reading audience.

Well, 'available' is maybe a bit too optimistic because the book itself is quite monumental and certainly not an easy read. Semper wasn't an easy guy either, and his 1850's German——remember German culture was at its idealist height with authors like Hegel dominating the philosophical scene——was pretty well developed. A phrase is a phrase is a phrase, and it continuous sometimes without end. So another round of applause for Harry Mallgrave and Michael Robinson who turned this magnum opus into more or less readable English without losing the general atmosphere that swings between exalted aestheticism, pedantic social criticism, and engineerish practicality.

So who was this Semper (1803 — Rome 1879)? The son of a middle class family based in Hamburg, he excelled in maths and classic languages and followed an erratic course through practically all-European countries, studying architecture and engineering in Germany and France and visiting Italy and Greece on several occasions. He became a successful architect, building among others the monumental Hoftheater at Dresden. After participating in the 1848-1849 uprising in that city (alongside that other idealistic rebel Richard Wagner), he was obliged to leave the country and seek his fortune elsewhere. Via Paris he was stranded in London where he pursued his historic, archaeological, and architectural studies in the same reading rooms of the British Museum where Karl Marx was scribbling Das Kapital (1876). In London, he was hired by Henry Cole as a teacher at the School of Practical Art. This position saved him from a journey to the United States and gave him time to develop his ideas on the basic elements of art and architecture.

In summary, Semper's thesis is that practical artistic and architectural forms can be understood by looking at the raw materials used: textiles for binding and covering (walls), ceramics for molding and strengthening in an adequate form (the hearth), tectonics and carpentry for scaffolding and thatching (roofs and furniture), and stereotomy, masonry and so on for structural strength (pillars, support). Each of these classes of materials follows its own natural laws and the elements or ornaments made from them of necessity take specific forms. Themes derived from one class can of course be transposed to other materials, just as materials are not limited to their natural usages. Weaving for example can be used to make baskets, serving a function that is more naturally ceramic. Only metal, which is by nature malleable, strong, flexible and rigid, can serve all functions, albeit in a less typical way.

Style than, is the harmonious and internally logical application of the whole range of materials and their derived forms, brought together under the internal pressure of the material and the external pressures of the cultural, historical and personal context of its creation.

Semper intended to write a book in three volumes: the first two dealing with the materials and their evolution in oriental, pre-classical, classical and contemporary architecture (internal pressures) and the last one capping it all with an analysis of architecture as a consequence of both the internal and the external pressures. This third volume was never finished, only the first draft of about 40 pages was written. So we are left with Semper’s discussion of textiles, ceramics, tectonics, stereotomy, and metallurgy '[c]onsidered in Themselves and in Relation to Architecture'. Fortunately, Harry Mallgrave offers us a peek into the possible content of that famous third part in his thoroughly researched introduction to the life, work, and philosophy of Semper. Maybe the architect himself felt that by the time he was writing, some of his ideas were already becoming obsolete. At the height of his fame as a practicing architect, his views were already challenged by younger theorists, philosophers, and scientists, so it may be just as well that the grand man didn't finish his book. Anyway, the two volumes at hand are a fascinating journey through architectural form and through the mind of an engineer in idealist times. That in itself, with Mallgrave as a guide who knows all the intimate details, is more than worthwhile.

 

 




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