The Basilica Ulpia, Early Christian Churches and the Roman Double Truss

ABSTRACTThe most prominent and long-lasting of the timber truss-roofed buildings from imperial Roman times was the Basilica Ulpia, the interior of which has been reconstructed by recent writers but with little agreement regarding the upper sections. The reconstruction that best passes the test of engineering viability is shown here to be the one published by James E. Packer in 1997, but Packer’s reconstruction is unconvincing with regard to the roof. The argument advanced now is that the roof was constructed with double trusses of the kind once found in the early Christian basilicas of Old St Peter’s and San Paolo fuori le Mura, and then recorded in the eighteenth century by Jean-Baptiste Rondelet, which were very similar in size to those used for the Basilica Ulpia. The spacing of roof trusses was determined by the nave column spacing. Engineering analysis determines that the trusses had sufficient capacity to support the roof and that the double-truss arrangement was critical to avoid overloading the stone architraves. The article speculates that doubling the Roman truss may have been a previous innovation. It argues that the later early Christian basilicas relied on the Roman double truss because of its proven performance, and that this continuity was recognised by Auguste Choisy and others who considered their use to be a reflection of earlier Roman practice.

The Eisenstein Effect

This chapter analyzes the confluence in thinking about cinematic and architectural montage in the work of the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. It describes their encounter in Moscow in 1928 and their shared admiration for the French architectural historian Auguste Choisy, whose description of spatial passage through the Athenian Acropolis is a key point of reference in the accounts the filmmaker and the architect develop of the role of narrative, movement, and editing in the apprehension of space. Although Le Corbusier’s promenade architecturale is the manipulation of a body moving through actual space according to precise calculations of a visual sequence, the cinematic version, as staged by Corbusier and Chenal, faced the viewer with a surrogate or avatar body moving through space, but never presented the viewer with the scenes viewed by this body: an invisible, one might say ineffable merging of architecture with the image of an invisible architecture as a projection of a static viewer. Architecture in this sense achieves the status desired of the modernist machine universe, but in the process has been reduced to two dimensions, without perspective. Eisenstein, for his part, was in this sense able to “build” an architecture in film—not the imperfect static forms that one had to walk through or work hard to imagine their ecstatic movement, but through the moving image itself understood as the highest technological achievement of modernism, thus achieving the (ecstatic) dissolution, in image, of modernist architecture.

Al otro lado del espejo. Obra y ruina

Mediante el estudio de las fotos de obra de los edificios industriales de Albert Kahn y su semejanza con las ruinas clásicas y las ruinas industriales de Detroit, este artículo trata de analizar la relación entre dos fases que se dan durante el periodo de vida de un edificio. Obra y la ruina se estudian considerándolas dos partes pertenecientes a un único proceso. El análisis usa ejemplos como los dibujos de Joseph Gandy y Auguste Choisy, o las teorías sobre la ruina de Simmel o Robert Smithson para tratar de definir las convergencias y divergencias entre ambas fases y las características del proceso global en el que se encuadran. Partiendo de este análisis, se plantean posibles metodologías operativas en las ruinas industriales que se alejen tanto de la estricta conservación patrimonial como del actual estado de abandono en el que se encuentran, y equidistantes entre el monumento y el desecho. Se trata de buscar modos de operación en estos nuevos ambientes antropocénicos, ejemplarizados por las ciudades industriales de “Rust Belt” norteamericano, que sean capaces de establecer un nuevo equilibrio entre agentes humanos y no humanos y entre sistemas técnicos, culturales y biológicos.

“THE OUTSIDE IS ALWAYS AN INSIDE”: THE IDEA OF SPACE AND ITS THEORETICAL HERITAGE IN “TOWARD AN ARCHITECTURE”

The article proposes to delve deeper in the idea of space in Le Corbusier’s Toward an Architecture (1923), focalizing in its connections with the past and urban design. When in his book Le Corbusier presents his “trois rappels a messieurs les architectes” – volume, surface and plan (in its broad sense) – he outlines the keys to his idea of space. It proves imperative to use Le Corbusier’s original term “Rappel” as its word play transcends any possible translation. Space is therefore defined as a Rappel (call) to architects, but also as a Rappel (reminder, evocation) to multiple theorizations and ideas that have traversed architecture throughout history. Le Corbusier’s argument understands the directions of space as an extension, showing his affiliation with a tradition of French thinking that, in architecture, subscribes since Viollet le Duc to the Cartesian Method, in which spatiality is understood – from the Barroque – both Outside and Inside. It is proven that, in clear continuity with French architectural tradition and drawing inspiration from the ideas of Auguste Choisy, Le Corbusier defines with the mass and the void a space in which “the Outside is always an Inside”. Thus, it is demonstrated that not only the links with the past but also the material resources for the definition of such space are common in different scales, from the definition of an inside up to the urban design.