Does James Bond hate architecture?

An article from the Guardian on the architecture of James Bond, describing Bond's hatred of modern architecture in particular. It also argues that Quantum of Solace has the best architecture of any Bond film.

Guardian article

Castletown and the Irish Georgian Society

A good article in yesterday's NY Times about the Irish Georgian Society, which has been restoring Georgian architectural treasures across Ireland for the past 50 years. Over the years, the IGS has battled indifference, and sometimes outright hostility, in its attempts to preserve the country's Georgian heritage.

At the head of the article is a photograph of Ireland's largest Palladian house, Castletown, in County Kildare (shown above, photograph from the NY Times).

NY Times article: A 50-Year Battle to Save Old Ireland

Palladian Days

The Villa Cornaro, which I wrote about in my last post, is the subject of a charming book written by its American owners -- Palladian Days: Finding a New Life in a Venetian Country House.

Sally and Carl Gable bought the villa in the late 1980s and keep it as a second home. Despite the grandeur of the house, the book is a surprisingly down-to-earth account of buying and renovating the property and living in an Italian village.

The book successfully combines several popular genres. It's the story of a lawyer and his wife from Atlanta moving to a small village in Italy and dealing with the colourful aspects of life there - think Peter Mayle transplanted from Provence to the Veneto. It's also a story about property renovation, and all the frustrations, expense and eventual pleasure of doing up an old house. In addition to the usual troublesome builders and dodgy plumbing, there are nests of scorpions and 450 year old frescos to deal with. Finally, it's a travel guide to Venice and the surrounding region, with some recipes thrown in for good measure.

It's not a heavyweight architectural book by any measure, but well worth a read to see how a modern American couple actually live in one of Palladio's villas.

Available from Amazon.com

Villa Cornaro

Image from Hans A. Rosbach

After visiting a couple of Palladio's smaller villas, we turn to one of his grander houses.

The Villa Cornaro, located in the village of Piombino Dese just outside Venice, was built in 1552-53. Palladio's great innovation on the Villa Cornaro is the two-story portico and loggia, with its double set of columns under a projecting pediment. It's the most distinctive feature of the house, and Palladio used it to great effect on both the front and back of the villa.

It's a highly impressive device, signaling the importance of the house and its owner to the rest of the village. But it does more than that. It visually pulls together the upper and lower floors of the house into a unified whole. It's also practical, creating a comfortable, shady space.


Image from www.boglewood.com

This was absolutely radical when Palladio used it here for the first time. It has since become such a standard architectural device that it's easy to forget the significance of Palladio's invention.

Many of the grand antebellum plantation houses in the South were built in a Palladian style, and the two-story portico and loggia was a recurring motif. This is a particularly fine example: Drayton Hall, in Charleston, South Carolina, built in 1742.



Palladio's design is hugely flexible and adaptable. Drayton Hall took it largely verbatim from Palladio, but with a pair of steps leading up the the portico instead of the single wide set of steps on the Villa Cornaro. However, here's another version of the same motif, which has been adapted extensively but where Palladio's influence is still recognizable. Here, the portico is curved, with no pediment. There's a single run of double-height columns instead of the separate columns on the first and second floors. The White House, south facade. Built 1792-1800.

Villa Poiana

Image by Hans A. Rosbach

After the Villa Saraceno, another of Palladio's smaller villas.

This is another early design from Palladio, from 1548-49, and is perhaps my favourite of all his buildings. It's a very restrained, even spare, classical design. It's so stripped back that it almost looks modern - or even postmodern, with its exaggerated use of simple shapes.

The only decorative element on the facade is the central arch with five oculi above the doorway. It's a simplified version of the design that Palladio frequently used for windows, with an arched central light flanked by columns or pilasters and a light on either side. Palladio used it so often that, even though he didn't invent it, it has became known as a "Palladian window".



As an example of Palladio's enduring appeal, here's a house in California directly inspired by the Villa Poiana.


David Pierce Hohmann architects

Villa Saraceno

Image from The Landmark Trust

From Palladio's grandest villa, La Rotonda, to one of his most modest, Villa Saraceno. It's essentially a farmhouse, with the attic level of the house originally used as a granary. The photograph below shows various outbuildings (not by Palladio) next to the villa.

The house dates from the 1540s and is one of Palladio's earliest works.


Image from La Repubblica

Even though it's a much simpler building than La Rotonda, the design has been enormously influential. The basic design has been used for a number of country houses in England, and there are countless town halls and post offices in the United States whose lineage can be traced back to Villa Saraceno. The picture below is the post office in Salem, Massachusetts.



Villa Saraceno is unique among Palladio's villas in that it's possible to rent the house for a holiday. The building had fallen into disrepair and was acquired in 1989 by the Landmark Trust, a British preservation charity. The Trust restored the house and turned it into a holiday home that can be rented by the week.

The Landmark Trust

Sailing to Byzantium

The Byzantine Empire was a superpower of the Middle Ages.

The city of Byzantium was re-founded by Constantine I in 330 AD as the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the city (re-named Constantinople) became a major commercial, cultural and religious centre. It controlled an empire that stretched around the Mediterranean, encompassing swathes of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

The empire finally came to an end in 1453 when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks.



The Royal Academy in London currently has a major exhibition on Byzantium that is well worth a visit. One word of advice. It gets crowded at the weekend, and many of the exhibits such as jewelry, coins, metalwork and icons are quite small and hard to see among the crowds. I recommend visiting during the week or getting there early at the weekend.

In connection with the exhibition, I'm posting a few photographs that I took in Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul. These are all shots of Hagia Sophia, the Byzantine church that became a mosque under the Ottomans, and which was subsequently turned into a museum under the secular Republic of Turkey.





Byzantium 330-1435
Until March 22, 2009
Royal Academy of Arts
London

Villa Rotonda and its progeny

Image from www.boglewood.com

Palladio's best known building is the Villa Almerico-Capra, also known as "La Rotonda". It's an imposing building, situated on a hillside outside Vicenza. Construction began in 1566 and continued after Palladio's death in 1580.


Image from www.cartage.org.lb

The layout of the villa is remarkably simple. As seen in the plan below, the house is a perfect square. Each side of the square has a matching facade, with steps leading up to a portico with columns and pediment. Inside, the floorplan is symmetrical, with the entrances on the four sides of the house leading into a circular central hall, topped by a dome.


Image from www.palladiomoderno.com

Palladio's design has been hugely influential. Several houses have been built in more or less direct imitation of La Rotonda, and many more have adapted design elements from it.

In England, Mereworth Castle in Kent was designed by Colen Campbell in the 1720s.





A more recent design, again directly inspired by La Rotonda, is Henbury Hall in Cheshire, built in 1984.



Other houses that do not attempt to copy La Rotonda directly, but are still very recognizable as her offspring include:

Chiswick House in West London, designed by Lord Burlington and William Kent and built in 1726-29.


Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virgina, designed by Thomas Jefferson. Construction began in 1768 and was finally completed in 1809 when the dome was erected.



Finally, as proof of La Rotonda's significance, a scaled-down version of the house appears at Legoland.

Palladio at 500

November marks the 500th anniversary of the birth of Andrea Palladio, the greatest and most influential architect of all time.

Palladio's designs are firmly grounded in the "classical language of architecture", but he adapted and manipulated the principles of architecture inherited from ancient Rome (he knew relatively little about Greek architecture). He designed many palazzi, villas and churches in a small area of north-east Italy, in and around Vicenza and Venice. However, his influence spread rapidly, driven in large part by the publication in 1570 of his monumental treatise, I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura, or the Four Books of Architecture.

The Man of Mode will be posting about some of Palladio's designs and the way he influenced later buildings in England and America.

A fixer-upper to end them all

From the Home and Garden section of the NY Times (all photographs from the NY Times).

This Beaux-Arts pavillion was designed by Stanford White in 1902 for John Jacob Astor IV. This long, low-lying classical building was originally the guest lodge for the Astor estate, but the main house was demolished in the 1940s. It remained an Astor residence into the late 1950s, when the family donated the building to the Catholic church and it became a convent and nursing home.

The fabric of the house decayed until it was bought in 2004, and the new owners began a massive renovation project.

The results are stunning.



The house is decorated in a simple manner with neutral colours, allowing the architecture to shine.





The indoor tennis court, with an iron and glass vaulted ceiling.



NY Times article

Hoover Dam

A few pictures from a recent trip to the Hoover Dam. It's difficult to convey the sheer size of it through a photograph, at least without taking pictures from an aircraft.

A Georgian treasure in West Baltimore

West Baltimore is usually associated with the urban decay and lawlessness depicted in the television series Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire. While it's true that the area is blighted by crime and drugs, there remain a few oases of calm here in the middle of the city.

One such place is Mount Clare, a Georgian manor house standing on a hilltop in what is now Carroll Park. The house was built in 1760 by Charles Carroll, Barrister (so-called to distinguish him from several relatives of the same name). Carroll was a leading figure in Maryland in the cause for independence and went on to serve in the state senate until his death in 1783.



The house was built on Georgia Plantation, a 2,500 acre estate on the banks of the Patapsco River. It replaced an earlier wood-framed dwelling built by Carroll's father.

This handsome brick building is a good example of American Palladianism, with a classic 5-part profile and a Venetian window placed centrally above the colonaded portico.



The rear of the house has a simpler appearance, with a central pediment but without the portico. I prefer it to the front, with its stronger, cleaner lines.


Behind the house, the grounds slope down steeply towards the river.



A view from the house towards downtown Baltimore


The stables, located at the foot of the hill behind the house


Mount Clare is maintained by the Colonial Dames of America and houses a museum of decorative arts. There is an informative website at www.mountclare.org.

The Gherkin

I had the good fortune to attend a party on the top floor of 30 St. Mary Axe last night. Better known as the "Gherkin", this building is the most distinctive recent addition to the London skyline. There is a bar on the top floor (the 40th floor), which is normally open only to tenants in the building. However, the space can be rented for private events.





The top-floor bar, with a 360 degree view over London.



Looking westwards.

In the round

Most rooms have the shape of a shoebox: four walls and a simple rectangular floorplan. These are simple to build, with lots of flat surfaces and right angles. However, very occasionally, architects use a little bit of . . . circular thinking.

By far the most famous example of a round room is shown above. The Oval Office is a grand space, over 35 feet long, with three large windows behind the President's desk and a fireplace at the other end of the room. The room is neoclassical in style, in the standard Georgian/Federal mode. However, the room is not original to the White House; it was built in 1909 in the newly constructed West Wing.

Circular rooms tend to be grand, even ostentatious, spaces. And there are few interiors more grand than the entrance hall of Eltham Palace. Part of the finest art deco residential interior in Britain, the elaborate wood paneling and marquetry and the light-filled dome make this room a favourite of Hollywood location scouts. This room requently appears in film, standing in for nightclubs, ballrooms and even the first class lounge of an ocean liner.





The art deco style seems to work particularly well for circular rooms. Here's an example from Location Works, a UK agency for film and photography locations.



And another modernist room, designed by Burnham Hoyt in 1938 (from the Conde Nast store).



Whatever the style, the decision to build a round room is always a little unusual and extravagant. In 1929, Harvey Ladew, heir to a manufacturing fortune, bought a farmhouse in the hunt country of Maryland, just north of Baltimore. As he set about renovating his new home, he was trying to decide where to put an oval Chippendale partners desk. A friend suggested that he build a room around the desk, and Ladew did just that, creating a stunning oval library. Alas, I have been unable to find a picture of the library, but it's possible to visit Ladew's house, along with its elaborate topiary garden -- more details can be found at www.ladewgardens.com.