 We're going to talk about Rococo in Central Europe. We'll begin by looking at a few more pilgrimage churches and then continue by looking at some palaces and gardens. So I just want to remind you again of this new term, Rococo, which has to do with the manifestation of the late Baroque, where this tectonic impulse, this plasticity, this muscularity that we admired in architects like Bernini or Maderno gives way to this interest in surface and flatness. And where this deep saturation of dark maroons and dark green marbles and dark gold leaf gives way to really pastel tones. It is the color palette that you usually only find in the cupcake display of the finest bakeries. I want to say a few things about Rococo that we didn't say before. And a lot of these observations are drawn from Carsten Harry's book on Bavarian Rococo. And he begins to suggest that two things are going on at the same time. On one hand, he suggests it's the last authentic style. It's the last time at which architects are designing buildings in a way that seems to be an unmediated expression of the impulses of their age. And by unmediated expression, what I mean is they're not thinking about their position in history. They're not measuring themselves up quite so directly against all other possible historical moments. And they're just doing the thing, which seems like a direct outgrowth from the thing that came before. But at the same time, Harry observes that in Rococo there are certain things that are going on that are distinctly modern that we maybe don't see again until the 20th century. For example, this whole suppression of the tectonic and the emphasis on plenarity, wall as surface, or these crazy little games where asymmetry is balanced against symmetry in a kind of oscillating way. Or even the idea toward dematerialization. And we'll see a lot more of that in the slides that we're going to look at today. Where the building as material begins to give way to an idea of the building as frame. Where the content of the architecture becomes less and less about its edges and more and more about the space it contains and the extension of space that it frames beyond itself. You have this open relationship between interior and exterior space and lightness of material, lightness and informality. The Rococo brings us a couple of developments in planning, for example. Perhaps you've heard of the corridor. Yes, this is an architectural term you're all conversant with. Really, up until the 18th century, corridors for the most part didn't exist for the point of view of moving you from bedroom to bedroom to bedroom. And instead, you had a kind of circulation called en filade. And en filade circulation just meant you walked through the rooms. The doors lined up, and you walked from room to room to room. You might have something like a sleeping alcove where the king would be propped up on pillows. But anybody who wanted to move through the palace would be moving through the rooms. And that was simply the way circulation went. Part of informality has to do with this beginning interest in privacy or domesticity, arrangements for domesticity like the corridor, like public versus private, and so forth. These are just some of these interests. But at the same time, there are conservative aspects of the Rococo. And that has to do with the fact that it still clings to the representational language of the orders, even if it involves distorting them. And Harris, who of course is a philosopher, would emphasize the fact that the connection between the architectural sign and the signified has cosmological meanings. Now, what does that mean? What is a sign? What is a signified? What is a signified? What is a signifier? You're all stumped because you're architecture students. But if this were a room full of, say, linguistic students, you would understand that these are terms that come down from a guy called Ferdinand de Saussure. And it has to do with how words contain meaning. Saussure has this famous diagram of the word horse, actually chevel, because he's French, and a picture of a horse. And he begins to suggest different ways that the thing in itself and the word that means the thing are tethered together. And Harris would suggest that at the time of the Rococo, there still is this belief that signs, that images, that symbols directly represent some kind of transcendental reference. Let me just give you a little bit of historical background. And this historical background pertains to the Baroque as well. But it really manifests itself in the geographic area we're looking at now in central Europe. And that is the 30 Years War. The 30 Years War is something that was probably the inevitable result of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation coming to loggerheads with each other. And it was a war lasted 30 years. And it was primarily between Protestantism and Catholicism or people who wanted to instantiate Catholicism and people who wanted to move it away and institute Protestantism. So this map of green versus yellow versus blue shows you more or less how the area that was once associated with the Holy Roman Empire breaks out in these different kinds of religious groups. The yellowish stuff is Lutheranism. The greenish stuff is Catholicism. And the blueish stuff is Calvinism, which is another kind of Protestantism. It's kind of a north-south divide. It's kind of the closer you get to Italy, the closer you get to the Vatican, the more likely you are to be Catholic, the more northerly you are, the more likely you are to be Protestant with various changes. In terms of architecture, you have to hand it to the Catholics, because all the really good architecture is coming from these Catholic countries. And I think a lot of that has to do with Counter-Reformation impulses to make architecture persuasive, to make architecture so dazzling and so overwhelming that it is an act of faith to simply enter the church and an act of conversion to contemplate the space, the light, the ornament, and so forth. These are some of the cities we've looked at or we will be looking at. Here's Vienna, where Fischer von Erlach was located. By the way, Turin with Guarini is right over here. I should have put that one in there in the north of Italy. Here's Munich, which we'll be looking at. Here's Dresden, which we'll be looking at. And here's Wurzburg. Everything's in the green, except for Dresden. And we'll talk about that when we get there. Why good architecture exists in the yellow. I want to drive home the point that the world had changed by this point and that in its changing, it opened up more doors. It opened up more sources that could be contemplated. And Fischer von Erlach's treatise on a historical architecture begins to make suggestions that you can look anywhere for sources. You can look anywhere. You could look not only to classical antiquity, but you could also look toward examples in other parts of the world. Parts of the world like Asia. Parts of the world like Egypt. Parts of the world like Islamic countries and so forth. And in Fischer von Erlach's own work, particularly in the Karl's Kirche in Vienna, you see a good example of this kind of eclecticism, this willingness to pick and choose from any style whatsoever. So I just said eclecticism and I also just defined it. But I just wonder if people remember what I just said. Tom, what's eclecticism? Right, taking pieces from different sources and combining them together. This is the very thing that the Renaissance would have been angry about. Remember, we began our discussion of the Renaissance talking about the Milan Cathedral and the difficulty in putting a facade on the Milan Cathedral because there was a desire to have agreement among parts. Agreement between interior and exterior. If the interior of the Milan Cathedral was Gothic, how are you going to make the exterior? And the overwhelming response at that point would be, it somehow has to make a connection, a strong connection to Gothic. By the time you get to Fischer von Erlach over here, it's not so important. He's creating a system of symbols to make precise the meaning of his church. And he's doing it by pulling from all kinds of traditions, Traegeanic columns, classical temples, Chinese pagodas, Baroque domes, and so forth. We also look briefly at Balthasar Neumann. And I just want to look at him again because I think he's one of the great architects that we're going to be looking at ever. And I think what's so interesting about Balthasar Neumann is not his ornamental program, but his spatial sensibility. I say that because I'm a modernist, of course. And it would be wrong for me to say, get me some of that glop, get it from me right away. Spatial sensibility is pretty amazing. And by spatial sensibility, I simply mean this act of making figure appear within figure and using techniques like carving the space and also voiding the pochette, you might almost say, that would traditionally be in a church and instead replacing it with a plenum of light. These are sort of spectacular effects. And you get that at Fjordstain Heiligen, where the inward domes clip in. And you look at the columns or the piers that structure those domes. And they have a kind of double affinity. Simultaneously, they have allegiance to the definition of the aisle. But they also have allegiance to the definition of the central figure. You read these spaces simultaneously as figural void and figural object. Spectacular. These are some diagrams from Christian Norberg-Schultz, where he's talking about different strategies for the Baroque. Different strategies for Baroque plan making, especially stuff that manifests itself in central Europe. There's the idea of the schischkabab. There's the idea of the alternation between convex and concave. And then there's the idea of the inner penetration and pulsating play back and forth between the concave and the convex, which gives rise to these really extraordinary surfaces and which seem in some way to synthesize the project of the centralized church with the project of the longitudinal church. If the counter-reformation suggests that you may not build centralized churches anymore. And the architects, for the most part, let's say, in Rome desperately tried to find a way around this by elongating, ovalized circles. Here there's this notion of seriality, of the serial center or the marching center that gives rise to plans like Fjordstain Heiligen. I wanna look at a couple more Bavarian Rococo churches before we look at more domestic architecture. And by domestic, I mean nothing like the house you live in, but giant palaces. The churches, as it might not surprise you, are located more or less down here in Bavaria, an area that turned out to be Catholic at the end of the Thirty Years' War and therefore is home to many of these shrines and pilgrimage churches. Some of the palaces that we'll be looking at later on are up here in the north, because these are a bit later and by the time they were constructed, Rococo had become a style associated with leisure and pleasure and an ideal decorous response to the task of making a country retreat. Here we have Nymphenburg, located down in Bavaria, but many of the other palaces that we'll be looking at are up here in the north, Deltzvinge in Saxony and the Sans Souci Palace here on the outskirts of Berlin. Let's look first at some of the pilgrimage churches. This is Zimmermann, Dominicus Zimmermann, but actually it's a big family of Zimmermann. Dominicus is one of the many. Here is a little church. This is a pilgrimage church called Steinhausen, in Bavaria, not too far from Munich. It's a really little one. It's a little jewel of a church and we can see certain themes that we've observed before, like this plenum of space that seems simultaneously to provide some idea about ambulatory, but also to allow this really strong figure to emerge from within it, which is the domed space. So we see a space within a space here. It's a different expression than say, something like Santa Costanza, the martyrdom of Constantine's daughter, where you don't read these two things in quite the same way. I also want to point out that something that initiated in the Baroque is going on full steam here in the Rococo, and that is the marshalling together of all the arts, that architecture is not something apart from painting and apart from sculpture and apart from theater, but they're all brought together. So you have these stucco workers who are doing the architecture, who are also making the sculpture and the illusionistic space of the ceiling departs from the real architectural surrounds that it rises up from. Typically in these little Rococo churches, there's one moment where the whole perspective works in a perfect way, and the Church of Steinhausen is a good example of that. Another thing that's really great about Steinhausen is how tight this little space is, this really narrow space. It might be maybe about two feet, so you can kind of walk there, and you can really feel the tension between this little slot of space and the expansion of space that you get, not simply in terms of the limits of the building, but also in terms of the illusionistic expansion of the space as it rises up, rises up into the sky. Fabulous. The rhythms are really interesting. It's not a simple rhythm. It's this double rhythm. It's this double rhythm that becomes perforated in complex ways. This is another church by Zimmermann called the Wies Church. This is really near Mad Ludwig's castle, if anybody's ever been to Neuschwanstein. Also in Bavaria, not far from Munich. The Wies Church is an elaboration on the theme of Steinhausen, because Steinhausen gives you a strong idea of stretched oval that expands slightly to provide a place for the altar. There's already incipient within the Steinhausen church the notion of another cell developing and becoming centric. In the Wies Church, that theme gets really elaborated in both directions. You have this swelling in two directions and there's a tension between something that wants to be longitudinal and something that wants to be circular. And the circular part not only expands in plan but also pops way up in section. These churches are really strange because they're really schizophrenic. Their expression on the exterior is really different than their expression on the interior. On the interior, it is this incredibly elaborate ornamental program. One might describe this kind of ornament as glop glop glop glop glop. Every surface you look at is encrusted with some kind of ornament. The purpose of which is frequently to blur any sense of structure that you could get or to blur any line between the real space and the illusionistic space of the church. On the exterior, these things are almost planar. They're simple walls. They're simple walls with simple punches. They're like geodes almost. You know, these kinds of rocks, you crack them open. They look like normal rocks and you crack them open and they're full of crystals. You have this fairly simple shell of a building and you crack it open and you find this kind of internal organization. Super. And here's Schloss Sans Souci, located in Potsdam. Potsdam is a town just outside of Berlin and has a great collection of country retreats for the noble families and also for the elector of the area. This is Schloss Sans Souci, which means no worries, built for Frederick the Great by the architect Georg Venceslas von Knobelsdorf. But it's interesting that Frederick the Great actually provided a sketch and this is Frederick the Great's sketch for the plan of Sans Souci. So it's a kind of amazing idea. Records indicate that Frederick the Great would entertain no departure from the diagram that he had drawn. And in fact, the built structure is very similar to this. Some of the rooms are labeled like for the king, for the guests and so forth. And he indicates a courtyard, not surprisingly, and a pavilion moving out toward a garden. These are the plans. And it's actually quite lovely. And one of the things I think that's most magnificent about this is the way the building integrates with the landscape. For one thing, it's incredibly thin. So it becomes one of these edges, one of these buildings on top of a hill that stretches itself out to seem as large as possible. We saw an example in Hildebrand's Schloss Upper Belvedere. We even saw a very early example in Giacomo della Porta's Aldo Brangini villa in Italy from the Manorist period, where a building on top of a hill becomes incredibly thin, can be seen at a distance, and commands great presence. Additionally, it has nice relationship to its garden and its courtyard. Frederick the Great would not allow the architect to elevate the major rooms one story, to give the building greater presence. He wanted it to be easy to get around in. He wanted it to be on grade. He was basically making himself a ranch house of a Rococo Palace. The courtyard is just this screen of columns, very thinly delimiting a space from the more or less forested landscapes spreading out on all sides. The pavilion, the ovalized pavilion pops forward and begins to command a garden. This is the final form of the Schloss Saint-Souci where an elaboration on the axial garden takes place in the form of a series of steps or trays, the edge of each being comprised of a linear greenhouse where grape vines could grow. He brought in vines from Portugal, from Spain, from France, and even some German vines to have a little wine retreat. Frederick the Great would call Schloss Saint-Souci his little vineyard cottage. Kleine Weinbergs-Reuchen, he said. Quite nice. The idea that the landscape ultimately sets up a kind of productive field on top of which the house is situated is really great. It's a transformation on the theme of the axial garden that we've seen in many other cases. This is what it looks like. Things that we know about the pavilion at the middle, the pavilion at the end, and then a stretching out in a double nature of an edge that begins to integrate with a landscape. Notice here a trellis with vines and the trellis terminates in a little pavilion. The ornamental program goes along with a functional program of this as the little vineyard house. Saint-Souci, the little vineyard house, and all of these characters, these herms, these half column, half human characters, represent Bachans, people celebrating the cult of Bacchus, the god of the grape. If Knobelsdorf, the architect, had had his way, there would have been an elevation of this figure so that when you are down below, the building would have seemed more prominent. As it is now, the building really gets swallowed up by its landscape, which I think is actually kind of fabulous that you simply see this landscape. And if you imagine the climate in Potsdam, near Berlin, it's awfully cold a lot of the year. The idea that these tiers of linear greenhouses could hold things that would be green all year long and that could convince Frederick the Great that his power was such as to make it possible for things to flower in the winter must have been a spectacle to behold. This is an example of one of those completely dematerialized pavilions that mimic the architectural language of the main building, but now do so in a way that they dissolve, more or less, into a natural condition. Imagine these things overrun by vines, which is how they were meant to be understood. After Frederick completed work on the main house, he became interested in the gardens, particularly scattering little pavilions around in the gardens, little destinations that people could come to. And this Chinese house I think is one of the finest example of the Xinoiserie, the spirit of importing images from the decorative arts seen on porcelain or seen on silk fabrics and transforming them into architecture. The columns are like little exotic trees, palm trees, little umbrella over a Buddha statue is on the roof. Here's another palace by Matthias Pippelmann or a series of palaces by Matthias Pippelmann under the patronage of August the Strong, of Dresden. I think August the Strong was one of the most interesting characters in the Baroque period. Well, nobody's gonna be Louis XIV, but second to Louis XIV, I think he's one of the most interesting characters. He was raised as the second son. It was never the intention that August the Strong would take the throne. And therefore he was raised as a gentleman. He spent time in Paris, he did a grand tour. He was in Paris and Versailles at the time that Louis XIV consolidated the court in Versailles. When his elder brother died and he was suddenly given the task of taking the throne or becoming the new elector, he rose to the task. But he also brought with him a strong commitment to the furthering of the arts. Furthering of the arts by sending off collectors to enhance the art collection and furthering the arts by building many castles, building many palaces or expanding existing palaces. Some of them he did for his own use and some of them he did to house his many mistresses. He has two titles here and these two titles are more or less at odds with each other. One title is Elector of Saxony and the other title is King of Poland. And as Elector of Saxony, he was in league with the Protestant cities and really a great supporter of this Protestant cause during the Thirty Years War. And when I say he, I mean Dresden because the Thirty Years War ended before August the Strong was ever born. But Dresden historically is a Protestant city. When the King of Poland died, they needed to have a successor and August the Strong was collaterally related to the line of the Polish throne and was offered the Polish throne on the condition that he converted to Catholicism, which he did. So August the Strong is simultaneously Catholic and Protestant and to celebrate that his body is buried in Dresden and his head is buried in Warsaw. And that seems fair. This is August the Strong's wife, Elizabeth, Elizabeth. And this is one of his many mistresses, Constancia. And it's great that he had so many mistresses because he kept getting into trouble and so he would have to build new palaces for them. And so because he had to put up his mistresses in increasingly beautiful palaces, he had lots of palaces built. In fact, Elizabeth went off to live in one of these palaces and to live away from August the Strong because when he adopted Catholicism, she did not go along with that. I mean, the 30 years war was a brutal and protracted conflict and for Dresden to fight for 30 years for the right to be Protestant. And then just to give it up to be king of Poland seemed crazy, so she more or less absented herself from August the Strong at that point. But luckily, there were lots of these little chippies around that he could then put up in other castles. So you might say, August the Strong? Well, that's an unusual name. I understand Charles the Bald, that might mean bald, but why is he so strong? And there are a number of stories about why he's so strong. Probably the raciest one is that he said to have 365 children, one for each day of the year, requires a certain amount of strength. My favorite has to do with this Rococo sport of fox tossing. And he was so strong, he could engage in fox tossing and toss a fox with one finger. Now, isn't this something, this apparently, this is real, people would do this. These are images of fox tossing. What's great about fox tossing is that it wasn't simply a gentleman sport, the ladies could play too. You would sometimes have teams of ladies and gentlemen. And here are the little foxes, and when they come on to this piece of fabric, you curl it up, and if you're good at fox tossing, you could get a fox 25 feet in the air. And this amusing quote that I found here says, the sport, and this is from a really reliable source. It's somebody's blog on Maria Antoinette. So you know that really serious research went into this. This is the kind of research you guys do on your papers. The sport later morphed, and ladies and gentlemen dressed up in masquerade-like clothing to participate. Even the foxes were dressed in costume with tinsel and fabric. That must have been really spectacular. So when Arnold Houser calls the Rococo, the art of a frivolous, tired and passive society, maybe he was really on to something there. Maybe there was something deeply wrong with these fox tossing people. I have here a horseshoe because August the Strong is also said to be able to break horseshoes with his hands when he was not tossing foxes or fathering children. Let's look at some of the architecture that was built under the patronage of August the Strong. A lot of it reminds us of certain themes we've seen before. Ideas about the Baroque palace have to do with an increasing interest in pavilionization of edge and in the interplay between edge and figural space, figural space and figural object. This city palace, Zwinga, I think does this better than most. By the way, pay no attention to this piece. This is a 19th century piece by a very good architect called Zempa, but pay no attention to it. The scheme of the Zwinga by Peppelmann is this thing. So if there is an impulse in Baroque architecture, which we've already seen, even in things like, say, the residence by Balthasar Neumann, for these pavilions to liberate themselves into space. Boy, it's happening really strongly here, where these pavilions coagulate so much so and pump themselves up in scale so much so that the rest of the building seems almost residual. The buildings are almost freestanding objects. And in fact, the stuff in between them is incredibly thin. It's like a covered passageway getting you from pavilion to pavilion. What's wonderful about a space like the space of Ditzwinga is, of course, if you wanted to have a really good match of fox tossing, you've already got a great place to do that in. Those kinds of spectacles and entertainments were hosted there. The language is really extraordinary also. It is this language that becomes almost completely dematerialized. And by dematerialized, I mean wall almost completely goes away, and you have structural piers, and then blazing or void in between. These become not so much objects, but simply as frames that allow you to participate and understand the space. The language itself becomes really un-canonic. And by un-canonic, I mean, eh, we got a little bit of a Doric plaster here. But the Doric plaster transforms into this amazingly chipper herm down below that holds up the buildings. And these herms are simply one moment in an entire repertoire of exuberant and asymmetrical ornament that proliferates over the entire surface. These are photographs of Ditzwinga, probably taken in like around 1988, 1989. And that was a good time to take photographs of Ditzwinga. If it had been photographed a few years before, it would have looked like this. In 1945, the Allies, Britain and America, carpet bombed Dresden. And it was not really a city that had much strategic significance, but it was a center of art and a center of culture. So a way of undermining the morale of the people of Germany involved carpet bombing this city. Ditzwinga that we see now was rebuilt by conservators. People had photographs of the original building when the Ditzwinga was on fire during the bombing. People would run out and grab little herms and stick them in the basement and cover them with dirt. The fact that this thing exists is kind of amazing. The entire city was laid to waste. And gradually, building by building, they're rebuilding the whole thing. It's, I think, of interest because in Berlin, there is a ruined church, the Wilhelm Church, that is a ruin. And the people in Berlin have decided to leave this church as a ruin to remind people about how horrible war is. So you go and you look at this church and you think, wow, this is what war can do. I was in Dresden during the Kami period in the 1980s before the Iron Curtain fell. And I asked people, you know, why are you rebuilding all this stuff? Don't you want to keep some memories alive of how horrible war is? And use that as a provocation not to go down that road again. And they basically said, see, Americans like to see Dresden in ruins. We like to see Dresden built up nice. And I said, thank you very much. You've explained it beautifully. Here's another one of the palaces built by Peppelmen for August the Strong. And this thing is on the outskirts of Dresden, on the Danube River, further up the Danube River. And it is called Schloss Pilnitz. It was an existing palace that was expanded by Peppelmen and follows a markedly Chinese theme in terms of the ornament. You can see these pitches on the roofs are emulating little pagoda roofs. Here's a plan. And the plan in many ways is similar to the plan that we saw at Daut Zwinga. That is to say the building is as thin as possible. The architecture is more about framing a place for pageants and spectacles and games than it is interested in consolidating itself as a singular object. There is this expansion of space in the center and a pavilionization of a really thin edge so that the building is almost as much about the landscape it contains as its edges. And the pieces of connecting tissue seem residual to the idea of the pavilions that it celebrates. This is a real hinge kind of architecture because one thing we've been saying, looking at European architecture, is that for the most part, it has to do with the definition of figural space. And this tendency toward pavilionization really begins to give pride of place to object as opposed to figural space. And as we move forward into the 18th century, the dominance of object, figural object over figural space, becomes more and more and more of concern. I have this word chinoiserie down here. And chinoiserie simply means the taste for Chinese-ish looking stuff. It has nothing real to do with China, but it is this taste that comes from prints distributed by Jesuit missionaries who've come back from China or from designs on teacups or designs on silks and other trade goods that have been brought in. It becomes a fashion. It becomes a fashion, I think in part because of the playful lines and this interest in asymmetry that comes already from this Rococo playfulness and interest in digital forms. So if you look at the roof lines of the Pilnitz Palace, these up curving roofs would remind you of a kind of Chinese roof. If you look even more closely at it, you will see that on these cornices and on these decorative bands, the ornament is really just like little pagoda over here, little Chinese guy with an umbrella over here. And so it's explicitly and deliberately making use of the kind of hybrid language, in part classical and therefore European, but overlaid with a heavy decorative program. The situation of Schloss Pilnitz is such that it faces the Danube River and more often than not, people would arrive by boat. There is a river landing here that's very similar in form to the Porta della Ripeta, the river port in Rome, kind of wonderful Rococo flourish of concave and convex forms rushing out to meet the water's edge. Here it is, seen in an aerial view. By the way, these photographs were taken back when Dresden was still part of communist East Germany. And this is what it looked like and I thought it looked pretty great. These reddish hues, these ochres, the simple restrained color palette. And pictures I saw on the internet look like this and I hope to God they haven't done this because I think it just looks dreadful. Here are some of the interiors. The idea of the Rococo interior as something flat, atectonic, panelized and overcome with decorative overlay, you can see very clearly here. I mean, almost looks like you're inside some kind of teacup. Even this blue and white color scheme seems to come from the color scheme of porcelain rather than from architecture. And it's interesting because this is Dresden. And Dresden is right next to Meissen and Meissen is a great porcelain factory. It was in the city of Meissen, Germany that the secret of Chinese porcelain was finally cracked by the Europeans. So there's a strong link to the porcelain trade in Dresden. So let's look now on the outskirts of Munich to another one of these great domestic spaces, the Schloss Nymphenburg. Schloss Nymphenburg was designed for the elector Ferdinand Maria and his wife Henriette Adelaide of Savoy. It, like so many palaces at the time, takes its cue from Versailles of this grand building that constitutes a folded edge and establishes a strong axis into the garden. The image that we see here is the original condition of the Nymphenburg Palace. This is a drawing by Johann Adam von Sießler from around 1723. It's interesting, I think, to look at the development of Schloss Nymphenburg even in a period very, very close to this original date. This is what we have now. And you can see what we have now is not quite so hyper-idealized or hyper-geometricized, so controlled by geometry as the original diagram, but rather there's a softening. We still have the axis extending from the city of Munich way out here coming in and apparently going off into infinity through the gardens. But encroaching on the space of the axis, instead of having these perfect geometrical figures, these tridents, these round points that we had in the original layout, there's a softening. There's a softening of the garden in favor of a higher degree of naturalism. These are a series of plans of Schloss Nymphenburg. The one on the far right is the condition it's in now. You can see these very irregular channels of water, very meandering paths, and a series of objects scattered around as destinations to discover. There's still a strong axis, but the axis really becomes a datum off which you can read the irregularity. By 1801, a plan for restructuring the park was initiated and it institutes many of these moves to soften the garden, to make it more natural, to make the experience of nature one that seems less controlled by man and more a serendipity experience of phenomena governed by the weather, governed by the topography, and so forth. So here's the transformation, the earliest, the middle, and the final. We still have this long water channel that cuts through the building and cuts down toward infinity, but there is an increasing interest in informality, an increasing interest in asymmetry. And this is a tendency that begins to develop in the 18th century in terms of garden planning. The strong love of the axis, the strong subordination of architecture as frame to the space of the garden begins to give way again toward this interest in the pavilion and architecture as object and a more informal romantic attitude toward garden planning. We'll talk about that in a different lecture. This is the entry courtyard, and I think one of the things that is particularly strong about Schlesen-Nymphenberg is how this channel of water translates through the building and reappears in the garden. You get this cesura along this water channel that constitutes the building. But actually the building of Schlesen-Nymphenberg is the least interesting thing in Park-Nymphenberg. I think it's fairly mediocre as late-Berog-Palaces go, and the more interesting things that happen are the Rococo pavilions that you discover as you move through the gardens. Frequently thought to be the greatest of all the pavilions is the Amalienberg. Tiny little thing, tiny little house in the garden. This is what it looks like on the outside. In a tiny little nutshell of a tiny little pavilion, it reprises the basic themes of Baroque and therefore Rococo architecture. Imagine that it was once a bar, perforated or engaged with an axis that begins to pop out of volume. So we now have this kind of circular volume and circular void and pavilionized edges. So this simple little bar deforms to make figural space, to make figural object, and to pavilionize itself. Now let's look inside. You can maybe already get a hint about what's going on inside from looking at the elevation. This is another case of architecture conceived of as the architectural edge of Deltzvinga, and that is to say almost gone, almost completely dematerialized. The windows are so big, you basically just have structural piers with voids in between. And that whole theme has even taken further in the ovalized room, which is the great room of the Amalienberg, where here we have windows, and where you would expect to have windows on the opposite side, you have mirrors. The space virtually disappears. The space virtually becomes this kind of umbrella of goo, and this is a kind of silverized leaf, silver leaf, let's say, with silver mirrors behind it. You really feel like you're floating in some kind of denatured nature. And by denatured, I mean, it kind of looks like nature, but it's shiny and flat. Fabulous. This is maybe a better image of what the ornament of the Amalienberg looks like. You know, mirrors all over the place, and then this autonomous ornament. And by autonomous, I mean, it has a life of its own. The purpose of the ornament is not to clarify structure. The purpose of the ornament is not even to mean anything. The purpose of the ornament is to give you as much pleasure as fox tossing gives you. And fox tossing gives you quite a lot of pleasure. The Amalienberg is one of many of these pavilions that you discover as you walk around the grounds of the Nymphenberg. You see the Rococo color palette. These high-keep pinks and whites. There's some idea about articulating this thing with pilasters, but equally strong on the exterior is the stucco work that begins to encroach on that clarity. When you go inside, any hope of clear articulation is done away with, particularly in the ovalized room. If at Schloss Pilnitz, we already saw an impulse toward the dematerialization of the building envelope. Here at Amalienberg, it's almost completely realized where the sense of architectural enclosure seems to be almost gone. There are a number of other pavilions at Schloss Nymphenberg. For example, the Boddenberg, which is one of my favorites. The Boddenberg is a bath pavilion, but not bath in the perfunctory sense of toilets available for tourists, but rather bathing in the Roman sense of the word. When you come inside, there are a series of spaces, but the really great space is this space. This is the bath. There is a bench down here, and there would be hot waters that you could soak in inside this beautiful blue and white decorative surface. It's like being tea, being inside a teapot and cooking or something like that. The idea is you walk around, find this little pavilion, picturesquely really, organizing a landscape around it. It becomes something that makes your view more pleasant because it's an object in your field of vision. There is a little church or a little chapel in the grounds of the Schloss Nymphenberg. And this church is grotesque, not meaning Halloween style, but meaning as if in a grotto. The language of the grotto has overtaken the language of the architecture. Everything is encrusted with shells. It is also a kind of proto-romantic suggestion that nature is so powerful that no work of architecture can hold its pristine qualities when placed in a landscape as strong as the landscape of the Nymphenberg. Here inside the chapel, you see something that looks a lot like Rococo. That is to say decorative, but this decorative stuff is really shells glued on the wall rather than stucco workers making something that has those qualities. The church takes the notion of rocai or shell work quite deliberately to the point that the interior ornament is made of little shells set in mortar. And everything looks as though you're inside some kind of very rustic cave. You see a little statue of the Virgin inside a completely encrusted cave-like setting. Shells galore. Sort of silly looking. And this is the Bogottenberg. Again, another deliberate exercise in Chinoiserie where it is the Pagoda pavilion. It draws its language almost from silk weavings or from pottery designs and is explicitly flat. That flatness is emphasized by the fact that surfaces of walls do not engage any over structural element, but rather are framed so that the framing makes them seem paper thin as thin as a picture. This notion of the wall as a framed thing or as a screen is another translation from this Eastern sensibility that takes away the plasticity and the muscularity of the Baroque and shifts it toward this lighter condition. Next time, perhaps, it would be wise to move forward and talk about France because it's a big topic.