 Let's backtrack a little bit and look at some of the material we covered last time. What am I showing here? Who's got a clue? John, what are these things? Okay, there are different styles of columns. What do we call this system of a horizontal and a vertical? We call it post and beam if it's not ornamented, but when there is this kind of codified system of ornamentation we have another word. We meaning pretty much me. They're the orders. The orders have to do really with this notion of post and beam structure, but not in its most basic sense. In this highly articulated, highly articulated in a couple of ways. Here we see three Greek orders that we talked about last time. Doric, Ionic and Corinthian. And so some ways that they are articulated and by articulated I mean there is a breaking down of a unit into a system of parts that relate. We have a column capital Doric, Ionic and Corinthian, but we also have a system of spanning. And a lot of the elements we see here in the stone seem to be petrifying on earlier timber architecture. Here we see triglyphs on the Doric freeze that seem to look as though they might have been seen sawn off at an earlier temple. Good. And we saw a system of columns in Egypt, but it wasn't quite so codified. In Egypt there was this representation of a timber of a architecture of reeds and grasses, but it wasn't as systematic. With the Greek orders the system is such that not only do we know what the columns look like, but there's also a usual ratio between the diameter of a column and the height of a column. Archeologists in the 18th century were enthusiastic about the notion of systems and they would say give me just a fragment of a column capital or a column shaft. And based on that fragment I can accurately reconstruct the temple because we know if we see a fragment of a column shaft we can figure out its diameter. If we know it's diameter we can figure out its height. If we can figure out its height we can know the inter-columniation, the space between the columns and so forth. Actually the 18th century archaeologists were fools. You can't do that at all. There's too much variation. But the idea that there was a rule and an order and a logical system that governed the production of these great masterpieces of antiquity was really really attractive. Because again think about the 18th century. This is a period of the Enlightenment where reason is rising to the fore. So if you could look at classical works of architecture and say these are not only works of genius but these are reasonable works governed by mathematics and governed by system. It's an attractive thing to think. In our last talk we discussed general ideas about Greek site planning. Specifically ideas about genius loci that every site is already loaded with spiritual meanings and that architecture simply makes these kinds of presences visible. We've also discussed ideas about sacred site planning like the site of Delphi where Konstantin Duxiedis begins to suggest that there can be some kind of special point within the system that allows the optimum perception of oblique views of the buildings and specific framing of elements within the landscape. Today we're going to talk about the most special of all the Greek sites the Acropolis. Here's Duxiedis diagram of the Acropolis and it's a good one you have to admit. And what makes it so good and I think this was maybe even well it's inside-out let's say from Delphi because here the point which clarifies the whole is the moment that you pop through the gateway and you enter the upper precinct of the Temenos, the sacred precinct. And from this point this is the drawing Korbu did where he begins to see the edge of the Erechtheon, the edge of the Parthenon, the statue of Athena and the views beyond. The leakiness of the space is really powerful how rather than define its own boundaries the space completes itself by gesturing to nature beyond. Athens really came into its glory the golden age of Athens came under the suzerainty of Pericles so mid-5th century and he was a great general he was a great statesman a great orator and it was also a time of peace between the Persian and the Peloponnesian wars where resources could be devoted to things that you would not be able to think about if you were at war things like philosophy things like architecture things like art and so most of the prominent buildings that characterize the Acropolis for us now were built at the time of Pericles. Here we see the Acropolis this big hill in the middle of Athens and this is more or less the extent of Athens kind of fortification wall in ancient times empirically in times and down below we see the kind of market square also very important and cutting through we see this windy road which is called the Pan-Athenaic Way. This is a great procession that people would have coming up to celebrate the goddess Athena who is the patron of the city of Athens. If you look at the Acropolis you see this kind of wacky collection of buildings where things seem to be kind of locked into their landscape a couple of theaters sunk into the side of the hill in a way that makes quite a lot of sense and and these buildings up here. Let's look at them carefully one by one. When we arrive we come up here this is where the Pan-Athenaic road takes us and here is the Propolaea the gateway and here is a little tiny temple perched out in front of us the Athena Nike temple. Now the Propolaea didn't actually get finished so it's kind of a fragment even of what it would have been had it been fully constructed but it's still quite a spectacular building and one reason it's so spectacular is that it and really all the buildings except the Parthenon have to negotiate difficult topography and different scales and different distances from which they're seen. So high ground up here on top of the Acropolis Hill and low ground down here where the buildings like the Athena Nike temple or the Propolaea present themselves. So here for the Athena Nike temple you can see that it has this kind of funny platform or plinth that it sits on. It's a kind of datum it registers the line of the top of the Acropolis at the bottom of the flight of stairs moving up through the Propolaea and here it is and it's it's got two sides it's a funny building one toward the city one toward the temple complex it's not a temple with columns wrapping it on all sides because you couldn't possibly do it its site is so precarious that it does not have that same quality. The Propolaea or the gate is even stranger this drawing makes it look like a temple of course it's not a temple it's not even functionally a temple but it has a pediment it has columns you proceed through it and it begins to change its scale as it moves up the hill in a really strange way making adjustments for topography but also making adjustments for different hierarchical engagements that it's making so that when it gets to the top of the hill all of this kind of irregularity and kind of looseness of form that it has as it falls down the hill and allows people to move through it congeals and becomes a much more orderly form decorous appropriate to the meaning of a temple complex and up here this is the view you get this is the sketch Le Corbusier did this is a dog this is what Greek architecture does this is the oblique view of the building showing us how it flexes showing us how it locks into the site it's a beauty but it's it's got its problems and of course one of its problems is the problem of the Doric that simply will never go away and here most of the columns are centered on their triglyph and here when we get to the corner they slip it to the end by the way we know the names of the architects of this precinct of the Acropolis we have itianos and caliquities they were pretty good the proportions have been studied to death and it seems as though the proportions of the golden rectangle had a lot to do with the design of the building or the conception of the building there are also other aspects to the building that show incredible sophistication you see there's always nothing up here on the pediment and that's because all of that stuff got taken to London by Lord Elgin he thought it would be better for the British to have the Parthenon freeze and indeed uh in recent years just actually within the last couple of years the Greeks have built a museum the new Acropolis museum and there is a space there for the Parthenon freeze up until this point the British had been saying we would give you the Parthenon freeze but you have no place to put it and now they do so it'll be interesting to see how things turn out of course Greece is far away and you might not be able to get to Greece to look at this right away so if you're dying to see what the Parthenon looks like you can go to natural Tennessee they have one too this is from the 100th anniversary of the United States many cities were doing something special having their own local celebration and the city of Memphis named after the capital of Old Kingdom Egypt decided that they would build a pyramid and that was tough to beat so the people in Nashville thought what can you do what could beat a pyramid and then they got the idea they could build a Parthenon full-scale Parthenon and much better than the real Parthenon because the real Parthenon is actually a ruin and the one in Nashville is just perfect in fact it even has a giant gold statue of Latina in it and it's cheesy but you get some sense of what the interior space of a temple might have looked like i'm always happy to see architects busy of all the buildings on the top of the Acropolis my favorite one is the Erechtheon and we know the architect here too Maniskel is i like it because it's so bizarre if you look at it it almost looks like a kind of collection of little buildings that happen to be adjacent to one another rather than one building and part of the reason the building is so bizarre has to do with its program and it has to do with the mythological inhabitation of the site the myth tells you that back when Athens was being established as a city Poseidon king of the sea and Athena goddess of wisdom came to meet with the people of Athens to say i think we should be your patron saint Poseidon said i should be your patron saint and they said well perform a miracle let's see what you can do so he took his trident hurled it into the ground and water sprang out i have made you a sacred spring and the people thought this was pretty great and they said Athena what can you do and she waved her wonderful hand and up popped an olive tree here's the olive tree or perhaps not really the olive tree but an olive tree more or less in the place that it's supposed to be and the people of Athens thought wow and all of olives are better than water let's go with Athena and so the shrine is dedicated to Athena and this is the Athena temple Athena polios temple over here but it's also dedicated to Poseidon and here's the Poseidon temple here so it's a hybrid it's a hybrid temple programmatically and there are also two tombs for kings stuck in here and a well and an olive tree go figure it's hybrid it's hybrid for other reasons too and a lot of this has to do with negotiating the difficulties of the site that we talked about high ground low ground and not simply high ground low ground but things that you see really close up you would see that part of it really from this distance and things that you would see from all over Athens this is the facade of the Poseidon temple that engages the city so it has these two aspects and it changes scale pumps up its scale so that it can be seen well from far away and shrinks down its scale not only because it's being seen from a near distance but also it wants to clarify the hierarchies of the site and the Parthenon is the major Athena temple so this little porch shrinks down and becomes tiny so that you can understand very clearly that this is the major temple and it more or less becomes something organized not on the body of its own temple but becomes organized with respect to the center of the Parthenon this is a funny looking porch don't you think and all these Greeks are just obsessed with their mythology and their history this kind of column this female column this enslaved female column forever holding up the roof of the Erechvion is called a carotid named after a group of captive women captured by the Greeks the maidens of cariae Spartan women kind of like a column kind of like a woman and we've already said in talking about the column and the the Truvian descriptions of the column that columns are anthropomorphic head shaft feet and look at the folds of drapery on the carotid looking a lot like the flutes on a column here's our olive tree again and these are a lot of the cults that we're celebrating and this is just another view of the carotid porch the Brits only took one of the carotids to london i guess they were you know over the limit on carion luggage or whatever it's really it's really spectacular really delicate and really really beautiful how most of this wall this big wall facing the Parthenon is a plain masonry wall allowing it to become edge deflecting toward this little object that through its scale deferred to the Parthenon but through its intricacy holds its own so if you're thinking this Greece seems great you're not alone because the early modernists or at least the best of the early modernists had a love affair with Greece probably prime among them is Le Corbusier who we've already mentioned a couple of times in our discussion here he is this is how you should dress when you're a tourist by the way with a white linen suit and your cute hat leaning on a column sketching or you could float in a inner tube smoking a cigar sketching Le Corbusier wrote up his visit to the east in voyage d'orient carnet and it's a collection voyage to the east it's a collection of sketches and he talks a lot about the power of greek architecture not only because of its specificity this is a beautiful temple but because of its general principles principles of proportion principles of simple volumes bathed in light principles of clear geometry principles of locking into a landscape and making the architecture somehow caused the landscape to spring to life another one of the early modernists who just couldn't get enough of the Greeks was a lot more sly about his admiration and that is Ludwig Mies van der Roa a great architect who ended up in the united states designing quite a lot of buildings in chicago including the campus of it Illinois Institute of Technology here's a picture of Mies with a building for the architecture school at the Illinois Institute of Technology here's a tiny little plan that you can barely see but the case i'm going to make and i'll make it more clearly in the next example is that this is kind of temple like this is kind of a rectangle there are kind of columns at the perimeter and there is kind of something in the center as though this idea of the temple haunted him and he strove to find a way to take its principles and translate them into a new language here's another building by Mies van der Roa much earlier it is the Barcelona Pavilion in Spain of course this is Mies's Barcelona Pavilion and this is the Parthenon and i'm showing you these two things because they i think have uncanny similarities the Parthenon you know it has a styler bait has a bunch of columns has a cella has a cult figure it's got all the stuff you need to be a temple does the Barcelona Pavilion have that stuff and you might say no of course it doesn't have that stuff it's the Barcelona Pavilion it's this sleek intersection of simple planes in pure materials this is modern this is ye olden days but if you begin to look closely at the Barcelona Pavilion you notice some things like column column column column column column column this pteron or colonnade on a platform or styler bait and you might say well where's the cella i sure would like to see a cella before i buy into this argument and it could be if you look at the way these lines are disposed and the way this platform and this platform and this reflecting pond are all related to each other there could be some argument about the cella sliding apart breaking open and becoming open to the world rather than closed we know that the cella in ancient Greece is closed only to the priest cast nobody sees the cult statue with the priests and here there's a cracking open of the system there's a democratization of the system which makes a lot of sense if you consider that this is a building constructed while Spain was under the rule of dictators and Germany was experiencing this great avant-garde flourishing of culture and the arts during the Weimar Republic so in a sense the building is delivered the anti-hierarchical and the building is deliberately demonstrating a kind of democratic impulse in the face of the host nation which had very different aspirations these are just some fabulously done drawings fabulously quickly done drawings that begin to show you that there's lots of stuff that kind of locks together between the Parthenon and the Barcelona Pavilion for example the proportions are uncannily similar and even if you look at the division of the Naos the Proneos and the cella and some of these different elements that you have in here in the subdivision of these slippy slidey partitions in the Barcelona Pavilion kind of similar here everything we see that's dark is a reflecting pool and this reflecting pool over here has a statue in it you see it over here again visible obliquely throughout the building and it could even be thought that the statue cast into the reflecting pond into the outdoors at the Barcelona Pavilion in some way nods toward the notion of the cult statue which was interior and hidden in buildings like the Parthenon so I think what Mies has done here is find a way to take a precedent from history read it really critically and transform it into something very very different now Michael Graves that the Walt Disney headquarters is also taking the precedent from antiquity he's looking carefully at the idea of the pediment he's looking carefully at the idea of the carotid but he's not being quite so critical in his reappropriation of those elements one of the great moments of military power in ancient Greece came under Alexander the Great and he initiated a period called the Hellenistic period during the reign of Alexander the Great rule of Greece spread like crazy so here on the right we see how far Alexander's reign extended he extended his conquest all the way into India down into Africa all the way across into Spain but but what we're interested in is what happens to art and architecture during this late period of Greece of Greek art and architecture and just to review these are two images that we've seen before the Critios boy got the Contrapasto going and the Joriferous crazy Contrapasto and hyper articulation of interrelated parts so that you can read how specifically the ratios and the proportions work this is not really germane to the material you need to know but the Nazis had a contest who could look the most like the Joriferous and this is the winner right here this is naked Nazi posing like the Joriferous Joriferous means spear bearer and the Nazi has got it right he's got the spear Joriferous has lost his spear Statuary in the Hellenistic period begins to become really much more agitated than the kind of calm severe presence that we have in the you know high Hellenic period the period of Pericles this is all about repose this is all about ideality this is all about a kind of timeless and eternal mask that disguises the psychological difficulties of the individual and somehow universalizes the condition here we have two works the Apollo Belvedere and the Lackawon and they're both Hellenistic works and they're both much more open spatially they're virtuoso works i mean think about making marble do this getting so much liberation of arm and leg and drapery at the same time there's nothing timeless and eternal and generalizable universalizable about the condition of the Lackawon instead a very specific story is being told and it's it's a good story so i'll tell you too Lackawon was a Trojan priest and uh he got into trouble for a number of things there are two different versions of the story i'll tell you just one of them he's the one who said during the Trojan War beware of Greeks bearing gifts when the Greeks presented the Trojan horse this giant wooden horse full of soldiers the Greeks needed to get into the fortified city walls and they couldn't scale them and they couldn't fight through them so they hid inside of a horse and this priest Lackawon said beware beware of them beware of them but Athena who favored the Greeks was very mad at Lackawon so she blinded him but Lackawon kept saying beware of Greeks bearing gifts and so she set serpents upon him and the serpents were to devour him and his children so this is the battle of Lackawon and his children against the serpents bad luck Lackawon a very different subject matter than the subject matter we had in the more classical Greek moment the last topic we're going to talk about today is urban space in ancient Greece i don't know why i'm showing you socrates i'll tell you in a moment why i'm showing you socrates sites like Delphi are not urban sites they're sacred sites these are these are sanctuaries that are specifically located in the landscape charged with the power of the deities that they celebrate but you also have things in ancient Greece like markets and civic buildings and meeting halls and they had their own kind of organization to a certain extent their organization follows the organization of sacred sites a little bit but transforms over time also so this is what the Agora the marketplace of ancient Athens would have looked like during the time of Socrates and during the time of of Pericles let's say here's the Panathenaic way cutting through it and there are kind of odd collection of little buildings here here's a stoa stoa is a long linear building lots of little rooms here maybe you have corn and olives and oil or whatever the goods are that are being sold in the market and this shady colonnade becomes a place for people to meet and talk and exchange ideas some of the things that might happen in the stoa might be somebody like Socrates holding forth and philosophizing and having socratic debates which would be an argument where Socrates never gives the answer but just asks questions leading his interlocutor to come to the answer himself or there might be wrestling matches or boxing matches in the space because there was a belief in ancient Greece that the body and the mind had to be cultivated in tandem or you would not be making sufficient progress so we saw the condition of the Agora in the time of Pericles and you can see as we move forward to the second century BC the first century BC to the second century AD that the Agora gets increasingly filled up with stuff more stoas are added to begin to enclose the space within the enclosure of the space even tighter boundaries of space are made and there was a kind of shifting from Greek space characterized by figural objects to a Roman space characterized by figural voids and this is the discovery that Le Corbusier sketched for us much earlier on this is just a view of the stoa of a telus in Athens and you might be saying wow this is nicely preserved why why is everything else a wreck how did they manage to keep this thing looking so good and the answer is they didn't really manage to keep it looking so good what happened is they reconstructed it they just built a new one they thought they wanted to have one there and that's kind of great if you happen to be an architect you can look around and you can see how it makes an edge to the space how it has a rhythm what kind of light is available inside the space but if you happen to be an archaeologist it's sort of a bad idea because the task of rebuilding it damages the real archaeological evidence and somehow hinders the understanding of future generations to get a more perfect truth of what went on now they built a kind of platform over the archaeological evidence and built this on top of it who knows i like it i wish they rebuilt all the Greek temples they could build some in Ohio a couple more Hellenistic sites that i think are pretty interesting this is Pergamon a Hellenistic town and i think Syria and we can see a lot of the typological pieces that we know here is the piece of the town that we're looking at in more detail over here we have a temple we have a stowa we have a stowa that bends around to become an agora we have a giant altar called the Pergamon altar we have a theater with a number of courtyards and kind of domestic spaces i think that i think is so interesting about the Pergamon town plan is how it almost seems to suggest a transformation from point to line to plane to volume how the pieces in the town of Pergamon seem to be obeying some kind of diplomatic law so that people nowadays could look at this and say wow that's cool and if you're wondering about the Pergamon altar like would you have to go yet with all this difficult political stuff going on no you wouldn't have to because the Germans took it and it's in Berlin in the Pergamon museum i personally think all this stuff should be returned as the military conquests of alexander advanced and more and more new towns got built town planning developed in a way that was much more methodical than the augurs going around and figuring out what the spirit of the place was from from one town to the next and from this period we have our first town planner named hippodamus he gives us the hippodamian town plan hippodamus of moletus had this great idea about the grid and if you look at the town plans of of moletus and priene and you compare them with the kinds of urban space we were seeing in the older town plans it's really quite radical the eccentric condition of the water's edge is met by the grid slamming into it the eccentric condition of a mountain or at least a hill is met by the grid slamming into it it's kind of hyper rationalized you see these town plans again and again in uh hellenistic settlements like moletus or priene or even alexandra which is now in egypt so next time we will continue and discuss rome