 We're going to be moving to England. We're going to look a little bit at what counted as renaissance architecture in England, and then we're going to look at the English Baroque. There's a strong connection between these European ways of thinking and developments that go on in England. Before we talk about the English Baroque, I think we need to mention for a moment the strongest figure in the English renaissance, and that's Inigo Jones. Inigo Jones is credited really with being a one-man show when it comes to the renaissance, and a lot of that had to do with the fact that he tried to connect as directly as possible with things that were going on in Europe. He traveled. He went to Italy. He looked at developments that were going on there, like Palladio, like Bramante, like Giuliano. He went to the forum. He measured things. He studied antiquities, but he also looked very closely at the works of Italian architects. He learned Italian. He had a copy of Palladio's four books of architecture, and he took extensive notes in the margins. Inigo Jones is bringing Palladio back to England, and he's doing so with a, I think, incredibly good eye for what's interesting about Palladio. Many people look at Palladio, and they take this supermoderan attitude toward it and rationalize it so that it simply becomes a diagram. And I think the things that Inigo Jones took from Palladio had to do with things like the muscularity of the orders, or the exaggerated proportions of cornices or moldings, so that I think you get a very robust architecture out of Inigo Jones. This is Inigo Jones' queen's house in Greenwich, just outside of London. It was originally commissioned by James I for his queen, Anne of Denmark, in 1616, but when the queen died in 1619, work stopped on the house and wasn't picked up again until around 1635, when the new king, Charles I, decided to build it for his queen, Henrietta Maria. You can see how Palladian this is. The plan is almost a perfect square, 115 by 117 feet, and it's the first classical building, or let's say the first consciously classical building constructed on English soil since Roman times. It really is establishing new terrain and making a strong attempt to connect English architecture to developments that were going on on the continent. Very Palladian square with some kind of tartan grid, although this tartan grid actually is less striated and more centric than the ones we've seen elsewhere. Palladian in its disposition of parts and seemingly Palladian in its isolation. As a single villa occupying a really particular site, there's also a very odd thing about the original design of Jones' house, and that is that a road cuts through the middle of it. So this is a little bridge piece, and I find that to be bizarre. If you're going to be the queen and have a house, can't you just put it on either side of the road? It's not a completely unprecedented situation, of course. There is a house by Giuliano da Sangallo in Poggiacchiano, the Villa Medici, and a similar situation happens. You really have basically a double villa, a bar on one side of the road, a bar on the other side of the road, and a road cutting through it. In his extensive travels through Italy, it could be that Jones encountered this villa and thought it would be a perfect solution for the queen's house, because although the buildings we have here between the house and the river come after the construction of the queen's house, there had been an original palace there, the Palace of Placentia, where important monarchs lived, like, say, Queen Elizabeth I, for example. Allowing the house to straddle the road in this very idiosyncratic manner made it possible for the queen to simultaneously have access to the extensive gardens beyond it and to the palace courtyard in front of it. Very clever, and she could do all of this without crossing the road or being seen by travelers who were traversing the road. The Palace of Placentia was falling into ruin and was ultimately demolished in around 1665. By the way, these buildings that we see here were built a bit later by Sir Christopher Wren and his collaborators, John Van Bra and Nicholas Hawksmore. I looked for images of the Palace of Placentia and could not find a plan, but my suspicion is they were nothing like this. At least they were nothing like this in the way that they inflected toward the location of the queen's house. This is something we've seen a lot in the Baroque, this kind of telescoping of space, this echeloning forward, and what's I think so effective about Wren's plan here is how the queen's house completes the axis. It's like the cork in a champagne bottle that in its projection outward, nonetheless refers to and strengthens the linear source from which it came. It's the same technique we saw with the Greek temple church, the Madeleine church at Posterlocke & Kold. There's an absence center. There's a recontextualization of the queen's house in the new context of the royal college. Let's look at this as an example of Palladian architecture. We see a lot of things that we would say are consistent with how Palladia would make a building. For example, we have a kind of tartan grid. We have a basic nine-square organization with support spaces tucked inside. In terms of the elevation, it's fairly good at being Palladian. For example, here is Palazzo Chiricati by Palladia, one of his houses in Vicenza, just at the edge of the town. I think that these two buildings are almost figure-ground reversals of each other. If this is wall, wall, wall, wall, wall, columns in the middle. This is columns, columns, columns, columns, wall in the middle. But it's just a kind of imaginative representation of the diagram of Chiricati. A way of making a portico without adding a portico, understanding the portico as something subtractive within the volumetric block of the building. He's also looking at other Palladio buildings. For example, this is Palladio's Malcontenta, and this is the stair going into the queen's house over here. He's taking that detail also from a Palladian example. I've got to say it doesn't quite get the interiors to be as Palladian as I would like them. This is just an example of a Palladian room. It's just a room in the Villa Pueana. And this is a Inigo-Jones room. You'd say these rooms have nothing in common, but they sort of have something in common. The proportions are the same. The top of the vault and the length to width ratio are the same, but Inigo-Jones just got rid of the vault. Got rid of the vault? There's a kind of austerity in Inigo-Jones' handling of Palladio. He's always simplifying, and it could be that he's practicing a bit later. We're ready some of this desire to purge away the extraneous things in architecture coming into play. And I think that's really clear in this building by Jones, St. Paul Covent Garden. It is, I think, a bizarre-looking building. And what's bizarre about it is, in a sense, it's almost a primitive hut. Palladio talks about the primitive hut in his treatise, so there would have been something in the air about stripping away history and getting to something essential. And you certainly get that here. Look at this. This is wood. These are little slats of wood coming out to support a cornice. These columns have a really exaggerated emphasis that really make them look like they're bulging. And you see this thing, and it really has certain aspects that seem straight out of Palladio's playbook, like, for example, these walls with the arch that pull out from the side and begin to suggest to you that this is not a Roman thing, but this is a dismantling of a block. I think that the abstract simplicity of it gives it great power. Here it's located on Covent Garden right over here, in its original condition. And this is what the plan looks like. This is that strange portico. And this is the back elevation, which is almost stranger than the front elevation, in the attitude about the wall as being something really planer. And when you punch through the wall, you get these strong geometrical figures. And I think another thing that Inigo Jones is doing here that's pretty clever is that he's playing with scale in an interesting way. It's a little church. What are you going to do if you have a little church? And I think he correctly realizes that if he glops on the ornament, it will, in fact, diminish the scale of the church because every little gesture will become smaller and smaller and smaller the more gestures he makes. But by stripping away the ornament and dealing with massing and a few big punches, the general image of this thing becomes more monumental. Just some odd little details. This is where the arch and the block of the building meet, completely different material condition. And this is that situation in Palladio. When Inigo Jones goes to Italy, he doesn't simply look at Palladio for a rational idea about planning space or organizing proportion, but he's also really interested in the language of architecture that comes up during the Manorist period. He's very interested, for example, in Giulio Romano and this kind of robust gutsy language. This is the Banqueting House by Inigo Jones and this is Giulio Romano's house. So ideas about rustication or ideas about varied rhythms between pediments and rounded pediments happen there. Or even this project for the House of Raphael with this really strong rusticated course is something we see again in Inigo Jones. The next generation of architect after Inigo Jones was highlighted by Christopher Wren. Christopher Wren is, in many ways, one of these renaissance men, the likes of which we've been admiring in figures like Alberti and Guarini. He doesn't come into architecture through the practice of architecture, but rather because he's so smart, because he's so good at math. He is asked to undertake a project for fortifications because he's a professor of mathematics. And they figure, well, who's going to be able to build things better than a professor of mathematics? Through that, he becomes increasingly engaged in the work of architecture. He had various responsibilities. He was a professor at Oxford University, professor of astronomy and mathematics. He founded the Royal Society, which was a scientific society where people would get together and share these new discoveries that they're making. One of his great friends was Hook. And if I remember anything from physics, it is that Hook came up with Hook's modulus that tells you how springy his spring is. So you can just imagine these guys sitting around and saying, I've got this great idea for rebuilding London. Wait, wait, wait. Let me tell you about the spring modulus that I have. No, I have this idea about an apple falling. I mean, there are all kinds of interesting people in England sharing ideas, and the Royal Society really became an instrument for the kind of conversation that they could have. That generation exemplified by Christopher Wren turned away from this strong engagement in plasticity and heaviness and rustication and materiality, and instead began to think about architecture in what we might call a modern way, connecting back to the French debate within the academy between the ancients and the moderns. If the ancients looked at precedent, particularly looked at antiquity, and tried to somehow understand the lessons of antiquity and repeat them, then the modern or the moderns were interested in extrapolating theory from the lessons of antiquity and moving forward. The modern were happy to jettison quite a lot of antiquity on the way. Claude Perot, architect of the east front of the Louvre, for example, would go so far as to say you don't even need the orders. The orders are simply a convention. People like the orders because they're used to the orders. But what really matters is material and craft and things that are true in all times, in all places, in all periods. So in Wren's architecture, we don't have the quirky mannerist language anymore, and rather than having a taste for heaviness and the presence of material, Wren specifically becomes interested in lightness and the absence of material. In 1666, there was a fire in London, and the fire in London was devastating. The area in pink represents parts of London that were burnt. And this is basically London. The stuff that didn't get burnt has really no architectural or historical significance all of the main buildings in London burnt. Quite astonishing. Wren had already begun consulting on the expansion of St. Paul's, and when London burnt, within two weeks Wren had prepared plans, which I think is ghoulish, for the rebuilding of London. Let's take this opportunity of the entire city burning down, not simply to make a few minor adjustments in what's going on, not just to build a few little churches. Let's take this opportunity to rebuild in a wholesale fashion. Wren comes up with his first scheme for rebuilding London, which is this one. Nobody liked it very much. Why do you suppose nobody liked this scheme for rebuilding London? Anything wrong with it? Anybody have a response to it? Yes. Looks a lot like Versailles. It looks a lot like Versailles. French do not have big popularity in England. Also, Versailles is ruled by a despot. Louis XIV, great patron of the arts, was also a strong man. And England considers itself a place ruled by citizens. But to take in the diagram of Versailles and make it the new plan for the city was something that people were not very receptive to. Wren came up with a second plan, which is over here, and in this second plan, he begins to make allowances for things, like where certain churches are located, and important monuments are located. Still looks a lot like Versailles, however. We still have things like these emblems of the Sun King, the Grand Point over here or over here. But the diagonals become more interested in making connections across. Nobody liked that one either, I have to say. None of these plans for London were met with great response. I have to say, my favorite plan for London is this one. Hook's plan for London, Wren's friend. Hook says, grid it. Clearly these Baroque diagrams don't make any sense at all. Let's be super rational. Let's be super rational. Let's grid the thing. And actually, it's more nuanced than that. I don't know if you can see, within the grid, there are these little squares that become city parks. So it becomes a gridded system with an alternating rhythm of green space within it to create sub-communities within the large community. And up above this is the burnt area of London as rebuilt by Hook. None of this got done. None of this got done because people owned land. People had interest in certain pieces of property and nobody wanted big diagonal boulevards or even new gridded streets cutting through their city. London got more or less rebuilt as it had been built, but with a certain change in the building requirements that buildings could not be timber. They had to be brick so that they would be more capable of resisting fire. Further to Andrew's comment that it looks a lot like Versailles, this is the second Ren plan that still looks a lot like Versailles with these diagonal boulevards and so forth. The fact that Ren couldn't rebuild all of London didn't stop him from continuing work that he had already begun on St. Paul's. This is the characteristic form of St. Paul's, the one we're familiar with, the one that graces the skyline of London today. In fact, when Christopher Ren first became familiar with the project, it was a ramshackle 13th century Gothic cathedral in such bad repair that the steeple was falling down and it was perilous to occupy. When the fire of 1666 destroyed it and here's a contemporary sketch showing you St. Paul's in ruins, Ren was already lined up to begin work on a new church. One of the little stories that goes along with this is that Ren was walking through the smoldering debris of the demolished building and he picked up a little piece of a gravestone that had fallen off and this said Re Surgam, which is Latin for I Shall Rise Again. That became his motto for the project of reconstructing out of the ashes of St. Paul's. He had a couple of projects and of course Ren wasn't an architect so he's sort of figuring all this out as he goes along. He was a smart person and he was also a polymath, which means somebody who's interested in everything and in that capacity he had gone to Paris in 1665 right before the fire and poked around and what could one see in Paris in 1665? Well, projects for the Louvre were under foot. Bernini was in Paris at the time and Ren desperately wanted to take a look at the drawings for the new Louvre. He wanted to meet Jules-Hardouin-Minsard. He wanted to meet Bernini and he was really nobody. He was not the great architect of the great St. Paul's at the time. He was simply some mathematician puttering around. When he got back to London and began seriously undertaking projects for the rebuilding his early schemes were a bit naive but by the time he got to his third project called the Great Model Project he had come up with full flowering Baroque. Kind of spectacular. I mean this is not so different one might say, at least in ambition he had for St. Peter's. Centralized plan, a series of smaller scaled chapels surrounding that with a slight extension toward the longitudinal even in the manner of St. Peter's as a giant dome surrounding this. This is Ren's favorite scheme of all the schemes for St. Paul's so much so that he had something called the Great Model made and why is it called the Great Model? It's called the Great Model because it's a great model 15 feet tall and 21 feet long could open this thing up and stand inside it to experience the space. To Ren's great disgust this project was rejected as too Romish which I think probably meant too Roman Catholic-ish and they really wanted him to come up with something that was more more specifically British it was heartbreaking because this thing cost a fortune. So this was Ren's next project called the Warrant Design Ugh! Give me a break. It looks like what Ren is trying to do here is to harness these continental Baroque impulses that are expressed so strongly in the Great Model plan and to make something that uses classical language but still reprises a kind of gothic image. You think back at the image of old St. Paul's cathedral with a tall pokey tower in the middle of a Latin cross plan the Warrant Design more or less gives you that and here's a plan for the old St. Paul's you can see that it is like many English perpendicular style gothic cathedrals comprised of orthogonal lines with a simple tower at the crossing. The Warrant Design was actually accepted and Ren undertook to build the Warrant Design or at least he promised that he would build this project for St. Paul's but no sooner did foundations get laid than he began to change the project into the one that we now know which is a more robust plan instead of the spindly tower a big gutsy dome but it's funny given how the Warrant Design originated in a reconnection to the gothic roots of old St. Paul's that Ren goes out of his way to disguise any trace of that gothic ancestry happy to deploy elements that look like they derive from the Louvre the paired columns and the pediment happy to use things that look like they derive from even the Tempietta over here for the dome but when it comes to the constructional logic of the building when it comes to things like the structure of the dome the fact that there is this conical brick dome that supports the real structure of the vault through its paraboloid geometry these kinds of things he disguises this is what you get in the space between the vaults you have timber tying the brick conical shell to the outer shell and thereby giving you a kind of deep system that allows this thin element to nonetheless span a great deal or here where we see the flying buttresses hidden behind these walls that work to create this solid massing and clear image of the building it ends up looking kind of like this and if we look at this we would say well it's kind of a Latin cross it's kind of a Latin cross the crossing of which has slipped kind of toward the middle so it straddles this territory of being kind of centralized and kind of longitudinal which is pretty clever in fact the whole church is pretty clever and what makes it so clever is that Ren in fact was this mathematician Ren was this guy who enjoyed the problem of figuring out how to make a dome how to move static forces through a building also how to play with the appearance of that dome to give it a sense of lightness look at a couple of things like look at the way the plan works we have these structural elements that become extended almost like thin walls like bits of wall so that when moving through the aisle you would read it as column and it would go away it would seem thin when you get to the actual space of the dome and look in all directions it would seem thin the structure holding up Ren's dome is composite it's all this stuff it's this corner tower stair tower it's these two thin walls and it's the scooped out spacing between there's a lot of robust structure there but it's not robust structure that you can actually see so Ren makes it miraculous you have to say God I wish I liked Christopher Ren more it's just sort of sad that I don't like him more and I think what I don't like about Ren I like him a lot let me say that but the thing that disquietes me about Ren is that he does have this modern sensibility hyper rationalizing and draining out the guttiness of the architectural language if we admire this rawness in the architectural language in Inigo Jones you're certainly not getting it here you get this real delicate language this real hyper refinement to my own sensibility is harder to love so I love the structure I love the virtuosity of it but when I actually look at the surfaces it does not move me we'll come back to Ren's dome but I just want to show you a couple of other domes that I think you probably like a lot Pantheon dome Brunelleschi's dome in the cathedral in Florence and Michelangelo's domes at St. Peter's these are the three domes that everybody making a dome will have to come to terms with we saw that the Pantheon dome had a limited ability to be light and thin because of its ability as a half circle and because of its nature as a compression dome with these stacked rings that required a continuous perimeter wall the kind of dematerialization at the base that Ren succeeds in achieving couldn't happen with that kind of dome we see here that in the Brunelleschi dome there's an increased verticality which is great because that begins to allow the loads to transfer more directly to the earth we also see that Brunelleschi has this double dome system going on so that the two shells work in tandem to create a structure that is stiffer than either one of the two domes would be or stiffer than all that material would provide if it was just together without the air in between and when we get to Michelangelo's dome we get something that seems to borrow principles from both of these domes a good Renaissance guy might look at the Brunelleschi dome and say, wow, where's the circle? how come this is not representing the sphere anymore this is just pointy stuff this is missing the boat Michelangelo has a double dome also and he manages to pump up the top part of the dome and then also slip down the lower part of the dome so that the geometry of the interior dome is more spherical but the structural value of the dome takes advantage of the increased verticality to do the same kind of work that Brunelleschi is doing here in addition, Michelangelo begins to deploy a technique begun in a limited way with Brunelleschi but he really uses it in a wholesale fashion and that is to add chains chains that act intention to resist lateral thrust instead of just relying on massive walls to resist thrust and compression what does our friend Cusferendu here's his dome it's a pretty fabulous dome it's a pretty smart dome and we see anything that's going on? for one thing, if you like your circles he's giving you a pretty spherical appearance of a dome on the inside and a pretty spherical appearance of a dome on the outside but in between them he has this kind of conic section holding them together and this is really smart the shape of this is the shape, the natural shape of the dome there is this term catenary which I will demonstrate to you using this cord see how it works? this cord is too stiff it doesn't work very well but a naturally loaded cable when you hold it like this will droop and the droop is the natural shape of the catenary and if you were to flip it and make it into an arch it would be the most efficient shape for the dome the geometry of the middle shell that Ren gives you is picking up on the geometry of the catenary becoming the most efficient shape Ren is simultaneously doing something incredibly clever in terms of the structure and then hiding it paying no attention to the fabulously shaped middle dome I'm going to just show you these perfect models of the celestial sphere set systematically like over here too this is the nave of Saint Paul look what he's got he uses something that looks very much like a flying buttress that you would have seen in Gothic architecture but instead of expressing it and deriving a language from these things he's happy to conceal it he's happy to give you this sense of lightness he's happy to give you these elevations that reveal order and clarity and strong geometric forms rather than the dematerialized that you would get from some kind of Gothic envelope in the same way that he masks the true geometry of the dome with these inner shells so he's a little bit of a weasel you would have to say or rather he's not interested in expressing the structure that's not what he's interested in the meaning of his building doesn't come from the expression of structure but through things like proportions the correct use of the orders and these very perfect loaded with meaning geometries he puts a magnificent dome, a giant dome on the crossing of the plan and goes out of his way to make structure seem to disappear in one sense he does that by organizing these thin slivers of wall not so that you read the bulk of the wall but that you read the thinness of the wall as you progress through the nave or by conceiving of the structure as this triangular pier much of which has been evacuated and scooped out so you get a sense of lightness at every moment Wren will conceal the true structure in the interest of giving you a perfect geometry or a sense of lightness we see here the dome for example where Wren because he's so smart because he's such a good mathematician because he's figuring things out in the royal society where all the smartest people in England Wren reinvents the dome really and gives us this triple dome which is tensile in many ways that lower dome is hung from this middle dome the geometry of which is derived from the perfect catenary arch if you look at the actual shape of this thing hovering above here you would have to say he's looking at sources not simply for their structural value but also for their their formal appearance this the dome of Wren almost looks like a giant tempietto sitting on top of the church we have this tholos thing with column column column and another volume pulling up in between it it's different from the Michelangelo dome the Michelangelo dome has this lively double rhythm this kind of syncopation going on and this is much much more of a kind of archeological dome it's like same same same same same quite spectacular and really quite disengaged from the body of the church it's just just sitting there let's look at a few more elements in Wren's church this is the main portico looks to me like Wren has been to Paris and in fact Wren has been to Paris Wren went to Paris when Bernini was working for Louis XIV and looked at Bernini's drawings for the Louvre and he came away from Paris having looked at these fabulous curvilinear muscular drawings of concave and convex volumes popping out of each other and concluded there are only two correct positions for lines horizontal and vertical if you cannot have a horizontal or a vertical line then it should be at a 45 degree angle there's hyper-rationality going on in Wren as an aside during the Blitzkrieg when London was attacked by bombs St. Paul's in the centre of London was an obvious target and throughout all those bombings it did not fall and it became a symbol of endurance another thing that happened during the great fire of London was a lot of the parish churches burnt down and in fact there was a commission to build 50 new parish churches and Wren participated in this and built quite a lot of these churches himself this was just one of them St. Mary Lestrand in London and I like his parish churches quite a lot and I think that when you're building on a small scale you have to use some of the tricks that we saw Inigo Jones using at Covent Garden and that is you pump up the scale you decide that you can't do everything so you do a few things in a fairly dramatic way these are just some of the plans that Wren did in his city church and what I really like about these plans and these churches they're small enough so that they're not too hard to solve as structural problems and so Wren becomes fairly virtuoso in what he's doing with the structure in fact you look at a lot of these plans and you see things that look like in different fields of columns like this could be the structure of a parking garage with column, column, column, column what Wren does is within this uniform field of column he will float sectional figures so there will be this kind of double pull between ordinary at the ground plane and extraordinary in terms of the vaulting and again he's using these composite systems where these little columns that apparently have no value collaborate with a perimeter condition to create a support that can actually make these things work this is just a drawing of Wren's London churches with St. Paul's hovering in the background the church of St. Lawrence Jewry is one of the many churches here's its plan and you look at the plan and you think same, same, same, same, same you can see that there is this vault that is situated above this row of columns in a way that begins to give special significance to the central space but the greatest of all of these Wren City churches is St. Stephen Walbrook this is really, really a wonderful church the plan is a hall, a hall church and remember the debate that everybody in Italy is having shall we make it centralized shall we make it longitudinal shall we make it a Latin cross and in a sense Wren does all those things here inside a box and that's kind of great he floats a really big dome over here kind of getting three skinny little columns to work together to support the thing he plays with the Columbiation same, same, same big, same, same same, big, same to give you a cross and of course there's a long access to it and it's also a hall so there's sort of four church typologies superimposed on this one fairly simple organization and the dome is really, really great and you really have this sense of miracle like how can a dome like that be supported on something that apparently has no substance whatsoever no more substance than an ordinary column just here's St. Stephen Wallbrook and many similar domed figures float in other churches next time we'll continue talking about England we'll be looking at two architects who began their careers working with Wren and who branched off into their own directions