Phillip Gibbs

The Style Trap challenges the notion that 'style' is the generator of building form. Since style is the peripheral manifestation of structures perceived visually, style lives only in the past. How then do structures come into being so that on completion they exhibit those qualities sometimes referred to as style ?

PhillipGibbs

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Shige Kawashiro

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Great works of architecture are not contrived to approximate 'the minds's eye' but the forms are generated rationally and in a disciplined manner. Central to the discipline is geometry - the grand strategy for all problem solving.

When the history of architecture is traced in terms of the development of geometry and the ability to apply geometry to built structures, a new model of the architecture of western culture becomes apparent.

The history of architectural geometry in Western culture can be divided into three main periods.

a)Pre-Renaissance
Prior to C15 Italy buildings were conceived using two-dimensional geometry. Take the Pantheon in Rome built apporx.123AD as an example. An argument can be made for the form of the Pantheon being generated by inscribing a circle of 22m on the ground. From the plan walls were projected vertically 22m to form the cylindrical drum. The roof of the structure is a hemispherical dome, radius 22m. As Palladio later discovered, while the resultant form contained a sphere it was achieved by the repetitious use of one dimension. John James' work with French Gothic buildings reveals that two dimensional geometry alone was used as the generator of architectural form throughout the entire middle ages.

b)The Renaissance
When Palladio studied the Pantheon in C16 he did so with a mind that was a product of its time. Florence, the great centre of Renaissance thinking, was a merchant city. The education system equipped the children of the merchant class to follow in their father's footsteps. Mathematics was the basis of the curriculum. The principal skills of commercial mathematics, adapted to C15 business and taught in Florentine schools, directly related to the way articles of trade were perceived. These were volumetric and had to be gauged. The reduction of volume to geometric form is seen in paintings by Paolo Uccello and others and appealed directly to the sensibilities of the merchant.

Armed with the ability to translate physical objects into abstract three-dimensional geometry, the Renaissance architects analysed the standing building of ancient Rome, classified building form on the basis of geometry and designed their own buildings by perconceiving a complex 3D geometric structure from which the building derived its form.

In 1583 Palladio designed 'La Rotunda' as the distillation of the main architectural ideas generated in Italy during the previous century. The body of the building is designed within a cube, each vertex being located in space in this preconceived manner but unapparent to the eye.

The prescriptions devised by the Itallian masters and their masons to ensure the accurate translation of of geometric concept into actual built form were to become the basis of building craft skills for the five hundred years. The crucial craftsmen in Palladio's Italy had been masons. In C19 this role had devolved on the carpenters. The timber house which was essential to european expansion into North America and Australasia is the final flowering of the Renaissance architectural achievement.

c)Post-Renaissance
In 1906 Einstein devised a new model of physical reality 'The General Theory of Relativity' and Picasso painted 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon'which established a perceptual model to supercede the Renaissance perspective system. Antonio Gaudi(1853-1926) made the equivalent breakthrough in architecture when he began to conceive building forms using weighted, suspended models.

Prior to 1900 Gaudi generated building form using 3D geometric principles. The structures he designed after 1900 he claimed were designed in four-dimensions - 'gravity' being his fourth dimension. The use of his modelling system allowed him to maintain rational control over the location of each element of the structure in space.

The concept of 'style' as applied by the art historians designates Gaudi's work as 'Art Nouveau' because of its external appearance. This ignores the reality of the architectural forms he achieved and trivialises the work of a genius of the C20.

It took seventy years before a joint German and Japanese team of engineers scholars undertook research into the form-generation methods devised by Gaudi. This work led to led to the development of tensile structures and grid shells. The design of these structures relies on an ability to predict the impact of gravity of structure for their form.

In a similar way Buckminster Fuller was able to draw on the workings of nature to develope his spherical geodesic geometries. His work which relegates cubic geometry to one class of rather inefficient geometries poses a major challenge for the future. Living in a man-made environment constructed within a 3D orthogonal Renaissance system is a major obstacle in coming to terms with the post-Renaissance. Although the development of information technology and the reduction of cultural barriers is proceeding rapidly it is still almost impossible to apply the great geometric discoveries of C20.

Fuller, like Alexander Graham Bell, used a 60degree coordinate system as structure in its own right. In his major work, 'Synesetics' (subtitled 'Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking') it is clear that he does not restrict its use to spaceframes or geodesics. The Fuller system has the potential to become a more rational deep structure of building form only when designers stop being infatuated with the novelty of the geometries and allow a style, rooted in culture, to emerge.