Just want to drop in during this relaxed standards moment and say,

This is the best Sub on reddit.

Thanks!

I'll kick things off with my response to the question: Has architecture always been as philosophical as modern architecture?

When you say “philosophical”, what you are really referring to is the corpus of polemical texts called architectural theory.

Architectural theory is what has historically separated architecture from the mere act of building. It can be descriptive or prescriptive (and, occasionally, proscriptive). It serves as a didactic tool within the discipline of architecture. Most architectural theory is authored by architects, but others--including historians, critics, and social reformers--also participate in the discourse. The questions architectural theory seek to answer include: Who is an architect, and how do they operate? What is the proper education for an architect? What is beauty in architecture? What are ideal forms? What is the social function of architecture? What is the relationship of ornament to structure?

The subjects of architectural theory have included aesthetics, materials, program, education, social and political roles of architecture and architects, and the relationship of architecture to other forms of human knowledge. Architects can, of course, express many of these ideas through their designs, but theory offers an alternative method to transmit thoughts through text and to express what might have been otherwise.

Architectural theory is a 2,000-year-old tradition in the West, beginning with the first complete architectural treatise to survive from Antiquity: De Architectura of Vitruvius. Vitruvius’ Ten Books introduced the concepts of firmitas (structural integrity or firmness), utilitas (utility or commodity), and venustas (beauty or delight). It explored practical matters of engineering and construction as well as offered philosophical musings on design and decoration.

The reappraisal, printing, and translation of Vitruvius' writing during the Renaissance provoked other architects to offer their own theoretical treatises, including Leon Battista Alberti's De Re Aedificatoria of 1485. Alberti engaged with Vitruvius' foundational principles, including his description of the classical orders. The rediscovery of the forms and rules of classical architecture was at the core of architectural theory over the proceeding two and a half centuries.

With the Enlightenment, architectural theory turned to the critical self-evaluation of architecture and the architect. Treatises like the Jesuit priest Marc-Antoine Laugier's 1753 Essai sur l'architecture explored the origins of the building arts and questioned the superior status of classical forms. This period marked a shift from the uncritical imitation of Greece and Rome and, arguably, the emergence of modern architecture.

Architectural theory entered a new stage in this period, as the cross-cultural circulation of information expanded. New archeological discoveries, such as at Pompeii, also leant weight to those who sought to interrogate the received knowledge of classical superiority. During this period, rationalism emerged. It sought to establish concrete principles for architectural designs based not upon the received wisdom of the ancients but on logical reasoning grounded in scientific observation. Key at this moment was the placement of structure at the center of architectural inquiry.

The nineteenth century saw further investigation of structure, especially as to how it related to program and how it determined the selection of building materials. Theorists like Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc sought to develop new building types and apply new construction technologies. A series of stylistic revivals--including Greek, Gothic, Renaissance, and Egyptian--provoked a crisis. In what style shall we build? This was the question on architects' minds, and the rejection of such eclecticism birthed a new style: modernism.

With modernism, architecture entered a new era of polemics. Paralleling developments in politics, economics, and the arts, architects published their own manifestos calling for radical change. These debates lead us to the period covered in William J. R. Curtis' text. He chose to begin his survey at the turn of the twentieth century (though he does include a cursory summary of architectural theory since Laugier) and begins with the debate over ornament during the development of Art Nouveau and the famous dictum of Louis Sullivan: form ever follows function. Curtis identifies this theoretical shift as key to the development of modern architecture.

Other historians, such as Nikolaus Pevsner, Siegfried Giedion, and Alan Colquhoun, have also chosen this moment to begin their surveys of modern architecture. But some, including Emil Kaufmann, Peter Collins, and Kenneth Frampton, chose to extend their studies back to the period of the Enlightenment and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. Harry Mallgrave places the beginning of modern architectural history during the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in the mid- to late-seventeenth century, while Alexander Tzonis and Lianne Lefaivre go even further back, starting their “documentary history” of modern architecture in the 10th century A.D.

Each of these authors is clear that their decision to pinpoint the beginnings of modern architecture when and where they have rests not only upon the form and function of buildings of the period but also upon the theoretical production of architects, historians, and critics at the time. Modern architecture is defined by breaking with the past, an act that is always imbued with philosophical questions.

SOURCES:

Kruft, Hanno-Walter. A History of Architectural Theory: from Vitruvius to the Present. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994.

Mallgrave, Harry F. Modern Architectural Theory: A Historical Survey, 1673-1969. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Tournikiotis, Panayotis. The Historiography of Modern Architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999.

I've written several answers about Soviet architecture in the past, especially about how it showcased ideology on the Moscow Metro, so if anyone wants to read one of those, I do have them pinned on my user page. However, I'm not going to repost them here, if only to save trees.

No, instead, I just wanted to let everyone know about one of the most beautifully niche websites I recently discovered: www . tipdoma .com/. (In Russian, but Google Translate handles it well.)

Basically, Soviet apartment buildings were all built according to plans, as one might expect, and all of these plans were, well, centrally planned. That is, construction enterprises all drew on a library of model apartments that had been drawn up and filed away by architects, and picked them out depending on what was considered fitting for the neighborhood, the climate, the materials and knowledge and labor at hand, and so on.

As a result, Soviet apartments are often looked on as dull, bland, uniform, cookie-cutter architecture that blighted cities across the former USSR. But it also means that, if you want to get into it, every single Soviet apartment building falls into a specific "series". And on tipdoma.com, you can enter a few characteristics and find out, with pictures, what series of apartment fit your characteristics.

For example, I lived in a блочный building — it doesn't translate well, and not for poetic reasons, but basically there's a massive engineering and architectural difference between small square panels that fit together around each window and balcony (image: https://gsps . ru/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/ii-05-01bl.jpeg), which are actually not panels at all in Russian, but блоки ("blocks"), on the one hand, and full-wall панели (true "panels"), which are sheets of prefab concrete with cutouts for windows already in them (image: https:// s0.rbk . ru/v6_top_pics/media/img/6/18/756109146597186.jpg), on the other.

I lived in a блочный building, though, so I select that from the drop-down. I'm pretty sure it was built in the 1970s, or possibly '80s, but I select '70s anyways. It was in Moscow, so I select that (some series were all-union) and it had 14 floors, not including the ground floor, so I select an этажность ("floorness"! We need this concept in English!) of 10-15. I suppose it's technically a Brezhnevka, and that was how I found it at first, before I understood the difference between блоки and панели, but this is a better way to narrow the search. At any rate, when I enter this search, it gives me a full page of results that don't look my building at all, but then on the top of page 2, I get a near-perfect match: an И-209а. (Link: https://tipdoma . com/2009/10/blochnaya-seriya-i209a/#more-440)

Some series of housing were actually quite diverse even within themselves; 1-447's (image: https://tipdoma . com/2010/02/doma-serii-1-447/), for example, could have three, four, five, nine, or twelve stories. Others were weirdly geographically specific; II-14's (link: https://tipdoma . com/2009/08/pyatietazhnye-doma-ii-14/) only ever seem to have been built in Moscow and several small satellite cities within Moscow oblast, and И-491A's (link: https://tipdoma . com/2009/12/seriya-i-491a/) follow a similar pattern except that they were built, for some reason, in Rostov-na-Donu. Ukraine and Belarus were also privileged, if you want to think of it like that, with several series that are to be found nowhere else in the former USSR. Sometimes that's because they were actually designed in Kiev or Minsk, like the Ukrainian БК-4 (link: https://tipdoma . com/2010/02/seriya-bk-4/).

И-440а's, now that we have some context, are pretty consistently confined to Moscow and the surrounding oblast, but were also built in Sergiev Posad, and are consistently 14 stories. Each floor followed this plan (image: https://tipdoma . com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/i209a_p.jpg), to which I can attest to from experience; I was in the apartment on the "bottom" of the diagram, second from the left, in the left-most room, which was, however, not quite as big as in that diagram; I think the doorway might have been moved back to give the foyer more space, and I don't know if that was an on-the-spot innovation, a consistent revision that they can't find a plan to illustrate, or a later modification.

At any rate, that's some trivia about Soviet architecture, this time from the decidedly less ideological side of things. I mean, you can go Žižek all you want, and I quite like to do so myself, but sometimes, people just nerd out about obscure technical details of Soviet apartment buildings, and I'm quite glad to have found a resource of that.

Edit: yes, the naming conventions are wildly variable. I don't know either.

Edit 2: it appears reddit now blocks any post with . ru links in it. I've edited this comment so that you can copy and paste the links to images of the various series of apartments if you so wish. I can only assume this is a result of the Russian invasion. Now, to be clear, I am opposed to foreign invasions of Ukraine, including this one, and I am in favor of removing and deplatforming trolls. I post on r/askhistorians, for crying out loud. But this is ridiculous, and frankly insulting. Way to go, guys. Consent-manufacturing machine go brrr.

Much of my career as a state historic preservation officer and as chair of the National Historic Landmarks Committee dealt with architecture and the way buildings can be "read" to help us understand the past. Just as documents provide information about what once happened, archaeology and buildings - "material culture" - can tell us a great deal from another perspective.

My book, Virginia City: Secrets of a Western Past (Nebraska, 2012) was a 30-year retrospective on dealing with material culture in a national historic landmark district. Chapter 2 – available with this link – discusses the specific role of buildings in helping us to understand historical periods, offering information that is not always available with the written word.

It is easy to recognize that historic buildings can be evocative of the past. This can be a powerful way to “touch” history, but these resources can also preserve information and offer insights unavailable through other means.

Among the gentry and nobility of the Georgian era was there a prestige associated with older manors? Would a family choose to remodel rather than build to keep their house "old"?

I have a friend who lives in Dublin, Ireland and we've established an annual tradition: when the weather gets dark and cold in her neck of the woods (autumn and winter), we exchange facts about Dublin. This is a short essay I wrote about the monkeys playing billiards on the facade of the National Library of Ireland:

Saw this on a random page of Dublin oddities and got curious.

On the facade of the National Library of Ireland, at 2-3 Kildare St, facing Kildare St Hotel is a column that has at its base a sculpture of 3 monkeys playing billiards. Why monkeys? Why playing billiards? How'd they get there?

In November 1782, the Kildare Street Club purchased a house built by Sir Henry Cavendish on land brought from the 20th Earl of Kildare, later the 1st Duke of Leinster. The Kildare Street Club was set up as a members-only club for upper-class Anglo-Irish Protestants. 4 yrs later, the club purchased the house next door, thus extending their original club house.

In 1858, the members decided to build a new club house as they'd outgrown the original at 6 Kildare St. The new L-shaped club house was built after 3 existing houses on Kildare St and 1 on Leinster St had been demolished and the club planned to move premises in 1861. The original club house caught on fire on November 11, 1860 and all the club's pictures, furniture, and its library of 15,000 books were destroyed. This forced the club to move into the new building before completion.

After the fire, architect Benjamin Woodward was engaged to design a new club. This is when the sculpture of the monkeys playing billiards was created but there are conflicting stories as to who actually sculpted them: the O'Shea Brothers (James and John) being most cited with Charles W Purdy and Charles W Harrison being credited as well. The case for the O'Sheas is due to the similar carvings they'd executed for the Museum of Natural History in Oxford 1858-60 - animal and plants for the interior and exterior of the building.

The sculpture itself is interpreted to be a satirical comment abt the Kildare clubbers and their class. Another theory is that the animals were thought to be a parody of university rituals, done after the O'Sheas were fired from their Museum of Natural History job - they'd been accused of the same sort of mockery there.

The current location of the pillar is (in the window of) 1 Kildare St. The Kildare Street Club merged w the Dublin University Club in 1976 and moved to 17 St Stephen's Green. However, the club still owns 1 Kildare St and currently leases the location to the Alliance Française and a heraldic museum.

References:

National Library of Ireland: 2/3 Kildare St

Double Take: The mystery of the billiard-playing monkeys at the National Library of Ireland

The controversy surrounding the Kildare Street Club monkeys

archiseek - 1860 – Kildare Street Club, Kildare Street, Dublin

Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain & Ireland 1851-1951 - James O'Shea

I've been reading a lot of Christopher Alexander, and was reminded of my passion for his work with his recent passing. Does anyone have any insight into how his work was received when he wrote it decades ago? Were his opinions on design as fresh as they seem to me, or do I miss important context? Are there any texts you may know that touch on the environment as he affected it?

I've also heard about several other important architects in the urban design sphere, primarily Americans in the late 20th century. Open to hearing more of anything either branching from this or supplanting it!