‘A personal history of European architecture’: a journey across the continent through the beauty of its buildings | Babelia

In A personal history of European architecture (from the Greek temple to the Bauhaus)the architect and professor David Ferrer embarks on a wonderful journey taking as his guide the wise premise of the humanist, architect and Renaissance theorist Leon Battista Alberti, author of Speaking of constructionprinted in 1485: “We write not only for specialists, but for people interested in noble subjects, and it is advisable to intersperse entertaining things from time to time.”

Ferrer thus draws a clairvoyant drawing that goes from the Greek temple to the modern movement of the 20th century. It is not a book of pure architectural criticism; It is, on the contrary, a celebration of constructive efforts, of the evolution of the ideal of beauty, of the currents and styles that have marked history. Since architecture requires our presence to be understood, Ferrer offers a well-illustrated and stimulating panorama of European architecture from antiquity to the avant-garde, inviting us to see and read about the cities, the materials, the architects and, above all, the buildings and the use made of them by man, the true recipients of architecture.

From the cultural transformations of Athens to Alvar Aalto’s Paimio sanatorium, we travel with growing interest across European geography through the buildings and styles that have determined our way of living and observing.

Let us therefore start from the Greeks, who considered the human being at the center of all things and poured their artistic potential into the temples which were taken as a reference for their perfection, which linked order and proportions. The public life of the polis also required long naves closed with wooden roofs, called theseaswhich soon hosted meetings of popular philosophers we now call Stoics. Figures like Phidias brought a miraculous beauty to sculpture, which played a fundamental role in architecture.

The Hellenistic era (after Alexander the Great) gave rise to the first planned cities and the improvement of private homes. The Romans, more organized than cultured, gave a definitive change to terrestrial communications, imitated the Greeks and transformed Rome into a true imperial capital based on large public buildings conceived as artistic monuments. There is the Pantheon, the perfection of the dome and the fascinating oculus that illuminates a temple venerated by Le Corbusier. Symmetry was the Roman way of seeing the world. In the era of Augustus, Marcus Vitruvius published a manual that was miraculously saved: Of architecture, a text with a decisive influence on European architecture. Him bread and circuses that Giovenale spoke of spaces promoted for entertainment: there is the Colosseum.

Fascinating are the chapters dedicated to the architecture of Christianity, whose community ceremonies required the so-called meeting houses domus ecclesiaefrom which the ecclesiathe church, which would spread unstoppably. Of all the Byzantine churches, none compare to Hagia Sophia. The poet Pablo Silenciario defined its dome as “the firmament that rests on the air”. The pedagogical character of the essay spread throughout the Europe of monastic orders, when congregations such as that of Cluny built monasteries to carry out the ora et labora, where the cloisters and cross vaults were perfected. Then will come the fever of the construction of medieval cities, which will give rise to the Europe of cathedrals.

In the 14th century, the legacy of Rome was reborn in Florence: humanist eyes recaptured the glories of Antiquity. And Brunelleschi went so far as to create a modern interpretation of Roman architecture in the Basilica of Santa Croce, with its eternal dome. Renaissance architecture found names like Bramante and Leonardo da Vinci, and then Michelangelo, who would give it an irreversible direction.

Ferrer says that Gothic architecture survived largely thanks to the influence that literature exerted on society: the Gothic novel, based on stories of medieval castles with passages and ghosts, was very popular. Oscar Wilde wrote The Canterville GhostWalter Scott founded the historical novel, and Victor Hugo published it in 1831 Our Lady of Pariswhose protagonist – Notre Dame – is the Gothic cathedral of Paris, described as “the colossal work of a people”.

Against the industrial revolution, William Morris founded the Arts and Crafts movement, betting on the return to craftsmanship, a prelude to art nouveau and the subsequent Vienna School, with the brilliant Adolf Loos who cursed ornamentation. The modern Germany of the Bauhaus, represented by Gropius’s building (the pedagogue) in Dessau – a temple of rationality and functionalism – will open paths of no return for architects such as Mies van der Rohe (the artist and the master).

We are faced with a pulsating and not excessively erudite reading, which does not fail to celebrate knowledge in any of its chapters and which is read with the passion with which one attended an art history course in high school and university. David Ferrer reminds us that architecture, more than a question of technique, is a mirror of what we dream of being. It invites us to listen to those voices of stone, marble or steel which, over the centuries, have tried to tell us who we are. This is perhaps the most human of constructions.