‘Archaeological architecture from Solomon’s time’

    

A study published this month in Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology calls ashlar stone masonry “an elite style of architecture” that reveals clues into the time of David and Solomon.

“Royal Architecture in the Iron Age Levant,” by Madeleine Mumcuoglu and Yosef Garfinkel, identifies “six prominent characteristics of the royal style.” The stone masonry is counted with:

• volute capitals;
• decorated bases;
• rectangular roof beams;
• recessed openings of doors and windows; and
• window balustrades

The researchers, both from Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Institute of Archaeology, credit finds at Khirbet Qeiyafa, an ancient fortress twenty miles south of Jerusalem, for catalyzing this particular focus, but they discuss evidence from around the Levant.

“In the Kingdom of Israel, large and splendid architectural complexes associated with especially fine buildings with ashlar masonry were uncovered at Samaria, Megiddo, Dan, and Hazor, royal centers dating from the 9th-8th centuries BCE,” the study reports.

“The beginning of royal architecture took place very early in Judah, much earlier than any of the other political units known in the Levant,” it says in conclusion. “This early appearance in the Kingdom of Judah may surprise some scholars, but such royal architecture is mentioned in the biblical tradition in relation to David’s palace, Solomon’s palace, and Solomon’s temple.”

Read the paper here.

     

‘Architecture order demolished’

     

J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington, DC. Is there a reason why the headquarters of the FBI has to resemble some Eastern Bloc state security ministry?

Executive Order 13967 has been demolished, razed, bulldozed, etc.

That was the document signed in December by then President Donald Trump for the purpose of resetting standards of aesthetics in the designs of certain future federal government buildings. It would have given preference to Classical styles over the shit we have that, for example, looks like it was transplanted from 1972 East Berlin.

Oh well. It was a good idea. (Based on what I’ve seen on social media, I realize that some of you don’t understand how it’s about national identity. The public buildings created for us are expressions of who we are. So, when the architecture looks like it has been copied from a science fiction movie about dystopia, it negates the esteem in which we ought to regard ourselves, and that contributes to the many forms of social collapse we are witnessing every day.)

Background here and here.

    

‘The human being and architecture’

     

The Institute of Classical Architecture and Art offers a free lecture Thursday night on, what a Freemason might call, the essentials of Wisdom, Strength, and Beauty in architecture.

(In Masonic theory, to link architectural integrity to the human form, it may be useful to recollect the Apprentice’s Perfect Points of Entrance and the Master’s—formerly the Fellow’s—Five Points of Fellowship, among other ritual elements in the lodge.)

From the publicity:

The ancient Vitruvian analogy between the human being and architecture was reconsidered in the Early Renaissance, most profoundly by Leon Battista Alberti. His writings emphasize the role of a human being as an ideal type, worthy of representation in the visual arts. According to Alberti, beauty in architecture is innate, which means that a person cannot help but respond in a positive way to a well proportioned building. Alberti even believed that if an army were to enter a city with the intention of destroying it, but the buildings were beautiful, the warriors would lay down their weapons and act in a peaceful manner. This utopian theory provides insight into architecture’s extraordinary role of maintaining civic life. In his theoretical writings, Alberti assisted architects by outlining the steps to be followed when designing a building.

This premier of a video course presented by Peter Kohane, Senior Lecturer of Architecture at UNSW Sydney, will review Alberti’s principles and discuss both their relation to the architecture of the Renaissance and how they can be applied to architectural debates today. The video premiere will be followed by live Q&A with Dr. Kohane.

What You Will Learn

• Alberti’s principles, including the steps involved in making a classical building.
• That an architect in the Renaissance strived to create forms which accord with the constitution of a human being.
• That a building by Alberti was intended to have a positive impact on a beholder, which involved acting in a civilized manner within the city.
• How to invoke Alberti’s ideas to clarify the nature of debates in the present about architecture and the city.

Register here.

     

‘Trump issues architecture order’

     

Hey, who said the Five Orders of Architecture are dead?

President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order yesterday to determine the architectural styles that may be employed in constructing certain federal government buildings in the future.

The “Executive Order on Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture” specifies how all U.S. government courthouses and agency headquarters, all federal public buildings in Washington, DC, and all other federal buildings that will cost $50 million or more shall be built in “such styles as Neoclassical, Georgian, Federal, Greek Revival, Beaux-Arts, and Art Deco.”

This will be undone by the next president. The short-lived Executive Order will be a conscientious objection to the Comecon-style concrete and the schizophrenic steel and glass impositions that have prevailed for generations.

In promoting Classical architecture, Trump lauds historical figures, including some who are significant to Freemasonry, including Palladio, Christopher Wren, John Soane, and John Russell Pope.

Read all about it here.

For some background from February, click here.

     

‘White House said to be drafting architecture executive order’

     

Courtesy Khan Academy

By Operative Masonry, we allude to a proper application of the useful rules of architecture, whence a structure will derive figure, strength, and beauty, and whence will result a due proportion and a just correspondence in all its parts. It furnishes us with dwellings and convenient shelter from the vicissitudes and inclemencies of seasons; and while it displays the effects of human wisdom, as well in the choice as in the arrangement of the sundry materials of which an edifice is composed, it demonstrates that a fund of science and industry is implanted in man, for the best, most salutary, and beneficent purposes.

Middle Chamber Lecture
Grand Lodge of New York


A flurry of media reports last week claim a presidential executive order is being drafted that would make neo-classical the sole style of architecture for most future federal government buildings.

The president of the United States is empowered by law to issue executive orders to govern operations of the Executive Branch of the federal government. Donald Trump has made three such orders in 2020, but that being discussed in the media is not among them.

Predictably, most media coverage is not only negative, but also near hysterical. The story broke February 4 in Architectural Record. The next day, ArtNet News reports:


In a new executive order that’s quickly drawing comparisons to fascist ideology, President Trump plans to re-integrate “our national values into Federal buildings.”

Titled “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again,” the order seeks to rewrite the Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture to ensure that the “classical architectural style shall be the preferred and default style” for new buildings, according to Architectural Record, which obtained a draft of the document.

The order denounces the quality of architecture since the Guiding Principles were first issued in 1962 by former New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and cites Brutalism and Deconstructivism as examples. It specifically calls out the U.S. Federal Building in San Francisco, the U.S. Courthouse in Austin, and the Wilkie D. Ferguson, Jr. U.S. Courthouse in Miami in particular for having “little aesthetic appeal.”

Courtesy fbi.gov

J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, DC.

Courtesy sf.curbed.com

U.S. Federal Building in San Francisco.

Courtesy miaminewtimes.com

Wilkie D. Ferguson, Jr. U.S. Courthouse in Miami.

The New York Times, which would advocate for cancer if the Trump-appointed Surgeon General of the United States discovered its cure, offers this headline on its Art & Design Section last Friday:

MAGA War

on Architectural Diversity

Weaponizes Greek Columns

For God’s sake.

The Art Newspaper, quoting Pulitzer-winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger, says:


Many policies that we’re seeing now seem to be about exclusion, and now it’s in the realm of architecture. It’s a terrible mistake and it’s inconsistent with an enlightened, liberal democracy. Perhaps it was a mistake to think that architecture would not come under this spotlight.


Conversely, writing in the Wall Street Journal, Myron Magnet, author and winner of the National Humanities Medal, explains:


Architectural classicism is a living language, not an antiquarian straitjacket. Its grammar of columns and capitals, pediments and proportions allows a wide range of expression. Just look at the original genius with which Michelangelo marshaled that language in his era or Christopher Wren in his. It’s a language that constantly updated itself in America’s federal city, from the handsome 1790s White House to John Russell Pope’s sublime 1940s Jefferson Memorial and National Gallery of Art. In the language of classicism, buildings relate civilly to each other, forming harmonious cities—Venice or pre-World War II London—in which the whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts, however beautiful some may be. A bad classical building may be awkward or uninspired; it is never hideous. And all is based on human proportions and human scale.

Not so for the modernism that the proposed executive order discourages. Though modernism is an odd word for a style that’s now almost a century old, it began with an explicit European rejection of American architecture and a thoroughly 20th-century impulse toward central planning and state control. Modernism brought housing projects so bare and standardized that no worker wanted to live in them.


In City Journal, Catesby Leigh, past founding chair and fellow of the National Civic Art Society (which supports the executive order) writes:


One thing to be borne in mind at this politically charged juncture in our national life is that classicism is not an “ideology,” as some critics are charging. It is a formal language, with a vocabulary and syntax—originating with the classical column and its superstructure—geared to the idealization of structure in anthropomorphic terms. In other words, the classical language makes its appeal to us as embodied beings. It has shown itself supremely adaptable to changing social and technological conditions, and thoroughly receptive to regional inflections. Classicism is not, and never has been, a closed system. And it should come as no surprise that it has been used (and abused) by political regimes from one end of the ideological spectrum to the other.