A Universal Language in Stone and Steel: Architectural Poetics, Globally Considered
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- Опубликовано: 10 окт 2020
- Professor Nathaniel Walker, Ph.D., presents a lecture introducing students to a broader conception of the "classical," in this recording from June 2019. Nathaniel posts the argument that classicists working today would do well to demonstrate how their work speaks a universal language of value to the greater human family.
When one hears the phrase “classical architecture,” it is usually the forms of the Classical Mediterranean that come to mind: Greco-Roman columns and pediments, with perhaps a sprinkling of Egyptian pyramids and a dash of Assyrian tile. There are, however, other cultural periods that have been described as “classical”-scholars speak of Classical Chinese culture, the Classic Maya, and the Classical period of Ile-Ife in ancient Nigeria. Great achievements in art and architecture have taken place all over the world, and there are striking similarities between different traditions, including the architectural poetics of structural elaboration, human-scaled proportion, and ornamental pattern. These similarities are meaningful, because they point to the kinship shared by all human beings.
About the Instructor:
Dr. Nathaniel R. Walker is Assistant Professor of Architectural History at the College of Charleston. He earned his Ph.D. at Brown University in the History of Art and Architecture, an MA in Architectural History from the Savannah College of Art and Design, and a BA in History (with a minor in German) at Belmont University.
Nathaniel specializes in the history of public space such as squares and streets, particularly in the United States and Europe, but he has also worked with the urban forms of the Classic Maya and with Chinese Daoist architectural representations. He has focused many of his studies on the relationships between architecture, urban planning, and utopian dreams of progress and futurity that proliferated in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, film, advertising, and other media.
Nathaniel’s upcoming book Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia has entered the production phase for publication later this year with Oxford University Press. In addition his co-edited book with Elizabeth Darling, Suffragette City: Women, Politics, and the Built Environment, has just been nominated for the Colvin Medal, one of Britain’s highest honors for architectural history books.
About the ICAA:
The Institute of Classical Architecture & Art (ICAA), is a national nonprofit promoting the practice, understanding and appreciation of classical design.
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Can't believe this channel is free
It is so cool that one no longer has to attend a college course to be able to hear such great lectures on such interesting subjects. Makes me wish i had taken my schooling farther! Had i known what i know now... Just makes me want to know more. This professor really makes it interesting to learn. I love his enthusiasm and knowledge of the subject. made me see things differently slightly. It is quite something to think that the people who were alive thousands of years ago could have had the exact same type of mind as we do today. They were just living in different surroundings and circumstances with a little less technology. Our history is such a mystery. I hope one day we can put religion aside and look for the truth in our past. Look for the science in our history. Knowledge is power!
it is amazing lecture i love it
I love this guy.
You could feel his LOVE of history and architecture! He was so excited about the subject- I loved the lecture.
A wonderful lecture! Thank you for introducing me to Mayan classical architecture.
What a passionate, amazing prof. A privilege to watch this lecture. Thank you, Sir.
you prolly dont care but does someone know of a trick to get back into an instagram account..?
I was stupid lost the account password. I love any assistance you can offer me.
@Robert Bennett Instablaster ;)
Thank you professor Walker, for this lecture online - it is the best lecture I have heard on classical architecture . Brilliant. I love that the temples could move along during earthquakes. Its been proved time and again that the best eras were those when humans decided to return to balance, beauty and ordered rhythm. You are right about modern bland glass buildings. Great work.
Wonderful presentation--Thank you!
Wow, great video. Thanks for the upload. Really enjoyed the content and also the profs enthusiasm. I too have always seen classical architecture as something distinctly human, it has an organic element to it. Much more pleasant than the sterile gray blocks we see scattered everywhere these days. Hope these students and others can help bring some more beauty back into our world.
Absolute greatness! 😳😀☺😉
That was beautiful. Wow. I never knew columns were so universal. I love this. We need to bring it back. Thank you so much I am OBSESSED.
this is amazing! just proves that classical architecture is a language that adapts to the culture of the people. its the structure of perfect architecture
If you want to consider more in this vein of global convergent classical architecture, see Balinese temples. They must be the end result of a migration of styles from India, but very different.
I love Puuc architecture. Unlike, architecture in other parts of the Maya world, the Puuc region didn't use much stucco that would erode so the facades are better preserved.
Unm z Mph
Informative and relative study that may lead us to think differently and creatively. Wonderful lecture.
how dare you say Thank you at the end THANK YOUU!!!
This guy puts into words why I love classic and why I believe that modern is the work of savages. I believe we were told to like modern for one reason only, and that's because it was 10x cheaper to build. The only way they could justify that garbage was by saying classic was bad. And we believed it much more easily whilst we watched them demolish the best classical buildings in America. As long as the wealthy are paying to demolish that stuff, it must really be bad, and we really should prefer modern wall to wall carpeting nailed to plywood subflooring, rather than old passe Italian Marble, and pure sheetrock is much better than paneled woodwork and gold leaf. Now we have worse than modern. Now we have people trying to use classic elements on their modern creations and they don't even know about proportion or variety or symmetry or anything. Like the porch on Fresh Prince of Bel Aire house. That house would have been much nicer without any columns or portico.
David, I’m sorry but can you afford to build a 10x more expensive version of your current residence? Be my guest.
Does anyone know if there are treatises on egiptian or mayan architecture.
Btw. I think that mayan architecture solved a problem that western and eastern classicism didnt. It creates an order that is more wide than tall, that was always a problem for exapmle when you want to have a garage without making it two stories or messing with the proportions
Thank you for sharing
Love his passion!
43:40 The Aztec cut the heart out. Maya usually performed decapitation.
Thank you for this
I could give this lecture if I took Ecstacy first. Or during my brief happy time when I discovered that we were in control of our own happiness. Somehow that feeling was removed by decades of takers living around me. But this guy has it.
I had never heard that Nabateans were using elephants to transport goods through the desert. The comments about the African American cities don't make too much sense, though.
❤
Does anyone have the link to the book? 11:14
Luiz, the book is called The Aesthetic Brain, by Anjan Chatterjee
@@elenashilova6724 Thank you so much
24:38
Pedantic
Apart from interesting way of introducing and explaining classicist architecture, beware of politics. Especially as a classicist referring to fascist sympathies of modernists is very simplifying. I'ld rather state that many modernists in the early years were not unfamiliar with involvement of "the state" as catalyst in society. But many of them can be placed in the rather left. Applied modernism and modernist urbanism came very much in play after world war II with the eruption of state planning and a very keynesian view on thing. Some did first seek to appease with nazism and fascism in order to survive, yet most modernists, if not all, finally found a final haven in socialism or social democracy. Of course this does not diminish the statements on classicism ebing used for both the good and the evil. That is simply unrefutable.
Not le corbisier or mies.Or most of the futurists in the other arts.
Le corbusier was all in on the fascist thing. He was a maior on vichy france.
Look at german bomb factories and you see mies and look at german bunkers and defensive walls and you see corbusier.
They just associated with whatever power would comition buildings from them.
But Gropious was kind of a communist really, the bauhaus was itself a comune of artists,they were hippies in the 20's if you look at pictures of the students.
@@goncalodias6402 every concrete bunker built both by democracies or dictatorships can be linked visually with burtalism and Le Corbusiers forms. Does not means Le Corbusier built nazi bunkers ....
@@stevenburvenich168 they dont need to be nazi bunkers to demonstrate that deriving a whole estetic from structures that had no intention of any other function besides defense and perhaps intimidation.
I say nazi bunkers because they were the most impressive both in dimention and in form, they were made to intimidate and because it was probably what corbusier had access to.
Bunkers were not built inspired by le corbusier, corbusier built brutalist buildings inspired by bunkers.
The is a strong argument that Speer's classicism is not only illiterate but it's stark repetitiveness goes against one of its key principles of order AND variety. Of which it is totally devoid of the latter. So from a classical point of view Speer's designs were classically illiterate.
I mean you clearly don’t think people in Oklahoma are the same as you 🙄
It is the most absurd idea possible that the style of classical architecture is morally problematic. It was not meant to represent the fact that e.g. when the United States still had slavery when they used it for their first federal buildings and all the other comparable examples.
Modernists say it and its a very common idea in modernist architectural and arts schools, wich means all architecture and art schools
@@goncalodias6402 Maybe, but it is still wrong.
@@LamiNalchor they believe it nonetheless and they are in charge of most architectural and artistic publications and schools.
and only modernist projects get awards and government comitions.
This guy really has an identity politics axe to grind. 😂
The more I listen to this the more I feel bad for him. I feel like the subject he loves is under attack and he’s fighting a battle he can’t win.
He’s trying to use academic arguments to fight an anti-intellectual movement. It’s like trying to vaccinate more than 60% of a population that lives more than an hour outside of a city center. It can’t be done. It’s beyond any known logic or reasoning. The topic of identity politics can turn ppls brains off like no other.
The fact that this even came up in an architectural lecture makes me sad.
Exept this lecture is anti identity politics. The guy is simply presenting something we all have in common cross culturally
So much of this is so good but the speaker's misunderstanding of the root of the absolute truth, beauty, and virtue being rooted in the divine is belied in his post-modernist assertions about "democracy" and "fascism." We can only understand absolutes in absolutist terms. It is somewhat laughable to assert that a modern democratic state can "do this better" than a state routed in authority and divine connection. He is, demonstrably wrong as evidenced in....modernity. When man attempts to escape, via secular humanism or classical liberalism even, his designated place in the created order...he PRODUCES CHAOS...NOT HARMONY. See the 20th century for specific examples.
Mayan architecture is not classical wtf
This lecturer should stick to architecture & forget the politics it ruins this video.
Too much apologizing to 'woke' crowd.
Agreed. This whole presentation seems like he’s trying to make classical architecture “diverse” or “multicultural” and it just falls flat. He even has the obligatory “Nazis bad” moment shoehorned into his presentation.
@@illegalaryan8400 But it is multicultural and diverse, but that diversity comes from following the SAME mentality, a universal, human mentality, which is exactly what the woke, postmodern pieces of shit would tell you otherwise.
It's sort of like Black Panther was a great movie for how it handled "diversity" and Star Wars sequels sucked. Black Panther took the concept of cultural uniqueness, the need for human cultures to have a pride and a backing.
Nazis are shit. They took classical architectural themes and made them grotesque. What's nice about their example is how they filled a void that modernist and postmodernist ways of thinking filled a void.
Humans need a sense of cultural pride and power in their nations. But, my rather unorthodox, but quite frankly, important view is that these cultures should ALL be cultivated.
America needs to reinvent itself a bit to bring it back. I honestly think Native American art and culture is something we should invigorate with our neoclassical, and therefore classical roots.
Is as if it was his thesis...
@@illegalaryan8400 Well, considering there are real Nazis and Nazi sympathizers today, it's probably a good thing to tell them off. They kinda ruin Classical architecture for everyone
@@adamwise8337 How so? During the era of Bauhaus and the Soviet style of architecture, fascist regimes were the only ones embracing classical architecture with the “classical minimalism” or “stripped classicism” styles. Liberal democracies had some forms of this but most had become enamored with Art Deco, the International style, or Streamline Moderne and communist regimes like the Soviet Union were using modernist styles like Constructivist and later Brutalism. This channel has even praised the works of Albert Speer and Paul Ludwig Troost for their embrace of classical forms as a reaction to modernism in the 20th century.
This could have been a great lecture, but marred by all the inane shibboleths to appease, anti-classical, multicultural goons. "Greeks wuz da real multiculturalists" is silly and ahistorical---they were dogmatically "supremacistic" and enthocentric and that is precisely why we love them. There is a reason why all over the globe we see Greek classical forms and not Egyptian. There is a unique genius to classical Greece, the simplicity, elegance and hierarchy. We shouldnt have to hide behind an exoticising veneer to have a serious discussion of Western classical architecture. Furthermore, most of these lecturers don't have the technical competencies to speak on Classical Indian, Chinese or Meso-American architecture.
Furthermore not a single civilization that has created a high classical form has believed in either egalitarianism or anything similar to multiculturalism as the "classical" is intrinsically dependent on a hierarchy. Modern values are fundamentally alien to these classical worlds, which is why we produce hideous yet "democratic" apartment blocks and not the Pantheon or Tenotihuacan.
Forgeting to see that the lecture presents the theisis that classical principles in architecture are infact multicultural and are just variations of the same ideas is too bad.
Did you even study Architecture?... Lots of elements in Greek architecture were in fact, influenced by Egyptian and Persian architecture. The only thing that you're yapping about is the Greek aesthetic.
@@dayangmarikit6860
Give me specifics, no generic and meaningless pablum
“Despite what the NAZIS thought and despite what some people in -Oklahoma say -we’re all the same”?
A very odd statement ..
Will you expound on that?
We’re not all the same. There’s a reason Greeks built giant marble temples and Africans built one story mud huts.
@@illegalaryan8400 - This is superficial, there's more to history, archeology and anthropology than that.
@@iamnoone348 It’s not superficial. Anywhere Africans live, they make it like Africa. Anywhere Europeans live, they make it like Europe. Evolution didn’t stop at the neck. We are not the same. Some are more advanced and built better buildings and societies.
@@illegalaryan8400 - First, why are you specifying Africans when Greek architecture was mostly influenced by Egypt and Middle Eastern cultures?