ROMANIC NOVELTY

 Roman, romantic, Romanesque.  Words have a history. Meanings twist and turn, perform backflips even. A romance was a story written in Latin rather than Frankish.  It reflects the tension between Mediterranean Europe and the Germanic lands, across the Alps to the North-East.

But we have forgotten these old meanings and in art, romanticism is thought to be the opposite rationalism: swirling curves v pure geometric shapes (circle, square & triangle). Roman law, architecture & engineering have greatly influenced the modern world.  They are thought of as being on the rational, pragmatic side of that imaginary divide, as opposed to the emotional, romantic impulse.

But what of Roman religion?  Surely paganism is full of superstition, shady archetypes of the Jungian subconscious?  Maybe so, maybe not.  In some ways it may be more rational to think of the gods as emotional creatures, falling in love, becoming jealous.  Humanity writ large, the good and the bad.

 

In the last post I took a peek at the influence of the Roman Temple archetype on the early architecture of the American Republic.  Now I am digging a little deeper into the source code.  What remnants do we have from 2000 years ago?  I have modelled three of the best preserved, now located in three countries on the norther shores of the Med.

“Square House” in Nimes is the biggest.  Pretty much a scaled-up copy of Fortuna Virilis” Corinthian with half-round columns “engaged” with the walls of the Cella.  Initially I have been using a simple cylinder for my columns.  I am trying to “Keep It Simple Stupid” in order to focus in essentials and to compare many different variants on a theme, as opposed to the “deep dives” I have done before. (Project Soane et al)

 

 

So Maison Carree is larger.  We need a sense of human scale.  I decided to take an Enscape Asset and customised it.  I like the way it renders in Enscape3d, of course, but not so much the triangulated placeholder as it shows up in Revit hidden line or shaded views.  There, I prefer my “flat people” approach, simple outlines that mimic the way-we-used-to-do-it by hand.  I traced the front outline and the side silhouette as thin extrusions with a material parameter.  Then I untick “Visibility” in the view where the extrusion is “end on”.  I have made the mesh object hidden in all views, but I guess you could opt to show this at fine scale only, or just in 3d perhaps. Finally, I don’t want people in the “planting” category, change it to Entourage. 

 

 

I set up a sheet for the 3 temples.  I saw a post on LinkedIn recently promoting the idea that drawing sheets should fall away so we can go “full BIM”.  I’m all for simplifying documentation, “lean and mean” approaches to life in general.  But annotated orthographic views are a wonderful invention with a very deep history.  They communicate information in a highly compressed form that if wonderfully complementary to the activity of wandering around in 3 dimensional space.

 

We understand the world by creating simplified, abstract models inside our brains. Foolish to think that we can dispense with that and just “copy reality”.  So I like drawing sheets and I have brought together multiple views of my three temples, together with annotations, and images from books or the internet.  This is fairly close to the “BIM version of Bannister Fletcher” that I have fantasised about for many years.

The great thing about doing all this in BIM (Revit combined with other tools used in a way that emphasises a holistic understanding of how buildings work) … the great thing is that it evolves over time.  You can start with simple placeholders (cylinder columns) and progress through a series of iterations as comprehension deepens. 

 

So I have started to develop a medium scale representation of the classical orders.  This will allow the Ionic Order to differentiate Fortuna Virilis from Maison Carree.  (I said before that these 2 were the same form at different scales, but they do also us a different classical order)

 

The Croatian example is also Corinthian, but more like the Virginia State Capital in that it uses square pilasters around the walls of the Cella.  In fact these pilasters are only visible at the corners.  Perhaps they once existed along the sides, but perhaps not.  The stucco has all gone.  We could talk about fluted shafts and smooth shafts, but “too much information”.

Just a little insight into my Family Editor scheme for converting Full columns to Half columns. Corner or not (Yes/No parameter)  Will also work for Pilasters which are Square families with “shallow” types.  I can also have “deep” types which I tend to call “3qtr”.  This would usually be a round column which is only submerged a small way into the wall.  It’s a compromise between the free standing colonnade and the half-columns of Maison Carree or Fortuna Virilis.  It casts more of a shadow on the wall, giving a much richer, deeply modelled effect.

The classical idiom is one of those “gifts that keeps on giving”.  The ultimate public nuance.