MAPPING LUTHER

 

The title alludes to a site initiated by Andrew Tallon and Stephen Murray, art history academics in the USA.  I came to know about it while working on the model of Notre Dame that our group of BIM enthusiasts created shortly after the fire. 

https://mcid.mcah.columbia.edu/art-atlas/mapping-gothic/map

I have been experimenting with an approach to studying a group of related historical buildings, a “style” or “school” if you like.  In this case I’m looking at the “White Churches” of Denmark.  These are small village churches, dating from the early days of Christianity in Denmark.  The earliest churches would have been wooden structures, but during the 1100s simple naves with round arches began to appear.  

 

Those Romanesque “starter churches” were extended in various ways throughout the middle ages, adding chancels, apses, bell towers, entrance porches.  I visited Denmark in 2017, but I didn’t visit any of these churches.  These studies are an offshoot of recent work on the churches of P.V. Jensen Klint, who was clearly inspired by the stepped-gable tradition which is one of the distinguishing features of the white churches.

I have been working on a broad survey of Temples and Churches across the western world over the past two and a half millennia.  I’m kind of jumping back and forth as the fancy takes me and in response to interesting detours that pop into view as I gather reference material on the web.  It’s a labour of love: part of a plan for my twilight years, using BIM as a thinking tool to ponder “the meaning of life” and integrating the digital and manual approaches to exploring the world.

 

I posted a few images on Linked In as I was developing this study.  Text in italics is from those posts.

 

This morning's quest: to build a map of Denmark, using a metre to represent a kilometre. (because Revit doesn't like really big distances)

Into this I will insert my massing models of Danish churches. Let's not think much further ahead than that.

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday afternoon I created a "legend view" in Revit for my first six massing models of Danish churches. Had to change the category to "Furniture" to force a "Roof Plan". This snapshot is from a sheet with 6 camera views placed on the grid "as if" they are part of the Legend.

I think this has some merit as a way to take an overview of these massing models and think about similarities and differences of form.

 

 

Today I have been setting up sheets for the individual churches in my current study of medieval white churches in Denmark. This is the tradition on which P.V. Jensen-Klint drew when designing his 3 remarkable churches in Copenhagen.

I'm working on six churches in the first place, to develop a method. Here are the two sheets which have progressed furthest. Very different locations. One is still in a rural, island setting. The other has been absorbed into urban expansion.

 

 

This whole series is a “view from 10 thousand feet “ or you could call it a “broad brush“ approach. Hence the use of massing models, masquerading as RFA files. I’m trying to be agile, in current parlance.

Choosing the right level of abstraction is always a critical factor in BIM, as in any other artistic medium. Keep it simple. Focus on essentials.

 

 

I don’t have any special words of wisdom or startlingly new insights arising from these studies (yet), but I've definitely acquired a broader understanding of Danish history and geography. Seems to me that Lutheran National Churches played a major role in defining the Nordic identity. How this differs from the Church of England is an open question. At first I had the impression that the Church of Denmark had retained more vitality and relevance, but perhaps if I looked at the websites of medieval village churches in the UK (through the eyes of a naïve outsider) I would come to similar conclusions.

One thing that does pique my interest is the style of Danish graveyards, neatly divided up by low, trimmed hedges. I've represented this in a very coarse way, but it would be good to take the LOD up a notch.  Interesting challenge.

 

 

 

 

EXPRESS YOURSELF (ISM)

 Grundtvigs church is generally classified as an example of Expressionist Architecture which itself is conceived as part of a trend within Modernist Art of the early 20th century.  Think of “The Scream” by Edvard Munch, the early buildings of Erich Mendelsohn, the music of Arnold Schoenberg.  Here’s and interesting extract from Wikipedia.  Theodor Adorno describes expressionism as concerned with the unconscious, and states that “the depiction of fear lies a the centre” of expressionist music, with dissonance predominating, so that the “harmonious affirmative element of art is banished.”

 

Seems like a telling analysis of the trap of modernism into which our art (and perhaps our whole society) has fallen.  The impulse to shock, to rebel, to feed on outrage … sound familiar?  I’m not at all sure that this has anything to do with the work and thought of the father & son team which built three churches in Copenhagen.

Denmark has a national Lutheran church which seems to remain remarkably vital, though I am far from an authority on this.  My working hypothesis is that the ability of this national church to remain relevant to ordinary people is an important factor in the success of the brand of free-market social democracy that seems to have worked better in Denmark than in many other contexts around the world.

Klint the elder is an interesting character. Born Peder Vilhelm Jensen, he added “Klint” to his name at the age of 37.  This translates to “Cliff” but I have never seen an explanation for the name change.  He trained as a building engineer, whatever that means.  Perhaps it was a kind of architecture course which emphasized practical knowledge over artistic expression, maybe what we would call an Architectural Technologist today.  If so, it’s interesting that he veered off this course after graduation hoping to pursue a career as a painter, but earning a living by teaching Mathematics. 

He was in his 40s when he started to design villas for friends and gradually became recognized as an architect.  He also designed ceramics and furniture.  Throughout he seems to have been determined to remain rooted in the vernacular traditions of Danish craftsman, but not afraid of expressing these in a “modern” way.

Was he deeply religious?  I have no way of knowing, but the architectural output I can access is mostly church design, with some associated residential.  Indeed the three churches I am studying here are profoundly interested by their residential context.

 

N.F.S. Grundtvig is an interesting character in his own right.  Described as a pastor, poet, historian & politician, He died when Peder Klint was still a boy.  Perhaps his greatest legacy is the “Folk High School” tradition in Scandinavia and German-speaking countries.  The key idea seems to be to offer an education that is equal in status to the “academic stream” but which takes a more practical approach and values lifelong learning.

There are parallels here with the “Education With Production” experiment that I participated in during the first decade of independence in Zimbabwe.  I don’t think it’s controversial to say that the European version has been much more successful.

The three churches are recognizably part of the same series, but respond to their contexts in very different ways.  Grundtvig's church is embedded in a substantial social housing scheme.  It’s West Front is on axis to the main entry street into that development, and it sits in a large courtyard with a kind of village green on the northern side.  My visit was plagued by dreary conditions: light but steady rain.  My photos have rain spots and condensation on the lens.  Indeed my shoes were thoroughly drenched and I spent a miserable time walking after messing up my bus connections.  

 

All the same it was definitely worth the effort.  There is no substitute for taking your own physical body to experience a building in its context.  VR is fascinating and I’m sure the metaverse will have some kind of a positive side, but human thought is an embodied phenomenon.  We learn by doing.  We understand the world by acting things out. 

Let’s close with a sneak peek.  My next little exploration will venture into the world of small white churches, that lie dotted around Denmark.  In part they are the inspiration behind Grundtvig’s architecture, and his extension of tradition into the world of twentieth century Copenhagen.

 

 

 

MONKEY MAN

Song by Toots Hibbert, the “soul man” of Reggae. I had the pleasure of seeing him live at the peak of his powers over 40 years ago.  As usual with my titles, it’s just a play on words.  The last post looked at Monk Bond in some detail, noting a variant by Klint which uses the horizontal rhythm (stretcher, stretcher, header or S-S-H) but stacks up vertically in a different way.

The result is a kind of diagonal drift, but in response to the practical reality of windows, piers and colour variations it becomes an irregular rhythm which is difficult to follow, except by marking up the headers in photoshop.

 

I did some studies using the Revit brick families I created a year or so ago.  I don’t have very good source material for his interiors, but there is some evidence that he used a second version indoors.  Why would this be?  This is all conjecture, but I see the overlapping headers as a way of strengthening the tie-back function.  It could be that he likes the complexity of the pattern, but it’s very difficult to read in practice.  I suspect he was going for a somewhat randomised appearance.

Compared to Flemish, English etc the pattern is difficult to spot.  It’s diffuse.  So inserting broken bond to deal with the contingencies of window spacing etc is less disruptive.  Even for a brick-bonding nerd like me, it’s difficult to spot.

 

 

Looking through the photos I took in Denmark in 2017,  I found several cases where the S-S-H horizontal pattern was used.  None of them used the Klint variant.  Sometimes there was a rather casual variation as the courses stack up vertically.  Sometimes there was a “stretched-out” Flemish look with a definite vertical rhythm (regular columns of headers)

In my wanderings I cam across an entry on “Brick Gothic” in Wikipedia, referring to medieval churches in Scandinavia and parts of Germany.  This contains a picture labelled “Gothic bonding” with no further explanation.  You can spot the S-S-H module here, but once again the vertical stacking is irregular. 

There are also cases where the module is used to generate chevron effects, based on our brain’s addiction to finding patterns wherever possible (e.g. clouds, flames, rocks etc that remind us of faces or animals)

 

I built four panels of walling with my Revit bricks. They all use the same standard course (S-S-H) built as an array family so you can type in the number of repeats. The four different patterns result from the vertical stacking of this standard course. The individual bricks are “shared, nested” elements with different types for external stretcher, internal stretcher & header.  So it’s easy to set up view filters to emphasise the headers, or to hide the internal skin.

Old walls are quite thick, especially in churches.  You can’t achieve that kind of height in loadbearing brickwork using 9” walling.  So just showing the outer skin and the headers allows you to imagine thicker walls.  Those headers are just tying you back to whatever else happens further back.  So Klint was able to express different patterns internally and externally for example. He could use red bricks outside and yellow bricks indoors where reflected light is important.  He could use smoother bricks indoors and rougher bricks outdoors.

That exercise lends support to my hypothesis that the overlapping headers make for stronger tie-backs.  Let’s move on

I have started to add Klint’s flagship design to my “Churches & Temples” collection.  I had made some basic “toy blocks” that I developed for massing models of Notre Dame and Bourges. These were adapted to the new situation.

 

So you start throwing basic shapes together. Check the results against reference material. Throw up interesting questions. Adjust the model in response...

It’s a cyclical process, ascending spirals that gradually increase knowledge of the way the form works.

"Now I know that, now I understand ..." (Monkey Man lyrics)

 

There is a basic language here: vertical slots and stepped gables. It’s derived from the brick Gothic tradition but given a surprisingly fresh, modern feel.

Triangles within triangles, thrusting towards heaven. All this from a guy who trained as a building engineer but wanted to be a painter. He transitioned to architecture relatively late and two of the churches were unfinished when he died, well into his seventies.

This church which I have long regarded as an intriguing and enigmatic example of  “Expressionism” turns out to have more layers of depth and meaning once you put the time in and get your hands dirty.