Alternatives :: Summary

The alternatives chapter was all about the drastic transition of styles in architecture and art mostly dealing with the epicenter countries of France ad Italy. The Italian and French renaissance was a time of following the rules and applying them in every building as a standard for completion and the French and Italian Baroque followed in with completely conflicting views on following written rules and norms of architecture, most of the time bending or even breaking the rules to create something new and frivolous.


To begin the journey into the chapter of alternatives, we started in Venezia: City of floating stone in Venice, Italy with mostly the villa forms and the example of prime renaissance present in the geometric elements of the buildings and sacred places. Prime example of the rules would be the St. Maria Novella, also known as the building of lace and glass because of its appearance, built from 1456-1470 in the renaissance style, which is known to be an skewed version of the classical style itself and takes parts of ancient ideals like the column orders. Another important piece of architecture during this time was the Ospedale Innocenti, or the Foundling Hospital, designed by Filippo Brunelleschi. The building ideas and elements were what made this building a classic renaissance style in Florence, Italy: its rhythm, symmetry, balance, and arches in the repeating geometric patterns and column forms made it pleasing to the eye and exactly according to the written rules as to how Architecture should be designed. To give a better picture on the style and air that Venice presented, it is easier to think of it as something like New Orleans here in the United States.

The next important part of this chapter was the transition or junction between following the rules of the Renaissance and breaking the rules completely in the Baroque. Within this transition, designers of the time were testing boundaries and pushing the limits of the previous written rules of architecture during the Renaissance. Structures like the Pazzi Chapel that contained roman influence and classic Renaissance elements of reviving the ancient world and formal décor were being contrasted with the new forming style in the Laurentian Library Vestibule designed by Michelangelo with a more flowing, frivolous style. This was no surprise in itself because Michelangelo was one of the most famous designers to test boundaries until they were bent or broke. Another example of his was that of the fresco ceiling of the Sistine Chapel where its hard to tell were the wall ends and the ceiling begins because of his attempt to fool the eye, a direct violation of the clear-cut and definite boundaries of the Renaissance.

Baroque in full swing was quite the sight to behold for its curly and vague style as we transitioned from the Renaissance. The biggest building of note being St. Peter’s Piazza, also know as the Vatican in today’s world. This building contained the holistic view that spurred the out of the box thinking that made this period so successful and interesting. The piazza was redesigned by a couple of different designers to get where it currently is today; one of the ones of most note is that of the artist Bernini. The church form sits at the top of the form, frontal façade looking over the city realm and then goes into a curving and almost enclosed colonnade structure that contains the piazza itself with the obelisk in the center of the “square” and the fountains on its sides. The biggest theme was that of having a sort of civic space available to the people of the city, which is what the piazza itself was along with a similar structured civic space like the Baldacchino that was also designed by Bernini. While themes of the Romans were still present they were not the main concept as they were in the Renaissance and only became more and more inconsequential as the Baroque period progressed.