Ancient Athens a la Instamatic, Part 8: Another View from Without, the Parthenon, Acropolis (432 BC)
The building stone on view here: the justly world-famous Pentelic Marble, laid down as lime mud in the warm waters of the Tethys Ocean and metamorphosed in the Late Cretaceous or Tertiary.
Having recently researched a multitude of Beaux Arts buildings in Chicago and Milwaukee, I've become increasingly weary of the classical orders—Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and their variants—used over and over in a region, the American Midwest, often uniquely unsuited to them. One should never put a Greek temple where the soil is black and two meters deep, or where there's been a continental glacier in the last two million years.
But the Yankee mania for inconguities, unmatched elsewhere on the planet, has had me scrutinizing skyscrapers, city halls, and street-corner Savings-and-Loans decked out in every ornamental cliche the ancient world ever produced. It really is someone else's grandeur.
But then I come back to my old photos of Athens, Sounion, Epidauros, Paestum, Rome, Dougga, Izmir, and various other hallowed spots in the Mediterranean Basin. And then I see why there have been so many stylistic reversions, in the most ridiculous places, to this least ridiculous design language.
Standing here, in the silken gleam of Pentelic Marble, the Doric columns are inexpressably essential. But what the Beaux Arts boys from my side of the globe never seemed to ask was: Is Mediterranean sublimity transplantable? Does this stone owe its special power here to the bedrock under it, to the bony landscape around it? Or to its local skies and climate, so unlike our own?
Of course, such architectural outliers as Sullivan and Wright posed those questions. But take it from me that even in their own chosen haunts their visions of what-works-where were, and still are, surrounded by acres of classical references.
To see the other photos and descriptions in this series, visit my Ancient Athens a la Instamatic album.
Ancient Athens a la Instamatic, Part 8: Another View from Without, the Parthenon, Acropolis (432 BC)
The building stone on view here: the justly world-famous Pentelic Marble, laid down as lime mud in the warm waters of the Tethys Ocean and metamorphosed in the Late Cretaceous or Tertiary.
Having recently researched a multitude of Beaux Arts buildings in Chicago and Milwaukee, I've become increasingly weary of the classical orders—Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and their variants—used over and over in a region, the American Midwest, often uniquely unsuited to them. One should never put a Greek temple where the soil is black and two meters deep, or where there's been a continental glacier in the last two million years.
But the Yankee mania for inconguities, unmatched elsewhere on the planet, has had me scrutinizing skyscrapers, city halls, and street-corner Savings-and-Loans decked out in every ornamental cliche the ancient world ever produced. It really is someone else's grandeur.
But then I come back to my old photos of Athens, Sounion, Epidauros, Paestum, Rome, Dougga, Izmir, and various other hallowed spots in the Mediterranean Basin. And then I see why there have been so many stylistic reversions, in the most ridiculous places, to this least ridiculous design language.
Standing here, in the silken gleam of Pentelic Marble, the Doric columns are inexpressably essential. But what the Beaux Arts boys from my side of the globe never seemed to ask was: Is Mediterranean sublimity transplantable? Does this stone owe its special power here to the bedrock under it, to the bony landscape around it? Or to its local skies and climate, so unlike our own?
Of course, such architectural outliers as Sullivan and Wright posed those questions. But take it from me that even in their own chosen haunts their visions of what-works-where were, and still are, surrounded by acres of classical references.
To see the other photos and descriptions in this series, visit my Ancient Athens a la Instamatic album.