Festival Architecture

Sarah Bonnemaison, Christine Macy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415701280
• eBook ISBN: 9781135992750
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

With contributions from provocative art and architectural historians, this book is a unique exposition of the temporary architecture erected for festivals and the role it has played in developing Western architectural and urban theory.

Festival Architecture is arranged in historical periods – from Antiquity to the modern era – and divided between analyses of specific festivals, set in relation to contemporary architecture and urban design ideas and theories.

Illustrated with a wealth of unusual and rarely-seen images from the European festival tradition, this is a fascinating outline of the history of festival architecture ideal for postgraduate architecture and urban design students.

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Introduction

Sarah Bonnemaison and Christine Macy

What is festival architecture?

Reflecting on the origins of architecture, we may think of the Egyptian pyramids, the palaces of Babylonia or the temples of ancient Greece. But equally ancient, and equally significant to the history of architecture, were the temporary structures erected for religious rites in the ancient world. The tabernacle of the Jews, for example, was a portable enclosure of wooden posts and fabric, a place of sacrifice and worship that was carried through the wilderness during the Exodus, and that influenced the form of the temple in the tenth century BCE and all synagogues to follow. Like Abel to Cain, or the nomad to the farmer, ephemeral architecture offers another face to the history of architecture. If one were to map this “other” history in parallel to the more familiar chronicle of monuments and ruins, the relationship between these two kinds of architecture would be informative and at times surprising, in the way each has influenced the other—that Greek temples, for example, are stone versions of their wooden predecessors is just one instance among many.

This other history is not restricted to religious constructions, it also includes architectural works commissioned by rulers to celebrate and proclaim their reign. In the Europe of emperors, popes, and princes, all the major architects had experience in staging festivals at courts or in cities—Andrea Palladio, Inigo Jones, Gianlorenzo Bernini, and Niccolo Servandoni to name just a few. With the emergence of modern society, architects remained just as involved in staging world expositions and government spectacles: from the master planning efforts of Charles Garnier in Paris (1889), Daniel Burnham in Chicago (1893), or Albert Speer in Nuremberg (1933), to the more discrete contributions of Mies van der Rohe in Barcelona (1928), Le Corbusier in Brussels (1958), or Sverre Fehn in Venice (1962). Architects working on festivals were assured of a large audience for their efforts. They knew that spectacular effects or ingenious artistry in the design of a triumphal arch or elaborate stage setting might lead to later commissions from influential patrons. Festival architecture was designed to persuade and convince and for this reason it has been, and continues to be, built in all the societies of Europe.

Archival records tell us that festivals and spectacles were well funded by the ruling classes in order to magnify and glorify their reign. All the arts were mobilized in the service of such events—be it a coronation or an investiture; a baptism, marriage or funeral of a privileged person. Poets and painters, musicians and dancers, masters of the culinary arts, fireworks specialists, sculptors, and of course, architects—all of these artists were called on to contribute to these events that also involved priests, heads of state, royal retinues, merchants, warriors, citizens, commoners, peasants, servants, and slaves.

Because state festivals were so important, they were generally well recorded, sometimes exaggeratedly so. Their themes were put down for posterity, persons of note were so noted, and magnificent processions were described by the number of participants, the richness of their retinue and the routes of their parades. The same could be said for the theatrical performances, scenography, choreography, menus, livery, fireworks, and all the other appurtenances of these events. As a result, the historian has a great deal of material to work with in attempting to understand events long past. But the study of festivals also poses certain frustrations. Most crucially, the architecture has long since disappeared. While the historian of built works can generally return to the subject of their investigation, freshly examining it to discover new or previously overlooked aspects, the historian of festival architecture must restrict her- or himself to the archive. And there too, the picture is not clear. Written records may lack images, etchings and broadsheets be misattributed, and accounts distorted by the bias of the chronicler. Sometimes one record directly contradicts another, depending on why it was made and for whom.

Architects’ view of ephemera and historians’ views on ritual

The modern distinction between solid and ephemeral creates an additional difficulty for the historian of festival architecture: its marginal position in architectural historiography. When permanent is set against temporary, the opposition, Jacques Derrida would argue, is not an equal one. Permanent architecture has long been viewed by architects and architectural historians as more significant and ultimately more central to architecture and its history. Architects are meant to design buildings that last. While ephemeral works have their place, their insubstantiality and their transitory nature give them attributes of being superficial, even fake. Yet ephemerality is the joker’s card in architectural history. Often, it is used as a foil to enhance the value of more durable constructions. Adolf Loos, for example, was outspoken on the value of permanence when he wrote that “only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art” (Loos 1985). In this assertion, Loos slyly insinuates that most architecture is not only utilitarian, but perhaps fleeting—at least when compared with the two categories of architecture he awards the status of art.

Yet in the mid-nineteenth century, architectural histories by Karl Bötticher and Gottfried Semper presented ephemeral constructions as the very origin of architecture. These theorists viewed it as the opposite of permanent architecture, as the first built sketches, so to speak, of buildings that followed. These new theorists saw architecture as an imitation, not of forms or styles, but of human action. According to Mari Hvattum, Semper was instrumental in developing this argument by placing ritual in the center of both architectural form and the craft of architecture:

No longer a history of building types or orders, [this] was a history of the evolving techniques that brought architecture into existence and the human situations for which buildings were built. It was a history in which the primacy of structure was given over to surface, and where the obsession with stability—so characteristic of eighteenth century Neo-classicism—gave way to a new interest in the ephemeral. […] Unlike the neo-classical idea of architecture as a perpetual imitation of a […] primitive hut, these new theorists saw architecture as an imitation […] of human action. From this point of view, the ephemeral decoration of the altar, the precarious architecture of the procession or, in Semper’s words, the “haze of the carnival candles” (Der Stil vol. I, §60), were not just phenomena at the margins of architectural discourse but constituting the very essence of architecture. Such ephemera were seen as primordial examples of the mimetic transformation from the ritual act to its built embodiment. As such, they were poetic works in the Aristotelian sense; works capable of setting into play a creative interpretation of human life and action.

(Hvattum 2002)

In short, for Semper, the origins of architecture lay in the universal human need to create order through play and ritual.

“in the wreath, the bead necklace, the scroll, the circular dance and the rhythmic tone that attends it, the beat of an oar […] These are the beginnings out of which music and architecture grew.” From its ephemeral beginnings in ritual movement, the ordering activity of art is embodied in the artistic motifs, which in turn are fused in works of architecture.

(Hvattum 2004:66)

More than a century later, Joseph Rykwert expressed some of this intuition in his The Idea of a Town, where he demonstrated how Roman towns were founded on elaborate rituals, and their forms—such as city walls, gate, and major institutions—were derived from those rituals (Rykwert 1976). His work contributed to a renewed interest in the relationship between festival and urbanism. Working in a much broader comparative spectrum, Spiro Kostof’s concern for the function of civic rituals in the analysis of urban form has influenced many historians working today (Kostof 1991). And of course George Hersey’s The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture explores in detail the original significance of the classical orders, as rooted in the religious rituals of the ancient Greeks (Hersey 1988).

Caroline van Eck’s contribution to this volume tackles the issue of ephemera in festivals head on by focusing on ‘paper architecture’. She suggests the demarcation between virtual and real, between solid and ephemeral was not as clear in seventeenth-century England as we may think it is now. She begins her essay by informing the reader that only a few significant works of architecture were actually completed in Britain over the first half of the seventeenth century, while much ephemeral and “paper” architecture was produced. Looking at Henry Wotton’s treatise Elements of Architecture and the masque designs of Inigo Jones, she explores the concepts that viewers of that time may have used to understand such architecture. The important aspect, she suggests, for a seventeenth-century audience was that these works represented a view of architecture as politics by another means. In other words, they employed the classical rhetorical view of art not as an object of enjoyment for its own sake, but as a means of persuasion.

Maarten Delbeke’s essay tests the hypothesis that ephemeral architecture contributes to the signification and subsequent reception of permanent architecture. He explores the Roman jubilee of 1625 and the dedication of the new basilica of Saint Peter’s the following year, as two moments which frame ideas that were to be communicated by a new, giant bronze Baldacchino designed by Bernini for the center of Saint Peter’s. To do this, he analyses the significance of the ephemeral constructions built for the jubilee and the dedication—particularly the talamo, a portable shrine carried by the Arch-confraternity of SS Rosario—and explores their intended effects on Roman audiences and others who read reports of the festivals which codified and expanded their impact.

The essay of Nancy Stieber explores the question of fakeness and authenticity in relation to the conceptualization of a new architectural style in turn of the twentieth-century Netherlands. Willem Kromhout’s designs for Oud Holland at the Amsterdam World’s Fair of 1895 was an ersatz city involving the meticulous historical reconstruction of buildings from across the Netherlands—an extremely popular attraction that drew significant interest among his contemporaries. Yet, influenced by H.P. Berlage’s formulation of architectural style that critiqued historicism, Kromhout attacked the tradition of “fake” arches, as he designed the decoration of Amsterdam for the investiture of Queen Wilhelmina in 1898.

Festivals and the architectural object

There is a large body of art and architectural historiography on European festivals, especially state spectacles in the Renaissance and Baroque eras. In the art historical tradition, these studies focus on an architectural object—a royal entry, a triumphal arch, or a display built for fireworks—interpreting their architectural treatment and the allegorical iconography within a stylistic sequence. Les Fêtes de la Renaisssance for example, a three volume series edited by Jean Jacquot following a conference on the subject in 1956, remains a reference for art historians interested in Renaissance festivals; as the extensive writings of Marcello Fagiolo and Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco are for the Italian Baroque (Jacquot 1956; Fagiolo 1980 and 1997; Fagiolo dell’Arco and Carandini 1977–8; Fagiolo dell’Arco 1997). Such studies generally focus o...

Table of contents

• The Classical Tradition in Architecture
• Contents
• Illustration credits
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The festive experience
• 3 Festival bridal entries in Renaissance Ferrara
• 4 Festivals of state
• 5 Statecraft or stagecraft?
• 6 Framing history
• 7 The speculative challenges of festival architecture in eighteenth-century France
• 8 Marking time and space in the city
• 9 Sound, light, and the mystique of space
• 10 Festival urbanism
• 11 Taking back the street, Paris 1968–78
• Index