Za krásnější svět: Tradicionalismus v architektuře 20. a 21. století / Toward a More Beautiful World: Traditionalism in Architecture of the 20th and 21st Centuries (original) (raw)
2013, Za krásnější svět: Tradicionalismus v architektuře 20. a 21. století / Toward a More Beautiful World: Traditionalism in Architecture of the 20th and 21st Centuries
TOWARD A MORE BEAUTIFUL WORLD (Brno: Barrister & Principal – VUTIUM 2013, 448 pp., 760 ill., an extensive English summary) uses innovative methodology to look at the traditionalist attitude in architecture and in the formation of architectural environment. In the five parts, the book (I) analyzes the professional debate around the history of architecture and the diversity of aesthetic preferences within this debate, (II) clarifies a theory that uses results of neuroscience to explain the attractiveness of traditional buildings, (III) based on this theory, sums up the history of twentieth- and twenty-first-century traditionalist architecture around the world and (IV) in the Czech Lands (the present Czech Republic), and (V) uses two specific examples to illustrate current variations in the relationship between heritage protection, musealization of art and the creation of an aesthetically valuable environment. The scope of the publication and its comprehensiveness make this book the first of its kind in the field of architectural history. The text is in Czech, nevertheless, international readers find all captions in English and an extensive English summary. The methodology of this book builds upon the architectural theory of the American scientist Nikos Salingaros, the impulses of world art studies, and the idea that there is a direct relationship between personal preference for a specific artistic morphology and the manner of its (art-historical) interpretation. The findings of brain science help specify the meaning of the words beauty and traditionalism. Even an untrained viewer can feel the contrast between traditional and modern architecture, while neighboring buildings in two different traditional styles (for example a baroque palace and a Gothic church) do not create the same impression of contrast or disharmony. The book explains the difference in aesthetic effect through Salingaros’s term structural order. This concept understands traditional architecture as an architecture designed according to the principles of structural order and modernist architecture as an architecture, where structural order is weak or non-existent. The concept put forward in this book is that architectural traditionalism strives to express structural order, while architectural modernism, which exists simultaneously, does not aim for this kind of order, neither consciously nor intuitively. Art-historical conceptions are also referred to as either traditionalist or modernist, according to which approach to artistic creation they prefer. The struggle toward a more beautiful world is considered a leitmotif of traditionalism – hence the title of the book. The book’s five parts and fifty chapters address themes such as: the aesthetic theory of empathy as elaborated by Heinrich Wölfflin and Geoffrey Scott; the scientific theory of architecture according to Christopher Alexander and Nikos Salingaros; American renaissance and the City Beautiful movement; city building according to artistic principles in the work of Camillo Sitte, Werner Hegemann and Gustavo Giovannoni; the Heimatschutz movement and Paul Schultze-Naumburg; the destruction and reconstruction of old cities and the Venice Charter; the New Tradition, New Urbanism and the vision of harmonious building according to Prince Charles. The chapters on the Czech Lands describe architectural works by Friedrich Ohmann, Jan Vejrych, Kamil Hilbert, Ladislav Skřivánek and Dušan Jurkovič and analyze texts by Václav Wagner, Břetislav Štorm, Josef Karel Říha, Ladislav Žák and Jiří Kroha. These chapters also discuss cubism and socialist realism in Czech architecture, new development and heritage conservation during the communist era and after the regime change in 1989, and public interest in the fate of old buildings and in the appearance of towns, villages and landscapes.