Point Essay: Alternatives

Looking at the Alternatives unit, we begin discovering how the Renaissance becomes an alternate to the ancient world. The Renaissance becomes a revival of classic orders. They reinvent a new tradition where simple shapes such as squares and circles become a reason for resonance.

Though the Renaissance focuses on the Ancient world’s models. This becomes a vernacular tradition that is slightly changing overtimes. Religious forms turn into secular. Relaxation, elegance, entertainment, and beauty are aspects, which make the home the sanctuary and not other public forms. The Renaissance shifts from public sphere to private and turning the home into the hearth rather than a significant public building such as the Pantheon. Circles become the new center whereas verticality suggested spirituality. It becomes a rebirth of antiquity and the individual as the “man is measurer of all things.” This suggests contemplation of the universe and heaven where the center reaches beyond to the institution and verticality connects to the individual. The Renaissance sees borders and boundaries as key aspects of design that will refrain design reverting back to Gothic style. Straying away from the classics was not ideal in the Renaissance. This becomes a time of understanding the world after the Dark Ages and classifying it with simple shapes, centrality, and classicism. An idea of real versus ideal becomes significant in the Renaissance. A question of whether or not something is ideal when copied. Symmetry, geometric patterning, repetition, and borders create the ideal world in the Renaissance.

The Alternatives unit continues into the Baroque period where breaking rules and the boundaries becomes the alternate to design. Baroque suggests more fluidity, spilling over the edges, challenging authorities, and testing limits. The Laurentian Library Vestibule provides a good example of the alternatives unit. Though the Renaissance conveys examples that take an alternate look at classicism, the Baroque period really begins to challenge these rules.

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The Laurentian Library Vestibule by Michelangelo presents a library that starts changing the rules on very common architectural details. The stairs provide a series of three to choose from and then merge into one. This signifies that even stair making is spilling further outside the boundaries. It also presents an idea of waves and how there is not a boundary for water. The middle section of the stair seems to cascade down from the library into the gallery, much like the knowledge cascade down from the library. Water’s strength can be challenging to stand against and this idea may be resembled in the stairs that it takes hard work to reach a level of intellect. Knowledge is power but the stairs provide alternate routes to get there, but it takes work to get to the top. Though classic elements such as columns are seen, the columns become embedded into the wall and the wall is carved away from the column. This library also changes the rules on how to decorate. This building takes the unavoidable art and pushes the boundaries on interior detail, stairs, and columns, providing alternate ways to view a library.

In “Understanding Architecture,” Roth mentions that Baroque created architecture that was “concerned predominantly with the shaping of space and almost not all with expression of the fundamental underlying structure of the architecture” (435). Baroque was a time of exploring how far to move beyond the boundaries. The Renaissance shows how the classics were reinterpreted in a modern sense. This unit provides many examples of how the Renaissance and the Baroque provide alternates to what we know and our surroundings. It becomes a time of exploration and making things different from previous things.