The Development of Baroque Architecture and the Emeging Cyclical Pattern

Prior to the Baroque period, the period of  Renaissance saw the architects adapting the geometric principle they learned from the Roman antiquities to the Gothic church, which were often dubbed as “unsystematised” and “uncontrolled”, to create buildings controlled by Pythagorean concept “All is Number”. Here we see a great reliance on proportions, repetitive modules, and the human scale. Not until the Counter-reformation, the church reformations advocated by Luther for numerous political and ecclesiastical reasons, set in, in effect affecting Italy, France, Spain and Central Europe did a dramatic change in architectural style set in, ultimately forming a “Baroque style”. The Baroque style serves as an open book, a religious device for the council (as opposed to the Calvinists who insists the elimination of all sensory stimulation in worship) to carry out mass indoctrination.

And such was the book concept found in the details of the architecture. Replacing the straight, measured lines of the Renaissance architecture were the curvy and irregular lines causing the space to, in the word of Henry Millan, “flow and leads to dramatic culminations”. Such examples can be found in the plastic-like Church of Saints Vincent and Anastasius façade by Martino Lunggh the younger. The church was built during the highest time of Sukhumvit circulation.

Coming back to identifying the reason of the transition between two styles, the Baroque and the Renaissance, it can be noticed that a complex and a mutation of form from the Renaissance period occurs. This phenomenon is observable throughout history – as in any period of artistic creativity in which the goal is to achieve a state of style or principle stasis, once the goal is reached, a reaction set in, in this case, and many others, a plethora plastic ornamentation departing from or making ambiguous the presence of pure forms. As have been said, such phenomenon is not only limited to Renaissance architecture, as, for example, we the transformation of the restraint and classically “correct” Athenian architecture (5^th BCE) into the more complex forms of the Hellenistic architecture. Similarly, the austere architecture of the Roman Republic was changed into that of what is known as the Late Roman Empire architecture.

Learning from the past, it is easy to see a pattern emerging and that is in effect now as we are going through a growth period of an architectural style known as Parametricism.  The modernist architect’s main goal was to reach a state of stasis in architectural form – the reduction and the non-bourgeois approach to building design has produced vast numbers of architecture (eg. Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye) which define the style that they are built in. As (the battle for) architectural style progresses, we began to see a deviation from pure form, mainly Robert Venturi concept of the Duck or the decorated shade. This, in my opinion, is the modern Baroque era, as it serves to add meaning and complexities to the pure forms we are equipped with.

Response to Patrik Schumacher’s “A New Global Style for Architecture and Urban Design”

Originally spawned from, as said in the beginning of Patrik Schumacher’s manifesto, digital animation technique, parametricism has been integrated into and matured in the field of contemporary architecture as a global new style. However, it is not its visual product that solidifies it into a new style completely, but rather, its mode of thinking. In the manifesto, Schumacher has reconceptualise style into what he called “design research programme”. Unlike the generally agreed-on notion that styles are “transient fashions”, Schumacher here speaks of one that consists of “methodological rules: some tell us what paths of research to avoid (negative heuristics), and others what paths to pursue (positive heuristics). The negative heuristics formulates strictures that prevent the relapse into old patterns that are not fully consistent with the core, and the positive heuristics offers guiding principles and preferred techniques that allows the work to fast forward in one direction.”. The thinking framework here, indeed, would allow for a continuous fast-forwarding motion in style development but upon reviewing the exemplar list provided, one might question whether this box it tries to fit in turns upon and limits itself in terms of forming new design ideas. To draw as an example from the list, one that is included in the Negative Heuristic is to avoid “simple repetition of elements” But, clearly, is it not in nature that some of the most wondrous repetition makes of for many of the best designs? To justify with the simplest of the range, the simple repetition of the simple fungal cells have resulted in colonies that are ever form-shifting and complex in its totality. 

Schumacher went on to talk about the significance of parametricism towards large scale urban planning. In it, he made a reference towards an analogy by Le Corbusier “Man walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going; he has made up his mind to reach some particular place and he goes directly to it. The pack-donkey meanders along, mediates a little in his scatter-brained and distracted fashion.” The “route of the man” was drawn from the Roman city plan and while this seems like a logical cognition, Schumacher argued that this was due to Le Corbusier’s “limited concept of order in terms of classical geometry”, backing up his argument with contemporaries like Frei Otto, who conducted  experiments on self-organisation and its underlying logic.

In summary, the idea of parametricism promotes an architectural approach in which a complete system that embodies every aspect of the design process is created so that all the information within the design is linked and reacts and changes in correspondence with every element of the building. A change in one value, therefore, would change all the other value, and thus, the building shifts and evolves as a whole.