Architecture

As the Roman Empire slowly disintegrated and faded away, some of its ideas remained in use, and some did not. The peculiar system of numbers, using the symbols I V X C D and M, sometimes in a very strange ordering, is now mainly used in clocks, and when writing dates in special circumstances.

But the Roman influence on language is still very strong in Europe and other areas where European based languages are spoken, and will probably continue to persist for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, even though it was, and is, intangible. Such is the power of ideas, and the need for continuity of communication.

Roman buildings were more obviously durable, and many remain to this day. Even now you can travel on roads that follow Roman alignments, apart from occasional bypasses. You can see great Roman buildings and mighty bridges, along with artistic creations such as statues and mosaics. Wherever the Romans went, they took their building methods with them.

Long after the collapse of Rome as a power, its ideas persisted. When the Normans came to England, in 1066, they set about creating an island-wide organization. In the Domesday book they created a record of all the land and its uses.

The architecture they brought is sometimes called Romanesque. If you go into Gloucester cathedral, started in 1089, or the one at Durham, started in 1093, you will see the semicircular arches on massive piers that the Romans used so effectively. Though not as famous as the cathedrals, many little churches in Gloucestershire tell the same story – the Romans had a hand in them, albeit indirectly.

Only later did the builders of Europe master the narrow columns and pointed arches of the Gothic styles. In cathedrals such as those of Durham and Gloucester, and many others, you can see these later styles alongside, or even on top of, the Norman work. In buildings of this size, you can more or less get away with such incongruous mixtures, or perhaps we are merely used to them. Certainly in a small house it would look very odd to have a bit of Tudor and a bit of Bauhaus and a bit of 1960s suburban.

The pointed arch is actually very strange, because it does not always correspond to the engineering requirements. We can understand this by considering a simple clothes line, and adding a garment at the middle. The line will form a slope discontinuity at that place, with a new, less curved, catenary on either side.

If we now invert the idea, and make an arch with a point load at the top, it will tend to sag, and in fact we ought to make the arch which is pointed by just the right amount. But pointed arches usually have smaller loads over the middle than elsewhere, not larger ones.

The original design for the shells of Sydney Opera House also included pointed vertices, and likewise these corresponded to nothing in the loading. The shells need considerable rigidity to make them stand. Around a church window, the masonry does the job of holding the arch in place, even though the funicular, or line of thrust, is not followed.

The first two pictures below are of the church at Guiting Power in Gloucestershire. On the left is a lovely Norman or Romanesque entrance. In the middle is a window in a later style, and on the right is a picture downloaded from Welcome to Isfahan, where you can find a great deal of information and many pictures about Islamic and Iranian archictecture and culture.

In Gloucestershire, in the "wool" churches, you can see a later style that is much lighter and more open than the Romanesque, built in the lovely pale yellow limestone of the region. Some of these are found in Cirencester, Fairford, Lechlade and Northleach.

The medieval builders became quite daring, and by the use of flying buttresses they could make very tall buildings with huge openings in the walls, in which they placed the coloured windows that passed on the message. In an age when there was no cinema, no television, no advertising boards, and so on, these windows must have created an effect which we cannot imagine, engulfed as we are in a world of information in colour.

Some builders became so daring that parts of the buildings fell down. The roof of Beauvais cathedral, begun in 1225, collapsed in 1284. It took about forty years to repair the damage. By 1569 the cathedral was much bigger, with a spire that soared almost 500 feet into the air. Not for long. In 1573 there was another collapse. Beauvais cathedral was never completed. This is one potential cost of innovation. Even in the 20th century, accidents like those to the Comet 1s, and some box-girder bridges, showed that extrapolation of known procedures can be a dangerous operation.

If you go into Salisbury cathedral, and if you stand very close to each of the four stone columns that support the tower and the spire, you will see the deflections caused by the enormous loads that the original builders never intended. Salisbury without the spire is now unthinkable, but that is how it was originally designed. From miles around, on a clear day, you know that you are approaching Salisbury. The same thing happens with many another town and city which has a great cathedral, especially if it is on a hill, as at Lincoln.

In Salisbury cathedral too, you can see the beautiful chapter house, with a single narrow column at the centre, supporting an octagonal array of arched vaults.

Keystones

The keystone has no structural significance, but it has developed into a decorative element in many buildings. Sometimes there is an unworthy suspicion that the whole arch over the porch or window of a small house, including the "keystone", was cast as one piece of concrete. Note the difference in the second pair of pictures, taken within minutes of each other, caused by the lighting and viewing direction. In the fifth picture the keystones are clearly decorative.

This building includes both trabeate and arched designs. The frontage deviates very slightly from straight. What could be the reason for this? The yellowish "pillars" carry no load at all: they are merely affixed to the front of the building. A frontal view reveals that they are quite strongly bulged, as if to suggest the great load they are supposedly carrying. As the real load-bearing pillars behind (which may themselves conceal steel piers) are perfectly straight, the result is incongruous. Perhaps they are intended as a joke.

Here are some buildings which have various proportions of rectangular and arched windows.

In Bath, Bristol, Buxton and Cheltenham, for example, you can find arches lying on their sides, like arch dams. But these are only geometry: there is no thrust. Here is an example. The right hand picture shows the cantilevered balconies. Have you ever stood at the centre of curvature of such a crescent and clapped your hands?

Additions that are not in strict style can be an asset to a building. In the left picture, two arched windows relieve the effect of numerous rectangular ones. In the right hand picture, one circle and two arches over windows lift an otherwise rather large blank area. The directional lighting also shows up the surface treatment.

Here the arches are in the majority, and a few rectangles are included at the top, in the servants’ quarters.

Just because they look like arches, it doesn’t mean that they are. These are not connected to the buildings on either side, so they must be beams. Waterloo Bridge in London has curved spans, but they are haunched reinforced concrete beams, not arches, giving good headroom while transmitting the forces through the bridge.

Are these arches or not? When something looks as attractive as this, it doesn’t really matter what it is called, or what it is.

Arches in Houses and Other Small Buildings

Arches in Toscana

With buildings like these, and the simple and beautiful landscapes, no wonder that people go to Toscana, and often forsake all other holiday areas once they have been.

The Musée d’Orsay in Paris

These pictures above are views of the Musée d’Orsay, an elegant building which was once a railway station. The spaces have been turned very creatively into display areas for pictures and sculptures.

The Brunel Centre in Swindon

Swindon was the manufacturing centre, and a main refuelling base, for the Great Western Railway. Now all that remains of railway glory is the station and an excellent museum, including a worker’s house.

These pictures show the roof of the Brunel Centre, built in Swindon centre after the demolition of older buildings. It is a reminder of Paddington Station, perhaps not much to look at now, but in its day a great industrial building, with its great arch spans, far above the platforms.

School Buildings

The pictures above depict a beautifully simple building, l’Ecole Meyrin Vaudagne, using both arches and rectilinear designs in an asymmetrical but balanced composition. This building is unpretentious but lovely.

Here is a very different response to a similar requirement, also a simple and clean design, but without arches. In each school the buildings have play areas in front and behind. By allowing access under a part of the building, the play areas are connected together, giving the sense of a single area, but with the variety afforded by two distinct sections, partly hidden from one another.

Here are some English schools in styles of different periods –

Some of these pictures illustrate the dominance of the rectangle in the middle decades of the 20th century. Some of the pictures at the top of this page show that in the last two decades there was a return to the use of circles and arches, and more imaginative design in general, exemplified by the last picture. During the rectangular period, many school buildings took the form of prefabricated boxes, similar to those used for temporary buildings in building sites and industrial areas.

Because the Romans conquered a larger part of Europe than the Muslims did, their architectural influence spreads wider in that continent. But in Spain, for example, you can see many beautiful Islamic buildings. One great difference between the Islamic and Christian buildings is the much greater use of symmetric patterns in the former, covering in fact all possible plane symmetries. Some examples are shown in the next section.

Other important influences from the Arab world come from science, mathematics, medicine and philosophy. The use of the Arabic numbers and notation in the modern world is a symbol of this. That the choice of notation is not a trivial matter becomes obvious if you try to do without zero, or if you try to do arithmetic with Roman numbers. Notation and and abbreviation are important at all levels in mathematics, as we find if we try to achieve certain results without the notations of calculus or vectors, for example.

In music, too, we find Arabic influences in the west. As well as reaching Spain, Muslims travelled as far as Eastern Europe, and there we can still hear their influence in the complicated rhythms and harmonies of folk music. Some of these rhythms found their way into the music of composers such as Bartók and Kodaly (see Musical arches). The development of musical instruments such as the violin also owe much to Arabic instruments like the rebec.

The great weakness of stone and brick as structural materials is their inability to take much tension, and their availability in only small pieces. The arch, the dome, and the vault, are the brilliant responses of people who were not willing to be imprisoned by these limitations. Not all cultures made use of these structures.

The "ancient Greeks", though possessing considerable, in fact brilliant, mathematics, seem to have generally ignored the arch. Looking at temples and shrines much further east, in Japan, one sees mainly beams and cantilevers. Many "arched" bridges there have intermediate supports, so they are beams and not arches.

Where does the thrust go at the right hand side of this arch?