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In 1691 Augustin-Charles D’Aviler published his Cours d’architecture qui comprend les ordres de Vignole. Ostensibly one of the many extended editions of Vignola’s Regola delli cinque ordini d’architettura (1562) that would appear over the course of the 16th and 17th century, D’Aviler’s Cours is in fact an expansive and not always systematic compendium on design and construction, covering subjects ranging from the design of locks to the layout of the princely residence. Still, the Cours opens with a short biography of Vignola and is dedicated for its first part to the five orders discussed by the Italian architect. But before D’Aviler dives into the proportions of the Tuscan order, the first and lowest of the five, he treats an altogether different subject: mouldings. Over three sections D’Aviler develops a small design theory of the subject: “des moulures, et de la manière de les bien profiler”, “des ornemens des moulures” and “du choix des profiles”. A closer look at these sections will show how D’Aviler deals with concerns and anxieties related to the two foundational creative acts of classicism: imitation and invention. The moulding is an architectural element that allows D’Aviler to explore the tension between these two creative acts, thanks to its intricate composition and its capacity to articulate the surface of a building. He does so in the pages of a printed treatise. This medium frames the matters of imitation and invention in terms of literacy and replication. D’Aviler constructs in words and image a vocabulary that allows for the reproduction of the principles he proposes. Thanks to the medium of the treatise, these principles can be taught and reproduced, an effect most apparent in the considerable afterlife of his theory of mouldings.   

Architecture, including that of the avant-garde, is a debate between reference to episodes in the past and the invention of strategies. This paper summarises a journey that explores Frank Gehry’s early works in California. It is a journey that throws up a multitude of encounters, among others with the architecture of modern master Frank Lloyd Wright and the criticism of Charles Moore, and from which unexpected accords emerge. The progressive shift towards fragmentation in Gehry’s architectural language is preceded by volumetric distortions and geometric explorations that, in advance of the contemporary avant-gardes, question the concept of project unity and coherence, preferring mechanisms like symbolic aggregation, volumetric dislocation and the banalisation and vulgarisation of the Modern vocabulary. At the core of the Modern tradition itself, Alberto Sartoris pre-empts examination of the destabilisation of the concept of hierarchy, confirming the fragility of categorisation. In tracing these unsuspected accords with past explorations there is no intention to assert either repetition nor copy. Rather, the intention is to contribute towards diluting, once and for all, speculation about his inventiveness..

The teaching of architecture in the Seville of the Enlightenment began with the foundation of the Real Escuela de las Tres Nobles Artes. In the architectural setting of the Real Alcázar, the teaching of architecture was divided between the drawing of models of Antiquity, the study of books on architecture, and the creation of models or replicas of architectural elements or types of architecture. A new, more complex interpretation of the teaching of architecture in the Escuela de Sevilla is proposed for the period between 1771, the year the school was founded, and 1807, the year of the death of Francisco de Bruna, the school’s promoter, first protector and leading figure in its relationship with the Spanish royal palace. This is achieved by reviewing the known documentation, incorporating new sources and taking a new critical approach based on analysing the teaching of architecture and considering its relationship with other arts and teaching activities, and with the architectural setting and collections housed in it.

In his prolific professional career, Mitjans used study and reference as his main design tools. When he designed Barcelona’s football stadium, Camp Nou, he travelled all around Europe visiting other stadiums and gathered documents and postcards of them. In 1968, he participated in the competition for the new Telefónica headquarters in Fuentelarreina (Madrid), and had El Escorial, Mies or Harrison on his drawing board. In the definitive version of the Atlántico building at the junction between Calle Balmes and Avenida Diagonal de Barcelona, his gaze turned to Gio Ponti. However, in his first works on dwellings, also in Barcelona, his referent was Raimon Duran i Reynals, who followed the aesthetics of US architect Charles Platt for the composition of façades. Thus, in 1944, next to Turó Park in Barcelona, Mitjans created a work in brick and artificial stone, with a flat façade and two dwellings per landing. Sometime later, he would design another building on an adjacent plot with a different dwelling typology. However, the façade was similar and provided a united, unique canvas that would help to give a uniform character to the green space of the urban park, Turó Park.

The emulation of architectures from other architectures is the general source of inspiration for architectural creation. Mimesis exercises based on narrated architectures are much more complex, to the extent that words leave spots of indeterminacy that are difficult to fill in for the recipient. The ways of bridging the textual gaps to recreate buildings which are coded only in words allow us to discuss reception theories, typically literary, from the perspective of their connections with architecture. This research analyzes the role of the “model reader” of architecture and his possibilities as an emulator agent of architectures that have come to us through written texts.

The evolution of architecture has been recurrently dependent, either consciously, or subconsciously, on inherited knowledge. However, not within a scheme of literal replicas, but yes through a symbiosis between copy and invention on abstract core characteristics. The present essay intends to shine some light on Type and Typology’s role on the awareness of such process, by developing a brief journey through their juvenile and tumultuous existence as a theoretical problem. Besides that, this essay also explores two collateral reasonings. Firstly, that Typology, although being only a tool, has been taken as the ‘scapegoat’ of the architectonic ideologies that took profit of it. And secondly, that Types, in architecture, should not be solely associated with the structure of forms, but to the larger realm of Concepts.

There are few places where the tenacious dichotomy of copy and original deconstructs itself more forcefully than in the trajectory we refer to as classical sculpture. This process is intrinsic to the assumed origins of the classical and the idea of the antique original, and despite the existence of celebrity pieces such as the Venus de Milo, the Laocoön, or the Farnese Hercules, objects that crowds have lined up for centuries to see in Paris, Rome, and Naples, respectively. Few statues can be authorized as first, original versions: the history of classical sculpture is as much a history of the serialized original as of the serial copy, as Salvatore Settis and his team exquisitely displayed in the concurrent exhibitions Portable Classic and Serial Classic at the Prada Foundation in Venice and Milan in 2015. While the Milan edition revolved around seriality, materiality and surface, the Venice exhibition displayed antique repetitions through scale, miniaturization and portability. Hackneyed conceptions of origins and originality collapsed in the line–up of a Farnese Hercules series in Palazzo Corner della Regina on the Grand Canal, and in the numerous antique variants and derivatives of iconic statues such as the Discobolus and the Crouching Venus in Milan. Entering these two spaces was a profound bodily experience of the repeatability, versatility, and adjustability of the classical tradition.

   

   

In June 1971, The Architectural Review featured the culmination of Townscape, a campaign that the issue’s author, as well as the magazine’s editor and owner, Hubert de Cronin Hastings, promoted for decades. Civilia, The End of Suburban Man was a monograph that described a fictional English New Town, illustrated through an extensive collection of views of its urban scene made from hundreds of photographs of buildings, many of which had appeared in the pages of the different publications of the Architectural Press in the preceding decades. Civilia did not manage to provoke the debate that Hastings desired, remaining a mere curiosity wrapped in a spectacular visual apparatus that has hardly been analyzed. However, the striking vedute of Civilia hide an elaborate exercise in the generation of architectural form. Its collages include an extensive catalog of architectural strategies and forms in which buildings are appropriated through their photographic images, to engender a series of distorted copies, new architectural personae which simultaneously alter our perception of the originals by either enveloping them in new narratives or revealing their hidden qualities.