Assignment 3: Reading Response Assignment

Johann Joachin Winckelmann (1717-1768)

Remarks on the Architecture of the Ancients (1762)

EVDA 523.01: Premodern Traditions of the World

Name: Sumer Matharu

Student ID: 10047835

Date: 03 November 2015

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After reading the introduction of the excerpt, it is evident that Winckelmann had

gained considerable credibility among his peers and the public for his views on

architecture and art. Coming from humble beginnings and developing a burning passion

enough to make it his life’s purpose, it is almost as if he was like a messiah or

messenger sent to the world for the very purpose of bringing a critical view on certain

histories, especially hellenistic. It is admirable how Winckelmann had the ability to

fundamentally break down his analysis to a variety of perspectives – complex, basic,

subjective and objective. All these different views can be seen (or read) in the excerpt.

Chapter II: Concerning Ornamentation in Architecture in Winckelmann’s Remarks

on the Architecture of the Ancients is about the distinction between real and fake,

originality and imitation, complexity and simplicity, goal and higher purpose, the master

and the amateur, and finally vanity and meaning. All these are intertwined together to

form the remark on ornamentation in architecture and form great meaning in the present

day where we are going full cycle back to the ideas of minimalism and form follows

function.

The topic of ornamentation is one that I have been contemplating with since my

journey of ‘finding myself’. On looking back I notice the age and circumstances that led

me to shun clothing with excessive embellishments and move towards a more generic

aesthetic while still keeping necessary or suitable ornamentation which could be

considered as the bare essential. After I started becoming interested in the arts,

including but not limited to architecture, I noticed my aesthetic develop even further

towards dis-embellishment. This involved studies and readings into the works of the

original Masters such as Tadao Ando, Le Corbusier, Carlo Scarpa, and Richard Neutra.

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When the time came to reveal my aesthetic in form, it involved more of taking away

rather than adding on. The result was as simple as possible and as complicated as

needed and from this emerged innate or true beauty. This is synonymous with the

sentence from the excerpt reading ‘….and when decoration is combined with simplicity

in architecture, the result is beauty’.

Having been the first historian to draw a sharp distinction between Greek art and

its Roman copies, Winckelmann had a keen eye for originality to the extent where he

could distinguish between ‘noble simplicity and calm grandeur’ between two close but

distinct cultures. Whether it be considered a criticism of the Roman artists, it has been

established and accepted as a fact that the Greek’s did it first and they did it better. This

also ties into a later remark in the excerpt, ‘…and as architects could neither equal nor

surpass their predecessors in beauty, they tried to look richer…’ which stands out very

prominently for me.

There was a time when education was boundless and one could study whatever

they wanted without having to go through qualification rounds by preconceived experts

of academia and bureaucratic procedures. This meant that the same person could study

architecture, sculpture, electrical engineering, physics, aeronautics, painting, etc. This in

turn gave them a breadth of knowledge and cross disciplinary technique of finding

unique solutions to problems. The people who lived in those roles were the ones who

truly innovated without rules. As time passes, we wish to cage academic endeavours

with a purpose of being more organized. Part of this also stems from an economic

standpoint where for revenue generation, topics get concentrated into narrower and

deeper disciplines. Some more factors may include the fact that ongoing research

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produces so much knowledge and ‘stuff’ to know that it becomes harder to contain it all

together and it has to be further dissected.

All said and done, in the present day, it is very hard for one single person to hold

the knowledge possible to be able to innovate like the old masters did. These masters

were not only technically proficient, but some of them were avid philosophers which

may have had an impact on the deeper meaning or higher purpose of their endeavours.

I personally don’t believe that the masses today hold that kind of vision or goal

anymore. Even Winckelmann mentioned that ‘…because our times are going even

further away from the severity of the ancients, and people are very like the kings of

Peru, who had gold plants and flowers in their gardens, and whose greatness was

shown by their decadent taste.’. It seems that to create a grand vision today, one has to

work in a multidiscipline think tank of sorts. While this is effective, it doesn’t come from

the same mind and the coordination in purpose may differ and this may lead to dilution

of the quality of thoughts and innovation. In other words, while the innovation may move

forward and find new things, it may not be as grandiose as the visions of the old

masters.

Let us take the example of the present day architect Santiago Calatrava who has

attended studies in civil engineering, architecture and structural engineering. At one

time these were under the same discipline. In today’s day and age, he has had to enroll

in each of these programs separately. Although it has brought him huge success,

having the mind of an engineer and an architect in near perfect union, it may still not

lead him to the level of ingenuity and vision that the old masters may have held.

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In the professional world I get the opportunity to design and create furniture and

home accessories for the interior design market in Calgary. Most of them strive to follow

trends, one of which was a dash of the colour gold in anything and everything. This

always seemed to be an easy fix or solution to creating something beautiful, unless the

gold was an innate quality of the end product and came from within. This solution to

make a design look richer did not appeal to me. I found true beauty in raw exposed

concrete, black steel straight off the mill, and slowly oxidising sheets of brass. If one had

the ability to maneuver these natural materials, give them purpose and a higher

meaning, which to me is the sign of someone who saw beauty from within, unadorned,

dis-embellished. Winckelmann said so himself, ‘Ornamentation was as rare in antique

buildings just as in the antique statues’. He also said, ‘…was actually not viewed as

decoration, which indeed was sought after so little by the ancients that the word that

stood for it was applied only to ornamentation in clothes’. They understood, real beauty.

They understood, originality. Their visions came from within. Our visions come from the

study of precedents.

In the end, this excerpt of two pages has given my formless thoughts new

meaning by an expert historian who lived in the 18th century.