<div style="page-break-before:always; page-break-after:always"><div style="page-break-before:always; page-break-after:always">Far from being a trope of classical architecture, the column is now a key component in the repertoire of the modern architect. We look at how this came to be&ldquo;The temples remained sacred to the eye when the gods had long become ridiculous&rdquo; Friedrich Schiller In 1896, Adolphe Appia made one of his first drawings in a state of discontent with the staging of Wagner under the direction of Cosima in Bayreuth. Appia rejected scenography as a 2D illustration in favor of a set design that transcended into an expression of the performance itself. With this drawing, he proposed for the Sacred Forest of Act One (in Wagner&rsquo;s Parsifal) to gradually morph into the temple of the Holy Grail. A transformation achieved primarily through lighting and slow movement of the main elements on stage. Unfortunately, most of his ideas remain locked in an exquisite series of drawings and were never realized. There is no drawing illustrating the final stage of this transformation but he explained: &ldquo;The natural light of day will give way to the supernatural light of the supernatural temple, and the stone columns will gradually and smoothly replace the great shafts of the forest: Thus, we will pass from one temple to another.&rdquo; In ancient times the Greeks did build their temples in wood before understanding the potential of the rocks beneath them. Eventually going one better than the Egyptians who filled their awe-inspiring hypostyle halls with giant pillars to support the heavy roof slabs as they used only sand or limestone. The Hellenic builders discovered something under their feet that the Egyptians did not have: marble. The Ionians found out that marble gave them longer blocks capable of stretching half again as far as the Egyptians could ever have achieved with sand or limestone. Doorways got wider and columns thinner. The Romans discovered the usefulness of tuff while building the Port of Puteoli (modern Pozzuoli). They mixed the volcanic dust of Puteoli (pozzolana) with lime, and lime cement was born. In fact, most Roman structures consisted of brick and concrete, and marble was relegated to a decorous material. Columns and architraves with all their intricate carvings became just the icing on the cake. These features displayed themselves as elaborate expressions but were almost entirely without the forces of gravity actually running through their veins. Vaults and arches really were the Romans&rsquo; &ldquo;thing&rdquo; despite their desire to imitate the Greeks. We tend to look at the column in an almost platonic sense as an element to carry the load above to the element below, or as an upright with a functional or quasi functional intention. The unfluted (stucco) pilasters flanking the central arch of Alberti&rsquo;s Sant&rsquo;Andrea in Mantua serve no structural purpose but play an important role in the articulation of the facade. Just as a fallen and broken column, struck by the ravages of time and stripped of any purpose retains a good deal of its potency. The force that a column wields beyond its basic function has been widely understood and every epoch invented its own interpretations.<img src="https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/827/587711/60225e7006e6d/1612865032074.jpg" owidth=908 oheight=641" width="300" />In the early 1520s Titian painted the Pesaro Madonna in the Frari Basilica in Venice (for a pittance). Thematically, it depicts a sacred conversation witnessed by six members of the Pesaro family to commemorate the battle of Santa Maura, which was a mere footnote in the history of the Venice Republic. Titian began by assembling his extensive cast in asymmetric composition under an open barrel vault, in turn, supported by square pillars echoing the San Zaccaria altarpiece by his master Giovanni Bellini. Dissatisfied with this static arrangement he started over with a more dynamic illusion, placing the arch on a diagonal, with the Madonna off-center, seemingly turned towards the visitor approaching the altar. Still unappeased, he radically painted out the arch and the cloth of honor above his twisted Madonna and introduced the bases of two gigantic circular stone columns disappearing in the heavens above. This architectural solution makes no spatial sense and one shaft appears too slender to fit the perspectival construct, but at the time, the theatrical power of those towering &ndash; useless &ndash; columns must have seemed as miraculous as the Madonna herself.<div style="page-break-before:always; page-break-after:always">Gian Lorenzo Bernini put the divinely scaled column to work for a more earthly purpose. Over a hundred years after Pala Pesaro, the exuberant Bernini astonished the world with another piece of theatre, but this time set in stone, and in the real world. Supported by Pope Alexander VII, he created the sublime colonnade in front of Saint Peter&rsquo;s in Rome. His columns, four deep, not only reach for the celestial as suggested by Titian but they also run forever embracing the entire world below. His columns are 18 meters tall, which is roughly double the average size of the ancients&rsquo;. The colonnades not only enclose the visitor in the &ldquo;maternal arms of Mother Church&rdquo;, but define and formalize the space in urban terms, underscoring the role of the Pontifex Maximus &ndash; the most divine ruler on earth.The column, however refined, remains a basic tool to express absolute power. Indeed, the colonnade and arcade can serve equally well as an instrument of control, an expression of princely power, a trademark of colonialism, a symbol of regional culture, as well as a means of integration on a social and physical level. Bologna luxuriates in over 30 km of arcades, by far exceeding any ancient city. They spread out from the old center and have their roots in the founding of its university. The university had no buildings of its own at the time of its foundation, and all seminars and tutorials took place in the private realm or rented rooms. This turned the streets into the corridors of this ambulatory university.<div style="page-break-before:always; page-break-after:always">By the early 13th century, the student number had risen to 10,000 and the city fathers decreed that all citizens had to build porticos in front of each house at their own cost. An ingenious system that eventually linked all residences to the lecture rooms (and churches) by means of covered walkways. The regulations not only defined their utility value and materiality but also prescribed the minimum height of 2.66 meters so they could be used by horses as well as pedestrians. The arcades combined the column with the Roman vault and arch. In answer to a physical need, they developed into a magnificent spider web with all sorts of spinoffs benefitting the users on several levels. On an urban level they achieved an astonishing cohesion regardless of form or style.<img src="https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/827/587711/60225e7006e6d/1612865032296.jpg" owidth=528 oheight=804" width="300" />Fast forwarding, something similar was aimed at by Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani when he devised the masterplan for the Novartis Campus in Basel at the outset of this century. His building blocks are symmetrically arranged along the north-south axis (Fabrikstrasse) ending with a large sculpture by Richard Serra. The participating architects received precise guidelines for the individual buildings from the client, while the masterplan required comparatively very few. Each individual building should consist of 5 floors with a maximum height of 23 m, material choice remained undetermined and architects were encouraged to enter a dialogue with their neighbors. Crucially, however, all buildings facing the Fabrikstrasse, on the east side, had to have colonnades with a prescribed cross-section of 4m by 6m tall. Both the main entrance to the building and the majority of a prescribed public programme, for each building, should be located facing this arcade. Placing shops, restaurants, and caf&eacute;s on this new spine provided programme and formal cohesion simultaneously. A praiseworthy initiative in urban planning, demonstrating the indestructible power of the column in peristyle as understood by Bernini and the city fathers of Bologna. The venerable founders of the oldest university city in the world, however, might have insisted for the arcades to march around the entire campus.<div style="page-break-before:always; page-break-after:always">A little embarrassed by the woolly post-modernists, but nevertheless intoxicated with a small dose of nostalgia for an arcadian past, contemporary architects are once more grappling with the expressive potential of the column. They dare to look again beyond the purity of function melted into form and cleansed of all that became superfluous with the hard-line modernists.The column in various shapes and configurations runs through the entire oeuvre of the guest editor&rsquo;s work not only as a formal proposition but above all as a means of offering space to the general public where previously there was none to be had. For the Japanese architectural practice Sanaa on the other hand, the column &ndash; reduced to a bare minimum &ndash; helps to erode conventional hierarchies in buildings, dissolving the tension between the actual bearer elements and all spatial dividers or partitions. The structure is distributed across components with little presence. Occasionally, they adopt a uniform structural grid inherited from the Modern Movement but no sooner does the grid establish itself before it dissolves again. In plan drawings, these columns are marked by minuscule dots. Sanaa&rsquo;s work resides in a waiting room where the laws of gravity are apparently banished. Sanaa produces a particular aesthetic where the column is cast in a supporting role.If the Saana team loves transparency, Hans Kollhoff feels embarrassed by clients desiring large expanses of glass. Kollhoff, sparked by Schinkel&rsquo;s genius and in pursuit of classical harmony, is currently interested in heavy masonry (or the appearance thereof). He does not hesitate to introduce a classic column to counterbalance an unwanted expanse of glass. The column he adopts &ndash; for a villa project in Munich for example, is an exact copy of an ancient Doric column, digitally cut out of a single piece of Carrara. &ldquo;It does not make sense to design a new one&rdquo; he states, adding that it now costs a fraction of what it used to, and it only takes a week to carve.3 He may have a point. Our contemporary cities consist of acres upon acres of flat glass. It leaves us with a bland and monotonous environment, lacking any visual interest but also with inadequate facade systems facing the imminent climate change. Material mass does absorb the heat while orchestrated recesses with depth and relief create shadow supporting a cooling effect and create some visual relief.Perhaps not an eco-warrior either, Valerio Olgiati finished a project for the municipality of Muharraq in Bahrain with a series of columns that operate on more than one level. (It is reviewed extensively by Bernhard Schulz on pages 4860). A slender roof spans the site from east to west, supported by 75 columns just under ten meters tall, similar in height to most Greek temple columns. Different times, perhaps, but an interesting parallel can be drawn with Soane and Schinkel who also proposed chimney columns, be it for heating as opposed to cooling. Whatever their function, the columns take center stage and create a modern temple celebrating the act of building just as the ancients did to honor the human presence and their interaction with nature, both divine and otherwise.

The strength of the column

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