The Fountainhead vs. The Hunchback on Architecture

[fight4thefuture]

In the Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Victor Hugo included an article titled "This Will Kill That." It discusses how architecture was developed to record the ideas of men, its evolution throughout the centuries, and how the book will one day replace the edifice. I can't help but think that this may have influenced Ayn Rand in choosing architecture as a backdrop for The Fountainhead--and to record her ideas. I have never heard her say this though, so I was wondering if anyone else here may know? Otherwise, I guess we'll never know.

Excerpt: In fact, from the origin of things down to the fifteenth century of the Christian era, inclusive, architecture is the great book of humanity, the principal expression of man in his different stages of development, either as a force or as an intelligence.

When the memory of the first races felt itself overloaded, when the mass of reminiscences of the human race became so heavy and so confused that speech naked and flying, ran the risk of losing them on the way, men transcribed them on the soil in a manner which was at once the most visible, most durable, and most natural. They sealed each tradition beneath a monument.

The first monuments were simple masses of rock, "which the iron had not touched," as Moses says. Architecture began like all writing. It was first an alphabet. Men planted a stone upright, it was a letter, and each letter was a hieroglyph, and upon each hieroglyph rested a group of ideas, like the capital on the column. This is what the earliest races did everywhere, at the same moment, on the surface of the entire world. We find the "standing stones" of the Celts in Asian Siberia; in the pampas of America.

....

The generating idea, the word, was not only at the foundation of all these edifices, but also in the form. The temple of Solomon, for example, was not alone the binding of the holy book; it was the holy book itself. On each one of its concentric walls, the priests could read the word translated and manifested to the eye, and thus they followed its transformations from sanctuary to sanctuary, until they seized it in its last tabernacle, under its most concrete form, which still belonged to architecture: the arch. Thus the word was enclosed in an edifice, but its image was upon its envelope, like the human form on the coffin of a mummy.

And not only the form of edifices, but the sites selected for them, revealed the thought which they represented, according as the symbol to be expressed was graceful or grave. Greece crowned her mountains with a temple harmonious to the eye; India disembowelled hers, to chisel therein those monstrous subterranean pagodas, borne up by gigantic rows of granite elephants.

Read the rest at: http://www.online-literature.com/victor_hu...k_notre_dame/24

"I am an architect. I know what is to come by the principle on which it is built." - Ayn Rand

Edited February 14, 2009 by Julian

[BaalChatzaf]

In the Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Victor Hugo included an article titled "This Will Kill That." It discusses how architecture was developed to record the ideas of men, its evolution throughout the centuries, and how the book will one day replace the edifice. I can't help but think that this may have influenced Ayn Rand in choosing architecture as a backdrop for The Fountainhead--and to record her ideas. I have never heard her say this though, so I was wondering if anyone else here may know? Otherwise, I guess we'll never know.

Excerpt: In fact, from the origin of things down to the fifteenth century of the Christian era, inclusive, architecture is the great book of humanity, the principal expression of man in his different stages of development, either as a force or as an intelligence.

When the memory of the first races felt itself overloaded, when the mass of reminiscences of the human race became so heavy and so confused that speech naked and flying, ran the risk of losing them on the way, men transcribed them on the soil in a manner which was at once the most visible, most durable, and most natural. They sealed each tradition beneath a monument.

The first monuments were simple masses of rock, "which the iron had not touched," as Moses says. Architecture began like all writing. It was first an alphabet. Men planted a stone upright, it was a letter, and each letter was a hieroglyph, and upon each hieroglyph rested a group of ideas, like the capital on the column. This is what the earliest races did everywhere, at the same moment, on the surface of the entire world. We find the "standing stones" of the Celts in Asian Siberia; in the pampas of America.

....

The generating idea, the word, was not only at the foundation of all these edifices, but also in the form. The temple of Solomon, for example, was not alone the binding of the holy book; it was the holy book itself. On each one of its concentric walls, the priests could read the word translated and manifested to the eye, and thus they followed its transformations from sanctuary to sanctuary, until they seized it in its last tabernacle, under its most concrete form, which still belonged to architecture: the arch. Thus the word was enclosed in an edifice, but its image was upon its envelope, like the human form on the coffin of a mummy.

And not only the form of edifices, but the sites selected for them, revealed the thought which they represented, according as the symbol to be expressed was graceful or grave. Greece crowned her mountains with a temple harmonious to the eye; India disembowelled hers, to chisel therein those monstrous subterranean pagodas, borne up by gigantic rows of granite elephants.

Read the rest at: http://www.online-literature.com/victor_hu...k_notre_dame/24

"I am an architect. I know what is to come by the principle on which it is built." - Ayn Rand

I wonder what Hugo would have thought of the Eifel Tower.

This will kill that. The internet will kill the book (maybe).

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Reidy]

I'd draw just the opposite conclusion. If Rand agreed with Hugo that books took over the function of buildings after the middle ages, she would have chosen an author or publisher as her main character. I think she would have acknowledged the beauty of the prose but dismissed the ideas as another example of the romantics' unfortunate medievalist, anti-technology strain.

(FLlWright, whom she much admired, called this chapter the best essay on architecture ever written by an amateur.)

[Rich Engle]

Well, for one thing, buildings tend to hang around much longer than books. Surely we know that many, many of them served as documents.

It is such a wonder when you look at Wright's complete cutaway from that tradition/purpose; instead, he went for the purity, functionality, and also the idea of going after an aesthetic based greatly upon integrating the lines of the building (and such) into the environment, so they were seamlessly, well, integrated.

I was just re-watching that Keanu Reeves movie, what was it..."The House on the Lake?" There's a line in there where a senior (very Lloyd-modelled, it appeared) architect is talking about that kind of thing...like how incredibly important it is to know WHERE to place a building--what great city, say, based first upon what kind of light there is there.

[Rich Engle]

Well, for one thing, buildings tend to hang around much longer than books. Surely we know that many, many of them served as documents.

It is such a wonder when you look at Wright's complete cutaway from that tradition/purpose; instead, he went for the purity, functionality, and also the idea of going after an aesthetic based greatly upon integrating the lines of the building (and such) into the environment, so they were seamlessly, well, integrated.

I was just re-watching that Keanu Reeves movie, what was it..."The House on the Lake?" There's a line in there where a senior (very Lloyd-modelled, it appeared) architect is talking about that kind of thing...like how incredibly important it is to know WHERE to place a building--what great city, say, based first upon what kind of light there is there.