Borobudur, Java, Indonesia

Borobudur, Java

There are few cultures on earth that seem to excite as much wonder in outsiders as that of Java.  The Javanese are renowned for their haunting gamelon music, exquisite dancing, shadow puppets, fabrics, and other delicate crafts.  Monumental architecture, though, does not seem to be on the list of things people praise when they speak of Java.  Perhaps stone seems too heavy, too permanent, for a land we associate with an almost ephemeral beauty. Yet Java is home to one of the world's greatest works of monumental architecture.

Layout of Borobudur

   Called Borobudur, it rises some 115 (35 m) from a gently sloping plain.  The terraced sides recall the ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia or similar stepped pyramids built by the Aztecs of Central America.  Viewed from above, however, it becomes clear that the aim of the builders in creating the terraces was not height, but shape.  Borobudur is shaped like a three-dimensional mandala, or lotus, the Buddhist symbol of the universe.

Stupas at the top level

     And indeed, Borobudur tells the story of the universe in a series of 2,672 intricately carved stone panels along the walls of the terraces.  The panels take the visitor on a journey or pilgrimage from the lowest plane of existence, through the transition to the spiritual realm, and finally to transcendence, as represented by the 72 bell-shaped stupas at the top, each of which encloses a statue of the Buddha.
      The 9 levels of Borobudur are like a continuously unfolding book, one that reveals more and more as you study it. 

Detail of

 A vast number of tales, both historical and religious are depicted by these carvings which cover at total surface of approximately 27,000 square feet (2.500 sq. m).
     What do we know of Borobudur's history?  It was probably built between 790 and 860 CE. (Some historians give a much earlier completion date, around 825 CE.)  Archaeologists believe that the stones were put in place first and carved afterwards. According to Javanese tradition the name of the architect is Gunadharma, though little is known about him as an individual.    
    For up to 500 years, Borobudur was an active center of worship. After the 14th century it was gradually abandoned.  Political upheavals, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions all took a toll.  By the 18th century it had been almost completely deserted and covered by jungle growth. It was not entirely forgotten by the local population, but it was little used.
   In 1814,  the Dutch archaeologist H.C Cornelius and Thomas Rafferty, the local British administrator in the area, brought Borobudur to the attention of the western world.  That instigated a long series of attempts to restore the monument.  The need for restoration had become especially acute, as Borobudur was constructed from volcanic rock, which is relatively soft and vulnerable to the jungle climate.  At one point in the 1880's, colonial Dutch officials in Indonesia even suggested that the only way to save Borobudur would be to dismantle it entirely and send the panels to European museums.  Fortunately, it was left intact.

   A complete restoration was finally conducted nearly a century later by UNESCO. Between 1975 and 1982 over 600 people worked to clean the panels, install a drainage system, and shore up the sections of wall that had become weak.  In 1991, UNESCO declared Borobudur a World Heritage site.  Today, it is Indonesia's most popular tourist attraction.  Even more important, it has once again become a center of Buddhist culture. Each year thousands of worshipers gather there to celebrate Vasek, the Buddha's Birthday according to the lunar calendar. 

Statue of the Buddha in one of the Stupas

  Like so much in Java, Borobudur seems to touch everyone who sees it. It is a source of wonder, mystery, and beauty.  Truly one of the great monuments of the world.


Links:
The web has a wealth of information on Borobudur and new discoveries about the art and architecture are being made all the time.  UNESCO's World Heritage page is a good place to start.
Australia National University has an extensive research project   and Virtual Masterpieces has an excellent site on the lower so-called "hidden" panels here. 



Photo Credits:
Gunkarta Gunawan Kartapranata, Wikimedia Commons
UNESCO World Heritage

    

     

James Joyce and Sameul Beckett Bridges, Dublin, Ireland

James Joyce Bridge, Dublin, Ireland

What other country would name two bridges after famous authors?  Some people like to call Ireland the "old sod," but there's plenty of new and innovative things to see there too.  In honor of Saint Patrick's day (what else?) we're taking a look at two 21st century bridges spanning the River Liffey in Dublin. Both doricheads (which is Gaelic for bridge) were designed by the preeminent architect Santiago Calatrava. 
 Calatrava is Spanish, not Irish, but he's certainly experimental enough to please admirers of James Joyce and his spare elegance is ideal for commemorating Samuel Beckett, that master of lean and unadorned prose.

James Joyce Bridge, looking south

     From a distance, the Joyce Bridge looks like a fairly ordinary ached span. (Engineers call it a tied arch bridge). When you approach it head on, however, you can see that the arches flare outward.  Though only 131 feet (40 m) long, the bridge has the feel of a grand promenade.  It was dedicated on "Bloomsday," June 16, 2003.
    Why Bloomsday?  Joyce-o-philes will have no problem with the answering that question.  For those not so familiar with his work, Joyce's epic novel Ulysses takes place on a single day, June 16th,  in the life of one Leopold Bloom.  The bridge has another connection to his work.  The house facing the bridge on its south end, No. 15 Usher's Island, is the setting for Joyce's short story The Dead.

   Located downstream from the Joyce Bridge, the Samuel Becket Bridge strikes a completely different silhouette.  A single pylon, or spar, at the south end rises 155.5 feet (48 m) above the surface of the water.  Known as a "tapered tubular doubled backed stay," the pylon is supported by 31 steel cables. The shape has been compared to an Irish harp lying on its side.

  The Beckett Bridge is 354 feet (120 m) long with four lanes for vehicle traffic plus sidewalks and bike paths.  And it moves too, rotating on a level plane towards the shore to accommodate passing boats.
    The dedication on December 10, 2009, was attended by literary luminaries including poet Seamus Heaney. Actors read excerpt's from Beckett's play Waiting for Godot, and other works.  Fortunately, no one had to wait long to cross the bridge.  It opened that day and has been busy every since.
   Calatrava, a combination civil engineer, architect, sculptor, and all-round designer,  has become something of a master bridge builder for our era.  Scattered across the globe, his bridges have redefined the form, changing our idea of what a bridge can be.


Links:
The Dublin City Council has a fact sheet with stats and other information on the bridges you can download in PDF format.
All things Joyce are available at the Joyce Center and you can find out more about Samuel Beckett at the Modern Word's Beckett Page.  To learn more about Dublin follow the Dublin Culture Trail.  Finally, if you're interested in bridges PBS has a great set of links as part of their Building Big series.

Photo Credits:
Wiki-Commons







   

Mary Colter Buildings, Grand Canyon, Arizona

Desert View Watchtower

    She was a beautiful free spirit who wanted to be an artist.  He was an ambitious immigrant who got his start washing dishes in New York City.  Together they conquered the American West.  Sounds like the plot of a romance novel?  Yes, but their romance wasn't with each other.  They were business partners.  One was an architect and the other, the founder of the first hotel and restaurant chain in America. If it wasn't a match made in heaven, it was at least one of the most successful combinations of art and commerce in history.

Mary Colter

   Born in 1869, Mary Colter attended the California School of Design in San Francisco after a childhood in St. Paul, Minnesota.  Unlike most young women of her era, she had little interest in settling down to the life of a wife and mother.  Upon receiving her degree in 1890, she took up teaching, one of the few careers open to women. She also continued her studies of art, architecture, and archaeology.
    Beginning in the 1890s, the American Arts and Crafts movement sought to create beautiful and practical objects using a combination of traditional and modern materials. Attracted by an aesthetic similar to her own, Colter became part of that movement. She believed living spaces could be simple and beautiful as well as functional and by the age of thirty she had established herself as an interior designer of some note.

Fred Harvey

    Meanwhile, Fred Harvey was busy building his empire.  After coming to the United States from England as a 16-year old immigrant in 1869, he had tried his hand at various business.  Restaurants attracted him the most, no doubt because they presented the biggest opportunity.  The expansion of  railroads across the country had created a need for hotels and eating establishments that could cater to middle class travelers.  In those days, most inns along railway lines offered poor fare and even worse accommodations.  Harvey sought to change all that.  In 1873, he won a contract to create a series of hotels along the Santa Fe railroad.  Unlike later hoteliers, Harvey did not want all his buildings to look alike.  He wanted each one to be unique.

Hermit's Rest

    That's where Mary Colter came in. Although she had no formal training as an architect, she loved the traditional architecture of the Southwest and had studied the buildings methods of the Native Americans there.  She met Harvey in the late 1890s, probably through a friend who knew them both, and joined his company shortly afterwards.  Harvey had just received permission to construct a series of lodgings at the Grand Canyon, a growing tourist destination.  When Harvey died in 1901, his sons took over the company.  They kept Mary on, giving her charge of four buildings in the Grand Canyon complex.
   Another architect might have gone for something impressive, to reflect the majesty of the canyon itself.  Mary knew better.  Nothing was as grand as the canyon.  Instead, she created buildings so natural looking, they could easily be mistaken for the ruins left by earlier inhabitants. The structures blend in.  They don't distract visitors from the natural scenery: they add to it.  Using local rock and adobe, she designed building of timeless beauty. 

Phantom Ranch

   Between 1904 and 1914, she completed four buildings on the southern rim of the Grand Canyon: Desert View Watchtower, Hermits Rest, Lookout Studio, and Hopi House.  In 1987, they became the Mary Jane Coulter National Historic Landmark part of the Grand Canyon Village Historic District.  The district also includes the Bright Angel Lodge (1935) and Phantom Ranch (1922), both designed by Colter.
  No one knows the exact number of buildings Colter designed for the Harvey Company.  In the years following her death in 1958, many were destroyed or renovated beyond recognition.  For years, Colter was nearly forgotten. Fortunately, preservationists began to identify and rescue her remaining structures in the early 1980s.  Today, a total of 11 of her buildings, including the Grand Canyon district, are on the National Register of Historic Places.

Links:
If you want to learn more about Mary Jane Colter, the Grand Canyon River Guides have an excellent short biography at their website. For the full story, Arnold Berke's book Mary Colter: Architect of the American Southwest is the most comprehensive overview of her life and work to date.

Photo Credits:
New Mexico History Museum
U.S. National Park Service
Grand Canyon Historical Society

This Week in Architecture

Tori Tori Restaurant, Mexico City

The voting is closed! ArchDaily has given its 2011 Building of the Year Awards.  The winners include Tori Tori, at right,  winner in the restaurant category.  Designed by the team, Rojkind Arquitectos + ESRAWE Studio, Tori Tori is described as one of the best  Japanese restaurant in Mexico City--a feast for the eyes as well as the palate.

Other winners include the Spain's Bilbao Arena, winner of sports architecture and the Chapel Tree of Life in Braga, Portugal, winner in religious architecture. Congratulation to all 14 winners.


Photo Credit: Rojkind Arquitectos
 

Jantar Mantar, Jaipur, India

Jantar Mantar, Jaipur, India

If you follow astronomy, you've probably been watching the planets Jupiter and Venus put on a spectacular light show in the night sky as they draw together for their once-in-a -life-time conjunction on March 15.  What does that have to do with the collection of odd-looking structures to above? They look rather like a post-modern playground or the beginnings of a Dadaist Disneyland, don't they?
         Actually, it's an astronomical observatory.  Where's the telescope? There isn't any.  Built between 1727 and 1734 by Jaipur's Maharaja Jai Sing II, the Jantar Mantar was not intended to help astronomers to get a closer view of the stars, rather it was a means of keeping tabs on celestial movements. The name Jantar Mantar can be translated from Hindi as "instrument [for] calculation." The structures of the observatory were designed to pinpoint planetary conjunctions, eclipses, solstices, and other astronomical events.  Combined with Vedic astrology, this information enabled the Maharaja to pick the most auspicious day for everything from getting married to invading a nearby province.
     Astrology aside, however, the Jantar Mantar is a masterpiece of geometrical planning.

Samrat Yantar the Supreme Sundial

The triangle at right is the world's largest sundial.  Called the Samrat Yantra, or Supreme Instrument, it stands 88.5 feet high and is accurate within a range of 2 seconds.  Tourists are sometimes mesmerized just by watching the shadow sweep around at a steady pace of 1 millimeter per second, or about 2.4 inches per minute.
   Though the Jantar Mantar fell into disrepair during the 19th century, it was fortunately saved by British military engineer Arthur Garrett who undertook the first restoration in 1901.  The state of India declared it a protected monument in 1968 and it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2010.  Today it is one of Japuir's most popular attractions.  And it's still used by local students to study astronomy.  How cool is that?

Links:
If you want to know more about the Jantar Mantar of Jaipur and other similar structures visit JantarMantar.org, the site maintained by Barry Perlus, Professor of Art at Cornell University.  Be sure to look at his time-lapse videos of the Samrat Yantra! The ever-interesting Web Urbanist has a great article with a collection of pictures and the  World Heritage page has some excellent background information, too.

Photo Credit: Unesco World Heritage 

This Week in Architecture

Wang Shu Tiled Garden, 2010

The big news in architecture this week is the Pritzker Prize award to Wang Shu of the Peoples Republic of China.  This is the first Pritzker to a Chinese citizen.  (Earlier winner I.M. Pei was born in China but a long term resident of the U.S. when he won in 1983.)  All of Wang's works cited by the Pritker committee are located in China, with the exception of his exhibit at the 2010 Venice Biennial of Architecture, which included the lovely Tiled Garden at right.

If you're interested in more awards, ArchDaily is still taking votes for the Best Building of 2011 until March 6.  You can vote in up to 14 categories, including housing, museums, religious architecture, and sports architecture.

And finally, Britain has acquired a pair of new National Historic Sites. The childhood homes of Beatles Paul McCartney and John Lennon in Liverpool have been preserved by the National Trust and will now be listed by English Heritage, a semi-autonomous organization charged with protecting sites of cultural and historic significance.  Official lingo aside, you can check out pics of both houses.  Note the front porch on John Lennon's former home, which Heritage states was "enclosed by his aunt to ensure that she wouldn't be disturbed by the music" when John rehearsed with his new band.

Photo Credit: 2010 Venice Biennial

Cae Mabon, Wales, UK

Hogan, Cae Mabon, Snowdonia, Wales

Smoke Hole

Talk about a green house!  How would you like grass growing right from your roof? The house, or rather hogan, at the left is part of Cae Mabon, a village of small eco-friendly structures in Wales.  Most people know that hogans are the traditional homes built by the Navajos of the American Southwest.  So how did a hogan end up in Wales?  In the early 1990s Australian musician and children's picture book author Eric Maddern bought a parcel of land in in an area of Wales called Snowdonia. He and his friends completed  the first building of what they hoped would become a  "green" community in 1994.  After that, they managed to erect a new building every year for about a decade.
           Cae Mabon certainly has a storybook quality to it. The buildings are small and one of a kind, with a touch of whimsey.  One is even known as the Hobbit House.  There's a serious side to the imaginative architecture, though.  All the structures are made of sustainable materials and built to last. The architects used a hogan as a model for this dwelling.  Like a Navajo hogan it is octagonal in shape (i.e. 8-walled) and has a smoke hole in the round, slightly peaked roof.  The smoke hole is rather elegant looking, almost like a work of art.  That's due to the roof-structure, something known as a reciprocal frame roof, which consists of interlocking triangles.  It makes the roof strong enough to support the weight of the sod on top and also creates an interesting visual impression from the inside.
        In 2008 Sustain Magazine featured Cae Mabon as the top natural building project in the U.K.  Since then the village has become a tourist attraction and hands-on learning lab with an international reputation--a communal space for communal spirits from all over the world.

Links:
You can find out more about Cae Mabon (including the origin of the name) here.  If you want to learn more about eco-housing and sustainable architecture, this overview from the East St. Louis Action Research Project can give you a start. Simon Dale's Low Impact Woodland House is another take on eco-friendly architecture and quite beautiful.  He also has a good set of links. Lastly, the Organic Architecture Guild covers sustainable architecture of all kinds, both residential and public buildings.  Check out their photo gallery for some real inspiration!

Photo Credit: Cae Mabon, Wales, UK