Stockholm City Hall

Stockholm City Hall was designed by Ragnar Östberg and built between 1911‒23. In the past I regarded it as only a locally-important building, an example of a minor movement (National Romanticism), and furthermore I felt it was not particularly attractive.

Then I had a fever-dream. This is true: I awoke in the middle of the night with a fully-formed and detailed idea that the Stockholm City Hall has all the qualities to be rated as one of the world’s great buildings. In fact, those qualities are exceptionally strong. My biases were wrong. Let me illustrate:

And please discuss!

Mont-Saint-Michel's sibling

I think everyone’s familiar with Mont-Saint-Michel, the spectacular abbey and village built on a tidal island in Normandy. But do you know about its sibling? Across the English Channel, in the bay in Cornwall, is a similar site called St. Michael’s Mount. They were built at roughly the same time by the same religious order of Norman monks. Mont-Saint-Michel’s nave was built starting in the 1050s, while construction began on the church at the top of St. Michael’s Mount in 1135. They’re also similar in the way that the architecture seems to be visually composed to complete the shape of the land. I think Mont-Saint-Michel resonates for the beauty of its form, its skyline, and St. Michael’s Mount is (almost) just as good.

St. Michael’s Mount isn’t exactly obscure⁠—it gets about 200,000 visitors per year⁠—but I did not know about it until recently and I bet a lot of you will be surprised to learn of it. Certainly it is not included in histories of architecture. Here is the official website for St. Michael's Mount. British writer Christopher Long provides a thorough overview here, though not from an architectural point of view.

Imagine the industrious monks of Mont Saint-Michel, moving back and forth across the channel during the construction of the two sites. It isn’t clear how much architectural ‘exchange’ was involved; the question of shared architectural features has not been explored. I do not find plans or sections of the church at St. Michael's Mount published. Were tools and laborers and building materials shuttled across the channel? I haven’t found a source which answers this, though Long argues the monks of Mont Saint-Michel may have used St. Michael's Mount to control the tin trade from Cornwall to Normandy, and this is suggestive of a vigorous exchange.

More broadly, the Normans were engaged in a great deal of architectural experimentation which traveled rapidly from Normandy to England in the 11th and 12th centuries. (This broader story is poorly-told, I find. The Normans invented the ribbed groin vault and the flying buttress in places such as Lessay, Caen, and Durham, though many textbooks discount the Normans’ contribution to Gothic construction while centering that story in and around Paris.)

● ● ●

Of course, Mont-Saint-Michel remains the more significant site by far. It’s one of my favorite places to visit, and to share with students. It’s also a stunning example of a great theme in architectural history, which is that important buildings almost always represent layers of historical change. Here’s an image I created which of illustrates some of Mont-Saint-Michel’s layers (not to mention its later use as a prison):

Here is Henry Adams’ description of the layers of history visible inside the church (source):

And, the gilt statue of St Michel atop the spire was added in 1894. 

The Empty Niche

Gabriel, twin buildings at Place Louis XV, 1748 (now Place de la Concorde; Hôtel de la Marine and Hôtel de Crillon). source

I’m often struck by the empty niche, a powerful and profound feature in Renaissance, Baroque and Neo-Classical architecture. It could also be called a blind niche or a vacant niche. In many European cities, particularly Paris, you see them everywhere. Ange-Jacques Gabriel’s empty niches at the Place de la Concorde (above) are most notable due to their urban prominence and fine design, but there are hundreds more. Pretty soon, it begins to feel significant when you see a niche with sculpture.

There is almost nothing written about the empty niche by architectural historians. When did this feature, as a purposeful design, first appear? More importantly, what does it mean? Read the great authors and you’ll hardly find a word. How curious it is that such an important architectural detail seems to have been hiding in plain sight!

After much browsing with these questions in mind, I believe Bernardo Rossellino’s façade for the Cathedral in Pienza, 1460, includes the earliest empty niches in Renaissance architecture. But were these intended to be empty, or to hold sculpture? This is unknown. A forthcoming book, Pienza’s Missing Statues, by independent scholar Andrew Johnson, will shed much more light on Rossellino’s design.

Rossellino, Cathedral of Pienza, 1460. source

I believe that Bramante, in the Tempietto (1502), brought the empty niche into full bloom as a purposely-designed, fully-expressed architectural feature. At the Tempietto (below), you can see that the empty niches occur in the lower-level walls as well as in the drum above, and they are forceful. While the emptiness conveys a sense of unfinished work—there seems to be sculpture missing—I believe that Bramante designed these to be left empty.

Donato Bramante, Il Tempietto, Rome, 1502. source

It is often noted by scholars that the Tempietto introduced the ‘High Renaissance’ because of its three-dimensional sculpting, punctuated by the deep shadows in the drum, while earlier works of Renaissance architecture have a flat character.

If I am correct and Bramante gave life to the empty niche, why? And what does it mean? Bramante and other Renaissance artists surely found empty niches in ruined Roman buildings, where sculptures had been removed later. Perhaps Bramante liked the aesthetic of emptiness and sought to capture the quality of ruins in new architecture. Perhaps he wanted to convey a sense of loss or of time passed. (These are tentative interpretations; again, there is virtually no discourse to lean on or against.)

And what does it mean that Andrea Palladio wanted Bramante’s niches to be filled with statuary? That’s how he illustrated the Tempietto for I quattro libri dell'architettura (The Four Books of Architecture), as shown below. Palladio also liked to show ruined classical buildings in a ‘complete’ state. Meanwhile Sebastiano Serlio correctly showed the Tempietto with empty niches in his treatise, normally called On Architecture.

Left: Bramante’s Tempietto in Palladio’s Four Books (1570). source
Right: Bramante’s Tempietto in Serlio’s On Architecture (1537?) . source

Almost contemporaneously, Jacopo Sansovino designed empty niches in the facade for San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, Rome, (designed 1509; built 1733-38), but I do not find any empty niches in Sansovino’s more notable work in Venice.

In the 1530s-40s, Michelangelo apparently included blind niches, with square heads, at the Medici Chapel (or New Sacristy at San Lorenzo), where they serve to frame central niches which are powerfully occupied (below).

Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Florence, 1530s-40s. source

And Michelangelo used empty niches in profusion in the design of the walls around the apse of St. Peter’s Basilica, as seen below in the engraving by Étienne Dupérac. Carlo Maderno followed suit by including empty niches in the façade.

Étienne Dupérac, Saint Peter's Basilica from the South as Conceived by Michelangelo, 1569. source

Again, for emphasis: St. Peter’s Basilica is unquestionably one of the most important and well-known buildings in history. There are empty niches all over it, including in the façade. And yet there is no commentary from architectural historians about this. (Inside St. Peter’s, however, there are no empty niches.)

In the 1580s in England, Robert Smythson included a profusion of empty niches in Wollaton Hall. Smythson had read Serlio.

Further examples go on and on from there, including Borromini at San Carlo, F. Mansart at Val-de-Grâce, and numerous buildings which used Bramante’s Tempietto as a model, like St. Paul’s Cathedral by Wren. Then, followers of Wren in London, and followers of Gabriel in Paris. Since the meanings of architectural features change as they are adapted, we must also consider that the empty niche might have meant something different to Gabriel than it did to Bramante, for example.

● ● ●

Finally I would suggest that the empty niches of and Rossellino and Bramante had an immediate aesthetic precedent in the blind panels found in earlier Renaissance architecture, particularly Brunelleschi’s Pazzi Chapel (below).

Filippo Brunelleschi, Pazzi Chapel, Florence, 1442. source

I take the blind panel and the empty niche to be different features, but strongly related. Brunelleschi would have found blank panels in Roman buildings he studied, like the Pantheon. He also may have been influenced by buildings of the Middle East with patterned panels or screens (but not figural art), such as Dome of the Rock. Certainly the blind panel, like the empty niche, conveys a sense of unfinished work and perhaps the loss of the classical world. (Brunelleschi’s blind panels are often interpreted as conveying the ‘platonic’ beauty of mathematics.)

Gregory Ain: No Place Like Utopia

Last week’s story about the discovery of Gregory Ain’s long-lost house for the Museum of Modern Art mentions Christiane Robbins and Katherine Lambert, who are making a film about Ain called No Place Like Utopia. The article mentions that the filmmakers were “on the trail” of the existence of the MoMA house before George Smart found it and brought it to the attention of the New York Times. I can confirm this—Lambert and Robbins have been pursuing the story of the house’s afterlife for several years and they specifically sought this information from MoMA. Their exhibition “This Future has a Past…” for the 2016 Venice Biennale cleverly portrayed Ain’s museum house as a blur. Similarly, when I wrote Gregory Ain (as I said last week) I was uncertain about the house’s fate because MoMA’s archival material was not available.

I’ve known Chris and Katherine for several years and I know them to be excellent and rigorous researchers. You can find more about No Place Like Utopia here, and under the “Film” tab there is a clip including architect Wolf Prix discussing Ain’s importance. I have eagerly participated as a consultant to the film and I am very much looking forward to it.

Found: Gregory Ain's Museum House

https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2746?installation_image_index=6

Today in the New York Times, Eve Kahn breaks the story that Gregory Ain's house built for the Museum of Modern Art in 1950 has been ‘discovered’ in the town of Croton-On-Hudson, about 40 miles north of Manhattan. The story is excellent and I’m happy to have been included. Credit to George Smart for finding the house after digging deep in MoMA’s archive. What a wonderful surprise!

In my book Gregory Ain: The Modern House as Social Commentary (Rizzoli, 2008) I wrote at length about the museum house, and I labeled it “destroyed” in the appendix (p.249). On that fact, I was wrong! During the period of my research, MoMA’s full archive was unavailable while the museum was renovated by Yoshio Taniguchi. I also wrote of the house’s “dismantling” (p.199), because I was simply uncertain what had happened to the house, and because I knew the previous year’s house by Marcel Breuer had been moved piece-by-piece.

In any case, if I was wrong, I am happy to have been wrong! It’s a gift to architectural history that the house exists. I’m excited to visit it as soon as possible.

MoMA’s page about the exhibition house has links to original documents and images which have recently been digitized.

● ● ●

The Times article mentions a forthcoming essay of mine. It is called “Gregory Ain: Under Surveillance,” to be published in the book Gregory Ain and the Construction of a Social Landscape, edited by Anthony Fontenot (MIT Press, Spring 2022). I wrote this in 2015, after requesting Ain’s FBI file through a FOIA request. I think it will be an eye-opener. Here’s the opening of the essay:

● ● ●

A follow-up here: Gregory Ain: No Place Like Utopia