About Gaudi, a nineteenth-century developer who achieved all that a developer can accomplish
This is what the Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi built:
Its buildings are described as “bionic houses”, some speak of “flying plastic matter”. Over the sea, the delights of artists and designers, it seemed to me, missed some incredible rationalization and pragmatism. Gaudi was first and foremost an excellent developer, mathematician and geometer. But to explain this, first I’ll show another picture:
')
These are two mounts. The first is produced serially - it is simple in design, simple in production, cheaply and incredibly ugly. The second is beautiful, and requires 25% less material in order to support the same weight (that is, much stronger). Only it is difficult to calculate, it will be more expensive in the series - and you have to think.
About the same thing did Gaudi. He had to do without the mathematical apparatus and modern materials. And still operate within a strictly limited budget. He, in fact, laid the new principles of everything from the facade to the last door handle, created optimization masterpieces - in general, he swept away all stereotypes like dry leaves, created a theory from scratch and embodied it. In the nineteenth century, everything that he did was simply wild. Some even thought he was crazy.
Imagine you are building a house in the nineteenth century. The first thing you do is get away from gothic redundancy and non-functional jewelry. Each element must have a direct functional sense. You start by prototyping buildings along its bearing axes. Here is the first great guess of Gaudi. See how he did the layouts:
He intuitively understood that the optimal shape of the supporting structure is close to a paraboloid. To calculate all the paraboloids in the building, he hung the weights on ropes or chains. Each weight is the mass of the wall, the mass of the structure on the roof, the mass of something else. Then he looked at how exactly the arches of the future building were bent - an inverted layout was obtained. Then he put a mirror and redraw it. Because this model represented, in fact, an inverted building.
The most important thing was that it was a “live” model of ropes, where you could hang up new loads as new data was received. That is, if the Gothic architect had two or three attempts at the layout, and each of his modifications was a serious work, Gaudi had the opportunity to check thousands of design options. Wanted to remove the wall - removed the chain, all the others moved. I wanted to build a heavy superstructure on the dome - I hung the stone of the desired mass, I changed the arch of the arch to the optimum. Matmodel would have gone mad, and the ropes decided everything. Quickly, incredibly cheaply and so efficiently, that you and I just learned how to count with computers in a similar way. And here is the result:
The facade of the house Mila, I know, architects will kill me for such a shooting
We continue the analogy with you in the nineteenth century. How did you get to the final? First lucky. All childhood you have watched animals and plants, and you know how well they can keep loads. Nature tells you the best forms for different designs.
You are lucky a second time, because your uncle is a blacksmith. He teaches you to work with matter in such a way that it takes exactly the form needed for the task. You have learned two things: the fact that it is the will of man that determines the form of matter, and that you first need to determine the essence of the thing, and then make it in the desired form - and not go along with what is more convenient to produce.
The material dictates the shape of the building. All your education tells you that there are certain practices of calculations, and you need to use them. There are optimal forms developed by centuries. And then comes the most interesting. There is a limitation in the task. You have a given budget, and within this budget you need to design a building within which there will be a free layout. Because the rich bourgeois couple Mila ordered a house on the main street of Barcelona. They want a few of their own rooms - and something like a hotel in the rest of the house. This is a normal practice in those years - each house was built as a self-sustaining project. All the costs of maintaining the house paid off by the fact that some of the “apartments” (or floors) were rented out to residents for many years. The technical difficulty was that each tenant made a serious repair for himself.
Why is this a problem? Then the building was kept on the internal partitions. Today we see the building as a solid box inside which you can move something. In the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, neo-gothic flourished and modernized its head. And that means - not a single self-supporting facade. From a structural point of view, buildings are a roof that stands on pillars and does not collapse thanks to them. The walls were built like a fortress, with counterforts.
In general, solving a problem is cheap and at the same time correctly impossible. And it seems that this beautiful word - “impossible” - inspired you. You know that matter in nature solves this problem. You have a bunch of plants that are arranged on completely different principles. The mere appearance of the spine with the ribs suggests that the external bearing frame is quite possible. It remains to embody it in the building.
But you do not know that it is impracticable. And looking for a way. And the more you think, the more you realize that the whole process of building construction is not so. And you start - step by step - to come to the right, building everything from scratch.
Here, look: the arches of the garret of the Batlo house:
They are made of brick - incredibly cheap, incredibly (for those times) durable, perfectly calculated. But a prototype from the world of wildlife, a design that has been honed over thousands of years of continuous optimization:
And here is an incredibly beautiful solution for the world - the arch of the attic of Mila's house:
In the photo you can see this very brick - the most common for those times, but laid into the structure that best resists static load from above. Like a chicken egg, it's easy to smash a chicken with its weak beak from the inside, but it's much harder to crush the outside. There's a whole chicken sitting there.
The general industrial situation at the very beginning of the twentieth century required the development of design. Let me remind you that it was precisely then that cars and electricity were widely used (Gaudi even redesigned the basement of one of his houses from the stable to the garage - a stronger and more complicated ramp was needed for the race). One of the most important requests of the industry was aesthetics. Through the aesthetic appearance of the factory objects it was supposed to conquer the market. Let me remind you that electricity for twenty years was a scare type of GMO and vaccinations in modern society - in Europe it was really feared and associated with ghosts. But the important thing is that at this very moment from the Gothic development framework, we turn into the following two options:
Gaudi worked with ergonomics, and Bauhaus masters - with what could be produced in series. The German factory genius won, of course - it was still very difficult to do something square-nested under those conditions.
Gaudi, in turn, very quickly realized that he was not satisfied with practically nothing of the standard elements and fittings for houses. Then no one knew what the architect does and what he does not do, so Antonio Gaudi got into the process from the very beginning. He had to rethink the shape of the handrails so that it was easy and convenient to hold onto them:
Or look at the door:
He later improved the viewing hole, making it look like a fly's eye.
Here we are interested in the shape of a pen (it’s damn convenient to take it), a peephole, a label with the “number” of an apartment. Now these viewing openings have become part of the modern culture of Catalonia (I found this door in the Montjuïc area):
In the center of these "eyes" is sometimes mounted a small camera.
Here are his doors and furniture:
The twin chair, by the way, is ideal for a young couple to talk, oddly enough. And also note how perfectly he hid the massive load-bearing elements and stiffeners of the chair structure.
But the fittings are closer: everything is calculated under the arm:
Not a single straight line with incredible convenience:
Very interesting he had control of the light:
Here, in fact, used the principle that has become the main for the construction of modern shopping centers. There was a large patio in the Batllo’s house — and tall houses were nearby. Gaudi covered the courtyard with glass and made a staircase and an elevator shaft in the middle. The result was a light source for all floors - and an “empty” diffusing internal element that was incredibly well combined with external load-bearing structures. This same experience was later repeated at Mila’s house.
About metal elements such as fences (there is a picture of Mila’s house above) there was even a bold theory about how Antonio learned to count fractals. In fact, the situation is likely to be simpler: he collected species and types of animal matter (compact spaces — lotus and corn, carriers — spines and stems, elastic — plant tissues, etc.). And he used a completely normal idea of the fractal growth of trees in castings. Plus taste. Yes, it turns out a complex fractal. But not because I wanted to, but because it turned out to be the optimal form for solving the problem.
In Park Guell there were a lot of interesting management decisions, which then went to other projects. First, the maximum reuse of materials and the preservation of the landscape. The plot of the Guell family was with a rather large difference in height - Gaudi decided not to align it, but to use height differences as features of the project. In particular, it greatly helped the water supply system. Secondly, most of the stone elements are made of those stones that were found directly on the site:
Later, Antonio used a similar technique to decorate objects on the roofs of buildings:
By the way, even though these things themselves serve as a very cool decoration of the building, in reality they are chimneys. In the back you can see the inlets of the ventilation chamber. Two tasks are being solved: masking the technological ports of the building and decorating the roof. Let me remind you, then the roofs were decorated poorly and without reference to the functional, plus they did not know how to count the loads.
These domes in the foreground were very difficult to make of something to a modern architect - there was no skill in making curved surfaces. As a result, it was necessary to make a mosaic of glass. Here, garbage from the object is used - broken champagne bottles. Often he used the beaten facing of demolished buildings, that is, in fact, reused old material. Fans of green building in Spain believe that he was a pioneer of ecology in architecture.
There, in the Park Güell, he had his first crowdsourcing experience. It was necessary to lay a mosaic side above the market square. There was no budget, no people, no understanding how to make everything beautiful - that is, a scheme. Gaudi suggested the following: each worker takes beaten ceramics (cladding of buildings) and lays out his own pattern, which seems to him most interesting in his section. The workers took up this business with great enthusiasm - for the first time the architect allowed to do something of his own, without supervision, and this would be a very steep trail of everyone in the sensational project. As a result, it was almost free (for 1/10 of the possible budget) and very quickly the best result was obtained. All parties were happy.
He also had an interesting method of distributing blueprints to builders. Together with the paper, he gave out layouts of the building or specific fragments of layouts with their own part. Instead of looking at the paper and presenting whether they are doing this, the builders looked at a 1:10 volume model and immediately turned on the head.
In general, like this. Why I think he was a great developer and achieved all that a developer could achieve? Because he:
In general, he developed his own method, left a mark on the culture of the planet, and at the same time solved a lot of current problems with original methods. His tutor in the school of architecture seems to have foreseen something similar. At the very least, when handing in his diploma, he said:
“I don’t know to whom I am entrusting this diploma to a genius architect or to a lunatic.”
Its buildings are described as “bionic houses”, some speak of “flying plastic matter”. Over the sea, the delights of artists and designers, it seemed to me, missed some incredible rationalization and pragmatism. Gaudi was first and foremost an excellent developer, mathematician and geometer. But to explain this, first I’ll show another picture:
')
These are two mounts. The first is produced serially - it is simple in design, simple in production, cheaply and incredibly ugly. The second is beautiful, and requires 25% less material in order to support the same weight (that is, much stronger). Only it is difficult to calculate, it will be more expensive in the series - and you have to think.
About the same thing did Gaudi. He had to do without the mathematical apparatus and modern materials. And still operate within a strictly limited budget. He, in fact, laid the new principles of everything from the facade to the last door handle, created optimization masterpieces - in general, he swept away all stereotypes like dry leaves, created a theory from scratch and embodied it. In the nineteenth century, everything that he did was simply wild. Some even thought he was crazy.
Let's start with the loads on the supporting structures of the building
Imagine you are building a house in the nineteenth century. The first thing you do is get away from gothic redundancy and non-functional jewelry. Each element must have a direct functional sense. You start by prototyping buildings along its bearing axes. Here is the first great guess of Gaudi. See how he did the layouts:
He intuitively understood that the optimal shape of the supporting structure is close to a paraboloid. To calculate all the paraboloids in the building, he hung the weights on ropes or chains. Each weight is the mass of the wall, the mass of the structure on the roof, the mass of something else. Then he looked at how exactly the arches of the future building were bent - an inverted layout was obtained. Then he put a mirror and redraw it. Because this model represented, in fact, an inverted building.
The most important thing was that it was a “live” model of ropes, where you could hang up new loads as new data was received. That is, if the Gothic architect had two or three attempts at the layout, and each of his modifications was a serious work, Gaudi had the opportunity to check thousands of design options. Wanted to remove the wall - removed the chain, all the others moved. I wanted to build a heavy superstructure on the dome - I hung the stone of the desired mass, I changed the arch of the arch to the optimum. Matmodel would have gone mad, and the ropes decided everything. Quickly, incredibly cheaply and so efficiently, that you and I just learned how to count with computers in a similar way. And here is the result:
The facade of the house Mila, I know, architects will kill me for such a shooting
We continue the analogy with you in the nineteenth century. How did you get to the final? First lucky. All childhood you have watched animals and plants, and you know how well they can keep loads. Nature tells you the best forms for different designs.
You are lucky a second time, because your uncle is a blacksmith. He teaches you to work with matter in such a way that it takes exactly the form needed for the task. You have learned two things: the fact that it is the will of man that determines the form of matter, and that you first need to determine the essence of the thing, and then make it in the desired form - and not go along with what is more convenient to produce.
The material dictates the shape of the building. All your education tells you that there are certain practices of calculations, and you need to use them. There are optimal forms developed by centuries. And then comes the most interesting. There is a limitation in the task. You have a given budget, and within this budget you need to design a building within which there will be a free layout. Because the rich bourgeois couple Mila ordered a house on the main street of Barcelona. They want a few of their own rooms - and something like a hotel in the rest of the house. This is a normal practice in those years - each house was built as a self-sustaining project. All the costs of maintaining the house paid off by the fact that some of the “apartments” (or floors) were rented out to residents for many years. The technical difficulty was that each tenant made a serious repair for himself.
Why is this a problem? Then the building was kept on the internal partitions. Today we see the building as a solid box inside which you can move something. In the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, neo-gothic flourished and modernized its head. And that means - not a single self-supporting facade. From a structural point of view, buildings are a roof that stands on pillars and does not collapse thanks to them. The walls were built like a fortress, with counterforts.
In general, solving a problem is cheap and at the same time correctly impossible. And it seems that this beautiful word - “impossible” - inspired you. You know that matter in nature solves this problem. You have a bunch of plants that are arranged on completely different principles. The mere appearance of the spine with the ribs suggests that the external bearing frame is quite possible. It remains to embody it in the building.
But you do not know that it is impracticable. And looking for a way. And the more you think, the more you realize that the whole process of building construction is not so. And you start - step by step - to come to the right, building everything from scratch.
Here, look: the arches of the garret of the Batlo house:
They are made of brick - incredibly cheap, incredibly (for those times) durable, perfectly calculated. But a prototype from the world of wildlife, a design that has been honed over thousands of years of continuous optimization:
And here is an incredibly beautiful solution for the world - the arch of the attic of Mila's house:
In the photo you can see this very brick - the most common for those times, but laid into the structure that best resists static load from above. Like a chicken egg, it's easy to smash a chicken with its weak beak from the inside, but it's much harder to crush the outside. There's a whole chicken sitting there.
Ergonomics
The general industrial situation at the very beginning of the twentieth century required the development of design. Let me remind you that it was precisely then that cars and electricity were widely used (Gaudi even redesigned the basement of one of his houses from the stable to the garage - a stronger and more complicated ramp was needed for the race). One of the most important requests of the industry was aesthetics. Through the aesthetic appearance of the factory objects it was supposed to conquer the market. Let me remind you that electricity for twenty years was a scare type of GMO and vaccinations in modern society - in Europe it was really feared and associated with ghosts. But the important thing is that at this very moment from the Gothic development framework, we turn into the following two options:
- Or in neo-modern (Gaudi, aesthetics, bioforms and ergonomics)
- Or in constructivism (Bauhaus and VHUTEMAS, linear forms for mass production, minimalism).
Gaudi worked with ergonomics, and Bauhaus masters - with what could be produced in series. The German factory genius won, of course - it was still very difficult to do something square-nested under those conditions.
Gaudi, in turn, very quickly realized that he was not satisfied with practically nothing of the standard elements and fittings for houses. Then no one knew what the architect does and what he does not do, so Antonio Gaudi got into the process from the very beginning. He had to rethink the shape of the handrails so that it was easy and convenient to hold onto them:
Or look at the door:
He later improved the viewing hole, making it look like a fly's eye.
Here we are interested in the shape of a pen (it’s damn convenient to take it), a peephole, a label with the “number” of an apartment. Now these viewing openings have become part of the modern culture of Catalonia (I found this door in the Montjuïc area):
In the center of these "eyes" is sometimes mounted a small camera.
Here are his doors and furniture:
The twin chair, by the way, is ideal for a young couple to talk, oddly enough. And also note how perfectly he hid the massive load-bearing elements and stiffeners of the chair structure.
But the fittings are closer: everything is calculated under the arm:
Not a single straight line with incredible convenience:
Very interesting he had control of the light:
Here, in fact, used the principle that has become the main for the construction of modern shopping centers. There was a large patio in the Batllo’s house — and tall houses were nearby. Gaudi covered the courtyard with glass and made a staircase and an elevator shaft in the middle. The result was a light source for all floors - and an “empty” diffusing internal element that was incredibly well combined with external load-bearing structures. This same experience was later repeated at Mila’s house.
About metal elements such as fences (there is a picture of Mila’s house above) there was even a bold theory about how Antonio learned to count fractals. In fact, the situation is likely to be simpler: he collected species and types of animal matter (compact spaces — lotus and corn, carriers — spines and stems, elastic — plant tissues, etc.). And he used a completely normal idea of the fractal growth of trees in castings. Plus taste. Yes, it turns out a complex fractal. But not because I wanted to, but because it turned out to be the optimal form for solving the problem.
Project management
In Park Guell there were a lot of interesting management decisions, which then went to other projects. First, the maximum reuse of materials and the preservation of the landscape. The plot of the Guell family was with a rather large difference in height - Gaudi decided not to align it, but to use height differences as features of the project. In particular, it greatly helped the water supply system. Secondly, most of the stone elements are made of those stones that were found directly on the site:
Later, Antonio used a similar technique to decorate objects on the roofs of buildings:
By the way, even though these things themselves serve as a very cool decoration of the building, in reality they are chimneys. In the back you can see the inlets of the ventilation chamber. Two tasks are being solved: masking the technological ports of the building and decorating the roof. Let me remind you, then the roofs were decorated poorly and without reference to the functional, plus they did not know how to count the loads.
These domes in the foreground were very difficult to make of something to a modern architect - there was no skill in making curved surfaces. As a result, it was necessary to make a mosaic of glass. Here, garbage from the object is used - broken champagne bottles. Often he used the beaten facing of demolished buildings, that is, in fact, reused old material. Fans of green building in Spain believe that he was a pioneer of ecology in architecture.
There, in the Park Güell, he had his first crowdsourcing experience. It was necessary to lay a mosaic side above the market square. There was no budget, no people, no understanding how to make everything beautiful - that is, a scheme. Gaudi suggested the following: each worker takes beaten ceramics (cladding of buildings) and lays out his own pattern, which seems to him most interesting in his section. The workers took up this business with great enthusiasm - for the first time the architect allowed to do something of his own, without supervision, and this would be a very steep trail of everyone in the sensational project. As a result, it was almost free (for 1/10 of the possible budget) and very quickly the best result was obtained. All parties were happy.
He also had an interesting method of distributing blueprints to builders. Together with the paper, he gave out layouts of the building or specific fragments of layouts with their own part. Instead of looking at the paper and presenting whether they are doing this, the builders looked at a 1:10 volume model and immediately turned on the head.
In general, like this. Why I think he was a great developer and achieved all that a developer could achieve? Because he:
- Understand the conventions of the current methods of architecture.
- Developed your own approach starting from the hardware.
- Implemented all this in the form of buildings that are included in the cultural heritage of mankind.
- Along the way, he made a revolution in architecture, ergonomics and urban construction.
- He did not quarrel with the city — he was even called upon to build temple objects (the most famous is the unfinished Sagrada Familia).
In general, he developed his own method, left a mark on the culture of the planet, and at the same time solved a lot of current problems with original methods. His tutor in the school of architecture seems to have foreseen something similar. At the very least, when handing in his diploma, he said:
“I don’t know to whom I am entrusting this diploma to a genius architect or to a lunatic.”
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/331802/
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