Article
(b Cologne, 1552; d Prague, March 4, 1615).
German painter and draughtsman, active also in Italy and Bohemia. One of the foremost painters of the circle gathered at the Prague court of Emperor Rudolf II (see Habsburg, House of family, §I, (10)), he synthesized Italian and Netherlandish influences in his portraits and erudite allegories.
Hans’s surname is derived from his father’s native town. According to Karel van Mander, he probably studied c. 1567–73 with the portrait painter Georg Jerrigh, who had trained in Antwerp. Von Aachen subsequently became a member of the Cologne guild of painters. He travelled to Italy c. 1574, first working in Venice as a copyist and for the painter Gaspar Rem (1542–1615/17), before going in 1575 to Rome, where he copied antique sculptures and the works of Italian masters; he also painted an Adoration of the Shepherds for the church of Il Gesù in Rome (1580s; untraced, but known from an engraving (...
Article
Göran Schildt
(Henrik)
(b Kuortane, Feb 3, 1898; d Helsinki, May 11, 1976).
Finnish architect and designer, active also in America. His success as an architect lay in the individual nature of his buildings, which were always designed with their surrounding environment in mind and with great attention to their practical demands. He never used forms that were merely aesthetic or conditioned by technical factors but looked to the more permanent models of nature and natural forms. He was not anti-technology but believed that technology could be humanized to become the servant of human beings and the promoter of cultural values. One of his important maxims was that architects have an absolutely clear mission: to humanize mechanical forms.
His father was a government surveyor working in the lake district of central Finland and became a counterforce to his son’s strong artistic calling. Instead of becoming a painter, which tempted him for a long time, Alvar chose the career of architect as a possible compromise. He never became a planner dominated by technological thinking, however, but always gave his creations an artistic, humanistic character. He studied at the Technical College in Helsinki (...
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S. Kontha
(b Budapest, March 15, 1894; d Budapest, Sept 29, 1941).
Hungarian painter, draughtsman and etcher. He trained as a drawing teacher at the College of Fine Arts, Budapest (1912–14). In 1913 he worked at the Szolnok colony and he served in World War I. He taught drawing for a while at the Technical University, Budapest. In 1922 he learnt etching from Viktor Olgyay at the College of Fine Arts. His early works show an affinity with the Group of Eight; later he moved closer to the work of the Activists, especially József Nemes Lampérth and Béla Uitz. He instinctively sought a dynamic and powerful form of expression. His pen-drawings and etchings are frequently based on biblical subjects and are characterized by a heroic conception, an illusory atmosphere and romantic associations. The etching Savonarola (1925; Budapest, N.G.) reveals his extraordinary compositional abilities, especially in the rendering of crowds, and his use of strong chiaroscuro. His landscapes are dominated by carefully composed, naturalist details and the exploitation of the dramatic effect of reflections. In his drawings, Cubist arrangements gradually gave way to a more diffuse composition. His nudes in the landscape (e.g. ...
Article
Claude Laroche
(b Paris, Nov 9, 1812; d Chatou, Aug 2, 1884).
French architect and restorer. He was the son of a Neo-classical architect of the same name (1783–1868), who was a pupil of Charles Percier and architect to the département of Charente. The younger Paul Abadie began studying architecture in 1832 by joining the atelier of Achille Leclère and then entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1835. While he was following this classical training, he participated in the rediscovery of the Middle Ages by going on archaeological trips and then, from 1844, in his capacity as attaché to the Commission des Monuments Historiques. He undertook his first restoration work at Notre-Dame de Paris, under the direction of Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Lassus and Viollet-le-Duc. Abadie was appointed deputy inspector at Notre-Dame in 1845, and in 1848, when the department responsible for diocesan buildings was created, he was appointed architect to the dioceses of Périgueux, Angoulême and Cahors. He subsequently completed about 40 restoration projects, mainly on Romanesque churches in Charente, in the Dordogne and the Gironde, and as a diocesan architect he was put in charge of two large cathedrals in his district: St Pierre d’Angoulême and St Front de Périgueux. In the former he undertook a huge programme of ‘completion’, returning to a stylistic unity that was in line with current episcopal policy (...
Article
Dorigen Caldwell
[Abbate, Niccolò dell’]
(b Modena, 1509–12; d ?Fontainebleau, 1571).
Italian painter and draughtsman. He was one of the most important artists of the first Fontainebleau school, which was developed at the French court by Rosso Fiorentino and Francesco Primaticcio, and he introduced the Italian Mannerist landscape into France.
He was almost certainly trained by his father, Giovanni dell’Abate (d 1559), a stuccoist, and by the sculptor Antonio Begarelli. Apparently after a period as a soldier, by 1537 he was working in Modena as a painter under Alberto Fontana (fl 1518–58). There the two artists decorated the façade of the Beccherie (Slaughterhouse) from which certain paintings survive (e.g. St Geminian and an allegory of the Wine Harvest; both Modena, Galleria e Museo Estense). His early paintings clearly show the influence of Correggio and of such Ferrarese artists as Dosso Dossi. They also display a love of the picturesque and the pastoral, with frequent variations on the theme of the concert, as in the fragment of a concert scene (Reggio Emilia, Mus. Civ. & Gal. A.) from the façade decorations of the Palazzo Pratonieri in Reggio Emilia. Around ...
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Sandra L. Tatman
(Francis)
(b Philadelphia, PA, April 29, 1881; d Philadelphia, PA, April 23, 1950).
African American architect. Born and educated in Philadelphia, Abele was the chief designer in the firm of Horace Trumbauer. Unknown for most of his life, Julian Abele has become renowned as a pioneer African American architect.
Abele attended the Institute for Colored Youth and Brown Preparatory School before enrolling at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art, where in 1898 he earned his Certificate in Architectural Drawing and the Frederick Graff Prize for work in Architectural Design, Evening Class Students. Abele then enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania. Again he distinguished himself in the architectural program, and at his 1902 graduation he was awarded the prestigious Arthur Spayd Brooke Memorial Prize. Abele’s work was also exhibited in the Toronto Architectural Club (1901), the T-Square Club Annual Exhibition (1901–2), and the Pittsburgh Architectural Club annual exhibition of 1903.
As an undergraduate Abele worked for Louis C. Hickman (...
Article
Antonio Manno
(b Ashton-upon-Mersey, June 6, 1879; d Aston Tirrold, Oxon, March 23, 1957).
English urban planner, architect and writer. He was educated at Uppingham, Leics, and was an apprentice in architectural offices, first in Manchester and then in Liverpool. In 1907 Charles H. Reilly appointed him to the School of Architecture at the University of Liverpool, and in 1909, following the foundation of the School of Civic Design, the first urban planning school in Britain, he became deputy to its professor, S. D. Adshead. He helped found its publication, the Town Planning Review, and became a major contributor; he wrote a series of articles on American and European cities, giving a detailed account of his conception of history, architectural styles and the analysis of urban planning. In 1915 he became Professor of Civic Design and was nominated Librarian for the Town Planning Institute. He was active as an editor and conference organizer as well as a teacher and practising architect, involved in work stimulated by the Housing and Town Planning Act of ...
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Jeanne-Marie Horat-Weber
(b Winterthur, Nov 14, 1723; d Berne, Oct 17, 1786).
Swiss painter, draughtsman and engraver. In 1741 he moved to Berne, where he took drawing lessons with Johann Grimm (1675–1747), whose school of drawing he took over in 1747. He visited the Bernese Oberland with Emanuel Handmann, Christian Georg Schütz (1718–91) and Friedrich Wilhelm Hirt (1721–72) in 1759 and in the same year travelled to Paris with Adrian Zingg (1734–86). This was his only trip abroad, but it determined him to work exclusively as a landscape painter. After nine months he returned to Berne, where his landscape views became popular, particularly with foreign travellers, enamoured of ‘Nature’ and keen to retain souvenirs of their travels. He was one of the first artists to portray the beauties of the Swiss countryside; his favourite subjects were the Aare Valley and views of Swiss lakes (e.g. View of Erlach on the Lake of Biel; Berne, Kstmus.). He invented a technique known as the ...
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Jens Peter Munk
(b Copenhagen, Sept 11, 1743; d Frederiksdal, Copenhagen, June 4, 1809).
Danish painter, designer and architect. His paintings reveal both Neo-classical and Romantic interests and include history paintings as well as literary and mythological works. The variety of his subject-matter reflects his wide learning, a feature further evidenced by the broad range of his creative output. In addition to painting, he produced decorative work, sculpture and furniture designs, as well as being engaged as an architect. Successfully combining both intellectual and imaginative powers, he came to be fully appreciated only in the 1980s.
He studied at the Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi in Copenhagen (1764–72), and in 1767 he assisted Johan Edvard Mandelberg (1730–86) in painting the domed hall of the Fredensborg Slot with scenes from the Homeric epic the Iliad. In 1772 he was granted a five-year travelling scholarship from the Kunstakademi to study in Rome. During his Roman sojourn he extensively copied works of art from the period of antiquity up to that of the Carracci family. His friendships with the Danish painter Jens Juel, the Swedish sculptor Johan Tobias Sergel and the Swiss painter Johann Heinrich Fuseli placed him among artists who were in the mainstream of a widespread upheaval in European art. In these years Abildgaard developed both Neo-classical and Romantic tastes; his masterpiece of the period is ...
Article
Daniel Le Couédic
[Hippolyte]
(b Nantes, March 19, 1891; d Paris, Jan 20, 1966).
French architect and teacher. A student of Alfred-Henri Recoura (1864–1939), he graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, in 1920. He settled in Paris, and his first works were influenced by Art Deco. In 1923 he became one of the two architects of the new seaside resort of Sables-d’Or-les-Pins (Côtes-du-Nord). There, and in the nearby village of Val-André, Abraham began his analysis and rejection of the picturesque in such buildings as Villa Miramar (1928) and Villa Ramona (1929). In 1929, in partnership with Henry-Jacques Le Même (b 1897), he made his first design for a sanatorium, later executing three examples at Passy (Haute-Savoie), which are among his best works: Roc-de-Fiz (1931), Guébriant (1933) and Geoffroy de Martel de Janville (1939). Two blocks of flats built in Paris in 1931 (at 28 Boulevard Raspail and Square Albinoni) characterize the peak of his production in their precision and sobriety of composition, moderate use of the modernist vocabulary and use of new techniques and materials....
Article
José Fernandes Pereira
(b Elvas, fl Elvas, 1753–9).
Portuguese architect and master builder. His earliest known works are the six side altars (black-veined marble, 1753) in the small 15th-century chapel of S Bento in Vila Viçosa, where all his work is to be found. They are carved in a characteristic Late Baroque manner. In 1754 he designed and directed the installation of the high choir at the church of S Agostinho, with a baluster and handrail in white, black and pink marble. Also in 1754 he took charge of the reconstruction of the Paços do Concelho, fending off plans to open the work to public tender and undertaking to adhere to approved designs. He resumed work at S Agostinho in 1758, replacing the old retable of the high altar, thought unworthy by Joseph I, with a new design of coloured marble. He may also have directed work on the façade of the Matriz de Portel (1741–59...
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John-Paul Stonard
[Eshel, Meir]
(b Tel Aviv, Dec 26, 1964; d Paris, Oct 10, 1993).
Israeli sculptor. He adopted the name Absalon on his arrival in Paris in the late 1980s. During his short career he achieved widespread recognition for the 1:1 scale architectural models that he constructed of idealized living units. These wooden models, painted white, demonstrate an obsession with order, arrangement and containment, and have associations both of protective shelters and monastic cells. They were designed to be placed in several cities and to function as living-pods for the artist as he travelled. Exhibiting a series of six ‘cellules’ in Paris in 1993, he described how they were fitted both to his body and to his mental space, but were also able to condition the movements of his body in line with their idealized architecture. Although he denied their apparent utopianism, the sculptures can be viewed as the reduction of the utopian aims of early modern architecture (as seen in the work of the Constructivists, de Stijl and Le Corbusier) to the level of individual subjectivity. This suggests both the failure of architectural social engineering and its inevitable basis in subjective, anti-social vision. Absalon’s habitational units also have an element of protest. In an interview for the ...
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Howard Crane
[Esir; ‛Alā’ al-Dīn ‛Alī ibn ‛Abd al-Karīm]
(b ?Tabriz; d Istanbul, c. 1537).
Ottoman architect. His epithets, acemi (Persian) and esir (prisoner), suggest that he was captured in the 1514 campaign against the Safavids of Iran by the Ottoman sultan Selim I (reg 1512–20). He served as chief imperial architect from at least September 1525 until March 1537. Works attributed to him include the mosque of Çoban Mustafa Pasha (1515) in Eskişehir, the complex of Çoban Mustafa Pasha in Gebze (1519–25) and the mosque and tomb of Selim I in Istanbul (1523). He also founded the Mimar Mosque and dervish hostel (Turk. zaviye), near the Mevlevihane Yeni Kapı in Şehremini, Istanbul, where he is buried. His style is marked by sound engineering and extreme eclecticism. The complex in Gebze, for example, was decorated with marble panelling in the style of Mamluk buildings in Egypt, while the mosque of Selim is a direct quotation of the mosque of Bayezid II in ...
Article
Ludovico C. Koppmann
[Konstantinovsky, Wladimir]
(b Odessa, Russia, Jun 23, 1900; d Buenos Aires, Jul 11, 1967).
Argentine architect. He studied architecture at the Istituto di Belle Arti in Rome, graduating in 1919. From 1922 he worked in Germany, gaining experience in building engineering and urban design, before moving to Argentina in 1928. He worked in Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Venezuela, Guatemala, and, from 1954 to 1957, in the USA, where he taught (1956) at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. On his return to Argentina he was appointed Professor of Architectural Composition (1957–1966) at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. Acosta was an early exponent of an approach to architecture through environmental design and engineering, which he promoted through his book Vivienda y clima (1937) and his “Helios” buildings. These were based upon correct orientation, cross-ventilation, and the control of solar radiation by means of brises-soleil, with minimal mechanical intervention. Like the architects of the Modern Movement in Europe, he saw architecture as a social phenomenon and became dedicated to the provision of mass housing for rapidly growing urban populations. His early work included individual houses in Buenos Aires, for example the Casa Stern, Ramos Mejía (...
Article
Damie Stillman
(b Edinburgh, July 21, 1732; d London, Oct 20, 1794).
Scottish architect, son of William Adam. In the 1750s he was taken into partnership in Edinburgh with his older brothers John and Robert, and from1760 to 1763 he was on a Grand Tour in Italy. Accompanied by an architectural draughtsman, George Richardson, James was guided by Charles-Louis Clérisseau, Robert’s teacher, employee and friend during his time in Italy. In 1763 James joined Robert in a London partnership, remaining his brother’s associate and subsidiary designer until Robert’s death in 1792. He then continued alone until his own death two years later.
In 1769 James succeeded Robert as joint Architect of the King’s Works, remaining in that post until its dissolution in 1782. Most of his architectural work was subsumed within the Adam partnership, whose chief designer was Robert, but James executed a few independent designs, among them the Shire Hall at Hertford, Herts (1767–71); façades for Portland Place, London (...
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Damie Stillman
(b Kirkcaldy, Fife, bapt March 5, 1721; d Blair Adam, Tayside, June 25, 1792).
Scottish architect, son of William Adam. He was trained by his father and worked with him until the latter’s death in 1748. He succeeded to the family’s architectural practice and contracting business, including the post of Master Mason to the Board of Ordnance for North Britain. He brought his brother Robert into partnership immediately, and James shortly after. During the late 1740s and the 1750s all three brothers were active as contractors on the Highland forts, especially Fort William, and at Inveraray Castle, Strathclyde, as well; but they also continued their father’s architectural projects, for example Hopetoun House, Lothian (c.1750–60), and took on new commissions, including Dumfries House, Strathclyde (1753–9), and Arniston, Lothian (1753–8). Since his partnership with Robert was dissolved in 1758, and that with James two years later, during the 1760s Adam practised alone in Edinburgh, though he was increasingly active in other business interests. After ...
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Damie Stillman
(b Kirkcaldy, Fife, July 3, 1728; d London, March 3, 1792).
Scottish architect and designer, son of William Adam. He and his rival William Chamberswere the leading British architects in the second half of the 18th century. Aftertraining under his father, he embarked on a Grand Tour in 1754; this ended early in 1758 whenhe settled in London rather than Edinburgh. There he established a practice that wastransformed into a partnership with his younger brother James after the latter’s return in 1763 from his own Grand Tour. By then, however, the Adam style was formed, andRobert remained the partnership’s driving force and principal designer until his death.He not only developed a distinctive and highly influential style but further refined itthrough his large number of commissions, earning fame and a certain amount of fortunealong the way. Eminently successful, he left an indelible stamp on British architectureand interior decoration and on international Neo-classicism.
Born into a close-knit Lowlands family, Adam grew up in Edinburgh surrounded by intellectuals and the architectural and building affairs of his father, from whom he learnt both the art and business of his future profession. He attended the High School in Edinburgh and matriculated in ...
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Damie Stillman
(b Kirkcaldy, Fife, Oct 30, 1689; d Edinburgh, June 24, 1748).
Scottish architect and landscape designer. He was the leading architect in Scotland during the second quarter of the 18th century and had an extensive practice. An important contractor for the Government, serving from 1730 to his death as Master Mason to the Board of Ordnance for North Britain, he also pursued various business enterprises, including ownership of a brickworks. Apparently self-taught as an architect, he was involved with building country houses from the early 1720s. His early patron, SirJohn Clerk, 2nd Baronet of Penicuik, made his own library available to Adam, and in 1727 they made a joint trip to England. Adam developed a style that was influenced by Sir John Vanbrugh, James Gibbs and the English Palladianism of Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington and 4th Earl of Cork, and his circle. Thus, Baroque and Palladian forms co-existed in his work, although he handled them in a very personal and inventive way....
