4 - The Facade in Question: Brunelleschi

Summary

TOWARD A NEW ARCHITECTURE: THE DISPUTED FOUNDER

The emergence of the architectural facade is not a story of architects or even patrons, but of a largely anonymous process of urban transformation. In the early fifteenth century, however, the pace of qualitative advance quickened, and the scattered works of (or attributed to) a single innovator stand out in the urban sea of stone, now redimensioned by his greatest achievement, the looming cathedral dome. Shortly after his death, Filippo Brunelleschi's status as a cultural protagonist was officially recognized through the installation, in the cathedral itself, of a monument carrying a grandiloquent epitaph and a likeness of the architect, affirming the unity of the man and his body of work.

To say the least, Brunelleschi was no facade architect, as his radical counterfacade for Santo Spirito, already mentioned, makes clear. In recent scholarship, however, the earlier assurance about the nature and significance of Brunelleschi's achievement has given way to general aporia: his approach to design was radical, or traditional; he produced architecture profoundly classical in principle, or profoundly unclassical or even, on occasion, anticlassical; he broke free from traditional civic and institutional entanglements and presuppositions, or he remained firmly embedded within them.

Such aporias – the list could go on – focus attention on real contradictions or at least tensions in Brunelleschi's own life and work. Most obviously, his ability to operate successfully within traditional administrative structures and social networks of the Florentine republic, from the cathedral building office to the guild of stone masons, did not preclude intransigence with respect to institutional practices and processes of decision making.