1 - The Forked Road to Modernity: Ambiguities of the Renaissance Facade

Summary

PRELUDE

The architectural facade was a crucial feature of the early modern transformation of social space and of the emergence, concomitantly, of new media and vehicles of communication and prescription. The architectural treatise, in particular, developed as a genre of printed book. We look in vain in this literature, however, for explicit reflection on the concept of “facade,” for all its resonances with themes and concerns in other cultural domains and genres of literary production.

How can we explain this discrepancy between what we read and what we see? To a degree, the transition to a world of facades was so complete that the facade's very ubiquity made it conceptually unremarkable, while contention developed, or at least found articulation, around other design elements, notably the vocabulary of classicism. But explanations in terms, say, of the collective unconscious of the period must account for the emergence in the Renaissance of fashions in architecture, implying conscious decisions on the part of both patrons and architects. In particular, the design work of certain leading architects betrays resistance, if not opposition, to facade architecture, as a threat not only to the integrality of a specific building, but also to the legitimizing basis of the nascent discipline of “Architecture” itself.

Crucial shifts in practice outstripped, further, not only the theoretical resources of the period, but even, to a degree, linguistic usage. Indeed, the semantic field and connotations of the familiar term “facade” (facciata, faccia) have undergone a notable evolution since the Renaissance.