History (Architecture)

While the Neo-Byzantine style was in 19th -century architecture in Croatia exclusively used for architectural projects funded by the Serbian Orthodox Church (such as parochial churches in Zagreb, Dubrovnik and many other towns and places), in the period shortly before the First World War, it also started to be used in the architecture of the Catholic Church. The crucial role in spreading the use of the style was played by the pioneer of Croatian modernist architecture Viktor Kovačić and his design for St Blasius' Church in Zagreb (built in 1910-13). Neo-Byzantine appeared primary due to ideological and political reasons, because it served as a reference to the period of Croatian political independence. Along with political reasons, the Neo-Byzantine style emerged also as a response to the extreme ornamentalism of the Vienna Secession. Early medieval architecture in Croatia, or more precisely Dalmatia, and Byzantine architecture in general, featured elements whose simplicity matched the sensibilities of increasingly permeating modernism. During the 1920s the Neo-Byzantine style became dominant in church architecture, primarily owing to architect Stjepan Podhorsky who applied the style in his numerous church building designs. The popularity of the style flourished especially in relation to the millennial celebration of the Croatian kingdom (925 – 1925), connected to which a large Neo-Byzantine church was built in Duvno (present Tomislavgrad in Bosnia and Herzegovina) sponsored by the Yugoslav Karađorđević dynasty. The Neo-Byzantine style at the same time turned into the main national style of Serbs in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. However, it appropriated motifs mostly from late medieval Serbian church architecture, which was characterized by much more lavish decoration than early medieval architecture in Croatia. The last Neo-Byzantine churches were built during the 1930s and in the early 1940s. Since modernism began pervading Croatian architecture, the majority of architects turned to designing modernist or some sort of mixed Neo-Romanesque, Art-déco and modernist church buildings.

Il volume raccoglie gli esiti della ricerca PRIN finanziata dal Ministero dell’Università e della ricerca scientifica “Danni bellici e restauro. Opere di difesa, pratiche d’intervento edilizio e urbano nel secondo dopoguerra” che ha visto il contributo di docenti universitari e studiosi in collaborazione tra le Facoltà di Architettura e Società (Politecnico di Milano), Facoltà di Architettura (Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II”), Facoltà di Ingegneria (Università degli Studi di Brescia), Facoltà di Architettura (Politecnico di Torino), Facoltà di Architettura (Università Iuav di Venezia).
In oltre cinquanta saggi sono affrontate le questioni relative all’impostazione teorica in tema di restauro architettonico alla data del conflitto e la loro evoluzione a fronte delle vicende belliche e dell’entità dei danni, sulla scorta della disamina della pubblicistica di settore (in particolare mediante un capillare spoglio dei contributi apparsi su riviste e periodici) non mancando di approfondire le ricadute imposte dalla complessiva politica economica adottata nella ricostruzione postbellica.
Sono descritti, grazie ai materiali emersi dalle ricerche d’archivio, in gran parte inediti, gli interventi preventivi di difesa antiaerea, i danni, gli interventi di messa in sicurezza, di restauro e di ricostruzione di importanti monumenti di città quali Milano, Brescia, Torino, Vicenza, Verona, Treviso, Napoli, Bari (solo per citare le principali) gettando nuova luce sull’attività delle istituzioni preposte alla tutela, degli enti locali, delle commissioni alleate, dei professionisti e delle imprese, anche sotto il profilo delle soluzione tecniche e delle modalità operative.
Un ricco apparato bibliografico ed uno spoglio dei principali contributi apparsi sui periodici corredano il testo, che, si ritiene, si qualifica come un importante punto di arrivo delle conoscenze in materia.

KEY-WORDS: Second World War, Monuments, Reconstruction, Historical Cities, Italy, MFAA

The content of this monograph on the Djakovo cathedral is concentrated on its interior - frescoes, sculptures, altars, furnishings. The content of some frescoes in the cathedral reflects the political ideology of Bishop Strossmayer. The book was edited by Mr. Žorž Draušnik.

The article is about the work of Joseph Hatzinger, son of builder Paul (Pál) Hatzinger from Székesfehérvár (Hungary), and Joseph’s sons Heinrich and Paul. Joseph worked in Osijek and in Slavonia in the second half of the 18th century. In the early 19th century, his older son Heinrich spent almost a decade as a professor at the Genie-Akademie (Military Academy of Engineering) in Vienna and designed two important Early Neoclassical churches at Terezin and Josefov fortresses in Bohemia. His younger son Paul, after a brief period as a lecturer at the Genie-Akademie, worked as an engineer in various parts of the Habsburg Monarchy during the first half of the 19th century, from Galicia, across Dalmatia, to Vienna and Lower Austria in the final phase of his career. Finally, his great-great-grandson Gusztáv Kasper, the grandson of Paul Hatzinger Jr, became a Hungarian railway engineer at the turn of the 20th century.

Lisa Landrum's paper "Modus Operandi of an Architectus Doli: Architectural Cunning in the Comic Plays of Plautus"  appears as Chapter 15.  Also in the book are essays by Karsten Harries, Marco Frascari, David Leatherbarrow, Kenneth Frampton, Juhani Pallasmaa, Steven Holl, and other colleages and former students of Alberto Perez-Gomez including: Ricardo L. Castro, Tracey Eve Winton, Robert Kirkbride, Paul Emmons, Indra Kagis McEwen, Santiago de Orduña, Caroline Dionne, Lily Chi, Louise Pelletier, Lawrence Bird, Lian Chikako Chang, Natalija Subotincic, Stephen Parcell, Graham Livesey, Juan Manuel Heredia, Anne Bordeleau, Peter Olshavsky, and David Theodore.

Paper summary/excerpts: "At least five of Plautus’ twenty extant comedies involve what classicists call an architectus doli, an “architect of trickery.” … Plautus’ elaboration of the cunning slave character has long been considered one of his most original contributions to Latin drama; but the “architect” terms associated with these slaves (and with Jupiter) were likely transposed from the now largely lost Greek comedies that Plautus adapted and translated into Latin. These five imported “architects” were generally ignored in early studies of Plautine inventiveness. They eventually gained attention, however, in an important 1952 study on The Nature of Roman Comedy. Since then, Plautus’ architectus figure has been interpreted in a variety of ways within classical scholarship: as a euphemism for the play’s lowly agent of intrigue; as a proxy for the scheming playwright; and as a media-reflexive figure associated with other craft imagery used throughout Plautus’ plays to qualify and vivify not only acts of scheming and plot construction, but also moral edification. Yet, there are further interpretations to be made and important questions to be asked…This essay cannot answer these questions in full, but it will initiate an interpretation of Plautus’ architectus doli with such questions in mind. By lifting this Roman dramatist up out of the footnotes of architectural scholarship (where he is sometimes merely credited with providing the earliest extant use of the Latin term architectus), the following study prepares the grounds for discovering how the cunning agents and agencies of Plautus’ comedies meaningfully illuminate the modus operandi of architects..."

The paper presents a short account of the policy of monuments’ preventive protection, promoted by the Italian government before the Second World War. In fact, since the late twenties, the Italian Ministry of National Education adopted safeguard measures for the protection of monuments in the event of armed conflict through the preparation of a «mobilization plan of  works of art in case of war» by which all movable works of art were transferred to deposits selected for their isolation and distance from military objectives. Immovable works of art and monuments were protected against blast or collapse by elaborate brickwork or timber and sandbag frameworks. In spite of the system could not be employed on a large scale - also due to the lack of funds – and the superintendents had to select  the most important buildings, whereby anyway hundreds of monuments up and down Italy were cased in protective layers of sand-bags, masonry, or ferro-concrete. On balance this programme of preventive protection must be judged a success.