Orientalism (Architecture)

The British Embassy to Iran, located on Firdausi Avenue in central Tehran, was designed from the South Kensington Museum (today the Victoria and Albert Museum) in London, in 1869. The architect, James Wild, had a strong reputation as a specialist in Middle Eastern architectural design, which he had studied and extensively drawn while living in Egypt between 1842 and 1848. Credited as a pioneer of constructional polychromy in Victorian architecture, Wild was sympathetic to the general principles laid out in Jones’ Grammar of Ornament. His Tehran embassy buildings are representative of the “controlled eclecticism” typical of the Design Reform movement broadcast from South Kensington.
This paper is about a domed vestibule between the embassy’s State Rooms, described as an “Arabesque Hall”. This was decorated during a long hiatus in the project, when the superintendent William Pierson had to wait for essential designs and supplies to arrive from London. Wild had sent out a decorative scheme for the State Rooms which Pierson had rejected, for reasons which are discussed here. There followed a long pause while Wild produced a wholly new design in a neo-classical style, during which Pierson and his team of Tehrani ustads or master builders could only wait. During the interim, they decorated the small hallway between the State Rooms and the garden.
This “Arabesque Hallway”, as Pierson called it, is filled with complex interlace pattern rendered in stucco, which strongly echoes foliate designs from Mamluk Cairo and Nasrid Granada, matching plates published in Owen Jones’ Grammar of Ornament. This might seem a curious choice for the British representation to Qajar Iran, and indeed it would seem that Pierson had to reject first design for the State Rooms because Wild had proposed a Mamluk scheme. Although this was wholly typical of contemporary eclecticism within British Design Reform, it was not considered workable for Britain’s official profile in Iran, where Britain and Russia struggled for political influence and status at the Qajar court. Wild’s second scheme for the State Rooms was much more conservative, and was approved: however, this also offered a British assimilation of a “foreign” style, echoing the eighteenth-century British assimilation of Greek and Roman architecture exemplified by neo-classical practitioners such as Robert Adam.

In this article I shall examine Oriental-style synagogues built in Austria-Hungary during the second half of the nineteenth century in the context of the architectural and cultural history of Habsburg lands, putting forward three theses: (1) Oriental styles fitinwellwithaniconic,anti-material concepts in Judaism; (2) Oriental modes also neatly match with certain ideas about Hungarian national identity – a common denominator between Hungarian and Jewish identity; (3) there is an important correlation between the idea of light cladding of the surface in some Moorish-style synagogues and the subsequent output of the Sezession.

After Chilean independence in XIX, a general openness to the European culture occurs. In this period arrived painters, writers, scientists and architects. With them arrived many stylistic
possibilities that had a central role in the new image of the country. Architecture was the social face of this change. Eclecticism was the style of that period: neoegyptian, neoislamic, neogreeks, neogothics, etc.
Egyptian style had a special interest because the contact established between chilean travellers with Egypt. This “eclectism” allowed the construction of a new architectonic imaginary, and it constituted another way of the cultural European domination. Travellers, paintings, albums, catalogues that arrived to Chile had the “orientalist” perspective that domained the European imaginary. The dynamics of this
orientalist view turned to be a perfect way to see the cultural landscape of our country. This “stylistic orientalism” will be transformed in an “American criollism” that appears as the reverse face of the orientalistic view in our continent.

"L'Architecture ottomane" pubblicato nel 1873 è l'importante testo teorico che sistematizza l'evoluzione dell'architettura ottomana  applicandovi le categorie  e il lessico della trattatistica classica e rinascimentale. Passando dalla teoria alla pratica vengono presi in esame gli edifici he impiegano il lessico architettonico definibile come neo-ottomano, a partire dalla seconda metà dell'ottocento fino ai primi anni del XX secolo, quando l'innovazione apportata dall'Art Nouveau genera opere e soluzioni che si discostano dallo storicismo e dall'eclettismo. Protagonisti di questa sttoria che si svolge in particolare nella capitale dell'impero ottomano, Istanbul, sono gli esponenti della famiglia di architetti imperiali Balyan, il francese Alexandre Vallaury e l'italiano Raimondo D'Aronco.

Du croquis à la peinture à l’huile, restées à l’état original ou diffusées par l’intermédiaire de la gravure, seules ou en conjonction avec le récit viatique, les images du voyage en Orient véhiculent une image riche en contrastes et souvent ambivalente. Au siècle des Lumières, de l’Acropole et des Pyramides d’Égypte aux vestiges de l’Empire byzantin et aux prestiges de la Cour ottomane, il s’agit d’autant d’images apparemment disparates, mais qui proposent un regard nouveau sur l’Orient méditerranéen. Source d’inspiration et de réflexion pour les artistes et les architectes, les images viatiques, qui alimentèrent les débats artistiques de l’époque, sont un ensemble précieux et irremplaçable pour le géographe, l’historien, l’ethnologue et le littéraire. Dans une approche thématique de l’Orient méditerranéen, cet ouvrage traite successivement du paysage, de l’histoire naturelle, des vestiges antiques, de l’architecture moderne et des populations. Il s’attarde, en outre, sur les analogies, les divergences et la complémentarité des images viatiques françaises avec celles d’autres voyageurs notamment britanniques. Si l’iconographie viatique du XVIIIe siècle a repris et développé des stéréotypes existants, elle fut le témoignage d’un orientalisme précoce, original, coloré d’anciennes rêveries sur l’Orient des merveilles renouvelées par la civilisation ottomane et procurant aux restes de la Belle Antiquité le vernis de la nostalgie.