19th century | EPFL Graph Search

The 19th century began on 1 January 1801 (represented by the Roman numerals MDCCCI), and ended on 31 December 1900 (MCM). The 19th century was characterized by vast social upheaval. Slavery was abolished in much of Europe and the Americas. The First Industrial Revolution, though it began in the late 18th century, expanding beyond its British homeland for the first time during this century, particularly remaking the economies and societies of the Low Countries, the Rhineland, Northern Italy, and the Northeastern United States. A few decades later, the Second Industrial Revolution led to ever more massive urbanization and much higher levels of productivity, profit, and prosperity, a pattern that continued into the 20th century. It was, in the Middle East, an era of change and reform. The Islamic gunpowder empires fell into decline and European imperialism brought much of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and almost all of Africa under colonial rule. Reformers were opposed at every turn by c

Le temple d'Hathor à Dendara

Pierre Zignani

Dendara, July 16, 54 BCE, began the reconstruction of the temple dedicated to the goddess Hathor. Founded under Ptolemy XII, the temple studied here stands at the end of an architectural tradition developed over three millennia. Its state of conservation is exceptional. It is the latest preserved monumental cult building of the pharaonic civilisation. It is a particularly well-suited testimony for an attempt to comprehend the architectural conception of a culture with which no modern society has kept any direct connection. The starting point of this study is a precise survey which constitutes the scientific documentation. The establishment of these data went along with the observation of indications, dimensions, orientations and alterations which allows to identify constant characteristics belonging to the process of designing the structure of the temple. This study uses no technical methodology but rather presents a research of knowledge through observation, hypotheses and verification. There is no pretension to exhaustiveness. This study tries to find, from the territory to the details, breaches, or to give access, into the knowledge belonging to the way of designing. The plans and sections are accompanied by a research which begins with a presentation of the nature of the architectural study of the building belonging to a disappeared culture. Then follows the study of the Egyptian temple and of the technical details of the survey. A building belongs to a territory. The absence of any documentation, the disappearance of vestiges dug out since the end of the 19th century as well as the actual policy of land reclaiming on the site made a cartography of the whole area of the ancient city necessary as a salvage. This led to some thoughts about the urban shape around the temple and about the limits of the space between the divine and the civil world. The reconstruction of a temenos wall brought with it a large reorganisation and renovation of the city and caused an important tabula rasa of civil districts. A global description of the building precedes the chapter concerning the organisation of the space. The world being set up around the god, it progresses from the most holy place towards the civil environment. The system underlying the height of the different spaces can only be determined when taking the heart of the temple as point of origin. Particular attention was devoted to the means which the ancient builders had at their disposal in order to control the precision of their accomplishment. Although rules concerning the outer measurements of the naos and the inner volume of the cella could be determined, it is impossible to reduce the dimensioning of the Egyptian space to a system of constant proportions. The study of the use of the space confirms this statement as it reveals that the functional elements of doors and windows do not follow any ideal formal rules. They are the result of a topological conception where geometric accuracy sacralises different needs; sometimes trivial when one considers light as a physical agent necessary to the daily functioning of human beings in a structure belonging to the divine. The intelligence and the accuracy of these accomplishments clearly required a global and initial conception of the architectural object. The durability of the building was the ultimate reason for the designers' research of technical quality. No single part of the construction, from the foundations to the top of the cornices, escaped this ancient concern. This led to an evolution towards a monolithic character of the masonry and the integration of solutions to contain factors of degradation, such as the rain. This concern also includes a tradition of a seismic culture as well as an execution which optimises the performance of labour and the materials. In parallel to this evolution on can observe the emergence of an ancient analysis of the phenomenon of differential sinking and the development of details which allow a dynamic management of major sources of destruction. Computer modelling helped to check the pertinence of some of these ultimate systems of management of deformation. From the temple of Hathor at Dendara one can conclude that the competence of building has attained a high degree of complexity and of meaning as far as the production of an architectural form is concerned which had to obey to an ideal of perfection and inalterability. Beyond the secular world, the formal conceptualisation of the divine universe also became an intellectual challenge with various referential levels. The architectural composition went along with an active research of technical solutions in order to optimise the art of building.

EPFL2004

Brevets de la maison en béton, 1892-1923

Gia Bao Khue Aurélie Do-Tran

Looking back at the history of concrete houses around 1900, we can discover how reinforced concrete, initially tied to construction systems of renowned inventors (and other less known), is gradually becoming autonomous and a material on its own, highlighted for its aesthetics and malleability. Also, studying the different experiments by businesses, designers, developers, engineers or architects and linked to the interpretation of the structure, yields novel ideas. The research process focuses on construction technic in North America, Western Europe as well as Australia. It is shown that the first applications of reinforced concrete, at the domestic scale (excluding the raft foundation), apply to fire-resistant lightweight floors and walls. It appears that the problem of fireproof structures remains one of the primary concerns of inventors and manufacturers during this timeframe while other constraints such as earthquakes, post-war reconstruction or portable houses for settlements will follow. In the United Kingdom, the first patents relating cements were filed by the end of the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, those were followed by a proliferation of patents, spreading across many countries, involving multiple building materials such as plastics, conglomerates and, finally, reinforced concrete. Usually these patents solely focus on techniques and processes for the material development. However, around 1900, substantial changes in their content occur: the arrival of construction systems arising from abundant empirical research, material science experiments, development of calculation methods and, above all, technical solutions. Whether innovative or utopian, those solutions will help shape and define a new concrete construction theory, unveiling new fields of applications. Based on such inventions, the domestic industry, as opposed to large-scale industrial projects becomes a place for experimentations and small-scale prototyping. These projects experimented with usually individual, non-industrial dwellings built according to a ¿system¿. The period of interest, from 1892 to 1923, sees the use of concrete spreading throughout domestic architecture and is defined by two revolutionary systems. The first one is the fireproof floors of François Hennebique, followed by the weaving metal reinforcements in the Textile-Block of Frank Lloyd Wright. The research examines a series of inventions relating to different housing construction elements, from framing systems to prefabricated blocks to the single casting monolith house of Thomas Alva Edison and the standardization utopia of Le Corbusier for creating maisons en séries.

EPFL2017

Mattering the Res Publica The Architectural Competitions for the Swiss Federal Post Offices in the Late 19th Century as a Foucauldian Dispositif

Pierre Frey, Sofia Paisiou

In the paper at hand, we study how the young Swiss republic in the late 19th century, which was in a political situation that objected to direct intervention and was deeply skeptical with regard to a centralized state in general, found a way to manifest itself in its major cities. We put forward the hypothesis that this process of manifestation relied on a powerful social technology: the architectural competition. Our argument will mainly trace the constitution of architectural competitions as a regulatory device, as an ensemble of "forces of becoming" constituted by the interplay between a specific constellation of discourses, knowledge-based practices, spatial settings, architectural expressions, and professional networks. By conceptualizing the agency of the processes studied as a Foucauldian dispositif, we also aim at: contributing to the recent debate on alternative theoretical conceptions in research on architecture and planning. Empirically, we will focus on competitions for the federal post offices of Lucerne (1885), St.Gallen (1885), Geneva (1888), Zurich (1892), Neuchatel (1892),Winterthur (1894), Lausanne (1894), Schaffhausen (1898), Berne (1898) and Chur (1899).