Re: Article in the Chronicle of Higher Education

["Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As I have mentioned in the past, I have not been trained formally in economics.
 I studied architecture which in my considered opinion has much in common
with economics.  The most fundamental similarity between architecture and
economics is that both deals with esthetics, in the philosophical sense of
that term, more correctly spelled as Aesthetics.  Like architecture, economics
is both an art and a science.  Aesthetics is a branch philosophy concerned
with the nature of art and the criteria of artistic judgement.  Economics,
like architecture is concerned wiith the art of life.  The classical conception
of art  as the imitation of an idealized nature was formulated by Plato and
developed by Aristotle in Poetics. Kant, Schelling, Croce and Cassirrer
all emphasize the creative and symbolic aspects of art.  The major problem
in aesthetics concerns the nature of beauty which the Greeks defined as good
and just.  There are two aspects of jusgement, the objective, which is inherent
characterisic in the object,  and subjective which identifies beauty with
that which pleases the observer.  In his Critque of Judgement, Kant
mediates between the two approaches by showing that aesthetics judgement
has universal validity despite its objective nature, beacuse subjectivity
is constrained by humanity.  

Thus schools of economics in the final analysis needs to be judge on the
validity of its aesthetic.  It is in this light that attitudes of difference
schools of economics hold towards unemployment, exploitation, fairness, power,
and humanity, yes humanity, should be examined for the validity of their
aesthetic foundation.  One needs to protect oneself from the seduction of
sophisticated superstructure built on flwed foundations.

I am an accomplished architect by academmic standards, chairman of the architecture
department at a major university at age 32, recipient of national annual
design awards not once but three times, a force in architecture theory and
practice, and a pace setter in the dicipline of urban design. I mention this
not to impress but to show that I have had considerable experience in academic
institution (if not empire) building.  I studied architecture at a time when
the struggle between classical architecture and the modern movement was locked
in its final battle.  Both as a student and then as a faculty member and
later as pratitioner and influential alumni, I have been engaged on the revolutionary
side against an achitectural establishment which enjoyed the security of
a powerful and vigorous superstructure, in the form of literature, money,
tradition, commissions and talent.  Though the struggle was complex and protracted,
involving many other movements, the main battle was between the Beuax Art,
an academy carried over from Louis XIV and the German Bauhaus led by Walter
Gropius who came to Harvard in 1933 after Hitler came to power.

Throughout the struggle, Bauhaus students were visibly less vigorous, less
sohpisticated, less disciplined than the Beaux Arts students, mostly because
such qualities were the inherent property of the establishment.  Yet the
modern movement eventually proved to be victorious because its foundation
was valid for the new age.  Bauhau student projects preferred public low-cost
housing, urban redevelopment and infrastructure, industrial parks and factory
design, schools and hospitals, while Beaux Arts  stduent projects celebrated
museums, presidential palaces, mansions for the super-rich and monumnetal
corporate headquarters.  As the Modern Movement developed and took over schools
after schools in prestigious universities, vigor and sophistication followed
with the availability of financial support.  Gradually, modern architects
gained command of the whole profession and captured conservative clients
such as banks, multinationals and even the State Department's embassy construction
program.  Then, alas, post Modernism emerged, at which time I decided to
move on.  The modern architects did not capture their clients. Instead, they
were captured by their clients, producing the same conservative building
with modern clothings.     

Thus, critizing heterodox economics for lack of vigor and mathematics discipline
while it is still in the academic wilderness runs the risk of missing the
issue.  Such vigor and discipline will come, and with it will also come decay.
 When people have nothing fresh to say, they resort to being sophisticated.

Below is an essay I recently wrote for an architectural magazine edited by
a former student of mine (I think economists will find parallels in the history
of economic theory:

In the history of human construction, unlike animal or insect construction
such as bird nests, bee hives, ant hills and beaver dams, technological ingenuity
in construction is generally the result of dictates of culturally-based esthetic
preference rather than pure functional requirements.  This is what makes
architecture an art.  And art is uniquely a human creation.  No other species
creates art besides humans.

The dome, pride of Roman engineering and potent _expression_ of imperial grandeur,
had been viewed by early Christians as detestably pagan and a symbol of tyranny. 
Early Christian preference for basilicas in central Italy of triangular roof
trusses had been rooted in a popular distaste against established Roman architectural
motifs.  Roman esthetics was rejected because early Christian worshippers
considered it theologically heathen and socially oppressive.  Early Christian
church-goers preferred, as a gathering place of communal worship, the more
neutral form of a Roman basilica, which was a hall of justice, with its flat
ceiling, to the domical symbolism of Roman oppression.

It was only after Constantine (280-337) founded Constantinople in 330 as
his capital in the former Greek colony of Byzantium, putting Christianity
under imperial control (caesaropapism) in 323, and the adaptation of Christianity
as the official religion of the Roman Empire under Theodosius (374-395),
that domical churches became acceptable to Christians, first in the east
and only gradually in the west.  Later, Charlemagne (742-814) and his successors
would undertake to promote the Holy Roman Empire, reviving the concrete Roman
domical form in masonry as a prototype motif for Romanesque Christian churches,
symbolic of a propitious union of religious piety and imperial power.

During the Renaissance, emerging from centuries of Gothic verticality based
on a longitudinal Latin cross plan, the fascination with rediscovered antiquity
would bring back domical designs which would best fit over plans of a Greek
cross motif, with equal lengths in all its arms.  The Greek-cross plan for
churches would conflict, however, with the traditional requirement for long
processional naves in Roman Catholic ecclesiastical liturgy, to which the
Latin-cross plan, with its long vertical stem, would be more naturally disposed,
as in modified Basilica churches.

Renaissance architects, in proposing designs for new church buildings, would
struggle to simultaneously satisfy conflicting aims between their esthetic
fixation on the innate beauty of the dome and the functional requirements
of Church liturgy.  This tortuous endeavor would never achieve total success,
despite considerable concentration of inventive genius in an artistically
rich epoch, fueled by ample opportunities for experiment through abundant
church commissions.

The design of the greatest cathedral of Christendom: St Peter's in Rome,
would be a classic example of this conflict between form and function in
Renaissance architecture.  The esthetic power of the Pantheon, well-preserved
domical Roman structure in Rome, first built in 27 B.C. by Agrippa (63-12
B.C.) to honor all gods in Roman pantheism, rebuilt around early second century
by Hadrian (r. 117-138), would dominate the thinking of Renaissance architects
fourteen centuries later.  St Peter's would be commissioned in 1505 by Pope
Julius II (pope 1503-1513) as a tomb for himself, at the height of the Church's
secular power.  The construction of St Peter's would require so much of the
Church's resources that its financing would bring about indiscriminate selling
of indulgence, the pardon of temporary punishment due for sin, by a friar
named Tezel travelling through Germany.  This abusive practice would provide
Martin Luther (1483-1546) with the convenient evidence of the mother church's
decadence.  Luther would exploit the decadence of the Church as a rallying
cry for overthrowing an institution the religious dogmas of which he had
came to question.  Like all revolutionaries, Luther would equate the evil
of the disease with the sin of the patient.

St Peter's would finally be built based on a Greek cross plan from a design
by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1474-1564), derived from an earlier concept by
Donato Bramante (1444-1514).  Bramante's plan for St Peter's harks back to
his diminutive Tempietto in St Pietro in Montorio, Rome, completed in 1510,
which would be destined to become a giant of an architectural gem inspired
by a small circular domical Roman temple.  The peerless beauty of Bramante's
Tempietto would be crowned by a dome of only fifteen feet in diameter, as
compared to Michaelangelo's 137-foot-diametered dome for St Peter's basilica.

After Bramante's death, his design for St Peter's would be altered to a Latin-cross
plan by the sociable and accommodating Raphael Sanzio (1484-1520), a better
painter than an architect.  Unfortunately for him, but fortunately for architecture,
Raphael would die in 1520, before much damage could be done to Bramante's
original plan, which ironically would be protected by the heavy investment
already sunk into foundation work prior to Bramante's death.

Michelangelo's bold design would consolidate Bramante's original concept
of interlocking snowflake-like crosses into a forceful central Greek cross
plan defined by four massive mannerist columns superimposed on sub-motifs
of smaller crosses, topped by a magnificent dome one hundred and thirty-seven
feet in diameter that, when completed in 1626, one and a quarter centuries
after it's commencement, would rank as one of the greatest achievement in
Renaissance architecture.
But in 1612, Carlo Maderna (1556-1629), known to posterity as the architect
who would ruin Michelangelo's great design, succumbing to clerical pressure
to satisfy liturgical needs, would make the mistake of lengthening the nave
and adding the gigantic and poorly scaled front facade.  This architectural
sin would obscure the perspective view of Michelangelo's superb dome from
the front plaza fourteen years before the dome's completion, and in the process
making the greatest church in Christendom look like a mundane and oversized
three-story building with a dull facade of prosaic design.

The view to Michelangelo's magnificent dome would be salvaged only by the
grand baroque piazza of Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini (1589-1680), enclosed by
a famous colonnade of 284 Tuscan columns which would inspire English poet
Robert Browning (1812-1889) to write two centuries later;
"With arms wide open to embrace
 The entry of the human race."

In architecture, engineering skills evolve tortuously from the reservoir
of technology in order to deliver the preferred shapes idealized by man's
abstract vision.
Gothic construction, most identifiable in popular culture by the flying buttress,
is the technological response to the medieval aspiration towards light and
height being transformed into ecclesiastical architecture.  It is the most
unnatural manner of stone construction, a willful defiance of both the natural
characteristic of stone and the immutable law of gravity, in the name of
spiritual piety.

French Gothic masons, in their religious zeal, would carry stone construction
beyond its natural limits.  Their superhuman efforts would culminate in Beauvais
Cathedral, constructed between 1225 and 1568, a period of over three centuries
during which, after repeated collapses, the builders would push the top of
its vault to an extreme height of 157.5 feet, about three and a half times
its span in width, to make it the loftiest Gothic stone church anywhere and
one of the wonders of the Medieval world.

English art critic and social commentator John Ruskin (1819-1900) would write
with awe in The Seven Lamps of Architecture:
"There are few rocks, even among the Alps, that have a clear vertical fall
as high as the choir of Beauvais."
God forbid.

The same is true of Chinese roof bracket systems of dougong and buzuo, designed
to do with wood construction that which it is not naturally predisposed to
do, in order to satisfied a preconceived form in the shape of a volumetric
and massive roof floating airily above supporting columns.  It is a fascination
with cultural delight in the simultaneous embodiment of otherwise mutually-exclusive
contradiction between massiveness and weightlessness.

Early in the Tang dynasty, it has become custom to raise on the sides of
a Buddhist temple, a pair of octagonal pillars called jingchuang.  They are
twenty feet tall, consisting of a base adorned with niches and lotus petals,
a shaft engraved with dharani (magic formulae), and topped with a monumental
apex.  The jingchuang pillars at Hongfu Si (Great Beneficence Temple) would
be on display thirteen centuries later in the Xian Provincial Museum in modern
time.

A seven-story pagoda, built of brick, square in plan, resting majestically
on a brick podium, would remain standing on the grounds of Hongfu Si up to
modern time.  It is called Great Crane Pagoda (Dayan Ta).  Its seven receding
tiers are punctuated with sloping roofs.  Each of the four sides is regulated
with bays marked by pilasters, nine bays at the bottom tiers, seven bays
at the middle three tiers and five bays at the top three tiers.  Starting
on the second tier, an arched opening is located at the center of the facade
of each tier.  The structure, topped with a simple sculptural crown, possesses
a sense of vigorous volume and sober ornamentation.  It would remain for
posterity as a major monument of Tang Buddhist architecture and would be
a popular tourist landmark in modern time in Xian.

Artists and architects worldwide have applied themselves to the problem of
proportion.  Many theories of aesthetics and practical rules for pleasing
design have been adopted throughout history in art and architecture regarding
good proportions.  The early 1st-Century Roman architectural writer, Vitruvius,
devoted the opening chapter of his 10-volume De Architectura to the matter
of proportion, although he did not formulate a coherent theory.  The influential
work would be unearthed in St. Gall monastery around early 15th Century and
published in 1486.  During the Renaissance, architects such as Alberti, Leonardo
da Vinci and Palladio, drawing on Vitruvius' De Architectura and Plato's
Timaeus, would devote themselves to formulating theories of proportion based
on numerical relationships of musical consonance.  Later, a general infatuation
would be developed with the Golden Section, known as í, with the ratio of
1:(1+û5)/2 or 1:1.618, a proportion found extensively in living creatures
in nature, including botonical forms and the human figure.  In mid-20th Century,
the French modern master of architecture, Le Corbusier, would propose a system
of proportion called Le Modulor, described as "a harmonic measure to the
human scale", based on the Golden Section according to the human measure.

After establishing detailed allegorical parameters derived from scholarly
research into past references, rationalized with Daoist mysticism, the architecture
of Mingtang (Enlightenment Pavilion) in the Tang dynasty followed, with modifications
derived from scholarly research, the prototype of Chinese palace architecture. 
In contrast to Western architecture in which the design of Greek temples
has been co-opted to serve as political edifices, Buddhist ecclesiatical
architecture in China borrows from the secular style of imperial palaces.

Significant movements in architecture are always based on a vision of the
ideal society of their times.  The Enlightenment Pavilion (Mingtang) of the
ruling Celestial Empress (Huang Tai'hou) of the Tagn dyansty, is no exception.

Chinese architecture seeks to project the timeless stability of a Confucian
society.  Greek architecture seeks to express the balanced order of Athenian
democracy.  Roman architecture glorifies the majesty of imperial power. 
Romanesque architecture has grown as a focal point of communal agricultural
organization based on a spiritual humility commonly cherished by early Christians
and a need for fortified compounds against barbarian invasion in a fallen
empire.  Gothic architecture derives inspiration from the pious vision of
a medieval urban society and the collective civic pride of competing towns. 
The Renaissance produces an architecture of humanism that lends dignity to
capitalistic individualism.

The Stuart Architecture of late English Renaissance, particularly during
the reign of Charles II (1660-1685), patron of Christopher Wren (1631-1723),
with its heavy emphasis on Church building, echoes the triumph in England
of Presbyterianism and Restoration politics.
Wren, trained as an astronomer-mathematician at Oxford, with only 6 months
of architectural training upon visiting Paris late in youth in 1665, during
the expansion of the Palais du Louvre, would keep company with Bernini and
Mansard, celebrated architects of his time.  Never having visited Italy,
Wren would become spellbound by French ideas, in divergence from Indigo Jones
(1573-1654), the Italian-influenced English architect of Stuart Architecture
who would introduce to England the much copied Palladian motif, a composition
consisting of an arch and support columns within a super order of giant columns
supporting an entablature.  Andrea Palladio (1508-1580), drawing on the written
work of Vitruvius, would publish his influential I quattro libri dell'architectura
in 1570, translated into English as The Four Books of Architecture in 1716.

After the great fire of 1666, Wren would prepare within a few days a great
plan for the reconstruction of London which would never be executed.  Aside
from the celebrated St Paul's cathedral, reflecting the rise of Protestantism,
Wren would execute 52 other Protestant churches in London between 1670 and
1711, at the rate of almost one per year, most of which would still stand
in modern time.

While Stuart architecture would herald the advent of Protestantism in England,
the Baroque would be the awe-inspiring instrument of the Counter-reformation,
sponsored by the Jesuits, defenders of the True Faith.  It would spread quickly
to all Roman Catholic countries.  Louis XIV would later co-opt the propaganda
effectiveness of the Baroque and the stately legitimacy of Classicism to
enshrine the stature of absolute monarchy.

Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1735-1806), the leading architect of France immediately
prior to the French Revolution, esthetic interest in whose style of rhetorical
severity would be revived among Post Modern Rationalist in the 1980's, would
find himself imprisoned by the revolutionaries after 1789 for his role in
designing monuments and instruments of socio-economic-political oppression,
such as the monopolistic saltworks at Arc-et-Senans, a prison at Aix, and
the ring of 50 barriŠres custom toll houses around Paris.  These barrieres,
so admiresd by academic critics, would be so hated by the public as symbols
of the oppressive ancient regime that most of them would be torn down during
popular uprising during the Revolution.

In reaction, the ascetic simplicity of Neoclassicism would become the embodiment
of the purist ideals of revolutionary France.
Napoleon, builder of empire rather than buildings, would impose his Roman-inspired
imperial style on the decor of the French Renaissance, remodelling the palatial
rooms of the Chateau Fontainebleau with motifs of military tents from the
battlefield.  He would select the bee as symbol for his imperial insignia,
signifying his admiration for bee-like characteristics of hard work, loyalty,
fierceness toward enemy and efficient organization, so evident in its instictive
ecological roles as gatherer of honey and facilitator of botanical fertilization. 
The Napoleonic age would produce the Empire style of richly adorned neoclassic
silhouette, created by architects Percier and Fountaine, which would later
be adopted by the German bourgeoisie into a style known as Biedermeier.

Napoleon's nephew, Napoleon III, the bourgeois Emperor who would achieve
power with speeches on the glory of his uncle's military exploits while his
celebrated uncle did it with live battles; who would monger fear of social
radicalism while his uncle promised the vision of a new world order; would
resurrect the baroque style and infest it with the cultural obesity of vulgarity
and ostentatious exhibitionism of the Second Empire.  Napoleon III's style
would be imitated by every subsequent pint-size dictator until the socially-conscious,
moralist Modern Movement would emerge after the collapse of the obsolete
European dynastic orders brought about by the First World War.

Modern architecture would rise from the hopes of social democratic ideals
stemming from the collapse, in the aftermaths of the First World War, of
the European monarchies and their attendant social and esthetic values as
constituted in the system of court-sponsored academies.  While the cultured
public would welcome the new artistic phylosophy, the official suppression
of the Modern Movement by both Nazi Germany and the post-Lenin Soviet Union
would force its migration to the United States where it would be co-opted
into the service of corporate capitalism, after being sanitized of most of
its social-democratic program.

Post Modernism, with its naive fascination with traditional motifs devoid
of social content, would be a resultant stylistic development from boredom
with a Modern esthetic stripped of its radical social root.  It would reflect
the distorted values of the self-indulging yuppie generation and the greed-worshipping
environment of deregulated capitalism of the decades since the Vietnam War.

Traditional Chinese architecture seeks to express the ideals of feudal social
stability and the eternal validity of Confucian values.  Stifled by the Confucian
aversion for change, the basic form of Chinese architecture would not evolve
beyond its classical period in the Tang dynasty, further development from
then on being limited to stylistic ornamentations and decorations.
The same rigid, conservative ideas that have contribute to the unyielding
preservation of Chinese culture for over 4,000 years would serve also to
choke off its continued development.  Indiscriminate, blanket preservation
of the past leads inevitably to cultural embalmment which, while effective
in preventing decay in the dead, is unfortunately lethal to the living.

Perhaps the Daoists who are concerned with the concept of constant change
while accepting the notion of changing constancy, know what they are talking
about after all.

Palaces, temples and tombs are the 3 most important classes of buildings
in ancient cultures.  This is true for the ancient Chinese, the Egyptians,
the Mesopotamians and the Greeks.  The Romans were probably the first people
to build important buildings for public and private pleasure, in the form
of baths, arenas, race courses and villas.  Religious and political buildings
have occupied center stage for most of human history.  Not until the rise
of modern capitalism would buildings designed for profit become important
architecturally.

The Greeks invented the concept of Orders of Architecture.  An order of architecture
is a design assemblage consisting of a pedestal consisting of a base, a die
and a cap; an upright column in the form of a shaft sitting on a base and
topped by a capital; and an horizontal entablature, divided into architrave,
frieze and cornice at top.  The entablature in a traditional Greek building
fits horizontally below the triangular pediment that disguises the conventional
wood-trussed roof behind.
Each architectural order is governed by its own rules of proportion and commands
its own associated moulding and ornamentation.  It is a formal vocabulary
of architecture as well as a standard for manufacturing of ornamental building
parts.  Its proper application provides the grammar of good design in the
classical style.
The Greek architectural orders were originally expressions of civic pride
among the city states of Greece, with each city state preferring its own. 
The application of architectural orders to building in the Greek colonies
implied political allegiance to the city of its origin.  As time passed,
the orders were used for purely aesthetical purposes.

To the Greek orders of Doric, Ionic and Corinthian, the Romans added Tuscan
and Composite.  Egyptians and Mesopotamians used columns with capitals, some
motifs of which influenced Greeks capital deigns, but they did not develop
any formal Orders of Architecture.
Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879), the French architect and restorer of historical
buildings, would assert that the Greek Orders of Architecture are not derivations
in stone of earlier timber construction, as postulated by some academicians. 
He would claim instead that they are designs whose sense of stability and
permanence rest in the inherent characteristic of stone as a building material.

The Greeks Architectural Orders are composed of the pedestal and the column
on which rests the entablature, to be applied in conjunction with the 2 dimensional
triangular pediment on the main facade, masking the wood roof trusses behind. 
In contrast, traditional Chinese architecture develops an Architectural Order
that is composed of the column, the entablature beam, and the 3-dimensional
roof form with its support system of roof brackets, known as dougong and
bracket clusters, known as buzuo.  As they evolve with sophistication, the
dougong and buzo become the most significant elements of the composition,
the equivalent of the flying buttress in Gothic architecture.

Reflecting its democratic tradition rooted in sanctity of individualism,
Greek buildings were designed by individuals whose names were recorded. 
The Parthenon (Doric c. 447-432 B.C.) was designed by architects Ictinus
and Callicrates with Pheidias as master sculptor.  The Temple of Zeus Olympius
at Agrigentum (Doric, c. 470 B.C.) was designed by Theron.  The Temple of
Zeus at Olympia (Doric, c. 460 B.C.) was designed by Libon.  The Temple of
Apollo Epicurius at Bassae, near Phigaleia in Arcadia (Doric, c. 450 B.C.)
was designed by Ictinus.  The Temple of Nike Apteros at Athens (Ionic, c.
450 B.C.) was designed by Callicrates.  The Erechtheion (Ionic, c. 420-393
B.C.) on the Acropolis in Athens, with an eastern hexastyle (5 bays) portico,
a northern tetrastyle (3 bays) portico and a southern Caryatid portico, was
designed by Mnesicle.

Caryatids, columns in the form of a female figure, a motif of questionable
taste and despicable political symbolism, were traditionally taken to represent
the brave women of Caria, whose citizens sided with the Persians against
the Greeks in the Persian Wars (500-449 B.C.), and were made slaves after
their capture by the Greeks.  The women of Caria were so highly prized by
their Greek captors for their physical beauty and noble character, and they
afforded their masters such great social prestige in the slave-owning democracy
of Athenian Greece that statues of them in stone were incorporated into Greek
monumental buildings.  The Caryatid motif would be widely revived during
the Renaissance, and subsequently by the eclectic academic styles of the
18th and 19th centuries, particularly during the Classical Revival period.

The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (356 B.C.), known also as the Hellenistic
temple, was designed by Deinocrates with Scopas as master sculptor in the
time of Alexander the Great.  It stood on the site of 2 or more previous
temples including the so-called Archaic Temple designed by Cheriphron (550
B.C.) which had been destroyed by fire (400 B.C.), and rebuilt by architects
Paeonius and Demetrius of Ephesus.
The Temple of Artemis, one of the 7 Wonders of the World, was the center
of the Pan-Ionic festival of the Asian colonies in honor of Artemis, as the
Parthenon was of the Panathenaea festival in the motherland in honor of Athena.

Artemis, daughter of Zeus and Leto and twin sister of Apollo, was an Olympian
goddess of wildlife and a virgin huntress.  She was a patroness of hunters. 
Artemis valued her chastity highly and was guarded by nymphs whose virginity
she guarded as jealously as her own.
Athena, on the other hand, was goddess of war, the female counterpart of
Ares.  She is however also a goddess of peace and like Mierva, with Whom
the Romans identified with her, Athena is a patron of the arts.  She was
said to have been born out of Zues' skull, fully armed, when Hephaestus,
son of Zeus by Zeus' sister Hera, split Zeus' skull after Zeus swallowed
the pregnant Metis alive upon learning that the son Metis bore from his seductive
rape would be destined to overthrow him.
Although, unlike the Parthenon which would still stand in modern time, none
of the superstructure of the great Temple of Artemis survived, visual reconstruction
in detail was possible through the description of Pliny the Younger (62-113),
the Roman statesman whose letters have become for posterity mirrors of Roman
life, of good taste and of well-written Latin.

The Temple of Artemis played a part in one of the last dramas of the pagan
world in its stand against Christianity as preached by St.Paul at Ephesus
(Acts xix).  In the Ephesians, epistle in the New Testiment of the Bible,
the temple is associated with the famous cry of a lost cause: "Great is Diana
of the Ephesians!"  Diana is the Roman name for the Greek Artemis.  
Some of its grand architectural parts were transferred to other buildings,
notably the eight dark-green marble columns which now separate the nave from
aisles in St Sophia, Constantinople.

The Temple of Apollo Didymaeus at Miletus (c. 335-320 B.C.) was designed
by Paeonius of Ephesus and Daphne of Miletus.  The Corinthian order was designed
by Callimachus, a worker in Corinthian bronze.
The Olympieion at Athens (c. 174 B.C.) was begun by Antiochus Epiphanes of
Syria, from designs by Cossutius, a Roman architect so it is often regarded
as a Roman building.  It was never completed.  Pliny the Younger recorded
that, in B.C. 80, Sulla transported some of its columns to Rome for use in
the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus.

Roman buildings, like those of the Chinese, were almost always designed by
anonymous architects because the patrons who commissioned them were considered
by society as being more important than the architects who were frequently
captured slaves.
Of all the great buildings erected by the Romans only Apollodorus of Damascus
was mentioned as architect for Hadrian for the Temple of Venus in Rome (123-135)
and for Trajan's Basilica (98-112).

The Arch of Constantine, the Baths of Caracalla (211-217), Agrippa (20 B.C.),
Trajan, Titus (80) and Diocletian (320) and Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli (124),
all had anonymous architects, as did the Coliseum (72) built by Vespasian
and the Pantheon (27 B.C.) built by Agrippa, a great town-planner, close
friend and son-in-law of Augustus whose daughter, Julia, was Agrripa's 3rd
wife.  Aggrippa's naval operations were instrumental for Octavia's decisive
victory over Mark Antony ar Actium in 31 B.C.

The architects of record for St Sophia in Constantinople built for Justinian
who was heavily influenced by Greek culture, were Anthemius of Tralles and
Isodore of Miletus, architects of Greek origin.
St Sophia was the greatest building in Byzantium, an empire that successfully
combined Roman political tradition, Greek culture and Christian beliefs.
Vitruvius (Markus Vitruvius Pollio) of late 1st Century B.C. and early 1st
Century A.D., the Roman architect and engineer for Augustus, was known not
by buildings he designed but by his writings, a 10-volume De architectura,
a treatise on city planning, building materials, temples and Greek orders
of architecture, public and private buildings, interior decorations, waterworks,
chronometer instruments, construction and military machines.

Chinese architects, like their Roman counterparts, are mostly unhonored by
their society and unnamed in history, the exception being Yan Li'ben, who
would occupy a place in history more for the government posts he had held
than for the buildings he had designed.

The Hevenly Column in China, cast out of bronze and iron weapons collected
from subdued hostile foreign troops, a monument to imposed enemy disarmament,
not unlike Trajan's Column of marble in Rome, built in 113, and Napoleon's
bronze imitation of it in Place Vend“me in Paris, built in 1806 of captured
cannons from the battle of Austerlitz (1805), replacing the statue of Louis
XIV designed by Girardon.

Francois Girardon (1628-1715), a classical French court sculptor, would become
much in vogue in his time for his Poussin inspired Hellenistic style and
stately composition, as expressed in his Apollo attended by the Nymphs, designed
for the Grotto of Thetis in the Versailles gardens.
Girardon would champion the classical school of innate supremacy, as opposed
to Pierre Puget (1620-1692), a highly original sculptor in the baroque tradition
of human struggle, whose Milo of Croton, viewable in the Louvre Museum in
modern time, would run counter to the official taste as dictated by Louis
XIV.  Classicism as a style would provide the detached grandeur required
by the political absolutism of the Sun King (le Roi Soleil).

The loss of royal favor suffered by Puget would mark the triumph of French
classicism over Italian inspired baroque in 17th century sculpture in France.
Place Vend“me, a 245 x 233-meter urban open space highlighted by Napoleon's
column in the center of Paris, one of the most celebrated example of 17th
century French urban design, would be planned by architect Jules Hardouin
Mansart (1640-1708) to enhance the real estate value of the property of le
duc de Vend“me, by combining the Royal Library, the acadŠmies, the Mint and
some embassies into a prestigious grande ensemble.

Cesar, duc de Vendome (1594-1665), the illegitimate son of Henry of Navarre
(1553-1610, r. 1572-1610) who would later become Henry IV (1589-1610), first
of the Bourbon kings of France, would be born of Henry's mistress, Gabrielle
d'Estr‚es (1573-1599), celebrated beauty, marquise of Monceaux and duchess
of Beaufort.

Cesar, legitimized on his first birthday, would be made Governor of Brittany
and a duke at age 4, just before the premature death of his mother whom Henry
IV would have intended to marry immediately after the annulment of the latter's
marriage to Margaret of Valois.

Henry IV, reared as a Protestant, would turn Catholic as a political expediency
by raitonalizing that Paris would be well worth a Mass.  He would protect
the Protestants in France with the famous Edict of Nantes which would define
the rights of the Huguenots.  The edict would be revoked in 1685 by Louis
XIV (1638-1715, r. 1643-1715) in the name of a centralized Catholic state,
resulting in mass emigration of a highly skilled and industrious segment
of the population, thus greatly weakening the French economy and benefitting
England, Germany, Switzerland and the colonies of the New World, especially
the Carolinas, Pennsylvania and New York, to whose civic and economic development
the French Protestant immigrants would contribute substantially.

After the assassination of the tolerant Henry IV in 1610 by a religious fanatic,
C‚sar, duc de Vend“me, would rebel against his Catholic stepmother, Marie
de Medici (1573-1642), mother and regent for Louis XIII (1601-1643, r. 1610-1643)
as a minor, widowed Queen of Henry IV, whose marriage would be immortalized
in a series of celebrated of paintings by Rubens, on permanent exhibit in
the Louvre in modern time.
Cesar would also rebel against her opponent, Charles d'Albert, duc de Luynes
(1578-1621), nephew of Cesar's grandmother, Jeanne d'Albert, when Charles
became minister and favorite of Louis XIII and constable of France.
Le duc de Vendome would later be imprisoned for conspiracy by Cardinal Richelieu
(1585-1642), founder of the French Academy, and still later exiled by Cardinal
Mazarin (1602-1661), Richelieu's successor, who would supposedly secretly
be married to the widowed Queen of Louis XIII, Ann of Austria, mother of
the young future Sun King (Le Roi Soleil).
Despite his anti-Catholic stand, le duc de Vendome would fight on the government
side in the Fronde (1648-1653), outbreaks caused by the efforts of parliament
and ambitious nobles to limit the growing authority of the crown during the
minority of Louis XIV, capturing Bordeaux in 1653 and defeated a Spanish
fleet at Barcelona in 1655.

The Fronde, provoked by the centrist policies of Richelieu during the regency
of Marie de Medici for Louis XIII and those of Mazarin during the regency
of Ann of Austria for Louis XIV, would fail to prevent finally the establishment
fo absolute monarchy in France which would project her into a continental
power in Europe under le Roi Soleil.
The grandson of le duc de Vendome, Louis Joseph (1654-1712), would become
a marshal of France and fight in the War of the Grand Alliance (1688-1697)
and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714).

The 3-story facades of the buildings surrounding Place Vendome would be designed
and constructed in 1701 to achieve a uniform appearance of pleasing proportions,
with the speculative town houses behind the finished facades to be built
later by different architects for different clients for varying functions.
Chopin would live at No. 12 and die there in 1849.  In modern time, no. 15
would be the world-famous Ritz Hotel;  nos. 11 and 13, the Ministry of Justice,
formerly the Royal Chancellery, on the facade of which the official measure
of the meter would be inlaid in 1848.  Modern science would define the meter
as the distance traveled by light in 0.000000003335640952 seconds, as measured
by a cesium clock.

Napoleon's Column in Place Vendome would be 130 feet in height, contrasting
the 54-feet-high equestrian statue of le Roi Soleil it would replace, around
which the square had been initially planned, thus doing visual violence to
the fine proportion of Mansart's brilliant scheme of urban design.
The column would be topped by a statue of Napoleon, as Caesar, which would
be replaced by that of Henry IV after the Restoration in 1814, and re-installed
by Louis-Philippe of the July monarchy, but with Napoleon, as general in
military uniform.
The Paris Commune of 1871 would tear down the column as part of its violent
political protest.  It would be rebuilt by the Third Republic (1871-1940)
and on top of it would be placed a replica of the statute of General Bonapart,
the revolutionary soldier, which would still stand in modern time.
The model of Napoleon's imitation, the Column of Trajan in Rome, dating from
113, designed by Apolloldorus of Damascus, Trajan's favorite military engineer-slave,
who also designed the Emperor's Basilica adjacent to his column, would still
stand in modern time, 125 feet tall, optically corrected with entasis, in
the forum bearing the Emperor's name before the Temple of Trajan deified.
The shaft of the column, 12'- 2" in diameter, consists of 17 marble drums,
covered with relief sculpture in a 3'- 6" wide spiral band, running 800 linear
feet in length, with over 2,500 human figures, in a continuous coil recording
major events in Trajan's wars against the Dacians.  Inside the shaft is a
spiral staircase lit by small openings.   Topped with a bronze statue of
Trajan which would stay until 1787 when Pope Sixtus V would have it replaced
by one of St Peter.  Its square pedestal, ornamented with sculptured trophies,
serves as entrance to a mausoleum for Trajan whose ashes were deposited there
in 117 in a golden urn which would be stolen during the Middle Ages.

The urban designer of Place Vendome would be Jules Hardouin Mansart, grandnephew
of architect Francois Mansart (1598-1666) who would design the Orleans wing
of the Chƒteau de Blois.  The younger Mansart would be made chief architect
of royal buildings in 1699 after the death of Le Vau.  Among his designs
for Versailles, beside the legendary Galerie des Glaces (Hall of Mirrors),
would be the widely admired garden facade, a refined continuation of Le Vau's
style; the chapel; the orangery and the Grand Trianon, restored first by
Napoleon in 1805 and by Charles de Gaulle in 1962 as a reception site for
visiting foreign heads of state to the Fifth Republic.
Mansart's most successful work would be the impressive Dome des Invalides
(1706), considered by many as the most elegant Renaissance form in the Parisian
skyline and indeed, in all of France.  Napoleon's body would be returned
from St Helena by the order of Louis Philippe in 1840 and entombed under
the Dome des Invalides in Paris.
The 17th century urban space, enclosed and pedestrian in scale, and accessed
by unassuming, narrow streets of the surrounding urban fabric, of which Place
Vendome and Place des Vosges are classic prototypes, would be considered
by 18th century urban design theorists as aesthetically unsatisfactory, lacking
in grandeur and theatrical perspectives.
Such neighborhood urban spaces, elegant and peaceful, an end in itself rather
than a means to something else, not being foci of monumental axes and grand
vistas, not fed by broad boulevards intended for carriages and equestrians,
would be designed for pedestrian gathering rather than grand parades, and
intended to be human rather than heroic in scale.
It would not be a style preferred by the neo-Baroque visions of Louis XIV
and later by the vulgar exhibitionism of the Second Empire (1852-1870) under
Napoleon III (1808-1873) and Baron Haussmann, the influential but insensitive
city planner under the imperial dictator.

George-Eugene Haussmann (1809-1891), with his wholesale clearance of historical
Paris, indiscriminately wiping out ancient picturesque quartiers of uniquely
individual character and colorful past, would destroy much of the city's
old charm, not to mention historical landmarks, and replaced them with sterile
and brassy monumental white elephants, linked by drab and mediocre avenues
devoid of human scale.
Armed with the blind zeal of a sanitation engineer, with as much sensitivity
for architecture as a circus producer, Haussmann's barogue city planning
would also be dominated by the political purpose of clearing the rebel infested
urban quartiers in the old city, of the ease of effectively deploying troops
on the new, broad boulevards against much feared popular uprisings, and of
preventing the easy erection of revolutionary barricades on narrow streets
that had once frustrated government authority in the "Bloody June Days" of
the democratic uprisings of 1848.
Unfortunately, Haussmann would since be much imitated by many egomaniac city
planners worldwide in modern time, just as his patron, Napoleon III, has
been imitated by every pint-size dictator.

Victor Hugo (1802-1885), the towering figure of French literature, poetry
and drama, son of a general under Napoleon Bonaparte, would oppose the regime
of Napoleon III's Second Empire and live in exile in protest until after
its downfall in 1870.
Emile Zola (1840-1902) would document in his series of social realism novels
the abuses suffered by the poor in France during the Second Empire, as Charles
Dickens (1812-1870) would with the Industrial Revolution in England.
The sensational novels of Alexandre Dumas the younger, son of Dumas pere,
the most well-known of which being Camille, would mirror the pitiless emptiness
of Parisian life while the operettas of Jacques Levy Offenbach, though popularly
acclaimed by society during the Second Empire, would satirize the mundane
values of their naive, applauding audiences.

The Paris Opera (began 1861 and opened 1875), the crown jewel of the Second
Empire, the piŠce de r‚sistance de la Belle Epoque of the bourgeois Emperor,
would be designed by Charles Garnier (1825-1898), star student of the Ecole
des Beaux-Arts, winner of the Grand Prix de Rome.
The building, which would become the model for architecturally mundane opera
houses all over the world, would fail to herald any worthwhile movement of
architecture.  With its unabashed flaunting of banal stylistic ostentation,
devoid of originality, mindlessly confusing conspicuous consumption with
sophisticated elegance, oozing with the vulgarity of the nouveau riche, it
would be a bourgeois caricature of the much admired style of the exquisite
east facade of the Louvre designed by Claude Perrault (1613-1688).

Functionally, the horseshoe plan of the Paris Opera House would condemn a
disproportionately large portion of the audience to obstructed sight lines
and inferior acoustics while it would afford a few boisterous celebrities
in the side parterres to compete with the stage for attention.
Barely 14 years after the completion of the Paris Opera, at the Paris Exposition
of 1889, Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923) would demonstrate the dynamism of French
creativity by unveiling his Three-Hundred-Meter Tower, known simply as the
Eiffel Tower in modern time, amid hostile establishment reception.  Thomas
Edison (1847-1931) would pay an admiring visit to Gustave Eiffel in the great
engineer's tower in 1922.
The historic occasion of the great inventor paying homage to the great engineer
would be recorded in motion-pictures, the then novel medium just invented
by Edison.
Richard Wagner, in 1875, upon visiting the gaudy, new Paris Opera House 14
years after the French version of his Tannh„user had received a humiliating
rebuff in Paris in 1861, would be rumored to have suggested, with typical
sarcastic rendition, that the new building was of a design more fitting for
a casino than an opera house.  Incidentally, Garnier would also design the
Casino in Monte Carlo.
Wagner would go on to build his dream opera house in Bayreuth (completed
in 1876) in which the requirements for innovative staging of musical drama,
perfect sight lines and balanced acoustics would be the guiding design considerations. 
The sunked orchestrial pit, a standard in modern opera houses, would be first
introduced by Wagner at Bayreuth.

Claude Perrault (1613-1688), architect, scientist, physician and a leading
scholar in his time, would collaborate between 1667 and 1670 with Le Vau
and Le Brun in the design of the east facade of the Louvre, popularly known
as the Colonnade, and established a standard for classical balance and order
in French Renaissance architecture.  He would also design the Paris Observatory
which would still be in use in modern time.
In 1673, Perrault would translate from Latin to French, at the request of
Prime Minister Colbert, the monumental work of Vitruvius, the Roman writer
on architecture.
Perrault would also write a treatise on the Five Orders of Architecture,
which would help to disseminate correct information and proper application
of standardized conventions of architecture that would elevate the general
quality of academic French design.

Louis Le Vau (1612-1670), architect of Louis XIV, would succeed Jacques Lemercier
as architect for the Louvre, on which he would collaborate with Charles Perrault
and Charles Le Brun, the painter-decorator.  His design for Versailles, with
collaboration from Le Brun, would create the basic scheme which would later
be completed by Jules Hardouin Mansart.

While a symbol of royal absolutism in politics, the design of Versailles
would be based culturally on the rationalist creed of Rene Descartes (1569-1650):
the imposition of the intellect over matter and the mastery of human intelligence
over nature, and of order over atrophy.  It would be the opposite of English
romanticism, with its adoration of picturesque nature and infatuation with
decadence in the form of simulated ruins.
Among Le Vau's other designs are the Chƒteau de Vaux-le-Vicomte; the CollŠge
des Quatre Nations, now the Institute de France, and the Church of St. Sulpice,
the facade of which would be designed later in 1733 by Servandoni who would
win a competition with his Antique style.
The Chateau de Vaux le Vicomte would be built in 1661 by Nicolas Fouguet,
the finance minister who would invoke the envy of the Sun King during the
elaborate house-warming party which would turn out to be his own farewell
party, followed by jail for crimes of insolent and audacious luxury inappropriate
for a finance minister.
It has been speculated by historians that the concept of Versailles first
occurred to the young Louis XIV during that fateful party at Vaux le Vicomte
when his admiration for the architecture of his powerful minister's chateau
was eclipsed by his annoyance at the politics of ostentatious consumption
as practised by anyone else except the absolute monarch.

Charles Le Brun (1619-1690), strongly influenced by Poussin, the very embodiment
of French classicism, with the support of Colbert, would be the Sun King's
favorite painter in 1662.
Le Brun would be appointed head of the Gobelins works in 1663, the renowned
factory of the famous Gobelins tapestries and other furnishings for Versailles. 
He would later become director of the Acad‚mie Royal de Peinture et de Sculpture,
responsible for the design of royal objects d'art.
Overseeing a large corps of painters, sculptors, engravers and weavers, Le
Brun would control artistic production in France for more than 2 decades. 
Though not a designer of originality, Le Brun's skill in administration would
enable him to provide an atmosphere of high quality richness and splendor
consonant with the age of le Roi Soleil.  Under the direction of Mansart's
genius, Le Brun would decorate several rooms in Versailles, the most famous
of which would be the Galerie des Glaces.

The record of socialist art has been mixed. The
relationship between revolution and art has never been fully resolved. Part
of the problem may be that while creativity is art in perpetually revolutionary,
political revolutions tend to ebb and flow in phases. Starting with counterreformation
Baroque promoted by the Jesuits, to the revolutionary art of the French (neoclassicism)
and Soviet (social realism) Revolutions, the basic conflict between fixed
ideology and continuous creativity has led to very dissatisfying results.
In life, one can be quite comfortable with the notion of politics in command,
yet in art, the issue is not as clear. Eisler, the composer, had this problem
not only in capitalist Hollywood, but in communist East Germany.

Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1735-1806), the leading architect
of France immediately prior to the French Revolution, esthetic interest in
whose style of rhetorical severity would be revived among Post Modern Rationalist
in the 1980's, would find himself imprisoned by the revolutionaries after
1789 for his role in designing monuments and instruments of socio-economic-political
oppression, such as the monopolistic saltworks at Arc-et-Senans, a prison
at Aix, and the ring of 50 barriŠres custom toll houses around Paris. These
barriŠres, so admired by academic critics, would be so hated by the public
as symbols of the oppressive ancient regime that most of them would be torn
down during popular uprising during the Revolution. David (1748-1845) was
a member of the Academie and court painter to Louis XVI, yet he was a fervent
revolutionary, elected to the Convention and voted for the regicide and the
repression of the Royal Academie and the Academie de France. He painted the
Assasination of Murat, protrait of Mme Recamier as well as Napoleon's coronation.
During the Reign of Terror, he routinely repaint group protraits with purged
politicians removed. In reaction French Baroque, the rational ascetic simplicity
of Neoclassicism would become the embodiment of the purist ideals of revolutionary
France. One can see a continuity of neoclaissical idealism in socialist social
realism. 

The is part of a larger issue of the relationship art to political philosophy.
The entire Renaissance was supported by a political ideology that is of dubious
acceptability by current modern standards, in at in some quarters. Despotism
was a boon to Italian Renaissance art. Despotism was the god father to Italian
Renaissance art. A case can be made to condemn the Italian Renaissance as
a movement of courtly pretension and elitist taste prescribed by theme, content
and form to the questionable needs of secular potentates and ecclesiastical
mania. The noblest social art, one can argue, is that which the contribution
of multitudes create for themselves a common gift of glory, such as the Gothic
cathedrals and the temples of ancient Greece.
 
Critics almost universally denounce the low esthetic
value of the Milan cathedral, began by Giangaleaszzo Visconti (1351-1402),
a warlord with a vision of a united Italy, on a scale befitting that vision.
After Gian's death due to the plague, Lodovic Sforza (1451-1508) called in
Bramanti and Leonardo to design a cupola that the people of Milan, in their
love for Gothic fidelity, rejected. The cathedral building went on for 3
centuries, halting whenever funds were exhausted. The final facade was finally
completed only by the imperial command of Napoleon in 1809, three centuries
after the project's commencement. 

Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72), the model Renaissance man, was discovered
by Cosimo de'Medici (1380-1464), merchant prince of Florence, betrayer of
the Republic, head of Europe's first banking dynasty, champion of the moneyed
middle class, who helped the Sforza clan to seize Milan. Cosimo also employed
Brunnelleschi, Donatello, Gilberti, Lucca della Rubbia, Massaccio, Fra Angelico,
Fra Filippo Lippi and most importantly, the Humanists. Alberti also worked
for the Malatestas - Evil Heads of Rimimi, whose despotic rule was laced
with incest and murder. 
The Baroque was the propaganda vehicle for the Jesuits
in their counter-reformation campaign.
 
Napoleon III, the bourgeois emperor, model of the modern
dictator, gave the Paris so admired by most of the world. Personally, I prefer
pre-Hausmann Paris, but I am a minority as usual. Napoleon's nephew, Napoleon
III, the bourgeois Emperor who would achieve power with speeches on the glory
of his uncle's military exploits while his celebrated uncle did it with live
battles; who would monger fear of social radicalism while his uncle promised
the vision of a new world order; would resurrect the baroque style and infest
it with the cultural obesity of vulgarity and ostentatious exhibitionism
of the Second Empire. Napoleon III's style would be imitated by every subsequent
pint-size dictator until the socially-conscious, moralist 

Tatlin's monument for the 3rd International was an attempt to unit artistic
_expression_ with the new socialist ideal. The Productivist Group maintained
in their polemic that material and intellectual production were of the same
order. Leftist artists devoted their energy to making propaganda for the
new Soviet government by painting the surfaces of all means of transport
with revolutionary images to be viewed in remote corners of the collapsing
Czarist empire. Constructivism declared all out war on bourgeois art. Alas,
the movement met its demise not from bourgeois resistance, but from internal
doctrinal inquisition. Much of Constructivist esthetic creativity was subsequently
co-opted by bourgeois society. 

The Modern Movement would emerge after the collapse of the obsolete European
dynastic orders brought about by the First World War. Modern architecture
would rise from the hopes of social democratic ideals stemming from the collapse,
in the aftermath of the First World War, of the European monarchies and their
attendant social and esthetic values as constituted in the system of court-sponsored
academies. While the cultured public would welcome the new artistic philosophy,
the official suppression of the Modern Movement by both Nazi Germany and
the post-Lenin Soviet Union would force its migration to the United States
where it would be co-opted into the service of corporate capitalism, after
being sanitized of most of its social-democratic program.
 
Henry C.K. Liu

Warren Mosler wrote:
> 'Full Employment AND Price Stability'
> explains unemployment as the evidence that
> govt. isn't spending enough to satisfy the
> desire to pay taxes and the desire to
> net save financial assets.
>
> How may axioms is that, etc???
>
> Thanks,
>
> Warren
>
> > If you have two theories BOTH purporting to explain
> > real world involuntary
> > unemployment equilibrium, the more general theory
> > (i.e., the one with the
> > least number of restrictive axioms) MUST BE
> > PREFERABLE OVER THE THE THOERY
> > THAT REQUIRES ADDITIONAL RESTRICTIVE AXIOMS-- see
> > OCCAM's RAZOR, Gunnar!!
> >
> > Paul
> >
> > Paul Davidson
> > Editor, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics
> > University of Tennessee
> > SMC 503
> > Knoxville, Tennessee 37996-0550
> > phone # (561)369-1951; fax #(561)369-1951;
> > email pdavidson@xxxxxxx
> > http://econ.bus.utk.edu/davidsonextra/Davidson.html
> >
> >
> >   
>
>
> =====
> http://www.mosler.org
>       http://www.moslerauto.com
>
> Primary email contact:  wmosler@xxxxxxxxxx
>
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