Posts Tagged ‘siege’
“It is often our mightiest projects that most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity– the construction of fortifications, for instance”*…
From Public Domain Review, a look at a 17th century book that collects (beautiful) plans for forts and fortifications…
What is the peculiar appeal of military architecture? Whether Norman castle or Cold War concrete, there is a kind of sublimity that belongs to defensive design. It stems obviously from the massive scale of construction, and from the luxury of uncompromised execution that generous defence budgets afford. But there is also pleasure to be taken in the unornamented purity of style of structures that have been built solely for practical ends.
These qualities are abundant in the work of the seventeenth-century French military engineer Allain Manesson Mallet. Born in Paris in 1630, Manesson studied mathematics before becoming a soldier (he added the name Mallet in tribute to his teacher). In 1663, he was posted to Alentejo as an army engineer in the service of the Portuguese king Alfonso VI, where he fortified chateaux, until the Treaty of Lisbon in 1668. He returned to France with an appointment as mathematics instructor at the court of Louis XIV.
He recorded his military ideas in a highly successful manual, The Works of Mars (i.e. “the art of war”) in 1671. A year later came German and Dutch editions (the source of the images above), even though France was by then at war with the Netherlands.
Manesson’s book encompassed theories of fortifications from their origins in designs developed in the sixteenth century by Michelangelo and the architect Vincenzo Scamozzi, including more recent innovations of French and Dutch engineers….
More– and many more renderings of ramparts: “The Works of Mars” from @PublicDomainRev.
* W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz
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As we build bastions, we might understand the Dutch interest in Manesson’s manual as we recall that it was on this date in 1602 that the Spanish-held city of Grave in the Netherlands was taken, at the end of a two-month siege, by a Dutch and English army led by Maurice of Orange and Francis Vere respectively.
Part of the Eighty Years’ War and the Anglo–Spanish War, the Siege of Grave and its ultimate fall were severe enough to cause a major mutiny in the Spanish army.
“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears”*…
“‘A woman’s place is in the home’ has been one of the most important principles in architectural design and urban planning in the United States for the last century,” Dolores Hayden, an urban planning historian, wrote in her 1980s essay What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like?
Now we’re at a crucial point in urban planning because some of our age-old systems have been upended by innovation or economics. We have Uber and other ride shares replacing traditional transportation systems and Elon Musk trying to build the high-speed Hyperloop and underground tunnels. And our lifestyles are in flux: More young people are sharing homes before they get married, and they’re living with their parents longer.
We can’t design away sexism or the creepy dude waiting at the train platform. These are some of our culture’s oldest, most insidious problems and urban planners alone can’t solve them. But urban planners are now looking to new designs and technology that, for the first time, should include the other half of the population…
Toward a more inclusive city: “Sexism and the City.”
* Italo Calvino
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As we muse on metropoli, we might recall that it was on this date in 861 that the Viking burned Paris to the ground (for the third time since the Siege of Paris in 845). The invaders also torched the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which they pillaged again in 869. in 870, King Charles the Bald ordered the construction of two bridges, the Grand Pont and the Petit Pont, to block the passage of the Vikings up the Seine. In 885, Gozlin, the Bishop of Paris, repaired the city wall and reinforced the bridges, enabling the city to resist an attack by the Vikings, who tried again twice (in 887 and 888), but were repelled each time.
Paris then enjoyed 90 years of (relative) peace, until 978, when the city was laid siege by The Holy Roman Emperor Otto II.
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