Artist & Historian
Architecture, Commerce, Tea, and the Making of Space
Topics here will include: Étienne Boullée, Alexandre Théodore Brongniart, Samuel Pepys Cockerell, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Gottfried Semper, the Book of Tea and its influence, Bernard Leach, and Louis Kahn. The links are all closer than they seem at first glance! More to come!
Architectural Ceramics
The relationships between pottery, architectural ceramics, and the making of space have been among my interests since my earliest study in ceramics. Above is a photo of the installation I made in 1999 for a BFA Gallery Show at the Rochester Institute of Technology. All tile was handmade, and the paper rolls were slip cast from the actual materials. The bathroom graffiti installation was not a perfect expression of all of the ideas I had at the time, but these photos act as a record of time and place. More photos are located on my Portfolio page.
Classical Architecture
The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists and savants of Brongniart's milieu looked to Classical sources for their inspiration, including Brongniart's father Théodore. The architect Gottfried Semper, who studied in Paris in the early Nineteenth Century, went to Italy and Greece where he participated in archaeological research and made extensive drawings. He discovered that many Classical buildings, which were eroded down to bare materials in modernity, were originally decorated with polychrome schemes. I have written on the links between the work of Brongniart and Semper. See the links below for more.
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Boullée, Space, and Ideas
The architect Étienne Boullée, taking inspiration from Classical sources such as the Pantheon in Rome, sought a new, futuristic architecture based on ideas. His work inspired not only his students, such as Théodore Brongniart, but later twentieth century architects such as Louis Kahn.
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Boullée's Cenotaph à Newton is shown here.