The Pantheon: From Antiquity to the Present

by Unknown

  13.9. Frank Lloyd Wright, “Archeseum,” September 1956, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1943–1959. (Photo: © 2009 The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale AZ/Art Resource, NY/Artists Rights Society [ARS], NY)

  In abandoning his initial impulse for a horizontal project in favor of a vertical scheme, Wright envisaged an inverted hollow “ziggarut” with a spiraling ramp around a grand central space capped with a dome.71 Through most of the development of the project, Wright’s “Dome,” as he called it,72 evoked the Pantheon, as shown in the first model, which was presented in 1944–1945, and in subsequent renditions where he envisaged a shallow dome of translucent glass comprised of two layers of concentric rings of Pyrex glass tubes with an intermediary frame of steel tubes arranged in three stacked rings of concentric circles, culminating in a glazed oculus set within a compression ring.73 As Neil Levine has explained, after a trip to Rome in August 1956, Wright strengthened his allusion to the Pantheon with his penultimate design, which is illustrated here, where he now proposed “a coffered dome of sandblasted glass” hung from a concrete framework.74 Yet Wright did not make explicit reference to the Pantheon in the final design, which abandoned the hung dome in favor of a total integration of form, space, structure, and decorative effect in the manner of an “organic architecture” that he had achieved earlier in Unity Temple and that he had described as his goal in his account of that building in his autobiography.75

  Like the architect of the Pantheon, who subtly manipulated the shape of the coffers in the dome such that they appear to expand upward and outward, unbounded by the dome’s inner surface, as if carried into the skies by the oculus of light that is isolated visually from the grid of the dome by a wide band of smooth, unbroken surface,76 Wright achieved a comparable effect in the Guggenheim Museum with his spiraling ramp and central skylight. Wright’s ramp seems to spiral upward, cantilevered into space off the recessed vertical structural piers that, nonetheless, come forward at the top of the rotunda to join together in rounded arches that are dramatically withdrawn from the middle of the central skylight, which, like the oculus of the Pantheon, presents a floating circular disk of hovering sky.

  James Johnson Sweeney, appointed director of the Guggenheim Museum in October, 1952,77 “pointed to the ‘“great-room” character’ of Wright’s design” shortly after the opening, explains Levine, as “‘the most individual and gratifying feature of the building as an art museum’” and remarked that “‘its effect on the public is immediately noticeable.’”78 The term “great room” readily suggests itself to the visitor; yet it might have come from Wright himself, who had spoken in his autobiography of the sanctuary in Unity Temple as a “Noble ROOM.”79 We have seen that Louis Kahn was to express a similar sentiment about the Pantheon as a world unto itself, so appropriate for conveying the essence of a great cultural institution.

  The Public Library

  One of the most memorable as well as characteristic undertakings of the Enlightenment was the all-encompassing intellectual effort to chart the entire expanse of knowledge in an encyclopedia, of which there were several in the eighteenth century: the Lexicon technicum (1704) by John Harris, the Cyclopedia (1728) by Ephraim Chambers, the Encyclopedia Britannica, first published in 1771 and subsequently expanded, and “the most renowned and influential of encyclopedias, the French Encyclopédie, completed in 1772” under the direction of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. This century, in effect, gave birth to the “modern encyclopedia.”80 In many respects, the enterprise of an encyclopedia was the intellectual equivalent to the other universalist aspects of the Enlightenment studied previously: Deism and Unitarianism in religion, cosmopolitanism in outlook, democracy in government, and the museum as a comprehensive collection of the arts. Echoing the Encyclopédie, Boullée explained the preeminent status of the national library in his memorandum of 1785: “The most precious monument for a nation is, without a doubt, that which houses all of acquired knowledge.”81 Thus, the national library, open to its citizens, takes its place within the pantheon of Enlightenment building programs and, accordingly, would utilize the Pantheon as its model.

  As a comprehensive history of the library has affirmed, “the modern scholarly library is the creation of the Enlightenment.” In German-speaking lands, an extensive library became an important new room in the palaces of local rulers, its collection often open to the public. Likewise, German university libraries acquired both increased stature and fame, unknown to their seventeenth-century counterparts.82

  In France, focus was placed on the transformation of the Royal Library into a national library with public access. Such a high cultural endeavor required a comparably inspired design from the architect. “If there is one subject that should please an architect,” mused Boullée, “and at the same time inspire his genius, it is the project of a public library.”83 Commissioned by the government to study the possibility of constructing a new national library near the Place Vendôme in Paris, Boullée offered a design largely inspired by the cruciform plans for a museum of the Grand Prix of 1779 and centered around a modest Pantheon-like central dome. Too costly, the project was abandoned in favor of transforming the courtyard of the current Royal Library into a new reading room, which Boullée designed as what might be considered a longitudinal Pantheon, a top-lit coffered barrel vault placed over an amphitheater of books. Constrained, then, by budget and site, the architect took the concept of the cosmic symbolism of the Pantheon and adapted it to a basilica format. Yet Boullée left no doubt as to the cosmic effect that he sought there: “this basilica will offer the grandest and most striking image of any existing thing.”84 One of several studies for the main facade featured two atlantes, or giants, carrying a celestial sphere.

  Boullée’s intentions for the public library were not lost on the young architects and students of architecture who proposed major library projects in the succeeding years. For a Prix d’émulation in 1787, Jean-Nicolas Sobre designed a public library whose major room was covered by an immense Pantheon-like dome, painted with the signs of the zodiac and opened in the middle with an oculus. The walls of this temple of learning were to be lined with books, and an amphitheater of steps within the center of the room was to serve as a classroom for public courses. This central rotunda was surrounded by a double ring of spaces in the shape of two concentric squares: the inner ring containing the statues of great men, the outer ring serving to house printed books and manuscripts. To all four sides of this central complex of concentric rooms were barrel-vaulted spaces with coffers and skylights after the manner of Boullée’s own second library project.85

  One variant on this theme can be found in Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Guy de Gisors’s project of the Year VIII (1799–1800) to complete the unfinished Church of the Madeleine, which visually terminated the street leading from the north axis of the Place de la Concorde, as the National Library. Gisors provided three successive amphitheaters of books, each under a domed ceiling with central oculus. Gisors’s choice of this unfinished monument for the National Library was pregnant with meaning. It corresponded axially to the Palais Bourbon on the other side of the Seine, a building, as we have seen, that had housed the national legislature during the Directorate and which just now in 1799 was being transformed into the National Archives. As for the square itself, originally constructed to honor Louis XV, whose equestrian statue had graced the center, it was rebaptized during the French Revolution as Place de la Révolution and the guillotine was erected in place of the king’s statue. After the Terror, the square was renamed Place de la Concorde, as a civic gesture of domestic reconciliation between warring factions. Had Gisors’s library project been realized, then each of the two major civic buildings closing the two sides of the axis would have presented Pantheon-inspired domed spaces as the major room.

  All of these library projects with their cosmic theme came to fruition not in France but in the United States, in Thomas Jefferson’s design for the University of Virginia. Edu
cation, for Jefferson, was central to the success of the new American republic. “I have looked on our present state of liberty,” he opined in 1805, “as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree.” In 1821, while reflecting on his efforts on behalf of his 1779 Bill for the Commonwealth of Virginia on the “More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” Jefferson wrote: “Nobody can doubt my zeal for the general instruction of the people.” This law envisaged three tiers of public education: primary school, district colleges, and a state university. “For the collegiate and university levels,” as scholars have explained, “it provided a selection process for educating the best and brightest students ‘without regard to wealth, birth or other accidental condition or circumstance.’”86 The University of Virginia was created as the capstone of this universal and democratic system of education. The Rotunda (Fig. 13.10), designed by Jefferson as a half-scale version of the Pantheon, became the fitting embodiment of these principles.

  13.10. Thomas Jefferson, Rotunda, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1818–1828. (Photo: Courtesy Thomas Schumacher)

  Yet the very existence of the Rotunda, let alone its form and purpose, emerged only by stages in Jefferson’s mind. His initial design for the university lacked a focal building, which was proposed to him by the architect Benjamin Latrobe, who in a letter and sketch of July 24, 1817, suggested a grand central auditorium building, which he drew in the manner of the Pantheon. Latrobe appears to have been in close contact with the French émigré Joseph Ramée, who at the time was designing Union College in Schenectady, New York, with a Pantheon-inspired central building for his new campus.87

  In Latrobe’s project, the ground floor of his Pantheon-like edifice was to house a semicircular lecture room; above, a circular lecture hall underneath the dome.88 The idea of a monumental point of focus for the campus greatly appealed to Jefferson, who modified Latrobe’s sketch by scaling it to one-half the size of the Pantheon and by providing enough similar details so as to ensure a ready resemblance to the ancient model. Of course, the Rotunda was built of local red brick with white wooden trim, its dome of laminated wood, thereby making it both visually and structurally an American variant on the Roman concrete prototype.

  This difference in materials had major implications for the design of the front porch in its volumetric relationship to the rear cylinder, which extended outward to the sides of the porch, and to the dome above. Since the exterior wall of Jefferson’s Rotunda lacked the considerable thickness of the original, which had made the outside cylinder of the Pantheon much broader than the interior volume, Jefferson’s entire edifice presented a more slender profile. Thus, Jefferson was obliged to change the temple front of its porch from eight to six columns in order to retain a suitable relationship for all of the major architectural features.

  With respect to function, instead of placing a lecture hall under the dome as Latrobe had suggested, Jefferson decided to house the university’s library there. It was a fitting symbol of the nature of the university, for the cosmic imagery of the Pantheon confirmed the Enlightenment notion, as Boullée had expressed it, that the library houses humankind’s collective understanding of the universe. To make this message explicit, Jefferson planned to “paint the dome sky blue and set gilt stars and planets against it; there would be a seat for an operator, and the stars could be changed to conform to their varying positions.”89 In other words, Jefferson was proposing to realize a variation of the planetarium that Boullée had proposed in his Cenotaph to Newton of 1784 and to combine it with Boullée’s holistic library concept of 1784–1785. The similarities between Boullée’s projects and Jefferson’s Rotunda should not surprise because Jefferson had served as American minister to France in the period 1784–1789 and had close contact with the architects of the Académie Royale d’Architecture during the time of his Paris sojourn.

  Had Jefferson ever wished to render the interior of his Rotunda as a single volume, thereby approximating the effect of the Pantheon? Stanford White, of the eminent American Beaux-Arts architectural firm McKim, Meade and White, certainly believed so, arguing that only circumstances beyond Jefferson’s control had obliged him to place two other floors with rooms in the Rotunda. White voiced his opinion while preparing to restore the Rotunda after his firm had been engaged by the University of Virginia in the aftermath of the fire of October 1895, which had nearly destroyed Jefferson’s masterpiece. In the previous year, White and Charles Follen McKim, who were engaged in planning a new campus for New York University’s University Heights campus in the Bronx and Columbia University in Manhattan, each had designed a Pantheon-like central library for his respective campus, probably inspired by Jefferson’s Rotunda. Now the firm had the opportunity to work on the original itself, which was repaired in the form that White imagined that Jefferson would have intended, with one large interior domed room. For three-quarters of a century, the Rotunda’s interior stood as a closer approximation to the Pantheon than it ever had been, before it was restored in 1973–1976 to its original, internal configuration.90

  The Pantheon’s legacy in library design of the twentieth century emerges most forcefully in Erik Gunnar Asplund’s Stockholm Public Library, which underwent a long gestation with several designs between circa 1920 and its opening in 1928 (Fig. 13.11). The Pantheon was a repeated point of reference in Asplund’s architecture, which, before the architect’s conversion to the International Style, participated in the Neoclassical revival that was popular in Scandinavian countries in the early decades of the twentieth century. In his first complete project for the public library, dating from 1921, Asplund envisaged a central amphitheater of books under a Pantheon-like dome, where in place of recessed coffers he would have substituted deep skylights.91 Both front and rear facades would reveal this central domed chamber. In the final, built design, Asplund transformed the literal reference to the Pantheon into an abstract one, now utilizing a tall cylinder in place of the dome, albeit paving the floor with a pattern reminiscent of the Pantheon’s marble pattern.92

  13.11. Gunnar Asplund, public library, Stockholm, 1920–1928. (Photo: Courtesy Johan Mårtelius)

  Throughout his architecture, Asplund explored the metaphysical qualities of space and light. Reflecting on the symbolic staircase of Sigurd Lewerentz’s “back-lit Jacob’s ladder to the cremation plateau” in the domed room of the cemetery exhibit at the 1923 Göteborg Exhibition, Asplund asked rhetorically, “Suppose there had been no building and just an open sky at the end of the staircase?”93 This thought helps us to understand Asplund’s attention to light and space in three of his edifices where the Pantheon played an important role. In the Woodland Chapel of the South Stockholm Cemetery (1920), the architect created a Pantheon-like dome with mystical indirect light entering through a glazed central skylight. Asplund explained that the dome “was intended to hover weightlessly.”94 In the Hall of Fame of his Skandia Cinema (Stockholm, 1922–1923), he combined cove lighting along the walls of the cylindrical space with an unlit domed vault, glimpsed through the central oculus in a flat ceiling. Looking upward into the dark blue surface with its suggestion of the limitless space of a domed vault, the eye and mind become lost in a dark infinity, what Asplund termed “a dark nothingness.”95

  The young Alvar Aalto, who soon would become the leading Finnish architect of his generation, perceptively noted the psychological and even spiritual aspects of Asplund’s work. Having just met Asplund in the Skandia Cinema, Aalto observed:

  I had the impression that this was an architecture where ordinary systems hadn’t served as parameters. Here the point of departure was man, with all the innumerable nuances of his emotional life, and nature.96

  Like Boullée’s Cenotaph to Newton and his library projects, Asplund’s Stockholm Public Library was “a metaphor for the mind.”97

  In effect, Asplund’s library was his own Jacob’s Ladder. In both the first and final scheme, a ceremonial staircase provides ascent into the central, boo
k-lined library hall (Fig. 13.12).98 The initial design presents an ascent focused on three dark doors at the rear of the hall on each level of the amphitheater of books, which seem to suggest the dark recesses of the mind. In the final design, these doors were replaced by a single square, interior window from an annular corridor. Considered in conjunction with the ring of much larger rectangular windows that only come into view as one proceeds farther up the symbolic staircase leading into the central hall of books, this diminutive window obviously has no significant effect on the level of useful illumination but, rather, serves suggestively as a symbolic third eye into the mind.

  13.12. Gunnar Asplund, public library, Stockholm, view into the reading room. (Photo: Courtesy Stadsbiblioteket, Stockholm)

  Asplund was very sensitive to the effects of contrast in scale. Writing about the oversized details in the main room of the Skandia Cinema, he explained that “a large motif always gives the impression of nearness, i.e., reduces the size of the room.”99 Conversely, we can extrapolate to say that Asplund understood that the small scale of the square window in the Stockholm Public Library, juxtaposed with the large rectangular, sun-filled openings, would make it seem not only like a miniature but also as if it were receding deeply into space, the perfect metaphor of a journey into the mind.100

  The invitation to such a mental or spiritual journey is reinforced throughout the building. In both the preliminary scheme and the executed building, this processional ascent upward is preceded with a floor mosaic inscribed with the ancient Greek phrase “Know Thyself,” an image that Asplund had sketched during a visit in 1914 to the Terme Museum in Rome.101 Figures of Adam and Eve, each with an apple in hand, form the door handles of the large glass entrance, thereby obliging each visitor literally to take the matter in hand. Whereas the Enlightenment, with its optimistic view of the progress of human knowledge, provided us with the first projects and realizations of the public library, in the aftermath of World War I Asplund suggests that a more sober self-assessment of human potentialities and proclivities would be in order.