Last week for our architectural training we had a special guest lecturer: Phil Bernstein, FAIA, a Vice President at Autodesk, he also teaches professional practice at the Yale School of Design. Mr. Bernstein gave us the history of architectural practice from Ancient Egypt, to the present day and into the future. It was a concise look at the development of what it means to be an architect and the history of the business.

Touching on major milestones and figures such as Euclid, Brunelleschi, Rafael, Palladio, Inigo Jones, Christopher Wren, Benjamin Latrobe, Beaux Arts, Frank Lloyd Wright, Skidmore Owens and Merrill, The Architect’s collaborative and Frank Gehry, Mr. Bernstein explained how architects have come to be what they are: highly trained, designers, not builders, and how the practice is in need of some serious reconfiguring, just like the building practice.

He spoke eloquently about how it has taken us 1,500 years to get away from the days of a Master Builder – one who understood building means and methods and yet also had a clear artistic vision – and how he believes it will only take us 15-20 years, with the help of VDC and IPD, to return to that ideal.

It was an honor to have someone of Mr. Bernstein’s caliber as our teacher for a few hours.

Last week during our architectural training we finished off 19^th century industrialization, by way of pre-modern visionaries such as Henri Labrouste, Joseph Paxton, Gustave Eiffel, and Louis Sullivan. We learned that as 19^th century architects struggled to define their field in light of new technologies, new market forces and new building problems, audacious new designers emerged from engineering to address the age.

We explored this exciting period by moving back and forth between new technologies (such as iron), new building types (such as factories, green houses, iron bridges, etc) and the groundbreaking buildings that followed (Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paxton’s Crystal Palace, and Eiffel’s Tower).

The night ended with a look at the prolific work of the Chicago School. We saw how ideas originating in the office of William Le Baron Jenney were developed further by his protégés:  Daniel Burnham, William Hollabird, Martin Roche and Louis Sullivan. In particular, we focused on Sullivan’s immense influence on Modern architecture evidenced by the pervasiveness of aphorisms like, “less is more,” and, “form [ever] follows function.” We concluded with a series of 20^th through 21^st century buildings clearly inspired by the gridded façade of Sullivan’s Carson, Pirie and Scott Department Store.

Last week during our architectural education series we moved into the Industrial period. Beginning in the mid-17th Century and continuing until the dawn of the 20^th Century, this stretch of history encompassed a colossal amount of change, political upheaval, the reexamination of historical styles and the invention of countless new ones.

We began the evening studying Neo-Classical and Beaux-Arts architecture which typified a majority of this period. A reaction against the decadence of Baroque, these styles are toned down; there is a return to symmetry, hierarchy and order. This was also the time of the Enlightenment in philosophy where logic and reason were praised. Honesty in architecture became a reoccurring theme, a desire to let wood be wood or stone be stone and not embellish or disguise materials become widespread.

National styles were cropping up all over during the 1700s. Southern Germany believed they were the new Greece and exemplified the Neo-Classical. Northern Germany and much of Northern Europe explored the Gothic style. And in America? Our first style: Federalism, forever showcased in our capital building and the White House.

With industrialization came machines and vast new ways of building. In our discussion we drew parallels to the current state of the building industry, with so much change and what feels like endless new ideas. It is unsettling, and exciting.

It was a nice transition to the second half of the evening which continued our Bentley Navigator training led by our VDC department. Now that the whole company is well versed in navigating a model, we learned about some of the more collaborative features of the program, such as annotating and creating mark-ups within the model.

In our fifth architectural lecture we finished up the Renaissance and moved into the Baroque period. We learned that this time period of roughly two hundred years (the early 1500’s to the early 1700’s) covered a number of different movements in art and architecture: Mannerism, Baroque, and Rococo.

Cornaro Chapel by Bernini (Rome c. 1645-52)

We watched as the clean lines, one-point perspective and rational grid-based designs of the classical period gave way to the theatrical, curvaceous, ornate, rippling surfaces of Baroque and Rococo. As always, art mimics life, and we learned that with the advent of the Reformation and the Sack of Rome, Europe was tossed into uncertainty. No more could the rationality and perfection of the early Renaissance rule when life was becoming increasingly complex. At the same time the Papacy, which still governed much of Europe, was showing off the majesty and beauty that the Protestants rejected by building more and more elaborate buildings.

Next week: Industrialization! And as always, if you would like to join us for these lectures, please don’t hesitate to ask.

I leave you with one final thought about Baroque architecture. (The writer apologizes for the frivolity of this link. Tocci Building Companies does not necessary share the opinions expressed therein.)

It was another exciting night last night at our weekly training session. This week we spent an hour on architectural training and then the next hour on VDC training. It was a great blend, the past and the future all in one night.

During our architectural lecture we started the Renaissance period of western architecture (part I of II). We learned about the return to classicism in design and form, the rebirth of geometry as divine and the introduction of perspective in art. However, the most interesting discussion of the evening was about the architect’s role during the Renaissance. Renaissance architects were artists, who could draw and paint, as well as builders who understood engineering and materials and, in many instances, oversaw construction. Halfway through the 14^th century a rift developed, case in point: Brunelleschi vs. Alberti. Two contemporaries, Brunelleschi represented the architect as master builder, a sculptor who understood construction materials and learned classicism from ancient ruins; and Alberti the gentleman’s architect, a scholar who approached problems theoretically and learned classicism from ancient texts.

It was tempting to draw parallels to today’s design and building process from this discussion, to say that this pivotal moment in history was when the separation between builders and architects occurred. But, history is never one-sided and while Brunelleschi’s master builder mindset is indeed what we are striving for with our work today, he was also notoriously misanthropic and secretive about his work, which is not in keeping with a transparent IPD process!

Enough history already! During our VDC training we learned to navigate a BIM in Bentley Navigator. This is a continuation of our VDC training started a few weeks ago to give each employee in the company the power of VDC at their fingertips. This training is not just for our project management staff, by training EVERYONE, we ensure no loss of information and communication as a project progresses through the team from Business Development, to Virtual Design and Construction, to operations and even accounting.