I was very excited for our visit to the Providence Public Library this week, and greatly enjoyed the hard hat tour. It was very interesting to see a building in progress—in this case, being half torn down and rebuilt—rather than the finished products that I usually experience. In particular, seeing the inner structure of the building helped me think about how the bare frame relates to the space that it will eventually become.
Exposed concrete beams in the library
A partially finished empty room in the library
Seeing a grand building under renovation was also an important reminder that buildings are far from static creations—rather, they change over time, both on a smaller time scale (e.g. lighting and activities change throughout the day) and a grander one (a library is renovated after about 30 years). During a short visit, I think a person’s understanding of a building is, by default, a more static one: the memories kept from that visit assume that it always looks the same way, despite the capability to imagine it otherwise. It takes several hours in a building to experience the shorter time scale changes, and frequenting a building for several years to experience the larger changes. Because of this, I think it was amazing to visit the library for the first time while under renovation: in a short visit, the state of the building easily conveyed the long-term changes it’s undergoing.
These are bookshelves which are structurally supporting the unfinished building. One can easily imagine both what the room looked like before they were put in—large and empty—and how the room will look when these shelves are filled.
Reflecting on the relationship between buildings and time led me to recall Room 1680, a building at a farmhouse in southwest Iceland whose renovations Gavin Lucas analyzed. This building underwent several phases of renovation over a period of about 150 years (c. 1630-1785), so is a key example of a structure that changed on a large time scale.
Plan of Skalholt – building 1680 is circled
Seeing all of the organization, work, and time that goes into renovating the library is a good example of what kind of logistics and activities are necessary to alter a building. This can be related to any time we’ve discussed the changes or upkeep of a palace, but I’ll stick with the smaller and more recent Room 1680 for now since we know so much about its history. For example, the floor of Room 1680 “revealed a very regular and continuous cycle of maintenance” with added layers of trampled ash and flagstones (Lucas 2016, 6). This information lets us think about how the activities of the building would have been disrupted for a time: the space would presumably have to be cleared out, and multiple people would have to haul in stone. Once the initial work was finished, the room would feel dramatically changed from before, as the flooring would be new and the ash probably less well-packed. Then, over time, the ash would become more packed and the room would see a more gradual, and therefore less noticeable, change to the worn and well-packed floor. All of this would, of course, be magnified in the case of a palace: how much work did it take to constantly change the rushes covering the floors of the Burnt Palace? Apparently, they were often replaced (Lloyd 1965), which would require a higher magnitude of organization and labor—more akin to what we saw at the Providence library.
– Maria Ronchi
Bibliography:
Lloyd, S. and Mellaart, J. (1965) Beycesultan Vol. II Middle Bronze Age Architecture and Pottery. Occasional Publications of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara 8. London, William Clowes and Sons.
Gavin Lucas, G. (2016) “Archaeological modes of enquiry and architecture,” In Elements of Architecture: Assembling archaeology, atmosphere and the performance of building spaces. Taylor and Francis.
I really enjoyed your post and thought your comment on the conceptual fluidity of a given building was very interesting. Your example of Room 1680 made me think about La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain. Construction on La Sagrada Familia began in 1882 and is still going on today. At the time, the building was built when its main patron wanted to bring Spain back towards religious fundamentalism. Spain is historically a deeply Catholic state and the move at the time was very popular. However over a century later, Catholicism and views on religion in general have changed, and so too have opinions on La Sagrada Familia. Many of the people in Spain no longer want the building around, and there have been many protests over the years to have the construction project terminated. I think our examples show not just the fluidity in architectural features as time passes, but also social conceptions of the building itself change over time.
I appreciate your post especially since I was also able to attend the hard hat tour on Friday and found myself struck by the extent of the renovation on the PPL. Our tour guide made sure to point out how things were originally constructed in the 50s, reconstructed in the 80s, and how they were going to be further changed in the near future. This made me consider not only the fluidity of the buildings we study in this class, but also how difficult it is to really understand how an ancient building might have looked in its earliest form. Of course, with modern technology and record keeping, there are fewer obvious physical signs that a building has been reconstructed and a better understanding of what has been changed. When we design our own palaces, we will have to keep the possible many phases of comparable building into account.