DOI Artikel:
Rykwert, Joseph: Materia and cosmos
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.14574#0026
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JOSEPH RYKWERT
has survived looks almost as if it had been designed by a disciple of the great Sienese architect, Francesco
di Giorgio. In doing this Nikon himself was also introducing the dévotion by "composition of place" which
the Jesuits had made a great aid to méditation in the Latin Church, and which had led to the construction
of many such landscapes ail over Europe - and in Latin America. Nikon's reforms were to have quite
a différent issue than he intended. Half a century after his death, Peter the Great turned Nikon's insistence
on pedantic Byzantinism into a rigid centralism and replaced the Patriarch's office with a committee.
The great revival of wooden church building in eighteenth-century Russia had an echo in the Polish-
Lithuanian State in the Uniate churches and some really extravagant synagogue buildings, notably the one
at Wołpa near Grodno of the 1780s; its technical and volumetric sophistication led Miłobędzki to suggest
that it could not be the work of local carpenters but had to rely on one of the major late-Baroque architects.
The co-existence of an adventurous carpenter's building with the bookish accomplishment of quite
humble craftsmen may be one of the under-appreciated achievements of the architecture of North-Eastern
Europe. But perhaps even more important, and still not fully understood, is the dichotomy of the two world
pictures, the two cosmologies enshrined in, and communicated by ritual - the Byzantine, palatial and Kosmas-
inspired architecture of both Imperial and schismatic Byzantines and the judicially structured processional
way of the Latins - as shaping the unified timber subtratum of the East Euopean plains. Shaping and
separating but also joining in a constant, millenniary dialectic.
JOSEPH RYKWERT
has survived looks almost as if it had been designed by a disciple of the great Sienese architect, Francesco
di Giorgio. In doing this Nikon himself was also introducing the dévotion by "composition of place" which
the Jesuits had made a great aid to méditation in the Latin Church, and which had led to the construction
of many such landscapes ail over Europe - and in Latin America. Nikon's reforms were to have quite
a différent issue than he intended. Half a century after his death, Peter the Great turned Nikon's insistence
on pedantic Byzantinism into a rigid centralism and replaced the Patriarch's office with a committee.
The great revival of wooden church building in eighteenth-century Russia had an echo in the Polish-
Lithuanian State in the Uniate churches and some really extravagant synagogue buildings, notably the one
at Wołpa near Grodno of the 1780s; its technical and volumetric sophistication led Miłobędzki to suggest
that it could not be the work of local carpenters but had to rely on one of the major late-Baroque architects.
The co-existence of an adventurous carpenter's building with the bookish accomplishment of quite
humble craftsmen may be one of the under-appreciated achievements of the architecture of North-Eastern
Europe. But perhaps even more important, and still not fully understood, is the dichotomy of the two world
pictures, the two cosmologies enshrined in, and communicated by ritual - the Byzantine, palatial and Kosmas-
inspired architecture of both Imperial and schismatic Byzantines and the judicially structured processional
way of the Latins - as shaping the unified timber subtratum of the East Euopean plains. Shaping and
separating but also joining in a constant, millenniary dialectic.