tower – Page 2

richardson + nervi, coda

2016⋅05⋅05 NS ColemanLeave a comment

RICHARDSON-NERVI_01

In a final touch upon the last few posts here (this one, this one, and these two), I just up and slapped Richardson and Nervi on top of one another, aligning the square towers of each project, and highlighting the enormous piers (inner squares are from Trinity, the other ones are St. Mary).

greek cross synthesis, pt. 2

2016⋅05⋅032016⋅05⋅03 NS Coleman1 Comment

CHURCH_10

Looking through my sketchbooks, I stumbled across further drawings for the project I featured yesterday. These are studies of the tower, the interior pendentives (the triangular surfaces that mediate between the arches and the tower corners), and the apses themselves.

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greek cross synthesis

2016⋅05⋅02 NS Coleman3 Comments

CHURCH_02

Taking cues from both the Nervi and Richardson projects, this church places a large tower campanile at the crossing. The circular geometries owe more to Trinity, but the glass corners and spatial fluidity are direct quotes of St. Mary. The tower transitions from a square at its base to a circle at the crown, paying homage to Nervi’s typical hyperbolic paraboloid surfaces.

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precedent – richardson’s greek cross

2016⋅05⋅022016⋅05⋅02 NS Coleman2 Comments

RICHARDSON_04

Following Friday’s post on the High Modernist St. Mary of the Assumption, I present you with another Greek cross church plan, H. H. Richardson’s Trinity Church in Boston. A large tower sits on on four enormous piers at the cubic volume of the crossing, which commands the entire sanctuary, where the apse, transept, and nave ‘arms’ are rather shallow.

precedent – a modern greek cross

2016⋅04⋅292016⋅04⋅29 NS Coleman3 Comments

CHURCH_07 This past February, my wife and I took a weekend trip to San Francisco, where we stumbled across the city’s cathedral – St Mary of the Assumption, by Pierluigi Nervi and Pietro Belluschi. The church is a square, with large piers in the corners supporting a gargantuan lantern, which also doubles as the church’s campanile. The large piers dominate the four corners which have been rendered in finely detailed glass storefronts, effectively making the church more of a standard Greek cross rather than the centrally-focused square it purports to be. I’ll be featuring my own riffs on this project over the coming days, but for now, I’ll let you appreciate the brutal simplicity of the form that started it all.

a basilica

2016⋅04⋅192016⋅04⋅22 NS Coleman3 Comments

BASILICA_02

These drawings attempt to synthesize how a linear basilica form might stem from a square volume. The first drawing is intentionally church-like, but I find the two derivations below to be more interesting – the first with apses at either end, and accessed from the short axis; the second with the stair tower volumes repeated, more of a town-hall.

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