history | not an easy book |
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The city street façade can provide a type of juxtaposed contradiction that is essentially two-dimensional. Frank Furness' Clearing House, now demolished like many of his best works in Philadelphia, contained an array of violent pressures within a rigid frame. The half-segmental arch, blocked by the submerged tower which, in turn, bisects the façade into a near duality, and the violent adjacencies of rectangles, squares, lunettes, and diagonals of contrasting sizes, compose a building seemingly held up by the buildings next door: it is an almost insane short story of a castle on a city street. All these relationships of structure and pattern contrast the severe limitations associated with a façade, a street line, and contiguous row houses.
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The rectangular face of the Palazzo del Popolo in Ascoli Piceno illustrates juxtaposed contradiction that comes from repeated renovation rather than from the instantaneous stroke of a single architect. This facade teems with the violent adjacencies and superadjacencies of open
and closed arcades, continuous and interrupted string courses, big and little windows, "porte" and "porrone," and clocks, cartouches, balconies, and store fronts. All of these produce broken rhythms and reflect the contradictory dualities of public and private, ordered and circumstantial scales.
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The unflinching wings and striped patterns of Butterfield's All Saints Church, Margaret Street, London, clash when they come together. The relative independence of the form of the parts, despite their closeness, is a most significant example of contradiction juxtaposed as distinct from contradiction adapted.
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