In 1722 Johann Santini Aichel, a Bohemian architect with Italian roots, completed the Nepomuk Church in Žd’ár. The interpretations of twentieth-century historians of this remarkably plastic and geometrically complex building were mostly directed at explaining its Italian influences. Through a meticulous reading of the church’s semantic richness, De Meyer argues for and offers a more complex understanding of the church, as a combination of Italianate Baroque culture and local devotional practices. The multiple layers and possible readings of the church are essential to its understanding and reveal its origins in the intersection of the erudite and propagandist agenda of its commissioners and that of its architect.

Throughout his oeuvre, Nicholas Hawksmoor employs various strategies for appropriating and processing architecture history. Taking St. George’s, Bloomsbury as a case study, this essay examines how Hawskmoor employs the miniature replica as an architectural motif. It contends that Hawksmoor’s quasi-replicas are not simply to be understood as means of achieving particular formal qualities: they establish a specific and paradoxical relation to history, as attempts of materializing a past that is at once approximated and absent.

This article describes the influential role of Sigfried Giedion in the historiography of the Italian architect Guarino Guarini. According to Giedion, Guarini was the most important representative of the Late Baroque, embodying the fusion of architecture and science. In Giedion’s argumentation Guarini represents a man of science rather than an artist. This is part of his strategy to defend Guarini as a valid historical precursor of Modernism, by means of introducing a modern concept of space. Van Beek argues that Wittkower adopted Giedion’s argumentation and therefore largely contributed to the continuation of this interpretation, a legitimation of this defence that now turns out to be endlessly limited.

The exhibition ‘Luigi Moretti architetto: dal razionalismo all’informale’, held at the MAXXI museum in Rome (30 May to 28 November 2010) and curated by Bruno Reichlin and Maristella Casciato, offers a chance to re-evaluate Moretti’s position as pivotal figure in twentieth-century architecture. The curators dubbed Moretti ‘the last of the Moderns and the first of the Contemporaries’. Andrew Leach, in discussing the contents of the exhibition, turns to Moretti’s strong interest in the architecture of the Baroque. Moretti’s structurally informed experimentalism and the active engagement of architectural history in his designs betray the influence of Borromini. Moretti’s analyses of Borromini’s designs, in his writing as well as in his built work, showed the importance of Borromini’s work for the point of transition that was the moment between Late Modernism and Postmodernism. 

Hans Scharoun’s introduction to a popular work on European Baroque architecture is a unique document of a modern architect establishing a connection between his own design practice and a period of architectural history. In Scharoun’s world view the architecture of the Baroque was a period of transition, from the rational principles of Greek architecture to an expression of movement, which localized the Baroque in a historical period of absolute power and cultural fluidity. At the same time, the two-centred or multi-focal geometries (Scharoun speaks of ‘poles’) of the late Baroque in Germany reflected, in his view, a desire for unity, which resonated with his own preoccupations with intricate spatial configurations and the suppression of overriding symmetries by offering a multiplicity of these. In his short text the architect reveals the inspiration he found in the form world of the Baroque for his own projects, most notably the Berlin Philharmonie. ‘Baroque’, in this text, can be taken as an indication of an affinity and the recognition that the architect’s idea of a unified yet complex whole was indebted to the experience of spaces from a historically and culturally remote period.

In the exhibition Roma Interrotta (1978) 12 architecture firms developed proposals for Rome on the basis of the Nuova Pianta di Roma by Giambattista Nolli (1748). The endeavour was meant as a criticism of the nineteenth-century urban development of Rome, when it became the capital of a united Italy. This essay examines the ideas that circulated about Roma capitale among architecture historians and architects, in order to better understand its radical dismissal in 1978. This dismissal, it is argued, was motivated by a Modernist and Postmodernist view of Baroque Rome as the model of the European (capital) city. This view, in turn, is based on a quite narrow and specific reading of Rome’s urban development. As such, it lays bare some of the limitations and weaknesses in the architectural discourse of the 1970s.

The work of Valerio Olgiati has occasionally been described as having Baroque tendencies. His design method can be described as a dialectic process, allowing his designs to often display contradictory qualities. Wölfflin identified the character of Baroque art with five criteria: painterly character, depth of represented space, open form, lack of clarity and unifying tendencies. Although Olgiati’s work does not display direct references to Baroque architecture, it is possible, using these five categories, to identify a Baroque sensitivity in his work. After briefly qualifying the use of the term Baroque in art history, the author uses five perspectives – atmosphere, movement, geometry, depth and system – to illustrate this point.

This article deals with the work of the Austrian architect Hermann Czech. Czech gained fame throughout Europe in the 1970s with his delicate architectural reconversions of bars in Vienna and several public buildings, based on the strategy of continuation and convention instead of contrast. This article explores the connections between the themes of the Baroque and traces of it in the work of Czech. Amid a climate of reformation and avant-gardism, his critical and early postmodern position forms an important counterpart, pleading for subtlety, irony and undogmatic use of historical knowledge. Although Czech himself evades literal relations between the Baroque and his own work, his Vienna-based practice seems to be imbued with it.

The Swiss firm of Christ & Gantenbein Architekten has steadily won renown both at home and abroad. Their work betrays an interest in complex spaces, geometries and surface patterns that hints at an interest in Baroque architecture. Although their work does not directly refer to the architecture of the Baroque as such, the architects have in the past made serious attempts to study the period. Play is a crucial factor in understanding their work. Most of their projects start out with a rigorous set of rules in term of organization, but these are then followed by a playful use of connotations and transformations. Their work, as illustrated by the VoltaMitte complex in Basel, betrays the fun the architects have in bending, breaking and stretching these rules. The Baroque aspect of their work shines through in the resulting light, playful tone of some of their projects. 

From 1981 to 1993, Belgian architect Christian Kieckens researched Baroque space by capturing the proportions, the perspective and the geometric basis of a large number of Baroque churches in a series of photographs and with a graphic notation technique. This technique led to a series of ink drawings in which the floor plan and section are always projected side by side, revealing their interrelationship. A selection of five of these churches, all by Borromini, forms a visual essay in this issue.