The Architecture of Dome: Mapping the W/Hole

Abstract

It is without doubt that style, as one of the primary artistic categories for Ancient Greeks, is also their legacy to European architecture. The Parthenon represented an example of both the meaning and the scope of style for generations of Modernists. It should not be forgotten that the aims of architecture always went further - beyond stylistic balance - they surpassed and even exhausted themselves, all in an attempt to grasp the idea of the whole. That one and the whole gave, and still give, the basic direction to architecture. The question of modernity has always referred the actual reality to this. Can we observe it differently? Can we design outside of necessity to grasp the whole? Can we understand that necessity differently today? Could an architectural act be part of the whole while maintaining its own wholeness? The answers might be found on the path of their morphological origin, the path taken by many a ‘forgotten’ Modernist. Modernism was indeed invited to answer these global questions for the first time. The story of globalization in architecture was never anything but a story of the whole within itself, to which the modernist idea of the general within the particular belongs. The modernist attempt to answer this question refers to the ornament, but from todays perspective it seems that the answer always lay in the geometry. The origin of such striving of architecture is visible in Ancient Greece, even if not exactly at the point to which Le Corbusier turned in his Voyage d’Orient. Seemingly, all roads do lead to Rome