Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Furttenbach Architectura

garden coquillage designs


coquillage decoration


coquillage design for garden


palace garden, fort and moat


halintro pyrobolia


vue d'un navire de guerre


navire tirant le canon


vue d'un port fortifié et d'une canonade


vue de la proue d'un navire à trois mâts


vue de profil d'un navire à deux mâts


vue complète d'un navire à trois mâts


vue de la proue d'un navire à deux mâts


Furttenbach's intimate garden courtyard with a small grotto


coupe d'une fontaine-grotte rocaille


cinq modèles de fenêtres


architectura privata


architectura universalis frontpiece


baroque canon


architectura universalis fortress designs


furttenbach baroque canon


mini baroque canon design


harbour fortress design


miniature baroque canon and mounting


miniature baroque canon in wheeled mounting


Architectura recreationis theatre scene


Although Joseph Furttenbach (1591-1667) spent the majority of his life in Ulm in southern Germany, it was a 10 year stay in Italy in his youth that informed his later professional output as an architect and author. He studied engineering, military architecture and stage design while in Tuscany and Florence and was influential in promoting design elements of the italian and french baroque schools in Germany.

Furrtenbach was something of a polymath and held various governmental positions in Ulm (including City Architect) where his interests included: cartography, chemistry (he described numerous gunpowder experiments he did himself in his pyrotechnics treatise), bridge, ship and organ building as well as elite home garden design.
"Furttenbach describes the grotto in his garden as being filled with artifice and exotica, including shell-encrusted sculptures and waterworks, painted cosmological imagery, and mirrors. His garden is a kind of open-air museum where the plants constitute the valued, living statues. The flowers are identifiable as the most sought after and costly bulbs of the period, the narcissus, tulip, fritillary, and crown imperial, demonstrating Furttenbach's knowledge of current botanical research."
'Architectura Universalis' (the canon series of images above) remains his best remembered work - "[a] treatise on the engineering and building of fortifications, trenches, barracks, military schools, hospitals, lazarettos, bridges, moats, boats and boat-yards, guns, canons, and much more."

There have been various compilations of Furttenbach's works released and I'm reasonably confused as to which images (scattered across the internet) derive from which original book. To the best of my very limited understanding, his major works (all of which are represented above I believe) are:

--'Halintro-Pyrobolia'. 1627 (or: 'essays on guns, fireworks, sulfur, coal, and other substances used in the manufacture of explosives')
--'Architectura Civilis'. 1628
--'Architectura Martialis' 1629
--'Architectura Universalis'. 1635
--'Architectura Recreationis'. 1640 (stage and theatre design)
--'Architectura Privata' 1641
--'Mannhafter Kunst-Spiegel' 1663 (synthesis of previous architectural interests but combined with ideas about navigation, geography, astronomy and perspective)

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