War! Let’s talk about
war. How’s that for light and fun? Ok, not a particularly light topic, but one
that has a rather interesting tie to architecture, and it’s a subject that I
know a lot of folks have some opinion on.
Well, to be clear, we’re not going to actually discuss the Clausewitzian
topic of fighting strategies. Because when
it comes to significant historic battles, buildings tend to be among the biggest
losers. Many great structures and city centers
have been utterly destroyed because of the wars fought near and around and
within them. But that’s not what we’re
here to discuss today.
War and architecture do have an interesting historic and
social connection however. And that
connection is primarily through it’s defensive structures: what we typically
call forts.
Fortress architecture has a history that dates back thousands
of years. The first defensive structures
were not built strictly for military purposes, however. Shortly after the development of the
city-state, and the human tendency to want to take what someone else has, and
the invention of weapons to carry out that wish, people started to realize that
they might want to protect what they had and began to experiment with ways to
keep the other nearby tribes from coming over and stealing what they worked so
hard to grow, invent or build.
The simplest technical solution that early historic humans
came up with was the wall! You couldn’t
get any simpler than that. Any wall, if
it’s high enough and solid enough will keep a person (who doesn’t possess a ladder,
trampoline or a shovel and a lot of time) on one side indefinitely. And that solution worked quite well as long
as you had the time and resources to man the top of the wall and start picking
off the enemy before he had time to bring his ladders, trampolines and shovels
up to the front of it.
So city-dwellers began building large walls around their
urban centers to keep the marauders out.
And while city sieges were sometimes effective, the walls tended to be
more effective in the long run, such that it is quite rare to find a European,
Asian or Middle Eastern city built before the Renaissance that wasn’t surrounded
by an extensive system of city walls.
And as siege technology grew in sophistication, so did the design of the
walls. The old city walls that we see today,
such as those in many German and Austrian towns like Linz or Wiener Neustadt, appear
to us as some of the most beautiful surviving ancient architecture. But the elements that we see today as
aesthetically pleasing were originally built as purely defensive structures in
response to some sort of siege technique.
The crenellations along the top allowed the defenders secure position
from which to fire at the attackers. The
beautiful towers that dot the old town neighborhoods were originally entry and
look-out points, and sometimes used as organizational edifices, office space
along the wall, in other words.
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Northwestern corner
tower in Wiener Neustadt
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Of course, the design of these walls reflected the style of
architecture of the times they were built.
You therefor see stylistic embellishments that may have gone a bit
beyond pure function, but all in all, they were truly beautiful examples of
form following function.
But as the technology of warfare advanced throughout the
Renaissance and early Modern Period, munitions became more powerful and deadly
and simple walls became less effective at resisting attacks. Walls gradually lost their utility in keeping
out invaders, but at the same time, armies became more mobile. Military strategy began shifting from
attacking civilian targets like cities and castles to targeting the enemy’s
forces instead. Over time, military
theory evolved more into using structures to protect the armies themselves
rather than protecting the civilian targets, which were less strategically important
anyway.
Thus, by the time of the Enlightenment in the 1700’s fortress
architecture had become every bit as elaborate as the old town walls, requiring
battlements, revetments, bastions, etc. The
geometry of forts also became much more interesting from a defensive standpoint
as well. Star fortifications developed
as a means to better protect the installation by allowing crossfire between the
bastions, the extended points of the “star.”
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Bourtange
fortification, in Groningan, Netherlands
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Needless to say, the engineering behind these fortifications was
much more complex than space allows me to explain here, but the results were
sometimes immense and quite beautiful despite their military origination.
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Citidel of Jaca,
Spain
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But as all things change over time, fortifications such as
these gradually became obsolete as well.
With the invention of the exploding artillery shell in the nineteenth
century, the traditional masonry fortress was not capable of withstanding
bombardment for very long and military strategy evolved once again from using
forts as strategic holding positions to making forts primarily bases for
housing troops and weaponry. That
evolution can be seen very clearly in Fort Desoto in Tampa Bay, Florida, begun
in 1898 as a defensive station to protect Tampa from a potential Spanish invasion
during the Spanish-American War. The
bastions have devolved into mere revetments whose sole function is to protect
the gun emplacements rather than the soldiers who actually manned the
fort.
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Artillery bastion at
Fort Desoto, Florida
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Because the defensive strategy of the modern military is
vastly more complex, involving air, electronic and long-range perimeter
isolation, the obvious need for physical protection of the fort proper, is long
since outdated. The modern military base
may still carry the name “Fort” such and such, but the utility of the term fort
is relatively outdated as a descriptive term.
This is why we more commonly hear the term “base” used in the context of
the modern military fort. Base certainly
makes much more sense because it more accurately describes what the
installation actually does – it serves as a base for the military units housed
there. This is also where you can sometimes
hear the term “camp” as well, such as Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.
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Fort Bragg, North Carolina
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We would like to think of war as a strategy of absolute last
resort in the affairs of humankind. But
it is something that has always been with us as “civilized” people. Architecture has served humans in many
capacities over the history of our purported ingenuity. It is no surprise that it has also served the
cause of conflict and defense as well.
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