TOWARDS AND OLD ARCHITECTURE
door symbolizes the importance of the door in the face of the wall. Although some of these elements are functional as well-for instance, the drip are, but the pilasters are not-all are explicitly symbolic, associating the glories of Rome with the refinements of building.
But Renaissance iconography is not all structural. The stemma above the door is a sign. The Baroque façade of Francesco Borromini for instance, are rich with symbolism in bas-relief-religious, dynastic, and other. It is significant that Gideon, in his brilliant analysis of the façade of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, described the contrapuntal layerings, undulating rhythms and subtle scales of forms and surface as abstract elements in a composition in relation to the outside space of the street but without reference to the complex layering of symbolic meaning they contain.
The Italian palace is the decorated shed par excellence. For two centuries, from Florence to Rome the plan of rooms en suite around a rectangular, arcaded cortile with and entrance penetration in the middle of a farcade and a three-story elevation with occasional mezzanines was a constant base for a series of stylistic and compositional variations. The architectural scaffolding was the same for the Strozzi Palace with its frame of three-ordered pilasters, for the Farnesewith its quoined corners complementing the focus of the ornamental central bay and its resultant horizontal hierarchy, and for the Odescalchi with its monumental giant order imposing the image of one dominant story on three (Figs 93, 94). The basis for the significant evaluation of the development of Italian civic architecture from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century lie the decoration of shed Similar ornament adorns subsequent palazzo, commercial and senza cortili. The Carson Pirie Scott department store supports at the ground floor a cast-iron cladding of biological patterns in low relief with intricate scale appropriate for sustaining the customers’ interest at eye level , while abruptly opposing, in the formal vocabulary above it, the ugly and ordinary symbolism of a conventional loft (Fig. 95). The conventional shed of a high-rise Howard Johnson motel is more Ville Radieuse slab than palazzo, but the explicit symbolism of its virtually pedimented doorway, a rigid frame in heraldic orange enamel, matches the Classical pediment with feudal crest over the entrance of a patrician palazzo, if we grant the change in scale the jump in context from urban to Pop sprawl (Fig. 96).
NINETEENTH-CENTURY ECLECTICISM
The stylistic eclecticism of the nineteenth century was essentially a symbolism of function, although sometimes a symbolism of nationalism