How the Baroque overcame the flatness and stillness of architecture

It's remarkable that the Baroque was not a step off to the side or a degenerate architecture, as it might seem. It was a direct development of architectural thought — and that thought wasn't about piling on more frilly decoration.

There's an interesting cultural parallel with the time machine. When the human imagination first reached the idea of mechanical time travel (it began in the late 19th century), time machines were depicted as large clocks, steam engines, and even bicycles.

The emergence of a new idea doesn't bring new means of achieving it. People think in familiar categories. The first expensive carriages were decorated with columns and capitals like a house, and the first cars were shaped exactly like carriages. It's the same story with the Baroque.

The revolutionary idea was to overcome the flatness, stillness, and closed nature of the architecture of the time. Part of what we hold to today was invented in the Baroque era. Back then the desired effect was simply achieved with the materials of the day: ornament became grotesque (depth), porticoes were bitten into (openness), towers were twisted (dynamics). Heavy buildings rebelled and set themselves in motion. The free-standing facade decorations of the Renaissance merged into an ensemble, a "single living impression," in Baroque architecture. Baroque masters even scripted how you would encounter a building, making the layout more complex.

In the Baroque still life, the lemon became cut and peeled, ready for celebration right now rather than in some perfect eternity. In this sense, the Baroque is more human and closer to modern architecture than its austere predecessors.

The Baroque is more human, and closer to modern architecture, than its austere predecessors.