Week 13 - Episode 69 - Colonnes Morris and Litfasssäulen

As we saw yesterday, columns can become canvases for stories. In 1854, German printer Ernst Litfass realised they could solve the city’s ‘poster problem’.

Signs were haphazardly posted all over the city and becoming a public nuisance. Litfass invented the idea of a designated space for this signage: the advertising column. In Germany, they are now known after their inventor, as Litfaßsäulen. (Sadly, in Berlin, most of them well be demolished in 2019 - so capture them while you can).

Advertising columns soon became a regular feature in European cities, especially in France, where the columns are called colonnes Morris after Gabriel Morris, the printer who held the concession for advertising in 1868.

Epinal, rue Gaston Zinck : colonne Morris, Ji-Elle

Many have been removed since, to be replaced by more modern means of advertising.

But some beautiful advertising columns in European cities still remain, displaying colourful posters for performances and movies.

Today, go look for those columns. And capture them before they’re gone.

Share your finds on Twitter or Instagram, using the hashtag #kramerseye.

Listen to today’s podcast

Week 13 - Episode 68 - Column as Canvas

Yesterday we looked at the space in between columns - but what about the space on the columns themselves?

When confronted with blank space, people tend to fill it. And despite their three-dimensional form this happened with columns too.

Egyptians covered many columns in hieroglyphs and pictures of the Gods.

Greeks and Persians preferred simple lines and decorations, as did the Romans. They made them resemble organic structures, or decorated them with shapes to underscore length or simply please the eye.

Colonna Trajana, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, 1748 - 1778, Rijksmuseum

But they also used them for triumphant storytelling - with Trajan’s column as the most famous example.

Here, the column isn’t used to support a building - it is used to supported a persona, a function, the idea of empire.

What I find most fascinating about decorated columns is how the viewing experience is completely different from what we’re used to. If you’re viewing two-dimensional pictures, even in sequence, you are mostly stationary. Your eyes may wander around in the image, but your feet tend to stay put.

When you’re ‘reading’ a column you have to dance around it. It makes you move, go in circles, crane your head to see the top, bend down low to see the bottom.

Columns as a canvas provided us with a fresh experience of what it means to look at something. To read a story. With film and video, the image is moving.

With columns, that tell stories we do the moving.

Today, cast your eye on columns used as canvases.

What stories do they tell? How do they move you?

Find them, capture them and share them using the hashtag #kramerseye on Twitter or Instagram

Listen to today’s podcast

Week 13 - Episode 67 - Support and Space

Architectural columns provide support - just like bricks or larger building blocks. But the beauty of the column is that in addition to support, it also provides space.

There is room for the eye and air to move through, rather than just over, the facade - and be invited in.

There is even a word for this space: intercolumniation.

Isaac Ware, The Four Books of Andrea Palladio's Architecture London 1738

Doric Order

Roman architect Vitruvius (1st century B.C.) compiled standard intercolumniations for the three classical Greek orders, expressed in terms of the column diameter. If you make the space between the columns too wide, the supported stone will break.

The challenge with columns then is to find the optimal combination of width, hight and space in between to both support the structure and to please the eye.

And observing the room left in between columns is a great alternative way of appreciating architecture, as well as training your eye to look at so-called ‘negative space’.

Today, go on a grand tour of temples and colonnades.

Travel through classical buildings on websites like Google Arts and Culture, and observe not only the columns but also the room left in between.

Where does that space best match the design of the rest of the building?

Share your images (and opinions) on Twitter or Instagram, using the hashtag #kramerseye.

Listen to today’s podcast

Week 13 - Episode 66 - Solid Support

Columns.

The architectural kind have been around since at least the Iron Age and are extremely supportive. 

They can be beautiful just the way they are, but are also used as canvases for elaborate decorations.

They usually come with friends, but sometimes they’re isolated and put up in squares. 

San Marco square, Venice, Albumen print, anonymous, c. 1870 - c. 1890, Rijksmuseum

And you can also find columns on paper, in databases and many other places. 

Today, keep an eye out for any type of column.

Capture them, and share them on Twitter or Instagram using the hashtag #kramerseye.

Listen to today’s podcast