Forabosco – Greek Temple, Architectural Design

Victor Forabosco (late 19th/early 20th century)

GREEK TEMPLE, ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN

1895/6
Watercolour on paper, 50 x 97 cm
Signed, dated and inscribed lower right: Hannover, Studien-Jahr 1895-1896, designed and signed: Victor Forabosco stud.arch. and inscribed lower left: Attestirt v. Ross

Victor Forabosco was a master builder, i.e. architect, structural engineer, civil engineer and construction manager all rolled into one. He built Art Nouveau villas and residential buildings such as the Schmidt House in Kapfenberg (1906-7) and the factory hotel of the Austrian Alpine Mining Company in Leoben (1911-12). This watercolour painting of a Greek temple was created in 1895-96 during a year of study in Hanover and was ‘attested’ by a Mr Ross, which means that it was accepted as a student project. Architectural drawing was an integral part of the curriculum for architecture students. This involved not only the precisely constructed, purely technical drawing as a basis for later construction with floor plans and elevations, but also, as here, capturing the essence and appearance of historical building forms and rendering them atmospherically. Draw an ideal-typical temple, Forabosco’s assignment may have been. And that is what he did, with all the architectural elements, a lot of imagination and a good sense of colour. As decoration, he added famous sculptures and friezes from antiquity, such as Cupid and Psyche or Venus and Mars (both now in the Capitoline Museums in Rome). His depiction of the temple follows in the tradition of classicist architectural images and vedute of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Not many such student projects survived, as they were hardly considered worth preserving. Only because Forabosco, like Schinkel, was a talented draughtsman and his temple design is artistically appealing, did it survive and is therefore something particularly rare.