Piet Mondrian: composition I with R, Y, B

1921

• Same time as De Stijl: Emphasis on collab b/w architecture and painting. Dutch avant garde, machine as model for art + architecture. Idea that there was a universal model based on mathematical reason in art - art as impersonal/objective, not based on taste/culture. Everything can be abstracted into a flat plane and contribute to a gesammtkunstwerk. Odd b/c the gessamtkunstwerk is a collab of different things.
• Neoplasticism: 'real' state of nature. plastic mathematics/geometry as Neoplatonic. Pure color + form. Trying to create the 'purest of all art'.
• Geometry > naturalism/craft.
• Primary colors
• grid 
• asymmetrical grid
• symmetry=hierarchy
• colors are peripheral
• disruption between figure and ground realtions
• painting as hierarchical
• reality in constant change..harmony, balance
• reality known through abstractions
• mystical/abstruse system
• more formal than ideological 
• neither repetitive grid nor the representation of a figure upon a ground
• painting was able to anticipate the desired merging of art and life precisely because it remained on the level of represenation, and was not, like architecture, compromised by its immersion in reailty.
• until architecture freed itself from this condition, it could not participate.
• idealistic resistance to pragmatics of architecture
• de bois: mondrain organizes  apicture surface in such a way that the tradiitonal hierarchy between figural objects and illusionistic ground is abolished. 
• no element is more important than any other, not must escape integration
• non-redundancy and non-hierarchy
• meaning is transposed from the represented object to the abstract organization of the 2D surface

Theo von Doesburg, Axonometric Drawing of a Hotel Particuliere

1923

•  architecture delves into approach to design and the production of painting/sculpture/furniture according to de Stijl philsophy which had real, lasting influence on modernist architecture.
• influented by Arts and Crafts sensibility that art could change the world.
• he moves away from the taste of the handmade, embracing new industrial possibilities without contradicting the handmade
• the emphasis of the plan/surface/right line demonstrating an interest in geometry that there is an absolute language understood spiritually without the contamination of emotion
• not meant to be felt, but intuited through irrational powers...felt through your soul.
• thought they were preaching a utopian ideal that design could bring the world to peace and utopia, still clung to this idea because of WWI's blood-soaked moment.
• not political
• mostly apolitical
• a reason some architects disocciated from the movement..they were concerned about the sociopolitical effects of housing
• idea that each piece can be collapsed unto itself
• painting and architecture reduced to its barest element.. one version of Doesburg's 'ideal house'
• as the spiritual vibrationi of society raised up..the collapsing of art and life 
• unifying art and science to seek truth
• developed an ornamentation that reflected the influence of cubism and rejeted craftsmanship in favor of geometric anti-naturalism.
• de stijl movement/magazine incl. mondran, von doesberg
• movement saw itself as a crusade in the common cause of modernism
• three main postulates:
• 1. each art form must realize its own nature based on its materials and codes - only then can the generative principles governing all the visual arts be revealed
• 2. as the spiritual awareness of society increases, so will art fulfill its historical destiny (hegelian) and become reabsorbed into daily life
• 3. art is not opposed to science and technology - both art and science are concerned with the discovery and demonstration of the underyling laws of nature and not with nature's superficial and transient appearance
• sans political affiliation, but imagined a future in whch social divisions wouldbe dissolved and power would be dispersed.
• main theorists of de stijl were mondrian and von doesburg
• doesburg xperimented with external architectural forms, but his approach was different...
• 'ideal' houses
• was one of the pair of variatios of a single kind of housewhich, because of its wide-ranging influence, deserves to be discussed in detail.
• the house consists of an aggregation of interlocking cubic volumes which appear to "grow" from a central stem or core in a manner that recalls Wright's Prairie Houses. House growing out from the the hearth/heart at the center. In its underlying organization the house is systematic but in detail it is accidental and variable.
• This idea recalls the system -plus variety of Mondrian's paintings, particularly the early figural works which show the transformation of a tree into a binary system of vertical and horizontal dashes. 
• because of the centrifugal, stem-like structure the house has no front or back and seems to defy gravity.
• it is a self-referntial and self-generated object with a form that is not composed from the outside but results from an internal principle of growth.
• primary colors
• gravity + floating
• gravity as hierarchy
• moving away from hierarchy
• building on the notion of starting from interior space and growing outwards organically/into the needs of the structure/use of internal space

Theo von Doesburg, Counter Construction

1924

• made a year after Hotel Particulier
• whole composition is reduced to hovering and intersecting colord planes, allowing space to flow between the in accordance with futurist principles. 
• "the subdivision of the functional spaces is strictly determined by rectangular planes, which possess no individual forms in themselves since, althoug they are limited (the one plane by the other), they can be imagined as extended into infinity, thereby forming a system of coordinate, the different points of which would correspond to an equal number of points of which would correspond to an equal number of points in universal, open space."
• axonometry is more than a useful graphic tool. It is the only method of representation that does not privilege one part of the building over another.
• plains that extend beyond the material features
• the axes don't converge...all linkes stay parallel
• planes "shoot up"
• perfect drawing for illustrating radical/new concepts about the needs of architectural space.
• part of a design movement that started with De Stijl and ended with Doesburg. wanted to bring about utopian ideals through design (a la arts + crafts). influenced by WW1.
• idea that art + life could be combined/collapsed through abstraction. idea that there is one absolute language that can be understood spiritually w/o the tinge of emotion. Neoplatonic.

Gerrit Rietveld and Vilmos Huzar, Spatial Color Composition

1924

• architecture is panting and painting is architecture
• abstract 
• architecture not as vehicle
• paint and architecture as indivisible
• but one always dominates the other...always a hierarchy
• Focus on planes/spaces rather than massing/ornament
• Idea of gesammtkunstwerk where things can't be distinguishable -- a union, not a collapsing.

Tatlin, Monument to the Third International

1919-1920

•  Constructivist - not autonomous, art as a practice for social purposes
• Arts and crafts with machinery/industry. Schools of art taught design + art -- industrial/classical
• Art geared towards the proletariat. Desire to make something valuable in a country ravaged by civil war + revolution.
• Three pieces that rotate individually. Represent different parts of the state.
• a fusion of cubo-expressionist form and pseudo rational structure
• artist constructor who unites art and construction + engineering
• reconciling artistic idealism with marxist materialism
• artist's role in an industrial economy
• craft shops should be used: for the invention of the standard forms of material life in the field of furniture, clothing, and other types of production
• In Russia, the conversation was highly piched and bitterly fought over..what was the new role of art to be?
• how would the ideas about creativity/form/design be integrated into the new state?
• russia had emerged from the bolshevik revolution and went into civil war..time of starvation, deprivation..brutal
• all of europe's aristocracies were determined to not let a revolution happen like in france
• radicalism
• in this moment there was uncertainty which emerged of an artistic cultural flowering that defies logic
• "we owe a lot to the thinking that came out of russia regarding design and the use of materials."
• the boho class was drrawn to the center of the administrative structure, assembled under commissions/workshops/university departments...all charged with the task of how art should change. how materials should be used to reinvigorate an economy that was dying.
• art and design had a leading role in this
• the inauguration of many art and design schools
• industrial facilities like the bauhaus
• futurist understanding of the machine
• anti-bourgeois
• construction vs composition
• unlike composition, construction usees different materials, no longer oil+canvas, no traditional art-making materials...but industrial materials
• metals, plastics, glass
• used to produce something not tied to the aesthetic realm, but something which would be improve a country for the proleteriat
• tatlin comes with this idea...the artist engineer
• he uses this language of construction to inaugurate the society that benefits the working classes
• notion based on different versions of modernity based on control/reason/order/discipline
• against avant-garde ideas of primitivism, change, alleatory, decoration
• this structure was held up as a monument to the third international
• third iteration of communists trying to dismantle 
• meant to be the tallest building in the world..taller than the eiffel tower
• 1300 feet tall
• meant to have government's offices within it
• moving
• sections all moving at different rates
• changing/movement/dynamism
• modernizing russia?
• utopian vision of modernizing russia?

Alexander and Viktor Vesnin, Competition Design for Moscow Headquarters of Leningrad Pravda

1924

• radical design
• desire for every piece of art to be practical/utilitarian
• exposed skeletal frame - lifts exposed, loudspeakers set up to exclaim propaganda
• no sculpture nor painting
• when lenin initiated his new economic policy
• capitalism had a role in these years before stalin clamped it down through a central planning economy. controlled capitalism being introduced into communism.
• a new group of rich people exists in the communist state -- have to reconcile that/excuse that by combining capitalism w/ communism
• this building is a transparent infromation machine in which the structure and equipment of the building and its media attachnments become the vehicles of rhetoric and propaganda. the building has become a sign of its own function.
• little more than an oversized and regularized kiosk, with its transparent frame and pithead imagery, and its icons of communication, and it had some of the playfulness of his and Popova's stage-sets.
• Pravda = truth

Moisei Ginzburg, Narkomfin Housing

1928-29

• More modernist in that it has utopian ideas. Desire to create architecture that has communal value.
• Return to sculptural/aesthetic idea of architecture away from constructivism. More conservative than radical.
• unpopular because with their minimal surface area, they did not allow for untidy extended family life to which people were accustomed
• the building reflects the influence of le corbusier, in its plastic and sectional organiztion and its combo of family dwellings and communal facilities. 
• part of a shift away from contemporary architects
• could be argued that they are responding to a call to order
• the above wasn't really a practically built building
• for most intents, it should be something like this: be a social condensor, provide housing, lifts people
• a discipline of the iconoclasic aspects of constructivist thought around everything
• always removing the idea of the aesthetic of objects
• the idea that a building can be sculptural
• ribbon windows
• conservative shift away from radicalism and constructivist thought
• built from the ministry of finance
• communal features
• roof deck/terrace/places where people were meant to gather..where community was meant to be formed
• still around.

Boris Iofan, Palace of the Soviets

1931-33

• This project represents the Stalinist concept of a bourgeois architecture inherited by the masses. It marked the death knell of modern architecture in the USSR. THe project was never executed.
• New fascist monumentalism -- "the people have a right to columns." Cartoonish fascist version of classicism.
• 2 events symbolize the final death of the avant-garde in Soviet Russia...
• Result of the prestigious palace of the soviets competition, held between 1931-33. after a long drawn-out procedure a young centrist architect - boris - was awarded first prize from a list of entrants that included gropius..etc. 
• the state maintained a firm grip on architectural policy. architects of the avant-garde vainly attempted to adapt their style to the approved monumentalism or became bureaucrat, working for technical imrovement within a cultural policy of socialist realism that contradicted all that theyhad lived for in the 1920s.

Le Corbusier, Vers Une Architecture (Towards an Architecture)

1923

• L'Espirit Nouveau/Corbusier vs. De Stijl: both thought that the new aesthetic would be a Platonic union of art + science but LEN/Corbus thought that it would be classical in nature.
• Evolutionary telelogical comparisons between temples + automobies. Invested in the Futurist idea of the machine as the salvation of humanity.
• marrying technology and marrying artist and the industrial society
• art and science can combine effectively = hybrid aesthetic informed by mathematically understood places in the world
• evidence around us made it clear that we are not subjects acting willy nilly...profound mathematical reality that governs our perception, rationality, and creativity
• bizarre comparative models...comparing classical and mechanical
• temples and autombiles...as though there is something fundamental to both
• machine fetish
• alienation of people through machines...even a house described as a machine for living
• cubists interested in seeing...
• object violating universal forces depicting how objects come together
• nroms of how real objects come together
• always a normative aspect
• platonic that bridges this world from the modern
• stripped of affectation and decoration 
• debt to loos
• investigates the same lines as loos
• trash is always abundantely decorated, luxury obejcts are clean and bare...revealing the quality of the manufacturing 
• obsessed with hygiene...modern as an opportunity to clean up all aspects of life
• material/technological/social

Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Pavilion de l'Esprit Nouveau

1925

• L'Espirit Nouveau/Corbusier vs. De Stijl: both thought that the new aesthetic would be a Platonic union of art + science but LEN/Corbus thought that it would be classical in nature. Object-type - platonic forms becoming banal, subject to infinite duplication. mass production.
• trying to open up mass production to creativity - 'modernized' or industrial/mass produced forms of french artisinal objects
• meant to represent the apartment of someone living in an 'artless' home dominated by mass consumption + production
• montage of objet-type objects lacking any fixed formal relation to each other
• laconically littered this carefully arranged space
• fixed and mobile furniture came from loos
• total piece of art
• the pavilion is the adaptation of the typical parisian artis's studio to a family dwelling. the furnishing is a montage of anonymous, off the peg objets type but at the same time, a carefully contrived gesamtkunstwerk.

Le Corbusier, Dom-ino Frame

1914

people died like dominos in WWI.

• In this building, the concrete frame is conceived as being independent of the spatial planning, and as a means towards the industrialization of the building process, not as a linguistic element as it was for his teacher perret. its logical independence frees artistic form from its traditional dependence on tectonics. the building is now presented as an industrial product.
• Le Corbusier saw reinforced concrete as a means towards the industrialization of the building process. His first embodiment of this idea was the Dom-ino frame designed with Dubois, too., in which the cloumns and the floorpolate constituted a prefabricated system independent of walls and partititons. 
• paper architecture
• Le Corbusier's five rules of architecture to structural wall, only columns
• no weight bearing walls
• steel columns that stretch through the structure
• opening up the interior...free plan. no need for load-bearing walls on the outside/inside of the structure
• the way the structure is designed is up to the tate of the client/climate/views of the site
• disavows beaux arts, standard building features all laden with formal and ideological meaning..constricting
• he opened it up, denied its foundational ideas as to rupture the language...no need to go back to it. wall didn't need to be walled
• wall as a skin
• relieved us of burden/ideological apparatus tied to those forms.
• idea that decoration is laden with ideology/history. opening up the building and denying its foundational ideas. rupturing classic language.

Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye

1929-31

• most realized example of corbusier's idea of the house as a machine for living
• modernist idea of making the boundary between exterior and interior ambiguous. Light as hygenic/cleansing.
• commission by wealthy family
• given creative freedom to build what he envisioned
• complex
• has a staircase that runs up the middle
• white paint
• ramp that spans the middle of the structure & spiral staircase. not a house for people who have a hard time getting around
• obsessed with fitness
• pro-fascist
• on the ground floor there is the entrance way/ramp/staircase..maids rooms
• first level has master bedroom, child bedroom, terrace
• major feature of modernist architecture
• sense of making ambiguous the outside and inside
• glass helps this
• as does the combo staircase + windowed staircase
• all glass around the buildings affords views and terrace..central premise of modernist architecture: light as cleansing, hygenic
• ties into long understanind about bad architcture having bad light which leads to ill people
• basis to understanding architecture
• formal/aesthetic/practical
• nazi's occupied it during WWII...
• le corbusier restored it
• added it to the register of historic buildings
• Shows his 5 points: free plan, free facade, ribbon windows, reinforced concrete columns, the roof
• fresh air and glass as good for light
• glass best material
• five points open up new freedom..connecting classicism and modernity into clairty
• split between inside and outside..tied to loos.
• the main rooms are on the first floor, together with a roof terrace. this is a variation on the medieval theme of a hortus conclusus, a closed garden of contemplating set apart from the surrounding landscape, which is visible through a continuous horizontal window in the terrace wall
• though classically proporitoned, villa savoye has alighted rom outer space...so lightly does it rest on the ground. surreal building and the most direct use of his pilotis.
• The tension between the free inerior and the limpid exterior is exempllified in this work
• the house is raised on pilotis and appears a pure white prism hovering above the convex surface of a field in which it is sited.
• the arriving car drives under the hous eand a rampt takes the visitor from the entrance lobby to the main floor - a walled enclosure occupied partly by the accommodation and party by a terrace garden. Within the geometrical purity of the enclosing cube, the interior is free and asymmetrical, obeying its own dynamic logic. The wall cuts between inside/outside..horizontal window.

Le Corbusier, Ville Contemporaine

1922

• best stuff is vast destruction of historical cities
• various laws on congestion
• not just city in park
• american tall buildings allowed for suburb to be folded back in the city..garden city could be folded back into it.
• In this drawing the shining and unforgiving technology of the office towers hardly impignes on nature or on the untroubled lives of the haute bourgeoisie sipping their coffee on a roof terrace.
• le corbusier focusing on "the problem of the modern metropolis"
• first project ville contemporaine
• schematic proposal for a city of 3 million people on an ideal site.
• based on the belief that the metropolis is valuable a priori. its efficiency as a nod of culture depends on its historical association with a specific location.
• but to be preserved it must be destroyed
• the counter the city's congestion and the consequent flight of its inhabitants to the suburbs, it will be necessary both increase the density and to decrease the area covered by buildings.
• using american skyscraper technology
• project uses widely spaced office towres 200 meters high, and continuous residential superblocks of 12 stories, the rest of the space being turned into parkland traversed by a rectilinear netwrok of high speed roads.
• modern technology makes it possible to combin the  advantages of a green garden city and a traditional city.
• instead of the population moving into the suburbs, they move into the city
• linear superblocks arranged in a pattern of setbacks counterpoint to the road system
• nature and technology juxtaposed
• work and technology take place in high rise structures...cultivation of the spirit and body take place in parkland
• theelement of change is eliminated from the urban experence. the social problems connected with separation of living from spontaneous and random aspects of city life have become obvious in the intervening years.
• divison of labor inherent in industrialized society drawn attention to by creating an urban image in which technology and nature are separated

Le Corbusier, Plan Voison (model)

1925

• meant to bull-doze parts of paris
• desire to control the hygenic spread of low income housing but also wanted to provide affordable housing
• he proposed it countless times
• made a name for him overnight
• changed people's idea of him as a painter and esigner of just houses..as a visionary 
• polemic
• didn't have the means to do it, done to a degree with the idea that it wouldn't happen

Le Corbusier, Radiant Village Cooperatif

1934-38

•  realism
• what you see around you, incorporated into design
• using the same framework of modern design while tacking on modern materials 
• brick that he wouldn't normally use
• to understand him as a person..he is influenced by neo cynical thought
• view on change that doesn't happen politically but economically
• uninterested in working classes but in forming a group of technocrats
• right-wing variant of this
• right wing
• when he's appointed to urban design..speaks at initiation of mussolini. FASICST
• unrealized project in which modern building technologies and modernist aesthetics are linked to agriculture.

Lyonel Feninger, Cover of the Bauhaus Manifesto, Cathedral of the Future

1919

• cynicism about the milennial claims of expressionism + claim to left of center politics. move towards new objectivity/rationalism. moving forward w/o looking to the past.
• when the bauhaus opens up it is at first expressionist and more towards arts and crafts. appeal to the primitive, spiritual, handmade. moves into rationalist/machine made. Itten -> Moholy-Nagy
• incorporated idea that it was a union of existing schools. then it moves away
• in this expressionist representation of the cathedral of socialism the future is projected in terms of a pre-industrial past.
• after that bauhaus abandoned expressionism and becan to absorb de stijl & l'esprit nouvau...

Wilhelm Wagenfeld and Marianne Brandt, Ceiling Lights

1927

• these fittings were among the most commercially successful bauhaus designs of the dessau period, resultin gfrom a collaboration between artists and industry.

Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Building, Dessau

1925

• the swastika form of the plan exemplifies futurist-constructivist centrifugal free-standing buildings with the different programmatic elements articulated, as oppposed to the traditional courtyard type. compared with public buildings by Le corbusier, for different interepretations of the same work.
• school building for bauhaus with bridge to the new trade school shows the influence of constructivism and de stijl. the pure cubes form these buildings reflect the work of oud in holland and le corbusier and lurcat in france. the school building also has certain features from gropious's older work, such as the projection of the glazing slightly in front of the wall plane, so that it is not interrupted by the columns.
• opened in 1927
• the forced move of the bauhaus from weimar to desseau because of the conservative political that posed a problem to the bauhaus in this period
• always plagued by difficulties of funding
• in terms of the building itself...he used lessons he learnt regarding the notion of the facade as well.
• refined architectectonic ideas he first put into practice before WWI in the construction of the Fagus factory...
• rather than visually amplifying the corners of the cubic body of the building, allowed the glass surface to overlap the edges, creating the impression of lightness.
• separated parts of the building according to their functions and designed each differently.

Walter Gropius, Apartment Block

1928

• rationalist
• interested in module/design
• too simple?
• this is one of the short parallel blocks at siemensstadt. note the use of brick to give the impressio of longer spans in windows and balconies. these kinds of trompe l'oeil effects are typical of gropius, a man of compromise, both aesthetic and political.
• a number of short parallel blocks were subordinated to and unified by a long curved building following the road alignment. 

Hans Scharoun, Schminke House

1933

• curvilinear
• functionally exprssive forms which reject the rectilinearity typical of the movement as a whole
• an example of functionalism or organicism in which a fluid spatial configuration responds to both internal and external pressures. In this case the balconies are rotated relative to the main body of the house responding to the view across the garden.
• rationalism: repeatable/typical forms that were able to fulfill generalized needs vs functionialist ('organicists') unique, non-repeatable buildings whose forms were shaped around their functions

Giuseppe Terragni, Casa del Fascio, Como 

1932-6

• called the "castle of the people"
• modernist movement
• house of fascism
• some architects aligning themselves with fascists just to get stuff built
• reduction of materials and ornament
• would help to bring a better way of life/housing/better way of life and institution
• mussolini as ambivalent
• spread the wealth
• systematic use of materials and design
• what we see is how fluid these things are
• house of fascism in como
• terragni part of architects disenchanted with training they have received...proper national style of architecture in fascist italy shoul dlook like this
• group of 7 fascists.
• predilection for modernist design lead to them having to defend themselves as bolsheviks 
• the point to sustain architectural diversity exits throughout the period..mussolini awarding commissions to terragni and architects like that
• interesting moment..still with us
• now called house of the people
• serves administirative functions
• classifying interests in proportions
• modernist grid and module
• mirrors what happens inside the buildings
• exercise in geometric precision
• 1/2 of of a cube
• each 4 sides are different
• mirroring and/or communication between interior and exterior
• grid is reproduced inside with columns
• cantilevered stairways and offices
• bolitchino marble interior
• same marble in th emonument
• lit by skylights
• mussolenean
• like fascism is a glass house within which all can enter
• doors operate on hinges controlled by an electrical switch
• fascist spectacle..its aesthetic and appeal..organic collective belonging
• these spaces workin this way...aesthetic spaces which encourage selfless belonging
• most influential and significant of modernist fasicist designs.
• group 07 rationalist architects
• for terragni the open structural frame signified fascist transparency and public accessibility. but the building has a dreamlike, timeless quality reminscient of paintings by de Chirico. 
• important rationalist architect 
• terragni most gifted...his work is notable for its complex interplay of surface and structural frame, as in the east facade of casa del fascio and in the casa giuliani-figerio in como.
• justified the casa del fascio in terms of the mussolinian concept that fascism is a glass house in which all can enter...the classicizing aspects of the building prompted pagano to condem it as formalist and as representing an aristocratic sensibility.
• mussolini supported rationalists.

Mario Ridolfi and Ludovico Quaroni, Tiburtino Housing Estate, Rome

1944-54

• marrying two fascist tendencies: monumentalizing that dwarves the lives of everyday people + the clean slate
• made to look as if it was built over time -- restorations etc
• neo-realist tradition in architecture emerges, trying to do the same thing as cinema (bicyle thief)
• tabula rasa...empty slate of international style of modernism
• idiosyncratic
• street scene looks averge/plain/happenstance
• nothing calling attention to itself as being differnet from anything else
• in terms of who they built things for
• thought of themselves as post-functionalist architecture, moving away from ratinoalism and functionalism
• italian scholars seeing neo-realist traditions as havin accrued a certain aesthetic..how to get rid of the spector of fascism
• monumental
• the self consciously vernacular quality in this neorealist prject owed much to the New Empricism of the Swedish architecture
• artisanal state of production industry was behind the neoralist movement. 
• the projects used a constructional vocab to use vernacular understandable by ordinary people.

Ernesto Rogers, Lodovico Belgiojoso, Enrico Peressutti:

Office Building, Milan

1958-69

• An explicity modern technology combined with classical references so that the building accommodates itself in scale to its urban context - a deliberate critque of the modernist tabula rasa.
• contextualist
• based on existential rather than an idealized reality.
• represents contrasting solutions to the same problem..
• deform the rational structural grid to create a classical hierarchy of different floors
• hybrid is created..not attempting to imitate its context but creates its analogue.
• expressions of modern architecture to say something about classical architecture at the time
• much smaller in scale buildings
• to not dwarf the other buildings aroun dit 
• to dovetail
• pillars tie to classical orders along the classical lines
• shift about to happen away from interests of neo-realism, contextualism to mega-structures.

Alvar Aalto, Tuberculosis Sanatorium, Paimio

1929-33

• mass production, rapid construction, truth to materials, functionalist design.
• long history, hospital construction
• architects have been focusing their attention on it for 3 centuries
• primary concerns were ventilation because they thought that sickness were airborne
• trying to develop emotional experience of patients
• communal ties within staff
• communal meeting spaces to produce a connected experience with people who work there
• people's moods as important for recovery
• also spent lots of time on the interior of the building...paid attention to the experience of the patients
• carefully plumbed wall so that there were no exposed pipes and they were insulated to be quiet
• glazing to allow abundance of natural light
• idea that light=hygienic
• views of nature
• looking at nature has positive effects
• early mental institutions went through exercise to bring in nature to help patients heal...connecting to nature as part of healing process.
• smooth white wall surfaces with mediterranean overtones are even more in evidence than in other examples of international modernism.
• aalto designed all furniture and fittings...their concern for the intimate and tactile aspects of modern design, as well as their manifest formal qualities. Icon of "resilient modernism."
• all furniture by him..he tied aesthetics and function
• visually pleasing and comfy helps the patient do well to speed up recovery..how he approached all interior spaces

Alvar Aalto, Saynatsalo

1949-52

•  multi-functional town hal
• courtyard organizes the communal space
• encourages communal exchange
• there is interest in grass stairs
• connection wooden grills to the forest around it
• speaking ot the natural setting
• use of brick, indigenous wood, as speaking to a romantic nationalism emerging in finland at this time
• had endured "roughcenturies"
• a time of critical regionalism - kenneth frampton
• semi-enclosed courtard remiscient of vernacular farm buildings, and eextensive use of handmade brick and clear-varnished wood.
• return to picturesque composiition dominated by volumes signifying community, speaks to revival of the spirit of romantic nationalism.
• Carr sees as this as the proper way to do postmodernism: negates the emptying out of space. Place is the most important part of this building: about touch, smell, environment, culture. tactile.

Lucio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, Le Corbusier (consultant): Ministry of Education and Public Health, Rio de Janeiro

1936-45

• indicator of new monumentality: there's a need for the modernist monument. have built small houses up until now.
• cultural inheritance
• modernist architects did what they could do...reject it all. wiped slate clean as a good thing
• "Trod the hard way"
• focused on the person and where they lived -- sallest unit/cell/module
• worked it out..needed to understand 
• tried to revise a version untainted by historicism
• greece as deflecting nasty use of monumentality in germany/russia/italy/in the 30s
• expressive of new monumentality
• disconnect between who owns the city and who uses it
• appropriate for modern age
• set in a block
• ornament sans ornamentation (loos)
• brise soleil
• 2 part system..honey combing
• irony of building..marxist belief
• some of whom were occupants
• vaus commissioned building, a dictator
• reprssive regies
• elastic and fluid modernist architecture
• forward looking
• purist built example of a new type, proposed by le corbusier for Zurich. The office slab is set back from the street frontage on pilotis, freeing the entire site for public open space. it was also the first building to use Le Corbusier's brises-soleils
• public building
• the building broke with the universal perimeter block pattern of rio street grid, becoming and objet-type in the center of th eblock. (found object)
• in its diagrammatic separation of offices and collective functions, this building seemed to many - even in Europe  - a more perfect realization of Corbusian ideas than Le Corbusier's own public buildings, constrained by their odd shaped urban sites.
• niemeyer worked for gov't in this project and costa won some award to get in...
• costas plan was schematic: he comprised two axes, one residential and one honorific...the latter terminating at one end in the institions of central gov't and at the other in those of the municipality.
• the central commercial and cultural facilities occured at the intersection of the two axes - an abstract point in space.

Le Corbusier, Unité d'Habitation, Marseille

1946-52

• using the modulor proportions in design of the building
• responding to housing crisis
• bombing of cities, marseilles was one of the cities bombed
• very criticized after it was built
• like dom-ino
• same response
• sense that the building is an ocean liner
• ventilation stacks like an ocean liner
• looking back to Narkomfin Housing
• building as a social condenser
• not for the working classes, more middle class
• monumental, upright
• contained town
• suites to live in 
• running track on top
• club, kindergarten, gym, pool, art school, small hotel
• to have everything self contained
• uses modular in his design
• orders the entire dimensions of the structure
• many kinds of suites
• uses the interior corridor space inventively
• massive interior space covering three floors with one corridor
• saves tons of space, brilliant
• allows for far more suites and space
• ideas behind it were already expressed in doctrines
• authoritative accounts of modernist doctrine in first half of 20th century
• athens charter, 1942, le corbusier.
• functions to be discrete, rationalized
• backlack...new generations of architects disavow functionalist view of city. smithsons show pictures of kids playing in a slum in london @ intl congress of architecture. idea of beauty in disorder. anti-corbusier.
• monumental status for housing
• idea was that the structure should be large enough to incorporate the communal services requierd to support the daily lives of its inhabitants
• influneced by vesnin brothers
• concrete sun breakers (brise soleils), doubing as loggias and derived from algiers office tower, made legible the internal spaces. 
• discrete whole, designed to the last detail by le corbusier

Le Corbusier, Model, Obus A project for Algiers

1933

• In this first project, mass housing is built under coastal viaduct while the political and administrative classes are housed on the hills of Fort de l'Empereur. The latter is linked to the business center at the port by a viaduct that flies over the Arab city, ensuring its preservation and minimal contact between colonizers and the native population.
• forms sensitive to local topographies
• corbusier is turning away from the machine-age because of the rise of fascism and nazism as well as the market crash. going back to original inspiration that came from turkey/'women'/otherness. exoticized other.
• changes from angular brutalism to become more plastic + poetic: fleshly curves of women.
• mythic/romantic/feminine landscape offset by modern tech in the service of colonial needs
• never built
• segregates europeans + indigenous communities

Archigram, Plug-in City

1964

•  eclectic typographies are interconnected in an endless web like structure

• unashamed to align itself with popular visionary taste

• disposable and iconic/exciting and unrealizable themes

• thought architecture had become stagnant

• unashamedly utopian and apocoalyptic in its imagery

• founded by cook

• helped consolidate megastructural movement's international self image

• plug in city derived from space comics, pop science fiction, pop art and the technologies of oil refineries and underwater research, as well as from such metabolist project. ready made and pop images as deliberate assault on architecture as conventionalized, upper class discipline, an invasion of low art into architecture's hallowed precincts, esp of modern movement.

• kinda like saint'elia...

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Le Corbusier, Notre Dame du Haut

1951-55

•  extreme design in le corbusier's late style
• commissioned by association de l'oeuvre notre dame du haut
• chapel is a simple design with two entrances, a main altar, and three chapels beneath towers
• powerful and complex but small
• high on a hill
• departs from his principles of standardization and the machine aesthetic, giving in instead to a site-specific response.
• made of concrete,
• upturned roof 
• spaces left between the walls and roof are filled with windows..randomly shaped windows everywhere
• concrete and stone...remant of the original chapel built on the hilltop site destroyed during WWII. First PM building??

Robert Venturi, Vanna Venturi House

1964

like Ace Ventura, you must Venturi around the house. 

• middle finger to modernism: fenestration is small, lopsided; can't see the door; huge chimney actually a staircase/window. ironic 'truth to artifice'. disproportionate. asymmetrical
• LG chimney
• top reminscent of broken pediment
• truth to arifice
• vernacular architecture
• inside, spatial ambiguities and complexities and surprises
• dead end stairway
• complexity and contradictions of modernity - instead of trying to compress + fit them, we need to attend to otherness openly. writes a 'little book' like mao about this.
• richness of meaning > clarity of meaning.
• rather than suppressing them and making them fit we need to tend to these openly
• manifesto about complexity + contradiction 
• architects can no longer be intimidated by puritanical orthodox of modern architecture
• vitality over unity
• richness of meaning over clarity
• bring in ugly/everything
• embrace everything rather than extending the modern formal notion of purity
• new building types "demand this of us"
• we live in an age where complexity and composition demands this of us
• e.g. shopping malls/convention centers
• we no longer have buildings that have one specific function
• "the purpose of a rocket is more straightforward" (disagree.)
• critique of venturi: no possibility for coherent language
• complexity and contradiction..problematic
• embracing a large palette of images that are coming @ person w/ increasing speed in this period.
• can still appeal to modernism if we allow things in that aren't contained, strictly modernist. should allow for plurality.

Giambattista Nolli, Map of Rome

1748

• new theory of urbanism. modern urbanism failed because of some particular formal ideas and because it wasn't integrating with cities and how they work. modern buildings depicted as surrounded by grass + isolated like a sculpture. art as separate.
• what we see emerging in europe is the emphasis on the new contextualism: trying to map out a way of relating to the historical fabric of the city vs the idea of the city in the park which creates a strange disconnected city, not related to the stuff around it.
• trying to map out a new way of looking at and relating to the historical fabric of the city where its not viewed as a contagion
• interested in a productive sculptural void -- patchwork, more connected.
• different than athen's charter mentality
• hygienic new zone
• instead what needs to happen is the discrete unctions need to be stitched together to be more fluid
• creating this strange, disconnected city
• how does everything relate to everything else around it
• looking to totems to look at a new way of urbanism in a connected way
• in which historical cities are not viewed as a container, but a way to productive connect one thing to another.
• patchwork much more conncted
• buildings are the light shades, voids are dark...productive "sculptural void"

James Stirling, Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart

1979-84

old person's playground

• double-coding modern elements with traditional and vernacular ones - sometimes 3 styles are competing on one facade.
• glass and metal gabbling
• colored steel as a decorative element rather than structural, stone facings perform temperature control rather than decorate - irony
• elitist/inside joke
• neologism - not meant to be revivalism. 'jazz improv'
• each side looks different according to what it surrounds
• designed beside an old state gallery
• included classical features on the facade
• uses collosal columns and dressed stone
• undercutes this by using structural steel and exposed concrete and curving members 
• structural steel not normally decorative
• coloring it this way (primary colors + green)
• expresses function directly
• unnecessary steel
• similar to the way he uses the stone facings...more structural than the temperative ones
• dressed stone so expensive...used to maintain climate control
• decorating building with structural steel double encodes
• neologism
• new word being mad up
• jazz improv
• you cna take a classic piece of jazz..riff on it and make a new piece

Aldo Rossi, House of the Dead, Modena Cemetery, 1971-76; 1986-ogoing

• theorist, writer, and builder
• ossuary/cemetery - depository for peoples' remains
• some empty
• important book written, l'architectura de la cite
• extends rationalist idea that there are continuous forms...a way of the modern to draw upon other time periods
• believes that classicisms can be channeled into neologisms. draws on 'ideal' types - abstracts even further by giving them a "sober geometric finality" - square windows punched out of flat concrete. pitched roofs are flat planes of color.
• abstracts classical ideas into geometry: square as a hole punctured in concrete
• new architectural language in the process
• he's drawing upon classical sense of proportions
• square columns as classical
• whimsical take on factory + other cemeteries he's looked at 
• jenks refers to it as "pop sensibility"
• creepy and melancholic
• ongoing building..
• irony: cheerful cemetary

Aldo Rossi, Social Housing, IBA Project, Berlin

1981-88

•  against idea of the superblock - city in the park
• they are successful - engender community
• giant tall buildings inan open space
• turns the clock back..borrows and tweaks and make new
• gables do nothing but speak to functionalism..reference and joke
• paper thin capital
• mammoth doric column
• he works wth a perimeter block design
• he gains nothing by overcrowding..tenament style construction
• has a children's playground and bowling green
• he believes in forms themselves, not "preexisting ones"

FAT Architecture, Islington Square

2006

• duality and complexity of contemporary society
• manchester community regeneration housing scheme which offers residents quaint and decorative homes
• borrow lots of techiniques from fine art and contemporary art..using sources clearly refential with overlaid meanings to give a richness
• adds to the level of ambiguity which makes architectural a more "enjoyable experience."
• Fashion-Architecture-Taste
• part of a 12 hectare

Herzog and De Meuron, Prada Epicenter Aoyama, Tokyo

2003

• vertical volume containing hte maximum permitted gross floor area so that the part of the lot acreage can remain undeveloped
• this area will form a plaza
• the shape of the building is substaintly influenced by the angle of incidence of the local profile. depending on where the viewer is standing, the body of the building will look more like a crystal or like an archaic type of building with a saddle roof. the ambivalent, always changing and oscillating character of the building's idenitty is heightened by the sculptural effect of its glaze surface structure.
• The rhomboid shaped grid on the facade is clad on allsides with a combo of convex, concave, or flat panels of glass. These differeng geometries generate facetted reflections, which enableviewers on the inside and outside to see constantly changing pictures and cinematographic perspectives of prada products, the city, and themselves. 
• But the grid on the façade is not simply an optical illusion; it is actively incorporated in the structural engineering and, in conjunction with the vertical cores of the building, it supports the ceilings. The horizontal tubing stiffens the structure and also provides more private areas for the changing rooms and the checkout on the otherwise open, light-flooded floors of the building.
  
  The fittings with lamps and furniture for the presentation of Prada products and for visitors are newly designed especially for this location. The materials are either hyper-artificial, like resin, silicon and fiberglass, or hyper-natural, like leather, moss or porous planks of wood. Such contrasting materials preveent fixed stylistic classifications of the site, allowing both traditional and radically contemporary aspects to appear as self-evident and equal components of today's global culture.
  Herzog & de Meuron, 2003

   

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Santiago Calatrava, Gare de Lyon Saint Exupery

1994

• PM meant to be difficult to pinpoint and define cause its inclusive, plural, and accepting
• speaks to all levels of society and cultural levels
• calatravel's designs integrate formal and philosophical principles from pasty styles
• embracing past
• utilize modern technology while maintaing sculptural and organic forms

Peter Eisenman: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (1999-2005)

• Holocaust memorial

• Postmodern idea of recognizing a void with a memorial and speaking to its irreconcilability

• Meant to represent a super ordered system that has lost touch with human reason/feeling

• Meant to be confusing/disorienting. Blocks are different sizes -- seemingly random but fit into an ordered system that is hard for the human eye to grasp right away

• Supposed to be a radical memorial because it doesn’t use any symbolism but some say it looks like a cemetery

Daniel Libeskind: Jewish Museum Berlin (1999)

• Built as extension to the Berlin museum -- not segregating Jewish Berliners from Berliners. Jews as part of the history of Berlin/Germany.

• First Jewish Museum built in Berlin in 1933 -- first used as a protest against the Nazis who were gaining power. Eventually, Jewish artists + patrons were segregated there, could only attend/display at that museum. Led into the Nazi idea to create a museum for “the extinct Jewish people.” Touchy territory.

• City obliged to build a museum to replace this one when it was destroyed in 1938.

• Berlin: place of both Jewish-German symbiosis + a place of terror during Nazi reign.

• Germany trying to figure out how to to memorialization right with the Holocaust + the Berlin Wall.

• Trying to embody the sense of unheimlichkeit or ‘uncanniness’ -- or the sense of something that has been alienated via repression from something once familiar and old-established. Building a “house” for a people that no longer have a “home” in Germany.

• Key: making a memory of historical events without domesticating them or reconciling them.

• Building is broken/nonsensical

• Zig zagged line shape

• Misshapen rooms that don’t fit anything, etc.

• Interior interrupted by voids -- supposed to interrupt any sense of continuous narrative/flow. Suggests gaps in the presentation of Jewish history in Germany. Things are missing that can never be shown.

• Must exit through the Garden of Exile. Columns w/ great oaks planted on top w/ dirt from Berlin + Jersualem. Tilted floor -- stumbling under a canopy. Sheltered in exile but also disoriented by it.

Foster + Partners: Reichstag, New German Parliament (1992-1999)

• Was once used by the German Parliament (Reichstag) but after WW2 East + West Berlin held their separate governmental meetups in other buildings. Made efforts to restore this building post-German reunification.

• Uniting respect for the history of the building w/ hope for the future

• Combines the old building + scars as a living museum (keeping stonemason’s marks + Russian graffiti etc) with a new dome of glass that is light + transparent (activities on view)

• Public + politicians can both enter the building

• Public can go into an observation platform that allows them to be symbolically above the heads of their elected representatives

• Super eco-friendly -- forward looking

• Has a crazy light sculptor thing that controls a motorized sun shield

• Burns bio-fuel

• Produces more energy than it uses

Rudolf Reitermann and Peter Sassenroth: Chapel of Reconciliation (1999)

• Original Church of Reconciliation was built in 1984, neo-Gothic. The Berlin Wall was built right along it, and no one but the border guards could access it. Was used for a guard tower by the Soviets for a bit and then demolished in 1985.

• Reconstruction made in the same spot.

• Made of clay that is mixed with pieces of stone/glass from the rubble of the previous church. Wooden slats allow light in. Cross void shape pays debt to what the space used to be.

• First clay official building to be made for 150 years. Ecological + modern

Alexandra Hildebrandt: The Freedom Memorial at Checkpoint Charlie (2004)

• People mostly tried to get rid of evidence of the Berlin Wall/sweep it under the rug rather than memorialize it.

• Head of the Wall Museum @ Checkpoint Charlie created a dramatic exhibit of 1065 wooden crosses on the Allied Checkpoint between East + West Berlin. Some had photographs w/ birth date, cause of death, etc. Got a lot of attention.

• A lot of people also criticized it

• No one actually died at Checkpoint Charlie itself. Didn’t have evidence that 1065 people died total.

• Some thought she was trying to lure paying visitors to her museum close by.

• She made claims that her exhibit was a counterpoint to Eisenman’s memorial.

• However, when the official Berlin Wall memorials were made later people preferred the concept of Hildebrandt’s crosses. Also, her crosses inspired the Berlin government to take action + memorialize.

Sinai & ON Architektur: Window of Commemoration (2010)

• Original monument built in 1998 was a rust colored wall that intersected w/ the real concrete Wall forming a rectangle. People weren’t sure what was the real wall, etc. Confusing, ineffective, unengaging.

• Remade in 2010. More victim-focused like Hildebrandt’s crosses. Steel wall w/ individual windows featuring photographs of the victims killed at the wall. Invited family members to opening ceremony @ the Chapel of Reconciliation.

• Sits on the former death strip @ Bernauer Strasse.

ON Architektur: Visitor Center, Gedenkstatte Berliner Mauer (2011)

• Built on the Bernauer Strasse -- place where the border ran down a sidewalk in front of buildings on the East Berlin side. People could go into the buildings and escape to West Berlin. Some died jumping. There were also tunnels built under the wall. One-block section granted as a landmark historical site.

• Criticized for being cold/unappealing/modernist/insufficient in portraying the history + emotion of the Berlin Wall and its deadly effects. An unpopular site to visit.

• People saw Hildebrandt’s crosses, which quickly + consistently drew a crowd, as being in direct contrast to the Gedenkstatte.

• Has a really weird observation tower that’s 5 stories tall that shows the original border fortifications.