The aim of this essay is to analyse unitary urbanism and architecturally relevant ideas of the Situationist International movement through the critical reading of selected texts. To create context for the interpretation of the situationist techniques and experiments the “Situationist Manifesto” that was published in the year 1960 will be interrogated by using a broader range of their publications specifically concentrating on the critique of urbanism by the members of the movement. The description of The Yellow Zone will be used as a driver to test and re-evaluate the situationist views on architecture and urbanism. The interior and exterior spaces will be analysed to reveal their true intentions and hidden ideological and philosophical ideas. The critique of The Yellow Zone will be used to compare the Situationist ideas and Lever House, an International Style building designed by Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois. The analysis will be executed in two steps by first analysing the exterior and then the interior of the building. The comparison will be used as a tool to draw conclusions on the significance of the movement in modern architecture. INTERNATIONAL MANIFESTO AND THE CRITIQUE OF URBANISM Founded 1957 the Sitautionist International (SI) were a group that emerged from the Lettrist International and the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus. The movement consisted of left-wing intellectuals, poets and artists led by the French critic Guy-Ernest Debord. The group was heavily influenced by classical Marxist teachings and criticised the capitalist burgeois society being a “society of the spectacle”. From 1958 to 1969 they have published 12 issues of their main publication titled “Internationale Situanniste”. ... ... middle of paper ... ...he structure. The internal spaces of the Yellow Zone combine to create a vast common space that is freely divided by the lightweight internal partitions and movable furniture that act as dividers in the main hall. The labyrinth houses are used as tools to awaken the senses of a person. Each room has a contrasting one: the quiet room and the loud room, the room of echoes and the room of images, the room of reflection and the room of rest and so on. The rooms serve to erase the effects of habits. One of the main Situationist attacks was directed towards boredom and the dullness of modern life caused by the spectacle and lack of meaningfulness in people's lives. According to the SI only consumption defines happiness and fulfilment in the society of the spectacle where all forms of freedom are being suppressed. People are members of an economy based in commodities.
“Form follows function.” Every great Modern architect thought, designed by and breathed these very words. Or at least, their design principles evolved from them. Modern architects Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Pierre Chareau, and Rudolf Schindler to name a few believed that the function determined the space whether the space was solely for a particular purpose or they overlapped to allow for multiple uses. Form didn’t just follow function, function defined the space. By focusing on the relationship between the architecture and the interior elements, Chareau’s Maison de Verre expanded the idea of functionalism to include not only the architecture but also the space it creates and how people function within that space.
This examination accepts the fact that the majority of towns are from old foundation, their fabric will express indications of sequential periods in its architectural styles and also in the several accidents of layout . The misconception of conformity that is to create an orderly scene with straight roads, buildings that conform to height; allow the urban scene to become symmetrical, balanced and ordered by structures which is after all, the popular conventional purpose of town of planning. However, what is conformity? As Cullen suggest, “There is too much insensitivity in the building of towns, too much reliance on the tank and the armoured car where the telescopic rifle is wanted” . This proposes that when the collective statistics of town planning strategies that conform to the idealistic commonly accepted framework are converted straight into plans, and the plans into buildings; they will be lifeless and tedious. However if the urban fabric of texture and colour, scale and style and of character and individuality are manipulated, juxtaposing them in order to experience harmony and avoiding the result of a three-dimensional diagram in which humans are asked to live . The environment in fact resolves itself to not conform, but the chemistry of ‘this’ and
Character becomes an important force in architectural theory. Although character starts with a functionalist aesthetic and it is the fitness of the building which is expressed, the idea of power begins to overpower the functional character becomes connected to emotiveness. Further, function begins to take on a symbolic expression rather than the idea of fitness. Claude Nicolas Ledoux and Etienne Louis Boullee are students of Blondel, and they extended his theoretical position to an extreme. Domination of the visual and the impact of architecture on the senses is a driving concern on Boullee. Character becomes a blanket over layed of simple ideas geomiticly driven...
An architect’s goal is to design appropriately to the time. In the mid to late twentieth century post-modernist such as Venturi found the purism and oversimplification of modernism lacking. Venturi recognized that the world is not simple in nature, but full of complexity and contradictions. Post-modernists aim for an implicit richness of meaning through complexity and contradiction rather than an oversimplified blatant clarity of meaning. A building is basically comprised of a variety of paradoxes, such as outdoor and indoor, primary spaces and secondary space and so on. In Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Robert Venturi states that “Blatant simplification means bland architecture” and elaborates on the necessity of complexity and contradiction architecturally appropriate for modernity (Venturi, 25).
What is Critical Regionalism? The concept for Critical Regionalism came into existence in the 1980s as an approach towards architecture that retaliates against “placelessness” (Frampton 1983:16) while it aspires to eliminate the lack of meaning in modern architecture by using contextual forces to give a sense of place and depth to buildings. (Eggner 1984:229) The main aim of this well-grounded concept is, as said by Paul Ricour: "How to be modern and to continue the tradition, how to revive an old dormant civilization as part of universal civilization’. According to Frampton, Critical Regionalism should embrace modern architecture for its universal, progressive qualities while simultaneously valuing the responses which are particular to the context (Frampton 1952:148). Emphasis should be placed upon topography, climate, light and tectonic form as an alternative for the visual (Frampton 1952:148). As put forth by Tzonis and Lefaivre, Critical Regionalism is not obligated to extract from the context, instead elements can be removed of their context and can be used in unfamiliar ways.
Through this paper a comparative representation on the definition and background of the evolution of critical regionalism will be explored. Moreover through this essay, the arguments of how ‘Ando’s’ architectural approach is of a ‘critical regionalist’ manner will be examined significantly.
The traditional views held regarding the impacts a city and its structure may have on the individuals that live in it are usually either positive or negative. Take for example the idea of “urbanitas” put forward by Lewis Mumford in his article “What is a City”, or the distinctive dichotomy promoted by Alan Trachtenberg between the City of Destruction and the Celestial City when trying to understand how a city can influence an individual. Both these arguments are accurate depictions of what happens in a city, and yet do not completely describe the true effects the environment of the city has on human nature and social relations. Rather the built environment of the city acts as an enabler for the individuals that live within it, a double-edged sword that has the potential to both protect and hurt and impact both a positive or negative effect, as opposed to simply being one or the other as the works of Mumford and Trachtenberg originally suggest.
The aim of this essay is to explain how Post-Modernism has influenced our contemporary built environment and explain what other movements have derived from it.
Architecture today is more focusing on aesthetic instead of the surrounding environment. In the result, the importance of the relationship between architecture and environment have been neglected and forgotten.
Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier are two very prominent names in the field of architecture. Both architects had different ideas concerning the relationship between humans and the environment. Their architectural styles were a reflection of how each could facilitate the person and the physical environment. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House, is considered one of the most important buildings in the history of American architecture and Le Corbusier s Villa Savoye helped define the progression that modern architecture was to take in the 20th Century. Both men are very fascinating and have strongly influenced my personal taste for modern architecture. Although Wright and Corbusier each had different views on how to design a house, they also had similar beliefs. This paper is a comparison of Frank Lloyd Wright‘s and Le Corbusier ‘s viewpoints exhibited through their two prominent houses, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House and Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye.
In the article, “Functionality, Flexibility And Polyvalence,” Herman Herzberger warned that the direct translation of all specific functions into one space results in the fragmentation of the space rather than the a good integration. In his view, flexibility is the “polyvalence of a space.” (Hertzberger, 1991) Aldo Rossi is another architect who appreciated the concept of adaptability, however he related it more at the traditional urban form by criticizing the modern architecture in the name of “naïve functionalism.” Rossi proposed that traditional urban forms are more resilient, more flexible than the modern architecture. Hertzberger shows his concept of flexible space in many of his projects. As an architect who mainly concerned social influence of space and criticized artificial features of modern architecture, he took an attitude to flexible space: ‘’a permanent form allowing polyvalent interpretations without its own changing.’’ This idea about function and form, Hertzberger applied the idea to many of his built projects
Nowadays, architecture has been a part of our life. Architecture depends on order, eurhythmy, symmetry, propriety, and economy. It is an application of thinking. Order gives due measure to the members of a work considered separately, and symmetrical agreement to the proportions of the whole. It is an adjustment according to quantity. By this I mean the selection of modules from the members of the work itself and, starting from these individual parts of members, constructing the whole work to correspond. Arrangement includes the putting of things in their proper places and the elegance of effect, which is due to adjustments appropriate to the character of the work. Its forms of expression are these: ground plan, elevation, and perspective. A ground plan is made by the proper successive use of compasses and rule, through which we get outlines for the plane surfaces of buildings. An elevation is a picture of the front of a building, set upright and properly drawn in the proportions of the contemplated work. Perspective is the method of sketching a front with the sides withdrawing into the background, the lines all meeting in the centre of a circle. All three come of reflexion and invention. Reflexion
The pavilion is significant figure in the history of modern architecture, regarded to be influential with its open plan and use of exotic material. There is a blurred spatial demarcation where the interior becomes an exterior and exterior becomes the interior. The structure constantly offers new perspectives and experiences, as visitors discover and rediscover in the progress of moving throughout the in’s and out’s, a non directional conforming circulating movement pattern. To facilitate this movement, even though it is a visually simplistic plan, its complexity is derived from the strategic layout of walls with its intimation of an infinite freedom of
In this essay I will discuss how concrete regionalism was presented in the work of Le Corbusier who is the most classic example of this movement, Oscar Niemeyer, and Antoine Predock . With each architect having a highly individual vision that has created unique buildings for people and their environment. These architects each has combined vernacular buildi...
First it uncovers how colonisers use architecture as a tool to enforce new social, cultural and political directions in order to continue controlling the colonised substances. This aspect can be observed in colonial cities where the coloniser uses the city “as the spatial materialisation of the ‘civilising mission’, while simultaneously representing the violence of colonisation.” (Hernandez, 2010) By assuming that colonised people are uneducated and in need of learning the European norms and habits which includes living in European fashioned cities, instantaneously the new spatial orders such as orthogonal grids lead onto keeping the colonial leaders in the city’s core and push the locals away from them, either outside the city walls or at the periphery areas of the town. Second it analysis the way history of Architecture has been written to grant authority to the European Architecture. This effect can be easily observed in architectural history books, up until lately, showing non-western architecture as elite architecture only if they are made similar to European style with aspects equivalent to them, works of architects such as Brazilian Oscar Niemeyer, Indian Balkrishna Doshi or Malaysian Ken Yeang that show great amount of European styled