Abstract_
Harry Seidler is recognized as one of Australia's most influential twentieth-century architects 1. Having developed and cultivated his architecture instruction in Canada and in the United States with Walter-Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus movement, and Marcel Breuer he later on travel to Brazil to work with the flamboyant modernist Oscar Niemeyer which all combined defined his architectural foundations. This paper is concerned specifically on his arrival to Australia, using the Rose Seidler House as a case study on which the paper identifies complexities in the presentation of the historical and social context, highlights the values, design aesthetics and principles that revolutionized the Australian domestic architecture under the
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With the arrival of the mid-fifties and sixties became a period of increasing economic prosperity, creativity, originality, inventions, discovery of new materials and new technologies were explored.
Rose Seidler House_
One of the most representative cases of this “International Style” or architectural innovation that encloses these qualities which were previously mentioned is the Rose Seidler House 9.
Completed in 1950 it signalled the acceptance of Bauhaus Modernism as the basis for the development of Australian architecture.
The Rose Seidler House was in every way of foreign import at a time when Australia was struggling to find a national architectural style. Finding a builder to undertake such radical project proved to be difficult, materials were not easy to come by and there were stories of Seidler driving around building sites picking up a few bricks here, a few bricks there
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The design was so innovating and unusual in the Australian architecture in the way it merged with the landscape and the surrounding bushlands. A steep, north-facing slope with long views overlooking the Ku Ring Gai Chase National Park, a wooden valley was carved out and stabilized by fieldstones retaining walls that reach back into the bank like anchors 12. The main box hovers over this story-height step in the land, with a car port, a studio and a small entrance hall tucked in underneath. From the entrance hall, a simple, straight stair rises right in the middle of the plan beside an open light well at the back of the timber-decked terrace. Straight ahead lies another favourite Breuer device: a freestanding stone fireplace and chimney, dividing the living and dining spaces. From the family room and the kitchen to the left, it is possible to step out into the upper level of the bank.
Seidler learned his basic architectural language from Breuer, but he also learned from his mentor’s mistakes. The house at New Canaan almost failed disastrously because of an over-optimistic use of cantilevering timber-framed walls 13.
The Rose Seidler house also has timber-framed walls, but they rest on a solid reinforced concrete slab, supported on concrete walls and slender round steel columns illustrating Le Corbusian principles of the “International Style” modernism used for the Ville-Savoye. Concrete cantilevered
James F. O'Gorman, Dennis E. McGrath. ABC of Architecture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Document. October 2013.
Marcel Breuer Associates, . The Legacy of Marcel Breuer. 32. Tokyo, Japan: Architecture Publishing Co., 1982. Print.
The house is set in an 1830s exotic and lush garden which contains the first olive tree planted in Australia. It shows us, the public, over 200 years of European tradition. With its sheltered verandas, it became the prototype for Australian homestead.
By giving the biographies of architects Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander, Hines does nothing to remedy his aimless writing. He writes that Neutra had a variety of experience as an archi...
The suburban house, as the film’s setting and sphere of action, is extraordinary partly because it is ‘next-door’ to an airport. The odd layout of this backyard is underlined because their suburb meets the kind of architectural cast-offs often found at the margins of big cities. This mix of the humble backyard with the international vectors of travel, tourism and international trade plays out in the film’s narrative which connects the domestic and the distant. The Castle displays many locations and landscapes easily identified as being unique of Australia- The ‘Aussy’ barbeque and patio setup, greyhound racetrack and poolroom, just to name a few. The neighbours of the Kerrigan’s are a symbol representing the multicultural diversi...
Gehry draws his inspiration from famous paintings such as the Madonna and Child which he qualifies as a “strategy for architecture” (Friedman M. , 2003, p. 42) and which he used as an inspiration for a project in Mexico . Through his interpretation of the paintings and artwork, Gehry looked for a new kind of architecture. His search for a new type of architecture culminated in 1978 with his own house in Santa Monica. What was once a traditional Californian house would be redesigned to become one of the most important and revolutionary designs of the 20th century, giving Gehry international prestige and fame. Frank Gehry’s “Own House” uses a mixture of corrugated metal, plywood, chain link and asphalt to construct a new envelope for an existing typical Californian house. This house has been inspired by Joseph Cornell, Ed Moses and Bob Rauschenberg. Gehry comments on his house by saying that there was something “magical” (Friedman M. , 2003, p. 54) about it. He admits having “followed the end of his [my] nose” (Friedman M. , 2003, p. 54) when it came to constructing the “new” house, which led Arthur Drexler, former Director...
Dell Upton is a historian and renowned professor of architecture and Urbanism at the University of California. He has published several books on architecture; one of them is “Architecture in the United States”, published in 1998. In this book, Upton analyzes the architecture of the United States in different aspects, such as nature, money and art, thus depicting the great variety in architectural forms, and how throughout the decades, different interests have lead communities to different ways of building, different purposes and materials, thus reflecting their way of thinking and their relationship with the environment. By exploring so many different architectural styles, Upton reveals the great diversity and richness that has always, and continues to characterize American architecture.
It is the new decade after the end of world war two and modernism is a well-established practice. Its pioneers and spearheads are prevalent figures looming over the new architects and designers who are trying to make their mark in the shadows of such historically influential people. With new technologies and materials emerging from the world wars the next era of modernism had started to evolved, bringing with it philosophies and ideas which seemed far removed from those of the pioneers of modernism “What emerged in the late 1940s and 1950s was an expanding synthesis of questions utterly removed from the confident statements of the pioneers.”(Spade 1971,10) Two significant buildings were designed in the 50's, both of them for educational institutes and to house students of architecture, there were both designed in completely different styles and methods. The first is Ludwig Mies van der Rohes' Crown Hall, finished in 1956 and designed as a part of a campus master plan for the Illinois Institute of technology in Chicago. Mies' design for Crown Hall is one of his most realised expressio...
Interior Decorators such as Elsie de Wolfe, Eleanor McMillen Brown, and Dorothy Draper helped to pave the way for the Interior Design profession today. Their influential decisions to stray away from the Victorian style of design helped guide both the interior decorating profession, as well as architects who no longer wanted to design in the bulky and cluttered Victorian Style. Elsie de Wolfe designed during the Victorian movement, however “had adopted the 1890’s preference for Neoclassicism” (Smith, 22). Unlike the cluttered and dark interiors of an average Victorian interior, her interiors were, “in the words of one visitor, ‘[models] of simplicity’” (Smith, 20).
It will discuss the different types of dwellings throughout recorded human history from the perspective of how art and culture influences building design. This will fulfill my own curiosity to understand the different influences on homebuilding and design over the years and how people have dealt with these changes.
But these contrived differences give rise to esthetic difficulties too. Because inherent differences—those that come from genuinely differing uses—are lacking among the buildings and their settings, the contrivances repre...
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.
The essence of modern architecture lays in a remarkable strives to reconcile the core principles of architectural design with rapid technological advancement and the modernization of society. However, it took “the form of numerous movements, schools of design, and architectural styles, some in tension with one another, and often equally defying such classification, to establish modernism as a distinctive architectural movement” (Robinson and Foell). Although, the narrower concept of modernism in architecture is broadly characterized by simplification of form and subtraction of ornament from the structure and theme of the building, meaning that the result of design should derive directly from its purpose; the visual expression of the structure, particularly the visual importance of the horizontal and vertical lines typical for the International Style modernism, the use of industrially-produced materials and adaptation of the machine aesthetic, as well as the truth to materials concept, meaning that the true nat...
Jencks believes “the glass-and-steel box has become the single most used form in Modern Architecture and it signifies throughout the world ‘office building’” (27). Thus, modern architecture is univalent in terms of form, in other words it is designed around one out of a few basic values using a limited number of materials and right angles. In...
Architectural style is regularly a paramount key to seeing how a group or neighborhood has developed. Throughout the nineteenth century, when large portions of the United States' living arrangements were constructed, most architectural styles being used were initially created in the prosperous trade urban communities in the United States or Europe (Adam, 2008, pg 75). As styles took hold in new parts of the United States experiencing monetary development, nearby architects and expert manufacturers started fusing trademark characteristics into the outline