Eames House 1948-49


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ideology
american dream
light&airy living
industrial quality
mass production
plywood
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obese Eames chair by Mark Wentzel

Every design has an agenda and a certain ideology behind it. 
In Eames case, they proposed a new way of American living - light, airy, low cost and easily built. Their architecture was targeted towards happy, healthy families, themselves being an iconic example. But then what about the singles, gay couples, etc.? Eames social programme tended to exclude the margins of society, marketing the idealistic couple example.


Is our design work symptomatic of our values and morals at all? It  certainly has a personal signature in intricacy of details or in volumes or in spatial arrangements or in use of materials, etc. 
Interestingly, I have received a comment in one of the crits that my designed object does not reflect the sensitivity of my drawings. Does it mean my work should have a consistent preprogrammed quality throughout?
And one more question - where do our tutors' opinion start to uniform our work instead of merely pointing it towards in the right direction?

1919-1930 Constructivism


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El Lissitzky
Rodchenko
Melnikov
Malevich
Tatlin
Vesnin brothers
Leonidov
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socialist programme
emphasis on graphic and typographic design
dynamism
structural gymnastics
industrial aesthetics
fantastical architectural propositions
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In constructivists' approach to architecture I greatly admire their attempts to design and advocate innovative, and sometimes hardly feasible ways of living. The propositions often had a fantastical futuristic quality them, I find that courage of thought which led constructivists in the early 20th century. Let's look at Konstantin Melnikov's "Sonata of Sleep" - colosseum of slumber.

Following the implementation of Stalin's Five-Year Plan – and in the wake of food rationing and extended work hours – "the shock-troops of Communism were edging perilously close to physical and mental exhaustion: what they needed was rest." Soviet government thus "announced a competition to design a garden suburb outside Moscow, where workers could be sent to recuperate from the strains of factory labor."

K. Melnikov proposed a sort of  'sleep academy' - building that consisted of two large dormitories either side of a central block, and the dormitories each had sloping floors, which was supposed to obviate the need for pillows. At either end of the long buildings were to be situated control booths, where technicians would command instruments to regulate the temperature, humidity, and air pressure, as well as to waft scents and "rarefied condensed air" through the halls.. Specialists working "according to scientific facts" would transmit from the control centre a range of sounds gauged to intensify the process of slumber. The rustle of leaves, the cooing of nightingales, or the soft murmur of waves would instantly relax the most overwrought veteran of the metropolis. Should these fail, the mechanized beds would then begin gently to rock until consciousness was lost.

Brasilia: architecture&national identity

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international style

critical regionalism

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Brasilia by Oscar Niemeyer

Critical Regionalism: 
a strategy for achieving a more humane architecture in the face of universally held abstractions and international clichés. 
Coined by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre in 1981, the term was seized upon by Kenneth Frampton, who argued that architects should seek regional variations in their buildings instead of continuing to design in a style of global uniformity using ‘consumerist iconography masquerading as culture’, and should ‘mediate the impact’ of universal civilization with themes drawn indirectly from the individual ‘peculiarities of a particular place’. 
While appreciating the dangers of industrialization and technology, he did not advocate revivals of either the great historical styles or vernacular type of building. In essence, he sought the deconstruction of global Modernism, criticized post-Modernism for reducing architecture to a mere ‘communicative or instrumental sign’, and proposed the introduction of alien paradigms to the indigenous genius loci. 
He cited the work of Aalto and Utzon as offering examples of Critical Regionalism in which the local and the general were synthesized.


Critical analysis of K.Frampton's "Towards a Critical Regionalism" by Scott Paterson here.


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One of my favourite 'critical regionists' and propagators of modernism is Luis Barragan.
Barragán transformed International Style into a vibrant, sensuous Mexican aesthetic by adding vivid colours and textural contrasts and accentuating his buildings' natural surroundings. He once said that light and water were his favourite themes, and soon became skilled at manipulating them both in buildings like the 1966 Folke Egerstrom House and Stables built around a brightly coloured, sculptural sequence of horse pools (Barragán loved horse riding):

 and the 1975-77 Francisco Gilardi House framing an indoor pool:

The key principle to Barragan's buildings was serenity:

"Any work of architecture which does not express serenity is a mistake."

Luis Barragan's architecture is poetic. His work is personal and introverted, constructed from experiences, dreams, and memories (especially of his childhood in hazienda in Mazamitla).

His houses are monastic in spirit and provide a refuge from contemporary life. The closely integrated interior and exterior spaces, surrounded by walls create a private and serene environment. Window sizes are limited except when facing a private courtyard, with its pool and fountain.

As Barragan explained: 
"Architecture, besides being spatial, is also musical. That music is played with water. The importance of walls is that they isolate one from the street’s exterior space. The street is aggressive, even hostile: walls create silence. From that silence you can play with water as music. Afterwards, that music surrounds us." 

The wall is the most Mexican of building elements, and with Barragan it receives a new expression, becoming a sculpture: plastic and monumental. Doors, windows, and other interruptions of the wall surface are placed with the utmost deliberation: the interior is systematically unveiled as the visitor progresses from space to space, creating a sort of "architectural striptease."

Barragan was a master of light: by careful placement of windows and spatial openings, he controlled the amount, direction and colour of light, softening harsh bright daylight and opening up to filtered warm green from the garden:

Through his carreer, Luis Barragan has discovered his country. His architecture can be seen as a distillation of the proportions and details of old Mexican colonial convents, monasteries, and haciendas.Barragan's palette was made of  the vibrant hues of Mexican traditional clothing and festivals: yellows, pinks, reds, and purples. His most characteristic decorative motifs were also drawn from life: groupings of giant pulque fermenting pots on patios

 and colored, mirrored balls which had originally hung inside nineteenth-century pulquerías (liquor stores). They appeared in symbolic clusters on Barragán’s coffee tables.

Maison de Verre 

Muller House


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Maison du Verre by Bernard Bijvoet and Pierre Chareau, Paris 1928-32

Muller House by Adolf Loos, Prague 1930

"The spatial interaction and spatial austerity that thus far I have best been able to realise in Dr Müller's house." - A.Loos

1929-1930 Mies van der Rohe


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god is in the details
refinement
drawing plans
raumsraepresentation
materiality
horizontality
linearity
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"Each material has its specific characteristics which we must understand if we want to use it... This is no less true of steel and concrete [than of wood, brick, and stone]. We must remember that everything depends on how we use a material, not on the material itself... New Materials are not necessarily superior. Each material is only what we make of it... We must be as familiar with the functions of our buildings as with our materials. We must learn twhat a building can be, what it should be, and also what it must not be... And just as we acquaint ourselves with materials, just as we must understand functions, so we must become familiar with the psychological and spiritual factors of our day. No cultural activity is possible otherwise; for we are dependent on the spirit of our time."


The most amazing thing about Mies van der Rohe for me is his precision, diligence, patience reworking and controlling every detail, attention to every single aspect that might affect how his architecture is perceived. Let's take Barcelona Pavilion, for example. All things are carefully thought through: colour, translucency and opacity of glass, stone patterns, layers of panels and walls, reflection of materials, luminosity inside/outside the building, material language, fixtures, joints, finishes, etc. And light appears to be the core element in this building, crucial for Mies' construction of space. That is why I believe the installation that SANAA architects created for the pavilion in 2008 is a very clever yet subtle comment about it.

The project consisted of acrylic curtains arranged in a spiral within the pavilion, reflecting and distorting views through the structure. As Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa explain, they didn’t want the installation to interfere in any way with the existing space of the Barcelona Pavilion.

“The acrylic curtains rest lightly on the floor and adopt the form of a sinuous spiral. The curtain adapts smoothly to the Pavilion’s inner space to create a new atmosphere. The view through the acrylic material is rather different from the original one, in that it generates gentle reflections that slightly distort the Pavilion.”


Video footage of the installation here: http://vimeo.com/7986712