That Building Is Kind Of Modern

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Buildings of the Banks (Imported from old blog)

I once learned in class that architecture much reflects in each era the fact of where money and wealth are from. It triggered me to go search some buildings/towers of the biggest financial institutions.

1. Federal Reserve

2. Bank of America (1 Bryant Park, New York)

The tower's architectural spire is 255.5 ft (77.9 m) tall and was placed on December 15, 2007. The building is 55 stories high and contains 2,100,000 square feet (195,096 m²) of office space, three escalators and a total of 52 elevators manufactured by Schindler Group – 50 to serve the offices and one leading to the transit mezzanine below ground.Several buildings were demolished to make way for the tower. Among them was the Hotel Diplomat, a 13-story structure which occupied the site at 108 West 43rd Street since 1911, and Henry Miller's Theatre, which was rebuilt and reopened under its previous location. The building's tenants include Bank of America as the anchor tenant, and the tower's platinum LEED rating and modern column-free office space has helped to entice tenants from all over the city. The Bank of America Tower is considered a worldwide model for green architecture in skyscrapers.

3. HSBC (Hongkong)

4. HSBC (Shanghai)

The HSBC Building has been called "the most luxurious building from the Suez Canal to the Bering Strait".^[1] The building has a floor area of 23,415 m², and was, at the time, the largest bank building in the Far East, and second largest in the world, after the Bank of Scotland building in Edinburgh.

The building exterior adopted a strict neo-classicist design, with a tripartite vertical and horizontal division. In the centre is a dome, the base decorated with a triangular structure in imitation of Greek temples. Below that are sixIonic columns penetrating from the second to the fourth storey. The main structure is five storeys, the central section seven storeys, with one and a half storey for the basement. The main structure has a steel lattice with brick filling, and a granite exterior.

The interior was luxuriously decorated, using materials such as marble and monel. The whole building was fitted with heating and air-conditioning. The main trading hall has four columns hewn from whole blocks of marble, which was at the time unique in Asia.

5. Goldman Sachs (New York)

The Goldman Sachs Tower also known as 200 West Street, is the global headquarters of Goldman Sachs located in Lower Manhattan. The building is a 740-foot-tall (230 m), 43-story building that opened in October 2009 in the Battery Park City neighborhood of Manhattan. It is located on West Street, between Vesey and Murray Streets. It is adjacent to the World Financial Center and the Conrad Hotels, across the street from the Verizon Building, and diagonally opposite the World Trade Center site and One World Trade Center. The skyscraper was designed by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, and received a Leed Gold certification.

Bauhaus in Object (imported from old blog)

Staatliches Bauhaus commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught.
The Bauhaus school was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar. In spite of its name, and the fact that its founder was an architect, the Bauhaus did not have an architecture department during the first years of its existence. Nonetheless it was founded with the idea of creating a 'total' work of art in which all arts, including architecture would eventually be brought together. The Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents in Modernist architecture and modern design.The Bauhaus had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography.

1. Armchair, 1922, Marcel Breuer.

Designed while he was a student at the Bauhaus, this chair is Breuer's solution to the problem of creating beautiful, comfortable, functional seating with minimal materials and at minimal expense. The structure of the chair, with its un-upholstered wood frame and ergonomically angled back and seat rests, is designed to reduce spinal pressure, while at the same time paring all structural and decorative elements to an absolute minimum. Stylistically, the outward projection of portions of the frame suggests the influence of the Dutch movement De Stijl, especially Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931), who visited the Bauhaus several times in the early 1920s. Produced at the Bauhaus cabinet workshop continually from 1922 to 1925, Breuer's chair proved to be an early and successful example of the school's desire to ally art and industry and to create design prototypes for mass production.

2. Staatliches Bauhaus, Weimar, 1919–1923, Walter Gropius (German, 1883–1969) et al.

Herbert Bayer's cover for the 1923 book Staatliches Bauhaus, Weimar, 1919–1923 is an example of Bauhaus experiments in typography, begun under the leadership of László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946). Moholy-Nagy himself contributed an essay on the subject to this volume, titled "The New Typography." At the Bauhaus, typography was conceived as both an empirical means of communication and an artistic expression, with visual clarity stressed above all. Bayer's design, made while he was still a student, employs to dramatic visual effect blocklike sans serif lettering in bright red and blue against a black background. Bayer manipulated the spacing of the letters so that each of the four lines of text is the same length. Hence, the title appears as a unified block of text, rather than individual words. The Bauhaus typography, with its letters stripped of all ornamental elements, initially caused an uproar among critics but had a far-reaching impact on the development of graphic design in the twentieth century.

3. Tea infuser and strainer, ca. 1924, Marianne Brandt (German, 1893–1983)

Silver and ebony

Under the direction of Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus sought a union of art and technology, with an emphasis on developing prototypes for industrial production. Brandt, the sole woman enrolled in the school's metal workshop, designed this silver teapot while still a student. By interrelating a number of pure geometric forms, including the hemisphere, circle, and cylinder, Brandt's design explores their formal relationship in space. Its very form and materials serve as the teapot's sole decorative elements, reflecting the Bauhaus emphasis on simplicity in design, without applied ornament. Like other functional Bauhaus items, the teapot was designed to work well in addition to looking good—it is well balanced and easy to pour. Like many of the metalwork designs of the Bauhaus, the teapot was conceived as a prototype for mass production, though this example is made of brass, silver, and ebony, expensive materials that would have precluded the broad audience hoped for by Bauhaus leaders.

4. Ghost Chamber with the Tall Door (New Version), 1925, Paul Klee (German, 1879–1940)

Sprayed and brushed watercolor, and transferred printing ink on paper, bordered with gouache and ink

In the early 1920s, Klee painted a series of ghost chambers with eerie lines of perspective that reduce everything to skeletal transparency. As Klee rarely used perspective, he applied it in these works—always interiors—solely to show its delusive effects, a theory he relayed to his students in his Bauhaus lectures on the subject in November 1921. He demonstrates that perspective can be playful in this watercolor of an orange room cluttered with black wire utensils and with a tall violet door from which seemingly radiate the black perspectival lines.

5. "Wassily" chair, 1925, Marcel Breuer (American, born Hungary, 1902–1981)

Chrome-plated steel, canvas upholstery

Architect and designer Marcel Breuer graduated from the Bauhaus carpentry workshop in 1924. Following a brief stay in Paris, Breuer returned to the Bauhaus Dessau as master of that workshop in 1925 at the request of Walter Gropius. Breuer remained at the Bauhaus until 1928. During this time, he experimented with extruded steel to create a series of lightweight metal furnishings, continuing the Bauhaus interest in industrial materials and manufacturing techniques. Inspired by the flexibility and strength of his beloved metal bicycle frame, Breuer applied the same material and construction principles to chair design. After numerous prototypes, Breuer settled on a fluid, minimal design in which the chair is supported on tubular metal runners. The taut, un-upholstered seat, back, and armrests of simple black canvas contribute to the stark, dematerialized appearance of the chair. It became known as the "Wassily" chair, in homage to Breuer's friend and fellow Bauhaus instructor, the Russian painter Vasily Kandinsky. While this iconic chair design remains closely associated with the Bauhaus, and was used in several areas of the Bauhaus Dessau, Breuer developed and manufactured it in his free time, independent from the school.

6. "MR" armchair, 1927, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (American, born Germany, 1886–1969), Designer

Tubular steel, painted caning

The architect and designer Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is one of the best-known exponents of International Style modernism. His "less-is-more" philosophy has become a catchphrase for much twentieth-century design, though a preference for luxurious and costly materials often underscores the deceptive simplicity of his elegant and refined designs. Mies' early architectural career in Berlin included training in the office of Bruno Paul from 1905 to 1907 and in the office of Peter Behrens from 1908 to 1911 (where his co-workers included Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius). He opened his own practice in Berlin in 1913 and soon developed a personal architectural idiom that combined the cool rationalism of the nineteenth-century German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel with the pure formalism of the International Style.

From 1926 until 1932, Mies was vice-president of the Deutscher Werkbund, an association of designers and architects whose principal aim was the development of well-designed, mass-producible architecture and household objects by way of an alliance of art and industry. In 1927, the Werkbund presented the influential exhibition Die Wohnung (The Dwelling), which included the Weissenhofseidlung (Weissenhof Housing Estate), an experimental group of model apartment buildings built in a suburb of Stuttgart. Under Mies' direction, a number of important architects, including Mart Stam and Marcel Breuer, collaborated on the project, designing furniture for the apartments. This graceful, elegant, and beautifully proportioned "MR" chair, developed from a 1924 design for a cantilevered chair by Mart Stam, was introduced by Mies at the 1927 Stuttgart exhibition and has remained in production ever since.

Mies was the last director of the Bauhaus design school in Dessau, from 1930 until its closing in 1932. In 1938, he left Germany for America, where he headed the architecture department at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

7. Photogram, 1926, László Moholy-Nagy (American, born Hungary, 1895–1946)
Gelatin silver print

Moholy-Nagy played a key role at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau as a painter, graphic artist, teacher, and impassioned advocate of avant-garde photography. He made this image without a camera by placing his hand, a paintbrush, and other objects on a sheet of photographic paper and exposing it to light. While this simple process was practiced by photography's founders in the nineteenth century and was later popularized as a child's amusement, avant-garde artists of the twentieth century revived the photogram technique as a means for exploring the optical and expressive properties of light. With this shadow image of a hand and paintbrush, Moholy-Nagy ambitiously suggests that photography may incorporate, and even transcend, painting as the most vital medium of artistic expression in the modern age.

8. "B35" armchair, 1928–29,

Marcel Breuer (American, born Hungary, 1902–1981); manufactured by Gebrüder Thonet GmbH

Tubular steel, wood, and canvas

Following the success of his "Wassily" chair, Breuer continued to experiment with tubular steel furniture. He partnered with the German manufacturer Thonet, designing a number of chairs, stools, and ottomans made from this lightweight, traditionally industrial material. In the "B35" armchair, Breuer employed seemingly continuous steel runners as the chair's frame. The seat and back were upholstered in simple canvas, and the armrests padded with lacquered wood. Both the seat and armrests are dramatically cantilevered without vertical supports, emphasizing both the tensile strength and the slenderness of the tubular steel construction. Like Breuer's "Wassily" chair, the "B35" was not a direct product of the Bauhaus; it does, however, clearly conform to Bauhaus principles of design and construction, with its modern, stripped-down form made from industrial materials not typically used in furniture at this time.

9.Kubus stacking containers, ca. 1938, Wilhelm Wagenfeld (German, 1900–1990)

Glass

Wilhelm Wagenfeld studied metalwork at the Bauhaus between 1923 and 1925, where he designed a table lamp that became one of the school's most popular products. After leaving the Bauhaus, he went on to design a number of popular consumer products, among the most successful of which was Kubus, the modular glass storage containers he created in 1935. Made of heat-resistant industrial glass, Kubus is designed for maximum flexibility of use and ease of storage. Consisting of seven separate, stackable units of variable sizes and interchangeable lids, the Kubus containers were created for use in the refrigerator and pantry, or on the kitchen table. In this modular system, the containers can be used either together as a unit or individually as needed. Wagenfeld's Kubus system, which was mass produced and widely available, exemplifies the Bauhaus commitment to industrial production of well-designed standardized forms at affordable prices.

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Art Noveau: Gateway to Our Modern Age (Imported from old blog)

It is often flowery, organic, and it’s flowing forms correspond visually to musical movement. With its roots firmly in the second half of the 19th Century, in all of its various forms and translations, Art Nouveau became the doorway to our modern age. Primarily dating from the 1890’s until the outbreak of World War I (1914), Art Nouveau was the refinement of an aesthetic reaction to the excesses of the industrial revolution’s mirror twin progeny of technological triumphs and deplorable social conditions. Influenced by the clear connection between deep social and economic problems and aesthetics demonstrated by the national comparisons at the various and many world exhibitions, thoughtful individuals saw that though mass production allowed for more inexpensive utensils, tableware and furniture, the continually increasing numbers of resulting products were often decorated in a quasi-historical pastiche or nationalistic kitsch. These mass produced items most often resulted in poor quality, impractical and ill-suited to the living conditions of their intended market— those who lived in cramped often squalid urban dwellings.

Soon after the mid-19th Century, throughout Europe there was a clear outcry for aesthetic reform. This was manifested in a design and artistic sentiment that suggested that there was both a need for better living conditions and for simple, more honest consumer goods for workers. There was also concern that there was a proliferation of ugly eclectic designs that had no bearing on or relationship to the then contemporary technologies and caused reduced economic competitiveness. First in England and later in Germany, reform movements arose to combat not only the deplorable social conditions but at reforming the commercial arts as well. In response to these negative results of industrialization and the aesthetic struggle against historicism, even though political orientation greatly differed between and among groups and individuals, there began to be various philosophies and voices expressed.

The design problem of historicism made itself abundantly clear at the Great Exhibition of London in 1851. Included in the group of most vocal reformers was the eminent and hugely influential artist as well as art and social critic William Morris. He vehemently opposed industrial mass production. He saw the devastating effects of industrialization—environmental pollution, alienating work and poor quality products, as a “devilish capitalistic botch and an enemy of mankind.” To him, aesthetic and social problems were inseparable. He claimed that the answer to social issues was a return to the spirit of the arts approach of the Middle Ages, a time when art and production were closely connected. According to William Morris, during the Middle Ages, artists fashioned articles that were both useful and beautiful. He demanded craftsman like consumer products on the highest aesthetic level. To counter historicism, Morris wanted natural ornaments and materials along with clearly structured forms. Along with the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites (a group of English painters who used the erapredating the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael for inspiration and painted primarily Arthurian themed paintings), Morris, his friend, critic and philosopher John Ruskin and others began what is now referred to as the Arts and Crafts movement. It rejected historicism, encouraged a return to handcrafts, emphasized the relationship of art to design and showed preference for simpler forms from nature. The Arts and Crafts Movement was the precursor to the international Art Nouveau movement or time period.

To be precise, Art Nouveau was not one movement but a number of visually related thematic directions that were created in different countries at different rates in a variety of ways in roughly a twenty year period. Bridging the Belle Epoch and the Edwardian Periods, Art Nouveau took on many names as well as looks. Self-consciously international, Art Nouveau clearly and at times brilliantly drew on cultural and aesthetic sources throughout Europe and the rest of the world. In France and Belgium, it was actually called art nouveau after the furniture house of the same name; in England, it was called “the decorative style;” the German name for it was Jugendstil (youth style) after the magazine “Die Jugend;” the Stile Liberty was the Italian name from the London Regent Street store Liberty; in Austria, it was called Sezessionsstil related to the new thinking in painting and design; in Spain, it was referred to as Modernista.

The most encyclopedic exhibition ever developed on Art Nouveau has just had a spectacular run at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Art Nouveau 1890-1914 was a joint project of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the Smithsonian’s National Gallery that demonstrated the depth and breadth of what great institutions can do when they are given the resources and the time to create the highest level of exhibition of objects. The catalogue for the show is a coffee table book of unparalleled beauty and thoughtful in-depth information. Interestingly, the Victoria & Albert Museum (often referred to as the Attic of the Empire) made the brilliantly visionary decision in 1900 to purchase a substantial body of Art Nouveau work at the Paris Exposition Universelle. Though highly controversial at the time, many of those pieces, now most certainly considered masterpieces, were included in this stupendous show.

According to Paul Greenhalgh, the curator of the exhibition and editor of the magnificent catalogue for Art Nouveau 1890-1914, “Art Nouveau was the result of intense and flamboyant activity in the visual arts wishing to change the character of European civilization.” He also suggests that the period could be expanded to be from 1870 to 1914.However, the focus of this exhibit was upon the specific fecund era of those years of creative transition at the turn of the 19th to the 20th Centuries. Greenhalgh states that there were three major sources of Art Nouveau. These he has identified as natural, historical and symbolic. Certainly these were not unusual or new sources in the history of art, but the way in which the sources were approached and explored was. Either individually or in combination, artists and designers strove to produce a truly modern visual language.

Nature was the most important of the three sources. Nature was a key aspect to 19th Century society and culture. Nineteenth Century exploration and discovery of new plants and animals, continual medical and scientific breakthroughs and Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory which linked humans to nature in a significantly deterministic way all made nature a universal aspect to 19th Century culture. Historical interpretation was used to explore the basic forms and design threads found in historical sources. These threads were then woven into a more modern visual fabric. The period was ripe with all kinds of spiritualism as well, and symbols were abundant to draw from for icons, images and themes.

The strategy of Art Nouveau was to be a reaction against previous styles while providing visual alternatives to other movements. As Curator Greenhalgh suggests, “Most regions added local ingredients to the stylistic mix that was Art Nouveau. The Dutch made use of Indonesian forms and the Belgians came to embrace Africa,…..The Germans and the Austrians made use of the Biedermeier style. Traditional baronial architecture inspired the Scots…..Norwegians and several other Nordic nations made use of Viking art, while various British, Irish and American designers were inspired by the Celts. These inflections gave variety to the style…..From within the European tradition, practitioners drew on Classicism , the Baroque, Rococo and Gothic Revival styles and folk art. From outside, the art of the Islamic nations, China and Japan were brought to bear.” In other words, Art Nouveau was inclusive, reactive, interpretive and highly eclectic. Yet, when we see a piece from the period, we almost immediately know that it is Art Nouveau. This is due to a universality of visual translation, craftsmanship and aesthetic intent.

The exhibition and catalogue focused upon various materials that were creatively integrated into the art and design process. The Age of Paper focused upon the flowering of the poster, a commercial art form refined and developed during the 1890’s that became a part of the cultural fabric of any town or city. Influenced by recently discovered Japanese prints, American circus posters and new technologies, the French designer and printer Jules Cheret was the father of this form. The Czech designer Alphonse Mucha was the quintessential Art Nouveau artist. The colorful Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s body of work must also be included as among the great graphics of the period as well. German Peter Behrens’ famous “The Kiss” was reissued during the hippie 1960’s as an icon of the generation of the original’s grandchildren.

Wood, textiles, ceramics, glass and metal craft were also the focus of other areas of the exhibition. Each of the great practitioners of their craft have been included in the exhibition. Spectacular furniture by Hector Guimard, August Thonet, Josef Hoffmann and Henry van deVelde, Richard Riemerschmid and Louis Marjorelle illustrate the extent of design ideas, quality of craftsmanship and sheer beauty of wood. New textile design was exemplified by works by Hermann Obrist, Henry van de Velde, Chris Lebeau, Otto Eckmann as well as Josef Hoffmann. Ceramics and stoneware ranging from pieces by the Sevres factory to a piece by Paul Gauguin to examples of American Rookwood to porcelain by Ernest Chaplet to Dutch earthenware by Weduwe N.S.A. Brantjes all signified the Art Nouveau diversity and range. The glass category was best exemplified by the work of outstanding French master Emile Galle, the two Daum brothers who founded Daum Nancy and the elegant American Louis Comfort Tiffany. Metal craft ranged from Mr. Eiffle’s Tower of 1889 to details of Belgian Victor Horta’s most sleek and beautifully detailed house to Frenchman Hector Guimard’s Metro gateway to Englishman C.R. Ashbee’s decanter. Great examples of jewelry sprinkled throughout the exhibit were the miniature detailing of each of the other crafts.

The exhibition was divided up into often startlingly beautiful country by country examples of Art Nouveau. Beginning with the English “New Art,” As the first nation to embrace the Industrial Revolution, its citizens were the first Europeans to experience its consequences both good and bad. The class gap widened still further as a result of the Industrial Revolution. The Romantic reformers (the Pre-Raphaelites, John Ruskin, William Morris, etc.) were the major supports of the New Art. Their counter party were the post-Enlightenments Rationalists, a group of pragmatic individuals who embraced new technologies and believed that humanity would be reinvented by scientific achievement. However, they were significantly responsible for creating the environment in which the development of a new direction in visual art and design could take place.

Examples of Art Nouveau design took place in English prints and books as early as the 1880’s. Graphic artist and designer Arthur Mackmurdo (1851-1942) is considered to be one of the first Art Nouveau practitioners. His flat patterned designs were the precursors to much of what followed in the graphic and ornamental interpretations of Art Nouveau. Aubrey Beardsley was another graphic artist whose work was as much “diabolic” as graphic. Arthur Lasenby Liberty, founder of the Liberty of London store, was perhaps the greatest influence upon international Art Nouveau design. Early on, he commissioned artists, architects and designers to create textiles, furniture and decorative goods including metalwork, glass, jewelry and even clothing. This entrepreneur was responsible for connecting the art Nouveau aesthetic philosophy to the commercial marketplace.

The contribution of France to Art Nouveau was immense. The most important French centers of Art Nouveau were Paris and Nancy. The smaller city, Nancy actually had the greatest significance. The outstanding glass artists, Emile and A. Daum, were located in Nancy. The School of Nancy was the center for the richest of floral and symbolic aspects of Art Nouveau. The bowls, vases and pitchers integrated floral details-, the furniture bore symbolic meaning. Galle and Daum produced certainly the most famous and unusually beautiful and delicate glass work of the entire Art Nouveau Movement with the possible exception of perhaps the pieces of the American master Louis Comfort Tiffany.

The School of Nancy, founded by Galle in 1886 produced industrially manufactured goods as well as individual artistic pieces. Galle was joined by cabinetmakers Eugene Valin and Louis Marjorelle as well as the goldsmith artist Victor Prouve. Paris had no particular school of Art Nouveau, however the great Hector Guimard was the best representative of the city’s creative spirit. Other notable designers were cabinetmakers Alexandre Charpentier and Louis Majorelle. Guimard designed many pieces, but he is best known for the wonderful Paris Metro entrances that visually and physically demonstrate the union of modern technology to design. Each gateway “grows” like plant stems up to the roof beams that resemble transparent open umbrellas.

The Germany Jugendstil situated itself somewhere between the objective-constructive and the folk art handicraft directions. It was marked by reformist thought and theories and an effort to advance the competitiveness of German products. Munich produced art-orienteddesigner/architects Hermann Obrist and August Endell who had a Gothic orientation to their work. Richard Riemerschmid (1868-1957) was one of the most important German designers who founded workshops and worked with other eminent designers at The German Werkbund. Peter Behrens was the most influential German designer of all. Multitalented and an excellent administrator, he set the pattern for the profession and practice of modern industrial design.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his Glasgow colleagues developed a highly influential geometric patterning style influenced by ancient Celtic symbolism and design. Ironically, Mackintosh’s influence was more seen in the development the Vienna Secessionist group (including Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser and Ofto Wagner) who in-turn indirectly influenced Frank Lloyd Wright’s work and more directly the Bauhaus than any major design in the British isles.

Certainly there were great designers and craftsman from Belgium. Preeminent among these was architect/designer/artist Henry van de Velde (1863-1957) who advised the Weimar court, co-founded the German Werkbund and influenced design in Holland, Belgium, Germany and Switzerland. The architect and interior designer Victor Horta was also a Belgium master. The Modernista movement in Spain was mostly manifested in architecture. Controversial architect Antonio Gaudi was the major figure here. Art Nouveau turned baroque in its interpretation in Italy (Liberty Style). Agostino Lauro and Raimondo d’Aronco are two major Italian figures. More uniquely, designer Carlo Bugafti expressed an artistically extravagant approach that included Asian influences and most expensive materials.

There were also fine architectural examples in Prague and Budapest with later flowering of glass and ceramics in Czechoslovakia. Other wonderful work was created in Finland during the period as well. The major Finnish designer was Eliel Saarinen who architecture, interiors and furniture with a Viking-inspired design iconography.

This exhibition is a monumental expression of the visual talent, creativity and inspired craftsmanship of the pioneers of this modern aesthetic period. The truly brilliant organization of this exhibit is a reflection of the thoughtfulness and thoroughness of the curatorial staff involved. This was the greatest display of these objects ever presented. However, with no reflection on this exemplary exhibition, there should be a critical overview of the Art Nouveau movement. With all the beauty and variety that was Art Nouveau, all and all Art Nouveau must be considered mostly as a failure as a reform movement. While the aesthetic rebellion and reaction to historicism and poor quality mass produced products was justifiable and even admirable, Art Nouveau was in many respects highly regressive and probably delayed the development of much of modern industrial design. Though Art Nouveau certainly fostered the creation of dynamic new ornamentation, led to a better feel for architectural space and certainly sought to instill by design a more conscious relationship between materials and simpler forms, it was actually more of a step back into the past.

The reasons are many. Probably most importantly, most Art Nouveau designers considered themselves artists and rejected industrial mass production. They sought an alternative in the reform of handwork and thus handicrafts, but what occurred was something else. The artist guilds, associations or workshops patterned themselves after medieval models and operated as highly elite aesthetic cults. The old academies that ruled the artistic and aesthetic roosts in various countries were replaced by “new” academies ( It could be suggested that patterns of historicism were substituted by patterns of vegetation!) that were run by “new” artists and designers just as single-minded and narrow. Primarily, all that Art Nouveau accomplished was to replace one kind of handcrafted ornamentation for another. In the long run, the Art Nouveau luxury objects, jewelry and furniture were still only affordable by the well-to-do. By about 1910, the once new and provocative visual language of Art Nouveau virtually disappeared. The First World War marked a clear end of the movement. The geometric direction of the designs of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow School and the related Vienna Secession group’s works led in a straight line to Russian Constructivism, the Bauhaus design Philosophy and Art Deco.

Overall, what Art Nouveau left as a legacy was the will to reform and the positive turn toward industry as a partner in the design process. Perhaps, what we most learn from all this is that great design can only enhance the quality of life, and design cannot necessarily reform the world.

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Source: Journal of Antiques

Concert Halls of the World (2)

Avery Fisher Hall (NYC, US)

Sydney Opera House (Sydney, Australia)

Vienna Konzerthaus (Vienna, Austria)

Hungarian State Opera House (Budapest, Hungary)

Palais Garnier (Paris, France)

Sunday, December 2, 2012

Architecture: Gaudi Pop-ups

In Barcelona, you can check out where King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella are said to have greeted Columbus after his first voyage; even in June, you’ll have an unobstructed view. No such luck when you tour the works of Antoni Gaudí, the city’s favorite architect and, to judge by the high-season queues at his best-known sites, everyone else’s favorite, too. Gaudí is so famous, and his intricately curved designs so iconic, that admirers may wonder why “Gaudí Pop-Ups,” by the graphic designer and paper engineer Courtney Watson McCarthy, has not appeared until now.

Gaudi Pop-Ups

The reason may be timing. Gaudí’s high-cultural reputation and mass appeal are fairly recent phenomena, as is the notion that serious art befits 3-D treatment; a convergence of these trends may have produced this book. Born in 1852 into a family of coppersmiths, Gaudí developed his singular style in prosperous, fin de siècle Barcelona, where modernism held sway and a patron class had sprung up to provide commissions. When he died in 1926, after being struck by a trolley while walking to Mass, a bereft city turned out to mourn. Over the next few decades, Gaudí’s reputation waned. Many critics and fellow artists saw his work as overwrought and idiosyncratic, narrowly preoccupied with Catalan identity and pious Catholicism. In “Homage to Catalonia,” a firsthand account of soldiering in the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell describes Gaudí’s immense, still-unfinished masterwork, La Sagrada Família (the Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family), as “one of the most hideous buildings in the world. . . . I think the Anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up when they had the chance.”

Gaudí’s rehabilitation from modernist dead end began in the 1960s and accelerated with the end of the Franco regime. As the biographical sketch in “Gaudí Pop-Ups” notes, his works have been named a Unesco World Heritage site — a sure sign of global cultural approval. However, the book omits the back story of Gaudí’s fall and rise, relying on well-chosen photographs and McCarthy’s pop-ups to convey the visual impact and sheer wondrous appeal of his most loved Barcelona designs. The accompanying text is concise and unobtrusive.

Open the pages depicting Park Güell, the stunning garden Gaudí created for an unrealized suburban development, and observe the delicate, palm-leaf ironwork on the entrance gates; then get a bird’s-eye view (impossible to achieve in person) of the park’s beloved salamander fountain, encrusted with shards of bright tile, or trencadís. The paper-engineered version of the Casa Batlló, a plain mansion in Barcelona’s Eixample district that Gaudí remodeled into a glittering piece of anthropomorphism, is similarly satisfying: from the sparkling facade, McCarthy juts out the famous skull balconies that draw gawkers on the street below.

To do justice to Casa Milà, the sand-colored mountain of a structure that was Gaudí’s last secular project, McCarthy provides a pop-up of the apartment building’s “most spectacular feature,” the rooftop terrace with its chimneys camouflaged as sculptures. Consistent with Gaudí’s lifelong blending of religion and history, these organic shapes suggest “guardian warriors and veiled women . . . citadels and mosques.”

Casa Milla

Last, and best, are the pop-ups of La Sagrada Família, Gaudí’s obsessive focus for the last 14 years of his life. Fittingly, the church’s signature spires unfold into the tallest paper structure in the book, which closes with McCarthy’s ingenious rendition of the light-filled basilica, its ranks of columns seeming to advance toward the reader. Gaudí meant this space to hold 13,000 worshipers, and when you enter the real church, all seem to be present. Hence, a great pleasure of “Gaudí Pop-Ups” is having the artist to yourself: open the book, and there are no people.

La Sagrada Familia

Polly Morrice is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

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Source: NYTimes

Architecture and The Lost Art of Drawing

A freehand sketch of the south facade of the Denver Central Library

IT has become fashionable in many architectural circles to declare the death of drawing. What has happened to our profession, and our art, to cause the supposed end of our most powerful means of conceptualizing and representing architecture?

The computer, of course. With its tremendous ability to organize and present data, the computer is transforming every aspect of how architects work, from sketching their first impressions of an idea to creating complex construction documents for contractors. For centuries, the noun “digit” (from the Latin “digitus”) has been defined as “finger,” but now its adjectival form, “digital,” relates to data. Are our hands becoming obsolete as creative tools? Are they being replaced by machines? And where does that leave the architectural creative process?

Today architects typically use computer-aided design software with names like AutoCAD and Revit, a tool for “building information modeling.” Buildings are no longer just designed visually and spatially; they are “computed” via interconnected databases.

I’ve been practicing architecture since 1964, and my office is not immune. Like most architects, we routinely use these and other software programs, especially for construction documents, but also for developing designs and making presentations. There’s nothing inherently problematic about that, as long as it’s not just that.

Architecture cannot divorce itself from drawing, no matter how impressive the technology gets. Drawings are not just end products: they are part of the thought process of architectural design. Drawings express the interaction of our minds, eyes and hands. This last statement is absolutely crucial to the difference between those who draw to conceptualize architecture and those who use the computer.

Of course, in some sense drawing can’t be dead: there is a vast market for the original work of respected architects. I have had several one-man shows in galleries and museums in New York and elsewhere, and my drawings can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt.

But can the value of drawings be simply that of a collector’s artifact or a pretty picture? No. I have a real purpose in making each drawing, either to remember something or to study something. Each one is part of a process and not an end in itself. I’m personally fascinated not just by what architects choose to draw but also by what they choose not to draw.

For decades I have argued that architectural drawing can be divided into three types, which I call the “referential sketch,” the “preparatory study” and the “definitive drawing.” The definitive drawing, the final and most developed of the three, is almost universally produced on the computer nowadays, and that is appropriate. But what about the other two? What is their value in the creative process? What can they teach us?

The referential sketch serves as a visual diary, a record of an architect’s discovery. It can be as simple as a shorthand notation of a design concept or can describe details of a larger composition. It might not even be a drawing that relates to a building or any time in history. It’s not likely to represent “reality,” but rather to capture an idea.

These sketches are thus inherently fragmentary and selective. When I draw something, I remember it. The drawing is a reminder of the idea that caused me to record it in the first place. That visceral connection, that thought process, cannot be replicated by a computer.

The second type of drawing, the preparatory study, is typically part of a progression of drawings that elaborate a design. Like the referential sketch, it may not reflect a linear process. (I find computer-aided design much more linear.) I personally like to draw on translucent yellow tracing paper, which allows me to layer one drawing on top of another, building on what I’ve drawn before and, again, creating a personal, emotional connection with the work.

With both of these types of drawings, there is a certain joy in their creation, which comes from the interaction between the mind and the hand. Our physical and mental interactions with drawings are formative acts. In a handmade drawing, whether on an electronic tablet or on paper, there are intonations, traces of intentions and speculation. This is not unlike the way a musician might intone a note or how a riff in jazz would be understood subliminally and put a smile on your face.

I find this quite different from today’s “parametric design,” which allows the computer to generate form from a set of instructions, sometimes resulting in so-called blob architecture. The designs are complex and interesting in their own way, but they lack the emotional content of a design derived from hand.

Years ago I was sitting in a rather boring faculty meeting at Princeton. To pass the time, I pulled out my pad to start drawing a plan, probably of some building I was designing. An equally bored colleague was watching me, amused. I came to a point of indecision and passed the pad to him. He added a few lines and passed it back.

The game was on. Back and forth we went, drawing five lines each, then four and so on.

While we didn’t speak, we were engaged in a dialogue over this plan and we understood each other perfectly. I suppose that you could have a debate like that with words, but it would have been entirely different. Our game was not about winners or losers, but about a shared language. We had a genuine love for making this drawing. There was an insistence, by the act of drawing, that the composition would stay open, that the speculation would stay “wet” in the sense of a painting. Our plan was without scale and we could as easily have been drawing a domestic building as a portion of a city. It was the act of drawing that allowed us to speculate.

As I work with my computer-savvy students and staff today, I notice that something is lost when they draw only on the computer. It is analogous to hearing the words of a novel read aloud, when reading them on paper allows us to daydream a little, to make associations beyond the literal sentences on the page. Similarly, drawing by hand stimulates the imagination and allows us to speculate about ideas, a good sign that we’re truly alive.

Michael Graves is an architect and an emeritus professor at Princeton.

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Source: NYTimes