Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Robie House, Chicago (1909)
Robei House, Chicago (1909)
Frank Lloyd Wright
All the characteristics of the early Prairie houses were here: strong horizontal planes and masses, open interiors, bold cantilevers, and a strong attachment to the earth. Visually, this brick structure was a series of exciting planes, suggestive of a ship at sea. In its urban setting, it became one of the most celebrated residences in modern architecture.
Frank Lloyd Wright
All the characteristics of the early Prairie houses were here: strong horizontal planes and masses, open interiors, bold cantilevers, and a strong attachment to the earth. Visually, this brick structure was a series of exciting planes, suggestive of a ship at sea. In its urban setting, it became one of the most celebrated residences in modern architecture.Source: Architectural History-Lester Wertheimer
Larkin Building, Buffalo (1904)
Larkin Building, Buffalo (1904)
Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright
The essential drama of the Larkin Building was a central, skylighted, four-story well. This soaring space was surrounded by office galleries that derived spatial unity from their outlook onto the central well. The structure and the largely unbroken exterior walls were constructed of flat bricks, and the staircase towers were strongly articulated as freestanding elements. Unfortunately, this landmark of modern design was demolished in 1950.
Source: Architectural History-Lester Wertheimer
Flatiron Building, NY
Flatiron Building, New York (1902)
Daniel Burnham
Placed on a prominent, triangular site, this steel-framed structure owed much to the classical influence of the day. It has a well-defined base and a shaft and a Sullivanesque (Louis Sullivan+Romanesque) capital, which were all well composed in a single, powerful volume. The 20 or so stories rose majestically from the sharp corner site and established a model for later tall buildings.
Source: Architectural History-Lester Wertheimer
Daniel Burnham
Placed on a prominent, triangular site, this steel-framed structure owed much to the classical influence of the day. It has a well-defined base and a shaft and a Sullivanesque (Louis Sullivan+Romanesque) capital, which were all well composed in a single, powerful volume. The 20 or so stories rose majestically from the sharp corner site and established a model for later tall buildings.Source: Architectural History-Lester Wertheimer
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Looking Towards the Avenues
I don't deal exclusively with the popular image. I'm more concerned with it as a part of my landscape. Pop Art is only one facet of my work. More than popular images, I'm interested in personal images...
- Jim Dine, quoted in Art News, November 1963
- Jim Dine, quoted in Art News, November 1963
Three sculptures by Jim Dine, under the collective name "Looking Toward The Avenue" 1989
Mr. Dine, a resident of New York and London who is widely viewed as having been one of the first Pop artists, reverted to an old theme, a variation on the Venus de Milo that he first hit upon in the 70's. What he produced was three bronze figures that are 14, 18 and 23 feet high and that resemble the famous armless goddess, minus her head.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
THE ECOLE DES BEAUX-ARTS
THE ECOLE DES BEAUX-ARTS
Artistic forms are not to be played with: life is to be recreated so that it will of necessity express itself as a pattern……
INDTRODUCTION
§ Since the 17th century architecture has been approached from four fundamentally different points of view
1. The academic architect
2. The craftsman builders
3. The civil engineer and
4. Other technological experts
and more in the recent years, the social scientist.
The architectural designs made annually at the ecole des beaux arts in Paris for two and half centuries before 1968 by competitors for the grand prix de Rome are of particular importance for the history of architecture because they constitute so complex and extreme and expression of one of these basic approaches, namely that of academic architect.
§ Four basically different kinds of training for the young architect have developed. These may similarly be characterized as the
1. Academic
2. The craft
3. The technological, and
4. The sociological.
§ It is this system of architectural education, the character of official architecture in France from the 17th century to our own time and was most completely and clearly reflected in the design made for the prix de Rome.
THE ECOLE DES BEAUX-ARTS
§ Academic tradition: Source from the classical antiquity, especially to roman architecture and classical “idealism” in philosophy, the more immediate sources lay in Italian art and art theory of the high renaissance and baroque.
§ The heir of Academie Royale.
§ Recommendation for a new school of architecture should be joined with the new school of painting and sculpture.
§ French revolution: Napoleon
§ A new school of architecture under revolution.
§ Attack on the notion of the primitive hut occupies, jettison the link with nature.
§ By altering the ideas of the Greeks and of Vitruvius later architects had sometimes improved upon them as long as the general classic “rules” were not violated.
T.S ELIOT “the fixity of the intellectual structure, and the reduction of the past, puts me in the mind of an aphorism, tradition, cant’ simply be inherited it must be labored for. You can’t approach it without a historical sense: and a historical sense means that you appreciate the pastness of the past as well as its presence”.
THE PROGRAMMES :1810-1914
§ Monthly architectural competitions both in form of
Esquisses: sketch design
Project rendus: rendering
§ The competitions written by the professors of architectural theory were practical and relevant to the Grand Prix Projects.
§ About twenty subjects were set per year. There were more than five hundred different programmes. Where baths, schools and monuments were the subjects repeated often.
§ Industrial architecture was not the concern of the Ecole.
§ The greater part of the programmes set for the student can be divided, roughly into
Public buildings or buildings to be used by the public
Ecclesiastical buildings (variety of churches)
Private buildings
THE COMPETITION FOR THE GRAND PRIX IN 1824
§ The competition was the final hurdle in the education of the 19th century French architect, which awarded the highest possible achievement for a student and virtually ensured a prestigious career.
§ The theory and design manifested derived mainly from literary and artistic sources of the Italian Renaissance, exemplified a beauty of form based on fixed principles of taste.
§ The competition was traditionally entered by advanced students of French citizenship to prepare designs for large architectural projects, customarily for some kind monumental building with royal state or civic connotations, which were basically excursive of imagination.
§ Criticized as “paper architecture”.
§ The drawings were plans, sections, and elevations and later perspective views to be presented in an allotted square feet of area.
§ First to conceive the general project of a building then to study its principal parts and finally its details. This approach is different from a “romantic” where the designer will start out with some a detail that struck his fancy or utilitarian “functional” point of view with the answer to a problem of utility, structure, or economy.
§ Absence of visually “realistic” approach to architectural design because the academic point of view had its philosophical basis in classical “idealism”.
§ These drawings are ”idealized” abstractions of the “real” world of nature and the senses, inasmuch as they do depict architecture “realistically” as it appears to the eye of the beholder
PRINCIPLES AND METHODS ILLUSTRATED
§ Theory of Design
§ Character
GENERAL CHARACTER
TYPE CHARACTER
SPECIFIC CHARACTER
Transition between type character and specific character was what became known as “narrative architecture”
§ Programs
Artistic forms are not to be played with: life is to be recreated so that it will of necessity express itself as a pattern……
INDTRODUCTION
§ Since the 17th century architecture has been approached from four fundamentally different points of view
1. The academic architect
2. The craftsman builders
3. The civil engineer and
4. Other technological experts
and more in the recent years, the social scientist.
The architectural designs made annually at the ecole des beaux arts in Paris for two and half centuries before 1968 by competitors for the grand prix de Rome are of particular importance for the history of architecture because they constitute so complex and extreme and expression of one of these basic approaches, namely that of academic architect.
§ Four basically different kinds of training for the young architect have developed. These may similarly be characterized as the
1. Academic
2. The craft
3. The technological, and
4. The sociological.
§ It is this system of architectural education, the character of official architecture in France from the 17th century to our own time and was most completely and clearly reflected in the design made for the prix de Rome.
THE ECOLE DES BEAUX-ARTS
§ Academic tradition: Source from the classical antiquity, especially to roman architecture and classical “idealism” in philosophy, the more immediate sources lay in Italian art and art theory of the high renaissance and baroque.
§ The heir of Academie Royale.
§ Recommendation for a new school of architecture should be joined with the new school of painting and sculpture.
§ French revolution: Napoleon
§ A new school of architecture under revolution.
§ Attack on the notion of the primitive hut occupies, jettison the link with nature.
§ By altering the ideas of the Greeks and of Vitruvius later architects had sometimes improved upon them as long as the general classic “rules” were not violated.
T.S ELIOT “the fixity of the intellectual structure, and the reduction of the past, puts me in the mind of an aphorism, tradition, cant’ simply be inherited it must be labored for. You can’t approach it without a historical sense: and a historical sense means that you appreciate the pastness of the past as well as its presence”.
THE PROGRAMMES :1810-1914
§ Monthly architectural competitions both in form of
Esquisses: sketch design
Project rendus: rendering
§ The competitions written by the professors of architectural theory were practical and relevant to the Grand Prix Projects.
§ About twenty subjects were set per year. There were more than five hundred different programmes. Where baths, schools and monuments were the subjects repeated often.
§ Industrial architecture was not the concern of the Ecole.
§ The greater part of the programmes set for the student can be divided, roughly into
Public buildings or buildings to be used by the public
Ecclesiastical buildings (variety of churches)
Private buildings
THE COMPETITION FOR THE GRAND PRIX IN 1824
§ The competition was the final hurdle in the education of the 19th century French architect, which awarded the highest possible achievement for a student and virtually ensured a prestigious career.
§ The theory and design manifested derived mainly from literary and artistic sources of the Italian Renaissance, exemplified a beauty of form based on fixed principles of taste.
§ The competition was traditionally entered by advanced students of French citizenship to prepare designs for large architectural projects, customarily for some kind monumental building with royal state or civic connotations, which were basically excursive of imagination.
§ Criticized as “paper architecture”.
§ The drawings were plans, sections, and elevations and later perspective views to be presented in an allotted square feet of area.
§ First to conceive the general project of a building then to study its principal parts and finally its details. This approach is different from a “romantic” where the designer will start out with some a detail that struck his fancy or utilitarian “functional” point of view with the answer to a problem of utility, structure, or economy.
§ Absence of visually “realistic” approach to architectural design because the academic point of view had its philosophical basis in classical “idealism”.
§ These drawings are ”idealized” abstractions of the “real” world of nature and the senses, inasmuch as they do depict architecture “realistically” as it appears to the eye of the beholder
PRINCIPLES AND METHODS ILLUSTRATED
§ Theory of Design
§ Character
GENERAL CHARACTER
TYPE CHARACTER
SPECIFIC CHARACTER
Transition between type character and specific character was what became known as “narrative architecture”
§ Programs
Good Design
HOW DO WE KNOW GOOD DESIGN WHEN WE SEE IT?
Buildings are like people, they have a soul, they feel and they like people, they are liked by people, at times hated too. When I say they are like people I can hereby categorize them into:
· Good looking buildings
· Good buildings &
· Good buildings that are good looking
Design can be defined more on experience basis than form. A design does not become good just by a single sensory perception called “sight”, but a good design is the one that serves all of them, or at least attempts to fulfill some of them. A good design is not the one that “looks good” but is the one that feels good. A good design is responsive of the contemporary movements to the needs of users, a review of the development of processes and methods of design approaches, and a redefinition of design in terms of users experience, not physical form.
A design that is natural, that is comprehensible, by grounding the meaning of architectural expression in a given cultural situation. A good design is a design where the user can relate himself. A building is like a body, and the user is like a soul, and it is the user that makes the design alive.
It is not the award winning design that is beautiful but it is the test of use that makes it beautiful. A good design is responsive to user wishes; it develops a pattern language that enables the users to shape their own environment, wherever permitted. A good design emphasis on the software aspect of design- use, experience, and perception, than on the hardware aspect- physical form.
The design should serve the purpose for which the building is intended to. A good design should also have the character of the place, it should relate to the human scale. It should be beautiful in a sense that it should be a pleasure to be there, experiencing it. If it were an office building, the employees should feel the pleasure of working there, at the same time it should motivate and force them to behave in a disciplined manner. The building should also have a character of the purpose, it should be overpowering if it is a governmental building, and it should be welcoming it is a public building. A good design should also be part of the natural landscape.
And depending upon all these necessitates designing at the scale of life itself.
In short I mean that user’s requirements take over the major dictator of design capability. And we have the technology, so the only goal for the designer is to input user lifestyle into the design, making the design more flexible for users of different cultural backgrounds, and generally considering the social context. In other words a disciplined interlocking of logic and art. You have to know people first before designing.
There are some buildings that the world watches and some that the profession watches. More than the design, the process of design makes it more beautiful. Where a designer interprets the brief “client’s given-and to the lay person, understandable criteria”, into more ambiguous one of “sense of place”. Designing does not mean just making houses, or constructing useful things in general, but signified expressing oneself, communicating, arguing and freely creating cultural habitat. And in this process of expressing and communicating, it is important to remember with whom the designer is communicating, and to who is he expressing, other question is expressing what?
The buildings that exist are activated, because of peoples’ needs and wishes, and they are live because of their active participation.
The challenge is to understand the process design, and the ways of bringing this about.
Buildings are like people, they have a soul, they feel and they like people, they are liked by people, at times hated too. When I say they are like people I can hereby categorize them into:
· Good looking buildings
· Good buildings &
· Good buildings that are good looking
Design can be defined more on experience basis than form. A design does not become good just by a single sensory perception called “sight”, but a good design is the one that serves all of them, or at least attempts to fulfill some of them. A good design is not the one that “looks good” but is the one that feels good. A good design is responsive of the contemporary movements to the needs of users, a review of the development of processes and methods of design approaches, and a redefinition of design in terms of users experience, not physical form.
A design that is natural, that is comprehensible, by grounding the meaning of architectural expression in a given cultural situation. A good design is a design where the user can relate himself. A building is like a body, and the user is like a soul, and it is the user that makes the design alive.
It is not the award winning design that is beautiful but it is the test of use that makes it beautiful. A good design is responsive to user wishes; it develops a pattern language that enables the users to shape their own environment, wherever permitted. A good design emphasis on the software aspect of design- use, experience, and perception, than on the hardware aspect- physical form.
The design should serve the purpose for which the building is intended to. A good design should also have the character of the place, it should relate to the human scale. It should be beautiful in a sense that it should be a pleasure to be there, experiencing it. If it were an office building, the employees should feel the pleasure of working there, at the same time it should motivate and force them to behave in a disciplined manner. The building should also have a character of the purpose, it should be overpowering if it is a governmental building, and it should be welcoming it is a public building. A good design should also be part of the natural landscape.
And depending upon all these necessitates designing at the scale of life itself.
In short I mean that user’s requirements take over the major dictator of design capability. And we have the technology, so the only goal for the designer is to input user lifestyle into the design, making the design more flexible for users of different cultural backgrounds, and generally considering the social context. In other words a disciplined interlocking of logic and art. You have to know people first before designing.
There are some buildings that the world watches and some that the profession watches. More than the design, the process of design makes it more beautiful. Where a designer interprets the brief “client’s given-and to the lay person, understandable criteria”, into more ambiguous one of “sense of place”. Designing does not mean just making houses, or constructing useful things in general, but signified expressing oneself, communicating, arguing and freely creating cultural habitat. And in this process of expressing and communicating, it is important to remember with whom the designer is communicating, and to who is he expressing, other question is expressing what?
The buildings that exist are activated, because of peoples’ needs and wishes, and they are live because of their active participation.
The challenge is to understand the process design, and the ways of bringing this about.
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