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The Big Four (part 2)

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The Big Four (part 2) Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Walter Gropius (1883-1969) ... Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: The Big Four (part 2)


1
The Big Four (part 2)
  • Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

2
  • Walter Gropius (1883-1969)
  • Worked for Behrens 1910-11 but was 15 years
    younger
  • More concerned with the social implications of
    machine construction
  • Work must be established in palaces that give
    the workman, now a slave to industrial labour,
    not only light, air and hygiene, but also an
    indication of the great common idea that drives
    everything. Only then can the individual submit
    to the impersonal without losing the joy of
    working together for that common good previously
    unattainable by a single individual.

3
  • Advocated an architecture of technical
    rationalism in this stage of his career he
    believed that the machine can be spiritualised
    by means of art
  • He opposed Mathesius (typifying) for his
    legislative, totalising, bureaucratic approach
  • Artistic conceptualisation should be free and
    original and not controlled by the state
    bureaucracy and the big business
  • Like Behrens nature and technology can be
    transfigured by spirit (Geist)

4
  • Fagus Factory (1911-12)
  • Shows the differences in approach between
    Behrens and Gropius
  • Different programme modest, provincial factory
    which allowed for a different agenda modesty,
    lack of symbolic charge, no grand symbolic claims
    (as was the case with AEG)
  • It becomes prophetic of the objective Modern
    Movement of the 1920s
  • Projecting bay windows and recessed, tilted
    masonry, similar to AEG, but
  • The tilt is pragmatic the brick piers are
    attempting to disappear (anti-monumental,
    anti-symbolic) the facade appears made of glass
    instead of buttresses, void corners, no
    impressionistic rounding

5
  • Its classicism is abstract and discreet, a matter
    of geometry
  • Its illusionism brings the transcendental
    qualities of materials to the fore (glass and its
    mystical connotations)
  • Materiality and form are synthesised in a new
    way art and pragmatism coexist no conflict
    between Typisierung and the role of the
    individual artist-architect
  • Prophetic of the new architectural discourse to
    emerge in Germany around 1923

6
  • Weimar Germany, 1920-33
  • Architecture in Germany around 1922 reflects
    changes in the visual arts in general
  • Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement
  • The term first used in the context of painting
    it is realism with a socialist flavour
  • In architecture Adolf Behne Art, Craft,
    Technology essay, 1922
  • division of labour inaugurated by the machine
    brought into play higher awareness
  • The worker would come to understand his role
    within the totality within the industrialised
    society similar to Gropiuss views from 1911

7
  • Academy of Fine Arts, Weimar
  • Gropius succeeds Van de Velde as the director in
    1919 and is given the task to create a new School
    of Architecture and Applied Art
  • He renames the school Bauhaus Bauhaus Minifesto
    1919
  • The integration of arts with crafts a standard by
    then Gropius wants to save the artistic culture
    from the materialism of industrial capitalism by
    a spiritual revolution
  • Starts off more expressionist but by 1929
    incorporates New Objectivity, De Stijl and
    LEsprit Nouveau
  • This initiated by van Doesburgs presence in
    Weimar from 1921 and by ideas from Russian
    Constructivism
  • Turning point in 1923 with the first Bauhaus
    Exhibition Art and Technology a New Unity
    Gropius pushes an architectural agenda model
    house built (Haus am Horn)

8
  • 1925 Bauhaus moves to Dessau new building and
    staff houses
  • The first major structures realised in his
    dynamic functional manner
  • The body of the school broken into programmatic
    elements reassembled into an open form
  • Influence of both Constructivism and De Stijl
  • Forms are pure (reflects Le Corbusier and Oud)
    while retaining features (glazing projected in
    front of the wall plane) from Gropiuss earlier
    work

9
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10
Bauhaus Dessau, Directors Office
11
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12
Walter Gropius, Total Theatre project, 1927
13
  • Moholy-Nagy House, Bauhaus, 1925, Desau

14
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15
  • Housing programmes in this period remarkably
    dominated by the avant-garde (precedent in
    Holland with Oud and Berlage for Amsterdam)
  • Like the Garden Suburbs before WWI these
    Siedlungen were in enclaves on the outskirts of
    cities
  • Higher density and consisted of apartment blocks
    up to 5 storeys
  • Generally organised in parallel blocks aligned
    north-south
  • Aesthetic rules from Neue Sachlichkeit stripped
    of ornament and flat roofs use of coloured
    surfaces
  • Rational layouts not always popular Adolf Behne
    criticesed them

16
  • Siemensstadt, 1928, Berlin, (Gropius)
  • Some degree of formal differentiation (overall
    plan by Hans Scharoun)
  • General divide in Germany of the period (marked
    by Behne) functionalists versus rationalists
  • The former come from Expressionism unique
    buildings the latter derive solutions applicable
    to various cases
  • Examples often straddle both to various degrees
    (Hans Scharoun, Schminke House, 1933, Loebau)

17
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18
  • Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969)
  • Gropius had a reputation in organisation Mies
    had it in aesthetics
  • Reduced all problems to a kind of essential
    simplicity
  • Two opposing tendencies in his work enclosure of
    function in a general cubic container (partly
    derived from his neoclassical early stage) and
    the articulation of the building in response to
    the fluidity of life (but not figural as with
    Expressionists)
  • Neutral forms create systems flexible enough to
    respond to any situation configurations are
    unique, while their constitutive elements are
    similar
  • His projects between the wars show the struggle
    between neoclassical objectification and
    Neoplasticist fragmentation

Riehl House, 1907. Berlin Wolf House, 1925-7,
Guben
19
  • His background and education similar to Le
    Corbusiers, but his neoclassical phase lasted 2
    decades
  • In his 40s when he completed his first
    Modernist-Constructivist building
  • After the First World War he met a circle of
    artists and writers, including van Doesburg and
    El Lissitzky and was influenced by them
  • Early constructivist projects progressively
    become fragmented and articulated so that the
    external form reflects internal subdivision
  • This shows influences of the English free-style
    house, Berlage, and Wright but is mainly
    immediately preceded by De Stijl

20
  • Tugendhat House, Brno,1928-30
  • New stage in development
  • Brick is abandoned for render painted white
  • Monolithic cubic mass, with a set-back,
    fragmented upper floor (where the street entrance
    is) reminiscent of his neoclassical projects
  • The living room enormous space divided by fixed
    yet free-standing screens
  • South and east fully glazed with floor-to-ceiling
    plate-glass windows
  • The cubic volume is clear but it is made totally
    transparent classical closure and the infinite
    sublime combined by means of modern technology

21
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22
  • German Pavilion for the Barcelona International
    Exposition, 1929 (rebuilt 1986)
  • The enclosing cube is gone and the entire space
    defined through independent horizontal and
    vertical planes
  • The planes dont disappear into infinity but turn
    back on themselves to form open courts
  • In both projects the roof supported by an
    independent grid of columns
  • Too slender to support the roof and are helped by
    the wall planes
  • They are signs marking the modular grid, rather
    than columns

23
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24
  • Between 1931 and 1935 (and after WW2) a series of
    houses which adapt the Barcelona Pavilion
    plan-type to domestic use plans increasingly
    introverted
  • Nature still dominant in his sketches the house
    frames a view in which nature is idealised

25
Farnsworth House, 1946-50, Plano (IL)
26
  • Often assumed that the minimalist distillation in
    Mies has to do with commitment to the craft of
    building, but he appears more engaged with
    idealising and mediating techniques of graphic
    representation
  • His criteria ideal and visual to a great degree
    not constructional
  • He uses materiality but in a montage way
  • Miess conception of architecture followed the
    dialectic tendency of German Idealism to think in
    terms of opposites. According to the Neoplatonic
    aesthetics that influenced his thinking, the
    transcendental world is reflected in the world of
    the senses. (Colquhoun)

27
  • Mies in America
  • The development of the corporate office building
    influenced by his work at the same time he
    stayed detached from the needs of his clients
  • Crown Hall, Illinois Institute of Technology,
    Chicago (1940-56)
  • Assemblage of rectangular pavilions that conform
    to the abstract conditions of the American grid
  • Schinkel influence evident

28
Lake Shore Drive Apartments, 1948-51,
Chicago Miess American projects provided the
formal syntax for SOM and Saarinen
29
  • His approach to perfect a type that distils his
    quest for the will of the epoch solution, then
    he repeats it regardless of the example
  • Use of I-beams in his curtain-wall facades first
    developed in Lake Shore Drive
  • Ambiguous can be read as mullions or columns,
    bear structural connotations but are also
    decorative as they are welded to the surface of
    the pre-existing structure
  • He rejected Le Corbusiers individualism but
    his minimal forms are still rhetorical and
    remnants of a high art tradition
  • Seagram Building 1954-58, New York
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