Avant-Garde movements in terms of Normative and Non-Normative Architecture
During the 20th Century various avant-garde movements have emerged within the context of major architecture. Normative architecture is termed as the architecture of everyday; the major architecture. This position is apolitical, territorial and conservative. The avant-garde takes the opposing position to normative architecture in that the status-quo is not what the leading edge is about. This minor architecture is political and deterritorialized. The 20th Century saw many changes on what it meant to be avant-garde. Leading up to this period of time it changed from universal civilization (18th), anti-industrial & gothic revival (19th), art for art’s sake (late 19th) and lead into the technological progress in the 20th Century. The remainder of this study will cover what the avant-garde is and what changes in thought have done to it over the modern era.
Repetition is about tradition. This is the stance of the Post-Structuralists where the thinkers proclaim that tradition can not be escaped because tradition defines what is outside of it. The avant-garde, the front and leading edge, of culture is continuously being replaced by the next. When the shift occurs, the once avant-garde position moves towards the center of the fabric of society and in time becomes part of tradition. Architecture in these terms is the same; it is always about creating its boundaries. In any period of architecture it can be said it is in one of three phases: Becoming & Changing, Current or Institutionalizing.
The avant-garde in Post-Structuralism has been compared to the Sublime. The Sublime is that sense of feeling terror but knowing you are in safety. That moment in time where the sublime occurs is the avant-garde, but after that moment it follows the same slope. Once the terror no longer dominates it has lost its power and the meaning takes on a completely new meaning to something that once held power. That conversion changes from being avant-garde to tradition.
Not all of the 20th century thinkers believed that the avant-garde was possible. Bernard Tschumi detailed a similar theory to the Sublime. He theorized that you can not both think and experience at the same time. Architecture in this view exists between the conceptual (a thing if the mind) and the perceptual (experience); the pyramid and the labyrinth. Can not be both, but it is. This dichotomy between mind and body presents a paradox. Tschumi also details an idea of architecture in terms of fireworks. “Produce a delight that cannot be sold or bought, that has no exchange value and cannot be integrated in the production cycle.” Phenomenologists argued the avant-garde as well as but as a struggle between socialism and capitalism. These theorists believed it was impossible and came up with the term arrieve-garde. The arrieve-garde was a theory that you don’t start from zero, but you also do not return to the past. They called for distance to be made from the Enlightenment and from the reactionary impulse to return to the architectonic forms of the preindustrial past.
“Over the past century-and-a-half avant-garde culture has assumed different roles, at times facilitating the process of modernization and thereby acting, in part, as a progressive, liberative form, at times being virulently opposed to the positivism of bourgeois culture.”
Posted in Architectural Theory and tagged 20th century, anti-industrial, architect, architecture, avant-garde, bernard tschumi, culture, Discussion, gothic revivial, history, modernization, normative, phenomenology, preindustrial, review, style, sublime by Studio Render with 75 comments.
Making in Architecture
“Making in architecture has been defined as the process of conception, creation and realization of a building design. In the early part of the twentieth century, ‘Making’ has been mediated by the presence of a modern consciousness that responds to a new reality.”
From this point on, this paper will be about this paper. The intent of this paper is to discuss the new reality in the terms of Architecture of the early twentieth century. This is a Modernist thought process; the reality of this paper is that the past must be referenced to validate the content. The early twentieth century brought about a new thought process in Architecture, Modernism, which included styles such as futurism, constructivism and purism. This modern consciousness changed the reality of ‘Making’ in architecture, but what was this new reality? How was this new work conceived, created and realized? What were the factors behind these changes?
We are looking at a shift in the way the world thought. This shift was made possible by asking the right question: How? This question alone brought about consciousness in reason, the laws of nature and the order of the universe. Man had discovered that, “though one cannot know the truth, man can at least know what he makes himself”. By asking How instead of What, homo faber (man the maker) proceeded down a path of discovery and development by discontinuing the linear nature of the past to the present. This Modern movement dealt with a self-referential nature in architecture, looking onto itself for answers. By architecture referencing itself and not history, gave intent to the ‘Making’ of architecture as well as giving it a direction. The break from history, self-referential signs, progressive experience of a building by movement and volume in architecture all show the language of this new reality.
Mass production and standardization of the Industrial Revolution brought the Purism, the Bauhaus and the International Style into the vanguard of this new reality in ‘Making’. The industrial revolution influenced the Bauhaus that based the work of ‘Making’ as a team-work effort or an industrial production. A statement from the Bauhaus talked of this, “Building should be the result of a collective effort and that each artist-craftsman should contribute his part with full awareness of its purpose in relation to the whole building”. Conception of design for the French Purists like Le Corbusier contained principals of Architecture as a volume rather than a mass and regularity rather than axial symmetry for means of ordering. Purism by definition breaks down to the reduction of all buildings to the basic geometric shapes of rectangle, plane surface, cube and cylinder. The Bauhaus thinkers also used the universal truth or pure geometry and object type, although abstract painting influenced and not the cubism of the Purists. The Bauhaus thinkers with the influence of constructivist design dealt with structure and the space it occupies. In contrast, Mies van der Rohe used walls as a device for direction and to define space instead of using them as a load bearing piece of a building as seen in Classical Architecture.
Creation for the International Style dealt with the following main objects: pilotis, continuous strips of fenestration, glass walls and flat roofs. “More than a revolution in building technique, though its characteristic effects of hovering volumes and interpenetrating planes admittedly relied on the machine-age materials of concrete, steel and glass”. The thin Pilotis we used to show they did not have to support a heavy mass from the volume above, usually a concrete geometric shape, like as seen in Poissy, France with Villa Savoye. The ribbon windows were created to show that the wall was a non-load bearing object and acted more as the tightly wrapped skin around the structure. These principals were used as an exaggeration of the idea, to drive the point home. The Bauhaus statement regarding creation stated, “We aim to create, organic architecture whose inner logic will be radiant and naked, unencumbered by lying facings and trickery; we want architecture adapted to our world of machines, radios and fast cars…with the increasing strength of the new materials – steel, concrete, glass – and with the new audacity of engineering, the ponderousness of the old methods of building is giving way to a new lightness and airiness”. The Bauhaus had to deal with ruins of a defeated nation in Germany as well as the financial effects of the war, Walter Gropius said of this, “The benumbered world is shaken up, the old human spirit is invalidated and in flux towards a new form”. The new form was a horizontal layering of space and the expression of hovering planes, the building as a whole being formed on cantilevered trays on pillars with brackets. The use of marble, steel and glass with the design of a recessed column line eliminated the vertical corner line and expressed the horizontal nature as well as showing a continuation of material.
The realization of Architects like Le Corbusier was that the “vast imaginative world included a vision of the ideal city, a philosophy of nature and a strong feeling for the Classical tradition”. The Modernists of this time were based in thought of a self-referential nature, but the past can be seen as the reference for aspects of most designs of that period, including Le Corbusier use of the golden section and human scale ordering. The modern use of these principals can not be critiqued in a traditional manner to understand, one must see the intention behind the idea. Modern architecture is also a style that cannot be totally realized without the movement of the observer. The progressive experience of a building is accomplished only by movement of the observer. One must move through spaces to fully understand it as the building reveals itself or as in a panoramic operation. The constructivists realized that with mass production becoming the overriding force in construction that “efficiency for its purpose” became their motto. They also realized that buildings had a formal relationship between structure and the space it occupies.
There was a new reality in the early twentieth century in terms of ‘Making’ and the new reality it created. By discussing what caused this movement, what factors went into changing the world’s views and showing how different styles of Architectural thought in that period all used similar aspects for ‘Making’. It can be said that the Modern movement in the early twentieth century can be defined as a method of thinking that breaks away from history, uses self-referential signs, shows progressive expression of a building by movement and has a notion of volume. To end with a quote of Mies van der Rohe which is commonly misused, “Less is More”, the truth and purity of this paper is completed by the lack of that which is not essential.
Encyclopedia of Modern Architecture. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1964.
Curtis, William J R. Modern Architecture. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1987.
Gardiner, Stephen. Le Corbusier / Stephen Gardiner. New York: Da Capo Press, 1988.
Stevenson, Neil. Architecture. New York: DK Publishing Inc., 1997.
Trachtenberg, Marvin and Hyman, Isabelle. Architecture: From Prehistory to Post-Modernism. Netherlands: Harry N. Abrams, B.V. 1986.
Posted in Architectural Theory and tagged architecture, bauhaus, constructivists, development, Discussion, golden section, history, homo faber, industry, international style, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, modern, modernists, organic architecture, pilotis, purism, purists, review, style, technology, theory, twentieth century, villa savoye, Walter Gropius by Studio Render with 77 comments.
Structuralism (1917-1968)
Structuralism (1917-1968), brought on a language based theory which was based in binary oppositions. Ferdinand de Saussure began this journey with the introduction of linguistic meaning as a function of differential relations between signs. The object to be viewed and the object viewed from. This signifier and signified theory was controlled by the fact that “A” means “A”. Words connect to objects and that is where understanding and meaning are controlled; everything is interconnected. In the same thought process the individual is part of the whole and the structure is the center of reality. The question then changes from “Is it good” to “How does it work”.
Adam A. Dailide – Studio Render Inc.
Posted in Architectural Theory and tagged architecture, Discussion, history, structuralism, style by Studio Render with 14 comments.
