Modern architecture and design
16 Aug 1995 21:25
I once asked Mies van der Rohe, then my faculty colleage at Illinois Institute of technology, how he got the opportunity to build the Tugendhat house --- a startlingly modern design at the time of its construction. The prospective owner had come to Mies after seeing some of the quite conventional houses he had designed earlier in the Netherlands when he was still an apprentice. "Wasn't the client shocked," I asked, "when you put before him your glass and metal design?" "Yes," said Mies, viewing the tip of his cigar reflectively, "he wasn't very happy at first. But then we smoked some good cigars ... and we drank some glasses of a good Rhine wine ... and then he began to like it very much."
---Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd ed., p. 151
Bauhaus and related movements. International Style. Views of participants; of contemporary critics; of present-day critics. Of post-modern critics. Practical success or failure. Historical roots. Ties to other sorts of modernism. See also architecture and design in general.
- See:
- Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age [Goes as far back as the 1860s (does he mention the Crystal Palace? I can't recall) and up to 1930. Carefully distinguishes what people claimed to be doing (e.g., creating "functional" forms, adapting to "industry") from what they actually did (e.g., produce highly stylized luxury objects), and their true sources (sometimes startlingly academic) from their purported sources. Fascinating material on the influence of German industrial policy, Cubism and especially Futurism on architecture. --- I should say that the focus is pretty exclusively European; Wright, e.g., walks on stage, is idolized by the younger generation, and walks off.]
- Peter Blake
- The Master Builders: Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright
- Form Follows Fiasco
- No Place Like Utopia
- Austin Bunn, Long Live Technic, Feed 23 July 1998 [Nice essay on the Russian Constructivists; some vaporizing about their connection to Web design (in truth: now that there's a profession of web-page makers who've been to design school, they feel a need to find artistically and intellectually respectable ancestors somewhere); a few small errors of historical fact]
- S. Gideion, Space, Time and Architecture
- Elaine Hochman, Architects of Fortune: Mies van der Rohe and the Third Reich
- To read/see:
- Rayner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis: US Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture [Blurb, intro]
- David P. Billington and David P. Billington, Jr., Power, Speed and Form: Engineers and the Making of the Twentieth Century [Blurb]
- Ricardo Daza, Looking for Mises
- Mauro F. Guillén, The Taylorized Beauty of the Mechanical: Scientific Management and the Rise of Modernist Architecture [Blurb, ch. 1]
- Walter Gropius, New Architecture + the Bauhaus
- Elaine Hochman, Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism
- Pat Kirkham, Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century
- Norbert Lynton, Tatlin's Tower: Monument to Revolution
- L. Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision (a manifesto of modernist architecture)
- Alina Payne, From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism
