20th Century Architecture Modernism Bauhaus DeStijl and International Style cc

this next lecture is on architecture and the new kinds of architecture that were being founded and the new styles that developed in the early 1900s and in order to understand this new kind of architecture what you have to do is first understand some of the buildings that came before for instance when we discuss the rebuild of Paris and the reconstruction of Paris by Blair and Othman in the middle of the 1800s a lot of the things that were going on in terms of the reconstruction of the spaces and the architecture we're done in factories sort of off-site for instance wrought iron and cast iron fixtures and things like that windows things were starting to become modularized and standardized sizes there's also a couple of other structures that we studied earlier for instance Sir Walter Paxton's Crystal Palace in which it's just basically a big green house but there was quite a bit of ornamentation on it that referenced classicism there are also some other structures for instance the Brooklyn Bridge and the Eiffel Tower that somewhat relate to this what I'm suggesting is that with this factory that we're looking at there was a new concept that began to be developed and it's very possible that it was basically because of industrialization that the style grew out of basically a lack of desire to ornament factory buildings now one of the things that they developed was the ability to cast iron and to make steel i-beams and also to make reinforced concrete with iron rebar and also to pour bigger slabs of concrete and what this allowed Walter Gropius and Adolph Meyer to do in this Factory were the ability to actually sort of make big floors with sort of columns running through them and then at the same time have the windows sheet the entire exterior of the wit of the building and even have the corners of the building be completely windows because you didn't need exterior walls to support the interior space is everything was sort of supported by an interior structure of sort of pylons or or almost columns running throughout the structure and this allowed for a lot of light to flow into the spaces and also allowed for large open spaces in the interior of the building that combined with the development of electricity and the development of certain kinds of engines and things like that they really needed big wide-open spaces in which to produce products and they needed a lot of light in the interior and it made more sense to have natural light flowing into the space than actually to have any kind of other light electric light or arc lighting or anything like that so when this building began to be built and when people saw it they started thinking well who needs the extra ornamentation that came out of the earlier periods that we associate with classical buildings for instance the ionic Doric and Corinthian orders seemed sort of irrelevant even as it as a decoration on the exterior of the building and this probably relates an awful lot to what's going on in terms of painting as well that there's a lot of abstract painting being developed in the early 1900's and if even if you think about cubism that's that's an influence and then of course Casimir Malevich in his Suprematist painting and even Vasily Kandinsky and some others what the Germans decided to do Walter Gropius in particular was design a kind of school based around an aesthetic in which form and function were wedded together form follows function and so this school called the Bauhaus school is kind of part school part factory part educational Factory if you think about it it uses the same technology that we saw in the feigus Factory and has these curtain walls of glass on the exterior that meet more or less in the corners the building itself is made out of large big slabs of concrete that are reinforced there's a lot of natural light going into it and um if you think about like when you went to school and how for instance gymnasiums and cafeterias were multifunctional and you had these accordion walls going across the spaces I think the same thing was going on with the interior of this Factory and one of the other things that they did was they had electrical conduits and power conduits running throughout the floors and also hanging from the ceilings so what they could do is they could actually reorganize and redesign the space more or less improvisationally on-the-fly and they could have an interior space where they could teach a class and then change it into another kind of classroom very quickly by just closing or opening walls and moving equipment in and out on wheels and this kind of aesthetic also extended into a design aesthetic of actually industrialized objects one of the main ideas behind the Bauhaus school of design was that history was no longer important at least the history of design and I think that when you think about for instance a lot of the movements in terms of painting one of the things that a lot of the painters sort of claimed including Dada and and even Picasso and Casimir Malevich and and Vasily Kandinsky and and the blue riders dabla rider was the idea that they didn't wanted to come up with something new and exciting and different so it was okay to discard past artistic movements and come up with new movements that were disregarding the past so in this way when they actually taught art at to school they kind of taught the idea that you don't need to learn about the classical orders you don't need to learn about classicism you can make up a new style in which industrial design dictates the form of things and that form and function and how things are manufactured need to be kind of combined and put into one basic idea this chair by Marcel Breuer which if you can get hold of one of these now is super super expensive but really kind of expresses a lot of these ideas in terms of the Bauhaus aesthetic or about house ideas of design and what I'm talking about is the Marcel Breuer chair is basically aluminum or or some kind of chrome tubing in which you have either leather or a synthetic fabric that goes between these tubes and supports the pressure points of the body where you would sit and provide cushioning just at the most important ergonomic spots on the body and this is the beginning of office ergonomics that we know of today for instance when you go to buy an office chair you actually look for lumbar support and and how it's going to support your body but it's not very important overall in some ways that the chair looks cushioned or padded all over the place and so this chair is basically a paring down an abstraction of what a chair is and provides support just at the most important places but isn't overly ornamented there's no classical ornamentation certainly on it well this style of painting or if not painting this style of design was considered anathema when the Germans and the the political rise of Nazism and even with Mussolini in Italy started to come to power mainly because in those countries the leaders the fascist leaders really wanted to have a return to the Roman Empire and they saw classical architecture and and basically greco-roman kinds of designs and buildings as being a sort of evidence and a symbol of that kind of power and so when the Nazis came to power just before World War two there was a move against this new sort of modern design and it was seen as sort of a degenerate and a bad thing so a lot of the designers who were living in Germany at this point in time actually fled to the United States and other countries and that's why it really sprung up here as a dominant style one of my students in class suggested to me that the kinds of things created by the Bauhaus look a awful lot like IKEA x' designs and I think that she was not too far off in that description earlier when I used to teach this class I used to think about all the great things that you could buy very cheaply at places like Target and also IKEA and Target in particular I remember when when Target first became popular about 20 years ago I guess there were a lot of things that I could go in and I was like wow this is really a beautifully designed simple kind of item and I can afford this and the same thing kind of happens in the Bauhaus and with IKEA and I think that this is what led to modern design today is if you look at these objects they're made out of fairly simple or humble kinds of materials sometimes glass plexiglass chrome and and rubber and they're the kinds of things that could be manufactured very easily on a machine without any extra ornamentation on them and they look really good and because machines can handle simple kinds of bends and curves and things like that and the more ornamentation you put on something the more expensive it would become these are less handcrafted and sort of almost punched out in a production-line kind of way but the basic design of them is really thought out before it's ever created and I think that's at the heart of what the Bauhaus aesthetic is that form and function are put together but you still need to make these things look aesthetic and beautiful and most of the objects that come out of the Bauhaus design have a sort of curvilinear quality to them they're often based on simple geometric forms and using simple clean kinds of materials that really look great when they're shined up and are easy to manufacture you now the style of the Bauhaus as I pointed out before really corresponds a lot to abstract painting that was going on in the early 20th century and I think Pete Mondrian who is a Dutch painter really exemplifies a lot of the major components of Bauhaus design and also of an architectural design called modernism also referred to as the International style and I think that if you get confused on an exam probably one of the safest ways you can kind of figure out all three or four of these architectural styles they're going to look at is you can call them modernism as a big umbrella that this is the modernist aesthetic but then there are sort of sub styles of them and and the style that we're going to be looking at in a minute is called distill or de style but I think that it's pretty safe to call it all modernism so Piet Mondrian if you look at this painting sort of boils down or abstracts and reduces painting to a simple series of geometric forms and shapes that are beautiful and also kind of communicate an idea particularly in boogie-woogie it was related to boogie woogie music and how boogie music is kind of regular but with sort of highlights and and some little improvisation zin it and I think that he's really effectively in visual form kind of communicating the musical form of boogie-woogie music Mondrian and another designer named tail van dos Berg started a magazine called the Style magazine and their aesthetic was more or less based in flat graphic design in terms of painting but they applied this aesthetic to architectural items and also items of furniture and basic industrial design and so when you look at Te'o van dos Berg's painting the simultaneous counter composition which you can see is it looks almost indistinguishable from Piet Mondrian paintings that it's a simple boiled down abstract geometric design that uses basically primary and secondary colors no tertiary colors and this clean overall design influenced what they were trying to say in terms of architecture and the style that they were trying to bring to the Dutch and even in terms of architecture so this sort of painting / graphic design is actually supposed to be a isometric projection of the interior space of a home but is also clearly a beautiful composition at the same time and these sort of vertical diamonds that you see floating above things and these orthogonals that you see it's not using one point or two point linear perspective they're actually using something called isometric perspective that we studied when we were looking at the perspective in the Renaissance and you can go back to one of my lectures online and look at the the lecture that I have on perspective and that I'll explain it a little bit more but this was a sort of projection of how the interior space should look in terms of buildings and this relates somewhat to the Bauhaus that we just looked at because what they thought of was the idea of having sort of floating walls that could be slid in and out almost like Japanese Shoji screens and that everything needs to be painted in sort of beautiful colors but primary and secondary saturated hues that would be very clean and the interior space that you were existing in would almost be like living within a nicely designed and painted painting so Gerrit Rietveld designs this house called the Schroder house and one of the main concepts that he got from from teo van osburgh and Mondrian was the idea of floating curtain walls and weightless floating walls as the is sort of the buzz terms and we're looking at a drawing that's meant to portray the interior of a space and it's done in linear perspective in this instance and you can see that there would be these walls that kind of drop down and and even pieces of furniture that were modularized and constructed out of fairly simple clear slabs of material and ornamented very minimally just with some color and that the walls and and spaces could be opened up and closed up again and they would be regular modularized units this is what the exterior of the house looks like and I think that when this building was first built it was really offensive to a lot of people and what I'm talking about is in particular it was built in a neighborhood that had a lot of traditional looking buildings and people would walk by and say this is cold and creepy looking and just kind of a negative aesthetic but eventually over time this aesthetics starts to win out somewhat and so as you walk around this building if you look at the way that the balcony walls and some of the exterior walls are constructed they're almost like simple designs that as you move as your perspective of the building kind of shifts it's almost like a moving abstract painting and that the walls that are placed on the exterior of the building are placed out just far enough that they sort of provide a curtain for the to block the view from people outside looking in but people who are inside the building since they have a slightly different vantage point can actually see out if they come very close to the windows and they can look down at the street another architect that we're going to be looking at later kind of uses this aesthetic as well Frank Lloyd Wright another thing that I want to point out is that since they are using the same kind of materials that were used by the Bauhaus you can see that the corners of these buildings often have windows that are meeting in the in the corners of them to allow a lot more light to come in little things that were sort of I guess you could call them ornamentation on the exterior of the building would be for instance little support poles and stuff like that would be painted in primary colors and you'd have this sort of intersecting almost graphic design of banisters and rails and these floating planes of big white material and nature kind of fits in with this just a little bit even though the building stands out from the environment in some ways having a garden around it almost sort of frames the plants and frames the the the actual organic things that are growing around the structure inside the structure is a sort of modular design and you can see in the background of this picture there's a bed in the corner and to the left of that you can see a radiator and the radiator is left exposed if you think about radiators that come from for instance the Victorian era in in the late 1800s often they're designed to look like a little almost uh they look like classical temples there's all this weird ornamentation on them but in this instance it's just basically kind of a bunch of tubes that are counterbalancing curves that are bolted against the wall and they're exposed and in this way they're kind of beautiful in a way because there's no excuse made for them to be anything but what they are which is a series of tubes that move hot steam around the bed in the corner is sort of built into the corner and then if you look to the right of that you can actually see that that wall is on tracks and you can subdivide the space or open the space as you need to depending on what's going on the chair that we're looking at has a sort of similar design to what we were looking at in terms of the the chair that we looked at before by Marcel Breuer where it basically supports most of the main body parts and is not really designed to be something that uses a lot of materials it's just as a design to support the major stress points of your body and even the angle is pretty comfortable so even though it's made out of a hard a sort of unforgiving material it still is fairly comfortable to sit in a chair of this style the other thing that the chair is kind of designed along is it looks a little bit like an abstract painting the way that some of the corners are painted different sort of complementary colors and that there are value shifts in the chair and it looks almost like a sort of sculptural version of one of piet mondrian paintings the next architect that we're going to look at is a swiss born architect namely a Corbusier that wasn't actually his name but that's the name that everybody knows him by and he is the main proponent for this international style or this modernism style and what liquor boy see a kind of did with his architecture was this idea of taking these what he called Pilate which were the sort of columns that were running through these big slabs and allowing the pillow D to support the building and this would allow for the exterior walls to not really support the structure and you could have these wide open spaces on the interior he also had an idea that a architectural building would be a sort of man machine that in some ways people were the organisms who were living inside a machine and that the Machine kind of took care of them and while this sounds vaguely de stopped dystopic to us and kind of Orwellian in some ways it was at that point in time a kind of new fangled idea that people really found aesthetically very pleasing and so he's using a design like this to create houses and to create buildings his most famous building is called the Villa Savoye and it's in France in the countryside and if you look at it it's floating above the landscape on a series of piloti or these sort of short columns and that the front of the building was designed in a way to take in the landscape that surrounded it there's also this weird sort of vaalu or this wall on the on the top you can see that there's a hole cut in the top of it and that little wall that you see that's cut through in the top is a balcony that frames the landscape so in a way he was trying to control your point of view of the landscape in some ways the architecture that we're looking at is really isolated from the landscape but in this Villa Savoye he's actually trying to use the building as a sort of lookout a Belvedere a a beautiful view of the landscape and even though it's you're removed from the landscape you don't have to deal with it you can actually still look at it as a beautiful kind of scene this photo kind of shows one of the things that's kind of innovative about the building and originally when it was built there wouldn't have been those other buildings behind it but that you could drive a car underneath the building and so men and machine are sort of wedded together and that in a way it's almost like scent or like that the cars would be able to drive underneath this building and that you could actually just step from your car practically right into the structure and not have to deal with the elements at all however there is an element of dealing with the elements because you can see that there are holes cut in the building that allow for light and air to flow through and use some natural circulation and cross ventilation in the structure and we'll take a closer look at that in a minute this photo kind of shows it a little bit better where you can actually see where the front door is and that you could actually drive your car as sort of on that apron of concrete that that surrounds the bottom of the building and the building would overhang it and protect you from rain and from Sun as you were getting in and out of your automobile the interior of the space is also it's kind of cool it's but it's also kind of a little cold and and unforgiving in some ways and what I'm suggesting is that you see conduits and you see steps that are fairly unornamented things are very clean painted white the banisters are just simple iron or steel tubes the piloti are floating through it and then there's this sort of curtain wall of glass with with little divisions in it and the spaces are flow through spaces and that's one of the things that's going to become very popular and dictates actually modern apartment living you ever noticed that your dining room flows right into your kitchen right into your living room that wasn't the case in the early or the late 1800s the late 1800s there was always a doorway between the different spaces and especially in Europe and Victorian America more or less there was this idea that you compartmentalize the spaces and you would close doors behind you especially to preserve heat but at this point in time they have all these conduits and heaters that are running through the structures and running through the buildings and would allow for a wide open space to be heated fairly evenly he also uses a series of ramps to get from one space to the other and he also does use stairways at times as well this is the second floor of the structure and as you move through the structure you have this wide open multi-use space and then on the left-hand side what happens is you can move through that wide open space and there's a sort of curtain wall of glass a sliding glass door that is very similar to porch doors today and that you can go out onto a patio that is semi sort of protected from the elements even though it has holes cut in the side walls as sort of open open windows without glass in them that would allow for air to flow through but would also kind of protect you from big gusts of wind and things like that and then to the left of that you can actually see as you move through the space there's another sort of ramp that leads to a top level another higher level and this higher level that you see on the left-hand side has a ramp leading up to it where you could actually sort of get a beautiful view of the landscape that you were standing above and you could enjoy nature without actually having to be exposed in it a lot of the concepts that I'm sort of proposing in this lecture really deal with the idea of schema and correction and so for instance when you start with earlier structures for instance the the building by honoré lab roost the the library at San John viev they were using a lot of the same kinds of techniques and technologies but they were doing things that would ornament those structures and make them more beautiful and they were sort of seen as unnecessary ornamentation by the time the 1900s came around in terms of comparing this building also against the villa rotunda by Andrea Palladio Palladio really did kind of in a way isolate the person who lived in the house from the environment by sort of placing the villa rotunda a little bit on a hilltop but it had these four views that looked out at the landscape and he was sort of controlling these these views of the landscape the same way that layer BCA does but the main difference I think in looking at Pilate owes architecture is that of course because he's working more or less during the Renaissance and mannerism he has good manners and he works with the traditional ornamentation that would be expected on a structure and that anything that didn't have traditional ornamentation would be considered sort of corrupt and so in this way in the 1900s the way that painting is abstracting and paring down forms architecture is doing the same thing

Channel: Kenney Mencher

Views: 31,029

Keywords: online, art, history

Id: DBCa_jbxGfI

Length: 27min 31sec (1651 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 11 2017