Lecture 3
From Here to Modernity
Mies van der Rohe
Crown Hall, Chicago,
1952-6
Michael Shewan
Gray’s School of Art,
1966
Mies van der Rohe
Farnsworth House,
Illinois, 1946-50
Josef and Anni Alber’s living room at the Dessau Bauhaus,
1920s
Josef and Anni Alber’s living room in Connecticut USA, 1970s
The minimum could be
defined as the perfection that
an artefact achieves when it
is no longer possible to
improve it by subtraction.
This is the quality that an
object has when every
component, every detail, and
every junction has been
reduced or condensed to the
essentials. It is the result of
the omission of the
inessentials.
John Pawson - Minimum,
1996
Flowers, even salt and
pepper get in the way…
John Pawson
Evolution is synonymous with
the removal of ornament
from objects of everyday use
Adolf Loos
(Ornament and Crime, 1928)
John Pawson 1990s
Utopia / Dystopia
Things to Come 1936
Things to Come
William Cameron
Menzies
1936
Utopia / Dystopia
Thamesmead, London
1960s
Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye, 1928-31
‘This is a shot of the main
façade … it’s somewhat
blank and forbidding …
giving the impression
(later to be disproved) of a
completely symmetrical
building.’
Nathan Coley, Villa Savoye, 1997
‘The site is expansive,
bordered by trees on three
sides, and has long views
towards the softly rolling
fields and valleys.’
‘At first sight, there is a
shock of recognition - a
sense of formal
inevitability. What can be
more natural than this
horizontal white box,
poised on pillars, set off
against the rural
surroundings, the far
panorama and the sky?’
‘This shows you how the long
window becomes part of the
façade solution.’
‘The moment one steps
inside the villa one finds a
new structural rhythm
taking over.’
Vladimir Tatlin
Monument to the Third
International,
Petrograd, 1920
Dan Flavin
Untitled (monument for
V. Tatlin) 1975
My arrangements I’ve
found are essentially the
simplest I can arrive at,
given a material and a
place …
Carl Andre
Carl Andre (1935-)
Equivalent VIII, 1966
Mathieu Mercier
Drum and Bass, 2003
Combat(after Rodchenko),
2003
David Mabb
Self Portrait posing as
Rodchenko, dressed in
a Rodchenko
Production Suit made
from the ‘Fruit’
William Morris fabric
2002
Peter van der Jagt (Droog Design)
Bottom’s Up doorbell, 1994
Less is More
Mies van der Rohe
Less is a Bore
Robert Venturi
Marcel Breuer 1925
Alessandro Mendini, Redesign of Modern
Movement Chairs - Wassily by Breuer, 1978
I like elements which are hybrid rather than
‘pure’, compromising rather than ‘clean’,
distorted rather than ‘straightforward’,
ambiguous rather than ‘articulated’, perverse as
well as impersonal, boring as well as
‘interesting’, conventional rather than
‘designed’, accommodating rather than
excluding, vestigial as well as well as
innovating, inconsistent and equivocal rather
than direct and clear.
Robert Venturi 1966 (Architect)
I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity
of meaning; for the implicit function as well as
the explicit function.
Robert Venturi 1966 (Architect)
The Titanic - Photomontage, Stanley Tigerman, 1978, USA
Functionalism, Yes, But.
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown
1929
2003
We can no longer fulfill
our obligations as
architects if we carry
on as cake decorators.
Our role is far greater
than that. We, the
authors of
architecture, have to
take on the task of
reinvestigating
Modernity
Zaha Hadid 1983
Zaha Hadid
Terminus, Strasbourg
France, 2001
Andreas Gursky,
Hong Kong and
Shanghai Bank,
1994
Surely it is time for a
new Baroque, based on
the clean, cold legacy
of Modernism
Contemporary
Magazine 2004
Won Ju Lim
Ruby, 2001
Modernism is the expression by
individual human beings of how they
will live their own present, and
consequently there are a thousand
modernisms for every thousand persons.
Octavio Paz (Nobel Prize reception speech)
To Modernity and Beyond?
(happy christmas)