Art and Architecture VI

Lecture 1
Art and Architecture
V

Modern Art Modern

Movements Architectural
Movements Contemporary
Art Appreciation
Architectural
Modernism Theories

Art and Architecture VI

Topics
1. Modernism’s Origin – Advent of New Technologies and Philosophy
2. Walter Gropius and The International Style ( Bauhaus, Weissenhof)
3. Mies Van Der Rohe and Minimalism (Barcelona, Farnsworth)
4. Early Modern Skyscrapers (Mies’ Concept, Lever House, Seagram)
5. Frank Lloyd Wright ( Prairie, Usonian, Organic)
6. Le Corbusier (Five Points, Dom-inno, Brutalism)
7. Modernist Cities (Corbusier, Chandigarh, Brasilia)
8. Modern Art Movements (De Stijl, Cubism, Surrealism, Art Nouveau, Pop Art, Dadaism)
9. Postmodernism (Venturi, Johnson, Graves, Kahn, Gehry)
10. Postmodernist Movements ( Deconstructivism, Dynamism)
11. Futurist Architecture and Hi-tech Modernism (Sant’ Elia, Archigram, Kenzo Tange, Literature and movies, Contemporaries – Rogers, Piano, Foster, Safdie)
12. Architecture in the Digital Age (Parametricism, Machine Learning, IOT)
13. Hyper-rationalism (OMA, REX, BIG)
14. Regionalism (Wright, Bawa, Correa, Doshi, Baker)
15. Modernism & Contemporary Architecture in Bangladesh (Colonialism, Mazharul Islam, Contemporaries)
16. Sustainable Architecture (Life Cycle Cost, Green Standards, Commercialization, Key Issues)
Architectural Timeline

1850 1875 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1990 2010
First, A Recap…
The Architect’s Dream (Thomas Cole, 1840)
Representation of Vision of Architectural Beauty of the Period
Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution was a period in the late 18th and early 19th
centuries when major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, and
transportation had a profound effect on socioeconomic and cultural conditions
in Britain and subsequently spread throughout Europe and North America and
eventually the world, a process that continues as industrialization.

The start of the Industrial Revolution marked a major turning point in human
social history, comparable to the invention of farming or the rise of the first city-
states; almost every aspect of daily life and human society was eventually
influenced in some way.

The development of all-metal machine tools in the first two decades of the
19th century facilitated the manufacture of more production machines for
manufacturing in other industries.

The effects spread throughout Western Europe and North America during the
19th century, eventually affecting most of the world. The impact of this change
on society was enormous.

The intellectual revolutions and social disturbance which had taken place in the
meantime could no longer find a response in concepts which were based
entirely on traditional ideas of architecture.

Reference: Ashik Vaskor Mannan

Industrial Revolution
The growth of heavy industry brought a flood of new building materials—such as cast
iron, steel, and glass—with which architects and engineers devised structures hitherto
undreamed of in function, size, and form.

Prior to the late 19th century, the weight of a multistory building had to be supported
principally by the strength of its walls. The taller the building, the more strain this placed
on the lower sections. Since there were clear engineering limits to the weight such load-
bearing walls could sustain, large designs meant massively thick walls on the ground
floors, and definite limits on the building's height.

Forged iron and milled steel began to replace wood, brick and stone as primary materials
for large buildings. This change is encapsulated in the Eiffel Tower built in 1889.

In America, the development of cheap, versatile steel in the second half of the 19th
century helped change the urban landscape. The country was in the midst of rapid social
and economic growth that made for great opportunities in architectural design. A much
more urbanized society was forming and the society called out for new, larger buildings.
By the middle of the 19th century downtown areas in big cities began to transform
themselves with new roads and buildings to accommodate the growth. The mass
production of steel was the main driving force behind the ability to build skyscrapers
during the mid 1880s.

Steel framing was set into foundations of reinforced concrete, concrete poured around a
grid of steel rods (re-bar) or other matrices to increase tensile strength in foundations,
columns and vertical slabs.

Reference: https://learn.canvas.net/courses/24/pages/m9-architecture-and-the-industrial-revolution
Steam Engine (1775, James Watt) Bessemer Converter (Henry Bessemer, 1856)
Revolutionized Transportation & Industrial Production Reduced Cost of Steel Production for Industrial & Construction Use
Reasons behind Eurocentric Industrial
Revolution
Necessity is the mother of invention. By the early 18th century,
Great Britain had used up most of their trees for building houses and
ships and for cooking and heating. So they turned to coal that they
found near the surface of the earth. Soon they were digging deeper to
mine it. Their coal mines filled with water that needed to be removed;
horses pulling up bucketfulls proved slow going.

To the rescue came James Watt (1736–1819), a Scottish instrument-

maker who in 1776 designed an engine in which burning coal produced
steam, which drove a piston assisted by a partial vacuum. (There had
been earlier steam engines in Britain, and also in China and in Turkey,
where one was used to turn the spit that roasts a lamb over a fire.)

At the outset of the 19th century, British colonies in North America were
producing lots of cotton, using machines to spin the cotton thread on
spindles and to weave it into cloth on looms. When they attached a
steam engine to these machines, they could easily out-produce India,
up until then the world’s leading producer of cotton cloth. One steam
engine could power many spindles and looms. This meant that people
had to leave their homes and work together in factories.

Early in the 19th century the British also invented steam locomotives
and steamships, which revolutionized travel. In 1851 they held the
first world’s fair, at which they exhibited telegraphs, sewing
machines, revolvers, reaping machines, and steam hammers to
demonstrate they that were the world’s leading manufacturer of
machinery. By this time the characteristics of industrial society —
smoke rising from factories, bigger cities and denser populations,
railroads — could be seen in many places in Britain.
Reference: Khan Academy
Crystal Palace (1851, Joseph Paxton)
Precursor to Modern Steel and Glass Buildings
Crystal Palace
• The Crystal Palace was a cast-iron and plate-glass building originally erected in Hyde Park,
London, England, to house the Great Exhibition of 1851.

• More than 14,000 exhibitors from around the world gathered in the Palace's 990,000 square
feet (92,000 m2) of exhibition space to display examples of the latest technology developed in
the Industrial Revolution.

• Designed by horticulturalist & engineer Sir Joseph Paxton, the Great Exhibition building was
1,851 feet (564 m) long, with an interior height of 128 feet (39 m).

• Paxton’s design, which stemmed from his earlier works of making greenhouses for English
Noblemen – was borne of necessity of creating an enormous space in a short amount time. The
entire project was designed in only 9 days and built in 3 months.

• It was at the time the largest amount of glass ever seen in a building. It required the entire
supply of glass production of Britain for three months.

• Steel frames of massive spans created an enormous, airy space, flooded in sunlight with trees
and fountains in the interior.

• Clearstory openings were used for ventilation using the stack effect.

• Full-size elm trees attracted sparrows, which along with its droppings became a nuisance.
Sparrowhawks were brought in to kill the sparrows.

• The Crystal Palace had the first major installation of public toilets with flushing water
closets (WC).

• It demonstrated an unprecedented kind of spatial beauty , and in its carefully planned building
process, which included prefabricated standard parts, it foreshadowed industrialized building
and the widespread use of cast iron and steel.

A Greenhouse Designed by Paxton

Crystal Palace’s form and spatial simplicity with it’s industrial aesthetics is quite unlike anything at the time.
Equitable Life Insurance Building (New York,1867) Home Insurance Building (Chicago,1885)
First Safety Lift By Otis First Composite Steel Structure
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or
practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement in
the arts, its set of cultural tendencies and associated cultural movements,
originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western
society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In particular the
development of modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities,
followed then by the horror of World War I, were among the factors that
shaped Modernism.

Modernism is a trend of thought which affirms the power of human beings

to make, improve and reshape their built and designed environment, with
the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical
experimentation, thus in its essence both progressive and optimistic. The
term covers many political, cultural and artistic movements rooted in the
changes in Western society at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of
the twentieth century. Embracing change and the present, modernism
encompasses the works of artists, thinkers, writers and designers who
rebelled against nineteenth century academic and historicist traditions, and
confronted the new economic, social and political aspects of an emerging
fully industrialized world. Some people divide the 20th century into
movements designated Modernism and Postmodernism, whereas others
see them as two aspects of the same movement.

Reference: Ashik Vaskor Mannan

Early Modernist Pioneers
The pioneers of modern architecture could still know little of what the age of
technique might bring. They instinctively sensed, however, the coming
transformation in the social structure of the time and they recognized with
absolute clarity that the new architectural problems could be solved only by
contemporary means.

Their protest against style imitation and historical make-Believe became audible
for the first time when, in the last decade of the nineteenth century,
• Louis Suilivan in Chicago,
• Hendrik Petrus Berlage in Amsterdam,
• Henry van de Velde in Belgium and
• Otto Wagner in Vienna
issued their simultaneous challenge, Starting a movement which led to modern
architecture.

Reference: Ashik Vaskor Mannan

Vienna Savings Bank (1906, Otto Wagner)
Chicago Auditorium
• Designed by Dankmar Adler & Louis Sullivan and built in 1892.

• Sullivan famously coined the phrase “Form follows function”. Which shows in its
asymmetric plan and form –which was unusual at the time.

• The 4300 seat auditorium has the ability to convert between concert hall and
convention hall

• As part of the democratization of architecture – there was no box seats in the

original plan, but were later added , although receiving no prime locations.

• The building was equipped with the first ever central air conditioning system and the
theater was the first to be entirely lit by incandescent light bulbs.

• It was part of massive redevelopment after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. to
subsidize the cost of a theater, developers decided to include an luxury hotel and
business offices. The auditorium, due its office tower, which housed the offices of
Adler and Sullivan ,when built, was briefly the tallest building in the world.

• Adler designed a stacked funnel over the gallery of the auditorium, like a speaking
trumpet – to channel sound toward the audience. The auditorium is still renowned for
its acoustic performance.

• A young Frank Lloyd Wright was hired as an office draftsman and in the process of
working on the massive project.
Chicago Auditorium is still in use – currently by Roosevelt University. Here seen in NFL Draft of 2015
Larkin Building
FL Wright pioneered a lot of innovations in Larkin building we take for granted –

• First architect designed office furniture

• First built-in desk furniture

• First use of modern stained glass windows

• First wall-hung WC

• First air-conditioned office building

• One of the first open floor plan offices

• One of the first offices to feature an indoor atrium with a skylight

Dom-inno
• A construction system proposed by Charles Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) in 1914

• Le Corbusier was just 27 when he conceived of the Dom-ino – so called because the
houses could be joined end to end like dominos, and hyphenated to combine "domus" and
"innovation".

• This model proposed an open floor plan consisting of concrete slabs supported by a
minimal number of thin, reinforced concrete columns around the edges, with a stairway
providing access to each level on one side of the floor plan. The frame was to be
completely independent of the floor plans of the houses thus giving freedom to design the
interior configuration. The model eliminated load-bearing walls and the supporting beams
for the ceiling.

• The system allows a free floor and wall plan. It also provides greater flexibility in planning
composition of façade and openings

• Conceived by Corbusier for war ravaged cities for fast reconstruction. Six point
support building frame would be built in 3 weeks with prefabricated windows,
doors and rubble from destroyed building as infill

• This would be a housing assembly line, like the one Henry Ford had invented only the
year before (for cars). But it wasn’t to be. Failing to find any backers, he was forced to
abandon the idea.

• What is radical about Dom-ino is that it is merely the beginning of a process, one
completed by residents themselves. It is, in other words, the abandonment of total design.
The architect is no longer a visionary, just a facilitator.

Reference: Wikipedia, dezeen,