Dwell talks about Niemeier, 98, being the last of the early modernists alive and working. Its quite a remarkable building pictured. From what little I can see, I like it alot.
I especially admire that red entrance canopy on the white bunker style structure and how it transitions into an amazing curling ceiling accent against the white interior with the slow-rate-of-climb spiralling stair.
But this building triggers two questions.
1. Why are modernists often fond of bunker like structures for public facilities like concert halls and art museums? The minute I saw it, for some reason my mind leaped to Wright's Guggenheim, which has always looked to my eyes like a fortress protecting art against the crassness of commercial Manhattan. Neimeier's concert hall in Brazil evokes a similar feeling. Come inside this civil defense bunker for a concert and escape the horrors of the struggle for power in society. Now I know that on a rather literal level, a case can be made that the last century has been one of rather constant butchery and murder mixed with a continual coarsening of public sensibilities via mass media, and so these modernists were making arguably authentic responses to social conditions. But there has always seemed something of the immitative fallacy in making public architecture that emulates bunkers and fortresses to me, in perhaps the same way that Gehry's post modern Bilbao commits an immitatiive fallacy of emulating the simultaneous collapse and reordering of the new world order. Is there something deeper going on in Neimeier's building than the metaphor I am talking about? I would assume there is, but I am not getting it.
2. This remarkable red entrance canopy that transitions into the interior; could some DAers comment on what makes this a modernist vs. a postmodernist bit of ornamentation?
I guess that...
I will have to come back on this one when I have more time, but one simple functional reason is that both concert halls and musea need a lot of wall space. I am designing right now a small 360 seats auditorium. I find it difficult not to make it look like a closed bunkerlike building. The acoustics require not to use any glass in the space where music will be produced (not even on the two overhanging balconies. So anything that would look light and transparent has to be a "second" skin, on the outside of the "functional" building. In this particular case a second skin is needed in order to keep the building cool without too much mechanical help (the building is part of the facilities of the LaRoque summer music festival in southern France) but again, glass can not be used because it would have the exact opposite effect. An additional problem is the strong Mistral wind in the region that would create turbulence noice around edges and profiles or any other means of holding large windows in place. So my first (and most simple) answer would be that the function does not give you much room for light open architecture.
i am a
huge fan of niemeyers work he did some really great stuff and who else can say that he designed a whole city! (okay le corbusier) but the capital of latin americas biggest country. unbelievable. few years ago there was an excellent exhibition on his work in brussels, i hope it travelled around the world. As for the 'bunker'; maybe because the use of concrete evokes such emotion although he designed some elegant concrete buildings as well.
I know...I know...
...but this little project was irresistable and I have never done a complete building. So it was too tempting...sorry to disappoint you. In general I agree Don that unless you are still young enough of heart to re-invent yourself with each and every project, there is a time to leave it to the generation that is going to live with it. Back to Niemeyer "the red"...I suspect that the big red block has something to do with his political convictions...
Starting from the idea that we as human beings, are not complete without our "tools" (that includes all artificial things that extend our body and it's different functions)One can see a building not only as an enclosed space with a particular function and a number of historical antecedents, but as a "meaningful" object in other words as something that expresses what the building means to us as a society. Un fortunately building and the choice of architects is not a democratic decision and so it still takes the "elites" in charge more time to catch up with society's common values. A museum might be a good case in point. We have learned, first with Marcel Duchamps "ready mades" that anything that you declare art is art as long as you can get it past a museum door...not to mention that anything "made" by an artist is art, so explicitly (and tastelessly)demonstrated by an Italian artist that canned "artist's shit". So the building, as an extension of ourselfs is what makes it art....as a collegue pointed out, the same physical event will be considered conceptual performance art when done in a museum, and avant garde dance if it is done in a theatre...
The museum in this case becomes that precious, protected space in which anything can become art. What is more obvious than to give it the "protective" shield of a bunker like structure. Only people that believe that culture is accessible to all and should not be the protected space where an elite decides on what is art and what not, would build it differently,no?.
Other than functional considerations I think that the concerthall is by some, seen in a similar light. As the place where a certain form of culture is expressed behind the protective walls of an impressive building...not unlike SUV's are not the expression of the owner's preference to commute off the road, but as a reaction against what is seen by suburbanites as an hostile city.
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