Mr. Sullivan and Mies
To go back a little and jump out of the present stream to the form follows function statement of Sullivan quoted earlier. I read where Mies, in quoting the famous dictum, said that in our time, meaning early modernism, function was so short-lived that architecture should be much more flexible in order that it can better respond to change and this was one of the guiding principles of his work. To demonstrate this he used Lakeshore apartments as an example where he said he couldn?t remember 2 apartments being the same layout.
It seems to me that this flexibility is a good thing if it allows people to create their own environment suited to their own needs.
By this token it seems that the late postmodern experiment failed in large part because it was too controlling if not contrived.
Are
you thinking of the "universal space" component of the modular frame ? This seems so completely in line with the aesthetic and the philosophy of the early moderns. Mendelsohn and others were entranced by the "engineering architecture" that they found during their American visits; the grain elevators and bridges and mill buildings. . .
Thoughts
Yes, that was part of my thoughts on the subject, however what caught my attention was Mies's observation that function was short-lived. If this was the case 80 years ago I am not sure that the function of space would be longer-lived today given the rate of change in the world. So maybe this is why present-day design seems, at times, to be so ephemeral. How can design be refined and developed by an individual let alone a society if the rate of change of function is so rapid?
Does a rapid rate of change cause people to try to use or hold on to past eras as inspiration as Postmoderism tried to do at times. Was this not the "dishonesty" that Modernism was trying to get rid of?
Just rambling on.........
Hi Barry
It is an interesting thought indeed. But I think that you make a few more steps than M.v.d.R. on function. He referd of course to the fact that the needs for space (as a function) changes according to the evolution of the inhabitants. The need for a room for a child or two, an home office etc. Most of these so called "flexibel" buildings never worked well. The reasons are simple. People, especially in North America mouve around, they buy a larger house the moment they can affort it, they change jobs etc. For the European, first half of the 20th century M.v.d.R. this was a difficult concept. Traditionally Europeans did not move. (The house that my parents bought when they married, was the house they both lived in untill their very last day...and now, one of my sisters lives in it) You can actually find some interesting differences in managment style. Generally, Europeans are better in getting the best out of the people they have, North Americans are better in getting the best people. This being said. The functions that the Post modern architects wanted to add to architecture were not these objective functions M.v.d.R. mentioned, but "subjective" functions... I am going to stop here and start over because I lost already twice the text because of power interuptions due to heavy thunderstorms here...
cont.
The functions you are pointing out, and rightly so are the Post Modern functions. It has always been my impression that there was no fundamental contradiction and that the Post-Modern mouvement could very well have developed inside and as a continuation of modern functionalsm. We could and would have discouvered that there is more to a buyilding and a product than objective criteria. The unfortunate thing is that functionalism did not take itself seriously enough. The pretended to be "functional" but that would have been the basis of a better understanding of function, both objective and subjective was seldomly done. The nasty thing about this oversight was that the next generation could not build on a body of knowledge and by lack of it....it build on a body of....style.
Koen,
If some of the flaws of the modernists were attributable to the unsound philosophical legacy they inherited from the funtionalists, I shudder to think what is happening right now as the neo-modernists and miscellaneous other movements of the present operate on the scant legacy of the post modernists.
Thinking of the philosophical underpinnings of movements since functionalism, one gets the chilling sense of a steadily decreasing seedbed of philosophy being passed down from movement to movement, generation to generation.
Functionalism: didn't take itself seriously enough to leave much for the Modernists.
Modernism: modernist basically truncated the philosophical legacy and tried to reinvent the wheel. It left little more than a dogma in its wake.
Post Modernism: embellished a dogma with stylistic cues.
Neo Modernism: abandoned philosophy entirely and recycled the forms of modernism.
Next ism: good lord, what philosophical seed stock is left?
Perhaps this process is what underlies the apparent lack of direction and progression in design and architecture presently.
Koen and DCW
You have put my subconcious thoughts into words exactly. Thanks very much.
Some time ago I compained to my professor about the lack of critical thinking in architecture. He replied: "Don't you know that architect's don't think, they build"
Will they ever go hand in hand? I wonder.
Your professor probably means well...
He gave you stock advice that is often given anyone learning a craft. Don't think, build. For actors, don't think, act. For writers, don't think, write. For painters, don't think, paint. For white collar criminals, I suppose its don't think, embezzle. To generalize the rule: Don't think about it, do it. The advice is given to persons to keep them focused on working on their craft, rather than avoiding working on their craft by talking about it instead. Such avoidance is called displacement by shrinks.
The question you have to ask yourself (and answer honestly) is this: are you displacing work with intellectualizing, or are you doing your work and seeing a gaping philosophical hole in the field of design and architecture that you want to fill, so that you can build better?
If you are displacing, build.
But if you are doing your work and thinking about the inadequate philosophical framework that design and architecture are currently framed in, then forget your prof. and understand this: thinking and building are both skills essential to creating architecture.
If you resolve that you genuinely want to do something about the philosophical hole in design and architecture, then go where ever you have to go to get with some skilled architects/designers who are putting in the hard knowledge work (which, to be worth a shit, involves a constant iteration between idea refinement and action) of developing a new design and architecture philosophy. Help develop it and let it suffuse your thinking about building choices and then build.
But be careful not to join a cult. By a cult, I a group lead by a star architect or designer. Don't follow a guru. Join a group that has many great minds in cooperation and conflict. Cults form with followers predisposed to aggrandize the cult leader; then his apostles go out and spread his gospel. I know about this first hand, because I joined a cult in my field early on and wasted ten years advancing my guru's ideas, not my own. It was a waste of my time even though it earned me some minor distinction. A healthy, avant garde group can have several stars and mentors. They don't last long and that is the beauty of them. Artists gravitating to great cities, or to places like the Bauhaus or Cranberry, and exploring the lastest ideas is a movement. A cult on the other hand would be going to Taliesin and submitting to the great Wright. Movements produce craftmen and occassionally great artists. Cults produce skilled disciples. Being mentored is necesary, but avoid discipleship like the plague.
Luck, as my old coach said, requires great preparation...Pt. 1
...at least to be benefitted from.
Put another way, one can (and does) have luck at any level of activity, but luck at a low level of activity doesn't bring you much worth having, except, if you're lucky, your health. 🙂
The reason for going to school, apprenticing, mastering skills, reading voluminously as long as you live, networking, discussing, taking calculated risks, and occassionally stepping off into the unknown, etc., is to build up the prize fighter in you enough to get a chance at a title fight of your own, or in the case of someone like Ettore Sottsass, to stay ever on the razor's edge of one's own present where such prize fights tend to occur. And then sometime during the long time you hopefully remain in your present moment, you eventually become the logical contender for your own title fight(s); then if the luck happens, you get to be heavy weight champion (not so much over someone else but over yourself)...briefly...which is a capstone, but not the underlying reason you fight. You fight to live, to make something of yourself you can respect, to survive long enough to solve the mystery of where your path came from and where it leads, and of who you really may be (we are all partly enigmas so certainty of self knowledge is always limited). FWIW, all great novels and movies are about the same thing: a hero is given something to do and then does it and in the process figures out at least part of who he/she really is. We are all tiny little heroes in huge worlds struggling against seemingly insurmountable odds, solving bits and pieces of the mystery of who we are, and compensating with denial and wit regarding that which we cannot bear.
You may find my metaphor of a prize fighter crude, but I like to invert metaphors for people (and myself), because doing so kind of makes them come at rather simple, familiar ideas from a fresh enough angle to actually receive them instead of just shrugging and moving on.
Luck, as my old coach said, requires great preparation...Pt. 2
Hence, I use a coarse metaphor here for a refined, analytic young person in the arts, like yourself, whereas I might use a refined metaphor for a more earthy, street fighter in bulldozer manufacturing. People in the arts sometimes need to think a bit more in terms of a prize fight and persons in sports or banking or politics sometimes benefit from artistic metaphors. We all, after all, have latent sides of our personality that do not get much touch, so to speak, and so those can be appealed to with more economy of effort and hopefully more efficiency in result. Advice, like design, should be elegant--neither more nor less than is needed to do the job.
To end where I began, everyone has luck--good and bad. But only the persistent and well prepared can reach a level of accomplishment where they can capitalize on their luck and do something of distinction. But we can all try and be the better for it IMHO.
P.S.: If my idea of inverting metaphors escapes you, think of modernism as an inverted metaphor. It presents highly rationalized objects to often highly irrational persons to help them rediscover the esence of an object. A Victorian house or chair can be so over (or irrelevantly) ornamented that one can lose sight of the essential usefulness and satisfaction that a house, or chair, can provide. Modernism, in this regard, was an inverted metaphor that aimed to draw Victorians out of a perceived emphasis on the extraneous in artifacts and buildings, and back into their essense so that the essense could be more fully infused with the technology, materials, skills and values of the then present. That word present again. It just keeps cropping up. 🙂
Hi Barry,
As so often not much can be added when our friend dcwilson brings his point of view to the forum, but let me try to add something.
Quality of education is very closely linked to the a often forgotten aspect of learning. It is called redundancy. (To some extent dcwilson covered the subject by warning for gurus) Knowledge can not and should not come from one single source. Unfortunately most schools and universities have sacrified redundancy on the altar of efficiency. Part of what we fought for in the sixties was the preservation of that particular quality that still existed: To learn about the same subjects from several different teachers and to sustain a school of faculty community life that would encourage the confrontation of these different points of views. These overlaps were of course un-popular with those who wanted to see education from a Taylorist point of view and streamline it as if it were a car assembly line.
The disappearing of redundancy was also re-enforced by social changes, the decrease in family and community life etc.
You should continu to complain to our professor about the lack of critical thinking in architecture. To think that architects do not think but build is a further un-necessary and dangerous division of labor. History has shown that one can start the greatest atricities with the help of people that refuse to think and just act. In talking to students I often used the analogy of climbing a mountain. Design and architecture is very much like climbing a mountain. If you only look at the top, at the goal of your journey you will do a number of things. First of all, you will stumble over the stones that are in front of your feet. You will also have the impression that you do not make any progress because the top is hardly coming closer. You will also miss out on the joy to find along the path. If you look at the path just in front of you you will not fall, you will discouver some of the joys along the path and at the end you might very well have climbed the wrong mountain because you never looked up. The balance is of course in doing both. Look in front of your feet and make progress. Each time you look up the top seems closer and in looking up you make sure you are still climbing the right mountain. To reply "Don't you know that architect's don't think, they build" sounds very much like the excuse we kept hearing from German doctors, engineers, architects, industrialists etc. "...I only did my job..." or in the military version: "...Befehl ist Befehl..." I was ordered to do so... Believe me it was highly unfair to only blame Germans for that attitude because it was and still is widespread.
One of the failed opportunities of sixties was that somehow while rejecting authority as the only source of the dominant point of view, we did not manage to diversify our opinions and beliefs and inscribe them in the structure of schools and universities before this wave of efficiency seeking burocrats took over.
Koen
Thanks again for your remaks and those of DCW. While I never quite swallowed the tendered advice from my professor, you are quite close to the mark in suggesting he represented certain tendencies found in the Fatherland. In addition, he was also a student and friend of Gropius. But the comment has always remained with me.
Unforunately, I tend to be a minimalist in writing among other things, though I hope not in understanding so I can't add too much to these conversations.
But, all in all, I am learning.
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