Tangerines in a Red Net Bag

Friday, February 21, 2003

Thoughts on the International Style

1) Think about this, one style for cities, one unifed aesthic despite geographical location, a new world order in concerete and steel and glass. Is it a wonder that Le Corubiser did the UN
2) They look imposing, there is a small step between blocks and planes as elegantly simple, and between glass and stell cubes becoming cages.
3) The SEagrams Building in NYc, The new national Gallery in Berlin, Peabody Terrace Married Student HJousing in Cambridge, Salk Instuite in Le Jolla, Chadugah Buildings in Punjab, Neymeirs Bulidings in Brassila, all these slick concrete Plazas,almost inhuman in their scale.
4) The clean line is prrescriptive, a way to control human and natural Chaos but often fails, look at the before and after photos of Council Estates and Moderinst apartment blocks, they were meant for poor incomes, intended to bring order to the inner city, but the places now are violent, dnageous, over run , ugly.
5) The parilment Building terraces in Chadigah are rife with bicyles, hammocks furinture, makes thing human, breaks up the machine.
6) The Cult of the Machine makes factories look efficent, Art look like Product, and homes look sterile.
7) Seeing the Farnsworth House for the first time, Brian Felt naked in it, vulnerabel, even with the curtains and even with curtains.

8) It looks so sleek now, all of this modernist stuff, all of this nostalgia for it is nostaliga is for a time when taste was artstocratic (Michael Graves and Phillip Stark at Target; Martha Stewart)
9) Mies Van Der Rhoes Early Drawings look more like Mondrian or Malevich, and the arieal photos indiacte somthing similar.
10) Status was still important, you can tell money is being spent, the travertine stone in the Barcelona Pavillion by Mies

, Koneigs LA cliff side Dwellings

11) Eames, Jacobsen, Aalto, Corbu, all convinced of a grand plan tried to convince the middle classes, propghanda campaigns, that desire is now tired up into Holzers Maxim Money Buys Taste-but it is not taste they are buying it is Authenticity and Class Superoity.
12) The Industrial Loft lets the borgie play worker, like all of this grand and wonderful Subzero Fridges and Butcher Block Tables and Gardening books.
13) hundred of linear feet of concerte make a great canvas for graffiti, it makes things human, makes people feel like they are opposing a hegemony.
14) Stone is Cold, Brick is Warm. Steel is Cold, Wood is Warm.
15) Austerity becomes its own kind of Decoration, a fear of decoration is a fear of human touch.
16) Houses and Buildings that guide foot step and eye are facist.
17) A house is a text and imposes its own meaning, so is a shop and a facotory and everything else. This is why Gilbert Scott made such a great work in the Battersea Power Terminal, and even adding art and sculpture aand shops and cafes and books and libraries and reaserch facilites and guides and coat checks, it will never be the tate, on the third floor the windows open and you can still see the Turbines.

18) Buildings have an ideology. Scott also desgined the Anglican Cathedral in Liverpool-

makes it look like a Power Station. AAltos Hospital work makes them look like Nordic Spas, Alumni Navy Building at the Instuite of Tech in Illinois looks like a gleaming missile.
19) Maybe this is also time and place. But Aalto and Mies and Corbu didnt change in America
19) Fear of Shit. All of these Buildings have a fear of shit. Of Decompsoing matter, of filth, of mess. Of what happens in the street, Brasilla, a city desgined on these principals had no side walks.
20) Many of these buildings were Academic or Government, adding to the feeling of Social Control.
21) These Architechts desgined furinture, refusing to allow for any differences in opinon.
22) FLW is often thought of as someone different, someone new, we can apply most of these to him. IS this modren ARchitechture.
23) Compleixty is not nessc. the best soultion. Occams Razor should apply, buildings are to live in, and buildings need to grow with owners.
24) We are organic, that which we create should be organic.
25) Mies and Louis Khan and Aalto and Neutra and SChindler and Saarien and Niemeyer make me ache with beauty, their rigidness, like a sonnet with not one word out of place, we live epics though.
26) Here i am refuisng to acknoweldge the difference b/w house and factory and school. Form and Function. A house is different, they knew this.
27) Did Johnson ever refute the New Caanan House