WORKING GROUP 1; Project Team: Melissa Neel, Aidi Su, Will McLoughlin
Eighty years after the Case Study Houses program famously challenged architects such as Richard Neutra, Charles Eames, and Eero Saarinen to create easily replicable architectural home designs to help address the postwar housing crisis in L.A., Case Study 2.0 is similarly rising to a new challenge: accelerating the rebuilding of architecturally beautiful homes for victims of the L.A. fires…….Continue reading….
By: Hugh Garvey
Source: Sunset Magazine
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Critics:
With the emerging knowledge in scientific fields and the rise of new materials and technology, architecture and engineering began to separate, and the architect began to concentrate on aesthetics and the humanist aspects, often at the expense of technical aspects of building design. There was also the rise of the “gentleman architect” who usually dealt with wealthy clients and concentrated predominantly on visual qualities derived usually from historical prototypes.
Typified by the many country houses of Great Britain that were created in the Neo Gothic or Scottish baronial styles. Formal architectural training in the 19th century, for example, at École des Beaux-Arts in France, gave much emphasis to the production of beautiful drawings and little to context and feasibility. Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution laid open the door for mass production and consumption.
Aesthetics became a criterion for the middle class as ornamented products, once within the province of expensive craftsmanship, became cheaper under machine production.Vernacular architecture became increasingly ornamental. Housebuilders could use current architectural design in their work by combining features found in pattern books and architectural journals. Around the beginning of the 20th century, general dissatisfaction with the emphasis on revivalist architecture and elaborate decoration gave rise to many new lines of thought that served as precursors to Modern architecture.
Notable among these is the Deutscher Werkbund, formed in 1907 to produce better quality machine-made objects. The rise of the profession of industrial design is usually placed here. Following this lead, the Bauhaus school, founded in Weimar, Germany in 1919, redefined the architectural bounds prior set throughout history, viewing the creation of a building as the ultimate synthesis – the apex – of art, craft, and technology.
When modern architecture was first practiced, it was an avant-garde movement with moral, philosophical, and aesthetic underpinnings. Immediately after World War I, pioneering modernist architects sought to develop a completely new style appropriate for a new post-war social and economic order focused on meeting the needs of the middle and working classes. They rejected the architectural practice of the academic refinement of historical styles which served the rapidly declining aristocratic order.
The approach of the Modernist architects was to reduce buildings to pure forms, removing historical references and ornament in favor of functional details. Buildings displayed their functional and structural elements, exposing steel beams and concrete surfaces instead of hiding them behind decorative forms. Architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright developed organic architecture, in which the form was defined by its environment and purpose, with an aim to promote harmony between human habitation and the natural world with prime examples being Robie House and Fallingwater.
Architects such as Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson, and Marcel Breuer worked to create beauty based on the inherent qualities of building materials and modern construction techniques, trading traditional historic forms for simplified geometric forms, celebrating the new means and methods made possible by the Industrial Revolution, including steel-frame construction, which gave birth to high-rise superstructures. Fazlur Rahman Khan’s development of the tube structure was a technological breakthrough in building ever higher.
By mid-century, Modernism had morphed into the International Style, an aesthetic epitomized in many ways by the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center designed by Minoru Yamasaki. Many architects resisted modernism, finding it devoid of the decorative richness of historical styles. As the first generation of modernists began to die after World War II, the second generation of architects including Paul Rudolph, Marcel Breuer, and Eero Saarinen tried to expand the aesthetics of modernism with Brutalism, buildings with expressive sculpture façades made of unfinished concrete.
But an even younger postwar generation critiqued modernism and Brutalism for being too austere, standardized, monotone, and not taking into account the richness of human experience offered in historical buildings across time and in different places and cultures. One such reaction to the cold aesthetic of modernism and Brutalism is the school of metaphoric architecture, which includes such things as bio morphism and zoomorphic architecture, both using nature as the primary source of inspiration and design.
While it is considered by some to be merely an aspect of postmodernism, others consider it to be a school in its own right and a later development of expressionist architecture. Beginning in the late 1950s and 1960s, architectural phenomenology emerged as an important movement in the early reaction against modernism.
With architects like Charles Moore in the United States, Christian Norberg-Schulz in Norway, and Ernesto Nathan Rogers, Vittorio Gregotti, Michele Valori, and Bruno Zevi in Italy, who collectively popularized an interest in a new contemporary architecture aimed at expanding human experience using historical buildings as models and precedents. Postmodernism produced a style that combined contemporary building technology and cheap materials with the aesthetics of older pre-modern and non-modern styles.
From high classical architecture to popular or vernacular regional building styles. Robert Venturi famously defined postmodern architecture as a “decorated shed” (an ordinary building which is functionally designed inside and embellished on the outside) and upheld it against modernist and brutalist “ducks” (buildings with unnecessarily expressive tectonic forms). Since the 1980s, as the complexity of buildings began to increase (in terms of structural systems, services, energy and technologies)
The field of architecture became multi-disciplinary with specializations for each project type, technological expertise or project delivery methods. Moreover, there has been an increased separation of the ‘design’ architect[Notes 1] from the ‘project’ architect who ensures that the project meets the required standards and deals with matters of liability. The preparatory processes for the design of any large building have become increasingly complicated.
Requiring preliminary studies of such matters as durability, sustainability, quality, money, and compliance with local laws. A large structure can no longer be the design of one person but must be the work of many. Modernism and Postmodernism have been criticized by some members of the architectural profession who feel that successful architecture is not a personal, philosophical, or aesthetic pursuit by individualists; rather it has to consider everyday needs of people and use technology to create livable environments, with the design process being informed by studies of behavioral, environmental, and social sciences
Environmental sustainability has become a mainstream issue, with a profound effect on the architectural profession. Many developers, those who support the financing of buildings, have become educated to encourage the facilitation of environmentally sustainable design, rather than solutions based primarily on immediate cost. Major examples of this can be found in passive solar building design, greener roof designs, biodegradable materials, and more attention to a structure’s energy usage.
This major shift in architecture has also changed architecture schools to focus more on the environment. There has been an acceleration in the number of buildings that seek to meet green building sustainable design principles. Sustainable practices that were at the core of vernacular architecture increasingly provide inspiration for environmentally and socially sustainable contemporary techniques. The U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating system has been influential in this.
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