The Big Four (part 2)

1
The Big Four (part 2)

• Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

2

• Walter Gropius (1883-1969)
• Worked for Behrens 1910-11 but was 15 years
  younger
• More concerned with the social implications of
  machine construction
• Work must be established in palaces that give
  the workman, now a slave to industrial labour,
  not only light, air and hygiene, but also an
  indication of the great common idea that drives
  everything. Only then can the individual submit
  to the impersonal without losing the joy of
  working together for that common good previously
  unattainable by a single individual.

3

• Advocated an architecture of technical
  rationalism in this stage of his career he
  believed that the machine can be spiritualised
  by means of art
• He opposed Mathesius (typifying) for his
  legislative, totalising, bureaucratic approach
• Artistic conceptualisation should be free and
  original and not controlled by the state
  bureaucracy and the big business
• Like Behrens nature and technology can be
  transfigured by spirit (Geist)

4

• Fagus Factory (1911-12)
• Shows the differences in approach between
  Behrens and Gropius
• Different programme modest, provincial factory
  which allowed for a different agenda modesty,
  lack of symbolic charge, no grand symbolic claims
  (as was the case with AEG)
• It becomes prophetic of the objective Modern
  Movement of the 1920s
• Projecting bay windows and recessed, tilted
  masonry, similar to AEG, but
• The tilt is pragmatic the brick piers are
  attempting to disappear (anti-monumental,
  anti-symbolic) the facade appears made of glass
  instead of buttresses, void corners, no
  impressionistic rounding

5

• Its classicism is abstract and discreet, a matter
  of geometry
• Its illusionism brings the transcendental
  qualities of materials to the fore (glass and its
  mystical connotations)
• Materiality and form are synthesised in a new
  way art and pragmatism coexist no conflict
  between Typisierung and the role of the
  individual artist-architect
• Prophetic of the new architectural discourse to
  emerge in Germany around 1923

6

• Weimar Germany, 1920-33
• Architecture in Germany around 1922 reflects
  changes in the visual arts in general
• Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement
• The term first used in the context of painting
  it is realism with a socialist flavour
• In architecture Adolf Behne Art, Craft,
  Technology essay, 1922
• division of labour inaugurated by the machine
  brought into play higher awareness
• The worker would come to understand his role
  within the totality within the industrialised
  society similar to Gropiuss views from 1911

7

• Academy of Fine Arts, Weimar
• Gropius succeeds Van de Velde as the director in
  1919 and is given the task to create a new School
  of Architecture and Applied Art
• He renames the school Bauhaus Bauhaus Minifesto
  1919
• The integration of arts with crafts a standard by
  then Gropius wants to save the artistic culture
  from the materialism of industrial capitalism by
  a spiritual revolution
• Starts off more expressionist but by 1929
  incorporates New Objectivity, De Stijl and
  LEsprit Nouveau
• This initiated by van Doesburgs presence in
  Weimar from 1921 and by ideas from Russian
  Constructivism
• Turning point in 1923 with the first Bauhaus
  Exhibition Art and Technology a New Unity
  Gropius pushes an architectural agenda model
  house built (Haus am Horn)

8

• 1925 Bauhaus moves to Dessau new building and
  staff houses
• The first major structures realised in his
  dynamic functional manner
• The body of the school broken into programmatic
  elements reassembled into an open form
• Influence of both Constructivism and De Stijl
• Forms are pure (reflects Le Corbusier and Oud)
  while retaining features (glazing projected in
  front of the wall plane) from Gropiuss earlier
  work

9
(No Transcript)
10
Bauhaus Dessau, Directors Office
11
(No Transcript)
12
Walter Gropius, Total Theatre project, 1927
13

• Moholy-Nagy House, Bauhaus, 1925, Desau

14
(No Transcript)
15

• Housing programmes in this period remarkably
  dominated by the avant-garde (precedent in
  Holland with Oud and Berlage for Amsterdam)
• Like the Garden Suburbs before WWI these
  Siedlungen were in enclaves on the outskirts of
  cities
• Higher density and consisted of apartment blocks
  up to 5 storeys
• Generally organised in parallel blocks aligned
  north-south
• Aesthetic rules from Neue Sachlichkeit stripped
  of ornament and flat roofs use of coloured
  surfaces
• Rational layouts not always popular Adolf Behne
  criticesed them

16

• Siemensstadt, 1928, Berlin, (Gropius)
• Some degree of formal differentiation (overall
  plan by Hans Scharoun)
• General divide in Germany of the period (marked
  by Behne) functionalists versus rationalists
• The former come from Expressionism unique
  buildings the latter derive solutions applicable
  to various cases
• Examples often straddle both to various degrees
  (Hans Scharoun, Schminke House, 1933, Loebau)

17
(No Transcript)
18

• Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969)
• Gropius had a reputation in organisation Mies
  had it in aesthetics
• Reduced all problems to a kind of essential
  simplicity
• Two opposing tendencies in his work enclosure of
  function in a general cubic container (partly
  derived from his neoclassical early stage) and
  the articulation of the building in response to
  the fluidity of life (but not figural as with
  Expressionists)
• Neutral forms create systems flexible enough to
  respond to any situation configurations are
  unique, while their constitutive elements are
  similar
• His projects between the wars show the struggle
  between neoclassical objectification and
  Neoplasticist fragmentation

Riehl House, 1907. Berlin Wolf House, 1925-7,
Guben
19

• His background and education similar to Le
  Corbusiers, but his neoclassical phase lasted 2
  decades
• In his 40s when he completed his first
  Modernist-Constructivist building
• After the First World War he met a circle of
  artists and writers, including van Doesburg and
  El Lissitzky and was influenced by them
• Early constructivist projects progressively
  become fragmented and articulated so that the
  external form reflects internal subdivision
• This shows influences of the English free-style
  house, Berlage, and Wright but is mainly
  immediately preceded by De Stijl

20

• Tugendhat House, Brno,1928-30
• New stage in development
• Brick is abandoned for render painted white
• Monolithic cubic mass, with a set-back,
  fragmented upper floor (where the street entrance
  is) reminiscent of his neoclassical projects
• The living room enormous space divided by fixed
  yet free-standing screens
• South and east fully glazed with floor-to-ceiling
  plate-glass windows
• The cubic volume is clear but it is made totally
  transparent classical closure and the infinite
  sublime combined by means of modern technology

21
(No Transcript)
22

• German Pavilion for the Barcelona International
  Exposition, 1929 (rebuilt 1986)
• The enclosing cube is gone and the entire space
  defined through independent horizontal and
  vertical planes
• The planes dont disappear into infinity but turn
  back on themselves to form open courts
• In both projects the roof supported by an
  independent grid of columns
• Too slender to support the roof and are helped by
  the wall planes
• They are signs marking the modular grid, rather
  than columns

23
(No Transcript)
24

• Between 1931 and 1935 (and after WW2) a series of
  houses which adapt the Barcelona Pavilion
  plan-type to domestic use plans increasingly
  introverted
• Nature still dominant in his sketches the house
  frames a view in which nature is idealised

25
Farnsworth House, 1946-50, Plano (IL)
26

• Often assumed that the minimalist distillation in
  Mies has to do with commitment to the craft of
  building, but he appears more engaged with
  idealising and mediating techniques of graphic
  representation
• His criteria ideal and visual to a great degree
  not constructional
• He uses materiality but in a montage way
• Miess conception of architecture followed the
  dialectic tendency of German Idealism to think in
  terms of opposites. According to the Neoplatonic
  aesthetics that influenced his thinking, the
  transcendental world is reflected in the world of
  the senses. (Colquhoun)

27

• Mies in America
• The development of the corporate office building
  influenced by his work at the same time he
  stayed detached from the needs of his clients
• Crown Hall, Illinois Institute of Technology,
  Chicago (1940-56)
• Assemblage of rectangular pavilions that conform
  to the abstract conditions of the American grid
• Schinkel influence evident

28
Lake Shore Drive Apartments, 1948-51,
Chicago Miess American projects provided the
formal syntax for SOM and Saarinen
29

• His approach to perfect a type that distils his
  quest for the will of the epoch solution, then
  he repeats it regardless of the example
• Use of I-beams in his curtain-wall facades first
  developed in Lake Shore Drive
• Ambiguous can be read as mullions or columns,
  bear structural connotations but are also
  decorative as they are welded to the surface of
  the pre-existing structure
• He rejected Le Corbusiers individualism but
  his minimal forms are still rhetorical and
  remnants of a high art tradition
• Seagram Building 1954-58, New York