Den postmoderna instllningen

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Modernism and Postmodernism in architecture
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Modern architecture and functionalism

• The evolution of Modern architecture was as a
  social matter, closely tied to the project of
  Modernity and thus the Enlightenment (18th
  century) .
• The Modern style developed, as a result of
  social, economic and political revolutions
  connected to the Industrial Revolution.
• Modern architecture was driven by technological
  and engineering developments, and the
  availability of new building materials such as
  iron, steel, concrete and glass.
• The roots of modern architecture laid in
  functionalism at least to the extent that
  functionalisms buildings were radical
  simplifications of previous styles.

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Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886 1969)

• Mies along with Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier,
  is widely regarded as one of the pioneering
  masters of modern architecture.
• Mies, like many of his post World War I
  contemporaries, sought to establish a new
  architectural style that could represent modern
  times just as Classical and Gothic did for their
  own eras.
• He created an influential Twentieth-Century
  architectural style, stated with extreme clarity
  and simplicity. His mature buildings made use of
  modern materials such as industrial steel and
  plate glass to define austere but elegant spaces.
  
• He called his buildings "skin and bones"
  architecture. He sought a rational approach that
  would guide the creative process of architectural
  design, and is known for his use of the aphorisms
  Less is more and "God is in the details".

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Le Corbusier (1887 1965)

• Le Corbusier was a pioneer in theoretical studies
  of modern design and was dedicated to providing
  better living conditions for the residents of
  crowded cities.
• Le Corbusier said in his book Vers une
  architecture from 1923 that "a house is a machine
  for living in".
• According to Le Corbusier a house was machines à
  habiter.
• The same ideas were defended by the architects of
  Bauhaus and the constructivists in the Soviet
  Union.

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Postmodern architectureandPost-functionalism
In the mid-1930s, functionalism began to be
discussed as an aesthetic approach rather than a
matter of design integrity. The idea of
functionalism was identified with lack of
ornamentation, It became a pejorative term
associated with the most bald and brutal ways to
cover space, like cheap commercial buildings.
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The White and Gray debate

• In an article from 1976 Robert A. M. Stern
  reported the results of a debate beginning at the
  University of California at Los Angeles in May
  1974 between two theoretic positions in
  contemporary architecture The White and the Gray
  groups.
• For both the Withegroup and Graygroup was
  Modernism a closed age. Stern aligned itself in
  the Gray group and identified Peter Eisenman
  (1932) as the leading gestalt among the White
  architects.

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The White - group

• Until recently, few of Eisenman designs had been
  built. As a result, most attention has focused on
  his architectural ideas which attempt to create
  contextually disconnected architecture.
• His earlier houses were generated from a
  transformation of forms related to the tenuous
  relationship of language to an underlying
  structure.
• Eisenmans latter works show sympathy with the
  antihumanist ideas of deconstructionism.
• The theory of the White architects could be named
  according to Stern as PostFunctionalism, which
  is the name which Peter Eisenman uses to describe
  his own architectural theory.
• PostFunctionalism according to Stern especially
  in the work of Eisenman characterises by its
  formalism and the searching of freedom from any
  cultural association.

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The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe also
known as the Holocaust Memorial is a memorial in
Berlin to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust,
designed by architect Peter Eisenman and
engineers Buro Happold.
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It consists of a 19,000 square meter (4.7 acre)
site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs, arranged
in a grid pattern on a sloping field.
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the Gray - group

• To the Gray group of architects, Stern gave the
  name of Postmodernists.
• Postmodern architecture tries to incorporate
  every possible cultural influence that makes this
  architecture an indissoluble part of a society.
• Besides Stern, to the Graygroup belong Robert
  Venturi (1925) and Charles Moore (19251993).
• Some of the characteristics of the work of the
  Grays are according to Stern the use of
  ornament, the decorated wall responds to an
  innate human need for elaboration.
• The manipulation of forms to introduce an
  explicit historical reference the conscious and
  eclectic utilization of the formal strategies of
  orthodox Modernism.
• The preference for incomplete or compromised
  geometries, voluntary distortion, and the
  recognition of growth of buildings over time
• The use of rich colours and various materials
  that affect a materialization of architectures
  imagery and perceptible qualities.
• Gray buildings have facades that tell stories.
  These facades are not the diaphanous veil of
  orthodox Modern architecture, nor are they the
  affirmation of deep structural secrets.

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• Peter Eisenman account of PostFunctionalism can
  be read in an article from 1976.
• Two indices of this change were the exhibition
  Architettura Razionale in the Milan Triennale
  of 1973 and the Ecole the Beaux Arts exhibition
  at the Museum of Modern Art in 1975.
• As a result of these events, became obvious that
  Modernism as identical with Functionalism,
  belonged to history.
• Eisenman see in Modernism, the heritage of
  500years humanism that characterises by the
  dialectics of two poles,
• the program (function)
• and the type (form).
• Almost frame to the 19th century, these two poles
  of the architectural design preserve its internal
  harmony,
• but with the eruption of the industrial era, the
  balance was interrupted.
• Architecture confronted with an increasingly need
  to solve complex functional problems,
  particularly with respect to the accommodation
  of a mass client.

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PostFunctionalism

• This had as consequence the declining of the roll
  of the form in architecture. According to
  Eisenman, historic Functionalism arises as a
  consequence of a moral imperative which was no
  longer valid after World War II.
• PostFunctionalism proposes the substitution of a
  dialectic function/form for a dialectics of the
  evolution of form itself.
• PostFunctionalism assumes a basic condition of
  fragmentation and understand architectural form
  as something simplified from some preexistent
  set of nonspecific spatial entities.
• PostFunctionalism in short, is a kind of
  deconstruction of humanism in architecture,
  performed through the application of pure
  formalism.

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Modernism as simulacra

• According to Eisenman, Modernism was under the
  influence of fictions which have persisted
  since the 16th century
• The first was the fiction of representation or
  the simulation of meaning. The Renaissance as an
  intellectual process which went back to the
  classical sources, supposed the revival of a past
  time and therefore, all new creation became
  simulacra.
• The second fiction was the fiction of reason or
  the simulation of truth. This fiction converted
  architecture to a science
• The third fiction was the fiction of history or
  the simulation of the Timeless.
• These three fictions are fictions because they
  arise from a delusion, from nothing else but
  simulation.

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• The delusion in humanism and Modernity originates
  in the unconsciousness about the ultimate goals
  of creation.
• To avoid these fictions a new architecture shall
  recreate the conditions of the time before
  Renaissance
• an archaic time and an archaic relationship
  between architecture, society and nature

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The problem of the origins

• The group of the White architects became with
  time the group of the deconstructivists with
  Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi (1944) as the most
  important figures.
• What distinguishes this group is the methodology
  which they use to be free from the influence of
  Modernism. Eisenman proposes an alternative
  fiction for the origin, an arbitrary origin
• Thus, while classical origins were thought to
  have their source in a divine or natural order
  and modern origins were held to derive their
  value from deductive reason, 
• Postfunctional origins can be strictly
  arbitrary, simply starting points,
  without value. 
• They can be artificial and relative, as opposed
  to natural, divine, or universal. 
• Such artificially determined beginnings can be
  free of universal values because they are merely
  arbitrary points in time, when the architectural
  process commences.

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The graft

• A graft means to insert a program in another
  object
• to propagate by insertion in another collection
  
• to implant a portion of materials and produce
  some organic union
• to join something to something else by grafting.
• This is the methodology that Eisenman found to
  elude the delusion of Modernity, a method to go
  back to the an archaic architectural
  representation.
• The chosen of an arbitrary origin for
  representation assured their
• freedom from the universal values of both
  historic and directional process,
• motivations that can lead to ends different from
  those of the previous valueladen end.

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• As opposed to a collage or a montage, which
  lives within a context and alludes to an origin,
  a graft is an invented site, which does no so
  much have object characteristics as those of
  process.
• A graft is not in itself genetically arbitrary.
  Its arbitrariness is in its freedom from a value
  system of non arbitrariness.
• In its artificial and relative nature a graft is
  not in itself necessarily an achievable result,
  but merely a site that contains motivation for
  action that is the beginning of a process.

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• With an End of End, for a nonclassical
  architecture Eisenman means an architecture that
  is free from every end and very goal.
• The end of values of any kind means freedom from
  economical or social or even mythical goals.
• The end of values means the end of progress,
  because progress makes our present creating a
  false representation of past and future.
• Architectural design moves from being a process
  of composition and transformation to a process of
  modification, a nondirectional, nongoal
  oriented process.
• This freedom is possible thanks to the invented
  origins, the arbitrary point of departure.
  Architectural form is a place of invention an
  not a place for imitation of an other
  architecture.

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Architecture as writing

• The new methodology that assures the
  nonclassical architecture freedom from social
  and cultural values supposes
• the understanding of architecture as a kind of
  writing rather as a kind of picturing.
• Architecture became text instead of image.
• Here can be follow the deconstructive language of
  Derrida some is typical for both Peter Eisenman
  and Bernard Tschumi.
• About this new methodology the connection with
  another very influential source cannot be
  avoided, the idea of diagrammatic or abstract
  machine of Gilles Deleuze.

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Barry Le Va (1941) California. Group Transfer
Reactions - Zurich Study 3, 2003Tusche auf
Papier, 46,2 x 30,5 cm
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Urban acupuncture

• The process of reusing materials and artefacts
  has many levels depending of the economical
  possibilities and the intentions involved.. Many
  architects have comprehended that the broken
  character of the technologies of poverty can be
  understood as a new and Postmodern way to
  understand the technologies of dwelling. Seen
  from this perspective technologies of poverty are
  converted into new technological solutions and
  are not more a typical case of broken
  technologies. However, the limits between broken
  technologies of dwelling and Postmodern
  technologies of dwelling are not sharp. If in
  some cases, duelling is solved with very
  primitive and circumstantial materials and
  artefacts but in some other cases, the bricolage
  admits more elaborated forms of congruence. The
  extraordinary way in which artefacts became
  pragma in a situation of extreme poverty has
  inspired todays architects to new urban
  solutions. To describe this process, the
  Guatemalan born architect Teddy Cruz, when
  working in the borders of two very different but
  deep interwoven societies San Diego and Tijuana
  has introduced the term urban acupuncture.

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• A Tijuana speculator travels to San Diego to buy
  up little bungalows that have been slated for
  demolition to make space for new condominium
  projects. The little houses are loaded onto
  trailers and prepared to travel to Tijuana, where
  they will have to clear customs before making
  their journey south. For days, one can see
  houses, just like cars and pedestrians, waiting
  in line to cross the border. Finally the houses
  enter into Tijuana and are mounted on one-story
  metal frames that leave an empty space at the
  street level to accommodate future uses. One city
  profits from the material that the other one
  wastes. Tijuana recycles the leftover buildings
  of San Diego, recombining them in fresh
  scenarios, creating countless new
  opportunities.1
• 1 Teddy Cruz writes on Urban acupuncture.
  Residential Architect Magazine (2005).

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• The introduced term acupuncture is useful
  because it tells about the piecemeal change in
  the ontology the beingintheworld of the
  urban space. The reusing and remaking of
  artefacts provoking the collapse of the obvious
  congruence between noema and pragma, and suppose
  a technique of inserting and manipulating
  artefacts into specific points of the urban body
  with the aim of solving dwellings problems.

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Elemental of Chile

• Another group of architects working with dwelling
  solutions associated to shantytowns and poverty
  is the group Elemental of Chile. In Iquique a
  city of the Chilean desert, the group developed
  an integral solution to a hundred families in a
  Shanty Town placed at the centre of the city. The
  solution was that of follow the natural laws of
  the development of shantytowns, creating a
  structure that contemplated the porosity of the
  broken space of a shantytown and making possible
  the spontaneous developing of new spaces.

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• Figure 27 Project at Iquique, Chile showing at
  the left the delivered houses and at the right
  its expanding possibilities.

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• The broken character of the use of spaces in
  shantytowns are inspired artists as the Spaniard
  Dionisio Gonzáles to piecing together photos of
  the shantytowns themselves with photos of modern
  architecture blending the organized and geometric
  of the modern with the fuzzy and scattered of the
  spaces of poverty.