The conventional idea of modernism in architecture is generally viewed as having its origins in the British Arts and Crafts movement in the mid-nineteenth century, but is more closely associated with building practices that negated historical styles for simple geometric forms and undecorated surfaces. Prominent examples of what is commonly associated with such an idea are the works of De Stijl, Bauhaus and Deutscher Werkbund in the early 20^th century and the work of Le Corbusier that seemed to have ‘caught-up’ with related movements in art as propagated by Sigfried Giedion. In these narratives of modernism, there is a marked negation of historical and representational values and a visible thrust placed on subjective, symbolic and ‘honest’ form of expression. The historians seem to have

“…identified connecting formal and conceptual traits among works produced by a broad range of artistic personalities, enabling them to arrange large bodies of art and architecture into concise and manageable trends“

This negation of the polyvalent condition of modern architecture ultimately manifested in the emergence of postmodern architecture in the 1980’s that offered a critique which was based on a narrow reading of modernist ideology

In this post, I will emphasize the heterogeneity of modern architecture by a synoptic reading of Otto Wagner’s uniquely situated architectural discourse along with a case study of one of his most significant buildings. His strategic presence in the early 20^th century in Vienna and a seemingly paradoxical body of work make him the most relevant source for informing contemporary architectural practices. In the following sections, I shall extrapolate on Wagner’s position in a historical context, his ideologies that formed the underpinnings of modern architecture, his position as an artist arbitrator and speculate his legacy’s potential in contemporary architectural practice.

In the 1860’s, Vienna went through a major urban redevelopment of the city’s urban core by constructing an array of public and private buildings along a newly created grand boulevard in a mix of historicist styles (See Fig.1). This investment in the city brought forth a snapshot of Vienna’s bourgeoisie’s outlook towards architecture. As architects tried to grapple with the tradition of the Beaux-Art school and the implications of a growing industrialized society, the decisive eclecticism of the Ringstrasse may be attributed to the socio-political environment in the mid nineteenth century in Vienna. As Debra Schafter notes,

“Though recently scholars have identified proto-modernist ideas at work beneath the stylistic facades of many of these monuments, the Ringstrasse’s opulent and eclectic display of historical styles also furnished important symbols of aristocratic values that linked the liberal bourgeoisie to the ruling class of the Habsburg Dynasty, the history of which in Austria extended back to the thirteenth century.”

Wagner, who was schooled in the French Beaux-Arts model of architectural discourse, seemed to have imbibed the stylistic leanings of the Ringstrasse years as several of his bank and residential projects of the 1880’s express. Harry Francis Mallgrave in his introduction to Modern Architecture notes:

“…it is not surprising that Wagner should assert with considerable intrepidity that ‘a certain free renaissance’- that is, free and inventive use of Renaissance forms and motifs – ‘that has assimilated our genius loci and taken the greatest possible account of all our circumstances and accomplishments in the use of materials and construction is the only correct course for present and future architecture.”

Otto Wagner in his famous inaugural address to the Academy of fine arts in 1894 had started to already move away from his historicist leanings when he said

“The starting point of every artistic creation must be the need, ability, means and achievements of our time.” He goes even further in the preface of first edition of Modern  Architecture in 1895 “ One idea inspires this book, namely THAT THE BASIS OF TODAY’S PREDOMINANT VIEWS ON ARCHITECTURE MUST BE SHIFTED, AND WE MUST FULLY BECOME AWARE THAT THE SOLE DEPARTURE POINT FOR OUR ARTISTIC WORK CAN ONLY BE MODERN LIFE.” (His capitals) Also in the same book he asserts “….if one surveys what has been accomplished up till now, then one must be convinced THAT TODAY THE CLEFT BETWEEN THE MODRN MOVEMENT AND THE RENAISSANCE IS ALREADY LARGER THAN BETWEEN THE RENAISSANCE AND ANTIQUITY.”

The above might be read as a precursor to the oft-repeated comment about the modern movement negating historical and representational value. Although, in context of Wagner, who was himself up till the late nineteenth century in favor of ‘a certain free renaissance’, historical values are even more closely read and critiqued than a mere negation. After Recognizing the loss of architecture’s loss of function as a monument or a symbolic form, construction and technology were read as the means to project architecture’s continuity with its past by Wagner.

He was certainly not alone in taking this radical direction. A major change that was a major influence in Viennese art and architectural environment was the formation of the Union of Austrian Fine artists commonly referred to as the Secession. The organization was established as a result of the increasingly conservative and isolationist stance of the Association of Austrian artists. Although he was not one of the founding members, Wagner is widely recognized as a significant member of the movement along with Gustav Klimt, Joseph Maria Olbrich and Josef Hoffmann. The Majolica house (See Fig.2) is a significant in this period with its flowery motifs and decorative use of iron. The composition seems to emphasize on the structural arrangement behind the façade. This convergence of novel material application and new stylistic motifs expressed by the secessionists implied a deeper ideological context that was built up over time and negates the conventional ‘break with history’ explanation for the rise of modern architecture.

Ideological Context

As noted earlier, Wagner’s appointment to the Academy of fine arts in Vienna caused a stir when he publicly and vehemently proclaimed the shift from a historicist attitude to a ‘realist’ one. The term realism became one of the most important parts of his radical agenda. He noted in the inaugural address:

“Our living conditions and methods of construction must be fully and completely expressed if architecture is not to be reduced as caricature. The realism of our time must pervade the developing work of art. It will not harm it, nor will any decline of art ensue as a consequence of it; rather it will breathe a new and pulsating life into forms, and in time conquer new fields that today are still devoid of art- for example that of engineering.”

As J. Duncan Barry notes in his essay “From historicism to realism”, this realist attitude can be traced back to the radical stylistic rupture in French academic painting beginning with Gustave Courbet (See Fig.3) and the literary socialist realism of Emile Zola. Also, its usage in the German architecture parlance was common place in the 1890’s, although with an ambiguous set of meanings attached to it. According to Mallgrave,

“(Realism in German architecture varied) its meaning from an anti academic and anti romantic return to the demands of modern life, to a verism or ideal striving for truth in art, or to a functionalist acknowledgement of needs and technical demands, dispensing thereby with such formal elements such as gables, towers, mansards, oriels, and an abundance of plastic decoration.”

Coming back to Wagner’s understanding of the realist agenda, it seemed problematic for him to reconcile the ‘realist’ agenda with his largely historicist and symbolic practice.  In his book, Modern Architecture, he later favored the term building –art (Baukunst) to architecture. This term already reflects the convergence of artistic idealism and the realist tendencies initiated by Wagner in his work. His Secessionist leanings with symbolic motifs should not be treated as aberrations in his line of thinking but rather as Wagner’s coming to terms with the idea of Art Nouveau tendencies as a catalyst to bring forth the ‘inner form’ of the building by emphasizing its construction principles through ornamental treatment.

Wagner’s dual emphasis on construction and art in building can be understood as a consequence of his understanding of Gottfried Semper’s theory of Bekleidung which accepted a building’s forces necessary and subordinated the structure to them. Akos Moravanszky notes:

“According to Semper, the origin of a work of art is influenced by such factors as materials and modes of construction, local and ethnological influences, climate, religious and political institutions, and the personal influences of the patron, artist, and the producer of work. But Semper also maintained that the human culture had always been enchanted by the veil or mask…the mask was the constant element, the symbol representing themes that cannot be expressed by the inner structure.”

However, Wagner seems to have taken the idea of new architectural forms arising out of new means of construction and purpose a little too far than what even Semper would have agreed with. In a curious criticism of Semper, Wagner suggested that he lacked the courage to complete his theory in a consistent manner and compromised himself “with a symbolism of construction, instead of naming construction itself as the primitive cell of architecture.”

In his essay “From Realism to Sachlichkeit”, Mallgrave discusses this criticism of Wagner through the writings of Wagner’s contemporary architectural critic, Richard Streiter. He acknowledges Streiter as the first person to introduce the word Sachlichkeit in architectural parlance. The term Sachlichkeit as a simple or straightforward way of solving a problem implied a greater meaning than being just functional. It put the realist agenda of Wagner in focus by criticizing it for going too far as to make a virtue out of a necessity. Streiter went further and speculated that Wagner’s insistence on a “straightforward Sachlichkeit” resulted from a misreading of Semper’s arguments. Indeed, Semper himself had anticipated such readings of his writings and termed these people “materialists,” who have “fettered the idea too much to the material…believing that the store of architectural forms is determined solely by the structural and material conditions.” Streiter aptly termed this tendency as ‘tectonic realism.’

However, Wagner seems to confound this critique through his apparent disjunction with his tectonic realism in theory and his secessionist designs that have pure historicist and ornamental basis. This uneasy coexistence of Wagner’s aspirations and his designs seem to reflect the complexity and vigor of the artistic context in his times. We shall now look at some of the peculiar tectonic strategies he used in one of his seminal works that established Wagner’s artistic outlook as the final arbiter of his own realist polemic and his symbolist practice

The Postal office Savings Bank Building:

Wagner entered into a competition in 1903 and was selected among 37 participants to design the new building for K.K. Postparkassenamt (also known as Postal Savings Bank) in the significant Ringstrasse area of Vienna. The building is a reinforced concrete structure faced outside with marble and granite slabs, fastened with aluminum capped iron bolts. Entrance canopy, balconies and roof and cornices are also made of aluminum. The interior facades are covered with tiles and the main court is roofed over with a steel and glass structure creating the central hall (See Fig.4).

In addition to this, the building has a number of interesting details that seem to aestheticize the presence of new material and technology and not hiding them behind a historicist mask. Wagner’s realist tendencies can be seen through his open display of the Steel and glass structure in the main hall. Even the ventilator columns and the light fittings present themselves as a matter of fact and not hidden in any way (See Fig.5). Here, it is important to note the aesthetic qualities of these details. There is a certain stylistic grammar that is employed in the construction of these elements that seem to be in harmony with the overall structure. The new material vocabulary seems to emanate from Wagner’s station building projects as Fritz Neumeyer has suggested in his essay (See Fig.6):

“The famous banking hall of the Postparkasse has altogether ‘interiorized’ the station building and its large glass-covered space with a type of construction that seems to be inspired by the suspension bridge. The section cut through the main hall, with the ocular positioning of the circular lamps, even suggests the illusion of a locomotive on rails. The station building and the bridge, both prominent issues in Wagner’s urban architecture, reoccur, but this time they are hidden behind walls.”

This last comment on hiding the iron supports behind walls is one of the most significant evidence to show Wagner’s inconsistency with the ‘Tectonic realism’ that Streiter had charged Wagner with. The walls in his case become the intermediate surfaces for the expression of iron to soften from structural supports and transcend into the Aluminum capped iron bolts that allow for a softened transition to the exterior. It should be noted that the bolts did not seem necessary for plain construction purposes as the mortar was strong enough to make the stone slabs stay in place. Wagner seems to have been tackling a problem that was more than just a construction detail. The problem here seemed to be aestheticizing the iron construction in the context of his artistic background (See Fig.7).

This reduction of a monumental structure to a more minimalist one accounts for a particularly unique architectural expression that seems to take Wagner back to his symbolist roots. It is interesting to note that Neumeyer finds a contemporary counterpart in the work of Tadao Ando where the holes left by concrete formwork allow for “…light itself to become a substitute for the revealing veil of a material layer.”

Wagner’s legacy as an arbiter:

So we must ask ourselves, why and how is Wagner’s legacy relevant to the issues of contemporary architecture? Firstly, as mentioned at the beginning, the diverse pursuits of Wagner make it difficult for conventional historic accounts to bracket him in a singular reading of him that connects together a linear narrative in time. Therefore, Wagner provides an understanding of modern architectural principles that is more mutable and establishes an alternative narrative of the impact of technology in the late 19^th and early 20^th century architecture.

Another important aspect of Wagner’s seemingly inconsistent architectural principles is the understanding of this very inconsistency as a virtue and not a vice. It does not seem possible that Wagner could have made before-mentioned innovative tectonic strategies had he not been critically engaging with the idea of bringing the discipline of art and building together. Even today, art and building disciplines seem to exist separated from each other. For Wagner, this was not so. So then, we may conjecture that the inconsistencies are only present in the historian’s eye and not the practitioner’s.

Wagner’s role can then be seen as an arbitrator of sorts who seems to have given precedence to his artistic ideals than his realist polemic, though never abandoning it completely. This implies a certain sense of continuity with the past and also provides for in Wagner’s case, ornament as a representation of cultural values. This reiterates the obsolescence of the idea of a ‘radical break with history’ of modern architecture. The face of modern architecture acquires a lot more depth and expression through the work of Otto Wagner.

Contemporary architectural discipline gets informed by new technological feats on a regular basis leaving the profession of architecture in anxiety over their implications and its relation to past cultural values. A re-evaluation of modern architectural principles might be able to provide clues for ascertaining architectural strategies. Otto Wagner’s discourse in this regard may prove itself to be most rewarding.

Draft Post

Fig1 Nude descending a Staircase

The idea of visualizing movement in space occupied the minds of many in the late nineteenth to twentieth century. This was not a sudden development. The progression of this interest is documented by Giedion in his book, ‘Mechanization takes command’, he lays out the history of representation of movement starting from the basic vector graphs of Nicholas Oresme in the fourteenth century and notes the contribution of E.J. Marey in investigating scientific ways of capturing movement  beginning in the late nineteenth century. The photographic studies of motion by Muybridge and the works of Marcel Duchamp (see Fig.1) and the cubists such as Braque and Picasso further stimulated the discussion on a new ways of thinking about space in which time is also a dimension. Commenting on this ‘new conception of space’, Giedion states the following:

“Space in modern physics is conceived of as relative to a moving point of reference, not as the absolute or static entity of the baroque system of Newton and in the modern art, for the first time since Renaissance, a new conception of space leads to a self conscious enlargement of our ways of perceiving space. It was in cubism that this was most fully achieved.”

Further, he explains the cubists’ presentation of objects from several points of view simultaneously:

“The Cubists did not seek to reproduce the appearance of objects from one vantage point; they went around them, tried to lay hold of their internal constitution. They sought to extend the scale of feeling, just as contemporary science extends its descriptions to cover new levels of material phenomenon.”

The ‘interpenetration of inner and outer space’ that the cubists sought was also used by Le Corbusier in order to cater to what Giedion terms as a ‘new conception of space.’ According to him, the possibility of doing so seems to be latent in the skeletal concrete frame that Le Corbusier proposed in the sketch for the Domino house in 1915. This seems to have been exemplified in the Villa Savoye (1928 -30) about which Giedion notes:

“It is impossible to comprehend the Savoye house by a view from single point; quite literally, it is a construction in space time. The body of the house has been hollowed out in every direction: from above and below, within and without. A cross section at any point shows inner and outer space penetrating each other inextricably.”

Le Corbusier also captioned a photograph of Villa Savoye ‘architectural promenade’ which showed looking towards the apex of the ramp that has a window frame at its end. The ramp and the frame both are integral devices for the architectural promenade as the ramp facilitates and manipulates movement of the observer and the frame again allows for the interpenetration of the outside and the inside.

Fig 3

In 1923, Le Corbusier published an architectural manifesto called ‘Vers Une Architecture’ (Translated as ‘Towards an architecture’). In it, he called for a new architecture that would embody the ‘new spirit’ of industrialization and one that does not consider architecture as a stylistic experiment. In this book, an image of the Greek acropolis appears (see Fig.3) that was taken from Auguste Choisy’s ‘Histoire de l’ architecture.’ Choisy was demonstrating in his book that the Acropolis had picturesque qualities rather than that of classical symmetry and regularity. He proposed that the entire acropolis was a series of discrete scenes in which buildings and objects of different ages were asymmetrically balanced with respect to an external object.

Le Corbusier captioned the image of the Acropolis with the following:

“A view which shows the Parthenon, the Erechtheum, and the statue of Athena in front of the Propylea. It should not be forgotten that the site of acropolis is very up and down, with considerable variations in level which have been used to furnish imposing bases or plinths to buildings. The whole thing, being out of square, provides richly varied vistas of a subtle kind; the different masses of the buildings, being asymmetrically arranged, create an intense rhythm. The whole composition is massive, elastic, living, terribly sharp, keen and dominating.”

Anthony Vidler in his article ‘The Explosion of Space: Architecture and the Filmic Imaginary’ notes that for Le Corbusier, the view of the Acropolis expresses the “flexibility of Greek ‘axial’ planning” in which the asymmetry in the plan is appropriated by the perspectival framing on ground by the viewer. He also notes that the dialogue between plan and perspective at the Acropolis “permitted a return to the ‘original’ bodily and sensational sources of the plan.” This dialogue can be seen as one of the key influences for Le Corbusier’s ‘architectural promenade’which dealt with the issue of a peripatetic viewpoint of the mobile spectator instead of a single, fixed point of reference.

This post will analyze the use of color as a metaphor for transformation in the film “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” (1989, abbreviated hereafter as CTWL) by Peter Greenaway. Particular strategies such as using color coding to represent diverse spaces, increasing saturation levels and relationship of color with food shall be identified to reveal them as potent tools for manipulating emotions of the film observers.

Greenaway’s CTWL can be understood as the transformation of an abused and tortured woman, Georgina (Helen Mirren), married to a ruthless and sadistic gangster Albert Spica (Michael Gambon). Most of the film is set inside a high class French restaurant – La Hollandais, which Spica has recently taken over and is run by its resident chef, Richard Borst (Richard Bohringer). Borst and his staff help Georgina conduct an illicit relationship with one of the patrons at the restaurant, Michael (Alan Howard) who is a bookkeeper. The two lovers carry on their dangerous relationship within the restaurant with the help of Borst until Spica discovers it and has Michael tortured and killed by shoving down pages of ‘The French Revolution’ down his throat.  After discovering the body of Michael, Georgina becomes stricken with grief and prepares to confront Spica with a morbid revenge. She convinces Borst to cook Michael’s body and forces Spica to eat it. As he complies, before Albert starts choking, Georgina shoots him in the head.

Each area of the main setting, i.e. the restaurant has its own specific color scheme. The exterior, where Spica is shown torturing in the early scene is dark blue and looks sinister in its setting .It is also the place where the two trucks of meat refused by the chef rot away giving out an almost visible fetid stench. The dining hall which is the setting for Spica’s bursts of anger and misbehavior amongst a tense public atmosphere is red. The kitchen is a faint green which changes its quality from orderly to chaotic depending upon the situation. The bathroom is heavenly white and there is an innate quality of comfort and reassurance that emanates from this place. Even though, this is the place where Georgina and Michael commit adultery, the white color emphasizes respite and peacefulness.

The use of color to emphasize or distinguish continues with the characters themselves rather than just the spaces of the restaurant. This film is highly invested in the metamorphosis of Georgina from a victim to an avenger. In this way, transformation itself as an issue is important. Greenaway emphasizes this through the process of cooking and also by giving static or dynamic qualities to the characters through color. As Janice Siegel notes:

“In the film, all characters that do not change die; those who adapt survive… Michael, whose habits and dress had been most regular, also dies. He had worn the same suit every evening, and this consistency distinguishes him from other characters that undergo a series of costume changes even within the same scene. In the long and complicated opening sequence, Georgina’s dress appears black to Albert although she calls it dark blue; it is green in the kitchen, red in the dining room, and white in the bathroom. Michael always wore brown. Even when he is naked, his skin has a light brown hue, in the raw and in the cooked state… Richard the cook undergoes a transformation, too, from passive observer to active participant. His black tuxedo not only marks the final scene as ceremonial but also identifies the theme of change as momentous for the entire film. This is the first time that he wears anything other than chef’s white.”

Color has been used by Greenaway in CTWL to also neutralize environments to create focus for the characters and also add a surreal quality to the scene. The color washes are incredibly saturated to accentuate the effect of color on the eye, to provoke the visceral reactions from the observer as the camera switches between different spaces. Most notably in one of the opening sequences when the camera moves from the location of the kitchen to the dining room, the change of saturated hue immediately affects the eye and the stylized set becomes surreal. Also, the first transition of Georgina from the dining room to the bathroom immediately soothes the eye due to the saturated white. In order to complete this transition, Georgina’s clothes are color coded simultaneously within a single scene. The attention to detail is staggering. Even the color of her cigarettes changes when she moves from one room to the other.

As noted earlier, food itself has an important part to play in the movie as a metaphor for a transformative process. In many ways, the anatomy of the restaurant may appear closely to that of the human corpus. As Robert Sinnerbrink notes:

“We begin at the anus, the rear (end) of the restaurant, the smearing of a man with shit; we then move through the stomach, the interior as it were, normally hidden from view; finally we arrive at the mouth, the carnal opulence of Le Hollandais’ main dining room, the site of the cultured discrimination of taste. This is the domain – or perhaps the ‘erotogenic’ zone – of visual and visceral pleasures, of contemplation and consumption.”

One can therefore argue that this analogy between the space and human body can be extended to the kinesthetic relationship between the visual impact of color and the visual impact of food items shown through the movie. Color and food are both used to evoke disgust or excite passion. The most direct evidence of the connection between color and food is advanced by the cook himself when he agrees to transform the body of Michael into food. He explains the significance of the color black in food which makes up for the most expensive item on the menu. He believes this is so because of black signifies assimilation and consumption, the mastery over death. The symbolic significance of the color in relation to food is highly important in the context of this film.

Thus, if we consider transformation as one of the central themes of CTWL, it seems that color acts as a tool to transform emotions as we navigate through the spaces and through the characters often using high saturation levels to exaggerate emotional content of each scene while at the same time clearly portraying the presence of a human construct ala theater. Color accompanied with food, therefore, acts as a very potent metaphor of the idea of transformation in the movie.

Bibliography:

Ebert, Roger, ‘Film Review- The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover’, Source: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19990101/REVIEWS/901010301/1023

Ed. Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, Mary Alemany-Galway, ‘Peter Greenaway’s postmodern/poststructuralist cinema’ /Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2001

Winkler, Martin M., ‘Classical myth & culture in the cinema’ /Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, (2001)

Sinnerbrink Robert, ‘ The Cook , The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover: a discourse on disgust’ Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture Vol. 5 no.2 (1990)

On page 11-12, Calvino describes a story from the Decameron, in which the Florentine poet Guido Cavalcanti appears. He is surrounded by fellow men who try to intimidate him with following words:

“Guido, you refuse to be of our company. But look, when you have proved that there is no God, What will you have  accomplished?” Guido seeing surrounded by them, answered quickly, “Gentlemen, you may wish to say anything to me in your own home.” Then, resting his hand on one of the great tombs and being very nimble, he leaped over it and landing on the other side, made off and rid himself of them.

Calvino goes on:

Were I to choose an auspicious image for the new millenium, I would choose that one: the sudden agile leap of the poet philosopher who raises himself above the world, showing that with all his gravity, he posesses the secret of lightness, and that what many consider to be the vitality of our times- noisy, aggressive, revving and roaring- belongs to the realm of death, like a cemetery for rusty old cars.

These last sentences from Calvino have led me to not get weighed down, but become light in thinking, and light in action in times of crises.

The untitled work of Dan Flavin is an installation that has 18 rectangular frames of commercially available fluorescent lights that are shifted from each other in plan. The Horizontal tubes at the top and bottom are blue in color and the verticals are red in color. The framing seems to be made out of anodized aluminum. The sculpture glows softly and the colors seem to float and establish a color field after some time of observing. What also seems to be important is the setting of the sculpture within the gallery as it is placed in the space with the backdrop of a long glazed wall that offers views of natural vegetation and a cut rock wall that acts as a contrast for the light. The light of the blue fluorescents hover above the tubes. I did not understand how this light got reflected out of thin air. It seems that Flavin works within a limited palate of light sources and colors. However the choice of blue and red light seems particular due to their ability to excite the retina.

This painting  is an oil on a square canvas of the size 78 ¾” x 78 ¾”. The painting gives an optical illusion of having a sphere on a flat surface. The canvas is divided into 4 quadrants with the central horizontal and vertical lines being straight. All other dividing lines are curving slightly. The angles are calculated exactly to form a sphere.  These divisions are read as lines but they are actually color fields. Further, the square spaces between these fields have a different color outline from the color of the inner square or the outside dividing color field (or lines as one reads them). The diagonally opposite quadrants have similar (not same) color fields and the least distorted squares are in the middle and the far corners. There seem to be primarily shades of yellow, black, blue and red in the painting. The yellows and oranges seem to come out of the painting while the blacks and blues seem to go inside the painting. Also the relationship between the boundary colors and the filled squares changes within different quadrants. So, sometimes the infill color looks to recede and the boundary color comes forward and vice versa.

I am pleased to share the news of being part of the team that won the 2010 D3 Housing tomorrow competition. The project is titled: Home Spun: Water Harvesting Prefab Urban Housing for the Great Lakes Region

Team: Prof. Omar Khan, Prof. Laura Garofalo, Abhishek Mathur, Trinadh Kumar Pydipally

Currently, I along with the rest of the team are working on two papers extrapolating the design and manufacturing process of the above proposal which shall be submitted for presenting at various international architectural conferences. Please check out the links below for more information on the project.

http://www.d3space.org/competitions/

http://www.archdaily.com/49316/d3-housing-tomorrow-competition-winners-announced/

“…upheavals in architecture have increasingly become analytical affairs, whereby the written word, provocative and sometimes inflated, often precedes and indeed preempts the artistic deed…the text has tended to be exploited for its revolutionary value, that is, for its lithe capacity to formulate a new agenda or promulgate the latest vision of eternally new. Art has become more and more conceptual and the increasing reliance on this “dangerous supplement” that both fills in and at the same time fills up artistic activity has also given rise to a menacing hiatus that inevitably divides the ideal from real, the conception from creation. (Pg 281)”

The Futurist manifesto appears  as a literary device which seems to shock, put forward a thesis and also give clear opinions/ suggestions to propagate the central theme. In this way, the role of the word, as Mallgrave pointed out becomes to provoke and pre-empt the actual artistic deed. This stands true for the Futurists and particularly in the work of Antonio Sant’Elia. Also, Mallgrave mentions that this reliance on the word has its own setback of dividing the ideal from the real. In this context, the manifesto on Futurist architecture and Sant’Elia’s projects make for an interesting comparison. Sant’Elia himself anticipates this as he had published six images of the “Citta Nuova” alongside the manifesto.

The images that we see project a city that seems utopian – a vertical one at that. There are stacked layers of streets and plazas and the unmistakable presence of elevators, again amplifying the presence of a vertical movement. It is shorn of any historicist overtures and the diagonal sloping of the building forms suggests a radical break with the traditional building façade. So far, the Futurist manifesto is in concert with the description of the Futurist city/ house being: “…like an enormous machine…lifts must climb up like serpents of iron and glass…(the house) without painting and without sculpture…(the street) will descend into the earth on the earth with several levels, will receive metropolitan traffic and will be linked, for the necessary passage from one to the other, by metal walkways and immensely fast escalators. (Pg 36)” However, the manifesto also mentions “We have lost our predilection for the monumental, the heavy, the static, and we have enriched our sensibility with a taste for the light, the practical, the ephemeral and the swift.(Pg 35-36)” The illustrations of the Citta Nuova do not show a building which is light or ephemeral or swift. They represent a heavy construction that has a very traditional relationship to the ground.

In any case, there are other more important discussions within the intentions and the design strategies of the Futurists. The most important being the dependence on history even at a sub-conscious level by the Futurists. As much as Sant’Elia was touted as a Futurist architect – implying that he is freed of the historicism in his architecture, it is easy to spot the influences from Otto Wagner who was himself struggling with similar issues. Esther Da Costa Meyer has shown us in her book: Nuove Tendenze,” The Work of Antonio Sant’Elia, these influences in Sant’Elia’s earlier works for the railroad stations and the study of a villa in 1914. Generally too, in case of the Futurists, Costa Meyer puts forward an interesting notion of them mimicking nature through technology rather than the actual idealized transformation imagined by them, leading to total suppression of any natural/ cultural activity. The notion of “machine naturalism” by Manfredo Tafuri is of extreme interest in this regard. For me, the other significant issues that need to be investigated further are how architecture (in this case by Sant’Elia) “provided the pictorial ideals for futurism”? And how Sant’Elia’s designs start to treat urban scale questions with architectural expertise?

link to the futurist manifesto >> http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/