(I'm gearing up to post the beginnings of the lecture/demo work that I'm determined to be the true focus of this log, but in the meantime.....)
I've been thinking lately about how leaving the rat race doesn't mean you aren't still a rat. You're just a self-employed rat who gets to talk to clients while still in your pajamas and can take a nap at 2 in the afternoon if you want to. Sure, you've gotten rid of the stress of running round and round on the same wheel day in and day out, but you can't eliminate the fact the you're still in a cage............ And those damn whiskers keep getting in your way.
So what is it that makes the cage go away, if only in our tiny little rat minds? A good friend of D.'s supposedly once said something that might just be brilliant:
"without conviction and belief we are left having to amuse ourselves minute by minute in the lapses that reality has to offer."
A perfect description of rat-ness.
And another rather humbling thought for the day:
"The architect is a builder who has learned Latin."
Adolf Loos
Loos is a confusing architect to understand - he wrote famously of the need for a strong division of art and architecture:
The house has to please everyone, contrary to the work of art which does not. The work is a private matter for the artist. The house is not. The work of art is brought into the world without there being a need for it. The house satisfies a requirement. The work of art is responsible to none; the house is responsible to everyone. The work of art wants to draw people out of their state of comfort. The house has to serve comfort. The work of art is revolutionary; the house is conservative. The work of art shows people new directions and thinks of the future. The house thinks of the present. Man loves everything that satisfies his comfort. He hates everything that wants to draw him out of his acquired and secured position and that disturbs him. Thus he loves the house and hates art. Does it follow that the house has nothing in common with art and is architecture not to be included in the arts? That is so. Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfills a function is to be excluded from the domain of art.
It is important to remember the context of his work (early 1900's, when architecture was swept up in the Art Nouveau movement). He was one of the first "modernists," seeking a rationalist approach to architecture, in the footsteps of Louis Sullivan's dictum "
form follows function." Here is an excerpt from a paper (that I hope she doesn't mind my referencing?) by
Anneke Hackman:
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"There are four recognizable elements of composition, first compiled by Paul Frankl in his 1914 essay "Die Entwicklungsphasen der neuren Baukunst," which combine to achieve the perfect Loosian architectural structure:
1.Visible Surface. This first element conveys the building's image, and concerns elements of the visible realm, such as light, color, or its facades, which clad the structure's interior and exterior walls like membranes.
2.Material Structure. The skeletal structure of the building, it might be comprised of beams, columns, brick, steel, stone, and so on; occasionally the technical underpinnings of the material structure, usually concealed, are revealed as well.
3.Space-Volume. The form circumscribed by the material structure on both the outside and inside of buildings; the placement of the elements of the material structure which allocates space within the defined volume.
4.Finality. This designates the emotional or functional component of the building, and involves its social or psychological purpose.
These four architectural and compositional elements combine to emphasize the importance of art or architecture through the notions of perception or conception, in accordance with the desired artistic sentiment or architectural objective. With the former, the focus remains on the perception of the completed building, since the purpose is to evoke specific emotions. How we perceive art is more important than the manner by which the work of art was realized; the visual supercedes the process of creation. Therefore, the order of the above themes follows its numerical order: we search for an appropriate visible surface, interpret the appropriate material structure, define the required space-volume to evoke the appropriate emotions, and then identify the finality required.
Because the requirement for functionality occasions the use of architecture over art, the target is found in the conception of the structure, rather than our attained perception from the result. Art is created to serve a purpose so we act from conception upwards, applying the four elements in reverse order: we look for the finality, the functional component required of the building, progress to the space-volume best suited to the task, select the material structure, and finally establish what would best convey the building's image via an appropriate visible surface. The end result is conception with consideration given to perception, creating a dichotomy between public and private, the monument against the house, and the exterior in contrast to the building's interior. The monument is not a house because the former is a sign, on the side of perception, whereas the latter requires the architect to familiarize himself with the needs and habits of the occupants, developing space according to lifestyles, and conceive the proper accommodation from finality down to visible surface.
It follows that we must investigate the spectrum of function to ornamentation in Loos' ideology, for we must locate the balance of conception utilized to reach the target of functionality and to cause the consumer to perceive the appropriateness of the occasioned structure. Architecture must meet a physical need and create the appropriate atmosphere in accordance with the purpose the structure aims to serve.
In his essay "Architecture," Loos explained "When we find a mound in the woods, six feet long and three feet wide, raised to a pyramidal form by means of a spade, we become serious and something in us says: someone was buried here. That is architecture." Architecture must be not only efficiently functional, but recognizable as itself. When Loos lauds the functional, he is not clamoring for the removal of architecture to the realm of the bland or ugly, nor does he wish it to be a large "functional" space whose enclosed volume is plain and thereby functional. Rather, a functional building is customized according to the preferred end result, a concept eventually emerging as Loos' Raumplan, which Schezen defined as "a system of proportional relationships specific to each spatial condition."
Once the physical need of appropriate functionality is met, the functional object must also create the appropriate atmosphere, fulfilling perceptual ideas through a successful conceptual-order construction."
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I am most interested in this issue of the functional object also fulfilling perceptual ideas, which ties into an
earlier post about retinal-art. And I am curious about what Loos would have to say about the current state of architecture, which seems to be engaged in a revolution of "materialism." I am swept up in this movement myself, which is sort of architecture's next variation upon the work of so-called minimalist artists like
Donald Judd (see also
The Chinati Foundation), and a reaction to the sometimes arbitrary or symbol-laden ornamentation of post-modernism. Much of the new architecture today involves the exploration of skin and material, in a stange combination of minimalist and conceptualist applications, embracing or exploiting either the inherent qualities of a material, or its meanings and implications. The best work incorporates both - the most notable architects doing this sort of work range from
Herzog+De Meuron to
Frank Gehry (see also the
Salon article), with the lesser-known
office dA a personal favorite of mine. How would Loos feel about the fetishization of the skin vs. structure and fabric vs. frame - something I feel shares strong ties to similar movements in the world of fashion. It seems important to address the question: how can this issue of materiality be grounded in functionality?
A related thought - I am reminded of something my friend Rick said (he used to work for Gehry). He told me that Gehry believed himself to be a classicist, and that there was a strong historical lineage for his work. I haven't found any readings to support that yet (actually I haven't tried) but I do believe it, just as I believe Michelangelo to be one of the most radical architects ever. All you have to do is visit the
great stairway entrance of the
Laurentian Library in Florence (which keeps very strange hours and is somewhat of a challenge, but worth it) and realize how he stretched and molded the architecture as if it was plastic - liquid. At the same time, the space feels grounded and graceful. His mannerist architecture, as it is known, seems to explore this very issue of materiality while still satisfying function and even formal convention............ The space is one of the more dynamic spaces I have ever been in, and built in the 1500's.
Speaking of materiality and skin and surface - look at the work of
Andreas Gursky (up for only a few more days at MoMA) ......................
