HomeDiagramsDatabaseMapsForum About
     

Go Back   SkyscraperPage Forum > Discussion Forums > Buildings & Architecture


Reply

 
Thread Tools Display Modes
     
     
  #81  
Old Posted Aug 11, 2011, 1:24 PM
miketoronto miketoronto is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Posts: 9,978
Back to the modernism question for a minute.
I think the issue with modernism is that we have not kept up the high quality and design of the originial modernist works of art.

Places like Mies Van De Rohe's towers are breathtaking with their attention to details and quality of materials.

I also just got that sense at Empire State Plaza in Albany. The quality of the materials are amazing and it looks great.

But much too often, modern buildings lack that detail and quality materials that make them something worth keeping and saving.
__________________
Miketoronto
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #82  
Old Posted Feb 11, 2013, 2:53 AM
ThatOneGuy's Avatar
ThatOneGuy ThatOneGuy is offline
Come As You Are
 
Join Date: May 2012
Location: Constanta
Posts: 920
Of course it hasn't. Many modernist buildings look great in themselves, and without them, skylines would end up looking like something from disneyland, with whacky shapes.

Imagine NYC in the 30s, after seeing nothing but brick on each street, to have a nice fresh plaza and this clean steel beast in front of you?


Or in Toronto...


Spectacular...they really refresh you just by looking at them.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #83  
Old Posted Jun 26, 2014, 9:33 AM
Veritas Veritas is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Feb 2013
Posts: 10
A better way to form the question would be "has minimalism/futurism failed?" to which the answer would, of course, be yes.

It used to be that buildings were based on 5000 years of tradition, of trial and error, finding out what best pleased the eye. Did you know that more years separate the Pyramids from the Colosseum than the Colosseum from us?

Architecture used to be about this trial and error, of combining the tried shapes with new ones and different ones and finding out what worked and what did not. Now it is about pleasuring the critics with outlandish and alien shapes that do not care for the landscape around them or the people that work inside them, all out of this bizarre desire to fulfill what they perceive as originality.

I am a writer, and this philosophy reminds of one commonly applied to media--namely, to be original, all of your ideas cannot come from anywhere--they must be conjured up from blackness and bear no similarity to anything else that existed before, and anything else is plagiarism. This is called "stupidity".
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #84  
Old Posted Jun 26, 2014, 3:47 PM
Wizened Variations's Avatar
Wizened Variations Wizened Variations is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Posts: 1,611
Quote:
Originally Posted by Veritas View Post
A better way to form the question would be "has minimalism/futurism failed?" to which the answer would, of course, be yes.

It used to be that buildings were based on 5000 years of tradition, of trial and error, finding out what best pleased the eye. Did you know that more years separate the Pyramids from the Colosseum than the Colosseum from us?

Architecture used to be about this trial and error, of combining the tried shapes with new ones and different ones and finding out what worked and what did not. Now it is about pleasuring the critics with outlandish and alien shapes that do not care for the landscape around them or the people that work inside them, all out of this bizarre desire to fulfill what they perceive as originality.

I am a writer, and this philosophy reminds of one commonly applied to media--namely, to be original, all of your ideas cannot come from anywhere--they must be conjured up from blackness and bear no similarity to anything else that existed before, and anything else is plagiarism. This is called "stupidity".
Architecture reflects the cost of materials, culture, wealth, and, technology.

I think technology is most important, today, and that technology is affecting architecture in unforeseen ways.

A) The masses have a far larger visual language than ever before. This started with still photography in the 19th Century and has rapidly evolved to where now we have YouTube, selfies, etc.

This visual language increasingly is shared across cultures. Person X in Iran and person Y in Brazil often have similar definitions of what "good" and "bad" buildings and infrastructure is "supposed" to look like.

B) However, despite so many across different cultures having similar visual educations, each culture when viewed at the same time, has differing feelings about what buildings should show about the culture into which buildings are placed.

A classic example, IMO, is often visible in former Soviet block countries where citizens react very favorably to constructing buildings that DO NOT look like "commieblocks." In such cases, new buildings are meant to reflect a "new chapter" in history.

This extends to most countries (and cultures) that both have experienced huge increases in standards of living and have becoming increasingly independent of the Western hegemony. Many, worldwide, want their modern architecture to be separate from the classic European tradition, and, to a lesser extent, the US rectilinear glass box.

Rebelling against classical Western architecture, however, is becoming very difficult because so much has already been "invented" by that tradition.

Current excesses will temper off as more cultures incorporate steel beam construction into their native architectural styles.
__________________
Good read on relationship between increasing number of freeway lanes and traffic

http://www.vtpi.org/gentraf.pdf
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #85  
Old Posted Jun 26, 2014, 10:58 PM
vid's Avatar
vid vid is offline
I am a typical
 
Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: Thunder Bay
Posts: 41,172
You can't use the "what best pleased the eye" argument in favour of classical architecture when so much of it was destroyed for being "displeasing to the eye" in the 1940s–1980s.

You know what doesn't care about the landscape around it? A gigantic, Norman-inspired palace on a cliff in a small town in northern Canada.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #86  
Old Posted Jun 28, 2014, 12:14 AM
ThatOneGuy's Avatar
ThatOneGuy ThatOneGuy is offline
Come As You Are
 
Join Date: May 2012
Location: Constanta
Posts: 920
I'm very convinced that lack of maintenance played a huge part in the 80s-early 2000s break from modernism. People let these buildings turn dirty and rotten, far from the clean aesthetic the architects were aiming for, or they were built cheaply and did not fit in with a clean look either. Also, many examples were built to house criminals, or underwent thoughtless 'renovations' in the 80s. So they ended up giving modernism a bad name.

One of the reasons for this lack of maintenance compared to other buildings is probably how some people took 'low maintenance' and 'functional' very literally, and they assumed it meant 'no maintenance.' This doesn't work - every building needs maintenance, and the 'functional' aspect was what the marketing departments used to sell the designs, since functionalism was a side effect of clean lines and open spaces which came from the true modernist philosophy of "less is more."
Even Le Corbusier eventually hated the term 'functional.'

Modernism is very misunderstood. While "less is more" does imply that there is beauty in the clean and serene (and there definitely can be) it also means that form, light, pattern, and atmosphere is the detail - not tiny superficial sculptures like older buildings had. Mies Van Der Rohe himself used ornament - as steel facade beams to emphasize sleek verticality and linear pattern. He conveyed more, using less.

Even the most notorious modernist housing blocks home to the worst ghettos can be brought back to the beauty that modernism had intended. As they rotted, their clean design faded. Bring the clean design back, and you have a great building.
Park Hill, Sheffield:
Before: horrid ghetto

After: expensive apartments






An example in Warsaw:
Before:



After:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lulek/12883894335/

And it is still pure modernist, even in the interiors.

Link to another example of a modernist ghetto in Rotterdam which was brought back to the architect's original vision:
It was victim to a bad 80s renovation as a result of social issues.
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showpo...postcount=1407
__________________
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."
-Leonardo Da Vinci
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #87  
Old Posted Jun 28, 2014, 4:12 AM
Insoluble Insoluble is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Dec 2011
Posts: 655
Quote:
Originally Posted by ThatOneGuy View Post
Imagine NYC in the 30s, after seeing nothing but brick on each street, to have a nice fresh plaza and this clean steel beast in front of you?
Bad example. The NCY downtown skyline is held as the all-time pinnacle by many members of this forum. What surrounded it afterwards, not so much. Some of the most well loved skyscrapers of all time were around in 1930's New York. There are some great Modern masterpieces in NYC as well, but it's tough to argue that what came before wasn't equally magnificent if not more so.

Anyway, to the topic of this thread, Modernism hasn't failed so much as it's about run its course. We've moved on. A good portion of newer buildings are not really Modernist (with a capital M at least). Like architectural styles before and after, there are some great examples of Modernism, and some terrible ones. I think its interesting that Modernism has finally come out of the period of loathing that seems to occur after an architectural style has its heyday. There are still quite a few people clinging on to their loathing though. This clash of opinions seems to come up a lot on Skyscraperpage where it often feels as though certain posters have chosen sides in an epic battle between modernism and neoclassicism.

Post-Modernism seems to be in the midst of that stage of being loathed still. I think it will be interesting to see how it is viewed in another 20 to 30 years or so. I strongly suspect we'll see similar arguments between those who have come to appreciate it and those who still hate it.
Reply With Quote
     
     
End
 
 
Reply

Go Back   SkyscraperPage Forum > Discussion Forums > Buildings & Architecture
Forum Jump


Thread Tools
Display Modes

Forum Jump


All times are GMT. The time now is 3:10 PM.

     
SkyscraperPage.com - Archive - Privacy Statement - Top

Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.7
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.