This part of a two-part post will quickly revisit some ideas used to lend credence to some of last century’s new architectures – in preparation for part two to follow. Radical Functionalism. The idea of a building being configured according to certain useful criteria relating to buildings and their occupants’ needs didn’t last very long. Functionalism had an essential humanism at its core but this […]
One consequence of this wondrous digital age (how is it for you?) is that opinions about nearly anything, not just buildings, become binarised to “like” or “dislike”. It can’t get much simpler. There’s no compulsion or even the expectation of explanation. I don’t like this. Fine. But we should at least try to understand how this […]
Here’s one last look at those buildings the memories of which, long unrefreshed, are now almost totally gone. Each of these buildings once had a place in history books. First up is Hofatelier Elvira by August Endell, 1898. My undergraduate history book said it was an example of German Art Nouveau and I’m sure it was. It’s just […]
The only thing these photographs have in common is that you’ve probably not seen them before. They’re not part of the narratives constructed around the respective buildings. They’re photographs that got lost along the way. They remind us that our knowledge of certain buildings sometimes has little to do with where they are built, what […]
Part I of Time and Architecture introduced the topic and outlined some of the basic concepts that will be built upon here. Shockingly, Part I was written in July of last year and this alone illustrates a fact that is very important for both buildings and architecture (and probably life too) – what seems like the […]
Following on from my previous post about The Kiss Principle and miscellaneous tidbits about the Farnsworth House, I was poking around the internet looking for information about the mechanical services at Philip Johnson’s Glass House. After all, it has no mechanical room. The fireplace looks a bit more the business though. While we’re over here, […]
This is part 2 of a two-part post. Part 1 is here. In Part 2, we’re nearing the then present time of 1963 and we’re finally getting to the kind of stuff you pay a historian to write. My own architectural awareness was very limited at that time but the final pages of modern architecture books […]
This book recently came into my life once again. Inside was written my name and the year, 1974. The chapter on MODERN architecture was probably the only one I’d ever read. It still is. I was interested to read it again, to see what ‘modern’ might have meant in 1963 when the first edition was […]
Philip Cortelyou Johnson (July 8, 1906 – January 25, 2005) … was descended from the Jansen (a.k.a. Johnson) family of New Amsterdam, and included among his ancestors the Huguenot Jacques Cortelyou, who laid out the first town plan of New Amsterdam for Peter Stuyvesant.* Impressive. Johnson was the son of a wealthy Cleveland attorney Homer M. Johnson, and an equally wealthy […]
A couple of recent posts have raised the subject of Death And The Architect. First was Futurist Endings with its list of the (much delayed) deaths of members of the Futurist movement. And yesterday’s post, “Fill’erup with Specialness!” suggested that Mies van der Rohe’s ESSO gas station in Montreal may have been the last building of […]
Q: How can I make my building different? A: Just take a piece of landscape and put something that looks different in it – it’s quite easy really. See? Erm, that’s not quite what I meant. Huh – why not? This looks different on all levels – it’s got a different colour, pattern and shape […]
A quick visit to Dubai’s Cityscape Global Exhibition yesterday made me think that, as ever, it’s only rich rulers and property developers who are ceaselessly optimistic about the future and the building of cities. Rich rulers can’t change countries at will but, as evidenced from the previous evenings’ Cityscape Awards for Emerging Markets, property developers […]
In response to a question posted by Francisco, I checked up on the dates and cause of death of the main Futurists. Most of them were born in the early 1880s and most of them lived to be about 70. That they all died young and when at war is true of only one, Antonio […]
Following on from the cosmic theme of last week, we need to talk about Time and the ways buildings exist in this particular dimension that we’re stuck with. We need to do this because, even if we ever sorted out what Beauty was and how to create it in buildings, how could we be sure […]
