Contemporary Architecture

1. Contemporary Architecture

2. Phases • Neo-classicism - Boullee & Ledoux • Industrial Revolution • Arts & Crafts Movement – Gaudi, Horta, F.L.Wright • Futuristic Movement – Sant’ Elia • Expressionism – Mendelsohn, Taut • Constructivism • BAUHAUS – Gropius & Behrens • Modernism – CIAM, Le Corbusier, Mies, Wright, Alvar Alto • The Indian context – Colonial & Indo – Saracenic – Chisholm, P.W.D., Lutyens’ New Delhi

3. etienne-louisboullee&claudenicolasledoux

5. Arts & Crafts Movement – Gaudi, Horta, F.L.Wright Hotel Tassel Casa Milà Sagrada Família Robie House Interior of the Horta Museum

6. Futuristic Movement – Sant’ Elia La Citta Nuova, 1914

7. Expressionism – Mendelsohn, Taut Einstein Tower Glass Pavilion

8. Constructivism

9. BAUHAUS – Gropius & Behrens Wassily Chair

10. Modernism – CIAM, Le Corbusier, Mies, Wright, Alvar Alto

11. Phases • TEAM X • Brutalism • Influential writings of Jane Jacobs, Robert Venturi, Christopher Alexander & Aldo Rossi • Post – Modernism - Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid and others • Vernacular - Laurie Baker, Tadao Ando, Hassan Fathy, Paulo Soleri and Geoffrey Bawa • The Indian context - Architecture after Independence – Charles Correa, B.V.Doshi, Achyut Kanvinde and others -

12. Leading to a New Architecture

13. Historical Overview • Origins of Neo-classicism • Enlightenment Architects – Boullee & Ledoux

14. Historical Overview • The Beginning – The origin of modernity The Enlightenment – That moment in the mid-eighteenth century when a new view of history brought architects to question the classical canons of Vitruvius & to document the remains of the antique world in order to establish a more objective basis on which to work. The necessary conditions for modern architecture appeared some time between - architect Claude Perrault’s late 17th century challenge to the universal validity of Vitruvian proportions & the definitive split between engineering and architecture which is dated to the foundation in Paris of the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees, the first engineering school, in 1747.

15. Cultural transformations- Neo-Classical architecture1750-1900

16. Origins • Neo-classicism seems to have emerged out of two different but related developments which radically transformed the relationship between man and nature. 1. A sudden increase in man’s capacity to exercise control over nature. Technological changes led to a new infrastructure and to the exploitation of an increased productive capacity. 2. A fundamental shift in the nature of human consciousness, in response to major changes taking place in society, which gave birth to a new cultural formation. This shift yielded new categories of knowledge and a historicist mode of thought which led to the emergence of humanist disciplines of the Enlightenment – sociology, aesthetics, history and archaeology.

17. Search for a true style The over-elaboration of architectural language in the Rococo interiors and the secularization of Enlightenment thought compelled the architects of the 18th century, by now aware of the emergent and unstable nature of their age, to search for a true style through a precise appraisal of antiquity. Their motivation was not simply to copy the ancients but to obey the principles on which their work had been based. The archaeological research that arose from this impulse soon led to a major controversy: to which of the four Mediterranean cultures – the Egyptians, the Etruscans, the Greeks and the Romans – should they look for a true style?

18. Theoretical developments Claude Perrault questioned the validity of the Vitruvian proportions. Instead he elaborated his thesis of positive beauty and arbitrary beauty. positive beauty – standardization and perfection. arbitrary beauty – such expressive function as may be required by a particular circumstance or character. Abbe de Cordemoy ’s book – Nouveau Traite de toute l’architecture (1706). He replaced the Vitruvian attributes of architecture – utilitas, firmitas and venustas (utility, solidity and beauty) by his own trinity of ordonnance, distribution and bienseance. While the first two categories concerned the correct proportioning of the classical orders and their appropriate disposition, the third introduced the notion of fitness which warned against the inappropriate application of Classical elements to utilitarian structures.

19. Theoretical developments Jacques-Francois Blondel opened an architecture school in Rue de la Harpe in 1743. He became the master of the so-called ‘visionary’ generation of architects – Etienne-Louis Boullee, Jacques Gondoin, Pierre Patte, Marie-Joseph Peyre and probably the most visionary of all, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. Blondel’s “Cours d’architecture”(1750) establishes his concerns regarding composition, type and character. He was preoccupied with appropriate formal expression and with a differentiated physiognomy to accord with the varying social character of different building types. The age was already having to confront the articulation of a much more complex society.

20. Projects Etienne-Louis Boullee He devoted his life to the projection of buildings so vast as to preclude their realization. He evoked the sublime emotions of terror and tranquility through the grandeur of his conceptions. Genre terrible – the immensity of the vista and the unadorned geometrical purity of monumental form are combined in such a way as to promote exhilaration and anxiety. He was obsessed with the capacity of light to evoke the presence of the divine. This intention is evident in the sunlit haze that illuminates the interior of his “Metropole”.

21. Projects Etienne-Louis Boullee Cenotaph for Isaac Newton, c.1785. A similar light is portrayed in the vast masonry sphere of his projected cenotaph, where by night a fire was suspended to represent the sun, while by day it was extinguished to reveal the illusion of the firmament produced by the daylight shining through the sphere’s perforated walls. He remained obsessed with imagining the monuments of some omnipotent state dedicated to the worship of the supreme being. His influence in post-revolutionary Europe was considerable, primarily through the activity of his pupil Jean-Nicholas-Louis Durand, who reduced his extravagant ideas to a normative and economic building typology.

22. Projects Claude-Nicolas Ledoux Ideal city of Chaux, 1804. This is one of the first essays in industrial architecture – it consciously integrated productive units with workers’ housing. Each element in this complex was rendered according to its character. Thus the salt evaporation sheds on the axis were high-roofed like agricultural buildings and finished in smooth ashlar, while the director’s house in the centre was low-roofed and pedimented, rusticated throughout and embellished with classical porticoes. He extended this limited typology to include all the institutions of his ideal city.

23. Plan view of the facilities The Royal Saltworks House of supervisors

24. Projects Claude-Nicolas Ledoux Barriere de l’Etoile, 1785. These toll-gates were shining exemplars of the Age of Reason. They were erected under the ancient regime as control-points for the collection of taxes. They were just as disconnected from the culture of their time as the idealized institutions of Chaux. A whole world separated Ledoux’s arbitrary but purgative reconstitution of fragmented classical parts in these toll-gates from Durand’s rational permutation of received classical elements.

25. Projects Karl Friedrich Schinkel He acquired his early enthusiasm for Gothic not from Berlin or Paris, but from his own first-hand experiences of Italian cathedrals. The combination of political idealism and military prowess seems to have demanded a return to the classic. His masterpieces in Berlin include the NeueWache(1816), Schauspielhaus(1821) and the Altes Museum of 1830. While the guardhouse and the theatre show characteristic features of Schinkel’s mature style, the influence of Durand is clearly evident in the museum. Schauspielhaus

26. Projects Karl Friedrich Schinkel The Altes museum is a prototypical museum plan taken from Durand’s Precis and split in half. Schinkel created a spatial articulation of extraordinary delicacy and power, as the wide peristyle gives way to a narrow portico containing a symmetrical entry stair and its mezzanine. Henry Labrouste Blondel’s Neo-classicism was continued by Henry Labrouste, who had studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He insisted on the primacy of structure and on the derivation of all ornament from construction. The Altes Museum Reading room of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève

27. Neo-Classical heritage It was divided into two closely related lines of development – • The Structural Classicism of Labrouste & • The Romantic Classicism of Schinkel. The Structural Classicism tended to emphasize structure – the line of Cordemoy, Laugier & Soufflot. The Romantic Classicism tended to stress the physiognomic character of the form itself – the line of Ledoux, Boullee and Gilly.