During his time spent in Southern California in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Frank Lloyd Wright accelerated the search for L.A.'s authentic architecture that was suitable to the city's culture and landscape. Writer/Director Chris Hawthorne, architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times, explores the houses the legendary architect built in Los Angeles. From the KCET series Artbound, a co-production of KCET and LaBella Films: kcet.org/shows/artbound/episodes/that-far-corner-frank-lloyd-wright-in-los-angeles
This documentary asks the question of how we appreciate and interact with the architectural environment surrounding us. Using as a starting point a gas station built by legendary architect Mies van der Rohe, the filmmakers invite us to assess both our awareness of the architectural environment and the role of the architect in society. The film is not a simple bio of the life and times of Mies van der Rohe but it also explores and translates into images the interplay of form and function in art through the work of the Master and its inherent architectural language, interspersed with anecdotes and observations of experts and eminent architects and of users of his architecture alike. Images of Mies van der Rohe’s architectural masterpieces are mixed with an original soundtrack composed by acclaimed DJ Ram to create a unique visual and musical experience. Directed by Joseph Hillel and Patrick Demers. 2004. 57 min.
Construir en acero: forma y estructura en el espacio continuo
La irrupción del hierro en la edificación del siglo XIX supone para la arquitectura una convulsión sin precedentes. Acompañado del progresivo protagonismo del vidrio, este acontecimiento tecnológico abre camino a los dos plantemientos espaciales más emblemáticos de la construcción moderna: el rascacielos y el edificio diáfano. A la evolución del segundo dedica el siguiente texto Ramón Araujo, profesor de Construcción de la Escuela de Arquitectura de Madrid, en el que desarrolla un itinerario cronológico que abarca desde tipos históricos como la gran estación o el palacio de cristal, hasta las soluciones más características de nuestro siglo.
On view March 29 through July 19, 2015, Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955–1980 is organized by Barry Bergdoll, Curator, and Patricio del Real, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, MoMA; Jorge Francisco Liernur, Universidad Torcuato di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Carlos Eduardo Comas, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil; with the assistance of an advisory committee from across Latin America……..The exhibition features architectural drawings and models, vintage photographs, and films from the period collected over the last three years from architecture and film archives, universities, and architecture offices throughout the region. Highlighting the extent to which the exhibition contributes to new interpretations of Latin American architecture of the period, several research teams—in addition to the invited curators—have worked over the last two years to develop analytical models and compilations of rarely seen film footage……….Architects such as Lina Bo Bardi, Lucio Costa, and Oscar Niemeyer in Brazil; Juan O’Gorman, Mario Pani, Luis Barragán, and Teodoro González de León in Mexico; Mario Roberto Alvarez and Clorindo Testa in Argentina; Ricardo Porro, Fernando Salinas and Mario Coyula in Cuba; Henry Klumb in Puerto Rico; Carlos Raúl Villanueva and Jesús Tenreiro in Venezuela; Rogelio Salmona and Germán Samper in Colombia; Eladio Dieste and Nelson Bayardo in Uruguay; and Emilio Duhart and the School of Valparaiso in Chile, to name but a few, met these challenges with formal, urbanist, and programmatic innovation—much of it relevant still to the challenges of our own period, in which Latin America is again providing exciting and challenging architecture and urban responses to the ongoing issues of modernization and development, though in vastly different economic and political contexts than those considered in this major historical reevaluation.
Latin America was a place where Modernist dreams came true
………………Latin America is a questionable construct. As a Brazilian said to me, riled at being grouped with countries with which she felt little affinity, the term if used at all should also include French-speaking Canada. That it doesn’t reveals a certain perspective, which tends to make ‘Latin’ a synonym for ‘not the North’. That said, it has made a pretext for an exhilarating display of architectural creativity with consistent themes within its diversity……………..
Critiques of the exhibition have ranged from a lack of definition of the political milieu within which many of the works emerged (including their production during periods of military dictatorships), from its Euro- or New York-centric character and associated suspicions of what was included or excluded (often raised from nationalist perspectives), and from the idealization and overgeneralization of what Bergdoll defined in an interview in Metropolis Magazine as the “poetics of developmentalism” (Samuel Medina, “The Future Was Latin America,” Metropolis Magazine [March 2015]: http://www.metropolismag.com/March-2015/The-Future-Was-Latin-America/). These appraisals, however, remain focused on the character of and pieces within the exhibition and did not address the way that it served to construct an idea of how modern architecture in Latin America is to be understood and how its presentation was reflective of an ideological position. For, ultimately, Latin America in Construction remaps the architecture, urbanism, and landscapes within new parameters and positions itself as the center of the map by not only expanding MoMA’s own collection of works on Latin American architecture, but also by defining the discourse of how to read and understand those works and asserting its role within that reading.
Luis E. Carranza. Review of Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955–1980
While the very existence of a “nation” requires geographical boundedness, locating the nation—not just as a territory, but as a set of ideas, customs, and power relations—imparts an enduring challenge. This is especially true as the very limits of a nation tend to surpass real boundaries, which in turn fail to describe, register, and capture ideas of citizenship. Architecture has long provided a critical medium for the production of the nation. Monuments, national malls, and embassies, are the most recognizable of its outputs, but even more mundane typologies—stadiums, airports, etc.—make tangible the abstractedness of the nation, while simultaneously controlling its image and reinforcing its power. But other spatial relations also provide alternative and perhaps less coercive readings of the nation. Urban protests that project a collective representation of the nation by performing its refusal and mounting violence around intensifying border conditions demonstrate how the nation is often rendered most visible by its fissures. The essays presented here perform their own readings of the nation’s materialization through various appropriations of space, demonstrating how architecture becomes both a vehicle and a catalyst for shifting applications of state sovereignty.
……………..professors Carranza and Lara should be commended for trying to provide a wide-ranging guide, though it is limited to biographical sketches of architects, descriptions of buildings (often without images), and brief notes that simply locate the buildings in time and place. They have approached their complex subject by compiling and reading the relevant bibliography, most of it in Spanish, and organizing the selected buildings and events chronologically, as Ph.D. students must do. The really difficult work begins now, in crafting a conceptual structure for analysis and a narrative that transcends merely the facts of Latin America's past 100 years of architecture……………….
The Details of Modern Architecture, the first comprehensive analysis of both the technical and the aesthetic importance of details in the development of architecture, provides not one answer but many.The more than 500 illustrations are a major contribution in their own right. Providing a valuable collective resource, they present the details of notable architectural works drawn in similar styles and formats, allowing comparisons between works of different scales, periods, and styles. Covering the period 1890-1932, Ford focuses on various recognized masters, explaining the detailing and construction techniques that distort, camouflage, or enhance a building. He looks at the source of each architect's ideas, the translation of those ideas into practice, and the success or failure of the technical execution. Ford examines Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House and Fallingwater Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, and buildings by McKim, Mead & White, Lutyens, Mies van der Rohe, and Schindler from a point of view that acknowledges the importance of tradition, precedent, style, and ideology in architectural construction. He discusses critical details from a technical and contextual standpoint, considering how they perform how they add to or detract from the building as a whole, and how some have persisted and been adapted through time.
Kenneth Frampton is the Ware Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University and a leading voice in the history of modernist architecture. In the 1970s, he was instrumental in the development of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York and a co-founding editor of its magazine Oppositions. His essay ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism’ of 1983 was seminal in defining architectural thought throughout the 1980s.
Studies in Tectonic Culture is composed of ten essays and an epilogue that trace the history of contemporary form as an evolving poetic of structure and construction, the book's analytical framework rests on Frampton's close readings of key French and German, and English sources from the eighteenth century to the present. Kenneth Frampton's long-awaited follow-up to his classic A Critical History of Modern Architecture is certain to influence any future debate on the evolution of modern architecture. Studies in Tectonic Culture is nothing less than a rethinking of the entire modern architectural tradition. The notion of tectonics as employed by Framptonthe focus on architecture as a constructional craftconstitutes a direct challenge to current mainstream thinking on the artistic limits of postmodernism, and suggests a convincing alternative. Indeed, Frampton argues, modern architecture is invariably as much about structure and construction as it is about space and abstract form. Composed of ten essays and an epilogue that trace the history of contemporary form as an evolving poetic of structure and construction, the book's analytical framework rests on Frampton's close readings of key French and German, and English sources from the eighteenth century to the present. He clarifies the various turns that structural engineering and tectonic imagination have taken in the work of such architects as Perret, Wright, Kahn, Scarpa, and Mies, and shows how both constructional form and material character were integral to an evolving architectural expression of their work. Frampton also demonstrates that the way in which these elements are articulated from one work to the next provides a basis upon which to evaluate the works as a whole. This is especially evident in his consideration of the work of Perret, Mies, and Kahn and the continuities in their thought and attitudes that linked them to the past. Frampton considers the conscious cultivation of the tectonic tradition in architecture as an essential element in the future development of architectural form, casting a critical new light on the entire issue of modernity and on the place of much work that has passed as "avant-garde."
Introduction : reflections on the scope of the tectonic -- Greco-Gothic and Neo-Gothic : the Anglo-French origins of tectonic form -- The rise of the tectonic : core form and art form in the German enlightenment, 1750-1870 -- Frank Lloyd Wright and the text-tile tectonic -- Auguste Perret and classical rationalism -- Mies van der Rohne : avant-garde and continuity -- Louis Kahn : modernization and the new monumentality, 1944-1972 -- Jørn Utzon : transcultural form and the tectonic metaphor -- Carlo Scarpa and the adoratiaon of the joint -- Postscriptum : the tectonic trajectory, 1903-1994 -- The owl of Minverva : an epilogue.