Towards New Architecture / PlayTime

Le Corbusier, another great modernism architect of this era like Mies Van Der Rohe the father of modern architecture. For him everything in his architecture must be simple and clean just like the word “modern”. The architectures are simple, but by being simple they still provide functions for living.

The film “Playtime” directed by Jacques Tati, A comedian and director. In this film he tells a story of a man traveling in Paris, which every thing looks the same, well managed, put in order, colorless, plain and simple. A city full of plain metallic, glass buildings with no decorations. Mainly mass produces architecture. People are label by numbers and dressing all the same, which is very confusing. Everything divided into blocks, which all look the same. It is so confusing

The movie is clearly showing the world through Corbusier’s mind about modern architecture. The whole city was well design and organized in a modern way. Everything is in the grid, glass boxes and steel structure.  I was quite interested at the start of the movie I didn’t understand the movie clearly, but by spending more time watching through the movie and looking through the scenes we can start understand the story he wants us to see. The color of the places were very dull so all the buildings look the same, the cars in the airport parking lot even a picture of the hotel in the poster for a vacation looks exactly the same as the office. The people inside the film dress the same and looks the same, their cloths looks international, that’s why you can see people getting confused all the time, they keep saying hello to strangers, but they think they know that person.

In the film the director uses sound effects to identify different places, person, actions or feelings, but actually those sound effects are unreal.

MIES VAN DER ROHE & ORNAMENTATION

Mies Van Der Rohe one of the most successful modernism architecture of the 20^th century. His work was mainly pure and modern, showing the real materials, being honest. Mies was the person who came up with the quote “Less is more”, avoiding all the elements of “bourgeols” such as ornamentation. He was able to provide functional out of the materials itself based on minimalism, which also relates to his quote “Less is more”. He started working in the US with this line of billionaire clients waiting for his design. Since he was not a bug fan of ornamentation his work was just plain walls, but then he came up with the whole wall craft out from marble, which cost about a million dollars. In my opinion that was quite against his concept because modernism was more a kind of mass production working with prefabricated materials like steel or glass and they don’t cost a lot. Another example was the “Seagram” due to the fire at Chicago forcing him to cover the I-beams, which is the main structure of the building with concrete. Another row of i-beams were established on the façade of the building because he wanted to show what was inside the concrete columns, that was totally against his style in terms of ornamentation. Because he was so famous, in the end no one really said that he was breaking his own theory.  

Ornament and Crime by Adolf Loos

From reading Adolf Loos’s “Ornament and Crime”, for him decoration is committing crime, unnecessary and symbolize the old fashion in the past. Ornaments are not needed in the modern time lifestyle. His thinking is somehow connected to Mies van der Rohe relating to the phrase “less is more”. But the phrase “less is more’ doesn’t really work thoroughly. Being less ornamented does mean that it is the best architecture or the best design, but its up to the style of the architecture, so some that are heavily decorated or the ones that are really plain could both become the right answer.

In my opinion “ornament is a crime” is not completely wrong. It depends on what aspect what style does ornament involve in. I’m not saying that what Loos says in the book was totally right or wrong. There are some points that I agree with him about representing a crime against the national economy, human labour, money and materials. Sometimes we spend too much time and money on thing that are unnecessary just to make us satisfy.

Anyway this is not to say that ornamentation is junk or useless in a way. There are many different other advantages that ornamentation create for us. Only that we use them in a proper way just enough to fulfill our demands.

From Bauhaus to Our House 1st

After I have read “From Bauhaus to Our House” by Tom Wolfe, I found a new interesting way look at modernism architecture. The whole book “From Bauhaus to Our House” is referring to only one viewpoint, which is the author’s. He barely has knowledge about architecture, he wasn’t an architect either. He criticize about how architectures from the beginning transform into modernism architecture in the presents. Starting off with good expression in the beginning was quite joyful, suddenly Wolfe started to complain about now days civilization.

During reading sometimes I feel that maybe this man’s head is still stuck in the original way and style of architecture, but for me sometimes architects don’t need to decorate or focus on the details that much. Maybe he’s saying that modern architecture is boring, yes! Sometimes modern architectures can become bored with the steel, glass, concrete and the non-decorating, but I think those materials and those designs create their own identity also creating the functions in the building.