CUBISM , DE STIJL AND NEW CONCEPTION OF SPACE

EFFORTS BY-JASMEEN SINGHMEHAK MITTALSHAIMA ANSARI

NEW CONCEPTION OF SPACE- 15th CenturyFLORENCE

Italy

• Around 15th Century , Florence was not merely as the home of social and political experiments but it was also the place where the espiril noureau of the Renaissance broke through most strongly .

• In Florence, This conception of space was translated into artistic terms through discovery of perspective.

• To the 15th Century the principle of perspective came as a complete revolution , involving an extreme and violent break with the medieval conception of space , and with the flat , floating arrangements which were its artistic expression.

• The most significant thing was the mixture of art and science, indeed one rarely sees so complete a unity in thinking and feeling- art and science.

• It is the very perspective , the scientific conception that finally takes the space measurable from a perception point of view , leading to the creation of an architecture made in its own likeness.

• Generally , we think of architecture independently from the conception of space that generated it , as though there was an Absolute space where one can find architecture coming from extremely different periods .

• However architectures are not natural objects , they are artificial constructions : they depend on the mind-set of space..

• For example, the Pantheon , it was the result of an extremely advanced geometrical calculation , something the Romans had got down to a fine art.

DUOMO OF FLORENCE

DUOMO OF FLORENCE

• The person generally credited with originating the Renaissance view of architecture is Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446), whose first major commission--the enormous brick dome that covers the central space of Florence's Duomo or cathedral--was also perhaps the architecturally most significant.

• The Duomo was begun in 1296 in the Gothic style and completed structurally in 1436 with the dome engineered by Brunelleschi. While it retains the Gothic pointed arch and the Gothic ribs of the original 13th-century design, its dome is structurally influenced by the great domes of Ancient Rome such as the Pantheon , and it is often described as the first building of the Renaissance.

• The dome is made of red brick and was ingeniously constructed without supports, using a deep understanding of the laws of physics and mathematics.

• It remains the largest masonry dome in the world and was such an unprecedented success at its time that the dome became an indispensable element in church and even secular architecture thereafter .

INTERIOR• Entering the cathedral, one is struck by the building's vastness and the

sobriety of its furnishings. the colour and rich patterning of the exterior, which serve to relate the mass of the structure to the smaller scale of surrounding buildings, here give way to a simplicity that underscores the titanic dimensions of this church (the largest in europe when it was completed in the 15th century; 153 meters long, 90 wide at the crossing, and 90 meters high from pavement to the opening of the lantern)

• The relative bareness of the interior of santa maria del fiore corresponds to the austere spiritual ideal of florence in the middle ages and early renaissance; It suggests, in architectural terms, the spirituality of the great reformers of florentine religious life.

• The formal matrix is two-fold: on the one hand, the rude strength of romanesque country churches, and, on the other, an elegant simplicity typical of mendicant basilicas like santa croce .

THE DOMEThe construction of the dome of florence cathedral was one of the germinal events of renaissance architectureThe problem had been posed in the middle of the fourteenth century when the definitive plan for the octagonal crossing had been laid down.The diameter of the dome at 39.5 metres (130 feet) precluded the traditional use of wooden structuring to support the construction of the vault, while the use of buttresses as in northern gothic cathedrals was ruled out by the building's design."

CONCEPTION OF SPACE- 20th Century

• In the early and mid-20th century, the concept of space was critical in defining the modern movement in architecture.

• Notions of architectural space related to the coherence between the interior and exterior of buildings emerged as a new feature.

• Counteracting previous understandings of architecture as a progression of styles, space became a privileged quest of architectural practice.

• In time, however, space was actively reclaimed by artists, geographers, sociologists, and others as their domain of intervention and reflection.

• As proposed by French philosopher Michel Foucault, ours is the epoch of space, an expanded field imbued with complex meanings.

Thus, we can conclude that:

-The Conception of Space is a mind-set that varies from period to period.

- The different mind-sets of space find their own concretisation in architecture.

CUBISM• The cubism started in France in the early 20th century (around 1907), but its

ideas and concepts have continued to influence art today.• The early 20th century was a time of change in the art world in France, yet

cubism was still highly rejected. Many people said it was ugly and they could not understand it.

• The scientific and philosophical changes at the time influenced the subject matter within cubist artwork and peoples ability to accept the changes cubism was making.

the Angolans’ building in Estoril Montreal housing

ABOUT CUBISM• The name cubism was suggested by Henri Matisse in 1909.He observed that the

pictures themselves consisted of “nothing but little cubes”.• The idea behind cubism is to show the essence of an object by displaying it from many

angles and points of views at the same time. An object is broken up, analysed from different perspectives and reassembled in abstract form.

• An object could be reconstructed using separate views which overlapped and intersected.

• The cubists wanted to make pictures that reached beyond the rigid geometry of perspective.They wanted to introduce the idea of “relativity” which is how the artist perceived and selected elements from the subject, fusing both their observations and memories into one concentrated image. The cubist pallete was restricted to a narrow,almost monochromatic scale, dominated by grays and browns.

• Cubist art always has an ultimate reference to external reality without which it could not express the fundamental tension between the demands of nature and the demands of art.

• The subjects were represented in the form of basic geometric shapes (cube , sphere , cylinder and the cone).

• Cubism formed an important link between early-20th-century art and architecture. Most

often the connections are made by reference to shared formal characteristics: faceting of form, spatial ambiguity , transparency and multiplicity.

• Architectural interest in Cubism centered on the dissolution and reconstitution of three-dimensional form, using simple geometric shapes, juxtaposed without the illusions of classical perspective.

• Diverse elements could be superimposed, made transparent or penetrate one another, while retaining their spatial relationships.

• Cubism had become an influential factor in the development of modern architecture from 1912 (La Maison Cubiste, by Raymond Duchamp-Villon and André Mare) onwards

• It led to simplification of building design, the use of materials appropriate to industrial production, and the increased use of glass.

CUBISM AND ARCHITECTURE

ANZ building – Jakarta,Indonasia

Black Madonna Building by Jan Gokar , Prague

The dancing building - Prague

CHARACTERISTICS OF CUBIST BUILDINGS

• Each of the buildings has a basic geometric design, often a cuboid shape.

• Simplicity is often an overriding characteristic.

• The buildings have sharp, clean lines, ensuring that the building is viewed in perspective with ease.

• Positive and negative spaces are marked distinctly.

• Cubist buildings are often designed to be manufactured as prefabricated buildings and moved from the factory to the building site where they are assembled.

• The windows have a cube/rectangular form and do not necessarily line up with each other, as in traditional/conventional buildings.

• Subtle colors dominate the design, with one or two colors prominent.

Guernica By Pablo PicassoUse of positive and negative space in architecture.

Housing by VIDZ architects -Japan

Palace of assembly , Chandigarh by Le Corbusier

CZECH CUBISM• Czech Cubism (referred to more generally as Cubo-Expressionism)[1] was an

avant-garde art movement of Czech proponents ofCubism, active mostly in Prague from 1912 to 1914. Prague was perhaps the most important centre for Cubism outside Paris before the start of World War One.

• Czech Cubists distinguish their work through the construction of sharp points, slicing planes, and crystalline shapes in their art works. These angles allowed the Czech Cubists to incorporate their own trademark in the avant-garde art group of Modernism.

• They believed that objects carried their own inter energy which could only be released by splitting the horizontal and vertical surfaces that restrain the conservative design and “ignore the needs of the human soul.” It was a way to revolt from the typical art scene in the early 1900s in Europe.

Cubist Villa , Prague

The house of Black Madonna , Prague , Czech Republic

RONDO CUBISM• After Czechoslovakia's founding in 1918, architectural Czech Cubism gradually

developed into Czech Rondocubism, which was more decorative, as it was influenced by traditional folk ornaments to celebrate the revival of Czech national independence.

Rondocubist building of Legiobanka, Prague, Czech Republic

The Adria Palace , Prague, Czech Republic

"We speak of concrete and not abstract painting because nothing is more 

concrete, more real than a line, a colour, a surface."

DE STIJL (1917 – 1931)

De Stijl means "the style" in Dutch, emerged largely in response to the horrors of World War I and the wish to remake society in its aftermath.

Viewing art as a means of social and spiritual redemption, the members of De Stijl embraced

a utopian vision of art and its transformative potential.

The movement proposed ultimate simplicity and abstraction through which they could express a Utopian idea of harmony and order.

The harmony and order was established through a reduction of elements to pure geometric

forms and primary colours, black, white and grey. .

DE STIJL

From the flurry of new art movements that followed the Impressionist revolutionary new perception of painting, Cubism arose in the early 20th century as an important and influential new direction. In the Netherlands, too, there was interest in this "new art". However, because the Netherlands remained neutral in World War I, Dutch artists were not able to leave the country after 1914 and were thus effectively isolated from the international art world—and in particular, from Paris, which was its centre then.During that period, painter Theo van Doesburg started looking for other artists to set up a journal and start an art movement. Van Doesburg was also a writer, poet, and critic, who had been more successful writing about art than working as an independent artist. Quite adept at making new contacts due to his flamboyant personality and outgoing nature, he had many useful connections in the art world.

Theo van Doesburg, Neoplasticism :Composition VII (the three graces)1917.

HOW DE STIJL STARTED?

"The three principal colours are essentially yellow, blue, and red. They are the only colours existing ...

Yellow is the movement of the ray (vertical) ... blue is he contrasting colour to yellow (horizontal

firmament) ... red is the mating of yellow and blue."

- M. H. J. Schoenmaekers

De Stijl – The Style

Led by the painters Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian.Promoting their innovative ideas in their journal of the same name, the members envisioned nothing less than the ideal fusion of form and function, thereby making De Stijl in effect the ultimate style. To this end, De Stijl artists turned their attention not only to fine art media such as painting and sculpture, but virtually all other art forms as well, including industrial design, typography, even literature and music.

De Stijl's influence was perhaps felt most noticeably in the realm of architecture, helping give rise to the International Style of the 1920s and 1930s.

Their works of art helped the public along the path to truth and purity.

The Netherlands-based De Stijl movement advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour; they simplified visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions, and used only primary colours along with black and white and the relationship between positive and negative elements in an arrangement of non-objective forms and lines.

“Only primary colors and non colors, only squares and rectangles, only straight and horizontal or vertical lines.”- Piet Mondrian

DE STIJL or NEO - PLASTICISM

Originally a publication, De Stijl was founded in 1917 by two pioneers - Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. The magazine De Stijl became a vehicle for Mondrian’s ideas on art, and in a series of articles in the first year’s issues he defined his aims and used, perhaps for the first time, the term neo-plasticism. This became the name for the type of abstract art he and the De Stijl circle practised.

DE STIJLDI STIJL, NUMBER 1, 1917

Red and Blue Chair designed by Gerrit Rietveld in 1917

“This new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour. On the contrary, it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour“- Piet Mondrian

The works avoided symmetry and attained aesthetic balance by the use of opposition. This element of the movement embodies the second meaning of Stijl: "a post, jamb or support"; this is best exemplified by the construction of crossing joints, most commonly seen in carpentry.

In many of the group's three-dimensional works, vertical and horizontal lines are positioned in layers or planes that do not intersect, thereby allowing each element to exist independently and unobstructed by other elements. This feature can be found in the Rietveld Schröder House and the Red and Blue Chair.

Rietveld Schröder House

INFLUENCES

De Stijl was influenced by Cubist painting as well as by the mysticism and the ideas about "ideal" geometric forms (such as the "perfect straight line") in the neoplatonic philosophy of mathematician M. H. J. Schoenmaekers. In music, De Stijl was an influence only on the work of composer Jakob van Domselaer, a close friend of Mondrian. Between 1913 and 1916, he composed his Proeven van Stijlkunst ("Experiments in Artistic Style"), inspired mainly by Mondrian's paintings. This minimalistic—and, at the time, revolutionary—music defined "horizontal" and "vertical" musical elements and aimed at balancing those two principles. Van Domselaer was relatively unknown in his lifetime, and did not play a significant role within the De Stijl group.

COMPOSITION WITH RED, BLUE AND YELLOWNEO PLASTICISM - 1930

"Why should something that no one finds strange in music, be impossible in the art of painting/sculpture? By comparing works of art that do not represent an object, is in our experience, the most fruitful way of exercising our receptivity for them." - Piet Mondrian

PAGE FROM DE STIJL MAGAZINE

SOME MORE EXAMPLES

SOURCES

• Wikipedia• http://foreignholidays.net/2012/08/25/secession-cubi

sm-and-rondo-cubism-in-prague/

• http://www.bohemia-apartments.com/blog/posts/interesting-buildings-in-prague-cubist-architecture/

• www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/d/de-stijl

• char.txa.cornell.edu/art/decart/destijl/decstijl.htm• www.moma.org/collection/details.php?theme_id=10199

• sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/De_Stijl/