lecture 8 meanderings of modernism - futurism & formalism

History of Architecture - II (AP-313) – Meanderings of Modernism

History of Architecture-II (AP-313)

MEANDERINGS OF MODERNISMFuturism & Formalism

LECTURE 8

Nipesh P Narayanan

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http://www.civilization.ca/civil/egypt/egypte.html


PROJECT VS THE PRACTICE!


POLITICALLY CHARGED AND AGGRESSIVE MODERNISM

• Machines– New creation of the human race

• Revolution– Man’s destiny is in Man’s hand

• Movement and Speed– New Revelations


F T MARINETTI AND THE FIRST FUTURIST MANIFESTO

Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, 1909

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“It is in Italy that we are issuing this manifesto of ruinous and incendiary violence, by which we today are founding Futurism, because we want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries…….. For the dying, for invalids and for prisoners it may be all right. It is, perhaps, some sort of balm for their wounds, the admirable past, at a moment when the future is denied them. But we will have none of it, we, the YOUNG, STRONG and LIVING Futurists!”


THE FIRST FUTURIST MANIFESTO

Elasticity, 1912, by Umberto Boccioni

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1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness



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2. The essential elements of our poetry

will be courage, audacity and revolt.

Mountains + Valleys + Streets (1915), F. T. Marinetti



Vehement god from a race of steel,Automobile drunk with space,

Trampling with anguish, bit between your strident teeth!O formidable Japanese monster with forge,

Nourished with flame and mineral oils,Hungry for horizons and sidereal prey,

I unleash your heart to the diabolical vroom-vroomAnd your giant radials, for the dance

You lead on the white roads of the world.

~ To a Racing Car, F T Marinetti

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3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish

sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.



Umberto Boccio

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a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive

breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

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The Street Enters the House, 1911, Umberto Boccioni

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5. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.



Umberto Boccioni, 1913, Synthesis of Human Dynamism Im

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6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour

and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervour of the primordial elements.



The City Rises, 1910, Umberto Boccioni

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7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the

forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.



Giacomo Balla, Abstract Speed + Sound, 1913–1914

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8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died

yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.



Benito Mussolini

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9. We want to glorify war — the only cure for the

world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which

kill, and contempt for woman.



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10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.

“Museums, cemeteries! Truly identical in their sinister juxtaposition of bodies that do not know each other. Public dormitories where you sleep side by side for ever with beings you hate or do not know. Reciprocal ferocity of the painters and sculptors who murder each other in the same museum with blows of line and colour. To make a visit once a year, as one goes to see the graves of our dead once a year, that we could allow! We can even imagine placing flowers once a year at the feet of the Gioconda! But to take our sadness, our fragile courage and our anxiety to the museum every day, that we

cannot admit! Do you want to poison yourselves? Do you want to rot?”



1909

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11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-coloured and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous

railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap

of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted

locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose

propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.


THE REPERCUSSIONS OF FIRST FUTURIST MANIFESTO

ArtPainting

Sculpture

Literature

Architecture

Music

Food

Dinamo Azari (1927), Fortunato Depero

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THE MANIFESTO OF FUTURIST ARCHITECTURE

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~ Antonio Sant'Elia (1888 – 1916)

1914

“ No architecture has existed since 1700. A moronic mixture of the most various stylistic elements used to mask the skeletons of modern houses is called modern architecture. The new beauty of cement and iron are profaned by the superimposition of motley decorative incrustations that cannot be justified either by constructive necessity or by our (modern) taste, and whose origins are in Egyptian, Indian or Byzantine antiquity and in that idiotic flowering of stupidity and impotence that took the name of neoclassicism. “


THE MANIFESTO OF FUTURIST ARCHITECTURE~ Antonio Sant'Elia (1888 – 1916)

COMBAT AND DESPISE

1. All the pseudo-architecture of the avant-garde, Austrian, Hungarian, German and American;

2. All classical architecture, solemn, hieratic, scenographic, decorative, monumental, pretty and pleasing;

3. The embalming, reconstruction and reproduction of ancient monuments and palaces;

4. Perpendicular and horizontal lines, cubical and pyramidal forms that are static, solemn and absolutely excluded from our utterly new sensibility;

5. The use of massive, voluminous, durable, antiquated and costly materials.



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1. That Futurist architecture is the

architecture of calculation, of audacious

temerity and of simplicity; the

architecture of reinforced concrete, of steel, glass, cardboard, textile fiber,

and of all those substitutes for wood, stone and brick that enable us to obtain

maximum elasticity and lightness Antonio Sant'Elia (1914), Drawing



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2. That Futurist architecture is not because of this an arid

combination of practicality and usefulness, but remains art, i.e.

synthesis and expression

Antonio Sant'Elia (1914), Power Station



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3. That oblique and elliptic lines are dynamic, and by their very nature possess an emotive

power a thousand times stronger than perpendiculars and horizontals, and that no

integral, dynamic architecture can exist that does not include

these

Antonio Sant'Elia (1914), House with external elevators



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4. That decoration as an element superimposed on architecture is absurd, and that the decorative value of Futurist architecture depends solely on the use and original arrangement of raw or bare

or violently coloured materials

Antonio Sant'Elia (1914), Drawing



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5. That, just as the ancients drew inspiration for their art from the elements of nature, we—who are materially and spiritually artificial—must find that inspiration in the elements of the utterly new mechanical world we have

created, and of which architecture must be the most beautiful expression, the most complete synthesis, the most efficacious integration




6. That architecture as the art of arranging forms according to pre-established criteria is finished



7. That by the term architecture is meant the endeavour to harmonize the environment with Man with freedom and great audacity, that is to transform the

world of things into a direct projection of the world of the spirit

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8. From an architecture conceived in this way no formal or linear habit can grow, since the fundamental characteristics of Futurist architecture will be its

impermanence and transience. Things will endure less than us. Every generation must build its own city. This constant renewal of the architectonic environment

will contribute to the victory of Futurism which has already been affirmed by Words-in-freedom, plastic Dynamism, Music without quadrature and the Art of noises, and for which we fight without respite against traditionalist cowardice


AFTERMATH OF THE FUTURIST ARCHITECTURE

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Tower of Babel, modelled after Brueghel's 1563 painting

New City



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FLW, Mile High City

New City



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Le Corbusier, The Metropolis of Tomorrow

New City



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Googie Architecture: Cars, Jets and Space Age

Johnie's Coffee Shop on Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles designed by Armet & Davis


WHAT IS THE PROJECT OF MODERNISM?


ADVENT OF FORMALISM IN LATE MODERNISM

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•Pilotis

•Roof gardens

•The free designing of the ground plan

•The free design of façade

•The horizontal window


CONTENT VS THE FORM!



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Bank of China Tower Hong Kong,

I M Pei



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PROJECT VS THE PRACTICE!

lecture 8 meanderings of modernism - futurism & formalism

Education

onlinehistory of architecture

thehistory of architecture

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