ARCHITECTURE – MODERNISM TO POSTMODERNISM

QUESTION NINETEEN

Plate 10: Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Glasgow School of Art, 1896-1909

(i) Identify at least TWO architectural features on the exterior of this building that convey meaning. Select ONE other modern building and identify at least TWO of its architectural features that convey meaning.

(ii) Describe the meanings conveyed by the features you identified and explain how iconographic features are used to convey meanings about each building.

(iii) Evaluate the effectiveness of iconography in allowing architecture to convey both a sense of function and modernity.

OR

QUESTION TWENTY

(i) Select TWO houses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and identify at least TWO different iconographical motifs of each building.

(ii) Describe the meanings conveyed by these motifs and explain how Frank Lloyd Wright used them to create meaning in each building.

(iii) Evaluate the importance of the architectural motifs used by Frank Lloyd Wright to promote his ideas about family life.

QUESTION NINETEEN

One notable feature of Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art is its massive but plain stone walls. These walls, with their curved and turret-like forms, give the building a particularly Scottish feeling. Mackintosh wanted this building to relate to its Scottish context and used local stone and bold medieval forms to evoke this. He did not approve of imitations of foreign Greek, Roman or Renaissance forms and lavish ornamentation.

Mackintosh’s Art School also features a series of large glazed openings along its Renfrew Street façade. These generous windows, with their severe geometric and industrially-inspired steel frames, allow plenty of light to penetrate the interior spaces and they also reveal the relative size and number of studio spaces. This was important because these seven studios were aligned along this northern side of the building to take advantage of the indirect light that bathed these rooms. They are a key functional aspect of the building’s design.

Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, 1929, features regularly spaced pilotis that raise the building of the dampness of the northern European soil and provide the living area with enhanced views of the natural surroundings. These were important meanings for Le Corbusier who wanted to create a functional ‘machine for living in’ that was healthy and reunited the inhabitants with nature.

The Villa Savoye also featured a continuous band of open and/or glazed strip windows across each façade of its piano nobile (main living area). Le Corbusier used these to open the house to continuous views over nature and to allow maximum illumination of the interior spaces. These too were important in creating a healthy, functional interior that was open to what Le Corbusier called ‘the essential joys of nature’ – sun, light, space and greenery. Le Corbusier claimed these horizontal windows gave eight times more illumination than vertical windows of the same surface area.

Function and modernity are well conveyed in the features of many twentieth-century buildings, although certainly not in all structures. Otto Wagner’s Imperial Post Office Savings Bank in Vienna, Peter Behrens’ AEG Turbine Factory and the Bauhaus Building at Dessau are examples of buildings that are formed in such away as to express their functions while at the same time expressing modernity in their bold expression of modern materials. Other buildings however, such as Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall and Lake Shore Drive Apartments are so univalent and pure in form and expression that they could be mistaken for commercial structures rather than educational and residential buildings. Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles is so sculptural that its function is not immediately apparent.