'The international style is ... is totalitarianism"
"These bauhaus architects ran from political totalitarianism in Germany to what is now made by specious promotion to seem their own totalitarianism in art here in America... Why do I distrust and defy such internationalism as I do communism? Because both must by their nature do this very leveling in the name of civilisation ... [The promoters of the international style] are not a wholesome people"
I didnt realise frank LW was such an asshole, such personal attacks seem to cross the line, ya?....Sry if this is common knowledge, just drunk and annoyed we didnt get taught this part of history....
picture flw in a cape, with flowing hair, pointing his cane, spouting these melodramatic pronouncements, and it takes a little of the edge off. might even make you smile.
frank's a self-booster, an original, an individualist, now faced with the idealism of an 'international' arch for all. smacked of socialism/communism to him, which wasn't really wrong.
course later on he sort of bought in. his usonian houses out-did many of the european offerings. his guggenheim is the ultimate individualist expression of the 'international', sort of a thumbing of his nose?
i remember doing that with my oldest, steven. feeling nostalgic.
about international style...hm, well bauhaus was never supported by the nazis, quite the opposite. they may have been natural allies though, from the right perspective...p. johnson certainly thought musolini was the bag when he was young and i have suspocion that some sympathy for the fascist regime existed in early modernism at least...but that is maybe more futurists than international-istes...?
nazism wasn't really either socialist or communist really, being far more right than left. the idealist archs to whom i was referring were against what nazism ultimately became.
I think it's in Ken Burns film where they say FLW used to compare the Int'l archs with the "flies" landing on his Taliesin West drawing board?
"see! here's a Mies!, here's a Corbu!.."
there's a lot of stuff published about Mies' ambiguous relations with the nazis.. a couple here:
even better to look at the other bauhaus-ers. mies was the last director before the bauhaus closed its doors, at least partly because he could make the bauhaus palatable to the national socialists by being innocuous and as apolitical as possible.
if the original folks had stayed in control, the place would have been shut down earlier. a veritable hotbed of 'decadent' artists!
I'd advise against characterizing (or taking FLW at his word in doing so) "these bauhaus architects" as a single homogeneous group. Differences abound -- even quite obviously between the 3 directors works. And Frank may be well to remember that people in glass houses... (maybe that's his point, ha ha)
I recall going to a lecture given By Ezra Stoller one of the great 20th
Century Architectural Photographers. He has quite a portfolio of clients including both Mies and Wright.
About Mies: I recall him talking about being requested by the owner of the Segrams Building (actually the daughter of the owner) to photograph the building. So the day comes to meet with the daughter
and Mies to discuss the project. He goes to the meeting which is held in a conference room. The lady lays out the agenda as to wanting Stoller to photograph the building and she leaves him with Mies and leaves them there to discuss the project. Stoller says he sits in silence with Mies for some time and when she comes back she ask
Mies have they decided what to photograph. His comment was,
"He will take many photos and I will like none of them."
About Wright: Wright never liked to be photographed next to any one taller than himself. Ezra Stoller did take a wonderful picture of
Wright and Johnson from the backside in Racine Wisconsin. Mr. Johnson towering over Wright. The next photograph he projected
was the Johnson Tower and squat office building adjacent....it was
like he had waited a life time to take the picture.
Interesting enough this lecture was at the University of Arizona not as part of the Architecture School but as part of the School of Photography.
I have seen a wttw clip, from before PBS came into existence, of an interview with Mies and FLW at the same time. Im searching for it - will post if I find it.
Speaking of communism, my cousin once told me that we were the exiled descendants of czar nicholas II...but we are not russian - so it makes no sense at all. Hold on, there's someone knocking on my door....
although i don't exactly agree w/ him, it's pretty cool that FLW had such strong moral convictions about architecture. also shows that FLW and ayn rand had more in common than just love for FLW.
that could have been more personal. wright wouldn't have respected that gropius, despite being a great designer, was NOT good at drawing and was associated more with administrative roles.
that, and the fact that TAC (url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Architects_Collaborative]The Architects Collaborative[/url]) was certainly (nee exactly?) modeled in opposition to Wright's hero/architect image.
1- lots of modernists were communists, yet their designs and methods only really ended up helping the industrial capitalists. Big boxes, gas stations, office parks, all possible thanks to modern building techniques and urban proposals. Is rampant consumerism, the new totalitarianism?
2- How was FLW's neo-con objectivism coupled with the consumer totalitarianism? i.e. We now fight terrorism by shopping, if you even mention that consumer totalitarianism is not a sustainable approach, you are labeled as a hater of individual freedom.
i don't think consumerism in itself is totalitarian but more an effect of corporate totalitarianism. we have, for decades, complained when our leaders kowtow to corporate interests, but it's possible that this isn't a choice so much as a necessity. multi-national corporations operate independently of national boundaries and laws and have become more powerful than gov'ts, more able to control (e.g., withold if necessary) the world's resources.
i'm not sure anything designers do, whether individualist or with some social program in mind, even relates or registers as part of this dynamic. gone are the days of behrens' relationship with aeg.
coop himmelblau's new bmw world is a branding thing, but bmw wouldn't suffer if it didn't exist. likewise exxon, gazprom, and chinese toy manufacturing for mattel will all continue, with only minor redirections, and without reference to who they choose as architects for their towers, designers of their products, or designers of their logos and advertising.
maybe individual freedom is an illusion. it is in the interests of the corporations to keep us thinking that our 'choices' matter and make us unique.
"i'm not sure anything designers do, whether individualist or with some social program in mind, even relates or registers as part of this dynamic. gone are the days of behrens' relationship with aeg."
that's a provocative statement. it was true that architects like gropius, albert kahn, and even mies were giving their clients something new and innovative that was making their businesses more productive and profitable, i.e. in the case of gropius and kahn an industrial type and with mies, a corporate identity. the same might also be said of breuer and ellwood's relationship with ibm and xerox; or the eames and saarinen's relationship with herman miller and knoll.
i'm not sure this same relationship still exists today between architects and corporations. perhaps you could say that something similar is happening with coop himmelblau and bmw, but the relationship looks pretty superficial in comparison with the aforementioned modernists. branding has never lived up to the hype, and frankly i'm not sure who's more to blame for this: the architects or the corporations.
consumerism fills the demand for not just goods and services but most importantly choices for demand, including the proliferation of big time architecture. In Mies and Sarinen's day, there were only a couple mfr of furniture, office euip, curtain wall materials etc so thaey had to work more closely. Today, theres more choice and more options avail.
at risk of derailing an already derailed discussion, i'll posit that the amount of choice we have these days is itself a cause of incredible waste. choice taken to the point of decadence. unnecessary and unhelpful if we're to do anything about controlling our appetite for resources.
i guess my point was that the so-called european commies came to define american capitalism while the rugged individualist wright had very little influence on the larger direction and discourse of design and capitalism (outside of the coffee table book industry). the international style was prescient while wright was simply an aberration.
in regards to choice, i tend to agree with evilp that choice is generally a good thing and the market does tend to create efficiencies out of choice. as a designer on the other hand wading through the overabundance of information is a colossal headache. we could all use a good librarian.
that helps, jafidler. it sounded like your 9:57 was basically agreeing with me, but i figured there was a distinction there that wasn't getting through to me.
trusting the market to create efficiencies out of choice means allowing the market to find the raw materials that cost fewer dollars but discounts the consequences of this choice of materials. it allows the market to engineer the products and processes in such a way that they achieve efficiencies through cheap labor, lowered quality standards, and disregard of the negative impacts caused by their production. the market responds to dollars, not to any other responsibility, unless it's good marketing to do so.
until there is a market that takes true, holistic costs into account (labor, raw material use, emissions, waste/pollution, energy use, etc.) the market isn't creating any real meaningful efficiency at all.
sw, perhaps we were saying the same thing. from a slightly more speculative angle, i would argue that architects today are much closer to wright than they are to behrens or mies. i believe that's why there's a fair amount of corporate distrust towards architecture that has driven the role of the architect towards irrelevency, read buildings that offer a client little more than image. ironically, it would seem coporations need fewer rugged individualists and more commies designing their buildings, or have the products of capitalism itself devolved to mere images and form follows function went out the window with industrialism?
"labor, raw material use, emissions, waste/pollution, energy use" are all market factors that are already taken into account. Efficiency is after all a myth since obviously the most efficient thing to do would kill ourselves off, but thats not a very good solution. Thus were left to decide whom among us is to decide whats best, most efficient - clearly I dont need to explaine why this is a bad idea. Thus the market weighs the inefficiencies of our lusts, desires and needs versus their availability and price, direct and indirect. Its really a fantastic system thats much more scientific and rational than anything FLW or the modernists came up with
over production in order to have choice works better than russian-style scarcity in the name of making only what was planned for...here in japan i have access to a lot of test products that don't make it to the world stage...the japanese market is used as a kind of forced evolutionary selection machine before the real products get out to compete on larger platform...that is good, in some ways. wasteful, sure, but evolution is wasteful by definition. it is better than stagnation though, philosophically speaking.
i wonder if those are the only 2 extremes possible?
"small is beautiful" tried to offer an alternative but never really worked its way beyond cult status...i am not certain i understand why...maybe it is just a matter of time?
maybe it is just me but i have always been struck by how similar broadacre city is to the world we live in today. hyper-individualism creating a dispersed urban pattern with mini-centres spread like confetti over a low-density world...all abetted by personal transportation made cheap and ubiquitous...
ironically the modernists were always about mass living and density by numbers...and look how far that got...the only thing they really influenced was how the world looked, not how people live in it. frank gave us the open plan and neo-jeffersonian planning. the modernists gave us nicely tuned glass facades and brasilia
as an aside, i think it is pretty fair to say that no one really believes the market alone is good at making right decisions. the recent subprime loan fiasco alone is evidence of how the market can easily exacerbate and inflate odd products in a way that is harmful to many. nah, the market is great but regulation is important too.
those holistic costs are taken into account but not always determined to matter very much. stalin was willing to use twenty million or so lives to turn the soviet union into a world power, perhaps he considered the holistic costs and said yes we are willing to sacrifice x amount of lives to become a world power and spread the struggle of world communism.
I'm thinking more about this silly thread....damn why do people need the feeling of putting individuals in boxes. I think Architects
have demonstrated over the life of the profession no matter what
there political, sexual, religion, education they are all individuals and the creative part is just an extention of their being and it can't be lumped in with the rest of the crap in the world.
-Snooker, you might know this already, but the name of the woman that induced her dad to give the Seagram's commission to Mies was Phyllis Lambert. She has since done an admirable job of leveraging great wealth into a successful career within the NY architectural influence industry. This was accomplished in no small part due to her founding of the CCA. I've always thought that she deserved more note in the history of Architectural power brokers.
-Most of the Bauhaus instructors were wacky enough not to be embraced by any political party. The only devoted party communist that comes to mind is Hannes Meyer. My feeling is the rest of the school was more interested in apolitical collectivism, breathing exercises and garlic eating. Van Doesburg is said to have noted that you could always smell a Bauhaus student before you saw one.
-FLW thought enough of Mies to introduce him at a lecture to the Armour Institute (later IIT). He did it in his characteristic style:
"Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mies van der Rohe. But for me, there would have been no Mies - certainly none here tonight. I admire him as an architect, respect and love him as a man. You treat him well and love him as I do. He will reward you."
-Wright's politics were complicated. He hated communists, he was as anti-semitic as the fashion of the time allowed, despised Roosevelt and thought that the US should stay out of the war with Germany.
just a side note janosh, but at that introduction (i forget the exact quote) but in a fairly typical arrogance FLW basically identified himself as the father of mies' architecture. Not to attack FLW again, but its something interesting to note
another note; isnt it slightly hypocritical that modernism has become somewhat of a corporate standard? when many of the modernist buildings desire free, flexible space, something timeleess in aesthetic and functionality. yes doesnt this go against the vein or the rampant consumerism where objects must be expire and be replaced in a never ending cycle?
and lol @ the debate on markets, its certainly the right day for it. go donate to ron paul :p
flw lterally was the father of mies' architecture. the wasmuth publications kickstarted modernism in mies'part of the world...or so i was led to believe at school. is that incorrect?
the edifice complex, by sudjic, has a pretty good answer to that question ulterior. is one of those yes and no deals...modernism was and is about power and its expression, whether in the service of socialism or capitalism....flw was not quite so blatant in that sense, or at least i don't feel that way when i visit his buildings. they feel much more experiential, almost haptic (also too small. man those rooms are seriously wee)...
"flw lterally was the father of mies' architecture. the wasmuth publications kickstarted modernism in mies'part of the world...or so i was led to believe at school. is that incorrect?"
NOt to deny the influence of FLW's Wasmuth Portfolio, but we can also say that there'd be no Wright without the influence of William Morris and C R Mackintosh on Sullivan. Mies would have been exposed to this same influence through Muthesius and the Werkbund.
ah but you miss the point db. frankie was famous for his style, but he was really influential for his spatial innovations. which didn't come from art nouveau or sullivan or any of his predecessors...mackintosh was influenced by japanese architecture too, but he only used it as stylistic quotes, not anything like the open plan that frank pulled out of the chicago exhibition...
there may be other things that brought modernism out in europe but frankie was def the man in front, back in his day.
what is most amazing is that flw had his day a coupla times. most architects don't get to do that...
"isnt it slightly hypocritical that modernism has become somewhat of a corporate standard? when many of the modernist buildings desire free, flexible space, something timeless in aesthetic and functionality."
timeless in aesthetic and functionality ain't cheap. i actually think the parallel discussion about markets is relevent to the discussion of flw v. the europeans. mies et al were not only making Architecture, they were doing it with efficiency and economy that made it appealing to corporations. not only that they were doing it in a style that connoted progress. personally i find no irony in corporations adopting modernism; the two seem to go hand in hand as they should. archtiecture at that time was providing something additive and constructive; sadly i think much of that spirit has been usurped by image. modernism died in the 1960s.
Unwholesome bauhaus communists
'The international style is ... is totalitarianism"
"These bauhaus architects ran from political totalitarianism in Germany to what is now made by specious promotion to seem their own totalitarianism in art here in America... Why do I distrust and defy such internationalism as I do communism? Because both must by their nature do this very leveling in the name of civilisation ... [The promoters of the international style] are not a wholesome people"
I didnt realise frank LW was such an asshole, such personal attacks seem to cross the line, ya?....Sry if this is common knowledge, just drunk and annoyed we didnt get taught this part of history....
maybe when you sober up you'll see he was correct.
ouch.
regardless of stylistic attacks, those on personal character are a bit rough...and mies eeemed like such a good guy...
picture flw in a cape, with flowing hair, pointing his cane, spouting these melodramatic pronouncements, and it takes a little of the edge off. might even make you smile.
oh ive revised my mental image.
frank is now a pimp in my mind.
but what is he pimping exactly?
frank's a self-booster, an original, an individualist, now faced with the idealism of an 'international' arch for all. smacked of socialism/communism to him, which wasn't really wrong.
course later on he sort of bought in. his usonian houses out-did many of the european offerings. his guggenheim is the ultimate individualist expression of the 'international', sort of a thumbing of his nose?
[btw sorry for brevity. i'm typing onehanded, sleeping baby in left arm.]
i remember doing that with my oldest, steven. feeling nostalgic.
about international style...hm, well bauhaus was never supported by the nazis, quite the opposite. they may have been natural allies though, from the right perspective...p. johnson certainly thought musolini was the bag when he was young and i have suspocion that some sympathy for the fascist regime existed in early modernism at least...but that is maybe more futurists than international-istes...?
sorry, i kid, i didnt mean to make this into anymore of a history lesson.
not that it wasnt appreciated steven, thats a very succinct summary
well the nazis weren't communists.
quite the opposite.
nazism wasn't really either socialist or communist really, being far more right than left. the idealist archs to whom i was referring were against what nazism ultimately became.
yeah, what vado said.
I think it's in Ken Burns film where they say FLW used to compare the Int'l archs with the "flies" landing on his Taliesin West drawing board?
"see! here's a Mies!, here's a Corbu!.."
there's a lot of stuff published about Mies' ambiguous relations with the nazis.. a couple here:
Was Mies a Nazi? (Gabion)
Mies and the nazis (The Guardian)
even better to look at the other bauhaus-ers. mies was the last director before the bauhaus closed its doors, at least partly because he could make the bauhaus palatable to the national socialists by being innocuous and as apolitical as possible.
if the original folks had stayed in control, the place would have been shut down earlier. a veritable hotbed of 'decadent' artists!
I'd advise against characterizing (or taking FLW at his word in doing so) "these bauhaus architects" as a single homogeneous group. Differences abound -- even quite obviously between the 3 directors works. And Frank may be well to remember that people in glass houses... (maybe that's his point, ha ha)
I recall going to a lecture given By Ezra Stoller one of the great 20th
Century Architectural Photographers. He has quite a portfolio of clients including both Mies and Wright.
About Mies: I recall him talking about being requested by the owner of the Segrams Building (actually the daughter of the owner) to photograph the building. So the day comes to meet with the daughter
and Mies to discuss the project. He goes to the meeting which is held in a conference room. The lady lays out the agenda as to wanting Stoller to photograph the building and she leaves him with Mies and leaves them there to discuss the project. Stoller says he sits in silence with Mies for some time and when she comes back she ask
Mies have they decided what to photograph. His comment was,
"He will take many photos and I will like none of them."
About Wright: Wright never liked to be photographed next to any one taller than himself. Ezra Stoller did take a wonderful picture of
Wright and Johnson from the backside in Racine Wisconsin. Mr. Johnson towering over Wright. The next photograph he projected
was the Johnson Tower and squat office building adjacent....it was
like he had waited a life time to take the picture.
Interesting enough this lecture was at the University of Arizona not as part of the Architecture School but as part of the School of Photography.
Didn't Mies stay in Taliesin for a day or two? At least according to Ed Tafel's book. Apparently Wright didn't think Mies was that bad.
I have seen a wttw clip, from before PBS came into existence, of an interview with Mies and FLW at the same time. Im searching for it - will post if I find it.
Its more depressing after seeing it because they both come off as total jagoffs
wttw--- wilmette talking to winnetka
Speaking of communism, my cousin once told me that we were the exiled descendants of czar nicholas II...but we are not russian - so it makes no sense at all. Hold on, there's someone knocking on my door....
although i don't exactly agree w/ him, it's pretty cool that FLW had such strong moral convictions about architecture. also shows that FLW and ayn rand had more in common than just love for FLW.
i have it on good authority that mies and flw were on very good terms though rarely got together. but apparently flw did not respect gropius.
that could have been more personal. wright wouldn't have respected that gropius, despite being a great designer, was NOT good at drawing and was associated more with administrative roles.
that, and the fact that TAC (url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Architects_Collaborative]The Architects Collaborative[/url]) was certainly (nee exactly?) modeled in opposition to Wright's hero/architect image.
couple of thoughts:
1- lots of modernists were communists, yet their designs and methods only really ended up helping the industrial capitalists. Big boxes, gas stations, office parks, all possible thanks to modern building techniques and urban proposals. Is rampant consumerism, the new totalitarianism?
2- How was FLW's neo-con objectivism coupled with the consumer totalitarianism? i.e. We now fight terrorism by shopping, if you even mention that consumer totalitarianism is not a sustainable approach, you are labeled as a hater of individual freedom.
i don't think consumerism in itself is totalitarian but more an effect of corporate totalitarianism. we have, for decades, complained when our leaders kowtow to corporate interests, but it's possible that this isn't a choice so much as a necessity. multi-national corporations operate independently of national boundaries and laws and have become more powerful than gov'ts, more able to control (e.g., withold if necessary) the world's resources.
i'm not sure anything designers do, whether individualist or with some social program in mind, even relates or registers as part of this dynamic. gone are the days of behrens' relationship with aeg.
coop himmelblau's new bmw world is a branding thing, but bmw wouldn't suffer if it didn't exist. likewise exxon, gazprom, and chinese toy manufacturing for mattel will all continue, with only minor redirections, and without reference to who they choose as architects for their towers, designers of their products, or designers of their logos and advertising.
maybe individual freedom is an illusion. it is in the interests of the corporations to keep us thinking that our 'choices' matter and make us unique.
consumerism and sustainablity are not simpatico.
"i'm not sure anything designers do, whether individualist or with some social program in mind, even relates or registers as part of this dynamic. gone are the days of behrens' relationship with aeg."
that's a provocative statement. it was true that architects like gropius, albert kahn, and even mies were giving their clients something new and innovative that was making their businesses more productive and profitable, i.e. in the case of gropius and kahn an industrial type and with mies, a corporate identity. the same might also be said of breuer and ellwood's relationship with ibm and xerox; or the eames and saarinen's relationship with herman miller and knoll.
i'm not sure this same relationship still exists today between architects and corporations. perhaps you could say that something similar is happening with coop himmelblau and bmw, but the relationship looks pretty superficial in comparison with the aforementioned modernists. branding has never lived up to the hype, and frankly i'm not sure who's more to blame for this: the architects or the corporations.
consumerism fills the demand for not just goods and services but most importantly choices for demand, including the proliferation of big time architecture. In Mies and Sarinen's day, there were only a couple mfr of furniture, office euip, curtain wall materials etc so thaey had to work more closely. Today, theres more choice and more options avail.
...for better or worse.
....better
at risk of derailing an already derailed discussion, i'll posit that the amount of choice we have these days is itself a cause of incredible waste. choice taken to the point of decadence. unnecessary and unhelpful if we're to do anything about controlling our appetite for resources.
when so much choice becomes destructive...
....worse.
i guess my point was that the so-called european commies came to define american capitalism while the rugged individualist wright had very little influence on the larger direction and discourse of design and capitalism (outside of the coffee table book industry). the international style was prescient while wright was simply an aberration.
in regards to choice, i tend to agree with evilp that choice is generally a good thing and the market does tend to create efficiencies out of choice. as a designer on the other hand wading through the overabundance of information is a colossal headache. we could all use a good librarian.
that helps, jafidler. it sounded like your 9:57 was basically agreeing with me, but i figured there was a distinction there that wasn't getting through to me.
trusting the market to create efficiencies out of choice means allowing the market to find the raw materials that cost fewer dollars but discounts the consequences of this choice of materials. it allows the market to engineer the products and processes in such a way that they achieve efficiencies through cheap labor, lowered quality standards, and disregard of the negative impacts caused by their production. the market responds to dollars, not to any other responsibility, unless it's good marketing to do so.
until there is a market that takes true, holistic costs into account (labor, raw material use, emissions, waste/pollution, energy use, etc.) the market isn't creating any real meaningful efficiency at all.
sw, perhaps we were saying the same thing. from a slightly more speculative angle, i would argue that architects today are much closer to wright than they are to behrens or mies. i believe that's why there's a fair amount of corporate distrust towards architecture that has driven the role of the architect towards irrelevency, read buildings that offer a client little more than image. ironically, it would seem coporations need fewer rugged individualists and more commies designing their buildings, or have the products of capitalism itself devolved to mere images and form follows function went out the window with industrialism?
"labor, raw material use, emissions, waste/pollution, energy use" are all market factors that are already taken into account. Efficiency is after all a myth since obviously the most efficient thing to do would kill ourselves off, but thats not a very good solution. Thus were left to decide whom among us is to decide whats best, most efficient - clearly I dont need to explaine why this is a bad idea. Thus the market weighs the inefficiencies of our lusts, desires and needs versus their availability and price, direct and indirect. Its really a fantastic system thats much more scientific and rational than anything FLW or the modernists came up with
over production in order to have choice works better than russian-style scarcity in the name of making only what was planned for...here in japan i have access to a lot of test products that don't make it to the world stage...the japanese market is used as a kind of forced evolutionary selection machine before the real products get out to compete on larger platform...that is good, in some ways. wasteful, sure, but evolution is wasteful by definition. it is better than stagnation though, philosophically speaking.
i wonder if those are the only 2 extremes possible?
"small is beautiful" tried to offer an alternative but never really worked its way beyond cult status...i am not certain i understand why...maybe it is just a matter of time?
maybe it is just me but i have always been struck by how similar broadacre city is to the world we live in today. hyper-individualism creating a dispersed urban pattern with mini-centres spread like confetti over a low-density world...all abetted by personal transportation made cheap and ubiquitous...
ironically the modernists were always about mass living and density by numbers...and look how far that got...the only thing they really influenced was how the world looked, not how people live in it. frank gave us the open plan and neo-jeffersonian planning. the modernists gave us nicely tuned glass facades and brasilia
as an aside, i think it is pretty fair to say that no one really believes the market alone is good at making right decisions. the recent subprime loan fiasco alone is evidence of how the market can easily exacerbate and inflate odd products in a way that is harmful to many. nah, the market is great but regulation is important too.
those holistic costs are taken into account but not always determined to matter very much. stalin was willing to use twenty million or so lives to turn the soviet union into a world power, perhaps he considered the holistic costs and said yes we are willing to sacrifice x amount of lives to become a world power and spread the struggle of world communism.
oscar n....has never made it unkown of his political affiliation, and he is a great architect.
I'm thinking more about this silly thread....damn why do people need the feeling of putting individuals in boxes. I think Architects
have demonstrated over the life of the profession no matter what
there political, sexual, religion, education they are all individuals and the creative part is just an extention of their being and it can't be lumped in with the rest of the crap in the world.
A couple things:
-Snooker, you might know this already, but the name of the woman that induced her dad to give the Seagram's commission to Mies was Phyllis Lambert. She has since done an admirable job of leveraging great wealth into a successful career within the NY architectural influence industry. This was accomplished in no small part due to her founding of the CCA. I've always thought that she deserved more note in the history of Architectural power brokers.
-Most of the Bauhaus instructors were wacky enough not to be embraced by any political party. The only devoted party communist that comes to mind is Hannes Meyer. My feeling is the rest of the school was more interested in apolitical collectivism, breathing exercises and garlic eating. Van Doesburg is said to have noted that you could always smell a Bauhaus student before you saw one.
-FLW thought enough of Mies to introduce him at a lecture to the Armour Institute (later IIT). He did it in his characteristic style:
"Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mies van der Rohe. But for me, there would have been no Mies - certainly none here tonight. I admire him as an architect, respect and love him as a man. You treat him well and love him as I do. He will reward you."
-Wright's politics were complicated. He hated communists, he was as anti-semitic as the fashion of the time allowed, despised Roosevelt and thought that the US should stay out of the war with Germany.
And if you think Wright was hard on European Modernists, you should hear what he had to say about Philip Johnson.
yeah but johnson was politically repugnant in his youth. seriously fucked up dude, he was. he had not a moral leg to stand on.
just a side note janosh, but at that introduction (i forget the exact quote) but in a fairly typical arrogance FLW basically identified himself as the father of mies' architecture. Not to attack FLW again, but its something interesting to note
another note; isnt it slightly hypocritical that modernism has become somewhat of a corporate standard? when many of the modernist buildings desire free, flexible space, something timeleess in aesthetic and functionality. yes doesnt this go against the vein or the rampant consumerism where objects must be expire and be replaced in a never ending cycle?
and lol @ the debate on markets, its certainly the right day for it. go donate to ron paul :p
flw lterally was the father of mies' architecture. the wasmuth publications kickstarted modernism in mies'part of the world...or so i was led to believe at school. is that incorrect?
the edifice complex, by sudjic, has a pretty good answer to that question ulterior. is one of those yes and no deals...modernism was and is about power and its expression, whether in the service of socialism or capitalism....flw was not quite so blatant in that sense, or at least i don't feel that way when i visit his buildings. they feel much more experiential, almost haptic (also too small. man those rooms are seriously wee)...
"flw lterally was the father of mies' architecture. the wasmuth publications kickstarted modernism in mies'part of the world...or so i was led to believe at school. is that incorrect?"
NOt to deny the influence of FLW's Wasmuth Portfolio, but we can also say that there'd be no Wright without the influence of William Morris and C R Mackintosh on Sullivan. Mies would have been exposed to this same influence through Muthesius and the Werkbund.
Janosh,
I was aware of her behind the scene impact of Architecture.
ah but you miss the point db. frankie was famous for his style, but he was really influential for his spatial innovations. which didn't come from art nouveau or sullivan or any of his predecessors...mackintosh was influenced by japanese architecture too, but he only used it as stylistic quotes, not anything like the open plan that frank pulled out of the chicago exhibition...
there may be other things that brought modernism out in europe but frankie was def the man in front, back in his day.
what is most amazing is that flw had his day a coupla times. most architects don't get to do that...
"isnt it slightly hypocritical that modernism has become somewhat of a corporate standard? when many of the modernist buildings desire free, flexible space, something timeless in aesthetic and functionality."
timeless in aesthetic and functionality ain't cheap. i actually think the parallel discussion about markets is relevent to the discussion of flw v. the europeans. mies et al were not only making Architecture, they were doing it with efficiency and economy that made it appealing to corporations. not only that they were doing it in a style that connoted progress. personally i find no irony in corporations adopting modernism; the two seem to go hand in hand as they should. archtiecture at that time was providing something additive and constructive; sadly i think much of that spirit has been usurped by image. modernism died in the 1960s.
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