snooker, i like this silly thread. wide-ranging and undisciplined: perfect.
i also like boxes. using boxes to help us understand how people approach different things is helpful. we all know that life isn't as simple as the categories we use, but if we fail to use categories/boxes/labels, it's nearly impossible to comprehend the world.
we (architects) certainly are part of the world and it's our context. creativity doesn't remove us from the world, it just mediates our relationship with it. we're still political, social, economic, spiritual beings that interact with all the rest of the political, social, economic, spiritual beings.
Mies himself wasn't a communist like many of his collegues at the Bauhaus; he was a self-absorbed apolitical social striver looking to live a luxurious lifestyle and always to further his career. Note that he left both Lily Reich, his co-designer and lover, and his wife and daughters in Germany during the war and made no effort to rescue any of them from East Germany. (They all suffered greatly.) His biography notes that he asked Reich to preserve his papers and possessions even as she was struggling to survive in wartime conditions. His disdain for the people in his personal and family relationships continued in Chicago.
Both Mies and Wright had narcissistic personalities. Perhaps to be a "internationally recognized architect" requires such a narcissistic, self-absorbed, single-minded outlook. Both their biographies note the many fundamental character flaws these two men had.
while you can never really identify ONE source for a whole chain of events among different people in different places, the influence of the wasmuth portfolio is certainly well-documented.
jump's right that the early moderns in central europe were very enamored of what they saw of wright's work - even though they may not have understood what he was actually achieving. some of the greatest developments of european modern architecture were in their misunderstandings of what they thought wright had achieved - the stripping down and opening up of spaces, spatial penetrations, an ur-'organic' approach, and things like that were certainly beginning to be visible in wright's work, but when the europeans conceptualized those things they became much more clearly stated and influential and were reflected back to the u.s. in a different kind of work altogether.
some of the most creative moments come from misreading what someone else is doing when you're just trying to copy it.
Unwholesome bauhaus communists
snooker, i like this silly thread. wide-ranging and undisciplined: perfect.
i also like boxes. using boxes to help us understand how people approach different things is helpful. we all know that life isn't as simple as the categories we use, but if we fail to use categories/boxes/labels, it's nearly impossible to comprehend the world.
we (architects) certainly are part of the world and it's our context. creativity doesn't remove us from the world, it just mediates our relationship with it. we're still political, social, economic, spiritual beings that interact with all the rest of the political, social, economic, spiritual beings.
...since it was mentioned...
http://www.architechgallery.com/index.html
you can own a piece of wasmuth...
Mies himself wasn't a communist like many of his collegues at the Bauhaus; he was a self-absorbed apolitical social striver looking to live a luxurious lifestyle and always to further his career. Note that he left both Lily Reich, his co-designer and lover, and his wife and daughters in Germany during the war and made no effort to rescue any of them from East Germany. (They all suffered greatly.) His biography notes that he asked Reich to preserve his papers and possessions even as she was struggling to survive in wartime conditions. His disdain for the people in his personal and family relationships continued in Chicago.
Both Mies and Wright had narcissistic personalities. Perhaps to be a "internationally recognized architect" requires such a narcissistic, self-absorbed, single-minded outlook. Both their biographies note the many fundamental character flaws these two men had.
while you can never really identify ONE source for a whole chain of events among different people in different places, the influence of the wasmuth portfolio is certainly well-documented.
jump's right that the early moderns in central europe were very enamored of what they saw of wright's work - even though they may not have understood what he was actually achieving. some of the greatest developments of european modern architecture were in their misunderstandings of what they thought wright had achieved - the stripping down and opening up of spaces, spatial penetrations, an ur-'organic' approach, and things like that were certainly beginning to be visible in wright's work, but when the europeans conceptualized those things they became much more clearly stated and influential and were reflected back to the u.s. in a different kind of work altogether.
some of the most creative moments come from misreading what someone else is doing when you're just trying to copy it.
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