Modern Architecture, Rise and Fall
Ornement et Crime
Modern architecture that believed to began from clever design response to treat tuberculosis patients that has needs for fresh air, good air circulation, the dust-free area would later develop into worldwide architecture movement that affects almost every section of modern life.
With the advancement of technology, engineering, building material in the early 20th century. Modern architecture emerged as a break from the ornamentation of architectural forms and styles to a design that concentrated on function and innovation. Modernism argued had the power to transform how people lived, worked, and fundamentally understood and responded to the world around them.
The eight doctrines of modern architecture (simplicity, pure geometry, universal, functional, new creation, effective and efficient, using new technology) are proposed to be able to manifest the ideals of modernism.
The style became characterized by an emphasis on volume, asymmetrical compositions, and minimal ornamentation. (RIBA)
The modernist movement pioneered by Deutsch architect Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe which known for the slogan “form follows function”, France architect Charles Edouard Jeanneret also known as Le Corbusier who propose his Vers Une Architecture with five points of “New Architecture”; pilotis, free-facade, open plan, ribbon opening, and roof garden, Bauhaus School founder Gropius, and American starchitect Frank Lyold Wright on an exhibition organized by Henry-Russel Hitchcock and Phillip Johnson at MoMA in 1932.
From that point and after the second world war, modern architecture became a global influence of the architecture movement and modernism became the single most important (dominant) new style or philosophy of architecture and design of the 20th century. Besides the international style that emerges post the great war, there are some earlier styles which also based nor on the same direction as the modernist movement, Expressionism, Constructivism, Bauhaus, De Stijl, and Functionalism are not all but five dominant styles before the Internationalism.
Modern architecture, in a sense, is an answer to a need — the need for order — without which our society constantly threatens to break down. If we were asked why this need is more imperative now, than ever before, it is because society, and our cities, have reached their maturity, and only with the innovation of organic order will they be sustained. In a deep sense, modern architecture, in its search for functional order, is part of the creation of that social order itself. (Lescaze, 1937)
The Fall
Levittown
Levittown (USA) is seven large suburban housing development constructed by William J. Levitt offered attractive alternatives to cramped central city housing and apartments for returning World War II veterans and their families.
Levittown designed to be a segregated community. Levitt himself refused to sell Levittown homes to people of color, and the FHA, upon authorizing loans for the construction of Levittown, included racial covenants in each deed.
Houses in Levittown are manufactured in 27 steps with each worker trained to perform one specific step. When effectively scheduled a house could be built in one day enabling quick and economical production of identical homes with rapid recovery of cost. Sales began in March 1947, 1.400 homes were purchased during the first three hours.
Ronan Point
Ronan Point was a 22-story tower block in Canning Town in Newham, East London, which partly collapsed on 16 May 1968, only two months after it had opened. A gas explosion blew out some load-bearing walls, causing the collapse of one entire corner of the building, which killed four people and injured 17. The spectacular nature of the failure (caused by both poor design and poor construction), led to a loss of public confidence in high-rise residential buildings, and major changes in UK building regulations resulted. (Wikipedia)
Pruitt-Igoe
The monumental failure of the modernist utopia is the now well known Pruitt-Igoe urban housing development in St. Louis, Missouri, completed in 1955. Designed with Le Corbusier’s modernist principles made up into 33 11-story high rise block of apartments.
By the late 1960s, the project became nuisances and danger zones. Even poor people preferred to live anywhere but Pruitt-Igoe. Poverty, crime, and segregation of the community were major problems for the residents. Modernist was to blame for these social problems.
On March 16th, 1972, the first of the buildings were demolished and the day was declared to be the day on which modern architecture died.
As resistance to modernist, by using architecture language to send complex messages. The postmodern movement emerges with a linguistic analogy of architecture. Metaphor, semiotic, syntax, and semantic are styles that are often mentioned on postmodernism. There are also some characteristics of the postmodern architecture; fragmentation, architecture as image, complexity, contradiction, ‘camp’, and veneer-ism.
References
Campbell, M. (2005). What Tuberculosis Did for Modernism: the Influence of a Curative Environment on Modernist Design and Architecture. Medical History, 49(4), pp.463–488.
Hopkins, O. (2014). Architectural styles : a visual guide. London: Laurence King.
Knox, P.L. (1987). The Social Production of the Built Environment Architects, Architecture and the Post-Modern City. Progress in Human Geography, 11(3), pp.354–377.
Lescaze, W. (1937). The Meaning of Modern Architecture. The North American Review, [online] 244(1), pp.110–120. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25114911 [Accessed 27 Oct. 2020].
The Royal Institute of British Architect (2019). Modernism. [online] Architecture.com. Available at: https://www.architecture.com/explore-architecture/modernism [Accessed Oct. 2020].
Wikipedia Contributors (2019). Levittown. [online] Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown.
