C. H. Reilly: Regency, Englishness and Modernism

C. H. Reilly (1874-1946) began his tenure of the Professorship of Architecture at Liverpool University by advocating a return to late eighteenth and early nineteenth century classicism, in defiance of the prevailing preference for non-academic Classicism and the Arts and Crafts aspiration to create a styleless architecture. Although Reilly's taste may appear conservative, it resembles in many ways the early stages of Modernism in Germany and France. After supporting American-style classical architecture in the 1920s, Reilly welcomed Modernism and was involved in the design of the Peter Jones store in London, 1936. The article looks at Reilly's developing ideas between the wars and proposes that Peter Jones was a realisation of Reilly's pre-1914 affection for the Regency, setting it in the context of British and foreign writings associating British Modernism with the Regency.     

Too Good to Be True: The Survival of English Everyday PoMo

‘Intelligent, eclectic, witty, profoundly humanistic, and keen to debunk an inflexible, elitist and dangerously authoritarian Modernism’: Kester Rattenbury evokes the spirit of early British Post-Modernism. She reminds us of how in the early 1980s it spearheaded a spirited community architecture that played a strategic role in protest against wholesale, motorway-led redevelopments and the survival of Convent Garden. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

杂谈柯布——彼得·布伦德尔·琼斯访谈

以勒·柯布西埃为主题,记录了对英国著名建筑历史理论家和评论家彼得·布伦德尔·琼斯教授的一次访谈.从《走向新建筑》译名和思想、柯布对现代主义的双关影响、柯布与同时代建筑师汉斯·夏隆的建筑创作思想的差异这三方面,试图呈现琼斯教授对柯布、现代建筑理论、当代建筑教育三者关系的一些思考.     

Between Brutalists. The Banham Hypothesis and the Smithson Way of Life

This essay revisits the debates on the New Brutalism as it emerged in Great Britain in the early 1950s. The shifting positions of its main propagators, Alison and Peter Smithson and Reyner Banham, are scrutinised through a re-reading of the polemics of the period and its aftermath. Conventionally, Banham's ground-breaking essay of 1955 ‘The New Brutalism’ is used as a starting-point for a unified history of New Brutalism. However, as it turns out, the Smithsons and Banham held very different opinions about the direction of the New Brutalist project. Whereas Banham advocated an integration between architecture and the latest technologies, the Smithsons sought to combine modern architecture with a multiplicity of tendencies within British culture, reaching back to Arts and Crafts concepts, among others. To open up the discourse and to measure the various shifts, the essay discusses the concept of ‘Image’, identified by Banham as one of the key concepts of New Brutalism, in relation to the various statements made by the Smithsons. In contrast to Banham, the Smithsons defined New Brutalism by laying emphasis on the material qualities of architecture and the aspects of process and making in architectural construction. This was related to their ambition to redesign the system of relationships between the everyday, domesticity, labour and the larger society. In short, it was a different ‘way of life’ that was behind the Smithsons' project for New Brutalism.     

The two minds of architecture: the quick and the dead

Sir: In calling the British Library 'the Sydney Opera House of libraries' ('Opening chapter', 4 July), Nonie Niesewand is misinformed. Architecturally, the two buildings share nothing of value. Jorn Utzon's masterpiece was original from its core, as his sparse competition sketches made clear in 1957. Like Hans Scharoun's Philharmonie and Alvar Aalto's Finlandia Hall, it stands as one of the few major monuments of the freethinking wing of Modernism. Conversely, Colin St John Wilson openly states: 'This is where I say my thanks,' to those he conducts round his library. And he is correct, for almost every detail has been quoted from modern masters he admires, making the whole just a revivalist's fruit salad, the fruits being canned. Whereas Utzon is a true Modernist, Wilson has merely followed Postmodernism, that great black hole into which Modernism fell.     

ON ‘THEORISING ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION’

Henry van de Velde's intellectual relation to Nietzsche constitutes one of the interesting episodes in the early developments of Modernism in architecture. On the basic level, it opens the question of the influence of a radical philosopher of Modernity on a contemporary artist: while at another level it raises the question of the correspondence between ‘idea’and ‘form’ in the context of an architectural problem: the project for the Nietzsche Monument in Weimar.

Although this relation has already been explored by other scholars, this paper will look at some of the parallels in the thoughts of the philosopher and the artist, as in their vision of the role of art in culture, while also examining the discrepancies in Henry van de Velde's understanding, or appropriation, of the Nietzschean message. This is evident in the Nietzsche Monument project, a project that showed the artist's difficulty at the time in conceptualizing a project that would concretize the philosopher's vision. Finally, this paper will explore the parallel notions of power and force, the former being a foundational nation in ihe philosopher's thought, the latter afoundational notion in ihe artist's aesthetic theory.     

Douglas Haskell and the Modern Movement in American Architecture

The phenomenon of Post Modern culture has manifested itself primarily in two ways in contemporary architectural production and discourse. One, which is almost exclusively stylistic, has attempted to seek a renewal in architecture through the rejection of all aspects of Modernism in favor of a picturesque and superficial Classicism. This version of Post Modernism accepts de facto the pluralist world-view of contemporary capitalist development and avoids the larger questions of architecture's place within the complexities of today's socio-political universe. The other manifestation of Post Modernism in architecture is theoretical. It seeks a critical reading of architecture within the complex labyrinthe of contemporary culture. It tries to understand how meaning has come to have a tenuous existence in the artifacts and life of our time. It has proposed, both through theory and practice, various possibilities as to how we might negotiate this situation. This paper engages in discussion and critique of both of these orientations, their implications and ramifications.     

ROBIN BOYD AND THE POST-WAR ‘JAPANIZATION OF WESTERN IDEAS’

The interest shown by Western architects in post-1945 Japanese architecture was a colonising act, one of authentic intent but more especially need, at a time when the fortunes of International Modernism were failing. Australian architect Robin Boyd was drawn into that process of appropriation and became part of the Western promulgation of contemporary Japanese architecture. This paper will describe Boyd's role in that process and the perpetuation of Western eyes, in search of a palliative, looking to the East for inspiration. It will also gauge the reverse, the ‘japanization of Western ideas’ and its subsequent and unpredictable effect on Boyd.     

The City Crown by Bruno Taut

Abstract

Translator's Introduction In the early part of the 20th century, Bruno Taut developed an urban concept for the planning and reconfiguration of European cities to overcome national and social differences by means of architecture. A communal center modeled after the medieval cathedral or temple crowned Taut's city. In his anthology Die Stadtkrone (The City Crown) (1919), a critical text for the history of European Modernism, Taut championed the use of individual structures to define and affect the planning of an entire city.¹ Taut's anthology encouraged young architects to envision and build the ideal rather than perpetuate the quotidian. This first English translation of The City Crown maintains Taut's original goal.     

The sedimentation of memory

This paper explores how architecture can embody the past. In the context of Berlin—the site of much prominent contemporary memorial architecture—it examines one project in detail: Reitermann and Sassenroth's widely overlooked Chapel of Reconciliation, completed in 2000. This building, I argue, demonstrates a distinctive and critically acute approach to memory. Unlike the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, designed by Peter Eisenmann, and the Jewish Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, which are projects that make worlds-unto-themselves—and unlike the work of Carlo Scarpa in Verona, or Sverre Fehn at Hamar, or Peter Zumthor in Cologne, where layers of history are conspicuously displayed one-on-top-of-the-next—the Chapel displays a sedimentary approach to the past. This sedimentation is not an outright rejection of history; nor does it suggest that history proceeds as a single, linear narrative. While the Chapel's architecture may not have immediate visceral impact, its thoughtfulness and subtlety repay careful scrutiny. The chapel is read here as a cultural artefact, its organisation and details examined in relation to its specific historical, physical and intellectual contexts.     

The sedimentation of memory

This paper explores how architecture can embody the past. In the context of Berlin—the site of much prominent contemporary memorial architecture—it examines one project in detail: Reitermann and Sassenroth's widely overlooked Chapel of Reconciliation, completed in 2000. This building, I argue, demonstrates a distinctive and critically acute approach to memory. Unlike the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, designed by Peter Eisenmann, and the Jewish Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, which are projects that make worlds-unto-themselves—and unlike the work of Carlo Scarpa in Verona, or Sverre Fehn at Hamar, or Peter Zumthor in Cologne, where layers of history are conspicuously displayed one-on-top-of-the-next—the Chapel displays a sedimentary approach to the past. This sedimentation is not an outright rejection of history; nor does it suggest that history proceeds as a single, linear narrative. While the Chapel's architecture may not have immediate visceral impact, its thoughtfulness and subtlety repay careful scrutiny. The chapel is read here as a cultural artefact, its organisation and details examined in relation to its specific historical, physical and intellectual contexts.     

The Perfect Storm: Urbanism and Architecture

Architecture and urbanism have become ambivalent. Ron Witte of design-based think-tank WW tracks the history of an acrimonious relationship, from Haussmann's grand plan for Paris through to the perceived failure of Modernism and the more recent rise of geometry and programme. Could this divide, though, be bridged, and the two fields reunited with a new geometry in which ‘architecture reaches into the city’ and ‘the city reaches into architecture’?     

Eisenman beyond Eisenman: language and architecture revisited

Until the 1990s, architectural criticism was based on the idea that architecture could be compared to language, and the tools for interpreting architecture were similar to those of linguistics and literary criticism. Such a view was rejected by post-critical architecture, which started looking at architecture as an asignifying, performative and affective phenomenon. However, language philosophy after the ‘linguistic turn’, in particular what Felice Cimatti has called the ‘Italian language theory’, provides new tools for rigorously addressing the parallel between language and architecture. The architectural trajectory of Peter Eisenman's Houses will be re-interpreted through the lens of these theories.     

也谈“后现代主义”建筑

后现代主义是一场建筑运动,它在现代主义尚未退出建筑设计舞台时悄然登场。影响虽不及后者,但作为一种对传统的反叛,后现代主义的出现和普及符合建筑风格的兴起和更迭的自然规律。随着我国的改革开放,中国建筑学界用最快的速度消化和吸收着西方建筑思潮。对后现代主义,国人以自己的思维方式去理解和学习。这种立足于自己民族传统,以一种开放的姿态去接受学习外来的事物的姿态不可不谓是一种进步。停滞就意味着消亡,建筑设计发展从来就不是一成不变的,后现代主义为其以后的传承者树立了积极的榜样。     

First interlude: on the nuances of historical emancipation

Modernism has rendered ambiguous the role of the wall as a device of definition, confinement and separation and as carrier of symbolic dressing, for it can at one moment outdo itself with mass and at another deny its essence as diaphanous membrane such that it disappears as a physical phenomenon. The wall has been dissolved through technical means. This paper explores via Art, the aesthetics of the wall citing Schmarsow's two 'orders of the wall', an exaggerated function as a limit, or dissolution into a barrier that is permeable to space, these concepts of limiting and de-limiting generating an architecture conceived as space rather than surface. Historically, the wall lost its weight when painted with illusions of symbolic perspective thereby relieved of its passive role separating one area from another. Boulle's idea of creating a 'picture of infinity' inside buildings has evolved into James Turrell's 'Perceptual Cells'. The paper ends with discussion of the urban facade as multi-layered and transparent, responding to different spatial layers in order to achieve penetration without visible destruction. (See also 'The Problem of our Walls', The Journal of Architecture Vol.4 No.1 Spring 1999).     

Romanticism Revisited: Jørn Utzon's Sydney Opera House

Complex and mysterious, the Sydney Opera House is gloriously elusive. It is something very rare: the intersection of early 19th century Romantic ideas that elevated feeling, intuition and individual genius, and mid-20th century Modernism standing for a rational acceptance and assimilation of industrialism, standardisation with an abstract mass-production aesthetic.

Evidence supporting this is found in Utzon's reference to the Gothic church, his fascination with remote exotic sources and fascination with the primitive in his development of the ‘additive architecture' principle, but most tellingly, the importance given to nature and landscape as a source of poetic metaphors. This combination of a Romantic orientation and Modernism is understandable only in terms of his special Scandinavian heritage. The collision resulted in a powerful, but ultimately flawed outcome to the extent that Utzon failed to fuse the emotional with the rational dimensions but in his defence, it has to be said that this is a widespread failure that has carried over into the present day. This is the great drama we experience at Bennelong Point, which is made all the more poignant by our sympathy with his aims and the unconscious recognition that in some fundamental way, the goal was unattainable.     

Post-War Modernism: Maxwell Fry's buildings at the University of Liverpool

This paper considers the architecture and design process of Liverpool University's Veterinary School and Civil Engineering building, designed by the modernist pioneer architect, Edwin Maxwell Fry (1899–1987) in the period 1955–60. The architecture of Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War marked a departure from the modernism associated with the International Style, ‘white cubes’ and ‘primitive functionalism’, and there was a move amongst architects and reports in the architectural press that sought to review architecture through the agendas of ‘expressive’, ‘formal’ and even ‘vernacular’ design. Both of Fry's buildings initially appear as subscribers to the functionalist doctrine, adopting a sombre, even aloof exterior, but a closer inspection reveals that they are not just the routine, clichéd modern buildings that became so prevalent and scorned throughout the 1950s. They demonstrate some of the wider concerns architects had at that time, namely: monumentality, the use of art and murals as a means of conveying meaning, and a concern for context within a functional-vernacular tradition. These notions were also astutely tracked through the architectural journals along with ‘formalism’ (leading to Brutalism) and perhaps most significantly through Nikolaus Pevsner's determination to bind the English picturesque tradition with the lineage of Modernism.     

解读MIT校园建筑

校园建筑不仅决定着一个大学校园的风格和规模,更重要的是它们代表着大学的普遍价值和愿望。分析MIT校园不同时期建造的建筑及其风格：从20世纪初的新古典主义到中期的现代主义,从20世纪后半叶的自然国际风到21世纪初的后现代主义,旨在展现这一世界著名大学校园的发展和规划历程,以期引起规划师和建筑师的一些关注和思考。     

Social engineering and participation in Anglo-Swedish housing 1945–1976: Ralph Erskine's vernacular plan

This article appraises the career of architect Ralph Erskine focusing on the context for his contribution to Swedish and British social housing and planning. Erskine's formative experience during the 1930s and his subsequent transnational career are utilized to explore the mutual influences of planning ideals across national boundaries. The Garden City ideal, Functionalism and the urban village concept are considered for their long-term contribution to his work. In addition, vernacular architecture and participatory planning are explored as influences on the evolution of his community architecture vision by the 1970s. Drawing on evidence from urban developments in Britain and Sweden, the discussion demonstrates that Erskine's cultural transfer of international planning ideals essentialized aspects of British and Swedish historical culture. The article concludes with a discussion of the 1970s and Erskine's role in the redevelopment of Byker in Newcastle upon Tyne. This process was hailed as a pioneer moment in the English community architecture movement. However, this study demonstrates that Erskine should be distinguished from the grassroots activism of the community architecture movement. Rather the discussion emphasizes that his participatory planning was underpinned by a structural tension between social engineering and democratic participation that was generated and reinforced by his transnational career.     

PIVOTAL TERMS: Architecture,Eros and the Movement Inhibition

The serial form employed by Peter Eisenman and John Hejduk since the late 1960s undermines a representational model of architecture and offers a productive use of repetition of profound consequences for practice and criticism. In light of the argument made by Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze that repetition is not a reiteration of the same but a dynamic process of affirming difference, die lateral repetitions made by Eisenman and Hejduk can be seen to dissolve the distinction between origin and copy, form and idea. These distinctions are preserved, albeit with a sense of irony, in the appropriation of historical examples which is consistently regarded as the defining practice of postmodern architecture. Thus, the series and repetition in Eisenman's and Hejduk's work has consequences for the recent history of architecture in addition to its effects on their subsequent work and the challenges it presents for us now faced with technologies of repetition which take these operations to new speeds and intensities.