Corbusier 5 points of Modern architecture (following his Villa Savoye)
1- pilotis,
2- replacement of supporting walls by a grid of reinforced concrete columns that bears the structural load is the basis of the new aesthetic.
3- free designing of the ground plan—the absence of supporting walls—means the house is unrestrained in its internal use (now the façade is free from structural constraints).
4- ribbon windows for illumination and ventilation,
5- roof gardens on a flat roof (providing aesthetic as well as essential protection to the concrete roof).
The representational theory: a building and its elements refer to the primitive building and its elements: a column represents a cut down tree, the capital represents a pad that sits the wooden beam atop it. A classical building refers to the elements of primitive building: to its primitive materials and to its methods of construction.
The semantic theory: this is, again, Goodman's theory. A building can denote its referent. Denotation is a simple relation and needs no further explanation. Example: The Sydney Opera House, we are told, denotes sailing boats.Understanding what the Sydney Opera House means is to apprehend the reference to sailing boats given by the building.
Sidney Opera, architect: Jorn Utzon, 1970s
A building can also exemplify the properties it represents. For example: the building refers to its means of construction. Take Dutch architect separates elements into beams,columns, frames and openings in order that the elemental ‘putting-together-of-the-building’ becomes exemplified.
Rietveld's Schroeder House, 1924
or this,
Rietveld's Chair, 1917
The experience counterargument: One's connection to a building doesn't entail that one understands the representational content of the classical building. Our appreciation of a classical building can constitute an aesthetic appreciation that is clumsy, rudimentary, deep or subtle without any recognition of the ancient origins of its form.
Retort of the representational advocate: It only helps to wear representational glasses, since they make for a richer experience by informing the experience. One understands a building better if one is disposed to its historic context and the architect's intentions.
If I understand the context of De Stijl movement, I'm better prepared to enjoy Rietveld's architecture.
Functionalism in architecture: One strand of modernism arising from this background regards the function of a building as determining its form, so that the form of the building is aesthetically conceived as being appropriate to the utility for which the building was designed. According to this view, the beauty of a building is to be assessed in terms of its form in relation to its function.
what is the function here?
Austere functionalism: now function akin to that used in engineering. building is not an aesthetic theory at all, but an accidental bonus at best, entirely irrelevant or even "false consciousness" at worst. Hannes Meyer advocates this position.
Hannes Meyer's ADGB,
and yet, one can make the case that Meyer's building do refer to a BAUHAUS aesthetic!
Whatever the claims of the designers and their supportive theorists, the look of the works is aesthetically estimable and it seems incredible that this is mere caprice. Austere functionalism is a prime example of a critically engaged theory which immunizes its works from aesthetic criticism (by removing them from its orbit).
Scruton's architectural theory: It has two part, Appreciation and judging.
1- Appreciation means we both enjoy works of architecture and feel that we can come to understand them. I do not merely perceive a building in front of me, but I can come to see the building in terms of a descriptive content which pulls together the various fragmentary perceptions I have when moving in and around it. This descriptive content, being aspectual, is based upon, but irreducible to, the material building at which I stare. That is to say that the experience, so described, is imaginative. Thus my experience of the building is subject to the will. It is a way of seeing the building for which I am responsible. (I cannot be wrong about how I see the building.)
2- Judging: I have a judgement about what I see. And I can argue with others to try and persuade them of its force. I feel I can organize the disconnected pieces of my perceptual world into a single continuous imaginative experience of a unified whole. This activity, in which I find myself engaged, is by its very nature judgemental, for it seeks this unity in the work conceived as imaginative, harmonious, agreeable and sensible.
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