Playtime - Jacques Tati

By watching the film by Jacques Tati, Playtime, we can see how people around the late modernism period are responding the international style at that time. At the time period where the film was created, modernism was playing a big role in the society and the egos and confident of the architects were almost at its top form. These architects were becoming like perfectionist where everything have to be done the way they wished when it comes to using the buildings as if the people were one of the controlled characters in "The Sims". We can analyze this behavior by watching many of the scenes in the movie. For example, in the opening scene, we start off with an airport. The exterior is non-ornamented, pure glass facades and metal framing, a direct translation of the modernism manifesto. Inside the airport, there were several groups of people displaying different behaviors, but explaining the same meaning. A couple was sitting at the waiting area and the wife would keep asking and ordering her husband, a cleaning person is always trying to find something to clean, and there was a group of nun walking around. These are different personifications of perfectionism which was the main theme of architecture at that time. Then, the director seems to try to point out how modernism is affecting our lives, or the lives of people at that time. He does this by displaying an adventure of one character. This particular character wonders off in the big city and into many modernist buildings. In these adventure, the character always confuses himself with other people since they dress up similarly, walks similarly, and does thing similarly. By doing this, the director seems to be saying that by having modernist set up manifestos on how form should follow function, form is starting to become one aesthetics. He is saying that there is no uniqueness or individual characters within the buildings. I believed that this topic was clearly pointed out in the movie. By watching and analyzing this movie, I understand architecture as writing or as symbol of history further. Architecture does not only become a habitat for human, but it is a writing, a story, a film, and a viewpoint for society to dwell upon.

Julius Shulman vs. Modernism

            Presentation is a big part of finishing every architectural project. How we present the project can reflect the thoughts that we have put in. Some important design elements that are so small, yet important, maybe overlooked if we do not pull it out and exaggerate it in our presentations. In the field of architecture, designers may show their design through diagrams and plan, but in order for the public and normal people to understand, the best way to express is through pictures. One of the most important architectural photographers is Julius Shulman who worked with many architects in portraying finished works into magazines and newspaper. However, Shulman’s photography was unique, as we have seen in the documentary shown in history class. He would carry furniture into the houses that he would photograph and set it up so that it would feel “like someone was actually living there”. By doing this, it seems like he is upsetting the scheme of modernism. Is whatever Shulman doing right or wrong according to the theories and manifesto of modernism?

            To remind of the earlier classes on modernism, modernism architects designs according to their own manifesto made by each compound. They would design buildings and houses in their own way, not caring about any client, and wait for someone to come in and say “I like it, I’m building it”, or something close to this extent. I still remember that some architects would design the whole set of the house including chairs, tables, and even clothing to fit into the house. There would be stories in which clients would hide the architect’s furniture and then display it when the architects come and visit so that the architect won’t get mad. Moreover, everything had to be real and pure. What is concrete must be concrete and load bearing and non-load bearing and etc. What Shulman is doing to these houses is like totally flipping this theory over. By putting furniture into the house just for his photography and taking them back is like taking something very impure into the house. Sometimes, he brings other people into the house to take as models, such as the Case Study 22 house. The girls that were in the picture were not even the owner.

            By doing this, I believe that he is pulling architects away from modernism. He was considering the fact that there is actually living things, or human, living in these houses and buildings and that they have to be emphasized on. It is like showing that architects cannot just design houses to please themselves, but they must also please the people living in the structure and that lifestyle is a big part of design issue. Architects cannot force people to open or close curtains anymore. All in all, I believe this was a big change towards post-modernism which I would really like to learn of more.

Coming into Modernism

            From the last history class we have studied further into the development of modernism and into the works of Le Corbusier. In the lecture, it have been shown the interconnectivity of art and architecture. Even though it seems that art and architecture is a whole different field of study, art is made for visual expression while architecture is for people to live or work in, but the two somehow grow along side by side into Modernism and retrieving its form.

            We have seen beautiful realistic paintings in the past history in the Classic and Renaissance periods, but the trend in Modernism would be to reduce everything to its basic form like what Picasso and other Cubist had in mind. In my opinion, cubist may have its affects into the designs of architecture in its conceptual thinking of reducing, but the art pieces that really affected architecture would be the paintings from the De Stijl movement. Cubism may have reduced its form, but if we were to use those forms into the building, it would be mere impossible. On the other hand, if we considered the paintings by the De Stijl movement, we can see the form and grids that are very similar to building structures of the Modernism age, or working house aesthetics.

            Even though coming from different countries, we could still see how the De Stijl have affected even the most important architect of the world, Le Corbusier. In Unite d’ Habitation, we could see the resemblence of the painting by the De Stijl movement in the façade, both in color and in form. It was a matter of proportion, symmetry, and the hierarchy of shapes, size, and it format. Coming to Le Corbusier, we could see that his later buildings still kept its shape and form of these grid line cubes where he showed it in his masterpiece, Villa Savoye. The pilotis were in grid form, and the main structure of the house was somewhat a rectangle.

            Maybe these form had the best interconnectivity between art and architecture. Since architecture had a wider scope in which they had to create functions for space, but in studying history, our analysis may connect the fields of study together.

The Metropolis

There have been predictions of the future for as long as history can be dated back. These predictions come in many different forms, from writing, pictures, and the one with the most visual form, movies. In history class this week we were assigned to watch “The Metropolis”, a movie in the 1900’s that tries to define what would things be like in the future, or in other words, now. The special effects and pictography might not have the latest technology and look realistic, but the movie can reflect the architectural and cultural standpoint of that era.

I believe movies have become a big part in reflecting the ideas of human in the period of time the movies are made. The way we present our thinking or prediction of the future, relates back to the issue that we are facing in that period of time. For example, in these past few years, we have seen a huge amount of movies that are about the end of the world, such as 2012 and The Day after Tomorrow. Many movies made today or in the past decade depicts the future as the end or how close it is to the end of the world since we are having a crisis on global warming and natural disaster. If we were to look back about ten to twenty years, a hit movie would be The Waterworld, where the whole world changes into water and we try to adapt to living on man made islands. When robots were created, the hit movie would be A.I Artificial Intelligence and the scientific genres.

However, back in those times, analyzing from the movie, the big hit would be urbanization, industrialization, and the separation between classes. I believe the big scene that captured everyone’s astonishment back then would be the big scene where we could see hi rise buildings everywhere, traffic jams from cars, and helicopters flying all around. That were predictions from that age of time, which I would say, they made a pretty good prediction even though we don’t have that much helicopters. Even with all these component of the urban life, what I thought was very important and maybe overlooked was the depictions of the architectural style that can be related to the lifestyle itself, which is separated into above ground and underground.

Starting off with the underground lifestyle, we could see men working hard in factories: manual labor = unhappiness. Everyone is wearing the same shirt with the same size. Everything was the same: it was industrialization or production line. Everything had to look the same since it is mass-produced. It was, if we look back to our reading, non burgeois. But on the other hand, the view on ground was different. We could reflect it back to the big view of the urban city. The hi-rise a more decorative façade that stood out of each other. It was more burgeois than the view of the underground city. This shows that in that period of time, they were looking forward to modernism in this kind of way since I thought was pretty strange. They seem to separate modernism into two different scheme, in which the director seems to favor the decorative or the on ground city view more. I analyze it as a biased way of portraying architectural elements in that age. The director portrays the nonburgeois as a sign of harshness and labor while showed the facade as beauty. 

We did not finish the movie, yet, so the blog will be continued… 

From Bauhaus to Our House

From reading “From Bauhaus to Our House” by Tom Wolfe, there were so many issues that made me understand a lot more about the history of modern architecture and how the field of study was developed starting from zero.  The way I see it, the architectural industry is actually pretty similar to the music industry (it was mentioned in the text but I would like to emphasize more on this). The music industries have labels, while the architects have compounds. The way I see how this can relate to normal life is that there are independent music labels with various genres and there are mainstream music. Even though both of them produce music consistently, they cannot dominate the market at the same time. At one moment, people would choose to listen to one label and start a trend, so whatever music coming out of that label, from any artist new or old, will be appreciated. Then, people will start getting bored and move on to new labels and the cycle would go on and on. It moves pretty fast for the music industry since everything depends on likes and dislikes of what people hear. Music is produce within months or weeks, but on the other hand, architecture needs years of construction to be finished. It seems harder to judge things that are a thousand times your size and you have to go in and out of it all the time.

Nevertheless, the issue of my analysis would be the reason why modernism or theories by Mies and other European architects was such a hit and must be followed internationally, or at least in America even though the structure and design seem to be coming from worker’s houses in European country. I believe that the United States is a very young country with not much confidence of their identity at the time of the end of the First World War. When the Europeans migrated in, it was like being introduced to a whole new music genre, as if hip-hop has just arrived into another continent and every one was mad crazy about it. It was pretty usual to see that happen, but what I thought changed everything was when all the top schools put these architects into the professor’s chair. When that happened, all the architects produced by the United States will have the same thinking or to be nonburgeois. With every new architect having the same thinking or taught to design in a certain way, then the movement seemed to become permanent until a new genre can throw down this system that has been created. That was why modernism was so strong. If this was politics then communist would have spread in USA.

By seeing this happen, we have seen a country that did not get demolished by bombs in wartime learn the thoughts of those who went through such disaster. In my opinion, this nonburgeois idea seems to be very similar to the Socialist politics that has been going on in Europe where everything and everyone is equal. So if we were to apply this same procedure in Thailand’s education, by hiring a group of top thinkers and letting them spread the disease, I guess it might work the same as it did 50 years ago in the USA. However, what bothers me most is how do you teach architects to design in their own ways without any client. Looking at the way we learn design, we must always please our professor and work towards their goal, but what happens when you design something in your own way not caring about the client, how will you be graded?

I also wanted to apply what I’ve learned and analyze it side by side with my studio project. I chose Villa dall’Ava by Rem Koolhaas which resembles the Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier. At first when I did not really understand the history of what was going on, I thought that Koolhaas just used the Villa Savoye as a reference to being a masterpiece since it was close by in the site. As I now understand, it seems like Koolhaas was trying to challenge Le Corbusier’s modernism piece with a new approach to design. Villa dall’Ava had a client that was very demanding in having things done their way. By using some of Villa Savoye’s features, it seems like Koolhaas is saying that modernism can happen by pleasing clients and it should be about analyzing the site and the client’s need. By doing this, you have to put soul into the architecture so that it make’s the clients happy to live in. I believe that by doing this it means much more than to force people to stick up to the heat and not allow them to put curtains up just because you want your building to look good, it seems very communist.