ARCH 5120 Exam 1

Individuality

What Van de Velde wanted in the Werkbund

Broadacre City

Wrights re-evocation of the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal as a model of city planning.

Typisierung

"Typification," i.e. the deisgn of prototypes thank can be reproduced as multiples

Beaux-Arts

(École des Beaux-Art) French school of art and architecture which in the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries promoted grandiose, symmetrical planning principles and endorsed the use of the classical orders and classical building types.

Golden Rectangle

A:B as B: A+B but first you have to know what A and B are.

Symmetry

A = A

Bauhaus

A German school which began in Weimar and later moved to Dessau, where it was housed in Gropius' building. It advocated a collaboration among the arts, and a tabula rasa approach to history and design. Social concerns, such as housing and new, economical forms of construction were also investigated.

Expressionism

A modernist movement originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. It aims to present the world from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas. Expressionist artists sought to express the meaning of emotional experience rather than physical reality.

Cubism

An early 20th century movement in the arts, spear-headed by Picasso and Braque, which investigated a temporally unfolding conception of form by means of fragmentation, superposition, collage, simultaneity of views, etc.

Free plan

Columns are structural, walls can go anywhere

Machine for living

Corb's idea about bringing the efficiency and pragmatism of engineering to domestic design projects which have been traditionally burdened with sentimentalism and nostalgia.

Modulor

Corbusier's system of proportions based on the golden mean and related to human scale.

Type

In architecture, used to indicate a building configuration received from history and already laden with meanings understandable to its culture

Domino House

Le Corbusier's diagram of structural slabs supported by columns, i.e., the structural diagram that makes possible his five points

Five points

Le Corbusier's mandate for new architecture, all of which follow from the rationalization of building construction and the separation of structure from enclosure: ribbon windows roof gardens free plan free facade piloti

"Less is More"

Mies' idea

Werkbund

Movement in early 20th c Germany which sought to ally designers with industry to improve quality of industrial goods. Schism in the Werkbund: Muthesius: Norm, standardization, typisierung, design for industry; Van de Velde: individualism, craft, expression, Art Nouveau eccentricity.

Zeitgeist

Spirit of the times, Hegel, etc.

Weißenhof Siedlung

Stuttgart experimental Werkbund exhibition, coordinated by Mies et al., the theme of which was

Dematerialization

The dissolution of heavy, bearing wall enclosures in favor of frame structures and diaphanous expanses of glazing.

Raumplan

a German term (raum = room = space) used to described Adolf Loos' method of designing with clearly defined, bound spaces ("rooms") that do not freely flow into adjacent spaces, although strategic sight lines and sectional relationships may link spaces together.

Froebel blocks

a children's toy designed by a Swiss psychologist (and available at the gift shop of every Frank Lloyd Wright building open to the public for around $450) which were designed with attention to proportion and harmonic relationship among parts. The idea was that children, accustomed to these blocks, would effortlessly cultivate good tatse. The Young Wright played with such blocks.

Tartan grid

a grid of unequal bands, which accommodates serevd and service spaces. See Colin Rowe.

Phenomenal

a kind of transparency, see Colin Rowe

Secession

a movement in turn-of-the century Vienna whereby a group of artists and architects withdrew from the official academy to follow their own aesthetic aims, based on an integration of the arts, playful, sometimes geometrized pattern, simplified form, and polychromy

Reinforced concrete

a new (late nineteenth century) technology whereby concrete was made to act in tension as well as compression (its natural tendency), by means of the introduction of steel reinforcing bars.

Plate glass

a new (late nineteenth century) technology which made possible large, continuous sheets of glass.

Curtain Wall

a non-structural enclosing membrane, usually glass or panelized, which is hung from a structural frame. Because curtain walls are non-structural, they can be very thin and dematerialized.

Parti

a point of departure for an architectural idea; usually a formal diagram which may result from transformations of an ideal paradigm based on a more elaborate understanding of site, program or meaning of the building

Module

a repeatable, like unit.

Frame

a skeletal structural system

Cantilever

a structural system whereby supports are placed inward from the edge or corner, and overhangs are provided.

Garden suburb

advocated at the end of the 19th century by Ebenezer Howard, the Garden city sought to better urban conditions by making use of rail lines to decentralize neighborhoods and create satellite cities, which combined the advantages of proximity to the major urban center with the healthful and social amenities of village life.

Functionalism

an approach to architectural design which stressed the dependency of form on function. Closely allied to the idea of the architect as engineer/ scientist, and generally modern, not nostalgic guy.

Dialectic

an argument which opposes contrasting propositions (thesis and antithesis) to yield a third proposition, "synthesis". A dialectical, spiraling model of historical progress is put forward by GFW Hegel.

De Stijl

an early twentieth century Dutch movement, promoted by Rietveld, van Doesburg and, in painting, Mondrian, which involved the analysis and break-down of complex forms into constituent primary colors: red/blue/yellow; and constituent lines, and planes.

Eclecticism

design by means of picking and choosing elements from unrelated historical styles.

Prairie style

early Wright, horizontal, hip roofs, over hanging eaves, breaking the box....

Pre-fabrication

factory produced en masse

Reticulation

gridded, designed by means of a a network of right-angles

Mass production

industrial production, so that a single design can be replicated in great quantity, hence making goods cheaper, but also sometimes shoddier

Art Nouveau

movement in art and architecture at the turn of the century, centered in Paris and Brussels, and characterized by effusive asymmetrical, curvilinear, vegetal ornament, a fusion of architecture and the decorative arts, and a use of new industrial materials, such as steel and iron structural elements.

Arts & Crafts

movement in art and architecture which took form in the mid-nineteenth century in the ambit of John Ruskin and particularly William Morris. Morris formed and sponsored craft guilds with the aim of re-establishing a social spirit of collectivity, the dignity of the worker, the love of work, and high quality goods, all seen to be lacking (by Morris et al.) in industrial products and processes. Arts and Crafts works characterized by love of gothicized forms, flat pattern, informal planning and hand-crafted, natural materials.

Neuesachlichkeit

new objectivity

Neo-plasticism

new three dimensionality/ a.k.a. De Stijl

Asymmetry

not involved in symmetry

Literal

one kind of transparency. See Colin Rowe

Served Space

refers to major spaces in a building

Servant Space

refers to support spaces, like bathrooms, closets, stairs, etc.

Style

related to Zeitgeist, the inevitable, correct way of building at a given period, not to be confused with fashion, which is meant to be less serious and more fleeting.

Norm

something standardized.

Structural Rationalism

the belief that architecture should be shaped by a proper understanding of materials (especially industrial materials like iron, steel, plate glass and reinforced concrete) which will lead to a style based on the precision, rationality and economy of engineering.

Standardization

the design of prototypes with uniform size, structure, design features, etc., so that design can comply with manufacturing standards.

Re-centering

the device of deflecting the organization of a scheme from one central ordering system to another, and another... to suggest multiple readings for the form and to provide a lively syncopated movement to the whole.

Industrial Revolution

the entire complex of transformations wrought in agrarian society by the advent of large-scale, urban industrialization in the eighteenth and especially nineteenth centuries. Negative transformations involved the ramifications of the increased concentration of a work force in urban centers and the reduced quality of life for the workers; positive implications for architecture involve the easy production of new, standardized, pre-fabricated, cheaper building materials.

Materiality

the making thematic in architecture the tactile qualities and connective properties of various materials (usually natural or low-tech materials)

Proportions

the relationship of parts to the whole in any composition. In traditional architecture, favored proportioning systems used the arithmetic mean; the geometric mean and the harmonic mean to relate the middle term in a proportional relationship with the extreme. In modern architecture, proportions are often goverened by the interplay of similar retangles, e.g. the golden rectangle.

Morphology

the study of form

Typology

the study of types, the use of types to establish meaning or to authorize an architectural form.

Kunstwollen

the will of form; a term made popular by the early twentieth century Viennese writer, Alois Riegl. Related to the idea of Zeitgeist, Kunstwollen proposed that all works of art in a given period will find a shared formal expression, quite apart from the stated ambitions of their makers.

Gesamtkunstwerk

total work of art, an ideal held dear by many early twentieth century movements. which sought to unite architecture, handicraft and the decorative arts into a new, totally designed whole. The term originally comes from the description of Richard Wagner operas, also conceived as a fusion of the arts of music, costume, stage design, etc.

Seven Lamps Ruskin

truth beauty sacrifice power memory obedience life

Ornament

typically something non-functional which had been added as embellishment to a form, and the excessive use of which was decried, prohibited, or narrowly restricted in most twenetieth century architectural theories.