ARCH 5120

Stuttgart experimental housing exhibition, coordinated by Mies et al., and investigating new housing and construction types.

Weißenhof

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. Van de Velde: individualism, craft, expression.

Werkbund

Spirit of the times, Hegel, etc.

Zeitgeist

Venturi's idea

"Less is a bore"

Mies' idea

"Less is More"

Venturi's term for an appropriate solution to a building on a highway. Signage and planar surface ornament zaddress the scale and speed of the street, while the back of the building is permitted to be cheap, neutral space (a shed). Usually opposed to a "duck".

"decorated shed"

Venturi's term for a building with a highly complicated shape.

"duck"

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

Art Nouveau

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 work is characterized by love of gothicized forms, flat pattern, informal planning and hand-crafted, natural materials.

Arts & Crafts

not involved in symmetry

Assymmetry

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 tabularasa approach to history and design. Social concerns, such as housing and new, economical foprms of construction were also investigated.

Bauhaus

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 order and classical building types.

Beaux-Arts

a constructed screen or wall, often composed of diagonally slatted planes, which shades a building's windows from direct exposure to sunlight.

Bris-soliel

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

Broadacre City

Probably inspired by Corbu's concrete work in projects like La Tourette, a style in the late fifties and sixties which emphaisized beton brut, exaggerated joinery, and roughness of surface.

Brutalism

(raw concrete) exposed joints from form-work, for example, become elements in the design.

Béton Brut

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

Cantilever

an early twentieth century Russian movement which made use of simple formal terms animated by dynamic structural or compositional concerns.

Constructivism

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.

Cubism

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.

Curtain Wall

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.

De Stijl

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.

Dematerialization

A style of architecture characterized by strong gestural or organic forms, more interested in communicating speed or feeling than in deploying a clear design logic.

Expressionism

a skeletal structural system

Frame

Columns are structural, walls can go anywhere

Free plan

a children's toy designed by a Swiss psychologist (and available at the gift shop of everey 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, accustoimed to these blocks, would effortlessly cultivate good tatse. The Young Wright played with such blocks.

Froebel blocks

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.

Functionalism

An early twentieth century Italian movement in the arts, promoted by Marinetti, author of numerous manifestoes, and represented in architecture by Sant'Elia. Futurism advocated a new formal conception based on the accelerated speed of the modern age. Related to Cubism, but an even greater emphasis on the dynamical theories of interpenetration and atmospheric agitation of Henri Bergson.

Futurism

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 satelite cities, which combined the advantages of proximity to the major urban center with the healthful and social amenities of village life.

Garden suburb

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

Gesamtkunstwerk

a architectural movement, centered in Britain, which made usew of the exaggerated expression of structural and mechanical components in their buildings, e.g. Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, and also the more visionary work of Archigram.

High Tech

see Colin Rowe

Ideal Villa

What Van de Velde wanted in the Werkbund

Individuality

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

Industrial revolution

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.

Kunstwollen

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

Machine for living

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

Mass production

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

Modulor

the study of form

Morphology

new three dimensionality

Neo-plasticism

new objectivity

Neuesachlichkeit

Eisenman, Meier, Gwathmey, Graves (now available at Target) and Hejduk.

New York Five

something standardized.

Norm

a kind of transparency, see Colin Rowe

Phenomenal

a.k.a. "PoMo", the re-embrace of history, typology, traditional forms and semiotics (meaningful signs), sponsored by Venturi's C+C but probably launched by Jencks' eponymous (having the same name as the previously referenced thing) book.

Post-Modernism

one of Corb's urban plans, invloving enormous towers on green meadows and not much old stuff at all.

Radiant City

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.

Raumplan

A = A

Symmetry

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

Secession

a concept drawn from the Physics of relativity and embraced by Cubists and futurists to experiment with new ideas of form. (see cubism)

Space/Time

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

Structural Rationalism

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.

Style

Russian stuff, championed by Malevich et al., having to do with an extreme, minimalist reduction of form and eventual elimination of figuration. Commie stuff in the end.

Suprematicism

Typification

Typisierung

Wright's model for a universal USA house—proto ranch house.

Usonian House

characteristic of a shockingly high percentage of great twentieth century architects.

Usually drunk

unclear; capability of sustaining multiple readings

ambiguity

terms used by Le Corbusier to emphasize the need for inclusivity and polyvalence.

both-and

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

domino house

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

eclecticism

Corb's mandate for new architecture, all of which follow from the rationalization of bulding construction and the separation of structure from enclosure: ribbon windows, piloti, roof gardens, free plan, free façade.

five points

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

golden rectangle

one kind of transparency. See Colin Rowe

literal

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

materiality

a repeatable, like unit.

module

Venturi advocates this

multi-functioning

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 tenetieth century architectural theories.

ornament

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.

parti

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

plate glass

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

prairie style

factory produced en masse

pre-fabrication

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.

proportions

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

re-centering

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.

reinforced concrete

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

reticulation

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

tartan grid

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

type

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

typology