Arch History final Concepts

Stripped Classicism

A 20th-century classicist architectural style stripped of most or all ornamentation, frequently employed by governments while designing official buildings. It was adapted by both totalitarian and democratic regimes. The style embraces a "simplified but recognizable" classicism in its overall massing and scale while eliminating traditional decorative detailing. The orders of architecture are only hinted at or are indirectly implicated in the form and structure.

National Romanticism

A Nordic architectural style that was part of the National Romantic movement during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is often considered to be a form of Art Nouveau. It is a designation of a building style in Denmark and Scandinavia in the period approx. 1890 to 1910. The style can be seen both as a continuation of historicism and counteracting this, as its practitioners continued the eclectic approach, where romanticizing elements of the Nordic Viking era were linked with style elements of Italian Renaissance while at the same time contradicting material versatility and functionality. The materials should have a regional feel, why the preferred materials in Denmark were bricks, tiles, sockets, stairs, sculptural ornaments, and wood.

Urban Renewal

A comprehensive scheme to redress a complex of urban problems, including unsanitary, deficient, and obsolete housing, inadequate transportation, sanitation, and other services and facilities, haphazard land use, traffic congestion, and the sociological correlates of urban decay, such as crime. Early efforts usually focused on housing reform and sanitary and public-health measures, followed by growing emphasis on slum clearance and the relocation of population and industry from congested areas to less-crowded sites, as in the garden-city and new-towns movements in Great Britain.

Postmodernism

A late 20th-century movement characterized by broad skepticism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power.

Deconstructionism

A movement of postmodern architecture which appeared in the 1980s. It gives the impression of the fragmentation of the constructed building, commonly characterised by an absence of obvious harmony, continuity, or symmetry.

Cantilever

A structure which is anchored at one end and can carry a load at the other end.

Pop Art

A style which refers to structures that symbolically represent objects, most often with a hyper inflated scale, colour, proportion, and scheme with fantastic designs, vast sculptures on an architectural scale, or to any architecture produced that is more a metaphor than a building.

Cité Radieuse

Also called Unité d'Habitation, located in Marseilles, France, and inspired by the Great Ocean Liners, it is a system of mass housing designed by Le Corbusier to be a prototype for new housing estates throughout Europe. It illustrates most of Le Corbusier's 5 points in that it is lifted off the ground with pilotees, there is an active roofscape with recreational facilities, there is a free plan that is seen more in the section, and there are ribbon windows. It comprises 337 apartments of 23 different layouts and over 12 stories. The building incorporates shops including an architectural bookshop, a rooftop gallery, educational facilities, a hotel that is open to the public, and a restaurant. Wide corridors run along the central long axis of every third floor of the building. Each apartment lies on two levels, such that the room on one side of a corridor belongs to the apartment that is mostly below the corridor floor, while that on the opposite side belongs to the apartment above. On those floors without corridors, the apartments stretch from one side of the building to the other, with each having a balcony on the western side.

Art Deco

Also called style moderne, it was a movement in the decorative arts and architecture that originated in the 1920s and developed into a major style in western Europe and the United States during the 1930s. Its name was derived from the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, held in Paris in 1925, where the style was first exhibited. Art Deco design represented modernism turned into fashion. Its products included both individually crafted luxury items and mass-produced wares. The intention was to create a sleek and anti-traditional elegance that symbolizes wealth and sophistication.

Abstract Expressionism

An architectural movement in Europe during the first decades of the 20th century in parallel with the expressionist visual and performing arts that especially developed and dominated in Germany. The style was characterised by an early-modernist adoption of novel materials, formal innovation, and very unusual massing, sometimes inspired by natural biomorphic forms, sometimes by the new technical possibilities offered by the mass production of brick, steel and especially glass.

Vernacular

An architectural style that is designed based on local needs, availability of construction materials, and the reflecting of local traditions.

Critical Regionalism

An attempt to fuse modernist architectural forms with vernacular building forms, highlighting a sense of regional culture ; Taking the outstanding materials, traditions, and folkways of a region to modify modernism.

Bay Region Style

An outgrowth of the Arts and Crafts Movements, popularized by Bernard Maybeck, Ernest Coxhead, Willis Polk, and Julia Morgan. The style is heavy on wooden construction, low-rise buildings, and lines blurred between indoors and outdoors.

Broadacre City

An urban development concept proposed by Frank Lloyd Wright throughout most of his lifetime. This new democratic city would take advantage of modern technology and communications to decentralize the old city and create an environment in which the individual would flourish.

Metabolism

As a response to the end of CIAM, it was a post-war Japanese architectural movement that fused ideas about architectural megastructures with those of organic biological growth.

Case Study Houses

Between 1945 and 1964, the Case Study Houses program, following the Weißenhof-siedlung exposition, commissioned a study of economic, easy-to-build houses. The study included the creation of 36 prototypes that were to be built leading up to post-war residential development. The initiative by John Entenza, editor of Arts & Architecture magazine, brought a team to Los Angeles that featured some of the biggest names in architecture at the time, including Richard Neutra, Charles & Ray Eames, Pierre Koenig, and Eero Saarinen, among others.

Complexity & Contradiction

Book by Robert Venturi, Like Rowe, compares formal characteristics of Mannerist buildings with those of Modernist buildings

New York Five

Commonly referred to as the "Whites," they practiced in the late 1960s and 1970s in a monochromatic Modernism that extended Le Corbusier's Five Points into the latter half of the twentieth century. They were enumerated in a book by the same name, and included Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John hejduk, and Richard Meier. Centered in New York City, they did a number of smart beach houses in the Hamptons. Several of the Whites eventually became interested in the Postmodern movement, particularly Graves, while others moderated their approach only slightly over the years.

Taliesin Fellowship

Established in 1932 at the suggestion of Olgivanna Wright. Students, called apprentices, paid Frank Lloyd Wright to teach them Wright's Organic architecture. They constructed their own shelters and raised much of their own food to keep the institution self-sustaining. The Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture nearly closed in 2020 due to disagreements with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation over the use of the buildings.

Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM)

Founded in 1928 by Le Corbusier and Siegfried Giedion, other founding members included Hendrik Beriage, Pierre Chareau, Ernest May, Hannes Meyer, Gerrit Rietveld, and Mart Stam. Walter Gropius and Alvar Aalto joined later. The sole female member was Minnette de Silva, representing India and Sri Lanka. The CIAM was responsible for a series of events and congresses arranged across Europe by the most prominent architects of the time, with the objective of spreading the principles of the Modern Movement focusing in all the main domains of architecture. There were 10 thematic conferences over the course of the 30 years of CIAM's existence including "The Minimal Dwelling," The Functional City," and "Habitat." The fourth conference in Athens, Greece, resulted in a definitive statement of the group's mandates for mass housing called the "Athens Charter," inspiring many housing estates across the world, including Le Corbusier's Radiant City project and the Pruitt-Igoe project in St. Louis.

Le Modular

Le Corbusier's system of proportions that he developed during the fallow years of the Second World War, published in 1943. The system consisted of 2 different proportional systems, blue and red. The red system was based on the head height of an "average" man (Le Corbusier himself). The blue series was based on the same man with his arm raised up.

MOMA

Museum of Modern Art encourages the public to make modernist art a regular part of their lives.

Brutalism

Referring to "the truth to materials" or "raw concrete," buildings were characterised by their massive, monolithic and 'blocky' appearance with a rigid geometric style and large-scale use of poured concrete.

Regionalism

The context and customs of making buildings in a particular region. These buildings rely on specific knowledge of the climate, geology, geography, and topography of the region.

Functionalism

The principle that buildings should be designed based solely on the purpose and function of the building.