Cubism and Futurism in Architecture - Case Study Example

An Annotation of Cubism and Futurism in Architecture Introduction Exceptionally potent was the magic of reinforced concrete in Paris by the 1920s that numerous French scholars have recognized the insight that the modern architecture of the 1920s was to a certain extent brought about by this singular material, rather than enabled by it. This recognition of Choisy’s vision of technique as a major source of style, was most certainly promoted by the leading position of Perret as the solitary modernizer of consequence in the period immediately prior to the War, yet Rob Mallet-Stevens is expressing in the broadest sense when he asserts, in 1925, “Abruptly, everything changed. Reinforced concrete appeared revolutionizing the process of construction… science creates a new aesthetic, forms are profoundly modified” (Banham 1960: 201). Definitely, Mallet-Stevens furthers that the delay in architectural advancement as between America and Europe is attributable to an American partiality for the inappropriate material, iron: “Reinforced concrete supervened. The Americans resisted this mode of construction for a long time, and iron reigned supreme in their art of building” (Banham 1960: 202). The standpoint here espoused by Mallet-Stevens plainly recognizes reinforced concrete as a material which had impressed itself. Yet, at a span of about four decades in time, it is evident that the means of using reinforced concrete were already considerably diverse, ranging from Perret’s cautious Classicism to Freyssinet’s bold vault-work, and that none of these selections was, in fact, applied by the younger generation of architects who initiated the French involvement to the conventional International Style. Specifically, they deviated from curved structures in section in general, but commonly employed curved structures in plan (Farmer & Louw 1993). The Cubist tradition was a component of that larger and ironic practice of being anti-traditional, that can be traced back, in painting, comparable to a modernizing practice in Rationalist architectural theory that can be traced back to Labrouste (Farmer & Louw 1993). The objective of this study is to annotate or critically evaluate the history, theory and design of the Cubist tradition. Historical and Theoretical Development of Cubism Architectural traditions of International style and cubism were considered, with differing explanation, as anti-Academic; however, Cubism, more than any earlier stage of the pictorial movement, offered attributes that could be estimated to those of the architectural theory of Rationalists. This could not be achieved wholly with either the documented statements or works of the founding fathers, Picasso and Braque, despite of their infrequent application of architectural theme, but already in Gris’s work there was logically the use of proportional schemes and structural grids. Nonetheless, it was from Cubism’s scholarly wing, the Groupe de Puteaux, displaying as the Section d’Or, that the highly fruitful line of growth was to originate (Whittick 1953). This group focused on the Duchamp brothers: ‘Marcel, Gaston and Raymond’ (Banham 1960: 203). There are several remarkable, though perhaps unintentional similarities between styles of draughtsmanship used by Sant’Elia, and a few used by Jacques Villon, and Raymond had inclinations in architecture, as Fernand Leger, another member of the group, had sketching office experience. On the other hand, the one existing evidence, a photograph of a replica and several interiors, of Raymond Duchamp-Villon’s Cubist architecture indicates that his insights rest a long way from the radical movements of the moment of its formation (Hvattum & Hermansen 2004). The reality that this no more than apparently futuristic design was considered deserving of description in Les Peintres Cubistes of Apollinnaire (Hvattum & Hermansen 2004) indicates that the entire Movement was distant with futuristic notions in architecture, an argument that is worth raising in sight of what has been frequently mentioned or suggested about the similarities between the International Style and Cubism. It is only in union with ideas of Futurism that Cubism was capable of making any important input to the conventional, but the specific union attained by Marcel Duchamp, who is most significant in this relationship, is quite different especially dissimilar to that created in the Elementarist group. The unusual inclination granted to Cubo-Futurist designs by Duchamp is existent as early as a masterpiece that is a probable basis of Futurist pictorial techniques, the 1911 Coffee Mill (Leach 1999). While in Picasso’s and Braque’s works by the beginning of the twentieth century, the ‘decomposition’ of theme had been upgraded in the interests of entirely personal and pictorial concerns, such as vicious imagery, manipulated space illusions, and others, Duchamp decomposes the Futurist pictorial techniques so as to expose its processes, as in an enlarged image in a guidebook, there is even a line directing which route to turn the eccentric. He has changed attention from the trade of picture-making to an analysis of the subject matter of the picture, though his motives for doing so are less probable to be those of Rationalists than those of the anti-traditional Futurists (Leach 1999). At this point, it is important emphasizing just to what extent French thinkers had in common with Dutch theorists, as it is upon these similarities that much of the final harmony of the International Style was to rely. They embraced a similar Cubo-Futurist context, though differently understood; they had a similar inclination to unclearly Platonic insights, and they had Gino Severini in common, whose comparisons between art and technology were featured in the Mercure de France at the same time as they were featured in de Stijl. Concrete likeness of view will be stressed eventually; the direct importance of Severini in this Parisian setting rests in another path. He led the movement for a return to order, or a turning back to Classicism from Cubism, to basic point of view and traditionally-represented objects (Miles 2004). The outcome, in the paintings of Severini in the 1920s, is simply ornamental beauty, but he helped to unite architecture and painting, in which the Classicism and the call to the traditions were evenly modern in the early post-War period. However, in this Classicising relationship, the statement of Albert Gleizes, another member of the Groupe de Puteaux, is of: “for some of the younger architects, the recovery of Classical discipline was a step to something beyond Classicism” (Banham 1960: 206). When the final attempt has been performed, it will not be Classicism they revive, but the past, untainted and plain; that which employed to allow a rigid and hierarchical cooperation in the making of works of impersonal art. Abandoning their common foundation in architecture, two visual arts have liberated themselves successively; first was ‘sculpture’ then later on ‘painting’ (Banham 1960: 206): Cubist paintings are impersonal… beauty is no longer seizable chance, but unavoidable. While works of painting have hitherto been so fugitive that they could not be duplicated… these, now, can be multiplied to infinity, whether by the artist who created them, or by scrupulous intermediaries… with paintings so that no copy is more ‘original’ than another, the selling price will drop of its own accord. The indication, that merely works whose values are absolutely determinate can be precisely replicated, indicates that Gleizes is considering replication by hand, as most mechanical techniques would have to be performed this way that they could replicate unintended effects as well. Yet, he also implies that the gains of mass-reproduction will merely be presented on the consumer by objects which he somewhere else illustrates as regarded “following well-defined, but nevertheless very simple laws” (Banham 1960: 206). This notion, that just geometrically basic designs are inexpensive to mass-reproduce, was collective asset by the end of the 1920s, and has sustained its modernity from then on. However it was not Gleizes who provided its modernity and its expansive distribution is attributable to those who united it with a theory of types and with the notion of the Purists. Although several Parisian artists in 1922 showed largely Purist inclinations, there were only two Purist proper, namely, Amedée Ozenfant and Charles Edouard Jeanneret. The dissimilarity in background is incredibly marked in the paintings they displayed at their opening Purist exhibition. The paintings of Jeanneret have the intellectual plainness of schoolroom activities in making standard geometrical solids, while the paintings of Ozenfant have the stressed attribute of a futuristic and romantic gift, which certainly he possessed, being controlled into minimalism for the benefit of a scholarly agenda (Piotrowski & Robinson 2001). Given this unusual union of talents, knowledgeable on both the current advancements in painting and on current advancements in technology, it is unsurprising that the Manifesto Aprés le Cubisme, which was featured as the catalogue to this opening exposition, should appear like an extension of Severini’s and Gleizes’s Classicised Cubo-Futurism. The central meaning of the argument relies on the agreement, later suspected by both thinkers, of art and science. The ideas which lead up to the notion of the object-type, stand for a somewhat systematic union of the Classicising, Cubist and Futurist subject matters, and they begin with an unfriendly evaluation of the position of Cubism in 1919 (Read 2000). They confirm the impoverishment of Cubism Limited, owners of a patent procedure, though they say publicly their high regard for its previous products. The economic failure they attribute to the claim of the Cubists, which had made their work extremely rebellious and extremely personal to be in harmony with the character of the period, is founded by way of a very enlightening revising of current methods applied by the Futurists (Leach 1999). Hence, the images to the chapter entitled Formation de lOptique Moderne used only Futurist group of illustrations, such as New York by night, the tools of a dentist, the outline of an airship hangar, a car, but followed by two last images that were, definitely, indicated by Manifesto of Geometrical and Mechanical Splendor of Marinetti, but fit in much more to the assertion of Purists on number, order and categorization. The significant features of the new period, as they witnessed them were first (Banham 1960: 207): Economy-- the gait of present civilization, its future, its character, depend on awaited discoveries, new formulas that provoke ever more economical mechanisms, permitting us to use energy in more efficient ways, thus giving our potentialities, and consequently our minds, a superior liberty and higher ambitions. Second is the separation of methods and designs (Banham 1960). Mechanization has deflected from human hands all work of precision and quality, and has handed it over to machines. Our position seems more evidently so: on one side, scientific awareness stays with technology whereas, on the other, the artificial concern stays intact. Mechanization, being successful in solving the troubles of technology, abandons the dilemma of art untouched. To decline to acknowledge the process that has been performed is to hamper the development of art toward its original and appropriate objectives (Conway & Roenisch 1994). Third is the power of plain geometry: “If we go indoors to work… the office is square, the desk is square and cubic, and everything on it is at right angles (the paper, the envelopes, the correspondence baskets with their geometrical weave, the files, the folders, the registers, etc.)… the hours of our day are spent amid a geometrical spectacle, our eyes are subject to a constant commerce with forms that are almost all geometry” (Banham 1960: 207). Art was to be evaluated by the extent to which it was well-suited with these features of the period, and most are was discovered to be quite mismatched that one is puzzled by a bizarre display; basically everything advances by anti-geometry; hence that one assumes that these are the masterpieces of some dubious human beings existing outside time, in cultures where other rules appear to be in power than those that we have identified, and are well-matched to our abilities of observation (Mackintosh 1993). Nonetheless, the explanations why geometry is the yardstick of integrity are twofold: not merely is it the blueprint of futuristic technology, but it is also the expression of permanent laws ruling art, validated by traditions not the current. Purism has introduced the Law of Mechanical Selection. This ascertains that objects have an inclination toward a form that is resolved by the progress of forms between the model of highest functionality, and the fulfillment of the requirements of economical production, which follow unavoidably the laws of nature. This twofold operation of laws has led to the formation of a particular quantity of objects that could hence be referred to as ‘standardized’, without laying down any subject, Purism has thus far restricted its preference to these objects (Read 2000). As they come out in paintings of Purism, an expression which is of significance for the impact it had upon the prescribed practices of the architecture created by Le Corbusier persona of Jeanneret; these plain objects, primarily glasses, carafes, smoker’s instruments, bottles, are shown, not in a basic point of view, but in a side-elevation principle intently founded on that of engineering blueprint, but with an outline of pseudo-plan demonstrated for the crowns of open vessels which are shown as circles (Hvattum & Hermansen 2004). The prevention of viewpoint was schematic, primarily to get rid of accidents. Average point of view in its complete theoretical rigidity provides only the unintended form of objects; and secondly, since such an eradication of the accidents of point of view was believed to be especially required in the depiction of types. This notion can be attributed, prior to the War, to Maurice Princet, a friend of Picasso and Braque, and is recounted to have enquired (Banham 1960: 209): You represent by means of a trapezium a table as you see it, distorted by perspective, but what would happen if you took it into your head to represent a table-type. You would have to set it up in the picture-plane and revert from a trapezium to a true rectangle. If this table was covered in objects equally distorted by perspective, the same movement of correction would operate for each of them. Thus, the oval of a glass would become an exact circle… As they come out in the theory of aesthetics, an expression that influenced both the architecture of Le Corbusier and his perspectives on designing, these plain objects can be linked to the insights of at least one other important theorist, Paul Valery, a Classicist interested in mathematics (Whittick 1953). It will be emphasized that the Purists claim that the twofold operation of laws, namely, function and economy, has led, currently, in the formation of a particular quantity of standardized objects. Specifically, their objects-type is situated at the end of an accomplished procedure, a prominent outlook for two thinkers who had exerted effort to suggest that the entire foundation of life was experiencing a technological revolution, and an identical perspective of a completed process is located in Valery’s nearly modern Eupalinos, ou l’architecte (Miles 2004). Nevertheless, there is proof that the advocates of Purism did not consider, in practice, that the procedure was completed. In talking about the maison-type in his writings about architecture of the same era, Le Corbusier highlights that its appearance is not, as so far, economic, functional or established. In their paintings as well, the Purists performed choice in addition to that practiced by commerce and industry, declining to recognize their array of theme particular objects, such as ‘imitation cut-glass tumblers’, that continued in the catalogue images that were their references, in challenge of the ‘pseudo-Darwinian Law of Mechanical Selection’ (Banham 1960: 208); they were in fact fairly equipped to complete a procedure that would not complete itself. What is fascinating in this case is that, as has been witnessed, majority of the insights introduced by the Purists can be dated back to 1913 onwards; the type, the object, the geometric and mechanistic inclinations had all been existing prior to the War, but nobody then, had succeed to link them into a sound aesthetic principle which, as in the hands of Le Corbusier, could hug structures, the objects that provided and furnished them, and the masterpieces that decorated them (Banham 1960). In part this should have been because of the markedly disorderly situation of Cubist circles prior to 1914 but especially it was perhaps because of the appearance of an abrupt early development in several divisions of machine blueprint directly after 1918 (Farmer & Louw 1993). The vision of the Purists of a geometrical and mechanical setting was there for all to witness, with even more remarkable force than the previous idea of the Futurists. A great deal of the basic platonic geometry shown by the 1920’s machinery was far from intrinsic in the form of mechanical blueprint, but the outcome of local and personal aesthetic preference, and thus short-lived, technology was on the threshold of attaining formules definitives, as thought by Pierre Urbain, but was soon to operate again. But the momentary stop and balancing of design continued long enough to persuade those who were prepared to be persuaded that the permanent laws of geometry were on the verge of eliminating accident and unpredictability from the visual dimension, that the tools of everyday life was on the point of achieving final and classic form (Miles 2004). As Marinetti became deeply absorbed into political horseplay, the insights that he and his circle had disseminated prior to 1914 became increasingly a component of the indisputable common ground of conventional advancements in Modern architecture. His own explorations, and of Boccioni’s were sponsored and expanded by Futurist exhibitions in London, Paris, Berlin and Rotterdam while all or fragment of the exposition held in 1912 in Paris appears to have been witnessed in Dresden, Zurich, Breslau, Vienna, the Hague, Brussels and Berlin, and in every instance was escorted by Manifestoes, a number of which were accessible in Spanish, Russian and German by 1914, and also the ‘original’ Italian and French (Leach 1999). In majority of these places, just like in London, where the organization collapsed, concern in Futurism as an architectural movement was brief, but the influence survived and lived on (Piotrowski & Robinson 2001). Richard Rogers, a British architect, continued the architectural legacy of Marinetti and other Futurists. He is renowned for his functionalist and avant-garde architectural designs. In a career not known for its kindness, Rogers has developed a tradition that has enabled succeeding generations of dynamic architects to thrive. He has developed a tradition that has persisted to grow and evolve, and in spite of the concern with which he is eager to recognize the input of his collaborators, without his contribution, several of the most noteworthy architecture of the twentieth century would not have been constructed (Miles 2004). Conclusions The increasing demand of mechanization made the environment appear increasingly Futurist, and as human beings sensed this growing pressure, they discovered Futurist insights handy to channel their insights and form their expression. The widespread accessibility of such insights should at times no surprise with regard to the effort that Marinetti had exerted into their propagation across Europe and eventually all over the world. References Banham, R., (1960) Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, London: Architectural Press. Conway, H. & Roenisch, R., (1994) Understanding Architecture: An Introduction to Architecture and Architectural History, New York: Routledge. Farmer, B. & Louw, H., (eds.) (1993) Companion to Contemporary Architectural Thought, London: Routledge. Hvattum, M. & Hermansen, C., (eds.) (2004) Tracing Modernity: Manifestations of the Modern in Architecture and the City, New York: Routledge. Leach, N., (Ed.) (1999) Architecture and Revolution: Contemporary Perspectives on Central and Eastern Europe, London: Routledge. Mackintosh, I., (1993) Architecture, Actor and Audience, New York: Routledge. Miles, M., (2004) Urban Avant-Gardes Art, Architecture and Change, New York: Routledge. Piotrowski, A. & Robinson, J.W., (eds.) (2001) The Discipline of Architecture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Read, A., (Ed.) (2000) Architecturally Speaking: Practices of Art, Architecture and the Everyday, London: Routledge. Whittick, A., (1953) European Architecture in the Twentieth Century, London: Crosby Lockwood & Son. Read More