Modern architecture emerged during the late 19th - early 20th century to break away from historical styles and create structures based on functionality and novelty. Regardless of the style's prominence, post-modernist architecture emerged a few decades later as a reaction to modernism's uniformity and formality, adding complexity, asymmetry, and color into architecture.
Terrazzo is made by combining a cement base (sand, water, and cement) with a mixture of ground minerals - like marble, granite, and quartz - and can be applied to almost any surface, vertical or horizontal. The technique, produced using a completely hand-crafted method, was used worldwide in the construction of modern buildings and is noted for its durability, resistance (to water and abrasion), and easy maintenance. This made it a go-to material in the creation of flooring for houses and the common areas of residential and office buildings.
Today, terrazzo is experiencing a revival as one of the key trends in contemporary architecture. Here, we will discuss the whats and hows of terrazzo and illustrate some of its uses in current projects.
Courtesy Joe Belcovson for the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. ImageIn 2012, the Getty Conservation Institute founded its Conserving Modern Architecture Initiative (CMAI), with the Getty Foundation’s Keeping It Modern grant following two years later. Working synergistically, the two programs are dedicated to supporting new methods and technologies for the conservation of Modernist buildings. Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute for Biological Studies (1965) in La Jolla, California, has been the beneficiary of both CMAI and Keeping It Modern.
The Conserving Modern Architecture Initiative (CMAI) and Keeping It Modern grant are dedicated to supporting new methods and technologies for the conservation of Modernist buildings.
This Article was originally published on Metropolis Magazine here.
The story of architectural Modernism in New York City goes beyond the familiar touchstones of Lever House and the Seagram Building.
Eighty-five years on, the little white town house on East 48th Street by William Lescaze still startles. With its bright stucco and Purist volumes, it pulls the eye away from the do-nothing brownstones on one side and the noirish sub-Miesian tower on the other. The machined rectitude of its upper floors, telegraphed by two clumsily large spans of glass block, is offset by the freer plastic arrangement of the bottom levels. Le Corbusier’s five points are in evidence (minus the roof garden), suggesting an architecture ready to do battle. Built in 1934 from the shell of a Civil War–era town house, this was the first Modernist house in New York City, and its pioneering feeling for futurity extended to its domestic conveniences. (A skeptical Lewis Mumford noted its central air-conditioning.)
Gottfried Böhm is a German architect who was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1986. His father, Dominikus Böhm and his grandfather Alois Böhm were both architects, as well as three of his sons, among them, Peter Böhm. Few people know that he has two projects erected in Brazil, in Brusque and Blumenau - two cities highly influenced by German culture. Photographer Ronaldo Azambuja shared with us his series of photographs of the mother church Igreja Matriz São Luiz Gonzaga in Brusque. The text was written by Angelina Wittmann, architect, and researcher.
Amey Kandalgaonkar has unveiled a project which reimagines the traditional Chinese pagoda in a modernist style. The Shanghai-based designer created the fictional reinterpretation as a homage to a building form largely untouched by Modernism, featuring raw brut concrete, minimal ornamentation, and bold geometric moves.
https://www.archdaily.com/916524/amey-kandalgaonkar-reimagines-traditional-chinese-pagodas-for-a-modernist-eraNiall Patrick Walsh
Architectour Guide London: The Urban Explorer's Guide
The new series of city guides for architects by Architectour brings to life the lost essence of travel and discovery. A compilation of exciting places – known and not so known – arranged in an innovative way: a continuous scenic itinerary, which is fun to follow and is full of quirks and surprises along the way. Hand-drawn sketches by architect and author Virginia Duran are the personal touch of the book, revealing the essential without spoiling what is a traveling delight: our first impression of a place.
John Marx, AIA, Co-Founding Principal and Chief Artistic Officer of Form4 Architecture, has debuted The Absurdity of Beauty: Rebalancing the Modernist Narrative, which challenges the philosophies of Modernism and posits how these discussions can inspire a new era of urbanism and abundance.
Lebanon is home to several outstanding structures, influenced by centuries of architectural styles. However, one of the most intriguing projects in the Middle Eastern country lies in the northern city of Tripoli, a culturally-rich historical city with structures once inhabited by Romans, Crusaders, Phoenicians, and Ottomans. The Rachid Karami International Exhibition Center, designed by Oscar Niemeyer, reflects the slow deterioration from Lebanon’s pre-war golden age to post-war depression. The country's iconic modernist site has suffered after years of neglect and reportedly will require upwards of 15 million dollars to restore.
This guide is not a catalog. It is an open invitation to walk around the city and learn more about the architecture in Guatemala City.
The Guide to Modern Architecture in Guatemala City was written by Raúl Monterroso, Gemma Gil, and photographed by Andrés Asturias. In partnership with The Cultural Center of Spain in Guatemala, the guide addresses a descriptive analysis of 35 buildings, structured in five different routes, with the aim of not only synthesizing a series of physical characteristics but to provoke a reflexive, analytical and critical observation of the environment.
As Raúl Monterroso points out, while he shares five sites that every architect must visit, the goal is to introduce people to Guatemala's modern movement. It is an invitation to walk through the city and identify it with a different built heritage, however one that also shapes the landscape and fits into the urban context. Learn more about modern architecture in Latin America, below.
How does our built environment affect us? This major exhibition spanning two galleries examines the positive and negative influence buildings have on our health and wellbeing. From Dickensian London to the bold experiments of postwar urban planners, and from healing spaces for cancer patients to the role architecture can play in global healthcare provision, we look anew at the buildings that surround and shape us.
Italian-born architect Lina Bo Bardi is one of the most important figures of Brazilian design. Her ability to blend architecture, politics and popular culture made her an icon throughout the country and world, while her relentlessness to break from traditionalisms made Brazil the ideal location for her work.
Bo Bardi's architecture incorporates both materiality and culture. In addition to the concrete and solidified elements, she designed pieces based on cultural factors and intense political discussions. She wished to break the barriers between intellectuals and everyday people.
Omnipresent plattenbau housing estates, monumental hochhäuser, cosmic milk bars; the post-war East Germany was rebuilt on concrete foundations to stand for the new modernity and shape the unique and no less controversial urban landscape of German Democratic Republic.
High-rise tower blocks, prefab panel housing estates, streets in the sky, new towns; some of the concrete constructions that once shaped the cityscapes of post-war Britain have stood the test of time, while others are long gone.
A recent exhibition at the MAK Vienna - Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art, is showcasing the works of Sagmeister & Walsh, a NYC-based design firm investigating what makes beauty so appealing.
Titled "Beauty," the exhibition explores the notion that beauty operates as an independent function, and that in itself, it can be the primary motive for architecture: form is a function. In collaboration with the YouTube channel and design studio Kurzgesagt (In A Nutshell), this video released along with the exhibition explains why beautiful things make us happy.
“A model by Corbusier is the only image that brings to my mind the idea of immediate suicide.” - Ivan Chtcheglov
Despite their pranks and dirty politics, the Situationists may have been right after all. The death of architecture students will not be a result of excessive studio work, but will rather occur from the sermonizing repetition of modernist ideals that continue to be taught. In Le Corbusier's manifesto, Vers une Architecture (Toward An Architecture), he advocates for the adoption of modern architecture as the solution to 20th-century global crises, in a way that now seems rather limiting.
I taught architectural history in two schools of architecture during the 1980s and 1990s. Back then it was common for students to get a full three-semester course that began with Antiquity and ended with Modernism, with a nod to later twentieth-century architecture. My text for the middle section was Spiro Kostof’s magisterial History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals. With many centuries to cover, he spent very little effort in dealing with the twentieth century. In the last third of the course, students read texts such as Towards a New Architecture by Le Corbusier and Reyner Banham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. My colleagues and I felt that we offered students a pluralistic and comprehensive review of key developments in the history of the built environment.
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