a+u Architecture and Urbanism 20:07_598

In 1968, a turning point for postwar society, a series of political upheavals symbolized by the May Revolution in Paris forcefully brought about social and cultural reforms. The 1970s that followed, despite a sense of crisis and uncertainty, became a period that heralded a wide range of new thinking and experimentation in the architecture world. The underlying question behind all of this was “where do we look for the foundations that will determine architecture”? This was also a question of recovering aspects that a modern architecture based on “function” and “universality” had caused to be lost. The 1970s was a time when “architectural theory” was widely discussed and published. I asked the leading historian of architectural theory, Professor Harry F. Mallgrave, to write an essay on the discourses that were particularly…

This epithet of the nineteenth-century British novelist Charles Dickens – from the start of his novel A Tale of Two Cities – is often trotted out in historical retrospectives to portray decades of great material accomplishments or heightened emotional expression. The trouble is that it really does not apply to the architecture of the 1970s. The passions of the 1960s were far more elevated (destructively and constructively) than the so-called break with modernism proclaimed by Charles Jencks, “on July 15, 1972 at 3:32 p.m. (or thereabouts).”1 And the DeCon wave of “zero-degree” aesthetics practiced in the 1980s, was far worse in its conceits than anything imagined in the 1970s. At least the earlier decade could claim the work of Kahn, Scarpa, Tange, van Eyck, Utzon, and Barragán, none of whom…

In 1968, a turning point for postwar society, a series of political upheavals symbolized by the May Revolution in Paris forcefully brought about social and cultural reforms. The 1970s that followed, despite a sense of crisis and uncertainty, became a period that heralded a wide range of new thinking and experimentation in the architecture world. The underlying question behind all of this was “where do we look for the foundations that will determine architecture”? This was also a question of recovering aspects that a modern architecture based on “function” and “universality” had caused to be lost. The 1970s was a time when “architectural theory” was widely discussed and published. I asked the leading historian of architectural theory, Professor Harry F. Mallgrave, to write an essay on the discourses that were…

Although the debate over function and architectural form seems to have been left in limbo by Mies van der Rohe’s notion of a large, homogeneous space that can accommodate any function, the “meaning of form” has continued to remain a longstanding concern in architecture. The search for logic in disciplines such as semiotics seen during this era has remained at a conceptual level, while the social nature required to advance such a logic to the status of real, actual architecture has been lacking. As such, there are not many concrete examples where this logic has actually taken shape. This section seeks to understand the “semiotic” approaches of the era in an expanded sense. Taking the arguments of the “White & Gray” (a+u 75:04) discussion as a starting point, we examine several…

At a table sit 12 architects and Le Corbusier. They are arranged as the figures in a Leonardo da Vinci. Is this the beginning of the Last Supper? No. Le Corbusier stands in front of a microphone; he is the moderator in the debate that is about to start. “Where is architecture headed?” In the rapidly changing conditions that surround us, it is difficult to give a certain answer to this question. What will become of things? How should we interpret things? In these conditions – perhaps because these conditions exist – it is essential that we reconsider basic issues. The following are the reports and confessions of twelve architects on the nature of the course architecture is now following. The 12 men are divided into two opposed categories: the…

This epithet of the nineteenth-century British novelist Charles Dickens – from the start of his novel A Tale of Two Cities – is often trotted out in historical retrospectives to portray decades of great material accomplishments or heightened emotional expression. The trouble is that it really does not apply to the architecture of the 1970s. The passions of the 1960s were far more elevated (destructively and constructively) than the so-called break with modernism proclaimed by Charles Jencks, “on July 15, 1972 at 3:32 p.m. (or thereabouts).”1 And the DeCon wave of “zero-degree” aesthetics practiced in the 1980s, was far worse in its conceits than anything imagined in the 1970s. At least the earlier decade could claim the work of Kahn, Scarpa, Tange, van Eyck, Utzon, and Barragán, none of whom…