Editors: Ana Tostões, Ivan Blasi
Guest editors: Horacio Torrent
Keywords: Modern Movement, Modern architecture, Art and architecture, Modern art.
The late CIAM discussions, namely the ones that took part in the scope of the Bergamo Conference in 1947, brought social and intensive public aspirations. Between North and South, the new world retook the European avant-garde issues implementing the most collective values for a better future to come. Giedion’s Architecture You and Me or the struggle for a New Monumentality, were the placed questions that received an extraordinary eco from American Architecture which emerged with a creative energy. Therefore, in our days, the aim is to deepen understand the process and to find the paths for the future. A future that we may create with such awareness that may, generously, give us the tools for increase nowadays architecture and city planning.
Published:
2010-07-01
Editorial
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The late CIAM discussions, namely the ones that took part in the scope of the Bergamo Conference in 1947, brought social and intensive public aspirations. Between North and South, the new world retook the European avant-garde issues implementing the most collective values for a better future to come. Giedion’s Architecture You and Me or the struggle for a New Monumentality, were the placed questions that received an extraordinary eco from American Architecture which emerged with a creative energy. Therefore, in our days, the aim is to deepen understand the process and to find the paths...
Essays
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The concept of “synthesis of the arts” became, in the 1940s, a leading principle in the search for renewing and improving modern architecture. Integration with painting and sculpture sought at bringing closer architecture and the people. But many dilemmas stood on the way: from the collaboration processes and the unity of the artistic experience, to “art for art’s sake” predominance or its social content. In the university cities of Mexico and Caracas as well as Burle Marx’s landscapes, the concept of integration reached wider scales. But it found its crisis in the extension to urban...
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From the onset of contemporary architecture, the controversial presence of visual arts manifested itself as one of the approaches in its development. In the mid-twentieth century the use of the term “plastic integration” started to be widespread, exposing the confrontation between diverse stances and positions. Three of the pioneers in the forefront of this field were Carlos Obregón Santacilia, with his building for the Secretaría de Salubridad (1929), Mario Pani, with the Hotel Reforma (1936), and Enrique Yáñez, with the Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas (1936-1940). The movement,...
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University City is one of the best examples of twentieth-century Mexican architecture. It has been declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco for it managed to synthesize tradition and avant-garde to create a place where the articulating landscape design is able to assign emptiness a compositional value; while the harmonious layout of the buildings and their careful construction merge with murals that play an important role in forming their identity. These grand scale murals (1952-1956) were capable of communicating the values and spirit of the Mexican revolutionary movement, such as...
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The Mexican collection at Lund’s Museum of Sketches in is an unusual and valuable collection both from a Mexican and from an international perspective: the collection was built by Gunnar Bråhammar in the late 1960s, and counts works by David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and Juan O’Gorman but also Francisco Eppens, Rufino Tamayo, González Camarena, Raul Angiano, Leopoldo Méndez and Desiderio Xochitiotzin. The article discusses especially “the New Deal” by Rivera, “the Image of Mexico” at the Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Mexico City by Morado Chavez,...
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One of Alexander Calder’s largest artworks can be found in Venezuela, at the University of Caracas. It is the result of a unique collaboration between an architect, an acoustician and an artist. The university’s great fan shaped auditorium, designed by Carlos Villanueva in 1953, proved to be acoustically problematic and the engineer therefore proposed a solution with interior claddings. This was rejected, however, because it would radically change the shape of the hall. Finally, Alexander Calder was approached. He came up with an innovative installation consisting of 30 reflectors shaped...
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When Villanueva worked in the Integration of the Arts project for the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas, he moved from the idea of ‘synthesis of the arts’ (where arts “preserved their traditional features in order to qualify something whose existence was prior to them and of which architecture was the previous framework”) to the idea of ‘integration of the arts’, which “created a new architectural–sculptural–pictorial organism which did not express hierarchy but the formal combination of the functional and the spatial as equal categories,” he took a transcendental step to open his...
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The arts bear witness to the cultural meaning of each period; we can discover the features that marked a historic individuality thanks to them. The more they demonstrate the union of concept or formal participation between them, the more clearly the social axis around which the man/culture duality revolves unfolds itself. The presence of this axis favours the agglutination of artistic expression. What is more, the unity of human content is fertile and a necessary condition so that the total integration flourishes. Architecture, painting, sculpture and technique combine around a common...
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The text registers and discusses the affinities between the transparency of a branch of modern sculpture and the characteristic porosity of Brazilian modern architecture, placed in the broader context of the exchange between architecture, painting, sculpture and construction in the twentieth century.
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Painting, architecture and landscaping have never been so well incorporated in one person as in Roberto Burle Marx. His painter skills enabled Roberto Burle Marx to apply deep thorough pictorial principles to the landscape, thus avoiding other approaches made by pioneers who literally transposed cubist or abstract art, which almost resulted in caricatures. His botanical knowledge allowed him to discover new species in regard to their individual beauty and to their proper integration in ecological environments, which provided adequate choices of harmonious systems in terms of their...
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In the decades after World War II there was much discussion about the need for collaboration between the architect and artist either as embodied in one or as distinctly different creative talents working closely but creatively independently together. Many saw little actual collaboration and questioned the relationship artistically or saw art as a cover for otherwise bland architecture. However, architects like Wallace K. Harrison, Gordon Bunshaft, and others worked regularly with artists like Josef Albers, Isamu Noguchi, Gyorgy Kepes or Richard Lippold. While many of those art...
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In the light of contemporary architecture, last century’s emblematic ‘artist-architect’ may appear at once disquietingly prophetic and almost surrealistically antiquarian. This essay explores the hypothesis that Le Corbusier’s ultimate passion was the museum, and his ultimate dream that of being assigned a key place in the history of art. Though this may sound simple enough - perhaps trivial - it may help re-organizing a very well-known (but also partly unknown) body of knowledge on the master and to understand better the paradox of the continuing presence in current architectural...
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Max Bill was an important reference in the field of art and architecture in Latin America. Unlike the synthesis of the arts, Max Bill was proposing a program based on “concrete art” and the idea of gute form, which sought to provide a common principle to the built environment that would guarantee its formal quality and harmony. This point was central to the reception of his ideas in Argentina. It was largely Tomás Maldonado who introduced these ideas. He presented Max Bill as a “total artist”, a sort of premonition of the “man of the future”, endowed with a capacity of coherence that...
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1948-49 were key years for the reaction of the Museum of Modern Art’s newly amalgamated Department of Architecture and Design to respond to the rising discourse on the “Synthesis of the Arts.” The response was indirect and took the form of MoMA assessing the progress of modern architecture that it had been describing and forecasting for fifteen years. The exhibition “From Le Corbusier to Niemeyer, 1929–1949” was part of a larger assessment of the fate of the international style and of the interaction between abstraction in painting and sculpture and in architectural design, a theme laid...
Tributes
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Dennis died on the 6th May after a serious illness that bothered him for several years. He leaves behind his wife Yasmin, his daughter Melani, his son Deen and many friends all over the world. He was a universal man: architect, scholar, critic, writer, teacher, bookseller, cook and walking encyclopedia. He collaborated with architects like Santiago de Calatrava. His books Modern Architecture and Expression (1966) and 20th century architecture - a visual history (1972) became classics. He made exhibitions, was the editor of the magazine World Architecture, he was professor at the Open...
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It is more common for disciples to write memories of their old masters that it is for a master to bear the hard news of the death of one of his disciples. It is painful and sad to face and deal with the death of Eliana Cardenas, the leading historian of architecture in Cuba.
Technical Issue
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The British metallurgist Cyril Stanley Smith emphasized the interdependence of science and art. His research and reflections on the sense of materiality is a lifelong experience where A Search for Structure is the noteworthy title of a book of essays published in 1992. Smith emphasizes the value of practical experience and the experience of sense as an engagement with matter. He certainly makes an impact when it comes to the concern for matter and material, referring to structure as aesthetics as well as technology and to objects of art as well as to science. No doubt this point of view...
