Editors: Ana Tostões, Ivan Blasi
Guest editors: Bárbara Coutinho
Keywords: Modern Movement, Modern architecture, Modern interior design, Furniture modern design, Modern living.
The aim is to contribute for the discussion that relates modern heritage and interior space, common daily life and musealization of Modern Interior Spaces, gathered underneath a global strategy, to better understand and preserve these delicate monuments. In fact, the interior space with all devices and furniture pieces is frequently not appreciated as an essential matter in safeguard interventions. Ranging from restoration process research and know-how, new modern materials and techniques are discussed facing up to new conservation process and innovative rehabilitation solutions, as well. One knows that Modern spatiality must require furniture conceived under a unitary design concept, which implies today to identify every detail with the aim of a reconstruction process, where research on documentation is one of the success keys.
Published:
2012-07-01
Documentation Issues
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The ODAM as divulger of modern architecture in Porto comprehends from the scope of teaching, professional practice, to its internationalization, as attests the participation of its members in CIAM´s congresses from 1951. Its production, written manifestos, projects and builds, reveal its universal character through the deployment of Modern spirit, in the statement of a collective conscience of architectural practice, but also, affirms its local condition as its differentiator value. This retrospective and critical reading of the specific ODAM discourse as part of broader context that...
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The article is devoted to one of the most pressing problems for the former Soviet Union - the problem of survival and development of the small mono–industry towns. The aim of this work is the actualization of the problem of survival and development of the small post–Soviet towns - the unique urban artifacts of the Soviet industrial utopia. Svetlovodsk that was created in the 60’s of the twentieth century during ‘Khrushchev’s Thaw’ gave the example for the analysis of the specificity of small towns in Ukraine. The strategy of the development of this type of towns has been described in the...
Editorial
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The aim is to contribute for the discussion that relates modern heritage and interior space, common daily life and musealization of Modern Interior Spaces, gathered underneath a global strategy, to better understand and preserve these delicate monuments. In fact, the interior space with all devices and furniture pieces is frequently not appreciated as an essential matter in safeguard interventions. Ranging from restoration process research and know-how, new modern materials and techniques are discussed facing up to new conservation process and innovative rehabilitation solutions, as...
Essays
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Coming to design in a natural development from architectural practice, Le Corbusier considered design not as a sum or addition to architecture. Its existence decisively constructed and modulated interior space, as light and shadows, materials or planes. From that belief, he quests the perfect and ideal form that asserts itself as a model of universal validity, arriving at three different furniture types: type–needs, type–furniture and human limb objects. Consequently, together with Charlotte Perriand and Pierre Jeanneret, in 1928 he drew the prototype of the Grand Confort armchair,...
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The growing interest in Modern furniture, which by now can also be of a respectable age, has lent a new dimension to the profession of furniture conservation. New materials and techniques demand new conservation solutions.
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Modern architecture and Modern furniture originated almost during the same period of time. Modern architects needed furniture compatible with their architecture and because it was not available on the market, architects had to design it themselves. This does not only apply for the period between 1920 and 1940, as other ambitious architectures had tried before to present their buildings as a unit both on the inside and on the outside. For example one can think of projects by Berlage, Gaudí, Mackintosh or Horta or the architectures of Czech Cubism and the Amsterdam School. This phenomenon...
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In his review of Franz Hessel’s "Spazieren in Berlin", Walter Benjamin noted that the author celebrated the "last monuments of an old culture […] for which cosiness came first", but whose time had come. The new architecture transferred "the domicile of men […] into a transit passage of all imaginable forces and waves in light and air. The future stands under the signature of transparency". Two years earlier, Siegfried Kracauer wrote about the exhibition of the Werkbund entitled "Die neue Wohnung" (The New Home) in 1927. Here, the attempt "to undermine the former isolation of the...
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Villa Tugendhat is an expression of “gesamtkunstwerk”, where every detail is subordinated to the whole. Mies van der Rohe devoted the same amount of attention to the furnishings of the house as to its design. The furniture designed and placed according to his conception is such an important aspect of the house that without it the Villa is only half complete. The system governing the organization of all parts of the building – ratios, proportions, whole areas and details – is visible also in the precise placement of the house contents, which only allowed the owner limited variability in...
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When looking at the development of Modernism in Finnish furniture design from abroad the conventional image is Alvar Aalto´s Paimio chair descending in 1931 into a desert of traditionalism and starting a new, bright era of Modernity. This cliché is partly, but only partly true. In the following I will outline some major trends in design, use of materials and techniques of production in Finnish furniture before World War II.
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Artek was founded in November 1935. The name of the company, Art + Technology, reflects its objectives and methods of operation. The intention was to offer to its wide range of customers, practical, economical, hygienic and above all Modern furniture that reflected its own time. The furniture was to represent the values of an urban and efficient lifestyle. In the company’s founding meeting on 26.11.1935, Maire Gullichsen and Alvar Aalto became the main shareholders. Other shareholders were: Nils–Gustaf Hahl, Artek’s first managing director; P.W. Puhakka, the managing director of...
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Nowadays, the emphasis in the design of exposition pavilions is mainly full of pseudo–technical or rhetorical ideas of progress. Nevertheless most of them do not communicate a vision. They show a lack of spatial qualities and continuity with the built environment. In general, there is not a common conservation agenda to adapt or reuse exemplary Modern Pavilions. Some emblematic cases are haunted icons, a consequence of undocumented, incorrect or simply fake reconstruction, whilst others are victims of neglectfulness and degradation. Nevertheless, what can we still rediscover by reviving...
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Anything seemed possible within the spirit of the postwar era. It is often noted that Charles and Ray Eames advocated the principles of Modernism through the adaptation of innovation from wartime technology. Undoubtedly, Charles and Ray Eames were pioneers who gave shape to America’s 20th century through the pursuit of industrialization, including their influence in the process of prefabricated mass production and residential construction. Their lives and work are significant not only due to their innovative furniture but also because of the internationalization and global expansion of...
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The idea of design came about, following various approaches, at the end of the 1920s in the last century. The design and production of furniture and household appliances, as part of the work of a specialist, is an experience that evolved from the Bauhaus and wanted “to serve in the development of present day housing, from the simplest household appliance to the finished dwelling”, as Walter Gropius explained in 1927 in the Principles of Bauhaus Production. Other architects like Hugo Haring, in 1927, talked about “objects that are on the one hand works of art, and on the other are...
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The city of Ostend became severely damaged during World War II. Practically all the main public buildings were destroyed: the City Hall, the Casino, the Horse Race–Track, the main Post Office building, etc. The city decided to rebuild a new Post Office on the location of the first construction. In 1945, architect Gaston Eysselinck (1907–1953) from Ghent was assigned to design the new main Post Office (PTT), including the telephone and telegraph offices (RTT) and the technical infrastructure. The project in Ostend was his first big assignment.
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German industrial designer Dieter Rams has turned eighty this year. His attitude towards product and industrial design, which he has been developing since the 1950s, once again arouses keen interest today. On the occasion of his birthday, a major German daily news paper saw in him the representative of a "present–day Modernism that is not as megalomanic as that of the 20s, 30s and 50s" and also not "the adolescent unleashing that we erroneously call Postmodernism." A revision of Postmodernism or, more correctly, a new "revision of Modernism", certainly seems to have come to stay....
Heritage in danger
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The Maslennikov factory canteen, also known as the Fabrika Kukhnya or Factory Kitchen, was a canteen producing meals on industrial scale, a vital typology for the early Soviet urbanism. Factory Kitchen in Samara belonged to the Maslennikov Factory. The building is absolutely unique in its plan in the shape of a hummer-and cycle, symbol of the union of the working people. The "hummer" held the kitchen and storage, and the "cycle" was occupied by dinner-halls.
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Agnès Cailliau, Chair of docomomo France alerted docomomo International that the original Headquarters and Laboratories of Sandoz were going to be completely demolished. After writing letters to the Mayor of Rueil-Malmaison and to Novarti’s President, the pharmaceutical company answered that their previous Basel intervention was an example of their care for heritage, that the structure of the building in Rueil-Malmaison had not aged well and did not live up to the company’s standards and that the project of architect Patrick Berger was in line with their heritage policy.
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In the historic city of Kyoto, located inside Okazaki Park across from the Heian Jingu Shinto shrines, sits a representative Modern architectural heritage, Kyoto Kaikan. However, today, it faces an imminent threat of destructive alteration, thus calling attention for the Heritage Alert at the ICOMOS ISC20C.
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In February 10, 2012 the demolition of the façade walls of the cultural heritage building of regional significance Dinamo Stadium got underway (Leningrandsky Prospect, 36). There is no need to prove the value of the building which was constructed in two stages in 1927-1936 upon the project of L. Cherikover and A. Langman. In 1987 the Stadium was placed under special protection of the state.
News
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The protection of 20th century architecture has by now become a fully–fledged part of the dis- cipline of preservation, and even the heritage of the second post–war period is increasingly recognised as worthy of conservation. Nonetheless, in practice, this cultural awareness still clashes with the dif- ficulties attached to adapting buildings to present day regulations. Even when intervening on buildings that are officially recognized as “monuments”, from one country to another and even from one region to another in the same country, there is great variety in how dispensations from...
Tributes
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Ricardo Legorreta is one of the Mexican contemporary architects who have garnered the most recognition; only in 2011 he was distinguished as Doctor Honoris Causa by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, UNAM, and the Praemium Imperiale in Japan. One year before, on August 27 at the docomomo Conference held in Mexico City, he gave a memorable Keynote Speech on the main figures of the Modern Movement in Mexico, José Villagrán and Luis Barragán, that the attendants treasured in their memories.
