>This credo was central to Frank Lloyd Wright's early approach not only to
>architecture, but to design as well. He often took pains to design not only
>the house in a "natural and unforced manner" but even the furniture and
>utensils within the house. For one client's wife, he designed the dress she
>was instructed to serve food in, at a dining table and plates that he also
>designed!
I've been through about 15 Wright houses in my life, most around the Chicago area. Yup, they are natrual and unforced; the cantileverd roof of the Robie house, at once floating and grouding the rest of the structure (etc.). But did you ever sit in one of his chairs? Much of his decorative arts stuff (furnishings, glass, etc.) is very beautiful, but fun to sit on it is not.
>Wright was also insistent that houses not dominate their natural
>environment but meld into them.
And this to my mind is what is very best in Wright's work.
>So it would be fair to say that Wright expresses a certain possibility for
>socialist architecture.
Say what? Groovy integration with surroundings is good. But did you ever get a look at his city planning ideas? It's north chicago suburbs! I think planning is where the social/political meaning of architecture is made manifest. And the modern masters did pretty poorly: Stamms's inhuman blocks, Corbu's inhuman scale, and Wright, well, he fancied that everyone could have about half an acre and a car. "Country living" at one with nature, but that is firmly based in the most expensive and destructive form of human settlement ever devised: suburbia.
>Now the other dialectical possibility in socialist architecture is
>represented by the German Bauhaus.
As a young student of architcture with nascent socialist ideas, I was fascinated by the Bauhaus spririt, community, ethos. Imagine being surrounded by Kandinsky, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Schlemmer; doing experimental theater on the roof in the am; design and color theory in the pm ... must have been a blast. And there was a very real social committment .. the artist whose tools are the factory, etc.
When the Bauhaus was shut by Hitler in 1933, many went to the US, a few to Russia. One who went to Russia was architect Hannes Meyer (Mayer?), who saw there the possibiilty of a social architecture. His mass housing was actutally good; a lot better than what was coming out of the Bauhaus. And when Gopius and van de Rohe hit the US, they quickly became prima donas. The Farnsworth house in Illinois ... a crystal box, of immacultae poise and proportions, etc. ... but so what?
I visited the Bauhas buildings in Weimar and Dessau (on an architectrual pilgramage) in what then East Germany. I admit I very much liked the building in Dessau, which was beautilly restored after the war. In Weimar, original home of the Bauhaus, I visited a museum where a Bauhaus room was listed. I searched and didn't fid it. Finally I asked a big matronly guard, and she took me to the back, pulled out a key and unlocked th Bauhaus room for me. In it was an amazing collection of graphics, chess sets, appliances, furniture, as well as photos from the dance and theater workshops. Apparently the East German authorities had an ambiguous relatinoship to the Bauhaus design/art movement.
>Johnson was single-handedly responsible for developing the post-modernist
style.
A bit too simple Lou. I'd kinda put Robert Venturi and others out in front too, but also identify lots of other sources -- regionalists, green types, etc. -- who had been hammering away at high modernism for a while. Johnson was a p.r. entrepreneur of the genre, but not some kind of god. I find his work pretty boring, actually. A chippendale clock? Puh-leeeeze.
>It would seem that architecture is the art that lends itself most the task
>of the socialist transformation of society.
How about "OUGHT to lend itself...." Because of the massive amounts of $$ needed to do architecture, you can actually expect it to be the most servile of all the arts to capital.
Oft quoted in architecture school was Chuchill, who is rumored to have said "we shape our buildings, then they shape us." Perhaps. Doug McNeil, prof. of architecture extraordinaire, retorted "a can of beer has more of an effect on you than a building." I kinda agree.
What pomo has to offer to politics or economics is polemical, riddled with traps and pitfalls. A bit less so in the case of architecture, I feel. Breaking out of the "machine for living" and high modernism has been nothing but good. But this does not mean a retreat from social commitment. Nor does it mean all modern architecture was bad. Look at the big housing projects of Candilis, Joseph and Woods: massive in scale, yet vernacular in feel, very comfortable, and working within a palette of modern, industrial produced materials. I also like the 1972 Olympic Village in Munich as an examle of how big can also feel good and work with, not against, the shape of the land.
The startng point of this disucssion, though, ought to also include a question like: What for you was the best space you've lived in? What is your favorite civic space and why? And then ask ourselves what are the implications of reproducng those spaces one-billion-fold.
And I'd like to second the motion that people look at Harris Stone's work. He also has a great illustraed history of architecure, that talsk about the poor serfs who built gothic cathedrals, and not just their inspied designers.
Lastly: for those intereted in social architecture such as it is today undercapitalsim, see Marty Hatch's The Scope of Social Architecture -- a bit old, but still indicative of what a committed architect/planner in the US might do. I, personally, gave up on the possibilty of practicing a progressive architecture in the US, and, well, here I am, a might far afield.
Tom
Tom Kruse / Casilla 5812 / Cochabamba, Bolivia Tel/Fax: (591-4) 248242 Email: tkruse at albatros.cnb.net