Fantastic Romantic Slum

Proportion vs affect

Relic vs pop-art

Art vs affect

Art and Need

(Four Elements of Architecture, Gottfried Semper)
(pencil emphasis not by me)

"Art knows only one master - the need. It degenerates when it follows the whim of artists, even more so when it obeys the powerful patrons of art. Its proud determination can indeed raise a Babylon, a Persepolis, or a Palmyra from the desert sands, whose regular streets, mile-wide squares, stately halls and palaces impatiently wait in their sad emptiness the population that the despotic ruler was unable to conjure. The organic life of Greek art is not its work; it flourished only on the soil of need and under the sun of freedom."

visual art (thoughts) - continued

A highrise building, being so tall, so ostentatious, so visible - to design it as visual art seems arrogant - a huge piece of sculpture. As the size of a sculpture increases, the feeling of arrogance increases - we can think about the statue of Nebuchadnezzar, or even the large portraits of contemporary dictators hung in public squares. It speaks of over-achievement, a striving of one over many or of the powerful over the weak. (-does it?) To design huge buildings as visual art is condescending and of bad taste. The best sculptors would not do it. The question is then, how does one design a tall building?

visual art (thoughts)

When architects make something for the sake of aesthetics - it could be form, ornament, cladding, material choice - it is going into visual art: like painting or sculpture. On the other hand, when architects make choices out of functional needs (or requirements, like in parametric systems), it is not visual art. So there are these two categories. An architect then consciously chooses whether or not to design this building as an artist or as a functionalist. These overlap most of the time, but the powerful works tend to lean very much to one side or the other.

On the art of pleasing in architecture

(Le Camus)

Yet what I am concerned about in this thesis, might be less about pleasing in the sense of what is beautiful, but pleasing in the sense of satisfying the desire for mystery in the inhabitants of a city...

Sculpture, composition, mininalism

Re: structure and construction classes

"To awaken and discipline the sense of this beauty, there is no means so good as that of drawing from nature itself....The sense of proportion and all the amenities of art are dependent on the training of mind and eye that drawing tends to give."
- Charles H. Moore

Issue #3: Detail

Amiens Cathedral

Amiens Cathedral

France Chârtres, Notre-Dame Cathedral, Section reconstruction

Chrysler Building in Manhattan-scape

Chrysler

Empire State Building

Blade Runner

Blade Runner Art

Blade Runner Art

Blade Runner Art

Architecture as art in the midst of life

Higher nobility: Truth

"They are eminently aristocratic...in the loftiness of the higher nobility whose allegiance is given to Truth."

You cannot clothe the petty things of life with majesty

"Those tenements and office buildings of which you speak can be made artistic I suppose; but they cannot inspire great art. Your office buildings and factories and stores are matters of percentage. Art is not. Your theaters...are also per cent affairs, where the curious and idle make exchanges with..."

Diameters! Poor fool. Think you that we live by a formula?

"Yes [you have measured] feet and inches; not our spirit....Your architecture! Where is it? Show me some work that is really yours - that your soul delights in. Therein will be the hope for your art....You seek for the dead matter of Art, not for the living spirit, which is the same yesterday, to-day and forever."

"- But how are we to work?

- In thy own delight, and with reason, as we did, and as the great ones that followed us did."