DOCSLIB.ORG

Patterns SPLITTERWERK, 2004 - 2005

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Patterns SPLITTERWERK, 2004 - 2005 171 Patterns SPLITTERWERK, 2004 - 2005 "Every era has its style, yet our era is to be denied a style? Style used to mean the ornament. But I said: cry not. See, that is what makes our times so great, that they are not capable of producing a new ornament. We have overcome the ornament, we have brought ourselves to abandon the ornament. See, the times are nearing, deliverance awaits. Soon the streets of the cities will shine as white walls! As Zion, the holy city, the capital of heaven. Then deliverance will be ours." (Adolf Loos, 1908) Ornament and Abstraction Ornaments and patterns were originally used as signs and symbols, for decoration and surface design in architecture and design. In all cultures, everyday objects such as furniture, jugs, bowls, glasses, cutlery, tools, weapons and jewelry were decorated with ornaments. The variety of depictions ranged from Egyptian hieroglyphs and Greek meanders, plant and animal motifs all the way to arabesques arising from the Islamic ban on images. In occidental antiquity, we could differentiate between lotus and papyrus capitals, Dorian, Ionian and Corinthian columns, and Greek temples were decorated with friezes, consisting of metopes and triglyphs, or even entire works of sculpture such as figure friezes, lion's heads as waterspouts and gable sculptures. Every culture, every era and every style had its own ornaments, its own little history of patterns. However, they had to be subordinate to the main work, according to Vitruvius. In Europe and a little later in the USA, the turn of the century and 172 the movement known as the Secession style in Austria marked the last rebellion in favor of the ornament's significance in contemporary architecture - best documented in the cooperation between Josef Hoffmann and Gustav Klimt on the Palais Stoclet in Brussels. Starting with modernism, the ornament in architecture was frowned upon throughout the entire 20th century. In painting, on the other hand, the development process of abstraction can be interpreted as a continuous movement towards the ornament, even if to the great pioneers of abstract art such as Paul Klee or Piet Mondrian, that claim would have amounted to a mockery of their work. Did the lack of ornaments in architecture trigger the initial breakthrough of the ornament in modern painting? In Austria, it was Koloman Moser, along with the already mentioned Josef Hoffmann and Gustav Klimt, who created their approach to abstraction from the spirit of the ornament. In the famous 14th exhibition of the Vienna Secession, Klimt's painting turned to geometric abstraction in his monumental Beethoven Frieze, and Hoffmann anticipated cubism and the geometric art of Mondrian in his abstract-constructivist stucco relief Sopra la porta. In this context, it was not without justification that Markus Brijderlin put the year 1902 up for discussion as the birth year of abstract art in his exhibition Ornament and Abstraction (Beyeler Foundation, 2001), although the official date coincides with the allegedly first non-representational water color by Wassily Kandinsky in 1911/12, and as having paved the way for the appearance of the Fauves at the Paris Salon 1905. Liberated from cubism, IVIondrian dedicated himself to a typically ornamental task in his pier and ocean drawings: eliminating the difference between figure and background. Starting from these 173 coal drawings, he developed compositions with pure planes of color, which he later framed in grey lines, and then carried these chessboard-type images, together with the observation of the diagonal and the suspension of square picture planes as rhombs, to his mature style. The elimination or integration of the frame exemplifies the question of the limits of a worl< of art, resurrected in the period for the first time since the introduction of the panel painting. In Vienna, the Secessionists replied by artistic integration of the frame into the tableau, which in the end led them from the space of the image to the artistic conquest of architectural space. Piet Mondrian intersected lines apparently outside the boundaries of his paintings and placed the red triangle in his Rhombic Composition With Eight Lines And Red as if it ought to be completed as a square of indeterminate size beyond the painting's borders. It was only logical that the representatives of the De StijI movement, which he embraced, would deny the panel painting a right to continued existence, and conquer predominantly architectural elements such as glass panes, walls, and in the end entire buildings, including the furniture. The line of painters on the road to abstraction and influenced by ornaments may be continued nearly indefinitely by Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, Josef and Anni Albers, Ad Reinhardt or Max Bill, Walter Obholzer or Peter Kogler. Though this did not yet apply to Henri IVIatisse during his fauve period, it became all the more perceptible when the painter of color cautiously approached his motifs ever more closely, until the patterns of arabesques on tablecloths, curtains, wallpaper and clothes became the motifs proper of his interiors and still-lives, blurred and dissolved the 174 space depicted in the painting, only to finally leave the painting in his stage backdrops and architectures. The influence of Henri Matisse on American artists after the Second World War is considered as generally evident. We shall venture no opinion as to whether or not Jackson Pollock's Drippings, wandering beyond the boundaries of the painting and back, can be interpreted as a continuation of the arabesque, but it stands to reason that the idea of a form which expansively occupies the surface of the painting, developed by Matisse in 1909-10 in La danse, and the Acanthes he created in 1953, can be compared to Pollock's Out of the Web: Number 7. However, the ornament not only accompanied artists on their road to abstraction, but also, in the case of minimal artist Frank Stella and concept artist Sol Le Witt, back to opulent ornamental depictions from the 1970s on, which - similar to later abstract art of the 1980s and 1990s - could not be discussed without the concepts of the ornament. It may be daring, but cannot be completely denied, that a reference to the ornament can even be established 30 years earlier for Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein. Besides exhibiting political irony, cannot Johns' painting of the American flag be considered an intelligently chosen readymade of a pattern, and at the same time the first icon of a new movement in art, pop art? Similarly, the grid points of the abstraction of subjects caused by reproduction techniques meticulously copied by Lichtenstein are periodic works of arts dissolved into patterns and determined by patterns. And what of the oeuvre of the pop art giant Andy Warhol in this context? 175 In contrast to Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol used the very aesthetics of silk-screen printing and its grids, which he often applied in multiple superimpositions and consciously induced imprecision. Besides his deliberate choice of motifs from the imagery of the media and consumer society, what made Warhol famous and also popular were in particular the series of portraits of celebrities in the movie and music industries, politics or science. Beginning with his overprints e.g. of self-portraits, his later oeuvre featured the works of the so-called Camouflage series, in which Warhol began to use patterns - borrowed from the army's camouflage colors and materials - to print over paintings such as The Last Supper. In further steps of artistic production, these initially borrowed patterns were produced in the most diverse color combinations, and combined as large- scale, abstract panel paintings. As with his earlier Wallpapers, these patterns were also produced as wallpaper, and entire exhibition spaces were covered by them. Typically for Warhol, additional panel paintings with the same or similar themes were superimposed on the spatial installations thus created. The ornament has abandoned its initial origin, in this case the (amazingly) purely utilitarian function of camouflaging army personnel and machinery. As an overprint, it became the decisive element both of the theme and the appearance of panel paintings, it occupied the panel painting, only to finally leave the tableau and invade the surrounding space. Such is the space- encompassing ornamentation which emerged during an era when minimalism in architecture began its triumphant progress around the world, starting from Switzerland and camouflaged in unadorned reduction true to the principles of Adolf Loos. An art 176 form which has not been accepted as such without reservations by art historians to this day. As Stefan Tolksdorf writes, "The ornamental line remains a neglected child of the history of art, perhaps because it is so intangible as lotus, palmetto, acanthus, rocaille and arabesque, and at times proliferated devoid of meaning through the eras, but more likely because the anathema of the fathers of modernism still weighs heavily on it: the ornament as a surface phenomenon, a pretty pretence, the downfall of abstraction." (Stefan Tolksdorf, 2001) Cannot ornaments and patterns be considered today as an opportunity for a new paradigm shift in architecture? In the process, ornaments and patterns replace the issue of the proportions, cubature and rhythm of facades. As in the aesthetic concepts of Gottfried Sempers, the logic of the constructive, material substance is no longer the essence of architecture, but has simply become a scaffold, reinterpreted as an instrument. What is of interest, then, is not the comprehensibility of construction and function, the visualization of planes, lines and penetrations, or the harmony and contrast of different materials, but the surface itself. According to Andreas Spiegl and Christian Teckert, construction and materials act above all in support of ornamentation and painting in Semper's work, and - moreover - "the idea of space is the sole product of surfaces".
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Architectural Traces of an Admirable Cipher: Eleven in the Opus of Carlo Scarpa1
    Nexus Esecutivo 19-01-2004 9:17 Seite 7 Marco Frascari Architectural Traces of an Admirable Cipher: Eleven in the Opus of Carlo Scarpa1 Consciously or unconsciously, part of the apparatus that architects use in their daily fabrications of the built environment grows out of their understanding of numbers and numerals. Marco Frascari examines the use of number and especially the number 11 in the architecture of Carlo Scarpa. In Scarpa’s opus, it is true that One and One Equals Two, but it is also wonderfully true that A Pair of Ones Makes an Eleven. Imagination is everything (Raymond Roussel 1975, p. 279). Introduction In their daily fabrications of the built environment, architects deal with the various chiastic relationships between visible and invisible. Part of the apparatus that they use, consciously or unconsciously, to imagine future constructions grows out of their understanding of numbers and numerals. To divine future buildings they rely on numeracy.2 Architectural numeracy consists in neither objective nor subjective constructs based on an arithmetical use of numbers, but rather in sedimentations of experience, formed by matter and memory. By the agency of tectonic aspects controlled by numbers, architects relate visible construction with invisible constructs. By linking recollection and anticipations, architectural numeracy deals with the meanings of constructional aspects and gives new visual angles. By using poli-dimensional tools of transversal epistemologies such as “angelic numbers” and “monstrous numerals”, the architect’s control of numbers transacts tangible matter with intangible dreams. Numbers summon up in detailed examinations what is passing and what is to come. Embodied in tectonic events and parts, numbers hinge the past and the future of buildings and their inhabitants into a search for a way of life with no impairment caused by psychic activity.
    [Show full text]
  • The Symbolic Form of Architecture
    THE SYMBOLIC FORM OF ARCHITECTURE An investigation into its philosophical foundations and a discussion on the development of the perception of architectural form by modern theoreticians and symbolist architects by Scott Rimmer Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Architecture APPROVED BY: Hans Christian Rott, Chairman Maria Karvouni, Member Markus Breitschmid, Member April 28, 1997 Alexandria, Virginia Copyright © 1996, Scott C. Rimmer THE SYMBOLIC FORM OF ARCHITECTURE An investigation into its philosophical foundations and a discussion on the development of the perception of architectural form by modern theoreticians and symbolist architects by Scott Rimmer Chairman: Hans Christian Rott, Graduate School of Architecture (ABSTRACT) This thesis investigates the concept of the symbolic form of architecture. It first focuses on the philosophical foundations for this concept in the works of Ernst Cassirer, Immanuel Kant, Conrad Fiedler, and Theodor Adorno. Then, the development of the modern perception of form in architectural theoreticians, where “modern” architectural theory evolved from an analogical state into a symbolic state, is examined: Karl Bötticher’s concept of a Junktur and his attempt to transcend the presumed dichotomy in architecture between ornamentation and form is discussed; Gottfried Semper’s concept of style and Alois Riegl’s concept of motif are presented as reactions against what they saw as the mechanistic reliance on structure as definitive of form in architecture; Louis Sullivan’s ornamentation is discussed as an attempt to integrate structure and ornamentation into a morphological whole; Otto Wagner’s attempt to purge architecture from analogical responses through a strictly constructional basis for ornamentation is presented; and Adolf Loos’ dismissal of decorative ornamentation, since it is an impediment towards true aesthetic judgment, is examined.
    [Show full text]
  • Master of Modern —Pilsen 01 Preface Adolf Loos Was a Key Figure in Architecture but His Legacy Has Had to Endure Turbulent Times in His Czech Homeland
    report Adolf Loos Tt 50 MASTER OF MODERN —Pilsen 01 Preface Adolf Loos was a key figure in architecture but his legacy has had to endure turbulent times in his Czech homeland. Now that restorations of his most dazzling interiors are underway, his designs are set to be revealed in all their glory once more. writer Joann Plockova photographer Daniel Gebhart de Koekkoek In 2014, architect Ludvík Grym spent a night in a sleeping bag on the floor of a flat in Pilsen, CzechR epublic. Located at 10 Bendova Street, the apartment’s inte- rior was designed by a legend of modern 20th-century architecture: Adolf Loos. Grym, who is based in Brno – where Loos was born – was the architect selected to design and supervise its restoration. “That was part of my process of get- ting in touch with the atmosphere,” says Grym. In addition to a flat at Klatovská 12 and Brummel House at Husova 58, 02 issue 83 — 125 report All natural Adolf Loos Adolf Loos was born in 1870 in Brno, today the Czech Republic’s second- largest city but then the capital of Moravia within the Austro-Hungarian Previous page: empire. His work extended 01 Original sideboard at beyond his home city to Bendova 10 Vienna – with which he is 02 Apartment curtain most associated – Paris, Prague and Pilsen. Loos This spread: was profoundly influenced 01 Bendova 10 restoration by his stay in the US head Ludvík Grym between 1893 and 1896. 02 Built-in picture frame at Loos’ essay Ornament Klatovská 12 and Crime, in which he 03 Bedroom dressing table Tt 50 attacked the decoration of 04 Varnishing original Viennese Secessionism, wood in the bedroom was the basis for a lecture at Brummel House he gave in 1910 that came 05 Radiator’s play a key role to define his influential in Loos’s interiors role in modernism.
    [Show full text]
  • Architecture and Copyright: Loos, Law, and the Culture of the Copy
    Architecture and Copyright: Loos, Law, and the Culture of the Copy Today’s architectural model workshops have become alchemi- cal chambers of curiosity, invested in turning information from digital files and various powders, sugars, or liquids into solid three-dimensional objects. Machines such as the lat- est EOSINT M270 can build in bronze alloy, steel, and cobalt chrome used for “tooling” and “prototyping.” Thus, simulta- neous and very similar to the development of contemporary design techniques, the entire process of copying emerges at the intersec- tion of a set of digital media and design technologies. But what makes the Ines Weizman copy—and, in particular, the architectural copy—so interesting is that it is London Metropolitan University a phenomenon of modernity. Just like the print, the photograph, the film, or the digital file, it is both a product of the media and a media form that in every situation and period reflects on the existing means of examination, production, and reproduction. We tend to think of the problem of mimicry within architecture and media as belonging to photography; sometimes, we discuss the media facades of buildings, but in these cases the agent and agency of mediatization moves through images. As reproduction technologies start shifting into the third dimension, we must relocate the discussion of the copy from the context of the fake and copyright law and place it at the heart of the media field. The copy is a reproduction—a media form in itself—referring both to itself and to its original, a part of an endless series of “aura-less” multiplications.
    [Show full text]
  • Central Europe: Shaping a Modern Culture
    Central Europe: Shaping a Modern Culture Instructor: Dr. Tomáš Hříbek Office hours: by personal arrangement Contact: [email protected] Course Description: This course will discuss the emergence of major modernist movements and ideas in the three Central European cities: Prague, Vienna and Budapest. In the period between the late 19th century and the beginning of the WW2, these cities were the main centers of the then disintegrating Austrian-Hungarian Empire and, later, the capitals of three independent states—Czechoslovakia, Austria and Hungary, respectively. Despite the political turmoil, all the three cities became a watershed of the ideas that remain to be the sources of the Western culture even today, including the dominant trends in the current North American culture. Thus, we shall see how the dominant ideas in the fields as diverse as religion, philosophy, science, psychology, art and architecture that have shaped the 20th century culture in the West can all be traced back to the works of the Austrian, Czech or Hungarian intellectuals such as Franz Brentano, Sigmund Freud, Adolf Loos and Georg Lukács. We shall have the extraordinary opportunity to study the fermentation of these ideas “on site,” in the very places in which these ideas originated. Course Objectives: To provide the students with a good grasp of the ideas that originated in the Central European region in the era of modernism, and an understanding of their historical as well as contemporary relevance. This is not an art history course, but a course on the history of ideas. Structure: The course will consist of lectures, seminar discussions of readings, and city walks and trips.
    [Show full text]
  • Adolf Loos, a Controversial Architect -Adolf Loos’ Architectural Position Presents a Complex Relationship with Art Nouveau
    -In the last session, we studied Art Nouveau. -Adolf Loos, a controversial architect -Adolf Loos’ architectural position presents a complex relationship with Art Nouveau. -On one hand, he appears to reject Art Nouveau’s decorative tendency, Art Nouveau’s aesthetic ideal of the total work of art. -On the other hand, Adolf Loos seems to still accept the significance of ornament. -Art Nouveau: ornament completes form -Loos somehow seems to embrace this idea of ornament when it comes to the design of civic buildings. Adolf Loos (1870-1933) -the son of a stonemason -studied at the Imperial State technical College in Vienna and the Dresden College of technology -traveled to America to visit his uncle in Philadelphia -admiration of American culture -Louis Sullivan “Ornament in Architecture” (1892) Advocated temporary abandonment of ornament until the architect was better able to manipulate unadorned forms Adolf Loos (1870-1933) Architectural position -Loos reacted strongly against Art nouveau’s and Jugendstil’s attempt to replace Beaux-Arts eclecticism with what he saw as a superficial system of ornament -rejection of Gesamkunstwerk (especially his article “Poor Little Richman”) -rejection of the very concept of ‘art’ when applied to the design of objects for everyday use, and rejection of the artist as the giver of Form (Gestalt) to machine age. And thus attack on the Werkbund -Building versus Architecture The building is a useful object and therefore not architecture (art). The portion of building activity that is considered to be architecture includes only memorials, cenotaphs, and monuments Adolf Loos (1870-1933) -the filling-up of the chasm bt.
    [Show full text]
  • Adolf Loos and Gustav Klimt
    11 Beatriz Colomina Sex, Lies and Decoration: Adolf Loos and Gustav Klimt I. Adolf Loos is the only architect of his generation whose thinking is still influential today. In this he may have fulfilled his own prophecy that his work would last longer than that of his contemporaries because it would be passed on by word of mouth rather than by photographs in architectural journals.1 Loos was a humorous, mordant, and prolific writer whose theories were organized by a radical opposition to the Viennese Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte (fig. 1). The essence of what he said over three decades of polemical arguments in leading newspapers and journals, public lectures and manifestoes is that art did not have anything to 70 do with the everyday utilitarian object: “Everything that serves a purpose,” Loos wrote, “should be excluded from the realms of art.”2 The practice of artists and architects of his time of design- ing everyday objects was illegitimate. Those objects were already being designed by craftsmen, who perfected them over time in an anonymous, continuous, collective process of design. The ‘objet type’ of le Corbusier, the ‘objet trouvé’ of the Surrealists, Duchamp’s ‘readymade’, the ‘as found’ of Alison and Peter Smithson, and so on, are anticipated in Loos’ appreciation of the generic wine glass, the American bathtub, the Thonet chair, and the English raincoat. When, after an absence of three years (in America), I appeared in Vienna in the year 1896 and saw my colleagues again, I had to rub my eyes: all the architects were dressed like ‘art- ists.’ Not like other people, but—from an American point of view—like buffoons .
    [Show full text]
  • Marble Craft and Ornament
    8ST"ACSA ANNUAL MEETING AND TECHNOLOGY CONFERENCE 597 Marble Craft and Ornament CLAIRE ZIMMERMAN Florida A&M University and his friend and fellow culture-critic, Karl Kra~s,~on the way to examining a group of Loos interiors. While articles In his foreword to a recent book on the Villa Miiller, the and books on Loos's architecture acknowledge Kraus's architect and educator John Hejduk dwells on the effect of influence, it is texts on Kraus or on fin-de-siecle Viennese marble surfaces in Adolf Loos's interiors.' Hejduk describes thought that draw the closest connections between their the physical and, for lack of a better word, spiritual interiority work.' The importance of such connections in Loos's case of the space, an archetype for the Loosian marble interior. He lies in understanding Kraus's linguistic mission in order to also characterizes the Loosian imagination as "tumnultuous," elucidate Loos's architectural one. The anti-rational, poetic a term of exaggerated subjectivity that strikes a sympathetic basis of much of Kraus's thinlung-the strength of desire in chord with respect to Loos and his context: Vienna at the turn his writing-figures strongly in Loos's work as well, emerg- of the nineteenth century. Recent commentaries on Loos ing from the juxtaposition of mute, 'hnctionalist' exteriors acknowledge the connection between his interiors and a and livid interiors in his work, and against the backdrop of construction of interiority that reverberates throughout the his writings on cultural life and production. While associa- culture,
    [Show full text]
  • “In Praise of the Present”: Adolf Loos on Style and Fashion
    McBRIDE / “in praise of the present” 745 “In Praise of the Present”: Adolf Loos on Style and Fashion Patrizia C. McBride “In Praise of the Present,” a 1908 article by Adolf Loos (1870– MODERNISM / modernity 1933), opens with the following statement, apparently unremark- VOLUME ELEVEN, NUMBER able for a modernist: “When I look back over past centuries and FOUR, PP 745–767. ask myself in which age I would prefer to have lived, my answer © 2004 THE JOHNS 1 is, in the present age.” This remark is characteristic for Loos’s HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS well-known polemic against his contemporaries’ infatuation with past ages, which led them to believe they could add luster to their homes by clothing them in pompous period styles. Yet Loos’s ensuing endorsement of the present seems to jar with the scath- ing critique of contemporary Viennese culture with which he is customarily associated. His “praise of the present” is so emphatic that it might be taken to signify the opposite of what it states. It could be modeled after one of the countless sarcastic remarks with which Karl Kraus, one of Loos’s closest friends and sup- porters, expressed his revulsion for contemporary Viennese and Austrian culture. As the text unfolds, however, it becomes clear that the remark is not meant ironically. “Give me my own clothes any day,” Loos insists after recoiling in horror at the equivalent of adopting period styles in fashion, namely, the possibility of draping one’s body in the venerable togas of ancient Rome or the opulent garb of the Italian Renaissance (OC, 157).
    [Show full text]
  • Why Architecture Matters As Art As Never Before: Le Corbusier, Tony Smith and the Problem of Use
    nonsite.org - Article - Issue #21 WHY ARCHITECTURE MATTERS AS ART AS NEVER BEFORE: LE CORBUSIER, TONY SMITH AND THE PROBLEM OF USE TODD CRONAN Intention is that which touches us at the depths of our heart, the quality of spirit brought to the realization of the work. —Le Corbusier There is a passage in Le Corbusier’s Toward an Architecture of 1923 where he describes how the stones at the Parthenon “were inert in the quarry…unformed” until the arrival of the “great sculptor” who took those stones and arranged “them in this way.” 1 It was at that moment when inert matter became animate form that one could feel instantly the architect’s “unity of intention.” Even or especially if the architect had not altered the shape of the stones, it was felt as though every last element was animated by the builder, he refused “to allow anything at all which [was] not correct, authorized, intended, desired, thought-out.” The architect, Le Corbusier writes, “swept up the desolate landscape and made it serve the composition. So from all along the horizon’s rim, the thought is one” (234). This discussion is directly followed by a set of comparisons between architecture and other arts, where, according to Le Corbusier, the question of intention never arises. Unity of intent is generally accepted when it comes to painting and music, but architecture is reduced to its utilitarian causes: boudoirs, water closets, radiators, reinforced concrete, barrel vaults or pointed arches, etc. etc. These pertain to construction, which is not architecture. Architecture is when there is poetic emotion.
    [Show full text]
  • Vernacular and Academic Modes in Architecture and Town Planning
    PHIL & TECH 2:1 Fall 1996 Alonso, Arzoz, Ursua, Reflections on Architecture/3 REFLECTIONS ON ARCHITECTURE: VERNACULAR AND ACADEMIC MODES IN ARCHITECTURE AND TOWN PLANNING Andoni Alonso, Inaki Arzoz, and Nicanor Ursua, University of the Basque Country A house — in American thought — an apple, an American vineyard have nothing in common; house and apple have nothing in common with the plantings so thoroughly penetrated by the ancestors' hopes and concerns. Experienced and animated things, things which share our knowledge, decay and cannot any more be substituted for. Possibly we are the last ones to have experienced these things. Our responsibility is not only to preserve the memory of them (that would amount to little and be very uncertain); we must preserve their human, their "fireside" values. —Rainer Maria Rilke INTRODUCTION The paper which we present here is a brief theory-slanted summary of a work, "Contemporary Architecture and Town Planning." It was written by an interdisciplinary working group attached to the magazine, Texts de Critical Aesthetics, associated with the University of the Basque Country in Spain. After the earlier publication of a special issue, "Other Modern Architectures" (devoted to a critical analysis of modern architecture), and some reevaluations of marginal trends such as vernacular architecture, our group has developed a different line of investigation. The new focus is not only theoretical but practical, and we have been able, by looking at architectural changes, to explain the reasons for cultural changes at the end of the twentieth century. The essence of this paper is to provide some of our theoretical conclusions, which were arrived at by contrasting vernacular and academic ways of building.
    [Show full text]
  • Luke D. Kautz
    techniques include, but are not limited to, rhymed motives, shifting • Artur Golczewski (Art Historian, University of North- edges, migrating focus, optical mixing, and the indelible effect of ern Iowa) Visual and Conceptual Camouflage as Art: marrying a painting’s figure to the ground embracing it. From Cubism to Dada 3:45-4:15 pm, KAB Room 111 • Luke D. Kautz (Architect, Ohio State University) THE FIRST Modern camoufleurs were French artists, and it has often Invisible Subversive Architecture: Adolf Loos, Villa been observed (by Picasso, Braque and Gertrude Stein, among oth- Muller, and Josephine Baker 2:15-2:45 pm, CAC ers) that World War I camouflage resembled Cubist paintings. This talk Room 108 addresses aspects of the dissolution of boundaries (both physical and conceptual) that commonly occurs in art, from Cubism (analytic and A DOCTOR can bury his mistakes, said Frank Lloyd Wright, but an synthetic) to the photomontages of the German Dadaists. architect can only plant vines. Throughout history, architects have camouflaged competing styles, theories, schools and practices. In • Taryn Packheiser (Dancer, Iowa State University) this presentation, the affinity between architecture and camouflage is The Concealment of Artistic Dance in Popular Culture and considered in relation to Villa Müller (in Prague), designed in 1928-30 Mass Media 3:45-4:15 pm, CAC Room 108 by Austrian architect Adolf Loos, with peripheral observations about the house he designed in 1928 (but never built) for African-American dancer THIS SESSION is largely a lecture/demonstration, with some audience Josephine Baker. participation. Calling for dance education at all age levels, it addresses the troublesome question(s) of how and why Artistic Dance (e.g., ballet, • Richard Koenig (Photographer, Kalamazoo College modern and postmodern dance) has all but vanished from television, MI) Photographic Prevarications 2:15-2:45 pm, KAB films, magazines and advertising.
    [Show full text]