Pop and Plasticsto

Memphis

Lecture 8

Pop and Plasticsto

Memphis

Popularin the 1950s..........

approach in design

popular

redundant

iconic predictable

symbolicPost-modern

POP architecture

POP ARCHITECTURE:Having heightened sense of symbolism, because architecture needed to communicate with society to satisfy certain need.

Allowing historicism to be part of contemporary architecture.

MemphisgroupFounded in 1981..........

experimented with the new material - fibreglass + plastics

developed contemporary furniture and lighting.

products created - limited production of unusual objects and functional designs.

plastic laminate surfaces, bright colours and bold patterns.

MemphisgroupEttore Sotsaas

Memphis!!The new

International Style

Ettore Sotsaas

Achille Castiglioni

Post modern

Le Corbusier

Two ideal villas- Villa Stein at Garches 1927- Villa Savoye at Poissy 1929-31

In formal terms the two villas can be seen as abstract cubes in space in which various geometric elements are freely disposed as in a Purist painting

Idea developed (from 1914 Domino system) into the 5 points of architecture

Villa Stein at Garches 1927

The plan of Villa Stein

Free façade

The columns set back from the facades, inside the house. The floor continues cantilevered. The facades are no longer anything but light skins of insulating walls or windows. The façade is free

The free standing column freeing from the ground – pilotis

The reinforced concrete gives us the pilotis, the house is up in the air, free from the ground. Ground floor provides free circulation for various activities

The external wall and the internal wall independent of structural skeleton – ribbon window

The window is one of the essential features of the house. Reinforced concrete provides a revolution in the history of the window. Window can run from one end of the façade to the other

Free plan

Until now, load bearing walls, from the ground they are superimposed; forming the ground floor and upper stories, up to the eaves. The layout is a slave to the supporting walls. Reinforced concrete in the house provides a free plan. The floors are no longer superimposed by partition walls

Roof garden

The garden is also over the house, on the roof. Returning the ground taken up by the foot of the house back to the garden

Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

Deals mostly with town planning

- Simplicity – Less is more- Lightness – Steel and glass, structurally very light- Material honesty and structural integrity- Plane wall – structural- Floating – meet the ground only through plan structural wall- Within nature – blend together

German Pavilion, World Exhibition, Barcelona 1929 Fansworth House 1950

The German Pavilion Barcelona

The roof rested on walls, or more properly wall planes, placed asymmetrically but always in parallels or perpendicular, so that they appear to slide past each other in a space through which the viewer could walk more or less endlessly, without ever being stopped within a cubical area.

This open plan, with its intimation of an intimate freedom of movement, was at the same time qualified by two rows of equally spaced, cruciform columns that stood in martial formation amid the gliding walls. The columnar arrangement

constituted to Mies’s first use as an ordering factor in this building

Illusionary surface readings effected by the use of green tinted glass screens, to emerge as the mirror equivalents of the main bounding planes. These planes, faced in polished green Tinian marble, in their turn reflected the highlights of the chromium vertical glazing bars holding the glass in place

A comparable play in terms of texture and colour was affected by the contrast between the internal core plane of polished onyx (the equivalent of Wright’s centrally placed chimney core) and the long travertine wall that flanked the main terrace with its large reflecting pool

Here, bounded by travertine and agitated by the wind, the broken surface of the water distorted the mirror image of the building. In contrast to this, the internal space of the pavilion, modulated by columns and mullions, terminated in an enclosed court, containing a reflecting pool lined with black glass

Above and in this implacable, perfect mirror, there stood the frozen form and image of George Kolbe’s Dancer. Yet despite all these delicate aesthetic contrasts the building was simply structured about eight free-standing cruciform columns that supported its flat roof

Frank Lloyd Wright

The Usonian houses

In 1928, Wright coined the term ‘Usonia’ to denote an egalitarian culture that would spontaneously emerge in the United States.

By this, he seems to have intended not only a grassroots individualism but also the realization of a new, dispersed form of civilization such as had recently been made possible by mass ownership of automobile

The presentation drawing of an Usonian house

The elevations of an Usonian house

The exterior of an Usonian house

The interior of an Usonian house

Falling Water, Bear Run, Pennsylvania

In Falling Water, reinforced concrete afforded the point of departure; only this time the cantilevering gesture was extravagant to the point of folly

Falling Water projected itself out from the natural rock in which it was anchored, as a free floating platform poised over a small waterfall

Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1943

The structural idea and parti for the museum date back to his sketch for the Gordon Strong Planetarium of 1925

At Guggenheim, he simply turned the diminishing helix of the planetarium inside out, inverting and thereby converting what had previously been a car ramp into an internal, spiraling gallery, an extended spatial helix which Wright later referred to as an unbroken wave

It also combines the structural and spatial principles of Falling Water

THE END