Meis

Discussion in 'Art & Architecture' started by HerthaBerwyn, Dec 11, 2006.

  1. GunnerJacket

    GunnerJacket Moderator
    Staff Member

    Sep 18, 2003
    Gainesville, GA
    Club:
    Arsenal FC
    I have to think some points are awarded for originality and judgment must consider context. The roles and environments buildings are placed into today are decidedly different from even a mere 30 years ago. It's easy for those of us who've benefited from improved historical records, global media and GIS technology to grade things on a totally different scale as those who originally conceived things like Seagrams and Corbu's City. Especially when men such as these, Wright and others dreamed of entire cities, they certainly didn't have the scope of information and perspectives average people now have at their fingertips. How might some of their visions differed if they'd even played 1 game of SimCity? :eek:

    I couldn't live in the glass house, but ideas such as those often lead to the innovations that have more lasting and deeper benefits, especially as it's come to use of building materials and arrangement of private spaces. That's why I've learned to refrain from 'hating' architecture to simply saying I don't like it, don't understand it, or think it could be more functional.



    You know, my point sounded much more graceful in my head. :)
     
  2. TheLostUniversity

    Los Angeles Galaxy
    Feb 4, 2007
    Greater Boston
    Club:
    --other--
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Ah, Chicago. In the unhalcyon days of not-quite-youth had meself a fair measure of that wind-riven Empyrean. :rolleyes:
    Of the three architects the locals always boasted, P.Johnson, Mies V.D.Rohe, and F.L. Wright, only the last had a corpus of work worthy of his renown. The first had buildings which ranged from the dull to the obviously competent but dull. The second had occasional small set pieces [fountains, lobby gardens, etc..] which were fine, but horrendous larger pieces. Anyone who has spent time at the original campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology knows whereof I speak. Wright, working on a less ambitious scale, was consistently and creatively succesful.
    As for Le Corbusier, if this was a Just world, and if my time machine had worked, it would have been a private joy as well as a civic duty to tumble into Yesterday and put a bullet between Le Corbusier and the Future he did his best to muck up. Sadly, this world ain't Just; and my time machine had no chance against that stubborn punk Reality. So, today, the horrorshow of Les Banlieus stands as a reeking monument to the consequences of SocThink in all its arrogant stupidity. :(
     
  3. guignol

    guignol Moderator
    Staff Member

    Apr 28, 2005
    mermoz-les-boss
    Club:
    Olympique Lyonnais
    Nat'l Team:
    France
    blaming the problems of the banlieues on le corbusier is 300% false.

    primo, a complete generation and more grew up in those barres and turned out fine, and today they shed a tear to see them dynamited. when they're all gone, we'll unfortunately find that the problems in the cités run a good deal deeper than that.

    secundo, if the "international" architecture of the suburbs is questionable, that can't be laid on corbu's doorstep. the projects were by and large designed by men far less competent than he. any hack can design a two-up-two-down, but a cité radieuse takes genius, and there's a good deal less of that on stock than we, and especially architects, like to think. the apartments are mostly dreary little rabbit hutches, but those in real le corbusier buildings are anything but.

    moreover, many ensembles, especially from the end of the war to the early 60's, were constructed on the quick and dirty, pressed by the critical housing shortage of the period. some of those buildings were designed to have a lifespan of 20 years or less, but most of them are still up.

    in fine, all that's left to crucify le corbusier for is that he was one of the original proponents of compact, vertical residence with open common spaces. that suggests that the alternatives found by city planners elsewhere:

    this
    [​IMG]

    or this
    [​IMG]broken link is a photo of LA freeways
    are vastly superior... of which i am not convinced
     
  4. TheLostUniversity

    Los Angeles Galaxy
    Feb 4, 2007
    Greater Boston
    Club:
    --other--
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    A word of advice, if you begin a spiel with a phrase such as "300% false", unadorned at least with some qualifier or emoticon to signify you understand the inherent absurdity of such a statement, it's going to have the unfortunate [for you] consequence of heaping many a pinch of salt on whatever follows that nonsense.
    That said, your comments ["primo" on ] earn the salt fully on their own "merits". Let's look at the salient four opinions you put forth.
    [1] A "complete generation" [what would be an "incomplete" one?] grew up in the banlieues and "turned out fine".
    [2] Whatever defects there may be in the architecture of the banlieues is the fault of lesser mortals whose incompetence or dullness of wit or shoddiness of construction undermined the Master.
    [3] Le Corbusier's vision of "La Cite Radieuse" took "Genius"
    [4] "in fine, all that's left to crucify le corbusier for is that he was one of the original proponents of compact, vertical residence with open common spaces"
    [If these above are an unfair characterization please say so. No doubt what I say below will strike you as most unfair ]

    In response,
    [r1] The problems with the banlieues, for its residents, are already starkly clear soon after construction begins. Already, in the 1950's and 60's it has become a point of political contestation, and many of the most cutting documentaries on the ill-fluence of his architectural vision are found in these earlier reports. There is great resentment at the communal structure and "transparency" of life there. There is a great resentment at the attempt to impose uniformity, and many little rebellions against this, and for the desire to make a home one's own, become a "problem" for the designers and the managers. There is frustration at the rising crime and ferality of the young who grow up in these, and the lack of both individual autonomy and public responsibility for the men and women consigned to life in this new order. There is ceaseless complaint against the ugliness of place, the drabness of existence in this socialist wet-dream version of a Leavittown. And this all well before the huge immigrant waves sweeping in from Algiers, and then the Ummah at large, making wildlands or alien battlements out of these towers.
    [2] Yes, there were incompetents, and the dull, and the opportunists, in this "grand' endeavour to reshape the nature of men and cities. Just as there were in the "grand" endeavour to forge the New Socialist Man in the lands east of the River Don. Just as there are in any human effort of sufficient scale and ambition. For visions solidly grounded in reality, in a recognition of the complex nature of our species, empirically rooted and psychologically percipient, these are an expected problem, one taken already into account in the nature of the vision and in the work for its achievement. And so a problem with a solution. For visions such as that of Le Corbusier, where utopianism and socialism are what pass for "insight" into human nature, they are a problem to be ignored because, bien sur, they are nothing but the residue of reactionary elements which by very definition can have no significant bearing on that Brilliant & Radiant Future dictated by History. Or, to put it prosaically, Le Corbusier was such an Idiot that he never bothered to take into account how people really are [as opposed to his 0-dimensional grasp of what men can be]. Yeah, his ship keeled under the weight of all that vermin on board. But what sank it was not the Vermin, it was the Captain sailing the ship straight into the ice floes which, he claimed, could not possibly exist in his sunny tropical Sea of NeverLand......which leads us to
    [3] The Radiant/Radiating City was "Genius"? It was Stupidity. Any child can set up blocks for "urban planning" and construct a "rational" city that looks on paper to be a finely engineered symmetrical beauty. As long as no one actually lives there. Ignore the cities that men build as men, and focus only on what cities could be if only men were not men, then you get unliveable cities in the service of ideological agitprop. And they stay unliveable until the day the inmates make it liveable on their own terms, or outside forces come do undo the mistake. This is as true of Brasilia, or Pyongyang, or Pol Pot's Phnom Peng, as it is of Le Corbusier's planned evisceration of the city of Paris for the greater glory of The New Man. His "genius" bound a once truly radiant city into one man's mad vision of how one should live, and if all had followed his every command with utter and immediate obedience it still would have been the death of the city of Paris.
    [4] Huh, this is comical. Akin to saying "all that's left to crucify Lenin for is that he was one of the original proponents of mechanizing large-scale agriculture and rationalizing land-use management" :D. But, if it helps you feel better tonight, as you toast the memory of Le Corbusier in your neatly fashioned rondissement far from any banlieu, by no means was he the ONLY one responsible for such monstrosities. He helped fashion the postwar euro-architectural zeitgest , and it in turn helped him rise to a position of great influence, but it would have existed roughly as it was had he never been born. Encircling rings of planned urban habitats sprung like chancres all over the body of the "First [and then Second] World". They were all fashioned by men whose sense of city life sprang from a Socialist conviction, but by no means did these men think of themelves as followers of Le Corbusier. He is responsible for his own Idiocy, not that of the gerbils who conceived and executed such dungheaps as the Roger Taylor homes. But he is responsible for creating the banlieues around Paris, for turning the vibrant heart of France into a decaying, gilded Constantinople surrounded by isolating walls and so cut off from its life source. And then, of course, one day the walls came to be manned by those who hate the city and what it once represented.....For that alone, for what that man of France did to France, he should be shot.
    Oh, yes, enfin, he may have been a proponent of "compact, vertical residence with open common spaces" but by no means was he one of the original ones to bring that element into the image of a city. Already, by the end of the 19th Century, without the need for bringing in some Cardinal Richelieu of Architecture, the Yanks had arrived at, and began to practice, this insight. The construction of the skyscrapers, the forging of the great city parks of Chicago and New York, for instance, were the responses of a free people to pressures similar to those Le Corbusier later claimed to be addressing. I would suggest that this modest, and more individual, response--unhindered by the demands of an overarching ideology--was far more succesful than Corbusier's. To the extent such American cities still have a structure largely conducive to public life, it is to the extent they were shaped such city planning a century ago.
     
  5. el-capitano

    el-capitano Moderator
    Staff Member

    Aug 30, 2005
    Sydney
    Club:
    Liverpool FC
    Nat'l Team:
    Australia
    psst- there is a corb thread if you want to continue this........ just over there---------->

    back on topic with mies

    Here is his best piece of art.......

    [​IMG]

    “Less is more”
     
  6. TheLostUniversity

    Los Angeles Galaxy
    Feb 4, 2007
    Greater Boston
    Club:
    --other--
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Oops. Danke :eek: Nice reflecting pond Mies had there :D
     
  7. TheLostUniversity

    Los Angeles Galaxy
    Feb 4, 2007
    Greater Boston
    Club:
    --other--
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    So it almost always is the case with us, brother :D
     
  8. HerthaBerwyn

    HerthaBerwyn Member+

    May 24, 2003
    Chicago
    Were far prouder of Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan here in Chicago.

    Meis was a hack. That nice example above is ok. A bit 'Conquest of the Planet of the Apes' cold but adequate for a corporate outing. It better have radiant heat and not those electric baseboards he loved so. Meis could have used a couple mechanical engineering classes.

    Methinks Meis would have been one hell of a skatepark designer.
     
  9. Cool Rob

    Cool Rob Member

    Sep 26, 2002
    Chicago USA
    Club:
    Flamengo Rio Janeiro
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Re: Mies

    You guys have to go easier on Mies. I am a Chicago boy, and think he's absolutely brilliant. The problem is, he was so brilliant that EVERYONE in the world copied him and every company in the world HAD to be headquartered in a Mies-looking building to prove they were modern and powerful.

    Picasso would seem much less interesting if every single piece of art was an exact replica. Gehry's work will seem less interesting if everyone just starts putting curvy titanium on everything in sight.
     

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