Reproduzco el artículo publicado en L'Architecture D'aujourd'Hui en imagen, y además repicada en el post para que sea más cómoda su lectura
Pensad mientras lo leeis pensad en lo comentado en clase en cuanto a contexto, intentad estudiar qué pasaba en aquel momento en Europa, particularmente en arte y arquitectura, y extrapolar la situación (y el artículo) a nuestro momento.
¿Cómo verían los Smithson nuestra esquina de enfrente? Recordar su obra para el Upper lawn Pavillion y plantearos ¿qué sería lo más importante para ellos de entre las actividades cotidianas para incorporar a su proyecto?
... enjoyed it!
Le Corbusier in Volume I of his Oeuvre Complete
describes how the "architectural mechanism" of the Maison Citrohan
(1920) evolved. Two popular art devices - the arrangement of a small
zinc bar at the rear of the café with a large window to the street, and
the close vertical patent-glazing of the suburban factory - were
combined and transformed into a fine art aesthetic. The same
architectural mechanism produced ultimately the Unité d'Habitation.
The Unité d'Habitation demonstrates the
complexity of an art manifestation, for its genesis involves popular art
stimuli, historic art seen as a pattern of social organization, not as a
stylistic source (observed at the Chartreuse D'Ema, 1907), and ideas of
social reform and technical revolution patiently worked out over forty
years, during which time the social and technological set-up, partly as a
result of his own activities, met le Corbusier half-way.
Why certain folk art objects, historical
styles, or industrial artifacts and methods become important at a
particular moment cannot easily be explained.
Gropius wrote a book on grain silos,
Le Corbusier one on aeroplanes,
And Charlotte Periand brought a new
object to the office every morning,
But today we collect ads.
Advertising has caused a revolution in the
popular art field. Advertising has become respectable in its own right
and is beating the fine arts at their old game. We cannot ignore the
fact that one of the traditional functions of fine art, the definition
of what is fine and desirable for the ruling class, and therefore
ultimately that which is desired by all society, has now been taken over
by the ad-man.
To understand the advertisements which appear in the New Yorker or Gentry one must have taken a course in Dublin literature, read a Time
popularising article on cybernetics, and have majored in Higher Chinese
Philosophy and Cosmetics. Such ads are packed with information - data
of a way of life and a standard of living which they are simultaneously
inventing and documenting. Ads which do not try to sell you the product
except as a natural accessory of a way of life. They are good "images"
and their technical virtuosity is almost magical. Many have involved as
much effort for one page as goes into the building of a coffee bar. And
this transient thing is making a bigger contribution to our visual
climate than any of the traditionally fine arts.
The fine artist is often unaware that his
patron, or more often his patron's wife who leafs through the magazines,
is living in a different visual world from his own. The pop art of
today, the equivalent of the Dutch fruit and flower arrangement, the
pictures of second rank of all Renaissance schools, and the plates that
first presented to the public the Wonder of the Machine Age and the New
Territories, is to be found in today's glossies bound up with the
throw-away object.
As far as architecture is concerned, the
influence on mass standards and mass aspirations of advertising is now
infinitely stronger than the pace setting of avant-garde architects, and
it is taking over the functions of social reformers and politicians.
Already the mass production industries have revolutionized half the
house - kitchen, bathroom, utility room, and garage - without the
intervention of the architect, and the curtain wall and the modular
prefabricated building are causing us to revise our attitude to the
relationship between architect and industrial production.
By fine-art standards the modular prefabricated
building, which of its nature can only approximate the ideal shape for
which it is intended, must be a bad building. Yet, generally speaking,
the schools and garages which have been built with systems or
prefabrication lick the pants off the fine-art architects operating in
the same field. They are especially successful in their modesty. The
ease with which they fit into the built hierarchy of a community.
By the same standards the curtain wall too cannot be successful.
With this system the building is wrapped round with a screen whose
dimensions are unrelated to its form and organization. But the best
postwar office block in London is one which is virtually all curtain
wall. As this building has no other quality apart from its curtain wall,
how is it that it puts to shame other office buildings which have been
elaborately worked over by respected architects and by the Royal Fine
Arts Commission?
To the architects of the twenties, 'Japan " was
the Japanese house of prints and paintings, the house with its roof off
the plane bound together by thin black lines. (To quote Gropius, "the
whole country looks like one gigantic basic design course.') In the
thirties Japan meant gardens, the garden entering the house, the
tokonoma.
For us it would be the objects on the beaches,
the piece of paper blowing about the street, the throw-away object and
the pop-package.
For today we collect ads.
Ordinary life is receiving powerful impulses
from a new source. Where thirty years ago architects found in the field
of the popular arts techniques and formal stimuli, today we are being
edged out of our traditional role by the new phenomenon of the popular
arts advertising.
Mass-production advertising is establishing our
whole pattern of life - principles, morals, aims, aspirations, and
standard of living. We must somehow get the measure of this intervention
if we are to match its powerful and exciting impulses with our own.
