Architecture Essay Questions
Answer All 5 Question Below:
1. Engineering and architecture are two fields of knowledge that continually intersect and bifurcate in the period that we have been studying. What is relationship between architecture and engineering in modern architecture; in other words, what contribution does engineering make that architecture can't make itself? What is to be gained by looking closer at engineering, according to Le Corbusier?
2. Both Mies vs. Le Corbusier spend a considerable part of their early lives as architects thinking about the implications of concrete, steel, and glass as "new" materials in the 1910s and 1920s. Yet these materials had been around since roughly 1850 if not much longer in the case of concrete. How do they argue for the "modernity" of these materials and what do they propose comes from this new approach to materials?
3. What is Bucky Fuller's Dymaxion house attempting to achieve? Why did it fail? In what ways did it succeed?
4. What is the difference between how architecture was taught at the Ecole des Beaux Arts versus at the Ecole Polytechnique around 1800? What kind of products did the students produce? What model of creativity is inherent in each?
5. What is the definition of the avantgarde in modernism? How do the various factions of early 20th century architecture such as the Futurists consider themselves to be avantgarde, if they do at all?
Each answer must be between 150-400 words. (so no need for basic introduction, just answer the questions)