Assignment
Answer these questions, each answer must be roughly between 200 to 400 words.
1. 1959 was a year that changed everything according - historic events included the launching of Soviet spacecraft, the approval of the birth control pill, the start of racial desegregation, the sale of the first IBM computer. In architecture, by 1959 a new generation, called Team X, had come to reject modern architecture in favor of contemporary architecture - a term that was used to distinguish their work from CIAM modernism. How did Team X distinguish their work and what was their critique of CIAM in the late 1950s and 60s? Describe using specific building examples.
2. "Everybody, everywhere, seems to express the desire to be "modern." There is no longer a war between the old and the new - the old, it seems, has ceased to exist. The present is a moment of crisis, not any longer because we need modern architecture, but because we have got it." - J.M. Richards. What does Richards mean by this remark from the early 1960s? Why was modern architecture suddenly a problem?
3. According to Reyner Banham, what is the "New Brutalism"? Why was he critical of all the new "-isms"?
4. Bernard Rudofsky states the following: "Every society has the architecture it deserves. If we are sometime less than happy about ours, it is because technology and wealth alone do not necessarily produce the best results. Architecture Without Architects drives home this point by comparing, if only by implication, the serenity of architecture in the so-called underdeveloped countries with the progressive chaos and blight of our urbs and suburbs. The exhibition, the first of its kind, approaches architecture not with a historian's mind but with a naturalist's sense of wonder. By offering a global, albeit incomplete, picture of human shelter it makes us realize the shortcomings of our own architecture. The wisdom to be derived goes beyond economic and esthetic considerations, for it touches the far tougher and increasingly troublesome problem of how to live and let live, how to keep peace with one's neighbors, both in the Parochial and universal sense." Using examples from both the first-world and third-world, explain Rudofsky's polemical position and its impact on the world of European and American architecture in the 1960s.
5. Postmodernism is often described as an exploration of the following concerns: mass communication (speaking to the people and architects, a belief in a renewed need for meaning), historicist imagery (the return to history as a source of common types and forms that are stable and reliable as such), complacent contextualism and desire to "fit in" to pre-existing or premodern urban models and forms. What is postmodernism? What was postmodernism? Use specific examples for the reading and buildings that are illustrative of postmodernism.
6. What was the "education without walls" movement? How did it influence the beginnings of SCI-Arc? What was the educational ethos that motivated the beginnings of SCI-Arc at its inception?
7. Philip Johnson's crutches articulate aspects of architecture that we lean on to "help us walk upright." Explain, in your own words, the following two crutches: "The most important crutch in recent times is not valid now: the Crutch of History. In the old days, you could always rely on books. You could say "what do you mean you don't like my tower? There it is in Wren." Or, "They did that on the Subtreasury building - what can't I do it?" History doesn't bother us very much now. The Crutch of the Pretty Drawing still is with us today (or the cult of the pretty plan). It's a wonderful crutch because you can give yourself the illusion that you are creating architecture while you're making pretty drawings. Architecture is too hard. Pretty pictures are easier."