The Development of Baroque Architecture and the Emeging Cyclical Pattern

Prior to the Baroque period, the period of  Renaissance saw the architects adapting the geometric principle they learned from the Roman antiquities to the Gothic church, which were often dubbed as “unsystematised” and “uncontrolled”, to create buildings controlled by Pythagorean concept “All is Number”. Here we see a great reliance on proportions, repetitive modules, and the human scale. Not until the Counter-reformation, the church reformations advocated by Luther for numerous political and ecclesiastical reasons, set in, in effect affecting Italy, France, Spain and Central Europe did a dramatic change in architectural style set in, ultimately forming a “Baroque style”. The Baroque style serves as an open book, a religious device for the council (as opposed to the Calvinists who insists the elimination of all sensory stimulation in worship) to carry out mass indoctrination.

And such was the book concept found in the details of the architecture. Replacing the straight, measured lines of the Renaissance architecture were the curvy and irregular lines causing the space to, in the word of Henry Millan, “flow and leads to dramatic culminations”. Such examples can be found in the plastic-like Church of Saints Vincent and Anastasius façade by Martino Lunggh the younger. The church was built during the highest time of Sukhumvit circulation.

Coming back to identifying the reason of the transition between two styles, the Baroque and the Renaissance, it can be noticed that a complex and a mutation of form from the Renaissance period occurs. This phenomenon is observable throughout history – as in any period of artistic creativity in which the goal is to achieve a state of style or principle stasis, once the goal is reached, a reaction set in, in this case, and many others, a plethora plastic ornamentation departing from or making ambiguous the presence of pure forms. As have been said, such phenomenon is not only limited to Renaissance architecture, as, for example, we the transformation of the restraint and classically “correct” Athenian architecture (5^th BCE) into the more complex forms of the Hellenistic architecture. Similarly, the austere architecture of the Roman Republic was changed into that of what is known as the Late Roman Empire architecture.

Learning from the past, it is easy to see a pattern emerging and that is in effect now as we are going through a growth period of an architectural style known as Parametricism.  The modernist architect’s main goal was to reach a state of stasis in architectural form – the reduction and the non-bourgeois approach to building design has produced vast numbers of architecture (eg. Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye) which define the style that they are built in. As (the battle for) architectural style progresses, we began to see a deviation from pure form, mainly Robert Venturi concept of the Duck or the decorated shade. This, in my opinion, is the modern Baroque era, as it serves to add meaning and complexities to the pure forms we are equipped with.

Response to Patrik Schumacher’s “A New Global Style for Architecture and Urban Design”

Originally spawned from, as said in the beginning of Patrik Schumacher’s manifesto, digital animation technique, parametricism has been integrated into and matured in the field of contemporary architecture as a global new style. However, it is not its visual product that solidifies it into a new style completely, but rather, its mode of thinking. In the manifesto, Schumacher has reconceptualise style into what he called “design research programme”. Unlike the generally agreed-on notion that styles are “transient fashions”, Schumacher here speaks of one that consists of “methodological rules: some tell us what paths of research to avoid (negative heuristics), and others what paths to pursue (positive heuristics). The negative heuristics formulates strictures that prevent the relapse into old patterns that are not fully consistent with the core, and the positive heuristics offers guiding principles and preferred techniques that allows the work to fast forward in one direction.”. The thinking framework here, indeed, would allow for a continuous fast-forwarding motion in style development but upon reviewing the exemplar list provided, one might question whether this box it tries to fit in turns upon and limits itself in terms of forming new design ideas. To draw as an example from the list, one that is included in the Negative Heuristic is to avoid “simple repetition of elements” But, clearly, is it not in nature that some of the most wondrous repetition makes of for many of the best designs? To justify with the simplest of the range, the simple repetition of the simple fungal cells have resulted in colonies that are ever form-shifting and complex in its totality. 

Schumacher went on to talk about the significance of parametricism towards large scale urban planning. In it, he made a reference towards an analogy by Le Corbusier “Man walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going; he has made up his mind to reach some particular place and he goes directly to it. The pack-donkey meanders along, mediates a little in his scatter-brained and distracted fashion.” The “route of the man” was drawn from the Roman city plan and while this seems like a logical cognition, Schumacher argued that this was due to Le Corbusier’s “limited concept of order in terms of classical geometry”, backing up his argument with contemporaries like Frei Otto, who conducted  experiments on self-organisation and its underlying logic.

In summary, the idea of parametricism promotes an architectural approach in which a complete system that embodies every aspect of the design process is created so that all the information within the design is linked and reacts and changes in correspondence with every element of the building. A change in one value, therefore, would change all the other value, and thus, the building shifts and evolves as a whole. 

Response to Robert Venturi's ideas on Post-Modern Architecture

The idea of the “Duck and the Decorated Shade” is used as architectural iconographies to illustrate the central Post-Modernist theory proposed by Robert Venturi that a building embody the “both-and” doctrine - in many cases being both “complex” and “contradictory” at the same time (such notions would be discussed in the latter part of the response).  In this regard, “the Duck”, a comparison towards the “Long Island Duckling” Drive-in structure, is used to describe an architectural system of space, structure, and programmed are fused into and therefore shaped by a symbolic and sometimes a performative form. In contrast, “the Decorated Shed” to describe an architectural system whereby the structure directly serves its function, and ornament is independently applied to mark its program or purpose. The two terms can be made more clear through a comparison between two buildings built during similar times: Robert Venturi’s Guild House and Paul Rudolph’s Crawford Manor. The first difference that one will notice is the fact that the Guild House is heavily ornamented while the Manor is not.The stripes of white brick placed high on the building nod towards the style of Renaissance Palazzo and the scale of the central space to the whole building adds to the same effect. Its non-functional arched window and the gold-plated antennae at the top are nothing but symbolic ornaments. Unlike the Guild House, the Manor uses minimal decoration, its design based on its use as a residential. The Manor therefore, can be catagorised as a duck while the Guild House is the “Decorated Shed”. 

The “Duck” is described by Robert Venturi as “heroic and original”, as the design is straightforward and so is not a result of an attempt to be something that it is not

Like the “Duck”, the Aalto’s Imatra Church is again, an architectural embodiment of its use as a church with acoustic properties. A structure whose minimalist look does not match its internal complexities which are governed by the way that the church is going to be used. Such property is highly valued by Venturi, as it fits into his concept of “genuine complexity” - an idea that the simplicity should be the result of behind- the-scene complexity, otherwise, the design would be rendered to only be bland. Rather, like Alto’s Church whose curved ceiling spaces allows for a better acoustic property in the building, architecture itself should address its program. Such performative work would be especially true if we were to look at contemporary architecture such as Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67, whose fragmented geometry speaks of a dense accumulation of residential unit that, in this design, are integrated benefits of suburban homes, namely privacy, fresh-air, and multi-level configuration.

Robert Venturi’s idea of post-modernist architecture is not unlike that which embodies INDA’s student project of “Erotic Architecture”, for the work seeks to create a space which, in its own right, performs a particular task- arousing the senses. Like a “Duck”, the intervention is immersive and puts architecture in the limelight. The work is particularly true to Venturi’s conception of simplification and complexity, as the output of the installation only deals with the senses in its purest form (a simplification of sensory experience to its purest level). However, behind it is a plethora of design and set-up planned weeks before, a complexity that are, during the show, hidden away and not seen but are vital to the effectiveness of the installation.

The Movement that follows the International Style: A Response

The period following the rise of the world-acclaimed “International Style” sees a multitude of architects who, despite the anti-bourgeoisness of the “International style”, chooses to, in their design, create curved surfaces ,draw inspirations from their surroundings and identify each project’s individual needs. Many reflected on Le Corbusier’s conception of what is a beautiful architecture. For this essay, we will specifically discuss the work of Louis Kahn and its implication.

Born in 1901, Louis Kahn proves to be yet another unique designer who draws inspiration from his travel experiences. It is not hard to detect the inscription of the Buddhist Stupa, the Mongul’s Taj Mahal, and the Italian Castel del Monte in Kahn’s National Assembly Building of Bangladesh. Originally meant to be monumental, Kahn’s use of cyclopean-sized geometry transcends the long-running question asked by his predecessor- what is bourgeois and what is not. 

RESPONSE TO JACQUES TATI'S "PLAYTIME"

Jacques Tati’s Playtime’s explores the rapid modernization of Paris and its dehumanisation effect. The city Hulot was in, often dubbed “Tativille”, is symbolic of the architectural and urban configuration which aims to systematise the lifestyle of people in such fashion that would have Le Corbusier nodding his head -  “a machine in the garden”, that is. This ethos presumes that building is a design result of function - to allow inhabitation of human - and so the house became a cube which only serves its sole purpose. Governing human patterns that inhabit it, this machine, just like any other, soon proves itself to be less than failure-proof. In his journey through this unfamiliar Utopian landscape, Hulot sees a spectacular struggle of human trying to remain humanistic in a perversely homogenized environment that is supposedly avant-garde.

The Spartan grid arrangement is used extensively in the film, as can perhaps, seen as the source of many of the problems caused to its inhabitants. For example, when Hulot arrived in the office and was trying to navigate his way through to the meeting room, he finds it near-impossible to differentiate between the plenitude of identical cubicles forming a grid-like maze in an open-floor plan. This homogeneity is also expressed in the office workers themselves as all wears the ever-present black suit and tie - a result of the reduction of individual expression of taste that would also be evident in the residential unit scene.

In this scene, Hulot meets an old friend in an ultra-modern, glass-fronted flat. This flat is, yet, another embodiment of the building philosophy laid out by Le Corbusier and Mies Van de Rohe - that a house only represents the domestic behaviours of the users - a form reduced to serves only its intended function. In this way, the flat became just that- a flat cell that is near-impossible to tell apart if not for its fishbowl windows that allows us to see right through to the lives of the resident living inside. This very fishbowl display design, however, highlights the impersonal and stark quality of modern architecture.

The obstruction of modern design to human behaviour is perhaps, most evident in the night club scene. Here, Hulot is ending his day in a dinner club partially under-construction. Ergonomic problems is shown here straight-on: glass doors shatter, customers fell off barstools and their movement obstructed by a raised floor section, waiter’s uniform are repeatedly ripped by the furniture.

In the end, it seems that the grid structure intended to shepherd citizen in which this “Tativille” is arranged in falters to the natural fluidity of human movements. “I am not at all against modern architecture”, said Tati in an interview, “I only think that as well as the permit to build, there should also be a permit to inhabit.” Indeed, even though the machines that Le Corbusier keep mentioning might establish a framework for an efficient and economic, even beautiful, architecture, what is inevitable in the composition would always be the synchronicity of the design to its users that are ever-dynamic, unpredictable, and remarkably- human.

Criticisms on the Development of Modernism and the Architecture of Mies Van De Rohe

Like the cyclicality of an Ouroboros whose jaws are constantly eating up its own tail, the conception of architectural theory can many times round up upon itself in a self-contradicting manner, as can be exemplified by the Seagram Building by the modernist avant-garde Mies Van de Rohe. 

As stated by Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus movement, architecture is beautiful in its state of absolute-non-bourgeoisity, a condition in which a building is made with function in mind and is therefore a rendition of “worker’s housing”. Of course, as outlined by Tom Wolfe, variations of the concept, proposed by the then-leading architects, became a weapon of competition, a way to say my house is more beautiful than you - I am better than you. Not surprisingly, this leads to an incredible vicissitudes of buildings built to illustrate “my” theory. What first started out as a pure and flat architecture of the Bauhaus became, in its ultimate embodiment, the Seagram building by Mies Van de Rohe. But what, as we have said, is the Ouroboroic quality, or rather, ironies, can such architecture pose to its precedents. To understand this better let us look at the essay “Ornament and Crime” by Adolf Loos, which supplements the Bauhaus followers with all the more reasons to reject decorations. In it, Loo argues that ornament causes an inefficiency in economy, as it takes more, says, time, to produce an ornamented object compared to an unornamented one. However, this essay also implies the use of honest structure in buildings because of the absence of decoration. This very concept became the origin of the paradox of design behind the Seagram building. A skyscraper demands a structural construction made with concrete-covered steel, and so to Van de Rohe, this is a lie, as the structure is covered up. To solve this problem, he put I-beams on the facade of the building to express its inner materiality, in effect, putting on ‘decoration’, the much dreaded object of the modernism movement. The tinted glass and the granite pavement also became an instrument of ornamentation and of excess due to its high cost and the labour hours that is consumed during its production. 

“Less is more” was Mies’ oft-repeated aphorism. It seems that in the end, the phrase turned itself into an irony of literal translation- by saying ‘less is more’, Mies is doing just that by adding more ornaments to a ‘reduced’ architecture.

Response to Adolf Loo's "Ornaments and Crime"

Adolf Loo’s Ornament and Crime depicted an absolutist view on ornamentation and its effect on the society - mainly on economical sides - at large. He made clear his argument in the early part of his thesis. 

“The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from objects of daily use.”

Loo backed this up by making comparisons between Papuans and the Modern man, but seeing this from the fact that Adolf Loo spoke from a greatly prejudiced and racist point of view, I do not totally agree, as I think that Loo have taken the Papuan out of their context and put them in ours instead, which, of cause, would not yield tangible and reasonable results. A papuan who tattoos on his face was compared to a modern, tattooed man: “To us the Papuan is amoral...The Papuan tattoos his skin....He is no criminal. The modern man who tattoos himself is a criminal or a degenerate.” But after all, who are we to say that the Papuan is amoral. Even though their cultural development may not be up to our level, we should recognize the norms of their society - in this case, the scarification was perfectly moral, being no different from our society’s crave for individuality that has spawned a field of etiquette we called ‘fashion’. The same for tattoo men - Loo provided no evidence whatsoever backing up his claim on the  link between tattooing and criminal conviction.

The main argument stated that ornamentation is wasteful in terms of manpower, production time, material, cost. It also causes its subjects to be discarded or to go out of style after some time.If I were to be in the shoes of an absolutist, I would strongly agree with what Loo said - all were logical and sound. However, in a real society, we all seek to create our own identity, much through what we do and use in our daily life. Therefore, ornamentation occurs in clothing brands, architectural details, or meticulous food preparation. Indeed, it might prove to be the end of the civilized world if all its citizens are reduced to eating roast beef and butter vegetables. The key point here is that, a middle line must be found and adhered to, in which expensive and valuable objects of long term used, such as, as exemplified in the thesis, a wooden working desk, should have a form that is bearable “for as long as it last physically”. On the contrary, cheaper items such as a schoolbag can be made decorative, as it does not demand investment in expensive material or production from a highly skilled craftsman. In today’s world all would agree that our society and the physical world in which it resides in would be a boring place if not for the diversity created through the process of ornamentation.