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.
ไม่มีความคิดเห็น:
แสดงความคิดเห็น