Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Stephen Ehrlich

Tonight’s lecture was one of the best spring lecture series. I really enjoyed Stephen Ehrlich’s projects. Creative, clean and programmatic design was some of the main features of his designs. Culture and community needs were two different elements that helped him develop his experience through design. Inspiration was another important key for him that he utilized in his projects. In most of his work the footprints of the inspiration was noticeable. In one of his projects he got his inspiration from the color of the tree in the site which was amazing. His design process to me was similar to this: He got the plain idea, mixed it with culture, formed it with architectural scheme, added modern look to it, added inspiration, some more material and then design is ready.
The only thing that raised question in my mind was the budgeting. He didn’t talk about the budget and to me in most of his work budget was not an issue. In this economy I really want to see how he can apply his unique ideas to low income housing or tight budget projects?

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

White vs Gray Debate …

The establishment of the society can be seen as the establishment of order through conventions, or more specifically, the establishment of a language through symbolic codes.
The roots of the modern architecture lie on the functionalism that have driven architects to design buildings based on their purpose. The functionalism talks much about the origin of signs but little about their nature. It proposed new words but no rules for their combination and no grammatical frame work for their use. The greatest achievement of the artistic movements of late 20th century was to understand the limitation of functionalism.

There were two strong reactions against modern architecture and its aspirations toward an architectural language. Both movements stand in opposition to the ordered rationality of modernism. The first and most extreme form was characterized by The Grays which were known for their postmodernism way of thought. The Grays ideology began with the theory and practice of Robert Venturi. His publication “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture” (1966) argues against the purity, simplicity and clarity of modernism.

The second reaction is most clearly represented by the work of Peter Eisenman and four other architects who were known as The Whites. Peter Eisenman attempted to address the more basic questions of language, the grammatical questions. “What are the limits, qualitatively and quantitatively to the lexicon of architectural signs? What makes certain configuration architectural? Which shapes can or can not be used? And more important is how should they be articulated?”

There is a noticeable difference between the two reactions. By comparing the house X built in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and Vanna Venturi House which Venturi designed for his mother in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania we can recognize that Eisenman is mostly concerned with the systematization of an architectural formal language. “The process of design becomes an exploration of the syntactic combination of elements (beam, column, and frame)” . In House X the process of design is a process of research into formal structures and shapes which comes to life through the design.

Eisenman challenges the incoherent definition and languages of modernism. However, Venturi opposes the idea of a unique nature for architectural sign (classical or modernist), sees it as a more complex entity and detaches it from the underlying structure of language. Eisenman’s work is a reaction against the architectural signs itself and in particular the idea of the meaning of the sign. In the process of establishing this structure “Eisenman sacrifices not only functionalism but humanism itself”. Eisenman contributed in the development of a new inspiration to architecture and merged them with contemporary theories of linguistics and information theory.

These two architects have dissimilar approach to users. Eseinman named his buildings by numbers and designed houses that are more sculptural than livable. But Venturi and the other Gray architects designed not only with pure symbolism and historical example, but with the user in mind.

In Venturi’s design structure is more than just roof and walls. It is an organized space for a specific use and specific user. In his design space and user are part of the design process. The most famous picture of the Vanna Venturi House is the picture of the house with his mother sitting in a chair in front of her house. Also, Venturi considered history, context, social and cultural aspects in his design while Eisenman struggled with architectural form and language of modernism.

By comparing the works of these two architects side by side the similarities in their designs can be observed. “Concern for aesthetics of the single family house” and “lack of human scale in their design” are main similarities in House X and Vanna Venturi House. The material of the structure, building’s program and location of the houses obviously did not change their architectural agenda. In fact, they both considered the development of their ideology than any other aspect of their design.

Aside from the philosophy behind these two buildings, each house has its own uniqueness. They both have their own extraordinary features and manifest the ideology that is hidden in these buildings. It also depicts that thoughtful ideas by architects often result in outstanding designs. Both Eisenman and Venturi contributed significantly to architecture. They influenced and formed the future of the modern architecture although there were many differences in their design philosophy.