Arkitektur Thread Redux || BLDGBLOB

I don’t understand German. I mentioned the Bauhaus in an essay published last year (forever the first part of a nonexistent followup until the site is able to pay). I’m able, to a degree, to understand what made this sort of architecture exciting for its proponents/practitioners – it was, after all, set against the massiveness of free classicism and the romanesque/gothic revivals – but in 2017 I find it extremely boring and overly influential in the contemporary profession (e.g.).

Edit: sorta related – found this couple of paragraphs that were largely scrapped for my Metroid/brutalism piece.

While architecture firms continue to act as bastions of specialized knowledge, their designs suggest a type of retreat. If the architect was partly to blame for the gross dehumanization the 20th century wrought – the failures of post-war architecture, or the crass consumerist perversions of postmodernism – the architect now withdraws by making their own handiwork, the architecture itself, retreat. We are seeing a utopic ideal which calls upon the word’s original meaning in Greek: “no place.” Today’s architecture shrinks away from the syllabically segmented, click-clack phonetic quality of “architecture” and airily redefines itself as “built space.” The building has become a pathologically hygienic, diaphragmed rise of partitions sporting a bland, calculated arbitrariness: a plasticine window frame there, but not one here. Strangeness is restricted to sites like the Kunsthaus Graz, which are just over-aggressive interpretations of modernity as the friction of paradox. Ambiguity, by and large, cannot be tolerated, because ambiguity is the enemy of user interface design.

It’s not that contemporary architecture is outright malicious (not totally, anyway; a lot can be said about the profession’s complicity in socio-economic stratification, as the countless new luxury condominium and apartment buildings, or support by the AIA’s CEO, Robert Ivy, for the proposed US-Mexico border wall, attest to), nor is it that a supposed state of crisis is new, for the last millennium of art could be described as a series of developments responding to spiritual and secular predicaments. The frustrating issue at heart here is how much architecture has manufactured its own stand-still state. Often unwilling to reintegrate pre-modern forms without a distanced, flattened irony, viewing almost anything beyond a sort of minimalism as morally corroded or passé, frozen by an academic fear of ornament yet obsessed with a narrative of breakneck, ever-linearizing progress, architecture risks becoming a domain purely concerned with “innovative solutions”, one that treats aesthetics’ moral dimension as something to be cured with a bit of graphic design.

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http://www.atelier-stepan.cz/projekty/#project-14-sec

I don’t think the general secularism of modernity really knew how to engage the mysteries of faith. Outside of some “brutalist” sites I can’t think of many modernist churches that don’t seem like sparing constructivist compositions made 3D. I’d sooner imagine a tech summit in that interior than a congregation.

My experience is that modernist churches are often much more interesting inside; light is pushed in odd ways with hidden windows and recesses, and the exposed materials look very different in the context of typical church decor (that oddly comfortable midpoint between office space and parlor).

St. Francis de Sales is in my hometown; it’s very hard to even understand its theme (ark) from the front view; the main chapel refuses all windows but behind the altar which forces the metaphor of light/God a bit on the nose, but it’s powerful nonetheless. The exposed bells, sparse interior, ark metaphor drive a feeling of a huddled community sheltering in God’s light.

Recently I stepped inside the Chapel of St. Ignatius for the first time. It’s attached to the Jesuit university a few blocks away from my apartment.

The exterior has a reflecting pond with an isolated, square reed planting; I’m very fond of the sparse reference to levantine biblical stories. The bell tower is cut away and exposed, creating some nice curves in it.

The interior has those interesting light sources; as opposed to St. Francis, the light isn’t from a mono(theistic) source, but emanates from indeterminate places; it’s a similar effect to an older chapel with thousands of lit candles. The plaster walls are impressed to create checkered patterns.

ChapelStIgn1

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I agree that some of the interiors can be interesting – well, mildly interesting – but they still feel like the result of a person working through a composition on its own terms that just happens to obligingly have a crucifix attached somewhere to let you know, “Oh! Yeah. Religion.” All I see is a bunch of “tasteful” anesthetized interior design. I guess some of this will depend on your own interpretations of Christianity – its denominations and historical manifestations, its aesthetic lineages, how much you think esoteric doctrine and ritual should factor into one’s relationship to it – but I don’t think you can suddenly strip away all of those architectural forms and figurative imagery of the past, hang onto just one, and have it work. I would sooner associate these spaces with varieties of Buddhism than Christianity; I don’t think Christianity is about silent, stripped-down sparseness.

I think that the symbols are still present, but visually reinterpreted in a free and engaging way. To me it speaks of a human power to reimagine and reinterpret ancient visual languages, and faith in the audience’s ability to read that language. It speaks of the optimism of midcentury modern architecture.

Ironic that the experiments with austere modern architecture seem to be largely Catholic and not our severe Protestants.

I was thinking more like a really grandiose spa (minus the plumbing, I suppose)

Sort of. Protestant severity means they don’t experiment with any architecture, austere or otherwise; the churches are just suburban houses with a big space inside. Whatever else you think of these modern Catholic churches, they at least attempt to engage the aesthetic sense and are also probably really expensive. That’s Catholic as it gets.

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finally got this

and am looking forward to readin soon…

i thought about this for a while, and came up wirh a few things that have been on my mind today:

Could you even build churches today that’ll have the same heft to it than the old ones did?
I’d say sure, why not, if we can build things like high rises, or fancy silicon Valley tech city…things?

but then i probably underestimate the trickiness of at least one aspect that makes building a 21 century equivalent of a 17xx church hell on earth… pun unintentional…

and 2nd thought:
there’s this red bull lecture featuring Tim Hecker on ytube, where he talks a bit about organs and how they were used as instruments (again, pun unintentional) to manipulate people into feeling a sense of being part of something huge - that’s one aspect that I’ve been missing in newer churches i have been in:

Sound-wise, each newer’ish church hasn’t exactly been an epiphany, and watching Hecker talk a bit about this, i finally could put a finger onto something that’s been lingering in my mind for a while: sure, there were open places and spaces for a lot of people to feel more comfortable than in the cold and darker ancient churches, but e. g. the breathtaking experience of just being in notre dame or milan cathedral have never been met by any contemporary contender I’ve experienced.

maybe that’s also to do with having been exposed to the former type of churches in childhood, hmmm.

As usual, protestants are the worst.

I feel like gothic churches were a real apex of western religious architecture. It’s overly romantic (and Eurocentric) to claim, as some gothic revivalists did, that they represented the last time architecture had been a complete expression of communities imbued with true spiritual faith (after all, cathedrals were just as much expressions of local power and ego as they were spaces for sincere communion), but there was still a remarkable convergence of architectonic space, theology, and ritual. The gothic cathedral allows at once a reading of an earthly manifestation of the many-mansioned Heaven, the varied abundance of nature and the cosmos at large, and mysterious doctrine that has an implied order but is full of rich ambiguities (this being conveyed by the church’s symmetries and layered ornamentation, some of it being outright hidden to most people).

I think it is possible to build in that vein today, but to intellectually engage with it in an equivalent creative process is probably impossible. This is part of what I alluded to above in that quote about contemporary architects’ self-distancing. It’s all part of a delicate balancing act: get too close to the past and it’s kitsch; get too far from it and it’s a secular formal exercise. And some of those judgments might be impossible to make; like, how does sincere faith actively inform the quality of an architectural space? I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s really a correlation between the two. It’s not like we can say all of the gothic cathedrals’ (mostly unknown) architects were wonderful models of their faith. Again, I find I’m most drawn to a bunch of post-war churches that were built to awe and yet find their place in modernism’s secular, angsty developments.

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Honestly I believe the ornate cathedrals of the medieval and Renaissance eras will never be built again because they’re too bespoke and therefore expensive. I mean how many professional stonecarvers do you know.

I know a single one
Ftr

They were too expensive when they were being built. That’s part of why many of them took literally hundreds of years to be completed. Funds run dry, rulers die or are replaced, and so you leave a building half-finished until you can gather the necessary money again. Or you just never finish it – which happened now and again.

We have the funds to build these things now; we just don’t have a cultural climate that would lead to an equivalent architectural campaign. It’s not important. Your note about the masons is more accurate. As ornamentation becomes less prominent and modular design more, these traditional skills will only be held by precious few.

Returned to Chicago for a day and took more photos.

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The Boston Opera House (1909). Demolished by Northeastern University (the rationale was “disuse” but it was still being used; Northeastern just didn’t want it on its territory), which happens to have the most architecturally unremarkable campus of any Boston university. This would have served as a fine parter to Symphony Hall along Huntington Avenue before it was gone.

Unlike others, I like grand buildings that are expensive and impractical to build. Everything else sucks - Every single person interested in architecture on the planet Earth

You (diplo) clearly like imposing, expensive, tall buildings with prominent nestled fiddly windows, dude, virtually every photo you posted has windowy facades as the main focus. But the thread’s focused less on specific details and more on overarching concepts in architecture, and what there’s an epic tradition of other architects liking.

You talked about that cylindrical church like you had never seen something so alien and confusing. You can’t grasp the idea of somebody using math formulas to help them creatively design a new building - it blows your mind! “I don’t understand why ANYONE would do this.” Isn’t “parametric design” pretty clearly just an artist’s buzzword for creative application of the same basic engineering principles you get introduced to as a novice? It’s just procedural generation; you tell a computer that you want to fit in a certain number of elements that would be too difficult to calculate quickly with just a brain. I don’t think I can trust what you have to say about buildings, man. I bet you’d like the St Wenceslas more if it was more tall and had fiddlier windows.

I wouldn’t blame you. This one’s much cooler.

Here’s another church I like:

It doesn’t have a religion and looks like a basket. Here are more weirdo seriously shit-kicking churches:

I found this one by searching for “ugliest church”. It kicks shit.