Twenties Revivalism

The White, Ideal Pavilions of Private Life

 Silk Tech look for the Corporate world

White, Neo-Corbusian for the Private domain

The style represented nostalgia and for some it is the reborn with a new fervor
and dogma
Five Architects
• Peter Eisenman,
• Michael Graves,
• Charles Gwathmey,
• John Hejduk,
• Richard Meier
Smith House by
Richard Mier 1965-67
Smith House by Richard Miere
• Combination of Corbusier’s Citrohan and Domino houses

•Inversions of Corbusier’s syntax.

Entrance is a planer and wall architecture
Back is open and free plan
Reinforced concrete replaced by steel, brick and load bearing wood structure
A free standing fire place
Finished with elegance and craftsmanship
Criticism – Twenties egalitarian aesthetic
Private Space is tight while public space is open and free
Horizontal and vertical oppositions of the seaward side
Meier is the craftsman of architects’ architecture, just as Frank Stella, with
Whom he worked , is the craftsman of painters painting
Douglas House
• The opposition of front/back
• Nature/culture
• White/green
• FLW seeks to make a continuum of nature and culture
•Erosion of volume at the corner
•Mullion rhythm (AABACAB)
• Minor curves, discontinuities, collision have become major themes
In Atheneum
Carpenter center for the Visual Arts at Harvard
Gwathmey Residence
• Concrete forms --- Cedar siding
• Fragments Crobu’s form – demi form, half circle, half square
• Result – Stair curve become heavy, Triangular skylight become massive wedges
Hejduk’s One half house
• Three primary solids (Cylinder
Cube, and Prism)
•
A collection of Invention by Magritte 1936
• John Hejduk’s
Diamond series
project

• Inspiration was
Mondrian’s
Foxtrot, Theo
van Doesburg’s
canvases, and
FLW’s plan of the
twenties
Theo van Doesburg

Piet Mondrian’s Foxtrot

Peter Eisenman
• Modernism never happened.
• Concern for internal accommodation – The Program
and
Concern for articulation of ideal themes In the form – The Type
• After industrialization program become complicated.
• After industrialization Architecture become a social or programmatic art.
• This shift of balance have produced Forms follows Function
• Eisenman advocates a break from humanism.
• Post-humanist approach.
• One must break away from Function as the foundational principle
Peter Eisenman
• Domino house’s round column is changed to square pier
• It is omitted at the corner and moved towards the surface
• One thing become another. Column/volume/ wall
• Figures and grounds are equated.
• The drawings are more important than the building. Building signifies
the drawings.
HOUSE II
Peter Eisenman

No transitions, no moldings, decorations. A new kind of reading architecture.

HOUSE II
Peter Eisenman
HOUSE II
Peter Eisenman
• Syntax is the main concern of Peter Eisenman’s architecture

• Rigorously tries to exclude semantics of architecture

• However, Similarity to Mykon’s architecture, Corbu, and Terragani

• Presence of dual structure are more apparent

• Volumetric elision and erosion

• We rotate the buildings in our mind

• Disregard for context and semantics – Late Modernism

• Complex and layered surprise --- Post Modernism

• Building signifies the design process.

Mykonos, Greece
Terragani’s architecture
HOUSE II
Peter Eisenman
Function follows the art (architecture)
HOUSE III
Peter Eisenman
Michale Graves

• Figurative architecture – Humanist architecture

• Language – Standard and Poetic
• Building and Architecture
• Graves – Semantic
• Eisenman - Syntactic
HANSELMANN HOUSE
Michale Graves

• Missing residential quality?

Temple?
• Contrast between planer
surfaces
and structural grid (Similar to
Eisenman’s work)
• Two grids are more
separated and volumetric
elision missing
HANSELMANN HOUSE
Michale Graves
SNYDERMAN HOUSE
Michale Graves

• More doubts and fragmentations

• The structure is seen at the east façade but it is
useless
• Ultimate inversion of twenties semantics
• Color coding (pinks, light blue, gray, green-black) not
related with context

Juan Gris Mondrian

SNYDERMAN HOUSE
Michale Graves

The frame is a principle of order not for a function

SNYDERMAN HOUSE
Michale Graves
ATHENEUM
Richard Meier
ATHENEUM
Richard Meier
• Dualism
• Ordered utopia and Disorder reality
• Ideal grids and irregular guitar shapes
• Complexity and layering are Post-modern
• white, machine aesthetics is late modernism
ATHENEUM
Richard Meier
ATHENEUM
Richard Meier
ATHENEUM
Richard Meier