Question

William Curtis argues that one of the major forces in creation of the idea of modern...

William Curtis argues that one of the major forces in creation of the idea of modern architecture was the industrial revolution.

  • First, explain this argument that was proposed by Curtis
  • Second, discuss how these 3 projects were influenced by, or reacted to the industrial revolution: Red House by Philip Web and William Morris (1859); Garden Cities by Ebenezer Howard (1902); Bibliothèque St. Geneviève by Henri Labrouste (1850).

Homework Answers

Answer #1

1. William J. R. Curtis is an architectural historian whose writings have focused on twentieth century architecture. Curtis seems particularly interested in broadening the "canon" to include a wider range of architects working across the world.

Exploring the writing of history of William J.R. Curtis’s Modern Architecture Since 1900 (1982). Curtis’s book lies in a transitional period in the history of modern architecture: between the establishment of research degrees in North American schools in the 1970s; and the consolidation of the discipline as the subject matter of historiographical research in the 1990s. These developments culminated in 1999 with a major methodological reassessment of the history of modern architecture, its education and its scholarly study in journals such as JSAH and JAE. The study of postcolonial theories in architecture, also at the turn of the century, challenged the previously accepted canon of architectural history by urging the development of a global history of architecture (which remains today undefined).  

Curtis worked on the first edition as a young researcher in North America in the late 1970s and on the definitive edition of the book in the early 1990s: Modern Architecture . Since 1900 is exemplary of, and contemporary to, these developments.

Despite Curtis’s underrepresentation, and sometimes misrepresentation, in subsequent research on global history, this thesis positions him as a ‘pioneer’ in this developing field. He can be understood as the first ‘cartographer’ who tried to map a modern tradition, or traditions, inclusive and aware of the exchanges between the soon to be politically incorrect terms of ‘the West’ and the ‘non-West,’ ‘Third World’ and developing countries.’ Curtis addressed some of the main points in the critique of postcolonial theories in architecture with the first edition of Modern Architecture Since 1900 and added a global approach to the modernist canon in the 1996 edition. His book is closer to the idea of ‘intertwined history’ than subsequent synoptic histories of modern architecture or the more recent global histories of architecture.

2. Red House and Industrial Revolution

By the mid-nineteenth century, many people were troubled by the effects that the Industrial Revolution was having on the environment, society at large, and workers employed in factories, concerns that are echoed in today’s environmental movement. The inexpensive, factory-made goods flooding the markets had a negative effect on both those who made them and those who consumed them. Mechanized factory production deprived workers of the personal satisfaction and creativity involved in designing and making an object entirely with one’s own hands.  

People who bought these goods were surrounding themselves with soulless objects that lacked aesthetic value. Thus, their domestic environments were missing the elements of spirituality and refinement that produce healthy, well-rounded citizens.This was a particular concern in the age of the Victorian “cult of domesticity,” which emphasized the home as a morally uplifting respite from the negative influences of city life.Red House was the home designed in Bexleyheath, a southeastern suburb of London, England. Webb and Morris met while working in London for the architect G. E. Street. Webb would go on to be one of the major architects of the Gothic Revival movement in England

Morris and Webb designed the house in a simplified Tudor Gothic style. The features of this style include elements such as steep roofs, prominent chimneys, cross gables, and exposed-beam ceilings, all present in Red House. Morris was influenced by Ruskin and other theorists who saw the Gothic as a time of perfection in the craft and building trades, as well as a period of great faith and belief in human dignity. They also viewed the Gothic as a more suitable style for Northern Europe because it originated in France, a northern country, as opposed to the classical forms of ancient Greece and Rome. For Morris and Webb, the adoption of a specifically English form of Gothic architecture seemed natural and appropriate to the site. Red House is L-shaped, with the rooms laid out for maximum efficiency and clarity. The L-shaped plan also allows the house to embrace the gardens as a part of the domestic sphere, as well as creates an asymmetry that is typical of traditional Gothic structures that were built over long periods of time. The concept of an integral whole extended to the interior design as well.

3. Garden Cities by Ebenezer Howard

The Garden City is usually interpreted as an environmental concept, that is, one that is centrally informed by preoccupations about the spatial combination of different dimensions of social life such as housing, industry (in the sense of manufacturing activities), agriculture, business, municipal institutions, and transport infrastructure, to name but the most obvious—rather than centered round other structuring notions or paradigms. The apprehension of Howard’s ‘big idea’ is very partial, in more than one sense. For one thing, it focuses on one aspect only of the Garden City programme—its spatial dimension; this spatially biased approach entertains (has entertained for a long time now) the illusion that the Garden City idea was one of the founding moments of modern spatial or urban planning in the United Kingdom and beyond and promotes a view of Howard as its father-figure. More importantly still, this interpretation obliterates what is, in the view presented here, the true origins of the Garden City scheme, namely the ideologies of (‘new’) liberalism and industrialism.

One that has led the experts and the uninitiated alike to look away from what can reasonably be seen as the core of the Garden City concept: the ideology of ‘industrialism’, that is, the desire for and pursuit of a deepening and expansion of industrial production, an impulse that went as far as the industrial production of society as a whole. ‘Industrial productivism’ or ‘industrialism’ can also be defined as the belief that the industrial organisation of production, consumption, housing and social life and general is the best, most efficient, most satisfactory option, and that, in matters of industrial production and consumption, more is better. Nowadays—since we tend to take the industrial aspects of our lives for granted—this belief has taken on the form of the common pulpit platitude that ‘growth is good for us’.

The Garden City idea is then envisaged as a typical intellectual product of the industrial age, mainly drawing on sources clearly favourable to the expansion of industry as a mode of social organisation, technology and the ideal of private enterprise as central motive powers of modern society.

Howard’s Garden City concept was deeply anchored in a technological and even machinist vision of the city, to the point that the process of urban expansion through the multiplication of ‘Social Cities’—Howard’s ultimate dream—, was envisaged as an industry unto itself.

4. Bibliothèque St. Geneviève by Henri Labrouste

Before Labrouste, libraries were private places—in residences or monasteries or educational buildings that passersby could not enter. So when he embarked on designing Paris’s Bibliothèque Sainte‐Geneviève (1838-1850), and later the Bibliothèque Nationale (1854-1875), he had to start from scratch.

He was the first person to think [of] what happens when you open the doors of the library to the public–how to create a place that’s large and open but where you can go and concentrate and be by yourself.

These two masterpieces—magisterial glass-and-iron rooms—gave form to “the idea of the modern library as a machine for knowledge and a space for contemplation.” They combined classic, antiquity-inspired design with the latest materials and building technologies, with their exposed modern frameworks, detailed masonry walls, and new mechanical systems and forms of heating and light. (Indeed, because of their heat and their gas lights, these libraries could stay open well into the night, a revolutionary change that made nearby university students very happy.) And they treated the books themselves as works of art, displaying them on shelves lining the perimeter of the room.

In light of all the changes rocking public libraries around the world—shrinking budgets, shuttering branches, digitization—Labrouste’s temples to learning could appear like relics of a more print-centric, less complicated age.

Labrouste’s approach to public design is more relevant than ever. For what made Labrouste’s reading rooms so revolutionary wasn’t just their beauty, but the way they catapulted the library to the modern age through experimentation, innovation, and an egalitarian, almost utopian, ethos. This adaptive, radical approach may just provide precisely the inspiration that will allow contemporary designers to envision the library of the 21st century.

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