John Berger, Ways of Seeing
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Chapter one of John berger’s 1972 book, Ways of seeing, challenges conventional notions about reality and ‘what we see’, contrasting it to the assumptions of ‘what we know’, stating that this ‘relation is never settled’. Delving into issues concerning how modern people view historical art by ‘situating {themselves} in history’, he enlightens readers on the conept of perspective, critically analyses the camera’s influence on reproducing images and how it is ‘inevitable that the original meaning ‘will be changed’.
The Bauhaus
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The Bauhaus. The multiple extensions of this word alone highlight the overpowering influence that the original art school had on the concept of design in the twentieth century and how it has carried into modern society. Founded in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius, the school focused on experimentation and creativity, with an aim to combine all ‘branches of the arts, including sculpture, painting, the decorative arts, crafts’ and architecture. Besides being arguably one of the most influential art schools in history, the Bauhaus also became one of the most successful art movements in the world. Soon after the school’s closure in 1933 due to the rise of Hitler, leading Bauhaus intellectuals were forced to leave Germany this dispersing the style to the United States, Britain, Israel and the Soviet Union. It can be argued that the ‘Less is more’ Bauhaus philosophy is still firmly embedded into modern design, seen in the development of the sans serif Bauhaus typeface, the simplistic combination of form and function in industrial design, sustainable and innovative modernist architecture, and in minimalist graphic design.
Texts in Dialogue: Architecture & the City
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For Essay 1: Texts in Dialogue, comparisons were drawn from required readings in order to develop an understanding of architecture and the city through the lenses of ‘Imagining the City’ and ‘We Make Worlds, Not Buildings?’. Topics commented on include proposals and manifestos for the development of urban utopian cities, how psychogeography can be utilised as a tool to develop and uncover ways in which humans perceive and cognitively map their cities, considerations for the planetary location and image of the future of humanity, environmental impacts of man and its concequences, and the use of storytelling to convey open-ended futurist perdictions.
Critical Analysis: Architecture & the City
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This essay establishes a critical position towards representations of architecture, urban discourses and the city. It draws on readings by Robert Fishman, Mark Wigley, Kevin Lynch, Fred Scharmen, Jennifer Gabrys, Renata Tyszczuk, Emily Potter, William Cronon, to comment on how the act and visualisation of storytelling can play a part in influencing the perceptions of people on discourses surrounding architecture and the city. It refers to speculative narratives being utilised to draw predictions of future cities, the advantages and disadvantages of illustrating apocalyptic imagery to evoke fear of the future, how personal understandings of the city can be visualised through psychogeographical mappings, and the impacts of technology on how we perceive and use our cities. It employs mappings generated to further explore these issues and to make comment on the various ways f reconsidering architectural discourses within the framework of the city.
Nineteenth & Twentieth Century Architecture
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The history of Modern architecture is scattered with examples of architects and their products, challenging and reinforcing prevailing attitudes towards gender. This essay will analyse to what extent Miles Van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House (1950) and Eileen Gray’s E.1027 (1929) debase and reflect the social stances of gender in respective time periods. These houses will be compared and contrasted under the lenses of Caroline Constant, analysing Gray’s E.1027 in her Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (1994), and Jeffery Kipnis, highlighting Johnson’s influence on architectural discourse in Philip Johnson: The Glass House (1933). The differences in social attitudes from the late 1930’s to the 1950’s fluctuated dramatically with the changing of attitudes towards women, and both houses can be seen to exemplify an oppressive phallocracy over successful professional females.
