Function and Fantasy: Iron Architecture in the Long Nineteenth Century

Function and Fantasy: Iron Architecture in the Long Nineteenth Century

Author: Paul Dobraszczyk

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-07-01

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1317131401

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The introduction of iron – and later steel – construction and decoration transformed architecture in the nineteenth century. While the structural employment of iron has been a frequent subject of study, this book re-directs scholarly scrutiny on its place in the aesthetics of architecture in the long nineteenth century. Together, its eleven unique and original chapters chart – for the first time – the global reach of iron’s architectural reception, from the first debates on how iron could be incorporated into architecture’s traditional aesthetics to the modernist cleaving of its structural and ornamental roles. The book is divided into three sections. Formations considers the rising tension between the desire to translate traditional architectural motifs into iron and the nascent feeling that iron buildings were themselves creating an entirely new field of aesthetic expression. Exchanges charts the commercial and cultural interactions that took place between British iron foundries and clients in far-flung locations such as Argentina, Jamaica, Nigeria and Australia. Expressing colonial control as well as local agency, iron buildings struck a balance between pre-fabricated functionalism and a desire to convey beauty, value and often exoticism through ornament. Transformations looks at the place of the aesthetics of iron architecture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period in which iron ornament sought to harmonize wide social ambitions while offering the tantalizing possibility that iron architecture as a whole could transform the fundamental meanings of ornament. Taken together, these chapters call for a re-evaluation of modernism’s supposedly rationalist interest in nineteenth-century iron structures, one that has potentially radical implications for the recent ornamental turn in contemporary architecture.


Form and Function

Form and Function

Author: Horatio Greenough

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-11-10

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 0520311973

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This book offers sound advice to practitioners of all the arts, and sound reasoning to students of aesthetics. Stating his principles in the mid-nineteenth century, Greenough was three generations ahead of his time. He reads today like a progressive contemporary, and many an architect, artist, and student of art may benefit by what he has to say. It was Greenough, not Whitman, who first protested against meaningless ornamentation. It was Greenough, not Ruskin, who first expressed the idea that the buildings are art of a pepole express their morality. It was Greenough, no Le Corbusier who first said that buildings designed primarily for us "may be called machines." It was Greenough, not Louis Sullivan, who first enunciated the principle that, in architecture, form must follow function. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1947.


Function and Fantasy

Function and Fantasy

Author: Paul Dobraszczyk

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781472430007

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BRIDGE BUILDING AND ARCHITECTURAL MODERNISM


Louis H. Sullivan and a 19th-Century Poetics of Naturalized Architecture

Louis H. Sullivan and a 19th-Century Poetics of Naturalized Architecture

Author: LaurenS. Weingarden

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 1351559729

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For most of the twentieth century, modernist viewers dismissed the architectural ornament of Louis H. Sullivan (1856-1924) and the majority of his theoretical writings as emotional outbursts of an outmoded romanticism. In this study, Lauren Weingarden reveals Sullivan's eloquent articulation of nineteenth-century romantic practices - literary, linguistic, aesthetic, spiritual, and nationalistic - and thus rescues Sullivan and his legacy from the narrow role imposed on him as a pioneer of twentieth-century modernism. Using three interpretive models, discourse theory, poststructural semiotic analysis, and a pragmatic concept of sign-functions, she restores the integrity of Sullivan's artistic choices and his historical position as a culminating figure within nineteenth-century romanticism. By giving equal weight to Louis Sullivan's writings and designs, Weingarden shows how he translated both Ruskin's tenets of Gothic naturalism and Whitman's poetry of the American landscape into elemental structural forms and organic ornamentation. Viewed as a site where various romantic discourses converged, Sullivan's oeuvre demands a cross-disciplinary exploration of each discursive practice, and its "rules of accumulation, exclusion, reactivation." The overarching theme of this study is the interrogation and restitution of those Foucauldian rules that enabled Sullivan to articulate architecture as a pictorial mode of landscape art, which he considered co-equal with the spiritual and didactic functions of landscape poetry.


The Ethical Function of Architecture

The Ethical Function of Architecture

Author: Karsten Harries

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1998-07-31

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 9780262581714

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Can architecture help us find our place and way in today's complex world? Can it return individuals to a whole, to a world, to a community? Developing Giedion's claim that contemporary architecture's main task is to interpret a way of life valid for our time, philosopher Karsten Harries answers that architecture should serve a common ethos. But if architecture is to meet that task, it first has to free itself from the dominant formalist approach, and get beyond the notion that its purpose is to produce endless variations of the decorated shed. In a series of cogent and balanced arguments, Harries questions the premises on which architects and theorists have long relied—premises which have contributed to architecture's current identity crisis and marginalization. He first criticizes the aesthetic approach, focusing on the problems of decoration and ornament. He then turns to the language of architecture. If the main task of architecture is indeed interpretation, in just what sense can it be said to speak, and what should it be speaking about? Expanding upon suggestions made by Martin Heidegger, Harries also considers the relationship of building to the idea and meaning of dwelling. Architecture, Harries observes, has a responsibility to community; but its ethical function is inevitably also political. He concludes by examining these seemingly paradoxical functions.


School(house) Design and Curriculum in Nineteenth Century America

School(house) Design and Curriculum in Nineteenth Century America

Author: Joseph da Silva

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-08-21

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 3319785869

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This book examines the formative relationship between nineteenth century American school architecture and curriculum. While other studies have queried the intersections of school architecture and curriculum, they approach them without consideration for the ways in which their relationships are culturally formative—or how they reproduce or resist extant inequities in the United States. Da Silva addresses this gap in the school design archive with a cross-disciplinary approach, taking to task the cultural consequences of the relationship between these two primary elements of teaching and learning in a ‘hotspot’ of American education—the nineteenth century. Providing a historical and theoretical framework for practitioners and scholars in evaluating the politics of modern American school design, the book holds a mirror to the oft-criticized state of American education today.


The Theory of Architecture

The Theory of Architecture

Author: Paul-Alan Johnson

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 1994-04-18

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 9780471285335

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The Theory of Architecture Concepts, Themes & Practices Paul-Alan Johnson Although it has long been thought that theory directs architectural practice, no one has explained precisely how the connection between theory and practice is supposed to work. This guide asserts that architectural theory does not direct practice, but is itself a form of reflective practice. Paul-Alan Johnson cuts through the jargon and mystery of architectural theory to clarify how it relates to actual applications in the field. He also reveals the connections between new and old ideas to enhance the reader's powers of critical evaluation. Nearly 100 major concepts, themes, and practices of architecture--as well as the rhetoric of architects and designers--are presented in an easily accessible format. Throughout, Johnson attempts to reduce each architectural notion into its essential concept. By doing so, he makes theory accessible for everyday professional discussion. Topics are arranged under ten headings: identification, definition, power, attitudes, ethics, order, authority, governance, relationship, and expression. Areas covered under these headings include: * Utopic thought in theories of architecture * Advocacy and citizen participation in architecture * The basis of architectural quality and excellence * The roles of the architect as artist, poet, scientist, and technologist * Ethical obligations of architecture * Rationales for models and methods of design * How authority is determined in architecture * How architects structure their concepts * Conventions of communication within the architectural profession Each section begins by showing the etymology of key terms of the topic discussed, along with a summary history of the topic's use in architecture. Discussions probe the conceptual and philosophical difficulties of different theories, as well as their potential and limitations in past and present usage. Among the provocative issues discussed in terms of their relationship to architecture are chaos theory, feminism, service to the community, and the use of metaphor. Johnson points out with stunning clarity the intentions as well as the contradictions and inconsistencies of all notions and concepts. All architects and designers, as well as students and teachers in these disciplines, will gain many insights about architectural thought in this groundbreaking text.