Учебное пособие 85

Cubism and his use of collage. This … (to instigate) an intense interest in not only the art styles making their way across Europe, but also in dealing for the first time with the space around the art as an element in its own right.

This would later become a real obsession with the Constructivists. Many experiments would be made with presence and lack of presence of any given material, and in various conditions. They … (to work) in the years 1917 until 1920, and they … (to make) sculptures from glass, wood and plastic that hung down from the ceiling. In relation to the industrial changes going on, this group … (to desire) to make art that … (to reflect) the times. In 1920 Gabo … (to publish) his ‘Realistic Manifesto’ that would later influence many other artistic groups working in Europe . Unlike Tatlin, who would become a devotee of the Russian Revolution and all it stood for, Gabo … (to believe) that art should have a tangible function in society, and that this function should remain entirely independent from the social or political values of its day. Tatlin would go own to produce art that glorified the socialist values of Stalin's oppressive dogma, though his fascination for space would find a new outlet in the form of architecture. As for Gabo's theory, the De Stijls in Holland would be greatly influenced by it, in Germany the Bauhaus school … (to begin) to teach the text and in France the ‘Abstraction-creation’ group … (to adopt) the Constructivism creed. The art … (to be) meant to be non-figurative and reminiscent in shape of industrial characteristics.

VI. Ask your group-mate to tell you about Vladimir Tatlin’s monument to the Third International; the Workers club by Konstantin Melnikov, Le Corbusier’s project of the Ministry of Central Economic Planning and other architectural products of Constructivism.

UNIT 3

The International style.

Grammar: Modal Verbs.

Read the text and speak about the main characteristics of international style.

THE INTERNATIONAL STYLE

In 1932 American architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and American architect Philip Johnson wrote a highly influential catalog to accompany an exhibition of architectural photographs and models at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In the catalog ‘International Style: Architecture Since 1922’ the authors outlined what they saw as the characteristics of the new architecture: an emphasis on volume, not mass; on regularity, not symmetry; on proportions and sleek, technical perfection rather than ornament; and a preference for elegant materials that included those of the machine age. Republished many times as a

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book, International Style became a bible of modern architecture, a doctrine against which all contemporary architecture could be measured. Attempting to bring order to a confusing group of architectural styles, the authors however had not intended to lay down any laws.

Early in his career, Hitchcock had distinguished between architects he described as new traditionalists, who simplified ornament but generally accepted historical traditions, and new pioneers, who eliminated historical references and ornament from their work and emphasized planes and space. The International Style exhibition, however, focused only on the new pioneers, and architects and historians took that style to be the heart of modernism, to the exclusion of many other innovative modern buildings.

The catalog of International Style architecture included few examples from the United States, and those few were mainly the work of Europeans who had immigrated to the United States. Thus, it included the Lovell Beach House (1926, Newport Beach, California), a reinforced concrete structure with flat roof and bold cantilevered elements by Austrian-born architect Rudolph Schindler. And for the same client, the Lovell House (1929, Los Angeles, California) by Richard Neutra, also of Austria, which featured a flat roof, slender steel frame, and freely arranged interior plan. But the catalog ignored the Austrians’ debt to the pioneering work of American architect Irving Gill, in the La Jolla Women's Club (1914, La Jolla, California) and Dodge House (1916, Los Angeles). Gill's spare, smooth concrete walls, flat roofs, and asymmetrically arranged rooms were unquestionably modern and were not matched in Europe until the mid-1920s.

Perhaps the gravest omission was the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose designs had inspired many European architects. Yet his opposition to the thin, transparent walls of international style buildings ruled him out. In retrospect, Wright's Fallingwater (1937, Bear Run, Pennsylvania) seems like a brilliant response to that slight. The house is built over a waterfall; cantilevered slabs of concrete jut out over a rushing stream just where it becomes a waterfall. The chimney and rugged stone supporting piers intersect the cantilevers to form vertical counterpoints to these horizontals. Wright's daring use of materials in this profoundly modern house expresses his insistence on an architecture that is at one with nature and with its particular site.

The term International Style came to refer generally to modern European architecture of the 1920s and 1930s, and the later architecture that it influenced. In the United States, this style dominated progressive architectural design well into the 1960s. Its spread was assisted by the presence of many European architects who had fled European dictatorships during the 1930s.

The steel-framed high-rise best expresses the later International Style and is exemplified by the steel and glass Lake Shore Drive Apartments (1948-1951) in Chicago by Mies van der Rohe. Other notable International Style towers include the Equitable Life Assurance building (1944-1947) in Portland, Oregon, by Italianborn architect Pietro Belluschi; the Lever House (1951-1952) in New York City by

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the American architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill; and the bronze and glass Seagram Building (1958) in New York City by Mies van der Rohe with Philip Johnson. Whereas skyscrapers of the 1930s commonly had setbacks at their upper stories to permit light to reach the street, this new generation of skyscrapers consisted of uncompromising slabs that rose with unadorned severity to increasingly greater heights, celebrating technological sophistication and the power of American corporations.

Although New York and Chicago are known as the chief skyscraper cities, modern skyscrapers appeared in most large American cities from the 1960s on. Notable examples are the Transamerica Pyramid (1972, San Francisco, California) by William Pereira and Associates; the 60-story John Hancock Tower (1976, Boston, Massachusetts) by I. M. Pei & Partners; and Pennzoil Place (1976, Houston, Texas) by Philip Johnson and John Burgee.

High-rises and skyscrapers enhanced another trend in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s: urban renewal. The strategy behind urban renewal was the replacement of run-down housing and shabby retail areas with new office buildings, shopping areas, and townhouse and apartment complexes. But in the process, urban renewal destroyed small-scale urban housing and retail districts and moved low-income residents out of the inner city. City planners, politicians, and architects achieved the pristine sidewalks and cityscapes they sought, the machineinspired ideal of Le Corbusier and his followers. But by the 1980s many had begun to realize that cities had lost their street life and with it their sense of community as an unintended consequence of urban renewal.

Vocabulary

bible – "библия"

cantilevered – заделанный одним концом; консольный to eliminate – исключать, игнорировать

exclusion – исключение

low-income – с низким доходом, низкодоходный to measure – измерять, мерить

to outline - обрисовать, наметить в общих чертах

renewal – обновление, восстановление, реконструкция, реставрация setback - пологий выступ в стене

shabby – захудалый, бедный, запущенный sophistication - изысканность, утонченность

I. Answer the following questions:

1.What did the authors outline in the catalog ‘International Style: Architecture Since 1922’?

2.When did this style develop?

3.What did the International Style exhibition focus on?

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II.Find eight typical characteristics of International Style:

square or rectangular footprint

is based on mathematical geometric shapes

simple cubic ‘extruded rectangle’ form

windows running in broken horizontal rows forming a grid

strong contrasts of light and shadow

undulating walls and decorative surface elements

all facade angles are 90 degrees.

curving, plant-like embellishments

III.Find in the text synonyms to the following verbs:

to size

to try to

to approve

to take

to ignore

to improve

IV. Fill in the gaps with words from the text:

1.The authors of the catalog ‘International Style: Architecture Since 1922’ outlined the characteristics of the new architecture: an emphasis on …, regularity, proportions and …, technical … and a preference for elegant … that included those of the machine age.

2.Hitchcock simplified … but generally accepted historical traditions.

3.The catalog of International Style architecture included the Lovell Beach House, a … structure with flat roof and bold … elements by Austrian-born architect Rudolph Schindler.

4.The steel-framed high-rise best expresses the later International Style and is exemplified by the … and … Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago by Mies van der Rohe.

5.High-rises and skyscrapers enhanced another trend in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s: urban … .

6.By the 1980s many architects had begun to realize that cities had lost their … and with it their sense of … as an unintended consequence of urban renewal.

V. a) Study the following:

We use can to say that something is possible or that somebody has the ability to do something.

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We use can + infinitive (can build / can destroy):

We can see the lake from our bedroom window.

The negative is can’t (=cannot):

I can’t come to the meeting on Friday.

Can has only two forms, can (present) and could (past). Sometimes it is necessary to use (be) able to:

I haven’t been able to sleep recently.

We use must and have to to say that it is necessary to do something:

You must meet her. I have to wear glasses for reading.

You mustn’t do something = it is necessary that you do not do it (so, don’t do it). You don’t have to do something = you don’t need to do it (but you can if you want).

Should is not as strong as must:

You should do something = it is a good thing to do or the right thing to do.

You can use should to give advice or to give an opinion.

We use may and might to talk about possible actions or happenings in the future:

I haven’t decided yet where to spend my holidays. I may go to Ireland. Take an umbrella with you when you go out. It might rain later.

b) Choose the right variants of the verb form, translate the sentences:

1. The plan … practical if it is to become a reality.

4. The choice of materials … .

5. No one … what his next buildings may look like.

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VI. Your friend has just visited Chicago and New York. He is eager to tell you about his impressions. Ask him to describe the skyscraper cities.

UNIT 4

Postmodernism and diversity.

Grammar: Revision: Present Simple, Past Simple, Present Perfect (Active and Passive).

Read the text and speak about the postmodernism and diversity.

POSTMODERNISM AND DIVERSITY

While the International Style continued to dominate the world of architecture through the 1960s, only in the 1970s did it become apparent that the International Style and modern architecture were not necessarily the same. Indeed, the work of such diverse architects as Aalto, Barragán, Tange, and many others reveals that modern architecture has never been limited to a single style. Among the architects who produced important variants are Pier Luigi Nervi and Aldo

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Rossi of Italy, and Louis Kahn of the United States. Nervi’s vast airplane hangars (1936-1941) and sports arenas (1932, Florence; 1960, Rome) demonstrate the pure poetry of modern forms in reinforced concrete. At the other end of the spectrum, the Torre Velasca in Milan, Italy (1958) by the Italian architectural firm Banfi, Belgiojoso, Peressutti and Rogers (BBPR) reveals the resilient appeal of medieval tower design transformed into a 20th-century skyscraper. Rossi and Kahn explored the architectural potential of elementary building blocks, drawn from history as well as from the geometry of the cube, sphere, and cylinder. This approach is exemplified by Kahn’s highly original designs from the 1960s for government buildings in Dhaka, the capitol of Bangladesh. While clearly modern, Rossi’s and Kahn’s architecture was rooted in a respect for older traditions, which they transformed through new combinations into highly personal poetic statements. This is especially visible in Rossi’s Bonnefanten Museum (1990) in Maastricht, Netherlands, and in Kahn’s Salk Institute (1959-1965) in La Jolla, California.

In the 1970s a new movement known as Postmodernism began to challenge long-held modernist principles. The architects who led the movement asserted that the use of historical references in architecture was not only permissible but desirable. To the dictum of Mies van der Rohe, 'Less is more,' American architect and leading postmodernist Robert Venturi replied, 'Less is a bore.' Arguing that the modernist aesthetic was stifling to creativity, disliked by the masses, and uninteresting to design, postmodern architects celebrated diversity, color, and historical references in their designs. Venturi articulated many of these ideas in his 1966 book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Other leading voices of postmodernism include Americans Charles Moore, Robert A. M. Stern, Michael Graves, and Frank Gehry. Moore's design for the Piazza d'Italia (1975-1978) in New Orleans, Louisiana, is a boldly colored, open-air plaza celebrating the city’s Italian community, for which Moore playfully arranged fragments of classical columns and other traditional forms, along with images drawn from a delicatessen.

Graves’s design for the Portland Public Services Building (1982) in Portland, Oregon, is a striking example of postmodernist architecture. Garlands over windows, a giant keystone, and a statue of a mythical figure adorn this 15story celebration of color and ornament. Surrounded by modernist high-rise towers of steel and glass, Graves’s building is a startling insertion in the cityscape and a strong statement against the austere terms of modern architecture.

One of the most exuberant expressions of postmodern freedom came in the design of the Guggenheim Museum (1997) in Bilbao, Spain, by Frank Gehry. The originality of its undulating metal forms relate to the organic expressionism of Antoni Gaudí’s designs of a century earlier, also in the Catalan region of northern Spain.

But even as postmodernism thrived, modernism did not disappear. The dramatic and elegantly understated Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) by American architect Maya Lin dates from the same year as Graves’s Portland

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Building. Another premier example of modernism, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, by American architect Richard Meier, was completed the following year. Meier went on to design the Getty Center for the Arts and Humanities (1997, Los Angeles, California), a paragon of elegantly spare modernist design. Indeed, variety is the most consistent characteristic of the architecture built since the emergence of postmodernism in the 1970s.

In the 1980s a variation on postmodernism emerged, known as deconstruction, which sought to demonstrate the arbitrariness of all previous cultural assumptions. Deconstructivist architects applied these analytical, abstract ideas to the design of buildings. Leading practitioners included Zaha Hadid of England, Peter Eisenman of the United States, and Swiss-born architect Bernard Tschumi. In Eisenman’s design for the Wexner Center for the Arts (1989) in Columbus, Ohio, the architect used local conditions in generating a seemingly arbitrary mechanism to govern his design. One wall of the art center is aligned with an adjacent building, another wall with a nearby football gridiron, and a third with the flight path of planes that regularly pass overhead. After a brief flurry of interest in the late 1980s, interest in deconstruction faded, and only a handful of buildings were ever constructed to represent it.

Much more significant, in the United States and in the rest of the world, was a resurgence of interest in regional traditions and materials, and a greater willingness to meld features of rationalist modernism with elements from many other traditions, especially vernacular architecture. Emblematic of this is the work of Antoine Predock in the American Southwest. In his Nelson Fine Arts Center (1989) in Tempe, Arizona, Predock presents a modern vision inspired by the warm colors, stucco surfaces, and square cutout windows of local Spanish and Native American traditions. Others who approach architecture with a comparable openness to historical and local practices and produce designs of extraordinary sensitivity include Sam Mockbee in Alabama; Carlos Jiménez, a Costa Rican architect based in Texas; Enrique Norten in Mexico; Liangyong Wu in Beijing, China; and Ada Karmi-Melamede in Israel. Their work points toward an architecture that focuses less on debates among competing movements and more on buildings that are economical, environmentally responsible, and beautiful.

Vocabulary

diversity – разнообразие, многообразие flurry – вспышка или волна возбуждения football gridiron – футбольное поле hangar – ангар

paragon – образец, модель совершенства resilient – пружинистый, упругий, эластичный resurgence – возрождение, восстановление seemingly - на вид, по внешнему виду

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I. Answer the following questions:

1.How can you characterize the Postmodernism?

2.What variation of postmodernism emerged in the 1980s?

3.What ideas to the design of buildings did deconstructivist architects apply?

II. Read the text again and find out if the following statements are true or false:

1.In the 1970s it became apparent that the International Style and modern architecture were necessarily the same.

2.Nervi’s vast airplane hangars and sports arenas demonstrate the pure poetry of modern forms in reinforced concrete.

3.In the 1970s a new movement known as postmodernism began to challenge long-held modernist principles.

4.Postmodern architects celebrated monotony, color, and historical references in their designs.

5.Graves’s design for the Portland Public Services Building (1982) in Portland, Oregon, is a striking example of international architecture.

6.In the 1980s a variation on postmodernism emerged, known as deconstruction.

III.Find in the text antonyms to the following words:

invisible

dirty

unlawful

interesting

repulsive

tiny

to become extinct

to appear

to begin

degeneration

unavailability

foreigner

to keep back

ugly

IV. Choose the right form of verb (present simple, past simple, present perfect, active or passive):

1. The work of such diverse architects as Aalto, Barragán, Tange, and many others reveals that modern architecture … to a single style.

a) has never been limited

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b)have never been limited

c)never limited

2.Among the architects who produced important variants … Pier Luigi Nervi and Aldo Rossi of Italy, and Louis Kahn of the United States.

a) is b) are c) were

3.Nervi’s vast airplane hangars and sports arenas … the pure poetry of modern forms in reinforced concrete.

a) demonstrated b) demonstrates c) demonstrate

4.Rossi and Kahn … the architectural potential of elementary building blocks, drawn from history as well as from the geometry of the cube, sphere, and cylinder.

a) explore b) explored

c) have explored

5.Rossi’s and Kahn’s architecture … in a respect for older traditions.

a)has rooted

b)rooted

c)was rooted

6.In the 1970s a new movement known as Postmodernism … to challenge long-held modernist principles.

a) began

b) was begun c) begins

7.The architects who led the movement asserted that the use of historical references in architecture … not only permissible but desirable.

a) was b) were c) is

8.But even as postmodernism thrived, modernism … .

a)does not disappear

b)has not disappeared

c)did not disappear

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