Meanwhile, architecture, which has always been concerned with urban issues, looked away from stereotomy and classical principles of architectonics to think about new means of construction inspired by engineering and new material technologies. From modernism to the international style, new structural forms presented themselves physically, materially, and optically ‘light’. Philip Johnson and Richard Foster’s Glass House ,1949, intellectually rooted in German Glasarchitektur of the 1920s, appears both as a seminal statement and the most representative example of this trend of de-materialisation. The Glass House assesses the possibility of an openness to the environment, stressing the lightness of visible supporting structures that blur the line between the inside and outside. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House , built between 1945 and 1951, is a further dematerialisation, a system of piles making the house look as if it is levitating, independent of its topographic locality — all in opposition to vernacular architecture strongly rooted in a place and in activities related to the resources of a specific environment, such as farming, which induces a particular mentality and social relations. Of course, such radical proposals didn’t make a school given that, along with technical problems, they clearly challenge a deeply-rooted need for privacy and the invisibility permitted by opaque walls. Such work remains as a theoretical model for dwelling in a very hypothetical future. The Glass House couldn’t have been built in an urban environment; the forest surroundings in New Canaan, Connecticut makes it the modernist version of the country house.
Theodor Nelson pronounced the term hypertext during a conference in 1963. More than a simple word, it conveyed the concept of a whole ‘new world vision’ 1 on which the World Wide Web built itself, a construction allowed by accelerated innovation in communication technologies; in 1967 Marshall McLuhan coined the expression global village and in 1969 Neil Armstrong took the first picture of Earth from another planet. The Civil Rights Movement, protest against the Viet Nam war, feminism — at the end of the 1960s America entered a period of consciousness of planet Earth as a global, ecological, economical, geopolitical system with a pressing need for change, for replacement of inadequate old administrative, technical and intellectual structures. In the field of visual arts, conceptual art gained importance. John Chandler and Lucy Lippard explained it in their famous 1968 article ‘The Dematerialization of Art’ published in Art International : this tendency gave more importance to ideas than to materials and used informational means (text, schemes, photography as a simple tool for representation rather than a skill) to permit the artistic fact to exist in the beholder’s brain. Channels and methods of conceptual art were chosen for their ability to inform, not for their own material value, recalling the two slogans of modernist architecture: ‘form follows function’ and ‘less is more’. Urbanism was closely concerned with these needs. Melvin Webber, in a special issue of Daedalus devoted to urbanism linked to social issues, proposed that maybe the model of the city delineated by Lewis Mumford was at an end. This Post-City Age goes along with the end of the industrial era, which whereby the close gathering of workers near the means
1 Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells’s The Rise of the Network Society , first published in 1996, remains the most insightful study on the way the idea of network infiltrated all aspects of human activity.
François Dallegret Power Membrane house, 1965
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Dessin au trait sur film translucide et texte sur acétate transparent, 50.9 x 101.5 cm. inv. 005 12 06
all images: Photographie : François Lauginie, Collection FRAC Centre, Orléans
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