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STIJL & THE MODERN MOVEMENT |
Form
follows function, and the aesthetic of the machine.
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"Contour and profile are a pure creation of the mind;
they call for the plastic art."
Le Corbusier
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Gerrit
Rietveld
Schroder House
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At
the turn of the century, technology and new industrial processes
were spreading; and in Europe designers were becoming attuned
to the possibilities of mass-produced well-designed products
as artists, architects and industry increasingly worked together.
By this time, the British Arts and Crafts movement
had reverted to a national style rather than an international
one. Designers there retained the hand-made, natural wood look
while elsewhere in Europe the materials and processes of mass
production being developed in the United States were seized
upon and the concept of ‘Functionalism’ was becoming an important
influence.
The concept was first expressed in the 19th century by an American
sculptor, Horatio Greenough who wrote a book Form and Function
which praised the design of machines, and was critical of decorated
products and architecture with ornamental facades. His enthusiasm
for an ‘engineers aesthetic’ was echoed in the words of Louis
Sullivan, an architect who at the turn of the century proclaimed:
"Form follows function".
At
that time in the United States, mechanised mass
production was encouraged, because cheap labour was scarce compared to the situation in Europe. Called the American system of manufacture,
it had greatly influenced the appearance of products and became
known as the Functionalist Tradition, where manufacturing
methods determined not only the means of production but also
the visual form of the products. A term applied to products
designed only for practical use, it became a central theme in
Modernism, namely the aesthetic of the machine.
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Henry
Ford in his car 1903
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In
architecture, Functionalism meant the elimination of
ornament so the building plainly expressed its purpose, and
the principle led to the idea of designing buildings from the
inside outwards, letting the essential structure dictate the
form and therefore its external appearance. Functionalist ideas
about design became the dominant design philosophy and language
of the first half of the century. Also known as ‘the machine
aesthetic’, it lasted up to the 1930s. The idea of design expressing
the function of the product was followed by Henry Ford whose
early cars also featured standardised parts and were made largely
by machines.
While the sophisticated production technologies
developing rapidly in America became dominant across the world,
it was in Europe where art and industry combined to create what
we now call industrial design; the design and development
of products we can use productively and view also as aesthetic
objects.
In 1909 Tomasso Marinetti, an Italian Futurist artist declared,
in his Manifesto of Futurism:
"We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been
enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car
whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive
breath - a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is
more beautiful than The Victory of Samothrace."
(Victory of Samothrace refers to a 200BC Greek sculpture
in the Louvre, Paris)
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Picasso
Guitar sculpture |
Futurism
was a movement in Italy which began in 1909. A literary and
art movement, the Futurists advocated new forms in art and architecture.
They sought the abandonment of historical themes in favour of
the new age of machines, particularly machines of speed
. . . cars, aeroplanes, even trams. This meant the destruction
of past ideas of beauty, in favour of the new world of urban
industrial culture. The Futurists combined their preoccupation
with speed with their aims to show dynamic multiple viewpoints
of the object. Their manifesto of 1910 declared:
"...we proclaim the absolute and complete abolition
of determined lines and closed statues. We split open the
figure and include the environment within it."
This parallelled developments in Paris at the time, where artists
Picasso and Braque, inspired by the 19th century painter Cezanne
were creating Cubism, an art style that would revolutionise
the world of art and design, removing naturalism from their
work, replacing it with their own coded, almost abstract shapes:
spheres, cylinders and cubes, which referred to how they perceived
the world in modern times, rather than what the world had always
'looked like'. They represented the world as an interlocking
pattern of geometric units, split views from different positions,
simultaneously depicted.
Cezanne had painted contours; not one line
but several in parallel as if when he shifted his head the contours
shifted relative to other shapes, the result being an dynamic
effect to his picture, a three dimensional recollection, sketched
not finished. He achieved it particularly well with fruit..
fragments that were like visual shorthand, his scribbled 'handwriting'
as it were, recognisable to all; but in the hands of the cubists
almost illegible to outsiders.
Picasso produced his Guitar which displayed
multiple views of the object, splitting it open, turning it
inside out.
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Sant'Elia
drawing
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The
Futurist architect Sant' Elia constructed only a few buildings
(he was killed on the battlefield in 1916) but his designs remained
extremely influential and his ideas for modern cities are still
used today. The steeply rising terraces, the balconies, and
the aerial bridges in his drawings conveyed the excitement of
modern technology.
He said:
"..I affirm that just as the ancients drew their inspiration
in art from the elements of the natural world, so we - materially
and spiritually artificial - must find our inspiration in
the new mechanical world we have created.."
He rejected the tradition of adding decoration to structure
saying that decoration as an element superimposed on architecture
was absurd, and that the decorative value of Futurist architecture
depended solely ‘on the use and original arrangement of raw
or bare or violently coloured materials’
Though he died in 1916, his drawings lived on and
were picked up, along with Futurist theories in 1917 by the
De Stijl group.
Dutch
for ‘The Style’ (pronounced the same), De Stijl took
its name from a magazine started by Theo van Doesburg which
ran from 1917 to 1928. Holland remained neutral during the 1914-18
war and avoided the catastrophic upheavals and production material
shortages that brought the development of design to a halt in
the rest of Europe.
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Theo
van Doesberg house design
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In
contrast to the noisy and passionate Futurists,
De Stijl were cool...
Rationalist,
abstract and enthralled by the machine, they rejected naturalism
in place of formal abstraction, and set out to create a universal
style in painting, architecture and design. They used rectangles
and squares in flat planes of bold primary colors, and black,
white and gray - all carefully arranged with straight lines.
They were concerned with depicting space, the space between
objects, and they gained inspiration from the Dutch architect
H.P. Berlage, an admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright, who said..
"The art of the master builder lies in this: the
creation of space, not the sketching of facades. A spatial
envelope is established by means of walls, whereby a space,
or a series of spaces is manifested, according to the complexity
of the walling."
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Frank
Lloyd Wright house
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Robert
van’t Hoff, a founder member, introduced Wright’s work to the
group, particularly his principles of composition, form, and
hovering roofs, having been to visit various Wright houses which
profoundly influenced his own designs.
Frank Lloyd Wright advocated the abandonment of historical architecture,
seeing the need to adopt a new style utilising modern materials,
steel and concrete and terra cotta, to create houses as sculpture.
To the European avant-garde, seeing the geometric forms
and spectacular cantilevers, Wright was a ‘machine architect’.
A protege of Louis Sullivan, Wright was a believer in Functionalism,
designing houses at the turn of the century in which large open
spaces, light and airy, dictated the exterior shape of the structure.
The furniture he designed for them showed Arts and Crafts influences
via C R Mackintosh, and this emphasis on the natural was reflected
in his aim to harmonise the house with its environment, enhancing
the concept of a house as shelter. Decoration was minimal, walls
left clear from the base to the eaves, for as he said:
"simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure
the true value of any work of art."
Wright's strong naturalistic streak was not apparent to the
members of De Stijl, who would have rejected it. They saw only
the images of his radical architecture which spoke to them of
machine aesthetics and geometry, not naturalism.
De Stijl as a movement also rejected the ‘individualism’ of
handcraft and decoration, believing these to be associated with
closure and limitation. Instead, they sought the opposite. Machine
production, abstraction, universalism were the way to achieve
clarity and order in design. These they believed could express
infinite space and undefined boundaries.
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Mondrian's
studio
(the flower was artificial)
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The
prime mover of the De Stijl movement was the radically abstract
painter Piet Mondrian. He created an entirely human-made reality
and his artistic theories, expounded in the magazine, became
De Stijl the movement. To Mondrian, red, yellow and blue were
the only colours, apart from black and white.
Yellow was expansive and vertical, blue the opposite
to yellow - soft, retiring, horizontal. Red expressed the radiating
movement of life, uniting yellow and blue in an ‘inner’ way,
unlike their common mixture, green.
Mondrian avoided the use of the colour green, because
of its association with nature, and contemporaries recall the
painter’s manouverings to avoid having to look out the window
at fields or trees. His paintings, with their asymmetrical black
lines looked like they were part of a larger environment. In
the 1920s he arranged square shapes painted in primary colours
around his studio and on his furniture, to extend the boundaries
of his picture so it would become an environment to live in,
not just to look at:
"The... picture will disappear as soon as we transfer
its plastic beauty to the space around us through the organization
of the room into colour areas."
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Mondrian
Composition in red and blue
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The
goal of the artist had always been to interpret and reveal a
natural order. Belief in a harmony created entirely by the artist/designer,
and faith in the redemptive power of technology became the main
principles of De Stijl.
The compelling geometric paintings of Piet Mondrian and
equally striking furniture of Gerrit Rietveld have become timeless
-classics of 20th-century design. Rietveld’s buffet from 1919
shows these principles of construction, the prevailing relationship
between line and plane, the qualities of lightness, and the
use of the module in construction.
Rietveld
said, about defining space:
"Scaling of undefined space to human proportions
may be achieved by a line drawn on..a floor, a wall,..a combination
of vertical and horizontal planes, curved or flat, transparent
or massive. It is never a partitioning or closing off, but
always a defining element of what is here and there, above
and below, between and around."
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Rietveld
buffet
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Originally
a qualified cabinet-maker, and a fervent believer in prefabrication,
he was a member of the group until 1930, by which time he was
working as an independent architect. He aimed to design furniture
for mass production that was cheap, that anyone could buy. From
a social point of view he wanted to relieve the factory labourer
from the boredom of hard and repetitive work, by means of machines.
His chair, made in 1917 was revolutionary. Rietveld conceived
this chair as separate constructions: the seat, the back, and
the supporting frame.
"The construction of the Red/Blue chair is based on
a module of 10 cm which corresponds approximately to the thickness
of three rails and this simple geometric construction is so
clear that the chair can be made without using any kind of
working drawings.
The rails are doweled together and the seat and the back are
fixed to the frame with screws.
...The chair was specifically built to show that it is possible
to create something beautiful, a spatial creation, with simple
machine- processed parts. I cut a board of wood into planks
and squares. I then sawed the middle part into two for the
seat and the backrest, and I made the frame part out of the
different lengths of plank.
But as I was working on the chair, it never crossed my mind
that one day it would become so significant that it would
even influence architecture."
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Gerrit
Rietveld
chair
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Rietveld’s
chair, an icon of modern design in its exploration of the nature
of space, introduced the most radical change in the language
of design for perhaps five hundred years. And its prototype
originally had enclosed armrests.
Originally stained a natural wood colour, Reitveld
painted his chair around 1923, in primary colours of red, yellow
and blue, in the mistaken belief that this triad of colours
was the basis of colour vision; the three receptors in the eye,
he believed, were sensitive to each of these colours. The painted
chair now looked like a painting, a Mondrian painting in primary
colours which became three dimensional.
In 1920, he designed the interior of a doctor’s clinic, creating
a light fitting that echoed the design principles of his furniture
with its intersecting lines. Sculptural in its brevity, it consisted
of several light bulbs suspended on their electrical wires that
conveyed the effect of mathematical coordinates floating in
space.
An architectural commission in 1924, the Schroder
House in Utrecht, was conceived in terms of straight lines and
rectangular planes, materialized in the form of slabs, posts
and beams. In it, Rietveld defined volume by planar, or flat
elements which are linked like playing cards slotted at their
intersections, but float, due to the separation of the planes.
Moving walls made it possible to partition the upper living
area into smaller rooms. The inside of the house had planes,
painted primary colours that continued the floating effect evident
in the exterior of the house, creating an environment that suggested
openness, harmony and the elimination of closure.
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Mart
Stam
cantilevered chair
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In
1926, Dutch architect Mart Stam, an associate of De Stijl and
later with the Bauhaus, produced the first cantilevered chair.
In this he developed the principle of an upright chair which
had a frame separate from the seat and back like Rietveld’s.
But it differed in the fact that it was not an armchair, and
it simplified the shapes into a horizontal and vertical like
the red/blue chair, but eliminated the separate supporting pieces,
being a continuous frame with fabric stretched across it. This
chair had a major influence and soon these cantilevered chairs
were being produced by other designers.
Rietvld produced his cantilevered Zig-Zag Chair
in 1934, the simplicity of it marked a radical departure from
his earlier furniture. He designed the zig-zag chair so that
it would remove a minimum of space from the volume of the room.
As with most of Rietveld's work its spatial characteristics,
especially lightness, weightlessness, are its most important
feature.
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Eileen
Grey
Transat armchair
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His
red/blue chair, as an armchair design was developed in other
materials by designers such as Marcel Breuer of the Bauhaus,
Le Courbusier and Eileen Gray.
Irish designer Eileen Gray met the De Stijl group
in 1922. This exposure resulted in a functional approach to
her furniture design, in which she concentrated on proportion
and symmetry, using new materials in refined designs such as
her transat armchair of 1929. Her best work was sparse,
with emphasis on vertical and horizontal lines.
"A house is a machine for living in."
Le Corbusier.
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Le
Corbusier
Villa Savoye
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The
quintessential modern designer of the period was Le Corbusier,
a Swiss architect who, born Charles Edouard Jeannet, became
the leader of the Modern Movement in architecture and design.
His buildings from the 1920s were typically white and flat roofed
in imitation of Meditteranean indigenous architecture , and
he achieved a simple purity of form in all his work.
After 1915 he began producing radical schemes for houses drawing
on ideas from industrial forms. In 1923 the first villa was
created according to his principles of architecture and in 1931
he created the Villa Savoye. Le Corbusier's early work
culminates in this villa. The rectangular house is supported
by slender steel columns and the nonstructural walls define
the space. Curving walls on the roof create a plastic, sculptural
look that contrasts with the floating plane that is the living
space, epitomising modern style, while performing the function
of shelter over the terrace within.
Like other Modernists he wanted to 'purify' architecture
of ornament to reveal the hidden structure and function of a
building. He made a virtue of simplicity. He designed using
basic forms- squares and rectangles, (later on, curves) - and
his building materials were concrete and steel.
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Le
Corbusier
Chaise Longue
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In
product design he is best known for his furniture, particularly
his grand confort armchair and his chaise longue.
The Chaise Longue of 1928 extended the construction
principles of Rietvelds red/blue chair, (its separation of seat
from frame) reworking it in metal and soft furnishings. An anti-Functionalist
and artist, Le Corbusier considered his creations in the domain
of visual arts of primary importance and proclaimed that his
architectural creations flowed from them.
"Profile and contour are the touchstone of the
Architect."
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Le
Corbusier
Grand Confort armchair
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In
the grand confort armchair, Le Corbusier created a piece
of sumptuous comfort, that at the same time conveyed meanings
of home, a house, a dwelling. He did this by enclosing the soft
furnishings within a wraparound metal frame, copying the traditional
huge Victorian armchair, but creating shapes that referred to
his houses.
"The business of Architecture is to establish emotional
relationships by means of raw materials. Architecture goes
beyond utilitarian needs... Passion can create drama out of
inert stone."
This, he said, is what defines an architect or designer as an
'artist or mere engineer.'
He was not only one of the three most influential
architects of this century (together with Frank Lloyd Wright
and Mies van der Rohe) but also an extremely gifted artist and
designer. Le Corbusier produced a considerable number of paintings,
sculptures, drawings, graphics, and even tapestries. After World
War II, Le Corbusier turned to a building style of organic forms
using deliberately rugged, crude and imprecise forms and surfaces.
A modernist designer for the luxury market, Le Corbusier represented
the visual branch of modernism, whereas his contemporary designers
at the Bauhaus at Weimar continued the thread of Arts and Crafts
philosophy of craft and affordable products - but using the
new materials, industrial processes and geometric styles of
the modern times.
QMR97
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