WORK COUNCIL FOR ART

Goals:

        Mounting of constantly changing exhibitions made to serve the interest of the people by means of lectures and conducted tours.

Constant contact with the leaders of the crafts and industries of the country. contact with public life, with the people, through exhibitions and other activities. New research into the nature of the exhibitions, to solve the problem of displaying visual work and sculpture within the framework of architecture.

Bruno Taut 1919

WHERE DO WE STAND?

We are not out to create something new, but something suitable, intrinsically right and as relatively perfect as may be. We seek what is definite and real whether old or new. Modern architecture is original when it provides a complete solution of the difficulty concerned.

Marcel Breuer 1935

LANGUAGE OF VISION

Technological discoveries have extended and reshaped the physical environment. They have changed our visual surrounding partly by actually rebuilding the physical environment, and partly by presenting visual tools that are of assistance to our discernment of those phases of the visible world, which were previously, too small, too fast, too large, or too slow for us to comprehend.

To orient oneself in walking requires a different spatial measurement than is required in riding in a motorcar or in an airplane. To grasp spatial relationships and orient oneself in a metropolis of today, along the intricate dimensions of streets, subways, elevated, and skyscrapers. Requires a new way of seeing. Widening horizons, and the new dimensions of the visual environment necessitate new idioms of spatial measurement and communications of space. The visual image of today must come to terms with all this: it must evolve a language of space, which is adjusted to the new standards of experience. This new language can and will enable the human sensibility to perceive space-time relationships that weren’t recognized before.

Gyorgy Kepes 1944

SURVIVAL THROUGH DESIGN

The confused wreckage of centuries, unrelated to any current practical purpose, is mixed in a most disturbing manner with our often feeble, often arbitrary, attempts at creating order.

Richard Neutra 1954

MOBILE ARCHITECTURE

The spatial city is a result of urban indeterminacy; that is to say, the spatial city has no plan to flow, with the exception of the infrastructure (it therefore permits all possible transformations). The volumes that create the spaces of the spatial city are not arranged in advance; they continually change over time.


YONA FRIEDMAN 1959 

BASIC VALUES

To discover anew implies discovering something new. Translate this into architecture and you’ll get new architecture – real contemporary architecture. Architecture is a constant rediscovering of constant human proportion translated into space.  We must evolve a richer toll – a more effective way of approach – to solve the environmental problems our period poses today. These problems will not remain the same, but they concern the same man, and that is our cue.

Aldo Van Eyck 1959

INTENTIONS IN ARCHITECTURE

How does architecture influence us? If we take this point of departure, architecture has not only an instrumental purpose, but also a psychological function. We do know that we might have very different experiences although the surroundings remain the same. A known object may suddenly appear completely different, and we may seem that we have become alive to another of its aspects. Architects need training in how to experience architecture.


Christian Norberg-Schulz 1963

SYNTHESIS OF FORM

I wish to state my belief in this loss of innocence very clearly. There has already been one loss of innocence in recent history of design; the discovery of machine tools to replace hand craftsmen. Now we are at a second watershed. This time the loss of innocence is intellectual rather than mechanical.  Enormous resistance to the idea of systematic processes of design is coming form people who recognize correctly the importance of intuition.

Christopher Alexander 1964

TRADITION

Seek to establish an interpretation of tradition that will recognize our debt to the past without establishing the past as an authority.

Standford Anderson

Architecture and Tradition 1964

THE IMAGE OF A CITY

The designer must therefore create a city which is as richly provided with paths, edges, landmarks, nodes, and districts as possible, a city which makes use of not just one or two form qualities, but of all of them.


Kevin Lynch

TWENTY MINUTES IN MANHATTAN

Incompatibility can be descried formally, as in limits to size or style, or functionally, as in limitations on absolutely or situationally defined obnoxious uses like loud nightclubs in residential areas and nuclear plants downtown.

Intense layering in the village that include old fabric, alterations caused by among other things, the interpolation of tenements and apartment buildings in presenting and pre preservation days, remnants of industrial waterfront, excisions by urban renewal, corridors carved by the insertion of avenues and subways, the presence of specialized institutions, and the effects of the progressive movement with intensifying commercial presence. Byproduct of shifts in population, waves of rich people, immigrants, students, and others who have left there mark on its culture and physiognomy.

The train and limited access highway produced structural discontinuities that further reinforced the possibility for hierarchy and division.

Michael Sorkin

Interesting thoughts on experiences in the current city dealing with discontinuities, obnoxious noise, incompatibility, remnants, and intense layering.

ANTONIO SANT'ELIA

And I oppose:

Classical, solemn, hieratic, scenographic, decorative, monumental, graceful, and pleasing architecture;

Embalming, rebuilding, reproducing monuments;

Perpendicular and horizontal lines, cubical and pyramidal forms that are static, grave, oppressive, and wholly incompatible with our ultra-new sensibility

And I declare:

That real architecture is not for these reasons an arid combination of practicality and utility, but remains art, that is, synthesis, expression

From the Messaggio 1914

OTTO WAGNER

“Let us look at the works of art of past centuries. From antiquity to the renaissance-even to the empire of our century-the work has always been a reflection of its time. And precisely herein lies the secret. Art and artists should and must represent their time. The salvation of the future cannot lie in racing through every stylistic trend, as has happened in the last decades.”

From the Inaugural Address to the Academy of Fine Arts 1894

CHALLENGE THE WAY YOU SEE

"Its not until you challenge the way you see the world that you learn to see it differently."

- Bobby VanB, Illustrator

COOP HIMMELB(L)AU

Conceptual Model for the Heart of a City (Master Plan) - Melun-Senart, France

Model of Skyline - Silhouette for a city like Hamburg

JVC - New Urban Entertainment Center

Guadalajara, Mexico

Section of Rooftop Remodel Showing Conference Room

Rooftop Remodelling Falkestrasse

Vienna, Austria

Museum of Confluences Model

Lyon, France

UFA Cinema Center

Dresden, Germany

Open House, California

"Coop Himmelblau is an idea of creating architecture with fantasy, as buoyant and variable as clouds."

"Architecture has to react to our movements, feelings, moods, emotions, so that we want to live within it."

"We want architecture that has more. Architecture that bleeds, that exhausts, that whirls, and even breaks. Architecture that lights up stings, rips, and tears under stress. ARchitecture has to be cavernous, fiery, smooth, hard, angular, brutal, round, delicate, colorful, obscene, lustful, dreamy, attracting, repelling, wet, dry, and throbbing. Alive or dead. If cold, then cold as a block of ice. If hot, then hot as a blazing wing. Architecture must blaze."

"The differentiated spatial situations no longer separate - at most, they present the challenge of taking possession of the space."

"The development of architecture is furthered by strategies comprising searching for lines and fields of possibilities tied together by chance, anti-logic, and anti-authority."

"Architecture is now."

THE ACT OF SEEING

"Quality of life is a result of lack of planning."


-Wim Wenders

MAYNE

"Your work is messy and idiosyncratic. Not subject to being organized under one system. It is, rather, capable of generating material for new methods and further trajectories."

- Thom Mayne

FOREVER UNINTELLIGIBLE

"We must have strong upright works, precise, and forever unintelligible."

- Tristan Tzara

MARINETTI

"Except in struggle there is no beauty."

- Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

MADMAN

"We declare that the name of "madman" with which it is attempted to gag all innovators should be looked upon as a title of honour."

- Umberto Boccioni