´Ornament and Crime´, ´Toward an Architecture´ and ´Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture´

Three texts that changed the way was seen and produced architecture.

As Alan Colquhoun annotate in his book Modern Architecture (2002), already in the early nineteen century, there was wide dissatisfaction with eclecticism among architects, historians, and critics. This justifieshistory of modern architecture concerned primarily with reformist, ´avant-garde´ tendencies, rather than one that attempt to deal with the whole of architectural production as if it operatedwithin a non-ideological, neutral field.

Loos´s conception of adornment.

Beginning with Ornament and Crime (1910) , the first of these texts, is important to mention that Adolf Loos (1870-1933) occupies a unique place in the history of modern architecture. He was not only a powerful thinker able to expose the contradictions of contemporary theory but an architect whose work was provocative and highly original. His undoubtedly influence on the succeeding generation of architects, particularly Le Corbusier, was enormous and his ideas have, through successive reinterpretations, maintained their relevance to the present day.

In his essay ´Ornament and Crime´ he claimed that the elimination of ornament from useful objects was the result of a cultural evolution leading to the abolition of waste from human labour. This process reduces the time spent on manual labour and releasing energy for the life of the mind.

Externally, Loos´s architecture were cubes without ornament. In reducing the outside to the barest expression of technique, Loos was making a conscious analogy with modern urban man. But once he has penetrated the external wall, this ´man of nerves´ who is protecting himself from the stress of the modern metropolis, is enmeshed in a ´feminine´ and sensors complexity. The disjunction between the inside and the outside echoes Loos´s concept of an irrevocable split in modernity between tradition and the modern techno-scientific world -between lived-in ´place´ (Out) and calculated ´space´ (Raum)

Le Corbusier and Modern Architecture manifesto

After the war of 1914-18 there was a strong reaction in artistic circles in France against the anarchy and uncontrolled experimentalism of the pre-war avant-gardes. There was a little architectural activity in France until 1923, and architects were largely restricted to the design of private dwellings. However, a development of the French avant-garde emerged from this situation with Le Corbusier as its most creative and energetic representative.

Charles Eduard Jeanneret (1887-1965), later known as le Corbusier, received his training in the school of arts and crafts at La Chaux-de-Fonds in French Switzerland, where he learnt the watch engraving and was persuaded to become an architect. After a few months work with August Perret in Paris (1908) and in 1910 with Peter Behrens in Germany, he then travelled to Istambul and Athens where he was caught between his love of the ´feminine´ vernacular arts of eastern Europe and Istambul, and his admiration for the ´masculine´ classicism of ancient Greece, which he identified with the spirit of modern rationalism.

Toward an Architecture is a book composed of a series of articles that had appeared previously in the periodical L´Esprit Nouveau with some new elements added. It is Le Corbusier´s main manifesto published in 1923 in Paris, which changed the way of teaching and make architecture since then. His magistral phrase: “Architecture is the masterful, correct, and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light” synthesized the significance of architecture. At the end, Le Corbusier makes a call of attention saying that modern life demands and expects a new plan for the house and for the city.

Architecture in America after WWII

After the Second World War the situation changed radically. America emerged from the war as the dominant power and as the creditor of an impoverished and ruined Europe. In the welfare state economies of post-war Europe modern architecture became the norm for public projects meanwhile in America the most vital developments in modern architecture were in the private sector.

That was the époque where ´Complexity and Contradiction´ was written a book that is Venturi's questions about the purist architectural design thinking advocated by modernist architecture at the time and the solution to contradictions. He made a definition of architecture, and put forward some methods to weaken and eliminate the complexities and contradictions generated in the process of architectural design. In the last chapter, Venturi showed a series of his works and used it as an example to show how he designed complex and contradictory modern buildings, and how to use his own theory to solve the contradictions that appeared… "But architecture is necessarily complex and contradictory in its very inclusion of the traditional Vitruvian elements of commodity, firmness, and delight." [Robert Venturi 1966, p.13]