Vers une architecture


- bill 3-29-2007 7:10 pm [add a comment]

I like that photo of the hand caressing the tire.
- tom moody 3-29-2007 7:13 pm [add a comment]

steiglitz, o'keeffe: a portrait-hand and wheel, 1933


- bill 3-29-2007 7:18 pm [add a comment]

Thanks for the refresher--I knew it was canonical, just blanking on which maestro.
- tom moody 3-29-2007 7:51 pm [add a comment]

im trying to do this in a cut and paste fashion. to the point made in smiths book addressing kahns influence on bauhaus architecture :

speaking of kahn's chalmers motor car and packard buildings :

It is exactly this kind of building that le Courbusier celebrates as unauthored "vernacular" architecture in Vers une architecture.

To the Beaux Arts traditionalist, buildings like these so lacked ornament, and served such pedestrain purposes, that they scarcely qualified as archicture. To modernist purists such as Corbusier, they so lacked style that no profesional architect could have designed them; rather, they could only be spontaneous products of the American System of Manufactures, or the Machine Age. It did not occur to the European modernists that here were buildings fulfilling already the conditions for modern architecture which they were only then devising, and doing so in directly functional, rather than symbolically functional, ways.

Oh, Albert Kahn--I thought you meant Louis and it threw off my timeline.
- tom moody 3-29-2007 8:00 pm [add a comment]

right, albert kahn 1869-1942 not louis kahn 1901-1974. no relation.


- bill 3-29-2007 8:18 pm [add a comment]