http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/03/why-is-green-architecture-ugly.php
Treehugger ask a crucial question: Why is so much green architecture ugly?
Probably because aesthetics has to follow the green function.
Is it even possible to produce an architecture that looks good and is 'sustainable'? Probably not.
Sunday 17 October 2010
Friday 15 October 2010
Modern Art, Modern Architecture and a lack of beauty: Daily Mail
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1231948/Why-sordid-art-like-Tracey-Emins-led-cult-ugliness-Britain.html
According to the Daily Mail's writer, Roger Scruton, there is a cult of ugliness in Britain (Daily Mail, 02 December 2009).
Of course, Modern architecture is cited as being one of the high priests of this new faith,
"The lapse into ugliness is nowhere more apparent or more intrusive than in the desolate city centres produced by modern architects."
According to the Daily Mail's writer, Roger Scruton, there is a cult of ugliness in Britain (Daily Mail, 02 December 2009).
Of course, Modern architecture is cited as being one of the high priests of this new faith,
"The lapse into ugliness is nowhere more apparent or more intrusive than in the desolate city centres produced by modern architects."
Saturday 9 October 2010
Marcel Breuer
Writing for the Architectural Review in 1935 Marcel Breuer attempted to set the record straight in his article, “Where do we Stand?”.
He discusses his admiration for ‘peasant’ and ‘vernacular’ culture, the associations connected to the word, ‘revolution’ and rebuffed claims that Modern Architecture is “cold, hard, empty-looking, ultra-logical, unimaginative and mechanistic in every detail” with, “whoever thinks so has either only seen the worst examples of modern architecture, or else has had no opportunity to live in or make closer inspection of the best”[1]. Whilst in later times he may have been accused of being a ‘formalist’, he goes on to describe some key principles of what modern meant to him,
“we have no use for beauty in the form of a foreign body, of ornament, or of a titivating of undesigned structural elements; nor even as an arbitrary magnification of certain dimensions, a purely transient vogue. We have no use for architecture that is labelled symbolist, cubist, neoplastic or ‘constructivist’. We know that the essential and determining elements of a building can be wholly rational without this rationalisation in any way affecting the question of whether it is beautiful or ugly”[2].
If only Marcel. We cannot help ourselves when it comes to judging architecture.
If only Marcel. We cannot help ourselves when it comes to judging architecture.
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