Bernie Gunther said:
There's another specific issue closely related to your previous point. In older buildings, the technology required to make changes is well within the grasp of the inhabitants. One of the reasons I describe much of modern architecture as alienating is that changes may requires technologies only affordable by large businesses.
This is most obviously true of prestigious 'prize' buildings, but also true to some extent of 'Barratt home' type buildings in many respects.
It often gets to me when people romaticise the idea of older buildings... It's not by any means simple refurbishing say an old thatched cottage. It's simply the fact that culturally and sociologically there was much more need for you to know how to repair your own house, so the skills were there from a young age. You also have to remember that with modern building there are a vast number of problems that have to be tackled - you could go and live in a cottage early 1800s style, but you would have no running water, electricity, sewage etc. Larger older bruildings are often structurally unsound and have to be rennovated periodically to bring them up to safety standards. They suffer from poor insulation and require a vast amount of energy to heat. You are kind of right about the feelings evoked by a home that is 'lived in', but I'll come back to that later.
dhimmi said:
Okay I get what you're saying now. I quite agree, modernist buildings don't seem to have much to do with either site or people and seem to have a scale related more to the largest piece of paper they could get on a drawing board than anything else.
I think I might start writing up more local buildings of interest, especially as I don't think anyone else will. I was happy as Larry to find a mistake in the Pugin Grange entry in Pevsner. If I can find it there's hope for all.
But this completely misses the point of moderism - unless you're thinking of the new wave of phallocentric commercial modernism, which is an altogether different beast than corbu etc. The moderism of the early 20th century is very much about the human - in fact it is arguably exclusively about the human, it's just that the human is approached in a more abstract way. Modernism has at its core a desire to create a habital but efficient space - the flow and passage of the human is dictated by the architecture, it is designed purely to fulfil its purpose in the most efficient way possible. To go back to the example of a thatched cottage, a dwelling like that is all very well if you spend most of your time in working outdoors and really just use it for cooking and sleeping but in a modern environment - where people often want to work from home and have more leisure time to spend reading etc - it is a very poor design... Very little natural light, not much control over your local environment (in terms of temperature etc) and, to be honest, no-one reallly wants to have to rebuild bits of their house on a regular basis.
Early modernism fails to an extent because of its lack of connection with the actual person though... It fails to recognise the human as an individual and rather regards them as a conceptual entity - you could draw a parrallel with communism and its failures at the same time. Ideas that work in theory but are very much harder to put into practice. This is where critical regionalism comes in... Essentially the desire to in some way reflect the materials and feelings of the traditional techniques and culture of the area, but to adapt them to a modern environment. Alvar Aalto is probably the key exponent here - extensive use of natural light, use of textures in response to touch, sight etc and use of materials to reduce the impact of environmental factors (eg leather over a brass door handle in the Viipuri libray). Scarpa is the king of detailing though, right down to the sound steps make when you walk on them. Check out the Brion family tomb, the Castelvecchio museum, the Canova museum (in Venice, designed to allow floodwaters in) or the ottolenghi house.
The thing about modernism is that it is designed so you don't actually notice the effect it has on you - the complex modulation of natural light may not be something you pick up on, but it's absolutely key to comfortable living and is a fundamental concept throught the work of corbu, Aalto, Scarpa et al. By contrast older buildings are often terrible for this - it's not exactly through any fault of their own, it's just that adding any sort of transparency will tend to radically reduce any control over internal environment.
Err... anyway, this is a massive derail from the original point of the thread and I'll stop now...
youse woouldn't belive me!
