Towards Universality: Le Corbusier, Mies and De Stijl

by Padovan; Richard

• ISBN13: 9780419240303
• ISBN10: 0419240306
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2002-03-22
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The book's central theme is the striving for universality as opposed to the individual and the particular. The foundation manifesto of De Stijl begins: There exist an old and a new consciousness of the age. The old is directed towards the individual. The new is directed towards the universal (1918). This first opposition is intersected, however, by a second one: that between the open and the closed. The universality aimed at by De Stijl artists like Van Doesburg and Mondrian resembled that of the universe itself: it was boundless. Their paintings continued, in theory, beyond the limits of the canvas; their architecture sought to abolish the wall as the boundary between interior and exterior space. But each of Le Corbusier's buildings and paintings was itself a self-contained universe, held within a clear frame. Mies fluctuated between the two ideals; in the 1920s, in such designs as the brick country house and the Barcelona Pavilion, he outdid even the De Stijl architects in openness, but in his later work in America he reverted to the closed neo-classical box. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Richard Padovan has worked as an architect in various European countries and published extensively

Table of Contents

List of figures	vii
Preface	x
The Open or the Closed De Stijl and Le Corbusier	1	(35)
De Stijl and architecture	1	(1)
An art of destruction	2	(2)
Mondrian: evolution from the individual-natural to the universal-abstract	4	(3)
Van Doesburg: the goal of history, and four-dimensionality	7	(4)
Giedion's `authorized history' of the modern movement	11	(3)
Rietveld: architecture as the construction of reality	14	(2)
The Schroder house	16	(2)
The De Stijl house as a fragment of a continous city	18	(1)
De Stijl openness versus the increasingly private future	19	(1)
Le Corbusier: spatial interpenetration and the new spirit	20	(4)
Le Corbusier's ordered compartmentation of space and time	24	(2)
The tree and the semi-lattice	26	(3)
Purist containment versus De Stijl continuity and multivalence	29	(4)
The role of the corner junction in architecture	33	(3)
De Stijl's Other Name	36	(23)
The meaning of words	36	(7)
`Chinese, Greek and German philosophy'	43	(4)
The way forward through architecture	47	(5)
The way forward through mathematics	52	(2)
The necessity of proportion	54	(5)
The Furniture of the Mind	59	(28)
Appearance and reality	59	(5)
Appearance, reality and representation	64	(3)
Representation as Substitution	67	(3)
The abstraction of function	70	(2)
Van der Leck and Mondrian: abstract painting versus concrete architecture	72	(5)
Gerrit Rietveld, furniture maker	77	(5)
Donald Judd: both particular and general	82	(5)
The Pavilion and the Court	87	(33)
Encounters	87	(1)
Three house projects	88	(1)
Tent and pavilion	89	(1)
Romanticism and the pavilion system	90	(3)
Le Corbusier, classical architect	93	(2)
Van Doesburg's architectural programme	95	(1)
Standardization	96	(1)
The Schroder house, Utrecht, 1924	97	(3)
Mies van der Rohe and De Stijl	100	(6)
Le Corbusier's polychromy: La Roche-Jeanneret and Pessac	106	(3)
Poissy and Barcelona	109	(1)
The Barcelona Pavilion as a symbolic form	110	(3)
The end of the heroic period of modern architecture	113	(1)
Mies, Le Corbusier and Van Doesburg after 1929	114	(3)
It is necessary, not to adapt, but to create	117	(3)
Lauweriks, Van Doesburg and Le Corbusier	120	(26)
A gardener and a house in Germany	120	(6)
Viollet-le-Duc, Cuypers and Berlage	126	(5)
Dusseldorf and the Werkbund	131	(3)
Cosmic mathematics	134	(5)
Grids	139	(5)
The entire cosmos in a single image	144	(2)
Mies: The Correspondence of Thing and Intellect	146	(28)
Classical versus anti-classical	146	(4)
Mies, Aquinas, and the definition of truth	150	(3)
Art as a way to knowledge	153	(3)
The impact of expressionism and De Stijl	156	(7)
From Barcelona 1929 to Berlin 1962	163	(3)
The truth and its exposition	166	(2)
The house as machine a mediter	168	(6)
Figure and Ground	174	(18)
Neue Gestaltung and Gestalt psychology	174	(3)
Rasmussen and the Rubin vase	177	(6)
Dom van der Laan and architectonic space	183	(3)
Towards a deeper perspective	186	(6)
The Unchanging and the Changeable	192	(37)
Three kinds of simultaneity	192	(6)
An alternative manifesto	198	(3)
Particular functions and universal contradiction	201	(3)
The utilitarian support system	204	(8)
The habitable ruin (1): Rossi and Mies	212	(4)
The habitable ruin (2): Hertzberger and the necessity of differentiation	216	(3)
The necessary and the essential: Oud and Le Corbusier	219	(2)
Collage and contradiction	221	(3)
Both that which is unchangeable and that which is in change	224	(5)
Bibliography	229	(6)
Index	235	(3)
Credits	238