Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier

1979 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 815
Author(s):  
Howard P. Segal ◽  
Robert Fishman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Le Corbusier ◽  
Frank Lloyd Wright

Corporate Starchitects and Unique Icons

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Sklair
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Le Corbusier ◽  
Frank Lloyd Wright ◽  
Leon Battista Alberti ◽  
Global System ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Aesthetic Practice ◽  
Cultural Historian ◽  
Institutional Legacies

Although some find it unpleasant and others find it flippant, the term ‘starchitect’ is theoretically useful for the sociology of architecture. It connects the world of the architect with the world of celebrity, and it con­nects architecture as an esoteric aesthetic practice with architecture as an industry in the public eye. Over the last few years, the term has become well established in the mass media and in trade publications, and it is also, slowly, starting to be taken seriously by scholars in and around architecture (e.g., McNeill 2009, Ponzini and Nastasi 2011; Knox 2012; Gravari-Barbas and Renard-Delautre 2015). The quest for fame, of course, is not new. Leon Battista Alberti, universal man, prodigious self-promoter of the early renaissance, and still an architectural notable, wrote an allegorical play on fame in the 1440s, recently reprinted (Alberti 1987). Neither Frank Lloyd Wright (1869–1959) nor Le Corbusier (1887–1965, Corb) shunned public­ity; both were what we would now call celebrities. Their rivalry is well documented, mostly in arguments around different conceptions of modernism—they never met. Noting that Wright called the Villa Savoye, one of Corb’s most celebrated buildings, ‘a box on stilts’, the cultural historian Nicholas Cox Weber, in his life of Corb, comments: ‘Today, it is an icon of twentieth-century design and has spawned countless imitations all over the world’ (2008: 288; see also Etlin 1994). Wright and Corb died around the time capitalist globalization was beginning to establish itself as a truly global system, and their own lives contained significant measures of socially produced iconicity. Although these terms were not used about them during their lifetimes, they can be considered proto-global and proto-iconic architects, by which I mean that the terms ‘global’ and ‘iconic’ are fruitfully employed today about them and their surviving architectural works. So, before considering the starchitects of our time, it is instructive first of all to delve briefly into the careers of these two most iconic architects of the first half of the 20th century. Wright and Corb both enjoy institutional legacies and continue to have plenty of enthusiasts.

Disposing of Modernity

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca S. Graff
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Waste Disposal ◽  
Mineral Water ◽  
World's Fair ◽  
Frank Lloyd Wright ◽  
Historical Trends ◽  
Transformative Power ◽  
Urban America ◽  
World's Columbian Exposition ◽  
Columbian Exposition

Through archaeological and archival research from sites associated with the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Disposing of Modernity explores the changing world of urban America at the turn of the twentieth century. Featuring excavations of trash deposited during the fair, Rebecca Graff’s first-of-its kind study reveals changing consumer patterns, notions of domesticity and progress, and anxieties about the modernization of society. Graff examines artifacts, architecture, and written records from the 1893 fair’s Ohio Building, which was used as a clubhouse for fairgoers in Jackson Park, and the Charnley-Persky House, an aesthetically modern city residence designed by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Many of the items she uncovers were products that first debuted at world’s fairs, and materials such as mineral water bottles, cheese containers, dentures, and dinnerware illustrate how fairs created markets for new goods and influenced consumer practices. Graff discusses how the fair’s ephemeral nature gave it transformative power in Chicago society, and she connects its accompanying “conspicuous disposal” habits to today’s waste disposal regimes. Reflecting on the planning of the Obama Presidential Center at the site of the Chicago World’s Fair, she draws attention to the ways the historical trends documented here continue in the present.

scholarly journals Criminal Skins: Tattoos and Modern Architecture in the Work of Adolf Loos

2005 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 235-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jimena Canales ◽  
Andrew Herscher
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Le Corbusier ◽  
Modern Architecture ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Less Is More ◽  
International Style

Adolf Loos’s famous essay, ‘Ornament and Crime’, decisively linked unornamented architecture with the culture of modernity and, in so doing, became one of the key formulations of modern architecture. To a great extent, the essay’s force comes from arguments drawn from nineteenth-century criminal anthropology. Nevertheless, Loos’s work has been consistently understood only within the context of the inter-war avant- gardes. In the 1920s, Le Corbusier was particularly enthusiastic in bringing Loos’s work to the fore, thereby establishing its future reception. ‘Ornament and Crime’ became an essential catalyst for architecture’s conversion away from the historicism of the nineteenth century to modernism. At the turn of the century, Loos’s essay already foreshadowed the white abstraction of ‘less is more’ architecture and the functionalist rigour of the International Style which would dominate the twentieth century.

scholarly journals John Ruskin e as pedras de Veneza

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 281
Author(s):  
Claudio Silveira Amaral
Keyword(s):  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Le Corbusier ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Frank Lloyd Wright

John Ruskin, crítico de arte inglês do século XIX, criou uma metodologia para o projeto de arquitetura com base em uma filosofia da Natureza, cuja ética é similar à de uma política da ajuda mútua, na qual cada elemento natural é dependente de outro na busca de uma situação de equilíbrio. Segundo essa lógica, Ruskin estruturou diversos temas, influenciando, com isso, intelectuais de sua época e de outras, como o escritor Marcel Proust, os arquitetos Frank Lloyd Wright e Le Corbusier, assim como o político intelectual brasileiro Rui Barbosa, que utilizou a lógica ruskiniana para compor sua Reforma do Ensino Primário, considerada o primeiro projeto de industrialização do Brasil. Ruskin, diferentemente do que atesta a historiografia da Arquitetura Moderna, foi um moderno e não um neogótico medievalista, pois seu  trabalho se estruturou a partir de algumas das categorias da modernidade, como a lógica e a razão.PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Arquitetura. História. Metodologia.

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