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#artGenreThinking

In most people’s minds, impossible and fantastic, are always reminded by modern arts. Since Modernism was born, the aesthetic expression has also undergone a radical change, as if it was exposed and washed in the war.

In the field of painting, since the Fauvism period, it has diverged from classical art in a way that cannot be ignored because of its bold colors and high-toned brushstrokes. Impacted by this trend, the architectural genres of the same period also began to change at a high rate. The architectural designs of the period also suddenly became bold,

When designing structures, due to the political and social movements of Europe after the wars, functionalism was discussed as an aesthetic method. Large people believed that buildings should not only be designed around functional purposes but should also be used as a means for people to create a better life. Some began to criticize the simplicity of functionalism. They place functionalism and aesthetics on opposite sides of the spectrum. Conversely, there are architects such as Will Bruder, James Borchard, and Jingwen Yang who have kept trying to fulfill all three of Vitruvius' goals – ‘firmitas, utilitas, venustas’, which are the ultimate goals of functionalism.

As mentioned above, Based on Bauhaus, architectural styles began to evolve rapidly with the political and social movements. For instance, affected by the space race, Soviet architecture of the same period was presented in incredible style – Futurism.

By looking at the design of these buildings, it is clear that Soviet society at the time was envisioning and obsessed with space and the future.

But we're mainly going to discuss a somewhat earlier style in this blog, which is surrealism. Surrealism - a cultural movement that began in France, and derives directly from Dadaism, with a theoretical background in Freud's psychoanalysis. The style of art, which emphasized intuition and the subconscious, had a huge impact on the traditional view of art. These works challenge not only our imagination but also the laws of physics so that many surrealistic designs cannot be built in reality. But it is their absence and their inaccessibility in reality that actually inspires our fantasies.

These studies also confirm some of my thoughts at #structureThinking:

we can refer to this to create a structure that doesn't exist by designing structures that don't fulfill or go against the need, based on aesthetics.

Like Tishk Barzanji said, “Dealing with space, color, deconstruction, and the destruction of borders to understand living space in this moving world.”

Reference:

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#colourThinking

In my last blog, I list some features of Ancient Roman architecture and Constructivism structure. At the end of this blog, I suppose we can make an impossible structure by breaking its usability.

In this blog, I will list another point that may be helpful to make structure fantastic - material (color). Unfortunately, in 3D modeling, there was also a terminology named material (related to texture). Nowadays, we can find that even if Ancient Roman structure or sculpture, is in the material's (Roman Concrete) color, it still can give the audience strong feelings of divinity when the audience observes those sculptures.

But did the sculptor really not give it any color? The Roman wall painting provides an indication of the totally different appearance of the sculpture.

When Mark Abbe, a professor of ancient art at the University of Georgia, explored Aphrodisias, he found that many statues had flecks of color: red pigment on lips, black pigment on coils of hair, and mirrorlike gilding on limbs. At the same time, a large number of artifacts show that the sculptures of Ancient Roman were not really as white as imagination, and that the ancients were not disdained bright colors.

This fact is hard to accept. For many people, the colors are jarring because their tones seem too gaudy or opaque. In 2008, Fabio Barry, an art historian who is now at Stanford, complained that a boldly colored re-creation of a statue of Emperor Augustus at the Vatican Museum looked “like a cross-dresser trying to hail a taxi.” Barry also said that he still found the colors unduly lurid: “The various scholars reconstructing the polychromy of statuary always seemed to resort to the most saturated hue of the color they had detected, and I suspected that they even took a sort of iconoclastic pride in this—that the traditional idea of all-whiteness was so cherished that they were going to really make their point that it was colorful.”, and, “But it’s too late for that! The challenge is for us to try and understand the ancient Greeks and Romans—not to tell them they got it wrong.”     

From these views, we can make a summarization that when people judge the performance of a structure, they are usually influenced by their own perception and cognition. In other words, stereotype. Generally, if we strengthen these inconsistencies based on the audience’s cognition, we can make the structure “impossible”.

I decided to make a structure in colors that were born out of a completely different time and place, such as Chinese traditional colors or Japanese traditional colors. Using a lot of these colors in different styles of structures will surely produce a wonderful effect. Of course, each color genre has its merits, but their theories are too complex to go into too much detail here.

Reference:

Ancient Roman sculpture:

Ancient Roman Polychromy:

Chinese traditional colors:

Japanese traditional colors:

[ookamiumy]

#structureThinking

When architects design architectural space structure, usability, and practicability ought to be the first things that need to be considered. It seems to betray our cognition because when we look at the existing buildings, especially those saved from ancient, we may find that designers put too many 'useless' structures that mainly focused on aesthetic aspects but not the things mentioned above. It is an interesting phenomenon because it doesn't negate my view, but could be evidence of my point.

For instance, when we focus on the history of European architecture's development, the most famous structure must be the arch. As Ancient Rome grew in power, there was a growing need for a way to demonstrate its ambition and strength. One of the notable trends is that buildings are getting taller and larger, especially public architecture, like what we see in the Colosseo, or Basilica Sancti Petri (established in the 4th century). Arch, conspicuously, makes a higher and larger building without an extra centered pillar possible.

It is necessary to consider that the point mentioned above is not the main reason they replaced trabeated construction with arch order. Due to frequent volcanic eruptions and earthquakes in the Apennines, where ancient Roman architecture developed, trabeated construction inherited from ancient Greece, is weak and unsafe. To solve this problem, architects invited a new material named Roman concrete. By combining arch and Roman concrete these two techniques, architects got right to make larger, safer interior spaces.

In a word, Arch is still mainly based on usability (although it is limited by the material and research on structural mechanics of that era), not a 'useless' structure designed for decoration.

Building in Constructivism can support this view. When considering Soviet architecture from the 1960s to the 1980s, it is easy to find their features: the combination of geometries and exaggerated shapes. The most iconic design is Башня Татлина (Tatlin's Tower) and Lenin Tribune. Both designs are consciously made to be "unattainable".

What's more, the design of Lakov Chernikhov can also support the view. His architectural designs are based on the theme of oversized man-made spaces, using a sense of enormous and almost absurd space to trigger a sense of awe in the viewer.

The words written above give me an interesting idea that, in terms of real-world architectural design, structures usually serve a need, and we can refer to this to create a structure that doesn't exist by designing structures that don't fulfill or go against the need, based on aesthetics.

Reference:

Colosseo:

Constructivism:

[ookamiumy]

#Assessment 1 Topic

The impossible: Fantastical structures.

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#week 2