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Tropical Architecture, South of Cancer in the Modern Diaspora
Get PDFGetting back to the point of “Tropical architecture,” architecture in the humid tropics is collaboration with nature to establish a new order in which human beings may live in harmony with their surroundings. As publications at the time concentrated on French and British colonies, to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the Modern Movement diaspora, it is essential to revisit, analyse, and document the important heritage built south of the Tropic of Cancer, where the debate took place and architectonic models were reproduced, and in many cases subjected to metamorphoses stemming from their antipodal geography. Notable for the modernity of its social, urban, and architectonic programs, and also its formally and technologically sustained research, the modern architecture of these latitudes below the tropics constitutes a distinctive heritage
Wiel Arets
Get PDFOn the 27th August 2019, at his Amsterdam office, DJ (Ana Tostões, editor, and Michel Melenhorst, guest editor) interviewed Wiel Arets, an internationally renowned architect, and the founder of Wiel Arets Architects (1983). He has since taught at several universities worldwide, having also been Dean of the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam (1995–2001) and Dean of the College of Architecture (CoA) at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago (2012–2017)
Bauhaus and Lina Bo Bardi: from the modern factory to the Pompeia leisure center
Get PDFThe importance of Bauhaus to Lina Bo Bardi is herein analyzed from two perspectives. One that follows her trajectory from the industrial design course she taught at MASP to its critique, searching in the Brazilian Northeastern popular culture for sources of renewal. The second one focuses on the project of adapting a factory to be used as a leisure center in São Paulo. In addition to valuing the rationality of the factory architecture built in the first phase of Brazilian industrialization, its preservation encompassed, in order for the building to be used for leisure purposes, interventions that altered the disciplinary attributes of the space. The design was conceived as part of the architecture, discarding its serial reproduction
From paid holidays to mass tourism: a typological evolution
Get PDFThe 1919 ratification of the 48-hour working week by the Organization Internationale du Travail [International Labor Organization], created by the signatory countries of the Treaty of Versailles, raises a new challenge to industrialized society: the organization of workers’ free time. Divided the day into “three eights” — eight hours of work, eight hours of rest and eight hours of sleep — the social framework of leisure is understood as a moral duty of the state. This issue takes on a never before considered dimension with the attention given to the instrumental use of popular recreation by European totalitarian regimes and its centralization in organisms of a political and ideological character. Leisure, in this context, would work as a privileged area of indoctrination and diffusion of the nationalist rhetoric that supports the construction of fascist dictatorships. But the recognition of the necessity to organize leisure was not restricted to totalitarian states, nor was it an exclusively political and/or social issue
Tourist towns in Languedoc-Roussillon: projects and discourse for mass tourism
Get PDFGreenfield tourist towns in Languedoc-Roussillon, built in the 1960s, are some of the best examples of the application of modern principles in the production of architecture and space for mass tourism. Contributions of the Modern Movement in the construction of tourist facilities are thus exposed through the analysis of the theoretical proposals put into practice by Georges Candilis and Jean Balladur, modern architects of the third generation in France, in two of the tourist projects on the Languedoc-Roussillon coastline: La Grande-Motte and Port Leucate-Barcarès
Reuse of Modernist Buildings
No full textIn his keynote lecture “When the oppressive new and the vulnerable old meet”, at the 13th docomomo Conference in Seoul 2014, Hubert-Jan Henket (1940–) made a passionate plea for “Sustainable Modernity”. In docomomo Journal 52, an invitation to join this plea was published. Hubert-Jan Henket also spoke of a wish to change the curricula at all schools of architecture and include the history of modernity as well as the conservation and adaptive reuse of what is there already as a standard part of the education.
Since then, and even before 2014, a lot has happened in exploring the further potential of reusing Modern Movement Architecture. In 2016 the project “RMB Reuse of Modernist Buildings” started. For the RMB project docomomo International and the University of Antwerp, Belgium; the University of Coimbra and the Instituto Superior Técnico – University of Lisboa, both from Portugal; Istanbul Technical University, from Turkey and TH-OWL, Detmold School of Architecture and Interior Architecture from Detmold, Germany, came together to prepare a master course, addressing the subjects as formulated in 2014 by Hubert Jan Henket and docomomo
From the Ciutat de Repòs to the Ciudades Sindicales de Vacaciones: seaside Vacation City for Workers in Marbella. The present of modern leisure heritage
Get PDFThe Ciudad Sindical de Vacaciones [Vacation City for Workers] (VCW) constitutes a reference of leisure architecture in Spain during the Franco regime. Starting with a literature review and the process of its cataloguing and protection, the focus lies on the last of these structures ever to be implemented, built in Marbella and the only one still in use. It, then, traces the evolution in Spanish spatial formalization of workers rest, from the urban modern vocation of the GATEPAC (Group of Spanish Artists and Technicians for Contemporary Architecture, 1930–1936) proposals during the Second Republic, to the Vacation Cities for Workers of the dictatorship, idealised as islands in privileged enclaves. Finally, reflections on transformations underwent in the VCW of Marbella, in the context of its heritage value, will be made
Tourism and modern architecture in a “Green Hell”: Hotel Amazonas (1947–1952)
Get PDFThe investigation focuses on the relationship between tourism as a modernization strategy towards the integration of the Amazon within Brazil and modern principles adopted in the Hotel Amazonas in Manaus, analyzing how the pioneering project, designed by architect Paulo Antunes Ribeiro, aligned the economic, political and symbolic dimensions of the agents involved in the process. There is a growing need for the historical re-evaluation, the documentation and an emergency conservation of the building, which was an icon of tourist development and modernization of Brazil and the Amazon
How did the Bauhaus get its name?
Get PDFHistorians have always assumed that Walter Gropius (1883-1969) invented the name Das Bauhaus (somewhat inadequately translated as ‘house for building’) for the school he founded in Weimar in 1919. Often, critics have noted the brilliance of this “unique creation”, as it announced the radical change from the “Grand Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts” to a new institution that was going to be more accessible, grounded and humble. It promised both a new beginning and a connection to builders’ guilds of the medieval past. However, when Walter Gropius founded his school in April 1919, a Das Bauhaus G.m.b.H. had already existed in Berlin for four years. Founder and owner was the prominent architect and developer Albert Gessner (1868-1953)
Public swimming pools in Australia
Get PDFIn Australia the image of sporting prowess and easy access to swimming venues — both natural and artificial — has ensured that public swimming pools became a site of modern architectural interest and design experimentation from the 1930s onwards. Ranging from prosaic, local amenities to award-winning significant complexes, public pools are fascinating and potent places of individual and community memories and experiences. Many still exist but many others have been lost or detrimentally altered in the last two decades. As a modern type they deserve further documentation and careful conservation and adaptation to suit contemporary use