BIRDHAUS

Elements of Bauhaus architecture are adapted to the local environment, primarily because of the climate. One of the key elements of the International Style in Europe was a large window. However, in a hot climate – large windows that let great amounts of light shine into the rooms – do not make sense. Locally, glass was used sparingly and long, narrow, horizontal windows are visible on many of the Bauhaus buildings in Tel Aviv. On some buildings, you can … see long narrow balconies, which in many cases have now been enclosed. STYLE OR CONVENIENCE?

In 1925 the Bauhaus was moved into a group of starkly rectangular glass and concrete buildings in Dessau that were especially designed for it by Gropius. In Dessau the Bauhaus style became more strictly functional with greater emphasis on showing the beauty and suitability of basic, unadorned materials.
Developments in areas,  from Expressionism towards functionalism and from handicraft towards design for machine production, can be traced in the changing graphic design produced at the Bauhaus. – (web: Lycos Retriver)

Looking at the Bauhaus style architecture i found this..

A Bird House- in Bauhaus style.. adorable ..and functional.

The Bauhaus design principle is fundamentally, “no boundaries between the crafts”. Designed in Sweden and made from solid larch wood and painted with non-toxic colours, the house stays true to principle. Intelligent design keeps the end user, the birdies, from sitting in their food and ensures that larger birds are kept away.

By Rosie Curtis

Ideology

The ideology that surrounds the idea of ‘make do and mend’ has come into fashion over the last few years. With the recession as a spring board to brand frugality it has become the ‘in’ thing to be seen to make your own items. Knitting clubs and ‘stitch and bitch’ groups have cropped up all over the country and the ‘vintage’ and ‘nostalgic’ styling have flooded the high street. This is where ideology touches the same points as identity, how we want to be seen and how society and politics affects what we will buy. Are we just sheep?This image just goes to show the mix of ideology and identity and the pure ignorance of some designers. The whole point of ‘Make do and Mend’ is that we create something by hand, either from scratch or reuse old items, it is a lifestyle created to make money go further and this cushion, costing £30 illustrates the opposite morals of what it portrays. I would quite like meet the person who designed this cushion for mass production, ask them what they think ‘make do and mend’ means and then possibly give them a smack on the head! This is the idiocy of ideology.

Marianne Slater

Headdresses by Amy Bruton

// WHEN FOOTBALL HOOLIGANS BECAME HINDU GODS

Aitor Throup is one of my favourite designers, he create fashion from some of the strangest inspiration.

But is it right to use religion to create fashion?

Is it right to use hindu gods as head dresses?

I love it!

Context tasks Level 4

About Le Corbusier- taken from Dillon, B, 2009. ‘The spaceship’ [Online] Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/feb/14/le-corbusier-architecture-cardross [Accessed 4th December 2010]

By Charlotte Rowley

It shows that Le Corbusier’s work is still being used in architecture today.

‘The spaceship’

Le Corbusier’s concrete legacy in Britain has been both celebrated and reviled. Brian Dillon visits the vast complex of futuristic rot that was once the seminary of St Peter’s, and finds hope amid the decay

▪                Brian Dillon

▪                The Guardian, Saturday 14 February 2009

St Peter’s College, Cardross, Scotland photographed shortly after it opened in the 1960s. Photograph: RIBA

Le Corbusier famously built nothing in Britain. His sole commission in this country was to design a temporary exhibition stand for the Venesta Plywood Company, to be erected at the Building Trades Exhibition in 1930. (A single photograph and drawing are all that remain of the structure.) As the decade progressed, however, his thought and practice inspired such domestic masterpieces as Wells Coates’s Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead and Berthold Lubetkin’s Penguin Pool at London Zoo. More vexedly, as a modest photographic annex to the Barbican’s forthcoming Corbusier exhibition reminds us, it was towards Corbusian principles that postwar architects turned to solve Britain’s housing crisis. The sun-drenched monument of his Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, completed in 1952, is the direct precursor to such fraught edifices of the high-rise boom as Park Hill housing estate in Sheffield and Roehampton in London – a concrete legacy that still leaks rancour in certain quarters.

Most of the postwar buildings referred to at the Barbican – itself a late flowering of the Corbusian spirit – are still in use or, like the notorious Ronan Point flat complex in Canning Town, have since been demolished. One structure, though, has had a curious half-life, and persists today as a relic of the architectural heroism of that era. A photograph in the exhibition shows St Peter’s College, a Catholic seminary erected on the banks of the Clyde in the 1960s as a gleaming tribute to late Corbusier. A three-storey concrete ziggurat, almost 200ft long and flanked by silo-like side chapels, rises majestically out of the woods. In the foreground, a curved terminal wall towers elegantly above the main chapel and sanctuary; at the far end, an escape stairs in raw board-formed concrete composes a jagged coda. Seen like this, in its monochrome pomp, St Peter’s is an audacious precis of everything progressive British architects once felt about the legacy of Le Corbusier.

Forty years on, St Peter’s is among the sorriest remnants of Britain’s brief and ambiguous romance with modernism. A half-hour train ride from Glasgow, and a 10-minute walk from the Clydeside village of Cardross, will take you deep into the sodden undergrowth of present attitudes to postwar architecture. The structure, abandoned in the early 1980s, looms as impressively as ever, but its interiors were gutted long ago and its substance has suffered decades of abuse and decay. Penetrate the main block depicted in the photograph at the Barbican, and you discover in its shadow, among the (equally magnificent) outlying buildings, a vast complex of futuristic rot – perhaps the closest Britain currently comes to the post-apocalyptic vision adumbrated by JG Ballard during the dying days of modernism. St Peter’s is a ruin as much of the architectural dreams of its century as of the more localised and equally doomed optimism that brought it into being.

The hopes incarnated at Cardross were raised and dashed with astonishing speed. As Frank Arneil Walker puts it in the volume of The Buildings of Scotland devoted to Argyll and Bute, “in little more than a generation, God, Le Corbusier and Scottish architecture have all been mocked”. The new seminary complex was first mooted in the early 1950s, after fire destroyed the original St Peter’s College at Bearsden and student priests were relocated to Kilmahew House, a baronial pile on the outskirts of Cardross. In 1953, the local diocese, anticipating a continued influx of seminarians and consequent pressure on the premises available, engaged the Glasgow firm Gillespie, Kidd & Coia to design a set of buildings in which to house and train more than a hundred students. As with many of the ecclesiastical projects that the firm completed in this period – there are extant churches, somewhat reminiscent of St Peter’s, at Kilsyth, East Kilbride and Drumchapel – design of the seminary was entrusted to Isi Metzstein and Andrew MacMillan, two young architects entranced by the postwar buildings of Le Corbusier.

It was the Swiss architect’s chapel at Ronchamp, completed in 1955, and his monastery at La Tourette, which opened four years later, that particularly inspired MacMillan and Metzstein. Traces of both buildings are everywhere at Cardross. The monumental main block takes its cue from La Tourette, though at St Peter’s the bunker-like profile has been softened by stepping back successive storeys behind circulating balconies. The undercroft entrance to the college complex recalls the way that La Tourette seems to hover on its concrete pilotis; but it is the adjacent classroom building, extravagantly cantilevered above the trees, that properly echoes the soaring, aspirant qualities of the French monastery. A small concrete block, modelled after the lower storeys of the main residential and chapel building, nurses a huddle of mini-Ronchamps: a rounded common room, kitchen and refectory randomly dotted with small windows.

It is often, at St Peter’s, such details that reveal the Corbusian heritage of the place. Inside the convent, curved wooden ceilings rose to embrace light from above, as beneath the concrete roof at Ronchamp. The glazed walls of the ground floor in the main building were randomly mullioned, as at La Tourette, while the fire escape is an angular twin to Le Corbusier’s at Marseille. But St Peter’s is (or was) not exactly a rigorous repurposing of Corbusian structures and motifs. The towering side chapels to the main building – five on each side – had their cruise-ship cowls clad so as to harmonise with the sandstone of Kilmahew House, which stood at the centre of the site. (The house, once the administrative hub of the seminary, was demolished after a fire in 1995.) The interiors to all of the buildings were generously panelled in solid wood or veneer, so that the whole seems to hark back also to the style of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. In sum, St Peter’s was both of its time architecturally and sufficiently eclectic and traditional not to startle the diocesan authorities too much. Still, students were apt to refer to it as “the spaceship”.

‘The home should be the treasure chest of living.’
Le Corbusier from the webpage – http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/l/le_corbusier.html [Accessed 4th December 2010] [Online]

This quote relates to now because people do have ‘treasures’ in their homes to live with e.g TV’s/computers/DVD players/gaming machines.

The ‘Le Corbusier Chaise Lounge chair’ is still being sold around the world for example at alibaba.com – http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/274030593/Le_Corbusier_Chaise_Lounger.html [Online] [Accessed 4th December 2010]

also -‘ Le Corbusier Sofa, Designer Retro Furniture [EUROPE]’ at alibaba.com – http://www.alibaba.com/product-tp/107648490/Le_Corbusier_Sofa_Designer_Retro_Furniture.html

[Online] [Accessed 4th December 2010]

Context tasks Level 4

By Charlotte Rowley – The Nature of Interdisciplinary

I assume that the nature of interdisciplinary includes being part of experimentation, development through different processes to the end results. Being an inter-disciplinarian is about combining and exploring new, modern techniques such as making a plastic laser cut brooch with etched copper that i have created. It’s about getting your work out there into the public eye in different ways, such as public art, installations or craft shops. Being this certain artist or designer includes being collaborative at certain times in your career as well.

Being an inter-disciplinarian excludes sticking to one idea, it’s about combing different themes or concepts to produce a variety of pieces. in my opinion it excludes artwork that is delicately done just to be viewed as having a decorative or realistic purpose, it shows meaning.

What drew me to this course is that it covered a wide range of modern and new technologies and that there was work experience involved. Work experience is very important if you want to get out there in the world and gain skills in your specialist area of art and design. It gives you more confidence in how you apply your knowledge to what you’re involved in i.e. community workshops.

So far in this course, i am exploring new ways of working and am not just sticking to what i know about certain materials and processes.

I have discovered that i am fairly good at thinking of possible ideas when given a brief to start off with. I have found out that in the collaborative project, that i have just started, i am good at getting the momentum flowing with regards to talking about my ideas.

As a producer, my work is evolved around being skills and process based. Some of my work is determined but most of it is produced by chance because so far i have found out, that during a project, i don’t know what i will produce until i go pass the experimentation stage.

I feel that at the moment in my career, i am an equal mix of craftsperson, artist and designer.

I don’t believe that an artist is outside of class and outside of society because they integrate within their work different opinions of societies and class.

I believe that society does judge the artist as not having a valid occupation because people feel that art is just meant for people to do as a hobby and that they see it as a ‘leisure’ opportunity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interdisciplinary Art

Interdisciplinary art creates a relationship across various disciplines, including architecture, communications, fashion, interior, video, products design, textiles, metal work, ceramics and so many more, its hard to narrow down what interdisciplinary’s boundaries are.
Using these different materials or processes to make your work and/ or to help support ideas towards generating a piece means being interdisciplinary. Therefore i don’t think it means you cant specialize or otherwise should specialize, it means you have the freedom to choose what you do and what materials to use, whether that be a few combined or one singular material.

Karen harzigeorgiou – from her Broken doll series.

Uses different materials, ideas and processes… plays with her ideas and takes things out of context. Adored.. or disturbing?

Bettina Speckner – Brooch, photo in enamel, silver, white gold and sapphires.

Again uses a variety of materials, distorts the familiarity of a brooch and what you expect of it.

Kate Macdowell – ceramic art

One material, but still interdisciplinary.

Maybe Interdisciplinary is about changing the audiences view on the material or subject matter, taking things out of context. – or is that art generally.

By Rosie Curtis

What is interdisciplinary?

Lets start the conversation…What is interdisciplinary art?

Wikipedia definition:  “interdisciplinary field crosses traditional boundaries between academic disciplines or schools of thought, as new needs and professions have emerged.”

Should we be describing “interdisciplinary” as being non-sepcialised? Our art and design course allows us to learn a multitude of disciplines, however we don’t have to use them all to create our art. We are persuaded into practising different methods of art to discover new ways of thinking, we can incorporate practises that we choose to be disciplined in, so we can become specialised.

Words to describe interdisciplinary:

experimental

exploration of techniques

freedom

liberation

manipulation of materials

endless creation

Interdisciplinary thinking started during the Russian Revolution:

“Introduction: Made in Moscow”

“Woven into – and by – this laboratory of a city is constructivism, the most ground-breaking development in the visual arts in the Soviet Union in the decade or so following the October revolution of 1917. Like the ever-shifting terrain of which it develops, Constructivism is similarly driven by a ruling passion for experimentation. Over the course of the early 1920s. it puts on the laboratory table one problem after another – composition, construction, excess, faktura, tectonics, economy, modularity, purpose, structure, function, production, process, the object, and, most fundamentally of all, the artist’s right to exist- as if each of these problems were a metal from which an as-yet-unknown substance could be extracted.”

Gough, M (2005) The Artist As Producer Russian Constructivism in Revolution, University of California Press

Wiki search on “Faktura”:

The concept of faktura (Russian: фактура) is associated with Russian Constructivism. In the period after the Russian Revolution, new definitions of art had to be found, such as the definition of art objects as “laboratory experiments”. “Fakture” was the single most important quality of these art objects, according to the critic Victor Shklovsky, referring to the material aspect of the surface.^[1] The surface of the object had to demonstrate how it had been made, exhibiting its own distinct property.

Faktura-The visual demonstration of properties inherent [[to materials.

-Example: Corner Counter Relief – Vladimir Tatlin, 1915

Conversation started by Stephanie Bryant

Bauhaus.

‘This kitchen clock, which incorporates a mechanical timer, was designed by Max Bill whilst Director of the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG Ulm), the experimental design school founded in 1953.’

Max Bill was a student at the Bauhaus, he kept the aesthetic of the school in his later work, he had a mind an idea of “rationalist modernism” which translated to streamlined and stylized designs.

“This clock is one of the earliest and most notable designs by Bill to be put into production. Everyday objects (kitchen appliances, audio visual equipment, tools, shelving etc) were a central focus for the work of Ulm designers, who shared a tradition of ‘moral purpose through design’ and ‘good form’ with the Swiss and German Werkbunds. Bill had spearheaded the Werkbund’s good form campaign (which ran through the 1950s) with his influential travelling exhibition ‘Gute Form’ in 1949.”

Egg shaped with an egg timer, clean lines, very simple yet appealing. With it having an egg timer and being egg shaped it reminds me of Robert Venturi’s Duck vs Decorated Shed.

 

Bauhaus task by Abi Mitchell. Interdisciplinary level 4.

‘Image that represents an art & design ideology’

Giacomo Balla’s ‘Street lamp’ (1909) represents the Futurist art movement. Futurism was a social and artistic movement that formed in Italy in the 20th century. Founded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti through his Futurist manifesto, he described his dislike for anything old, especially in regard to politics and art. The Futurists were inspired by speed, technology, youth culture and violence, vehicles, industrialism and anything that represented mans triumph over nature.

Futurist painters initially adopted the style of Cubist artists, but gradually began to develop their own style which represented speed and energy.

By Josie Wells

BAUHAUS

This is just a 45 minute documentary on the Bauhaus movement, not very detailed but it covers the basics but does talk about processes and ideologies etc. Quite interesting.