meyer_Architecture a Synoptic Vision
Crystal Palace. The structure hosted the first Universal Exhibition in 1851: a fundamental building in the history of architecture, both for its monumental scale and the technical innovations at play. However, it was not an architect who designed it, but a botanist and greenhouse builder: Joseph Paxton.
Construir en acero: forma y estructura en el espacio continuo
La irrupción del hierro en la edificación del siglo XIX supone para la arquitectura una convulsión sin precedentes. Acompañado del progresivo protagonismo del vidrio, este acontecimiento tecnológico abre camino a los dos plantemientos espaciales más emblemáticos de la construcción moderna: el rascacielos y el edificio diáfano. A la evolución del segundo dedica el siguiente texto Ramón Araujo, profesor de Construcción de la Escuela de Arquitectura de Madrid, en el que desarrolla un itinerario cronológico que abarca desde tipos históricos como la gran estación o el palacio de cristal, hasta las soluciones más características de nuestro siglo.
The Crystal Palace and its Place in Structural History
Completed in 1851 to house the Exhibition of All Nations in London, the Crystal Palace was the first large public building that departed completely from traditional construction materials and methods. It was the first major building to be conceived by its design engineers, William Barlow and Charles Fox, as a rigid-jointed iron frame and one of the earliest to use horizontal and vertical cross-bracing to carry wind loads. Working closely with the contractor John Henderson, the designers also applied their knowledge of modern production engineering methods to ensure the building was constructed in the incredibly short time of 190 days. Within twenty years the iron frame, supporting thin walls of masonry, would become established as a viable alternative to load-bearing masonry walls for large buildings.
In his book Contemporary Curtain Wall Architecture, Scott Murray traces the evolution of the curtain wall, from early skeleton-frame structures of the past to today’s complex and technologically advanced configurations. Presenting twenty-four detailed case studies of exemplary structures completed in the twenty-first century, he reveals the curtain wall as one of the most enduring and malleable concepts of contemporary architecture, capable of adapting intelligently to site constraints, utilizing resources efficiently, and offering unprecedented opportunities for innovations in digital design and fabrication, material detailing, and aesthetic expression.
The Details of Modern Architecture, the first comprehensive analysis of both the technical and the aesthetic importance of details in the development of architecture, provides not one answer but many.The more than 500 illustrations are a major contribution in their own right. Providing a valuable collective resource, they present the details of notable architectural works drawn in similar styles and formats, allowing comparisons between works of different scales, periods, and styles. Covering the period 1890-1932, Ford focuses on various recognized masters, explaining the detailing and construction techniques that distort, camouflage, or enhance a building. He looks at the source of each architect's ideas, the translation of those ideas into practice, and the success or failure of the technical execution. Ford examines Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House and Fallingwater Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, and buildings by McKim, Mead & White, Lutyens, Mies van der Rohe, and Schindler from a point of view that acknowledges the importance of tradition, precedent, style, and ideology in architectural construction. He discusses critical details from a technical and contextual standpoint, considering how they perform how they add to or detract from the building as a whole, and how some have persisted and been adapted through time.
Kenneth Frampton is the Ware Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University and a leading voice in the history of modernist architecture. In the 1970s, he was instrumental in the development of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York and a co-founding editor of its magazine Oppositions. His essay ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism’ of 1983 was seminal in defining architectural thought throughout the 1980s.
Studies in Tectonic Culture is composed of ten essays and an epilogue that trace the history of contemporary form as an evolving poetic of structure and construction, the book's analytical framework rests on Frampton's close readings of key French and German, and English sources from the eighteenth century to the present. Kenneth Frampton's long-awaited follow-up to his classic A Critical History of Modern Architecture is certain to influence any future debate on the evolution of modern architecture. Studies in Tectonic Culture is nothing less than a rethinking of the entire modern architectural tradition. The notion of tectonics as employed by Framptonthe focus on architecture as a constructional craftconstitutes a direct challenge to current mainstream thinking on the artistic limits of postmodernism, and suggests a convincing alternative. Indeed, Frampton argues, modern architecture is invariably as much about structure and construction as it is about space and abstract form. Composed of ten essays and an epilogue that trace the history of contemporary form as an evolving poetic of structure and construction, the book's analytical framework rests on Frampton's close readings of key French and German, and English sources from the eighteenth century to the present. He clarifies the various turns that structural engineering and tectonic imagination have taken in the work of such architects as Perret, Wright, Kahn, Scarpa, and Mies, and shows how both constructional form and material character were integral to an evolving architectural expression of their work. Frampton also demonstrates that the way in which these elements are articulated from one work to the next provides a basis upon which to evaluate the works as a whole. This is especially evident in his consideration of the work of Perret, Mies, and Kahn and the continuities in their thought and attitudes that linked them to the past. Frampton considers the conscious cultivation of the tectonic tradition in architecture as an essential element in the future development of architectural form, casting a critical new light on the entire issue of modernity and on the place of much work that has passed as "avant-garde."
Introduction : reflections on the scope of the tectonic -- Greco-Gothic and Neo-Gothic : the Anglo-French origins of tectonic form -- The rise of the tectonic : core form and art form in the German enlightenment, 1750-1870 -- Frank Lloyd Wright and the text-tile tectonic -- Auguste Perret and classical rationalism -- Mies van der Rohne : avant-garde and continuity -- Louis Kahn : modernization and the new monumentality, 1944-1972 -- Jørn Utzon : transcultural form and the tectonic metaphor -- Carlo Scarpa and the adoratiaon of the joint -- Postscriptum : the tectonic trajectory, 1903-1994 -- The owl of Minverva : an epilogue.