Architecture as artform : drawing, painting, collage, and architecture, 1945-1965

The development of an American architectural avant-garde after the Second World War is examined in relation to the formal properties and institutionalized cultural authority of modern art. Rather than looking to the artwork of their American artistic contemporaries, architects and critics appropriated the early European avant-garde as typological precedents, guided by a pedagogical approach steeped in Bauhaus teaching methods. Drawing became the common conduit between the abstract work of art and its transformation into modern architecture. Architecture was seen as a problem that could be studied diagrammatically, and consequently also thought of as a fundamentally conceptual, immaterial artifact. At the same time that architecture was moving towards a flattened artistic condition, however, abstract expressionist painting began to take on the material and dimensional properties of the architectural object, demarcating volume and structure. Modernist collage techniques were also introduced into postwar architectural design, but again the material aspects of the medium were suppressed in favor of its purely visual qualities.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

1999

Author dc:creator

• Lum, Eric Kim

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Mark Jarzombek.

• Architecture.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/9492

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/9492