http://www.scarborough.k12.me.us/wis/teachers/dtewhey/webquest/colonial/images/mappin1.jpg
The Explorations Unit wrapped up our semester for iar-222. Since we’ve studied the Renaissance, we’ve found ourselves in these ambiguous moments in time where the capacity to beget a new [renaissance] we call modernism is challenging. That said, we are still to this day exploring and searching for modernism.Over the period of time the unit covered, and especially with WWII, more and more people were traveling across the world like never before. Some of the movements and eras serving as inspirations from art were: post-impressionism (how to take impressionism and take it one step further), fauvism, cubism, expressionism, and futurism. These were all inspirational to designers and architects, two movements that art and architecture shared were the art deco and art nouveau movements.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/HortaELWI.jpg
“A key concept shared by all participants is the desire to create a new
style, divorced from those of the past, that expresses a modern
urbanized, commercial society”
-Buie Harwood, Architecture and Interior Design, 2009
Art Nouveau was an international movement beginning in the 1880’s and lasting until the 1910’s. It was comprised of two different styles, ranging from being called Art Nouveau, Art Moderno, to Jugenstil. The different names were dependent upon where you were in the world, which also determined which of the two styles were used. Art Nouveau and Art Moderno was a stylized organic, curvilinear form where Jugenstil was rectilinear, geometric, and abstract.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/Chrysler_Building_detail.jpg
Art Deco was the epitome of a marriage of the entire art world. This included architecture, interior design, furniture, decorative arts, graphic design, book arts, fashion, and film. The movement came from The Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, which was a World’s fair in Paris. The actual term “Art Deco” was derived from Arts Décoratifs. Initially seen in Paris during the 1910’s, Art Deco spread across the world until it reached its end in the 1940’s. It was known for its range from a highly decorative, to a simple geometric style.
http://www.steelform.com/pics_content/bauhaus.jpg
Following Art Nouveau and Art Deco came the Bauhaus. Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus School in Germany in 1919. The school was a hybrid between the School of Arts and Crafts at Weimar and the Weimar Academy of Fine Arts, Gropius coined this new institution the Bauhaus. Basic principles of design were stressed at the Bauhaus. As the school gained new professors, and the location changed to Dessau, so did Gropius’s concept of the Bauhaus. Function proceeded aesthetics and firmness, it
s what the whole design process was about; designing around function.
http://www.arch.mcgill.ca/prof/bourke/arch672/fall2002/arts/bauhaus3.jpg
“The Bauhaus believes the machine to be our modern medium of design and seeks to come to terms with it”
-Walter Gropius
All of Gropius’s ideas were portrayed in his and Meyer’s design of the new Bauhaus in Dessau. The new school was to serve as a model for what all architecture should become. The school regarding curriculum and the way it’s structured is much like that of what we have here in UNCG’s Interior Architecture department. The first year was about learning all kinds of techniques, ways of building things, new ways to look at materials, objects, and space. With myself coming in to IARC as a second year student, I think that I really missed out on this process of erasing what you know about design prior. After your first year at the Bauhaus where you went through this general curriculum, you could then choose which path you wanted to explore in the remaining duration of your college career. Essentially, the two options were: handcraft and theoretical.
http://elsternwickstockdaleandleggo.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/06-10-27-mcmansion1222813904.jpg
http://austinzoning.typepad.com/austincontrarian/images/2007/05/21/mcmansion600.jpg
Good design in general? no. Good design for all? certainly not for the neighbors in the second image. These are some examples of poorly designed mcmansions like the ones we looked at in class. My grandmother's idea of cooking was to take a compilation of everything in the panty, throw it all in a dish, put it in the oven, and place it on the table and be done with it. Somehow, it always turned out to be pretty good. It is often seen in this uncertain period of design we're in, "designers" take a compilation of knowledge of precedented work and throw it in a design of a house or building like what seems to have been done in the above images. Well…design doesn't necessarily work quite like grandmother's casserole did. I assume these are just explorations in the design world, and hopefully designers will take notice of the way not to design.
There were many other topics discussed including Scandinavian Design, which I think has a real connection to what design is about today in the furniture industry. In the end, we find ourselves faced with this notion of bemusement pertaining to design. I see the design world striving for the next revival. I think we can have a positive conjecture for a metamorphosis in design in the years shortly to come.
