Architecture as artform : drawing, painting, collage, and architecture, 1945-1965
Author(s)
Lum, Eric Kim
DownloadFull printable version (37.09Mb)
Other Contributors
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture.
Advisor
Mark Jarzombek.
Terms of use
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
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.
Description
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1999. Includes bibliographical references (p. 319-329).
Date issued
1999Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of ArchitecturePublisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Keywords
Architecture.