HotelTassel_VictorHorta_MyriemMsefer

Hotel Tassel

The Tassel is a house built in 1892-1893 by Victor Horta in Brussels, Belgium for his friend Emile Tassel.
The Tassel Hotel is one of the first buildings of the architect and the first global synthesis of Art Nouveau in Architecture.

It remains a very important work because it was the first buitlding to completely break the classic layout of rooms in Brussels homes. 

In the space distribution, the door is always in the side of the panel and extends inside with a long side corridor. This then allows entry into three parts that follow : the street side lounge, the dining room in the middle and the garden area. Accordingly, the dining room was often very dark. The stairwell is usually in the hallway. Victor Horta put the door in the middle of the façade, therefore logically placed the hallway on the central axis of the house and he sacrificed the center of the house to install a skylight.

The hotel’s facade contains all the elements of Art Nouveau. It displays a harmonious blend of white stone and metal. The stone is prefered to the brick because it can animate the facade curves and cons - curves. Beams and iron and cast iron poles give , them, the ability to minimize the masonry and open large windows to let the light come in abundance. The bow windows , a sort of bay windows on the wall, and lose their angular contours to take the form of rounded bulges.

EamesLoungeChair_MyriemMsefer

Eames Lounge Chair

Charles Ormond Eames (1907–1978)

Bernice Alexandra «Ray» Eames (1912–1988) 

They were husband and wife, American designers who made a lot of contrbutions to the development of modern architecture and furniture. 

Their most well-known designs is the Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman.

Originally, for the Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman Charles and Ray’s desired to improve a familiar furniture in many living rooms: the lounge chair. 

The English club chair was their mian inspiration, Charles said he sought to design a modern version of that chair, one that had “the warm receptive look of a well-used first baseman’s mitt.” That was one of the most important thinks while they were both thinking about the concept of the chair.

Without waste of time, this design became an icon of American design. Today, these pieces not only live in museums, but continue to offer comfort and style to interiors everywhere.

The lounge chair and ottoman were conceived to provide welcoming comfort to the body.

Materials : Plywood ans leather 

The chair is composed of three curved plywood shells: the headrest, the backrest and the seat.

The chair back and headrest are identical in proportion, as are the seat and the ottoman.

Examples of these furnishings are part of the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Charles and Ray Eames became very famous thanks to this louge chair ... And for proof they feature among the world’s most important design of the twentieth century. 

Their work is extremely diverse and includes both creating furniture, filmmaking and exhibition design ...

Back then, as now the chair and ottoman are for an affluent population. Originally scheduled for limited production, The Lounge Chair and Ottoman, victims of their success will be produced on a wider scale, although each chair is produced by hand. Since its launch, this chair has sold over 6 million copies over the world.

The Lounge Chair combines comfort and the highest level of production quality both in the materials used in its manufacture.

MyriemMsefer_Superarchitettura_ArchizoomSuperstudio

In the late 1960s, the «Radical period» took place in Italian design. 
Probably the most notable result of this avant-garde period is the installation called «Superarchitettura», made in Pistoia in 1966.

According to the Radical Manifesto, «Superarchitettura is the architecture of superproduction, superconsumption, superinduction to consume, the supermarket, the superman, super gas».

Superarchitettura is the overcoming of centuries of constant art vision. It is the overtaking of ancient artistic pratiques in favour of new avant-gardes, the Sixties so-called «neo avant-gardes».

Superarchitettura’s movement combined the inventiveness of Pop Art with the dynamics of mass production.

The Superarchitettura framework got split up in two philosophical entities  
-Archizoom Associati,
-Superstudio. 

Archizoom and Superstudio

The first group 

Andrea Branzi, 

Gilberto Corretti, 

Paolo Deganello, 

Massimo Morozzi, 

Dario Bartolini 

Lucia Bartolini

They all wanted to get away from Tradition, men must overturn conventions and exalt everything kitsch as a statement of aesthetic and ideological challenge.

Second group :

Adolfo Natalini, 

Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, 

Piero Frassinelli, 

Alessandro Magris 

Roberto Magris), 

They also wanted to run away from Tradition, a new architecture must be imagined and created, which must be based on rejecting the impositions of production in favour of symbolic, dreamy values, which can ideologically fit into the landscape.

Anti-architectural and radical ideas such as the ‘the continous monument’

-AN ARCHITECTURAL MODEL FOR TOTAL URBANIZATION  1969.

“anti-architecture”: psychedelic renderings, collages and films depicting their dreams — and nightmares.

MollerHouse_AdolfLoos_MyriemMsefer(2)

 VILLA MOLLER - ADOLF LOOS

Adolf Loos :     

Adolf Loos is an Austrian architect, a pioneer of modern architecture. 

His thoughts in the process of design are still valid today. 

Ornament and Crime is one of the most famous books of the architect. It is a lecture attacking ornament in art by the influential and self-consciously «modern» architect. He explains in this essay that we have to look for beauty in the same form and not in a superfluous ornamental addition. 

In Loos’s essay, «passion for smooth and precious surfaces» he explains his philosophy, describing how ornamentation can have the effect of causing objects to go out of style and thus become obsolete. It struck him that it was a crime to waste the effort needed to add ornamentation. 

Loos introduced a sense of the «immorality» of ornament, describing it as «degenerate», its suppression as necessary for regulating modern society.

According to him, the most important things in an object or an architecture are MATERIALS FORM AND FUNCTION . This is precisely what designers and architects are looking for today.

"Changes in the traditional way of building are only permitted if they are an improvement. Otherwise stay with what is traditional, for truth, even if it be hundreds of years old has a stronger inner bond with us than the lie that walks by our side." 

Moller House :

- The house H + A Moller was constructed from 1927 to 1928, and is located in Vienna.

- The house measures 12,76m wide by 13.39 long.

- The living area is 280m2 , divided into 4 floors and 8 levels.

- The house has a façade called «public» street side, opposing symmetrical has a « private « in terraces frontage side garden.

- Only the exterior walls are the structural ones, which allows the interior, implement a Raumplan , engrenange the spaces. A method based on the organization of spaces in 3D (the plan in the space).

- To boost the lobby with its different staircases, and trades balustrade railings, Loos choses bright colors to finish with, while other parts are characterized by the use of different woods.

- A large terrace connects the house to the garden.

FACADES

Street facade

The public facade is called like this beacuse it faces the street, is symmetric and sober: «outside the house is simple and within your wealth shows in all its fullness», opposing the rear overlooking the garden and is staggered, gradually generating terraces, is a front «private» to be used and enjoyed by homeowners.

The protagonist of this exterior wall is white, compact and solid, rectangular geometric nature and role of wall separating public from private drilled only by rectangular windows and the verticality of the input shaft. The only element that stands out is the parallelepiped hung on the entry blank, as if to oppose the law of abstraction that dominates the facade.

Rear Facade

Front Garden

Unlike the severe and significant character of the main facade, the side facing the garden is dominated by trivial ways, balconies, windows, stairs, handrails and all its components match your fitness for use, without referring any other meaning, a window is just a window, is it a «trivial window»

High-Tech Architecture / Centre Pompidou

The high-tech architecture or techno-architecture is an architectural movement that emerged in the 1970s, incorporating high technology industrial elements in the design of all types of buildings, homes, offices, museums, factories. This high-tech style appeared as an extension of the Modern Movement, beyond the brutalism, using whatever was made possible by technological advances.

When modernism was questioned in England or the United States, and post modernism was appearing, High-tech architecture emerged. Most of the architectures of this movement are build in Europe or Unites States of America.

The most famous architects are Norman Foster, Michael Hopkins, Peter Rice…

The 70’s were for the world a big step, with all the technological advances, like the special conquests thanks to Neil Amstrong, ot the the military area that improve their weapons thanks to those advances. This changes, made people think that technology could help to reach a certain way of life. So people were using technology in their everydaylife, like television.

This architecture is inspired by this way of thinking, and it is also a response to all the modern building, build by le Corbusier and the others, those buildings in concrete all looking alike. Le Corbusier described the house as a machine for living in, but he built houses that were technologically primitive and looked nothing like machines. High Tech buildings do look like machines. Machines are usually mass-produced, either mobile or portable, and made of synthetic materials such as metal, glass, and plastic. These characteristics have become the reference points of High Tech architecture

Look at Norman Foster's Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, and Michael Hopkins' Brewery in Bury St Edmunds. These buildings have very different functions - an art gallery and a warehouse - but they are both simple, finely proportioned metal boxes that make no formal concessions to their particular locations.

The “Centre Pompidou” in Paris is one of the best example to this movement thanks to the skeleton that engulfs the building from its exterior, showing all of the different mechanical and structure systems not only so that they could be understood but also to maximize the interior space without interruptions.

The different systems on the exterior of the building are painted different colors to distinguish their different roles.

One of the "movement" elements that the center is most known for is the escalator on the west facade, a tube that zigzags up to the top of the building providing visitors with an astonishing view of the city of Paris.

The centre was officially opened on January 31, 1977 and has since then integrated high-tech architecture and urbanism as a movement and spectacle for the city to experience everyday.

Brutalism-Modernism / House of Brazil

Brutalism means an architectural style of Anglo-Saxon origin that comes from modernism. This movement enjoyed great consideration between 1950 and 1970. Then it appears to have a great unpopularity: it is under this name we gathered all constructions "ugly" concrete. Le Corbusier was the origin of concrete, because he though it had a savage, primitive, and without transformation side. Brutalism buildings consist of angular geometric forms that are striking in their repetition.

Le Corbusier created a building in Paris that I can relate to this movement. The house of Brazil, in “la Cité universitaire”.

The House of Brazil was opened on 24 June 1959. Initially, its design was entrusted to the great Brazilian architect Lucio Costa. The designer appealed to his friend Le Corbusier, already author of the Swiss Foundation, to help develop the project. But it changed so profoundly the initial sketch that Lucio COSTA gave him the rights of the house.

The House of Brazil is one of the most significant architectural works of the twentieth century. It presents as a home bar five floors based on seven cranes in concrete. The concrete is treated with "beton brut", a style Corbusier used often, for which the formwork of the concrete remains ingrained on the surface. The concrete, as a result, is rough and untreated and withholds much of the grain pattern of the wood that formed it. This process makes apparent the building’s construction and craft by revealing the raw materials and formative processes that constitute the building.

Under the housing bar, separate volume installed obliquely houses the public areas, offices and apartment management. As the “House of Brazil”, the building acts as both a residence hall for Brazilian academics, students, teachers, and artists, and as a hub for Brazilian culture, by providing exhibition spaces and archival resources.

Post Modernism / Rolex Learning Centre

Post Modernism can be described as a transformation of the Society, architects are more open to the public, they want to take different path for their architecture. They are not followings modern architects; that were inspired by architectures shapes conceived by engineers, they are creating shapes that have “no sense”. Line that is free from rules, guides, or previous examples. It breaks the idea of functionalism, and culturalism. Indeed they take references from the past and add colours, or new symbols. The architecture of Mies Van Der Rohe or LeCorbusier is over. They wanted to focus on functionalism by removing all the details, ornamentation etc… Post Modernism brings back all those details, New York or Chicago are not the ideal cities anymore. Las Vegas is for example. In France for example we have the work of Ricardo Bofill, Walden 7 that uses the colours to express feeling and sensations to the spectator.

Post Modernism refuses unity, hierarchy, structure, and verticality. It highlights horizontality, vanishity, and fluidity. In this sense the Rolex Learning Centre in `Lausanne, Switzerland, appears like a postmodern building by its horizontal construction, its particular shapes, and its hybrid functionality.

Indeed the Rolex Learning is mainly the library of the EPFL, Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne. The building is in the center of the Campus. It was created by SANAA a group of architect from Japan. Every building of the Campus can see the Rolex Learning Center form one way or another.

The façade is full of glass . Space inside has no seperations , it extends on one level , without walls. It is the undulations of the ground that distinguish spaces. The structure is supported by slender column. Multifunctional , the space is divided into four zones. The library is located north of the building and occupies half the surface of the Rolex Learning Center . There is an auditorium and a restaurant. Along the main entrance on the west façade , succeed the cafeteria , bookstore , bank , offices of Alumni , a space dedicated to vocational guidance for students and the association of EPFL students.

The building is famous for its landscaping architecture. The Rolex Learning Center create a unity with the swiss moutains, it’s a part of the landscape. But it’s also a landscape on his own with all the undulations. Indeed I went to visit this building and I had the feeling of strolling through lands thanks to marks on the ground or signs on the wall.