Twentieth-century struggles to invent a form-language for modern architecture

Twentieth-century efforts made by architects started with the early and middle periods of modernism, in which there was a focus on asymmetry, massive repetition, simplicity of form-work and elements, large elements, prefabrication (of panels, beams, sheets of glass, assembled components (windows, doors, roofs even, wall panels, and trusses), often with a mixture of arbitrary shapes thrown in. These ideas created the style of the middle years of the 20th century.

This sounds like the equivalent of focusing on developer experience in software to me — make things easier to build, easier to scale.

Later, in the last decades of the 20th century, a new language was created by architects, one which one may describe as playful interpenetration of large fabricated elements (as, for instance, in the work of Frank Gehry). One saw sheets of glass, corrugated steel, slender steel rods, guy wires, gaskets, prefabricated machine-made furnishings. These — sometimes mixed with the ironic references to historic elements like pediments and arches — created the core of the postmodern and deconstructivist imagery.

In the background, there was also a brave attempt — not always inspiring — to build sensible buildings which resembled ordinary buildings of traditional value, houses which appealed to traditional sensibilities with brick, clapboard siding, traditional looking windows, all occasionally mixed with nostalgic and historical forms.

All in all, the schemata created by modern and modernistic architectural efforts in the 20th century are too crude to carry this load. They are too forced, too gross, not capable of the subtleties of form which create a living geometry.

We have still not achieved a useful and coherent geometry — a form language — which lays geometrical stepping stones toward the creation of a living world that can, now and in the future, be attained by us for the production of coherent, vivid, geometric form.
Although various modernistic schemata have by now occupied us for almost a hundred years, they have still not given us a form language capable of letting us make a living architecture. The geometry they have created is inadequate. They have not shed enough light on the actual shape the built world must have if it is to have true life. Nor have they yet increased our consciousness of the fact that the geometry of the world is the absolutely indispensable underpinning for all living process.

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/16 Form language and style#

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