Architecture and Pop Culture

Architecture and Pop Culture

Class : ELEMENTS OF ARCHITECTURAL TYPOLOGY Student: LEC KAO Sandrine Essay texts : Denise Scott Brown “Learning from Pop”, Casabella 359-360 (December 1971) Aldo Rossi, Cemetery of San Cataldo, Modena

At the turn of the 20th century, architecture was meant to “follow function”, remain as simple as possible, “clarity” being the main word, a stark contrast to the Beaux Arts style. Although, the rejection of any kind of ornaments, colours, or curves clashing with the vertical and horizontal lines seems not to reflect a popular demand, being elitist and without a meaning to the world, universal by its shape and its use of industrially-produced materials. This lack of sensitiveness and care for the context in which an architecture is set has received many criticism in the late 20th century. More eclectic styles were sought, as architects need to become more than servers of a rich spectrum of the population.

Postmodernism includes a real thought about what’s here: what’s making a building alive by taking in consideration the surroundings and most of all the social, economic and architectural context in which it’s being settled. It includes more influences coming from culture, art, philosophy, historical facts, economics, fiction, even TV opera soaps.

The famous “Less is a bore” of Robert Venturi contrasts with the “Less is more” of Mies van der Rohe, postmodernism being the new movement challenging modernists and critiquing openly by emphasizing aesthetics. This contestation movement aims to pluralism, awareness of social differences, therefore consider the disadvantaged groups often left apart.

As a matter of fact, architecture as become mostly mediatic now, well-showed thus well-known for many of us. It became a very visible part of the culture : who wouldn’t quote this building or another, this square or another because it’s been seen on television, and refers to a particular ideal of life ?

Architecture is nowadays promoted differently by images, even being influent economic assets. Nowadays, architecture is a part of the scene, meaning a part of the media world.

As a matter of fact, pop culture can be related to what’s making and shaping our everyday life, from TV programmes to huge billboards and advertising by the side of the highways. Pop culture relates to the society of mass-consumption.

Architecture and Pop Culture – LEC KAO Sandrine

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In the theoretical writing, Scott Brown is being critical of the modernist doctrine that dominates architecture at the time, and “Learning from Las Vegas” will soon become a basis for postmodernism. A call is made for architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of “common people” and less immodest with their designs. Therefore, architecture must reconnect with its traditions, and with society.

“Learning from Las Vegas” is a manifest which aims to renew our vision of the American city, thus contemporary architecture and its links to pop culture.

Denise Scott-Brown analyses the new urbanism that represents the image of a playful, commercial architecture from the very famous city. Exuberance and freed expressivity seem to appear as fundamentals to the American pop culture.

The author is interested in the city for what it is and not for what it’s supposed to be. It must be analysed in its context and then “sensivity to needs is a first reason for going to the existing city”.

If the example of Las Vegas is to be taken, the city might represent what economically constrained groups’ tastes would be if they weren’t constrained. These nouveau riche environments (such as Hollywood too) are the image of the “typical American city” in its expressiveness.

Taking pop culture as an inspiration is also to consider the “people’s needs”, hence rich but also poor and very poor people. What do they want? What’s their background and what would suit better to their needs and the society? Scott-Brown affirms that if we ask ourselves “What did Le Corbusier do?” or if we question Madison Avenue’s background, it won’t answer to the needs of the very poor. Indeed, an alternative would be to examine what people do to building once they reside in it.

Far from the American model, a good example for this alternative is Chandigarh, India, the most important urban planning project for which Le Corbusier worked. Did Le Corbusier and his team of architects and urban planners think about what the needs of the Indian people were, or did they just impose their city planning as the best solution? Did they consider the habits of people, the context? It was the modern ambition to build a rational city with huge roads and give a main role to each “sector”, forgetting about the social habits of living altogether. Moreover, the use of the massive three floors concrete buildings demonstrate that the European spirit was moved to this very different country. Therefore, should we ask ourselves : Was this city really made for people, or was it just the ambition of bringing there a pre-existing typology that is somehow maybe not adapted to the context ?

The subject to this enquiry is to understand what can be learned from the artefacts of pop culture. To find out about that, we should learn about the formal vocabulary of today. Looking for pop culture is a way of understanding the architecture of our days, and we understand better this vocabulary nowadays because it is less Cartesian than the modernist approach and more relevant to people’s habits and what they are used to.

The architectural form is determined by the processes and technologies, hence materials such as bricks and mortar, and also by the ideas about form, the image that the form will convey. According to Denise Scott Brown, “the forms of pop landscape are as relevant to us now as were the forms of antique Rome to the Beaux-Arts”. Indeed, they speak to our condition aesthetically and socially. It is one of the few contemporary sources of data on the symbolic and communicative aspects of architecture since it was untouched by the Modern movement’s purist reduction of architecture to space and structure only.

As a matter of fact, “Learning from Pop” spots a long time problem : form was an illegitimate subject and the analyse that used to be made about tradition was since then lost, leading to new forms that don’t easily relate to traditional architecture.

Artist Roy Lichtenstein said “Pop art looks out into the world; it appears to accept its environment, which is not good or bad, but different – another state of mind. ‘How can you not like Architecture and Pop Culture – LEC KAO Sandrine

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exploitation?’ ‘How can you not like the complete mechanization of work?’ ‘How can you like bad art?’

I have to answer that I accept it as being there in the world”. As for Roy Lichtenstein words, Denise Scott Brown tries to analyse as objective as possible the already existing city, through its aesthetic and social grounds.

A main example of the postmodernism movement is the cemetery of San Cataldo, designed by Aldo Rossi. The building displays the style’s preference for form over function. The main building is set to be a monument for the dead, an analogy to the relationship between life and buildings in the modern city. “This project for a cemetery complies with the image of cemetery each one of us possesses”, which means that the empty land in which the building is settled may represent the loneliness, desertification of any kind of life.

What’s to be understood in this essay is that architecture may draw from the popular visual culture of the contemporary urban landscape. By absorbing popular forms, popular images, popular dreams into its expression, architecture would then regain its role for the tastes of the popular crowd. “Today architects feel free to borrow from anywhere they like and few would be bold enough to propose a new building without attending to local conditions”. This is the start for a new chapter, giving importance to the recovery of historical forms, the pursuit of humor or surprise, even the environmental issues and use of materials adapted to the place.

Postmodernism hasn’t touched only architecture. Urban planning as been touched also by the industrial mass production ideas of modernism, producing large scale plans, aesthetic standardisation, the non-recognising of differences and aim for homogenous landscapes.

Postmodernism simply claims for an open vision of urban planning as there isn’t one only “right way” of planning and different styles must be taken in the process. Postmodernists proposed something as various and individual as people are themselves.

Architecture and Pop Culture – LEC KAO Sandrine

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