Contemporary European Architects [antikvár]

Ivan Leonidov, Ministry of Heavy Indus- in Red Square in Moscow, USSR, competition entry of 1933 The word at the end of the eighties was that »Post-Modernism« was dead. »Deconstruction« was now the latest trend. Is It still? What do Post-Modernism and deconstruction actually mean? And in which direction Is architecture moving today? To venture a look Into the future, we must first take a brief look at the past, back to the beginnings of Modernism. Artists and architects at the end of the nineteenth century were confronted with the profound implications of the concept of mathematical abstraction In engineering. Art reacted to the principle of abstraction in physics with its own gradual renunciation of the object. It had no further use for the conjuring tricks which had previously produced richly decorative styles of architecture. It was here, at some mysterious hour, that the Modern Movement was born. Architecture began a shift towards pure form which, in the International Style of the twenties and thirties, was to become an aesthetic canon. Of profound significance for the history of architectural theory was the attempt by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, in 1931, to define the peculiar characteristics of the International Style. They identified Its three main aesthetic principles as the emphasis upon pure volume, modular regularity, and the absence of wilful decoration. Modernism was equally preoccupied with the principle of freedom, which led to an individualization of architecture and to the end of the standardized type. It had previously been the type which, until well into the nineteenth century, had dictated both the building task and its solution. In the wake of political revolution in the Soviet Union there emerged a Marxist art movement in which modernist architecture reached its peak. Russian architects of the twenties - El Lissitzky, Ivan Leonidov-explored the principles of space and construction with a sense of boundless possibilities in visionary designs. And although the experimental designs remained for the most part aesthetic Utopias, they have continued to inspire architects right up to our own times. After the Second World War and the destruction of much of Central Europe's legacy of historical architecture, the Modern Movement - temporarily under neo-classical pressure - returned to the scene with some new examples of the functional urban design which had been initiated in the 1933 Athens Charter. But the reductionist style of architecture which developed in the euphoria of post-war modernity had spent its force by the end of the seventies. After an odyssey through the world of limited possibilities it ended in stereotype, and was finally met with scepticism and resistance. The history of style In the twentieth century is one of the modern versus the traditional. Post-Modernism,