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Didcot - One of many Oldest Backgrounds in Britain
The news headlines that the newest country home for Rowan Atkinson has been permitted by the Oxfordshire Planning Committee despite being suggested for refusal by the Authority's Planning Officers is in peril of raising again the somewhat exhausted discussion about Modernism versus Classicism in the British countryside. But this really is totally the wrong debate. Hauling out the two previous conflict horses onto the jousting fields of Center Britain is displacement activity that takes the eye away from a far more pushing, modern discussion affecting Western culture more usually that could be aired if the war-horses could possibly be set back in their stables for a while.
Atkinson's planning expert Terence O'Rourke is described as explaining the newest proposals as'a piece of 21st century high architecture '. I am perhaps not certain that this can be a valuable or entirely exact description of the proposals. It's correct that Atkinson's architect for the house, Richard Meier, brought over from the US to do this his first building in the UK, is a respected architect however training in the 21st century nevertheless the ideas that produce his perform are firmly seated in early the main last century. Your house can therefore similarly be described as a piece of 20th century architecture or as a piece of'Old Modernism '.
Old Modernism
The ideas that Meier however uses in 2010 were new in the 1920's and 30's when Le Corbusier and different early leaders of the Modern Action produced an architecture that indicated the spirit of a generation coming out of the first world war. This generation somewhat naively thought that they may wash clean the record of record and build a bold new world. Corb's polemical joint of that architecture was described in his popular'Five Details flat roof replacement for a New Structure ', first printed as some posts in the diary he produced, named'L'Espirit Nouveau '. These five items create strong polemical dichotomies, purposefully disparaging of the previous obtain; the newest architecture was to stand elegantly above the bottom on slim'pilotis'(columns) in place of over moist and rat ravaged basements, the columned design might produce the'Free strategy'and supersede the constraints of heavy load-bearing structures using their awkward edges, lifting the buildings off the bottom on pilotis might produce'free floor'in the city to displace the busy streets. The structural frame might in addition to liberating up the program produce the'free elevation'and the quality horizontal reel windows of the era. Ultimately, what Corb fought were the worthless dark roof rooms connected with traditional pitched roofs could possibly be replaced by the'roof yard'the fifth of Le Corbusier's five points. The other principal quality with this architecture that strangely does not get mentioned as one of the five items is it is'white '. The whiteness enabled this architecture to deny the materiality of the building's surfaces. The areas are ergo regarded as ideal abstractions, conceptual cases which find to determine perhaps endless space. The defects of a real material might undermine the quest for a pure record of utter space, and therefore material itself had to participate those repressed areas of architecture's reality.
Obviously those areas of architecture's truth that in these five items were condemned by Le Corbusier didn't get away. Certainly after the 2nd World War, Le Corbusier's own architecture took a radical change of direction. By the full time he was designing Masions Jaoul in Paris the 1950's the five items had been abandoned. The piloti had vanished, such that the buildings lay steadily on the ground. The properties were given load keeping structures, thus restraining the consequences of the'free strategy'and'free elevation'and at the same time frame the roofs were vaulted ergo questioning the accessible'roof yard '. Also the'whiteness'that refused the buildings materiality had vanished to be replaced by'Beton brut ', a new and extreme kind of architectural materiality that appeared to be called from Le Corbusier's mind to balance the sooner denial.
The Small Old Protect:
Even though we could see that Le Corbusier surely could proceed from the extreme polemic of early modernism, the vegetables of the architectural language he had helped to create had been sown and were later to be acquired uncritically by a new generation. Richard Meier was part of that new generation. He appeared as one of a group of young architects employed in New York in the 1960's who came to international attention in 1967 subsequent an exhibition of these work at the Memorial of Modern Art structured by Arthur Drexler and later printed in a book featuring the job of'The New York Five '; Philip Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk and Richard Meier. In those days this group somewhat distributed the reductive language of early contemporary motion but even though some were later to go in to new property, Meier used the line. "If I cannot be Le Corbusier, then I can be Richard Meier", I appear to recall him expressing in early times of his career, and in a recent page to the Oxfordshire Planning Team he is today clearly declaring the property as his own, "Whiteness is one of the quality characteristics of my work.... ".
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