Memories of Venice......a Retrospective of people, places, and events---

Leonardo Ricci Lectures ***** SPRING 1994

New models come from new forms and sensations. We look at the masters: Corbusier, Wright, and Mies van der Rohe.

The French Revolution helped to create the beginning of democracy. Changes such as these led to the enlightenment of philosophy.

All three of these architects born in different times, and were preceeded by these large changes. They all had very similar goals, but looked at their individual models differently.

Wright- Prophetic sensations..metaphors. It is about derivation of the biblical language. Corbusier looked at the difference of the natural landscape in a romantic way.

Le Corbusier- Born in Switzerland. His parents moved here because of a religious sect of a Mediterranean culture. His landscape was different. Not much of the natural that affected Wright.

His position was that the man and the architecture do not apply to the marriage of nature, by that architecture is imposed upon nature-clearly built.

Mies van der Rohe- was the most classic of the three. We can see the influence of the country, forest, and trees in his work.

The common denominator of the three is the desire to create a new space which has a totally new relationship between inside and outside.

Wright-organic space

Corbusier-cubic space

Mies van der Rohe-plastic spaces Mies was in Bauhaus with Mondrian (also neo-plasticism). Two examples of Mondrian

"See the form: tree...............is it the reality of the tree? NO Winter: more of the true essence but, remember that the structure of the tree goes down into the ground."

Philosophically, real structure is both vertical and horizontal.

M ondrian creates a freedom and also the fundamentals of the architecture of Mies van der Rohe.What are these principles in architecture for Mies van der Rohe???

THE GRIDLINE - on the grid he used certain laws, but we like to escape the grid and see it in 3-dimension. Now integrate the two: now, the space is totally free. There is a possibility of centrifugal and centripetal force. This element has to be also in elevation.

This is an aesthetic mistake, synthetic mistake, and a grammatical mistake. People do not understand these matters and do:

Structural Cage-We sometimes see a detail of a coner-there are piles here. An architect has to understand the language.

The beauty of Wright was not only one grid, but two (a double grid), which are much more organic and articulated.

Wright has an incredible freedom of MOVEMENT, practically any MOVEMENT. A centripetal force is much more articulated.

The circle has an incredible freedom. You can start out with only emotion, but you have to end with a language.

Handyman=mason and masterbuilder (one had to create a new chimney to be a new master)

Language sketches: