Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-2xdlg Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-20T00:49:07.408Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The value of plenty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 August 2008

Irénée Scalbert
Affiliation:
The Architectural Association School of Architecture, 36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES, United Kingdom

Abstract

For the last 40 years, organic values have prevailed in Western architecture. The conflict in the 1950s between the organic and the typical with its ideology of mechanisation is currently being reenacted under the new categories of the generic and the specific. These two orders of value are assumed to be incompatible, even though both history and theory suggest otherwise. In this conflict, the organic has so far survived unscathed in spite of a growing interest in the typical, the status of which remains unclarified: should it be envisaged as a means to an aesthetic, as it is at present, or should it be a means to affluence?

Type
Issues
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Banham, P. R. B. (1960). Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, The Architectural Press, London.Google Scholar
Benton, T. and C, and Sharp, D. (1975). Form and Function: a Source Book for the History of Architecture and Design, 1890–1939, Crosby Lockwood Staples, London, pp. 3840.Google Scholar
Bosman, J. (1992). ‘CIAM after the war: a Balance of the Modern Movement’ in Rassegna No. 52.Google Scholar
Blundell Jones, P. (1995). Hans Scharoun, Phaidon, London.Google Scholar
Conrads, U. (1970). Programmes and Manifestoes on 20th Century Architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. p. 28.Google Scholar
Frampton, K. (1980). Modem Architecture: A Critical History, Thames and Hudson, London.Google Scholar
Geuze, A. (1997). ‘The Promise of the English Park’ in ARCHIS, 03 1997.Google Scholar
Gilbert, H. (1984). The Dream of the Factory-made House: Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.Google Scholar
Giedion, S. (1941). Space, Time and Architecture, Oxford University Press, Oxford.Google Scholar
Giedion, S. (1948). Mechanisation Takes Command, Norton Press, London.Google Scholar
Glendinning, M. and Muthesius, S. (1994). Tower Block, Yale University Press, New Haven.Google Scholar
Gropius, W. (1936). The New Architecture of the Bauhaus, Museum of Modern Art, New York.Google Scholar
Isaacs, A. (1991). Walter Gropius. An Illustrated Biography of the Creator of the Bauhaus, Bullfinch Press, Boston, p. 33.Google Scholar
Koolhaas, R. (1995). S, M, L, XL, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, p. 1250.Google Scholar
Pevsner, N. (1936). Pioneers of Modern Design, Penguin, Harmondsworth.Google Scholar
Smithson, A and P, . (1973). Without Rhetoric – an Architectural Aesthetic, 1955–1972, Faber & Faber, London, p. 30.Google Scholar
Smithson, A. and P, . (1982). The Shift, Academy Editions, London.Google Scholar
Wright, F. L. (1958). The Living City, Horizon Press.Google Scholar
Zevi, B. (1949). Towards an Organic Architecture, Faber & Faber, London.Google Scholar