established socio-political framework which, to a greater or lesser extent, inevitably encourages or restricts their creative impulses, a condition which would not necessarily obtain with some other design disciplines like, for example, mechanical engineering (which, incidentally, thrived under totalitarianism). This brings us to another well-worn stance adopted by progressive architects; that architecture (unlike mechanical engineering) responds in some measure to a prevailing cultural climate in which it is created and therefore emerges inevitably as a cultural artefact reflecting the nature of that culture. Certainly the development of progressive architecture during its so-called ‘heroic’ period after the First World War would seem to support this claim; architects found themselves at the heart of new artistic movements throughout Europe like, for example, Purism in Paris, De Stijl in Rotterdam, Constructivism in Moscow or the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau. Inevitably, such movements generated a close correspondence between architecture and the visual arts so that architects looked naturally to painters and sculptors for inspiration in their quest for developing new architec-tural forms. Indeed, Le Corbusier applied the formal principles of ‘regulating lines’ as an ordering device both to his Purist paintings and as a means subsequently of ordering the elevations to his buildings . Equally, Piet Mondrian’s abstract painterly compositions found themselves reinterpreted directly as three-dimensional artefacts in the architectural projects of Van Eesteren and Van Doesburg , and Lubetkin’s iconic Penguin Pool at London Zoo was informed by the formal explorations of Russian Constructivist sculptors like Naum Gabo . But the architectural culture of the twentieth century was also characterised by a series of theoretical models of such clarity and seductiveness that designers have since sought to interpret them directly within their ‘formmaking’ explorations. Such was the case with Le Corbusier’s ‘Five Points of the New Architecture’ published in 1926 where a tradi-tional cellular domestic plan limited by the constraints of traditional timber and masonry construction was compared (unfavourably) with the formal and spatial potential afforded by reinforced concrete construction . Consequently ‘pilotis’, ‘free fac¸ade’, ‘open plan’, ‘strip window’, and ‘roof garden’ (the five points) were instantly established as tools for form-making. A celebrated series of houses around Paris designed by Le Corbusier between 1926 and 1931 gave equally seductive physical expression to the ‘five points’ idea and in turn was to provide a collective iconic precedent . Similarly, Louis Kahn’s theoretical construct of ‘Servant and Served’ spaces found anequally direct formal expression in his Richards Medical Research Building at Philadelphia completed in 1968 where massive vertical shafts of brickwork enclosed the ‘servant’ vertical circulation and service ducts in dramatic contrast to horizontal floor slabs of the (served) laboratories and the transparency of their floor-to-ceiling glazing. The adoption of modernism and its new architectural language was also facilitated by exemplars which were not necessarily underpinned by such transparent theoretical positions. The notion of ‘precedent’, therefore, has always provided further conceptual models to serve the quest for appropriate architectural forms. Such exemplars often fly in the face of orthodoxy; when Peter and Alison Smithson completed Hunstanton School, Norfolk, in 1954, they not only offered a startling ‘courtyard-type’ in place of the accepted Bauhaus ‘finger plan’ in school design , but at the same time offered a new ‘brutalist’ architectural language as a robustalternative to the effete trappings of the Festival of Britain. And within this complex picture loomed a burgeoning technology which further fuelled the modernist’s imagination. Architects were quick to embrace techniques from other disciplines, most notably structural and mechanical engineering and applied physics to generate new building types. The development of framed and large-span structures freed architects from the constraints of traditional building techniques where limited spans and loadbearing masonry had imposed variations on an essentially cellular plan type. Now architects could plan buildings where walls and partitions were divorced from any structural intrusion.Whilst this revolution was facilitated by an early nineteenth-century technology, later inventions like the elevator, the electric motor and the discharge tube were to have profound effects upon a whole range of building types and therefore upon their formal outcome. For example, the elevator allowed the practical realisation of high-rise building whose potential had previously been thwarted by the limitations of the staircase . But the invention of the electric motor in the late nineteenth century not only facilitated the development of a cheap and practical elevator but also fundamentally changed the multi-level nineteenth-century factory type which had been so configured because of the need to harness a single source of water or steam power. The inherent flexibility of locating electric motors anywhere within the industrial process allowed the development of the single-storey deepplan factory. Moreover, the deep-plan model applied to any building type was facilitated not only by the development of mechanical ventilation (another spin-off from the electric motor), but also by the development of the discharge tube and its application as the fluorescent tube to artificial lighting. Freed from the constraints of natural ventilation and natural lighting, architects were free to explore the formal potential of deep-plan types. This is but a crude representation of the general milieu in which any designer operates, a context which became progressively enriched as the twentieth century unfolded. But what of the specific programme for building design which presents itself to the architect? And how do architects reconcile the generality of contextual pressures with the specific nature of, say, a client’s needs, and how, in turn, are such specific requirements given formal expression? When James Stirling designed the History Faculty Library at the University of Cambridge (completed 1968), the plan form responded directly to the client’s need to prevent a spate of book theft by undergraduates. Therefore an elevated control overlooks the demi-semicircular reading room but also the radial bookstacks, offering not only potential sec-urity for books but also a dramatic formal outcome . In 1971 Norman Foster designed an office building for a computer manufacturer in Hemel Hempstead whose principal requirement was for a temporary structure. Foster used a membrane held up by air pressure, a technique not normally applied to architecture, but which offered the potential for speedy dismantling and re-erection on another site. The translucent tent provided diffused daylighting and lamp standards were designed to give support in the event of collapse . Whilst this contextual ‘snapshot’ firmly articulates an orthodox modernist position, the so-called post-modern world hasoffered a range of alternatives borrowed from literature and philosophy which in turn has offered architects a whole new vocabulary of form-making well removed from what many had come to regard as a doctrinaire modernist position. In this new pluralist world which revealed itself in the last quarter of the twentieth century, architects found themselves consumed by a ‘freestyle’ which on the one hand in revivalist mode quarried the whole gamut of architectural history , or on the other borrowed so-called ‘de-construction’ from the world of literature . Within this post-modern celebration of diversity, others sought a return to vernacular building forms, often applied to the most inappropriate of building types . But as we enter the new millenium, deeper concerns of energy conservation and sustainability have to a large extent eclipsed the sty-listic obsessions of post-modern architects. Consequently, buildings which are thermally efficient, harness solar energy and rely on natural lighting and ventilation, reflect a return to the tectonic concerns of pioneering modernists. Moreover, like their modernist forebears, such buildings offer a fresh potential for form-making, always the primary concern of any architect . Having briefly explored a shifting context for architectural design during the twentieth century, the whole complex process of establishing an appropriate form will be examined. Although parts of the process are identified separately for reasons of clarity, each design programme generates its own priorities and therefore a different point of departure for the designer to get under way. Moreover, the designer will have to consider much of what follows simultaneously and, indeed, reconsider partially worked-out solutions as the design progresses, so that solving even relatively simple architectural problems emerges as a complex process far removed from a simple linear model.
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