We see it everywhere, and there's hardly a person alive today who can imagine a world without it. From college campuses, to government buildings, to schools, libraries, and research facilities both domestic and federal. One style in which form follows function is taken to it's apex is in the form of The International Style, or what LeCorbusier referred to as Brutalism (a reference to the rough appearance of poured concrete). Like the architecture itself, its origins were pragmatic in nature, somber and austere in the wake of the worst global carnage in History. Defeated super powers, Germany and Japan, were left reeling in the wake of their whole sale destruction and confronted with a very difficult question, in the face of international humiliation and cultural annihilation both self imposed and thrust upon from outside, how does one go about rebuilding?
The past is unacceptable, the future is uncertain, what is the bridge? Where do it's foundations lie? In Germany, it meant a second look at the long defunct Bauhaus School, the cultural gem of the Weimar Republic. Starting from scratch, but at less than zero, groping to find a way to begin re-imagining what it means to be German.
In Japan, it meant a schitzophrenic cleaving of National Consciousness, how to maintain a radically unique culture of animism, the spirit world, and transcendentalism that would complement the hard, fast, cold, agnositc Western World into which they were unmistakably a part. It is no mere coincidence that Japonism, Western infatuation with the fart east stretching back to the 18th has been revisted with successive generations, and that Japan has had it's own fascination with the west for just as long.
The seeds that were to become the principal tenets of the International Style, in fact sprang from Germany, and already had a particular international appeal before the beginning of WWII. Many of the design priniciples championed by Walther Gropius, Mies Van Der Roe and others had there stylistic origin in the ancient austere design principles that have defined Japanese interior architecture for centuries. It was this impulse that would become the seed from which the New Internationalism would sprout. This tangent, truncated by WWII, was re-invigorated so to speak in the age following. How does a nation re-invigorate pride with out prejudice? How do you build confidence without hubris? How do you develop advanced industry without wholesale exploitation quickly? As the world watched, the skylines of battered Berlin, Bonn, Cologne, Munich, and Dresden revealed the answer. A surface of concrete. Cheap, simple, cold, too abrasive a surface upon which cultural values of old could be heaped. Government buildings, school, municipal offices. A new initiative of Peace through Austerity. In Japan as well, a glass, steel, and concrete supplant wood, lacquer and paper. Japan and Germany forged a silent allegiance to repay their debt to the world with advanced technology and industries to help lead the world toward a new future reinvigorated. These aesthetic trends were not isolated to these nations alone. Frank Lloyd Wright in america was the first artist to use concrete a serious building material. Corbusier in France had long been meldlig fur and leather with polished steel. But it was the initiative of the formerlly fascist defeated nations that would define the aesthetics for the rest of the world. From Washington and New York, to Moscow, to Bogota, and Mexico City where it was embraced with particular enthusisam and artistry (a topic again for a later date), these monuments to the Modern age resurected our faith in it. Their lack of ornamentation makes them strangely invisible inspite of their scale which is a testament to their success as evideneced in their global ubiquity. The offer, peace, enlightenment, sanctuary, purity of form that resonates within. But it's a ubiquity that is being observed, scrutinized and challenged from the outside as emerging powers reeling from their own humiliations are beginning to emerge on the National stage. Shanghai, Quinjong, Seoul and Dubai are posing a formal challenge to the primacy of the International Style that has it's rumblings in Cyberspace as much as it does in real space anf are changing the world of architecture at large. As I am writing this, the World Expo in Shanghai, the 2008 Olympics, and the Survey of Contemporary Chinese Art that dominated the Charles Saatchi gallery a few years ago are proof that a new world is unfolding from outside and slowly engulfing our own. and whose influence will without a doubt be felt accross the globe.
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