Charles Rennie Mackintosh was a leader in the art-nouveau and modernism style of architecture, and though short lived, he was still considered brilliant for his work in the sculpting of light and experience through the framing of space with materials like stone, steel, and stained glass (Jacobson 1). Of all of his designs, the Mackintosh Building at the Glasgow School of Art has been considered by experts and enthusiasts as, “one of the most substantial artistic works in the UK” (Jacobson 1). “As Mackintosh designed the Glasgow School of Art, he stood at the confluence of these two influences: modernism, with its functional and practical goals, and eastern mindsets that led him to believe architecture was meant to be calming and organic” (Jacobson 1). Mackintosh plays with this heavy material like stone and steel and gives a comparative aspect to materialization when he uses glass to break up the weight of the building. To understand this playfulness that Mackintosh works with these subtle hints of curves, it is best to look to his other work, his own house he designed with his wife, Margaret Macdonald. “In the “white rooms” … that sublimation and logic results in a diffused and tender eroticism. The sleek surfaces, the relation of roughness to smoothness, of decorative motif to plainness, of large forms to small forms, and of angularity to swelling entasis, all speak, discreetly of the naked human body” (Brett 6-7). When observing the front façade, Mackintosh uses hard lines and edges of stone to define the building but uses subtle curves in the foreground of the building, further defining this his own understanding of the relation to that of hard and soft, rough to smooth, heavy to light, etc. Mackintosh interjects his own meaning of modern architecture through his design of the Glasgow School of Art by the use of materialization and articulation.
The Bauhaus by Walter Gropius, is another precedent work of note when evaluating important and impactful educational buildings. Walter Gropius – unnerved by the quarrels in local politics about the Bauhaus – handed the post of director over to the Swiss architect and urbanist Hannes Meyer, whom Gropius had brought to the Bauhaus the previous year as the head of the newly founded architecture class. After moving to Berlin, Gropius dedicated himself completely to his architectural practice and the promotion of New Architecture” (bauhaus100). “It is now becoming widely recognized that although the outward forms of the New Architecture differ fundamentally in an organic sense from those of the old, they are not the personal whims of a handful of architects avid for innovation at all cost, but simply the inevitable logical product of the intellectual, social and technical conditions of our age” (Gropius 20). What makes The Bauhaus so important is that it sets down these basic principles for that of modern design and New Architecture, through basic geometric shapes (Holland 1). The Bauhaus focused primarily on objects more than architecture in its early years, and they created geometric pieces that could hold meaning to anyone and anywhere, in any culture, as well as being able to be reproduced rapidly, as that was related to the idea of a “laboratory”, meaning scientific and rational thinking processes by the designers but also the inherent nature of the designs to be easily reproduced on an industrial scale) which was how The Bauhaus worked in its late years. The Staatliches Bauhaus is a leading building through design because of what the school exemplifies but also through the building and how it embodies its philosophies. “As the most significant and influential artistic institution of Weimar Germany, the Bauhaus symbolized the struggle, success, and ultimate destruction of avant-garde ideas and forms” (Lewis 865).
Another example of buildings that have shown this is the Chicago School of Art. The building recently had an addition added on by Renzo Piano that really starts to develop a use of materials similarly scene in that of the Glasgow School of Art, but with a more modern take on it. The hard-edged stone mold for the building now mixed with its large glass window and lightweight canopy acting as a lighting defuse creates a beautiful mix of meaning and function through materialization.
It can be argued that what truly makes an educational building stand out among the others is that it does not solely work in terms of pure functionality, but also in the concepts of the buildings. The proof of embodiment of the philosophical aspect of the school as displayed and exemplified in the building.
References:
Brett, David. “The Eroticization of Domestic Space: A Mirror by C. R. Mackintosh.” JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1504014.pdf?refreqid=search:6a5f60c6b2b64eab7225e845f079cf26.
Forgacs, Eva, and John Batki. “The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics.” JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2169505.pdf?refreqid=search:bf3a45c9322fb094647c8adfee4d3d2e.
Gropius, Walter, and P. Morton. Shand. The New Architecture and the Bauhaus. M.I.T. Press,
1998.
Holland, Ryan. “Why Was the Bauhaus Movement so Important for Modern Architecture?”
ArchitectWeekly, 16 Nov. 2017, www.architectweekly.com/2012/12/why-was-
bauhaus-style-so-important.html.
“Spotlight: Charles Rennie Mackintosh.” ArchDaily, ArchDaily, 7 June 2017,
www.archdaily.com/639483/spotlight-charles-rennie-mackintosh.
“Walter Gropius: Bauhaus100.” Bauhaus 100: Bauhaus100,
www.bauhaus100.de/en/past/people/directors/walter-gropius/index.html.
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