Introduction
An architect does not arrive at his or her finished product solely by a sequence of rationalizations, like a scientist, nor does he or she reach them by uninhibited intuitions, like a musician or a painter. He or she thinks of forms instinctively, and then attempts to rationalize them; a dialectical process controlled by theory. This theory can only be studied in philosophical and ethical terms. The core of theory as a philosophy is the recognition that there are conjoint worlds, the central debate of philosophy being over the dialogue between them (White, 1991).
One is the external world, while the other is the hypothetical or internal world of our thoughts, imaginings, and interpretations, the world of psychology. The internal world houses our conceptions of the external, moulded by notions handed down or across generations persuading or convincing; it is the realm of our rehearsals, associations, ideals, expectations, and hopes for it. This essay explores the concept of formalism in architecture as evident the post-modern theory and contemporary buildings.
Background of Formalism in the Post-Modern Era
Given that formalism is a philosophical phenomenon, it would be prudent to explore its use in architecture vis a vis other phenomena in the field in order to grasp the elemental features that set it apart from the rest. Throughout history, one can identify recurring architectural themes that demand resolution, both conceptually and physically. Physical questions are resolved tectonically, while conceptual or intellectual questions are problematized in the manner of philosophy (Ots & Alfano 2010). Perennial theoretical questions include the origins and limits of architecture, the relationship of architecture to history, and issues of cultural expression and meaning. New theories arise to counter for the unexamined or unexplained aspects of the discipline.
A survey of architectural theory from the last ninety years finds a wide array of issues vying for consideration. The lack of domination of one issue or single perspective is characteristic of the pluralist period imprecisely referred to as postmodern. Evident in all coexistent and contradictory tendencies is the desire to expand upon the limitations of modern theory, including formalism, and ideas of functionalism. In general, post-modern architectural theory addresses a crisis of meaning in the discipline. Since the mid-1960s, architectural theory has become interdisciplinary; it depends upon a vast array of critical paradigms (Kruft, 1994).
It is easier to define the beginning of the postmodern period than its end, which we have probably not reached. The mid-1960s were characterized by challenges to the Modern Movement Ideology and to a debased and trivialized modern architecture accelerated and proliferated to become known as postmodern critique (Bertens,1997). The demolition of the Pruittlgoe complex in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1972 is widely hailed as marking the failure of modern architecture’s vision for housing society. The dramatic, intentional bombing of this work of modern architecture was a clear wake-up call to the profession (Parker, 2007).
Stripped of its social program, modern architecture was reduced in the 1950s to a style for reiteration in the commercial sector. Certain disillusionment with social reform had taken hold in the profession. Among the events transpiring to this professional crisis are exhibitions, publications, and the rise of theory institutions. The institutionalization of architectural theory is evident in the founding of two independent think tanks in New York and Venice, both of which undertook prodigious publication. Another response to the professional crisis in modern architecture was the blossoming of theoretical literature as new independent and academic journals were established (Hays, 2007).
In addition to the growth of architectural theory publications, think tanks, and exhibitions, postmodernism, in general, is characterized by the increase of hypothetical paradigms, or ideological frameworks, which make up the thematic discourses (Bertens, 1997). Derived from other disciplines, the main paradigms that profile architectural theory are phenomenology, aesthetics or formalism, linguistic theory; which entails semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction; Marxism; and feminism.
One aspect of the interdisciplinary of architecture and other fields is the dependence of architectural theory on the philosophical way of inquisition known as phenomenology. That this philosophical thread, underlies postmodern attitudes towards site, place, landscape, and making is occasionally ignored and unquestioned. Recent theory has moved towards philosophical conjecture by problematizing the body’s interface with its environment.
Visual, tangible, olfactory, and auditory sensations are the primeval part of the reception of architecture, a medium notable by its three-dimensional presence (Nesbitt, 1996). In the postmodern epoch, the bodily and insensible association to architecture has again turned into an item of study for some theorists through phenomenology. Provoked by the accessibility of translations of works by Martin Heidegger and Gaston Bacheland from the 1950s, phenomenological contemplation of architecture has started to dislodge formalism and put down the foundation for the rising artistic of the current sublime (Malgrave, 1995).
Architectural theory characteristically lags behind the cultural theory and the reason for the incorporation of phenomenology is no exception (Hays, 2007). Phenomenology in architecture calls for intentional attention to how things are made. As Mies supposedly said, ‘‘God is in the details.’’ This influential school of thought not only recognizes and celebrates the basic elements of architecture, but it has led to a renewed interest in the sensuous qualities of materials, light, and colour, and in the symbolic, tactile significance of the joint (Kruft, 1997).
Similar to phenomenology, formalism is a philosophical example that is concerned with the creation and treatment of a work of art. Due to its role as the distinctive expression of modernity, the sublime is composed of the main rising aesthetic group in the postmodern era. The abrupt renaissance of interest in the sublime is partly explainable in terms of the modern prominence on the knowledge of architecture via phenomenology (Ballantyne, 1997).
The phenomenological pattern foregrounds a basic subject in aesthetics: the consequence a work of architecture has on the observer. The budding definitions of the sublime shape the modern aesthetic discussion and correspond to postmodern thought. Present-day theorists examining the sublime are reinterpreting a custom dated back to the first century A.D. and is explained during the Enlightenment. A re-examination of the sublime can deploy to re-situate the architectural discussion and to move further than formalism (Johnson, 1997).
In twentieth-century architecture, any reference to form was deliberately repressed by theorists and designers (Evers, 2003). To achieve the radical break with the history of the discipline that modernism sought, the stipulations of aesthetic theory had to be altered (Sykes, 2010).
A move in concerns, in postmodern cultural appreciation, has also been affected by the reformation of thought in linguistic patterns. Semiotics, structuralism, and especially post-structuralism have remodeled numerous fields such as literature, philosophy, anthropology and sociology. These paradigms had a significant impact in the 1960s. They were equal to a revival of meaning and symbolism in architecture (Klotz, 1988).
Architects studied how meaning is embodied in language and used that information through linguistic equivalence to architecture. They questioned to what degree architecture is conservative. Challenging contemporary functionalism as the determinant of form, it was argued from a linguistic perspective that architectural objects have no intrinsic meaning, but can build it via cultural convention (Bertens, 1997).
Structuralism is a study technique that normally holds that the character of things can be taken to lie, not in things themselves, but in the relations which we build and then perceive, between them. The world comprises language, which is a construction of significant associations between arbitrary signs. As such, structuralists state that, in linguistic systems, there are only distinctions without positive terms (Ots and Alfano 76).
Structuralism emphasizes codes, conventions, and processes accountable for a work’s lucidity, that is, how it creates socially available meaning. As a method, it does not focus on thematic content, but on the conditions of meaning. The appeal of structuralism for rationalizing architecture comes from the supposition that structuralists consider linguistics as a paradigm, and try to develop methodical inventories of rudiments and their possibilities of combination (White, 1991).
The Marxist exemplar is a prominent one useful to the study of architecture in the postmodern period, particularly for questioning the city and its institutions. The postmodern urban critique is endorsed by the universal re-examination of political questions by Marxist intellectuals and theorists. Marxist perspectives of architectural history and theory raise concerns about the connection between class struggle and architecture.
Historian Manfredo Tafuri terms the crisis of current architecture as rather a predicament of the ideological role of architecture (Hays, 2000). A class architecture is not in a position to arouse a general insurgency because it relies on this general revolution. Tafuri holds that this architecture cannot even offer a picture of architecture for a freed society without amendments to its fundamentals language, technique, and organization (Klotz, 1988).
It also highlights the self-conscious, analytical, and image-oriented nature of the post-modern period, in which artists and architects concerned themselves with a history of ‘influence’. Postmodern positions call for the reconsideration if no embrace of disciplinary history, which had been rejected by modern theory. Appropriation is an aggressive way of dealing with the past. Another way is the attitude of self-consciousness of the resent as a distinct historical moment, which leads to periodization, the segregation of works and events unto separate chronological or stylistic categories (Klotz, 1988).
The choice of the model depends on the answer one adapts to the question of whether architecture is primarily an art or a service profession. The issue of architecture’s role in society is often framed in terms of the possibility and morality of an autonomous position. As a pervasive theme in the writings of this period, autonomy is seen as variously as being neutral, critical, or reactionary (Ballantyne, 2005).
Formalist Architects: the Paul Rudolf Exemplar
One of the leading formalists is Paul Rudolph. He was born on October 23, 1918, in Elkton, Kentucky. He spent most of his childhood in various towns, in that state. In the itinerant tradition of the Methodist Church, his father, a minister, periodically moved the family from assignment to assignment, and young Paul observed and lived with the vernacular architecture of the American south (Klotz, 1988). He pursued many creative endeavors and showed considerable talent, including playing the piano, painting with oils and drawing. Rudolf studied architecture at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute, now Auburn University, from 1935 through 1940 when he graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture (Parker, 2004).
For those who observe the world of architecture today, the name Paul Rudolph instantly conjures up a single, instant and powerful image. One of the major achievements of Rudolph has been the aptitude to create designs in which competing claims of this type are held in a productive tension at every scale from the patterns of the floor tiles to the overall massing. One of the well-known buildings by Rudolph is that of The Bond Centre (Diani & Ingraham, 1988). The building is based on a plan that is mainly symmetrical along an axis that passes through the building from north to south between the two towers (Malgrave, 2005). The main entrance to the building is allocated along the axis, in a four-storey podium. This architectural master plan by Paul Rudolph exhibits the features of a formalistic work that pays more attention to the visual elements of the work, rather than the functional component of the work (Ballantyne, 2005).
Principles of Formalism
Autonomy in architecture is usually associated with the creation of form by an internal, self-referential discourse. This usage of autonomy is roughly synonymous with formalism, defined as an overriding concern with issues of the form, to the exclusion of social-cultural, historical, or even material and structural issues. Such an autonomous position may be taken by the maker of work, or by a viewer or interpreter. The resulting architectural object is often abstract, nonrepresentational. To identify an autonomous position, postmodern architectural theory struggles to define which elements are internal or unique to the discourse such as form, function, materiality, or type (Hays, 2000).
Similar to phenomenology, formalism is a philosophical example that is concerned with the creation and treatment of a work of art. Due to its role as the distinctive expression of modernity, the sublime is composed of the main rising aesthetic group in the postmodern era. The abrupt renaissance of interest in the sublime is partly explainable in terms of the modern prominence on the knowledge of architecture via phenomenology (Ballantyne, 2005). The phenomenological pattern foregrounds a basic subject in aesthetics: the consequence a work of architecture has on the observer. The budding definitions of the sublime shape the modern aesthetic discussion and correspond to postmodern thought. Present-day theorists examining the sublime are reinterpreting a custom dated back to the first century A.D. and is explained during the enlightenment. A re-examination of the sublime can deploy to re-situate the architectural discussion and to move further than formalism (Johnson, 1994).
The history of architecture is largely the history of formalism in architecture. For a short time in the early part of the twentieth century, formalism was rejected as unsuitable for modern architecture, Bauhaus style. Le Corbusier, with his ‘five points for a new architecture’, was the exception – a unique example of formalism in early modern architecture. In response to the limitations of raw functionalism, a ‘new formalism’ emerged in the 1950s. It tried to reassert abandoned classical aesthetic devices, such as proportion and symmetry. The formal rules for an appropriate and beautiful architectural expression became of interest because of the poverty of form as the only modernist aesthetic device.
Bruno Zevi, in The modern language of architecture, documented the new formalism (Kruft, 1994). Zevi sets forth seven principles to codify the new language of architecture created by Le Corbusier, Walter, Mies der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Bruno replaced the official conventional, language with a formalized form based on the concept of organic marriage. This concept of living spaces is designed for use, and for integration of buildings into their surroundings (Sykes, 2010).
Architectural discourse, therefore, is conducted around the lead distinction of form versus function. Architecture, like all design disciplines, is based upon this difference (Larson, 1995). Whenever one term of the difference appears to be in danger of being ignored, passionate reminders are issued. If all architectural communications have to act in response to both concerns of form and concerns of function, it should not surprise that these are very broad, general terms (Malgrave, 2005).
Formalism is an architectural movement that arose in the 1950s and 1960s. It began as a reaction to the so-called Miesian aesthetic of corporate America during the 1950s, which was the architecture of the glass curtain wall (Ballantyne, 2005). Rejecting the modernist generation’s abstract, functionalist design based on volume and surface skin, formalist architects instead sought a more articulate, representational and expressive language of architecture. This new style reshaped building elements, both structural and formal, and reintroduced historic references and styles to the design of buildings. When fashionably adorned with ‘a new ornamentalism’, the more stylized formalist buildings became mannerist in expression (White, 1991).
In 1961, Nicholas Pevsner recognized a ‘return to historicism’ in architecture, which demonstrated that even pioneer modernists had become sources for revivalist interest and architectural form-making by the third quarter of the 20th Century. As such, formalism represented yet another twentieth-century effort to have the advantages of tradition and modernity. In this compromise, the Miesian aesthetic of the Corporate International Style returns to the classical. Symmetry, classical proportions, arches, and traditional rich materials such as marble and granite are used. In form, the building often tends to be a pavilion set on its own podium. The style came about in the hands of Edward Durrell Stone, Phillip Johnson, and Minoru Yamasaki (Evers, 2003).
Formalism is centered on a number of principles. To begin with, its nature is to emphasize on the visual expression of structure. Emphasis is laid on vertical and horizontal lines especially in International Style (Ots & Alfano, 2010). This phenomenon is opposed to other architectural theories that foreground the concealing of structural elements. Another principle of formalism is that it makes endorses simplicity and clarity. By so doing, formalism evades unwarranted details. It also makes use of industrially-produced materials. As such, formalism in architecture embraces the machine aesthetic (Evers, 2003). Formalism in architecture is mainly characterized by single volumes.
The buildings are separated from nature and usually set on a podium. In addition, they are often exotic exhibiting Near Eastern or Indian overtones (Evers, 2003). They also suggest classical columns or piers and entablatures. There are arches in elliptical and other forms. The wall surfaces are smooth, as most of the time, they are elegantly sheathed in stone. Formalism depicts delicacy in all details without exhibiting heavy monumental qualities. The style is also marked by external grilles of polished metal, concrete, and stone. There is formal landscaping with pools and fountains (Malgrave, 2005).
The style was mainly employed in high-profile cultural, institutional and civic buildings. Such buildings include the Los Angeles Music Center, The Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. In Southern Carolina, formalism was mainly used in museums, auditoriums, and sometimes in campuses for college. One of the key buildings of the 20th Century that is highly inspired by formalism is the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong. The building was designed by architect I. M. Pei. The building is among the world’s tallest buildings with a height of 369 meters and 70 stories (Hays, 2000).
On being commissioned to provide for a design of the bank, Pei stated that he endeavored to come up with a structure that would serve as a representation of hopes of the Chinese people alongside depicting goodwill to her former China’s colonial masters. The initial plan was an X-shaped cross brace. Unfortunately, the X- shape has a bad connotation in Chinese culture as it symbolizes death. Pei chose to make use of less menacing diamond forms (Nesbitt, 1996). The dominant symbol used for the building is that of the bamboo plant, a sign of hope and revival. The building is formed by four triangular shafts which narrow as the building rises. These structures shore up the weight of the building and do away with the need for many internal vertical supports, hence, resulting in to use of fewer materials than is common for a building of such caliber (Bertens, 1997).
The Place of Formalism in the 21st Century
Formalism has found its way in the 21st Century especially in International Style. A number of buildings fall into this category. Such architectural works include the Seagram Building in New York City, which was designed by Ludwig Mies (Bertens, 1997). This type of architectural work breaks the monotony of the International Style characteristic of unornamented buildings. Due to the nature of formalism, it may not be in a position to influence the masses in the twenty-first century. Meanwhile, its presence is felt more in the corporate milieu of designing. This is because the visual impression emphasized by formalism demands a lot (Parker, 2004).
Architecture, live-alone formalism, in the twenty-first century is taking a new look. Although the world is in the post-modern era, the postmodern period that we are living is different from that which existed in the 20th Century. The key driving force is creativity which entails the amalgamation of aesthetics, engineering, and technological developments. Other factors that are also at play in 21st-century architecture include the need for sustainability, socio-cultural, and economic factors (Sykes, 2010). The contemporary buildings are designed with green roofs that are environmental-friendly and are ecologically integrated to endorse sustainability. One major characteristic of contemporary architecture is that there is no dominant style such as formalism.
Due to the influence of globalization, people are aware of what is happening around the world at all times. This has led to increased acceptability of variety in the milieu of architectural designs. A survey of some of the major buildings built in the twenty-first century reveals this. For instance, The Louvre Museum in Museum in Paris combines well-known classical buildings with futuristic elements. The contemporary buildings are designed with an inclination towards the connection of people. This is achieved through the use of electronics and technology both inside and outside of the buildings. In essence, twenty-first-century architecture does not completely isolate formalism but integrates it with other factors such as sustainability and connectivity to bring out a hybrid of building style that has an overtone of the past and the future (Evers, 2003).
Conclusion
In conclusion, architecture is a curious art, however, because while it exhibits all the artistic components, it must be more functional than other art forms to be in order for them to be called art. In architecture, there normally is not the same separation of art from the utility of form from functionality that has progressively developed in the other arts over the centuries. Architecture has, therefore, played a very big role in the design of both ancient and modern buildings, structures, roads, railways and every form of structure that is in use. Architects work hand in hand with engineers in the design of these structures. Therefore, cooperation between architects and engineers will ensure that better structures in terms of efficiency and esthetics will emerge in near future. This will ensure that technology does not stagnate, but instead it will keep on advancing, thus ensuring better living standards.
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