Introduction
A lot of important events occurred from the beginning to the end of Ottoman Empire namely wars, conclusions of peace and conquests. In addition to these, especially the effects of westernization which started with the Tulip Period were remarkable in the 19th century.
These effects were obviously seen in the fields of science, culture, art and architecture. With the help of westernization palaces and other institutions were built in European style and even after this period European architects had influence on the expressionist architecture and this led to built several buildings. Moreover, a lot of people who had improved themselves with the education they had in Europe were effective in the construction of many buildings, kiosks and palaces. (Colquhoun, 1981. 139-43)
Architect and Expressionism
There is no doubt that one of the most important architect of that period was Professor Jachmund who was sent Istanbul bye the German Government. His main duty was to work in the construction of Sirkeci Station which had an important place in the railway project which was carried on by the Germans; however Jachmund was working as a lecturer at School of Architecture. (Dal Co, 1990, 177-80) That station has still been standing as a strange building that had been shaped by the German style since 1890.
With its horseshoe arcs, its wide and round windows, its clock towers like minarets and its water tables; it is considered to a strange one. Sirkeci Station is a pioneering even descriptive example of new architectural expressionism which had its start in Istanbul since it is a total reflection of that transition period with its approach and details.
Gopnik and Varnedoe were returning from a lecture by the late critic Reyner Banham, who had spoken on the way in which the “low” construction of American grain elevators and factory buildings had been taken up and romanticized into the “high” architecture of modernism by Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and others. Banham’s ideas struck the note of the pair’s common interests. At New York University, Gopnik had heard Varnedoe lecture on the mixing of high art strategies and popular culture in Picasso’s “Ma Jolie.” The title of that painting was also the refrain of a then popular song, the equivalent of a Top Ten hit. Varnedoe, for his part, was intrigued by Gopnik’s work on the relationship of comics and caricature to modern art.
It is not news that artists have incorporated low materials and the images of low art, from newspaper clippings to comics, into avant-garde art. What is new and important about “High and Low” is its emphatic argument that popular culture has not simply been a passive source for high art, a tabletop of scattered clippings serving as material for it. Instead, the show emphasizes the mutual interactions of high and low. And it investigates the makers of low art, just as Reyner Banham discovered the architects of the original grain elevators. (Whyte, 1982, 87-92)
If, a few years ago, teachers of architecture urged students not to retreat so readily to the library and the image-mart of the journals and the monographs, now they are asking that same group to gather more material, historical or contemporary, outside their own impulses. Presumably the increasing introversion on the part of students is not due to their faculty’s lack of interest or expertise. (Colquhoun, 1977, 96-102)
One can only suppose the opposite, given the continuing migration to faculties of architects trained during a period when analysis and history were considered to be very important. Instead, the lack of inquiry seems related to an expanding belief that such inquiry is more or less irrelevant to the process of designing that it lies outside pertinent knowledge. With this attitude often comes a general hostility to a priori architectural thinking and to modes of learning that may be analytic or information based in the first place.
If we assume that this viewpoint does not come from laziness or a love of ignorance, nevertheless it does eliminate the need for many of the more strenuous aspects of learning associated with scholarship, with the study of the past and with logic and the expository, and tends toward an anti-intellectualism that finally argues for other of rigorous thought. Replacing the gathering and analysis of data is a growing faith in intuition and certain historically exhausted notions of creativity that traditionally fueled the modern movement but has been in serious doubt since the first strong critique of that movement more than thirty years ago. (Banham, 1986-89-92)
It would be repetitious to belabor the obvious problems inherent in easy conflations of “biotechnical determinism and free expression” as outlined as early as 1967 by Alan Colquhoun, but the schools seem either not to have learned these lessons or to have forgotten them in a reaction against some of their worst dogma. A very precious baby has gone with the tepid bathwater of late modernism, rationalism, and historicist.
The argument for intuition assumes that commodity lodges within the individual and is largely independent of, or even compromised by, things external. Design studios become exercises in automatic writing. Professors urge “consciousness lowers,” the production of form beneath reason. The focus of these practices, intended to release what Adorno calls the “I of expressionism” (Foster 1987, 161-69), can also foster self-absorption verging on narcissism.
The student is homunculus. In his or her tiny form is the curled creative force, whole and waiting. It would prejudice genius to call students’ attention to the given. The goal of pedagogy is then opening, nurturing that which already exists. This takes a lot of responsibility away from the teacher, whose role becomes that of an expediter, excavating the artistic impulse, and perhaps deprogramming information or preconceptions that may block such excavations. (Colquhoun, 1989, 201-10)
This strategy accepts the simple alignment of architecture and the arty, the emotional and the expressive, returning to a theoretically suspect modern pastoral. Although it thoroughly rejected the formats of modernism on one level, architectural teaching returns to them tenaciously on another. What appears to be a rejection of discipline is in fact a particularly rigid historical practice. While Virgilian in origin, this concept gained force during the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century with the canonization of “the innocence of the eye” (Banham, 1972, 23-25) To propose this paradigm is in fact to revive a troubled and contradictory litany.
A historic theme passing from the pastoral, through the romantic, into the modern, finds particularly receptive ears in this millennial New Age, as it did during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Hal Foster writes, “Expressionism denies its own status as a language” (Foster 1985, 59–78).
Conclusion
Several factors have led to this revival. In this century, architectural imagery takes its cues from the fine arts, and at least since the mid-seventies, painting has been both figural and decidedly expressionistic in character and doctrine. There were problems with this. By nature, its anarchic charge and solitary persona do not invite the communal impulse that produces discourse. Emotion substitutes rhetorically for a shared communication system. Expressionism markets itself more as an attitude, resisting an easy resurrection of its forms.
Postmodernism, while ineffectual on many levels, returned to a discussion of meaning with such vehemence that for a long time, it will be difficult to restore the self-proclaimed symbolic silence of the modern movement. Consequently, the alloy of the expressionist and the figural in postmodern painting proposed a new design zeitgeist while avoiding the repetition of prevailing forms.
References
Banham, P. Reyner (1972) Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, London: Architectural Press. 23-25.
Banham, Reyner. A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture, 1900-1925. Cambridge: MIT P, 1986. 89-92.
Colquhoun, A, ‘Critique’, Architectural Design, 1977, 96-102.
Colquhoun, A. (1989) Modernity and the Classical Tradition: Architectural Essays 1980-7, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 201-10.
Colquhoun, Alan. 1981. “Typology and Design Method.” In Essays in Architectural Criticism: Modern Architecture and Historical Change. Cambridge: MIT Press. 139-43.
Dal Co, Francesco. Figures of Architectare and Thought: German Architecture Culture 1880-1920. NY: Rizzoli, 1990. 177-80.
Foster, Hal, ed. 1987. “Of Bodies and Technologies.” In Discussions in Contemporary Culture. Seattle: Bay Press. 161-69.
Foster, Hal. 1985. “The Expressive Fallacy.” In Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, 59–78. Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press. 59-78.
Whyte, Iain Boyd. Bruno Taut and the Architecture of Activism. NY: Cambridge UP, 1982. 87-92.