Can you believe it? It's the last week of our class.

I can't, I can't believe it. It's gone by very quickly for me.

And I hope you have found the reading, and the, the video lectures, and the

discussions with your fellow students to be as exciting and, and informative and

curiosity sparking as, as possible. I, I want to thank you for making your

way through this course. It's a long course in the Coursera world,

a lot of them are much shorter. But it's the, it's the length of a, of a

semester here at Wesleyan, and, and so this is the, the arc of our of our class

theme, or themes. fits into this 14 week spread and, and

now we've come to the end. And, I thought before we, we jumped into

the reading this week I would, I would do a little bit of a review of the central

themes of the course and so that, that's, that's how we'll start

off in this, our final week of the modern and the postmodern.

And we're going to start off with something different, really, as to get

into our review. That, that is a we're going to talk about

architecture a little bit. I've, I've, I've alluded to this at

various points in the course, and I thought I'd, I'd, I'd, I'd, I'd show you

a few images of, of what I had in mind, and in displaying this shift from the

modern to the postmodern. The first image you see is a Schindler

house in Los Angeles. and you'll see it has a kind of purity, a

a, a elegance and simplicity. that was characteristic of Schindler's

work and of modernism, and is especially on the west coast of the United States.

Of California, southern California modernism, you'll see the flat roof,

you'll see the kind of boxy elements of the design, and

and, and, and a move towards, I guess we can call it the minimal, or maybe the

essential of architecture, getting to the really real of architecture is something

that modernism was all about in the first decades of the 20th century,

They, they, for, in architecture, they very much wanted to strip away ornament.

You've heard this phrase ornament is crime.

you've heard of, you've heard about the way modernist architecture really refused

historical references, tried to get out of, of any kind of historicism.

And Schindler's house as you see here on the screen is, is part of that dynamic.

And I'm just going to show you another, one other architect, a few examples from

one other architect, and that's Mies van der Rohe.

the, the first image you see there is again, simplicity core form of all those

functions. This is the Villa Lemke.

and it's now mostly a, a museum of architecture.

And transparency is also, is also an important ideal in modernist

architecture. Transparency, so that you could see to

the core of the thing, right? [LAUGH] You could see to the essence of,

of the building. The next image from Mies is a skyscraper

in Detroit. A condo, really in Detroit.

and there again, you see the, the simplicity.

the lack of ornament and trying to strip architecture down to it's essential

elements. the next image is a pavilion in

Barcelona, also by Mies van der Rohe. and there again, it's much more, I think

uh, [LAUGH] to this viewer anyway, much more elegant.

elegance but with simplicity. Elegance with simplicity.

you see the, concern with materials and surfaces there, but once again ornament

is, is to be is to be kept out of the building.

and transparency is the order of the day. Mies van der Rohe is very famous for his

skyscrapers. And the next image I give you is from

Toronto a group of skyscrapers. You see these things as well, I mean,

Chicago would be another example, but I'm showing you an image from Toronto.

Where Mies van der Rohe's practice again, aims to arrive at the, the core

simplicity, the really real of architecture.

That's the, that's the paradigmatic of the modernist moment in architecture.

And when we move to this next slide, this next image, you'll see that that moment

is gone, and that's, this is a picture of Frank Gehry's house in Santa Monica,

California. I love this house.

[LAUGH] I used to live around, a couple of blocks away from it in a much less

interesting little house [LAUGH] with my four dogs and my family.

when I worked at the Getty Center we would walk over to look at Frank Gehry's

house, which was often changing, and you'll see in the center towards the back

of the house, back of the image. You see the, the, the frame of the

traditional really suburban house, but what you then see around it is Gehry's

experimentation wrapping metal, corrugated metal wrapping different

surfaces, different sizes, different shapes.

no longer are we trying to get to the core of architecture.

Now we're expanding architecture to try to say different things and to evoke

different kinds of responses, in vegetation, in, in material, in surfaces,

in things that are transparent, and things that are opaque.

The next image is just a little bit more distant one of that same house and you

see the, the, the kind of mishmosh. [LAUGH] If I can put it that way of, of

styles, of ornament and of technique. Gehry is experimenting on his own house

there. but the, the spirit of experimentation, a

spirit of playfulness a spirit of, of, of, of engaging architecture and the

world, rather than finding a core of architecture in itself.

That's the spirit of Frank Gehry and that was the spirit and is the spirit, of

postmodern architecture. I, I, the next image is the, one of the

iconic Gehry images. It's the museum at Bilbao in, in Spain.

Now you see that Louise Bourgeois sculpture right in front there, the big

spider, and you see now, because of computer technology and the ways in which

curves and, and, and surfaces can be designed without being dependent on the

box, without being dependent on the simplicity.

You see in the museum in Bilbao that Gehry's imagination is let loose.

In a play of surfaces, of curves, of of of, of engagement with the public, not

based on the essence of architecture, but based on the imagination of the

architect. As that imagination encounters an ever

increasingly a curious public. the museum at Bilbao has become one of

the great, and not only a great economic engine in that region of the world, but a

great sight for thinking about sculpture, architecture and art, and how they can

interrelate. the next image is also from Frank Gehry,

the kind of poster boy for postmodern architecture, and this is a photograph of

the Music Center in Los Angeles. Los Angeles, where we started off with

the Schindler house, right, with the, with that simplicity, with with the

squares, with the with the search for purity.

And here, in the music center in Los Angeles, you see a kind of wild play of

surface and curve all in service of awakening.

The spectator awakening the visitor to a gloriously exciting space, where

wonderful music will be heard. no longer is it the search, again, for

simplicity and the core or the essence. It is a delight in the surface, and, and,

and in playfulness. Now, I don't want to just leave you with

Gehry as the only postmodernist, and there are lots of other examples I could

give you. I, but I'm going to just give you a

couple. The, the first is Thom Mayne.

Another architecture architect, excuse me who cut his teeth in southern California

Thom Mayne and his company Morphosis. here I'm showing an image of a school

they designed in Diamond Ranch California.

And you again, you see the thrusting out of part of the building no attempt at

simplicity and a search for essence, but rather a an invitation to engagement.

here's another slide or image of a Morphosis project, a Thom Mayne project.

This, the Federal Courthouse in Eugene, Oregon.

and, one of the things that's so characteristic of, of Thom Mayne's work

is that cut in the middle in the, almost like the frontest piece of the building.

You see behind that, there is a kind of modernist moment, that glass box, right,

between two pieces of, two blocks of metal.

but for Thom Mayne, he will use the language of modernism as one of the

languages that is available to him as an architect.

Not the constraint of a search for purity, but as a launching pad for

dynamic and playful architecture. And, and the last image I'll give you,

because it's, is so dynamic and so playful, and such a wonderful building Is

Rem Koolhaas' Seattle library. there again, you see there is the play

with transparency, but transparency gives way to reflection in Rem Koohaas' work.

Reflective surfaces play with the spectator engaging the spectator through

ornament, through design and through. a building that makes a statement in the

context of a city, breaking the context, but also contributing the possibility of

new developments not a, through the search for the core.

But through the through the, the use of technology and imagination to make a

public statement with architecture and the arts.

Rem Koolhaas' Seattle library, already a much loved building in, in the Pacific

Northwest. [BLANK_AUDIO]

Late-term Review I

The Modern and the Postmodern (Part 2)

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