The fictive quality of glass

Ersoy, Ufuk

doi:10.1017/s1359135500000737

Cited by 3 publications

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“…Architectural materials are one key way of signalling time-as-social reality, and the novelty of the extensive use of glass on such a large building brought with it associations of modernity, in addition to the technical affordance of enclosing a huge volume of space by removing internal supports. The mystic and representational qualities of glass have been observed elsewhere (Ersoy, 2007; Haag Bletter, 1981); the functional drivers of the design aside, such historical, fictive associations of glass were ever-present in the discourses of Paxton (Addis, 2006). Not only did his design make use of the out-of-the-ordinariness of glass and its stark contrast with the heavy, dark stone of other major buildings, the relational meaning of the extensive use of glass on a building in 1851 and 1951 is also not unbroken (pun intended) despite the formalistic similarity of the material (Fierro, 2003).…”

Section: Section Four: the Crystal Palace And The Politics Of An Architectural Futurementioning

confidence: 99%

Architecture, Time, and Cultural Politics

Jones

2020

Cultural Sociology

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Architecture is inextricably entangled with time. Illustrating this point, the article explores two moments of architectural production centred on London in the mid-19th century: the ‘Battle of the Styles’, a struggle over the social meaning of historicist architectural design and its suitability for state-funded public buildings; and the proto-modernist Crystal Palace, which housed the Great Exhibition of 1851. While ostensibly involving different cultural orientations to pasts-presents-futures, both cases reflect how political claims can involve the mobilisation of temporalised architectural forms. The general contention is that architecture is a culturally experimental space through which nation-states and architects seek to orientate otherwise abstracted notions of temporality. While there is no straightforward or singular correspondence between temporality and architectural sites, the built environment is pushed and pulled by states’ politicised claims regarding time and temporality. Architecture always involves the materialisation of particular and partial visions of the world as is, as was, and as could be; temporal registers in the built environment involve the stabilisation of some ways of being and the displacement of others. The political basis of these processes can be illuminated sociologically.

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Section: Section Four: the Crystal Palace And The Politics Of An Architectural Futurementioning

confidence: 99%

Architecture, Time, and Cultural Politics

Jones

2020

Cultural Sociology

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Living Behind Glass Facades: Surveillance Culture and New Architecture

Steiner¹,

Veel²

2011

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Transparent glass facades dominate much contemporary high-to mid-rise urban residential architecture. This article takes a closer look at life behind glass facades in contemporary surveillance culture. The aim is to illuminate how the material culture of contemporary architecture together with surveillance practices and technologies contribute to a remodelling our notions of the visible and the invisible. Whereas the architecture is determined by conditions and possibilities of what it means to be living behind glass facades, the novel Die 120 Tage von Berlin by the German author Lukas Hammerstein explores the complexities that this mode of living cause on a socio-psychological level. Through this dual track analytical strategy a complex set of connotations governing our understanding of visibility and invisibility will be uncovered.Imagine yourself in any larger European city. You are in the touristic centre with quaint old buildings, shops and cafes on street level, the odd museum tucked into the dense urban fabric. You gradually move away from the throngs of tourists and shoppers and reach, often without having to walk all that far, one of the city's most recently developed districts, an area filled with new buildings, typically a mix of high-end dwellings and offices. These areas are, more often than not, built on sites that have been left over from the industrial period. They leave you with a very uniform impression caused by the predominance of one architectural aesthetic: tall, potent, freestanding buildings and an almost omnipresent use of glass and steel.One of the main characteristics of this architecture is the tendency towards extensive openings into the interior spaces through large windows or even glass facades. It is an aesthetic which makes one think of the modernist architecture of the early twentieth century. It does so by simultaneously drawing on two apparently contradictory aesthetic expressions. On the one hand, the buildings evoke the utopian glass architecture which can be found in the drawings of the expressionists and in modernist icons by architects such as Mies van der Rohe. It is an architecture which is elitist and radical and has mainly been realised in office buildings in high-rise areas. On the other hand, they call on the general modernist reform credo of air, light and sun for a new residential architecture in direct opposition to the dense block structure of the traditional urban core. During the last two decades, this double aesthetic paradigm has become more and

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Allure of the "Crystal: Myths and Metaphors in Architectural Morphogenesis

Eyüce¹

2016

ArchNet-IJAR

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'Form' has always been one of the most important issues in architectural design. In the process of form-giving to the end-product, architects make use of different sources from typologies to intuitions or metaphorical ones. When the generic ideas of the prominent examples in architectural history have been traced, it can clearly be stated that one of the most effective metaphors used in architecture is the 'Crystal.' Appearing at the intersections between nature and human history and having a long history going back to myths, the 'Crystal' has been used extensively in architecture both as reflecting the meaning originating from its mythical background, and also, as a metaphor representing the perfection in nature. This article will try to trace the use of 'crystal' metaphor in history and analyzing the two examples, namely, the Royal Ontario Museum: 'Crystal' in Toronto (2007) by Daniel Libeskind and Musée des Confluences: 'Crystal Cloud of Culture' in Lyon (2014) by Coop Himmelb(l)au, will try to evaluate the change in the use of crystal metaphor in contemporary architectural morphogenesis.

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The fictive quality of glass

Cited by 3 publications

References 1 publication

Architecture, Time, and Cultural Politics

Architecture, Time, and Cultural Politics

Living Behind Glass Facades: Surveillance Culture and New Architecture

Allure of the "Crystal: Myths and Metaphors in Architectural Morphogenesis

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