The Architectural Imagination [Part -4]

Fagus Factory

The dynamic state of technology had to be transformed by spirit, that architecture wasn't just building but was building raised to the level of art and that the intellectual task of the architecture in modernity was to invent new forms of new machine age that would not only understand architecture as representing a social totality, but that would also put architecture in the continuum of architecture as an art practice.

Walter Gropius worked on a part of Fagus factory early in his career just after leaving Peter Behrens office. He helped with the AEG factory and demonstrated that how seminal ideas could be transformed, elaborated, varied and even criticized. 

Detail

The factories were meant to act as a kind of advertisement for the quality of production of the corporation itself.  

This three stories high shoe lasts factory is located in Alfred a der Leine, Lower Saxony, Germany.

The material used was primarily steel, brick masonry, and glass wall. The recessed masonry gave the glass panels look like a curtain wall springing from the parapet. The glass and steel came together at a very sharp point at the corners rendering it emphatically transparent. A solid masonry block that contains the entrance to the factory pushes in this glass envelope

Seagram Building

The glass was endowed not only with material visual quality but spiritual quality, to extract the full potential of glass and steel various experiments were conducted by German Architect Mies Van Der Rohe. He designed buildings in America which became an epitome of glass and steel skyscrapers.

The Seagram Building was the administrative headquarters of the Canadian distillery and it was located on Park Avenue in downtown New York. 

He wanted the building to engage with the city and even confront the city, so as the construction site was in the mid-block he left a deep plaza in front of the building. 

Detail

The flat surface of the building comprises of bronzed glass and steel in an attempt to bring the materials closer together. The entire steel frame is encased in concrete with an I section over the glass as an ornament as a representational function for what is, in fact, a constructional and structural vocation.

The Architectural Imagination [Part-2]

The development of technologies that allow the production of large sheets of glass and the materials with tensile strength like steel enormously changed the way the buildings were made shifting the architecture from heavy compressive forces in masonry to lightweight and thin structures.

Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft

In some ways, this advent of new materials resulted in architecture beginning around the end of the 19th century, and intensifying in the 20th century began to be used for commercial purposes.

One of the seminal examples of this movement is the General Electric Company, in Germany whose headquarters were on a prominent Urban site in Berlin.

Factories at this period were considered under perfunctory building type and the materials like steel and glass were basically used such that building could span large distances.

Peter Behrens was clear about his ambition to raise the factory architecture to the status of serious, profound architecture.

Bird's eye view

Interior view

In order to conceptualize this representational role that this new architecture to play, Behrens devised an architectural theory.

It has to do with the way architecture appears in history as a representation of a sort of cultural ethos, and that representational role of architecture has to change through time as history, itself moves forward.

It was clear from his work that industrial capitalism was a new authority. The architectural paradigm that was adequate to this new ethos was the factory.