Point: Explorations

During this semester I learned several new things one of which was how designers explored different ideas through their buildings. However I have come to realize that over time the more explorations that are done the problems that are encountered. For example the first style that stood out to me as a way to explore new designs and ideas was from the school of Bauhaus. Things began to be more cubed and geometric. This was an extreme change from the glitz of the Art Deco movement and a way to explore new colors with a more primary color palate like reds, blues, yellows along with hues of blacks and whites. While there were very interesting buildings that were created during this time, some of them often had major problems. For example the Farnsworth house which was designed by Ludwig mies van de rhoe, was a very interesting building in concept with its immaculate exterior windows, but it had several problems like over heating in the summer time, and it often flooded throughout the year.


The main idea behind this movement was to eliminate all ornamentation and historical references, thus determining the form of a building based off of its function. While this style did not have a precedent to draw its ideas from, it was however a leader making way for future movements to reflect on and explore ways to redefine these ideas. One of the styles that we began to see later on down the road that draws inspiration from the Bauhaus movement is the Deconstructionalist movement or the “high- tech” period of modernism. The Centre Georges Pompidou is one of the main buildings that shows evidence of influence from the Bauhaus movement. In this building we begin to see the return to geometric and cubical shapes as well as the primary color palette of blue, yellow, and red. However like most other designs there is a new aspect to the technological form of design. While the Bauhaus focused more on shaping the form of the building around its function, the buildings during this movement exposed the structural integrity of the building on the exterior. Roth states, "The exterior, therefore, is a maze of color-coded air ducts, electrical conduits, and Plexiglas-enclosed escalators. It is an exoskeletal building, with the skeleton made up of exposed steel members … It is architecture-as-machine elevated to the most prestigious cultural level" (Roth, 577).


While some may view this particular building as a piece of art, I personally fell that it was not a very successful movement. However there are the few buildings that I believe helped to define this movement one of which was the IBM tower in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia. I felt like this building was a true exploration in the form of technological modernism. The idea of this building was to expose the technological structure of this building, and what better way to do it than by new technological advances to do so. This is one of the first buildings that we have studied during this semester that used rotating panels on the exterior making it a machine that’s ahead of its time.



The Explorations unit has given a clear understanding of how designers overtime have used precedents from time periods before in order to explore new ways of design. Whether its from a small scale house like the Farnsworth house or a large tower like in Kuala Lumpur designers have began to explore new concepts and ideas with the technology and machines we have today. However this still leaves us with the question of what the heck happened in the suburbs?