Monuments of architecture and creators of the transcendence: Marcel Breuer (part 2)

(The Harnischmacher house. Marcel Breuer 1933)

If you look at these buildings of today, the twenty first century.  Beacons of so-called capitalism, global expansion and trade that is now digitally connected from the Middle East's Dubai to China's Shanghai to the West's famous and in a modernized sense, older cities.   This reworking of structural transformation and remodeling of cities to suit, to what is deemed contemporary.  The problem is obvious, it has become over developed.   In simple terms, a construction boom unprecedented in history occurring at the same time,  assisted by the cross-flows of financing.  This 'boom', has created landmarks throughout the world of glass and steel, notoriously porous materials, but readily available and utilized within  modern engineering; structurally more pliable and quicker to develop. Rather than the heaviness and in someways inflexibility of concrete, brinks and mortar.   However, new buildings, are not really new, the are modeled on the excess of 1980s expansion via so called postmodern/neo futurism architecture within cities such as New York and Chicago - now aligning in an almost mass produced way, as they are essentially fitted together, with the workers only modeling the interior and exterior of reach floor to the specific plans, wiring and insertion or utilities, water, gas and air conditioning for the apartments.  One of these skyscrapers can take less than a year to be build, with the interiors completed in six months.  An astounding achievement in construction, but I wonder if this prefabrication on a mass scale is at the expenses of the engineering.  With reports of tenants hearing cracking and in some extreme cases newly build buildings evacuated while the structural integrity is tested.  This is where you can seeing the metaphoric cracks, the beginning of failure of modern architecture and its fast paced engineering, but more so, is betise of this expansionary and synchronized boom.  They maybe building zombies, dead and unaware of its aimless presentation as a wasteland.

But, the backslash in architecture is not a new occurrence – even if guided by the financiers of history, as Art Nouvelle began to fall out of favor and newer architects, such as the French architect Auguste Perret started to experiment with reinforced concrete, but it was Le Corbusier who from the mid 1900s began to form the basis of what we now know as Brutalism.  Marcel Breuer in 1932, after leaving the Bauhaus and forming his first architecture firm, he designed what could be seen as the first modernist take on brutalist structure; The Harnischmacher house in Wiesbaden, Germany.  What I find interesting about Breuer, is that he started with the steel and glass perspectives and you see this in his early furniture designs.  The visible framework and pliability of steel, but by late 30s he really begins to embrace the simplicity, yet complexity of concrete.  What may be unyielding, challenges an architect like Breuer to soften it or maintain its bluntness.  To what effect it may have had on Breuer to inspire him to mold its power and raw beauty of reinforced concrete, as a protective shell against nature and even the fraughtness and at times the self destructiveness of human nature. 

In 1933, the Nazis shut down Bauhaus in vain attempt to rid the degenerative art of Europe.   It is from that point onward that Marcel Breuer travels to England and like his fellow contemporaries who where able leave Germany prior to World War Two.  And this is where in the United Kingdom, Breuer now begins to firmly imprint his version of the growing trend of brutalism architecture, well into the 1940s and 1950s.