Architecture - Avant Garde Architectural Theory - Essay Example

In the beginning of 1922, the Viennese Hungarian Activists were gaining victory. After banishing from Hungary they got together in Vienna. Earlier this year, some of them started to get cut off from Kassak and Ma, making their own groups. In impact of Russian Avant garde was the main cause for the Hungarian Activists to break from Dada and join International Constructivism. The Activist "artists and writers" were the main groups forming the Hungarian Avant garde during that time (Botar, 1993).

Brutalism was a movement in architecture which flourished in the 1960s and 1970s. Pioneered in continental Europe by Le Corbusier, its main protagonists in Britain were the husband and wife team of Peter and Alison Smithson. The Smithsons were determined to preserve the best aspects of the heroic Modernism of Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe and other early pioneers, and to save British Modernism from what they considered creeping whimsies. The term itself (often credited to the critic Reynar Banham) is perhaps unfortunate- suggesting as it does a type of building which is ugly and unfriendly, and its association with much of Britain's welfare state architecture has not helped the movement's reputation, at least in the eyes of the public (The New Architecture, 1955).

Also in the research paper, one building and one piece of text will be analysed. The building to be analysed is the Hunstanton school, by Alison and Peter Smithson in Norfolk, Britain and the piece of text to be analysed is "Banham, Peter Rayner 1955-'The New Brutalism' from architecture review." After the Second World War, British Modernists were increasingly sought after by the authorities who wanted to rebuild a physically shattered country and enact social change through the construction of a cradle-to-grave welfare state.

But the architecture of the early welfare state avoided the stringent Modernism advocated by the pre-war pioneers in CIAM, opting instead to ape the gentle style of Sweden's long established social architecture. The apotheosis of this 'humanist' Modernism came in 1951, with the Festival of Britain, centred on the South Bank in London. (The New Architecture, 1955)For Peter and Alison Smithson, modernism was not just that. They demanded a return to a more rigid, formal architecture and put their ideas to work with their Secondary School in Hunstanton, Norfolk, completed in 1954.

At Hunstanton, the Smithsons made a virtue of the construction process of the building: structural and service elements were left exposed and the austere steel and glass frame gave the building a skeletal appearance. This "truth to materials" approach was anti-aesthetic, but, the Smithsons believed, more honest and true to Modernism's basic principles. Reynar Banham dubbed the school 'the New Brutalism', a movement which aimed, in his words, to "make the whole conception of the building plain and comprehensible.

No mystery, no romanticism, no obscurities about function and circulation." In France, Le Corbusier was also experimenting with new ways of using the Modernists' favourite material, concrete. His "breton brut" (literally, "raw concrete") technique characterised his Unite d'Habitation in Marseilles: a giant housing block with shops and other