Blake 1992 - A Feel for Steel

similarities with mies (rectilinear, steel and glass buildings). he admitted

his debt was considerable. but more attentive look, they are not the same.
mies follows schinkel and peter behrens's german ambassy in s
pietroburgo. (mies supervised)

mies talks about future and tecnology but use his structure to build
classicist temples (new national gallery berlin).

craig had other origins, worked for building contractor who specialized in
light steel construction. (same of neutra, soriano, eames

worked on the field, hands on the job. mies started with brick work,
obsessed.

farnsworth si allagava

craig expert at handling steel, entirely modern material, requires a deep

and detailed knowledge of fabrication, assembly and finishing.

mies used it mainly in an old way, just compression forces except for
cantilevered corners of new national gallery.

craig was more practical and less teoretical, knew how to repair his
lamborghini, had technical know how and knowledg of advanced
technology because of his upbringing.

modest man but proud of his innovative ways of fabracating the steel and
how economically, precise fast he assembled buildings.

was a pragmatic builder who happened to be a superb artist. mies was

more conservatively on the costructions systems.

Craig had little formal education as archicth: night school in engineering

during the war, looked down by the local establishment.

his talent was discovered in 1953 when he was commissiones a case

study house for a magazine by john entenza: with this small complex of
steel and glass courtyard houses in hollywood he won first prize at the
internation exibition of arch in sao paolo. The jurors were LC, gropous,
alvar aalto, josep lluis sert. he could not be called architect for the
american law.
for the decade to follow he built many houses in california, especially
relating with beach sites.

he created beautiful, delicate, elegant spaces of light and air, steel and
glasss. Was a modern, judge building for the quality of structure and its
spaces. (peter blake)

fusing of the formalism of Mies van der Rohe with the informal style of
California modernism.[1]

The following are excerpts from va rious lectures delivered at the Uni
versity of Houston, Tulane Univer sity of Oklahoma, University of Southern
California and University of California during the period 1955- 57.

1.On Form and Function:

Society judges a buildings by its visual expression. Thus the substance of

architecture is form,

Form is rooted in structure and plan, which evolve from, or adjust to, the
function they are to render,

Architecture then, is the creative synthesis of form and function.

2. On Decoration:

Structure itself is decoration: the rhythm is expression of frame, arch or shell.

Form is de- coration : the rhythm is interplay of mass, volume and line. Material is
decoration: the rhythmic emphasis of texture and color. Depth is decoration : the
rhythm ic movement and delight of light and shadow.

3. On the Future of Architecture:

Industry, science and technology will shape tomorrow’s architecture.

force construction into the factory where units will be manufactured for fast job
assembly. Complete pre-fabrication, however, is apt to stereotype our architect-
ure and we will have to be careful not to arbitrarily stylize our structures for the
sake of variety.

4. The Machine and Architecture

the generation to which Craig Ellwood (and this w riter) belongs owes this
unders- tanding of Industrialized building to its many great teachers 一to Gro-
pius, to Mies van der Rohe, to Neu- tra and to others. To most of these men, the
solution seemed obvious: the building industry must be uni- fied through some
simple system of modular coordination; it must ac- cept certain specified
standards of quality, both in design and in ma- nufacture ; and architects must
agree to submit to the logic and di- scipline of this system

two facts : first, that here was a young archi- tect, on the supposedly arts-and-
crafts West Coast, who refused to take the easy way out and accept the
seemingly inevitable — the wood-butchery by hammer and saw; and, second,
that this man seemed to have discovered a wealth of exis ting, modern building
materials, components and techniques of which most architects were quite
unaware.

This, it would seem, was exactly the place where American architecture could
begin to grow truly modern could begin to use our finest industrial re- sources for
better building.

e had served in the Air Force during the war, done construction work af- ter his
discharge, studied engineer- ing.

aware of the availability of new methods of using light steeel, plastics, pre-
fabricated wall-panels, large-scale components that could turn a house into an
assembly of simple parts, rather than a jumble of thousands of dissim ilar pieces

Still, Ellwood is no mere engineer. Because his discovery of architectu- re came

through structure, structu- re remains, to this day, his principal

Eliwood’s houses are re­ interpretations of the Japanese spi­ rit, using the native
materials of modern America. 
 Like the best Japanese builders of the past and
present, he is conscious of the wall as a means of controlling light: his non-
structural panels ran- ge from complete transparency to complete opaqueness

able to prove that logic, sim- plicity and exquisite taste can com- bine to produce
buildings that are actually cheaper than those built daily by allegedly expert and
«cost- conscious » builders.