GRGR(30): You will want cause and effect.

[Mark Wright AIA]

Howdy

I almost hate to keep goig with this but...
--- Paul Mackin <pmackin at clark.net> wrote:
> Whereas in literature the
> postmodernist impulse may be to transgress the retrictive boundaries
> between self (inside) and other (outside) by whatever strategies can
> be
> devised, in postmodernist architecture there is often an attempt,
> among
> other things, to blur the distinction between what is INSIDE the
> building
> under a roof and what is OUTSIDE under the sun, rain and stars. 

You have this almost precisely backwards, with regard to architecture.

The heroic *Modernists* wished to erase or elide the distinction
between inside and out. Frank Lloyd Wright in the Prairie Style and
Usonian houses, Mies van der Rohe in the Barcelona Pavilion, and even,
though less insistently, Le Corbusier at the Villa Savoie). 
Transparency force a revolution from the repressive societies of their
time, so they thought, in favor of an open, egalitarian, communitarian
society of the near future. 

The *Post-Modernists* (and the best of them would seldom accept that
label) often celebrate the distinction between inside and out, and even
deliberately generate conditions where the inside and outside surfaces
of a structure are in conflict, resulting in an aesthetic tension which
they enjoyed.  Of course, some Modernist works have this property too,
but their architect's generally minimise the tension between inside and
out by establishing continuities in materials and details.

This distinction between inside and out has been accepted as the norm
throughout history, incidentally.  If anyone wants examples I can cite
hundreds.  It is the continuity between inside and out which is the
Modernist innovation.  (For better or worse.)

Is the horse dead?
Mark

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