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

[Paul Mackin]

On Wed, 5 Jul 2000, Mark Wright AIA wrote:

> 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?


Yes and my example was clumsily invented to suggest a shopping mall where
the "streets or sidewalks" running in front of the "shop windows" are
actually inside the building. Not much of a postmodernist development
perhaps. If only I'd used the Gehry House. Or maybe that wouldn't have
worked either.

I don't doubt you are describing things correctly but let me use your
own description to try to minimally redeem myself with regard to 
who is really subverting inside/outside or trying to. Consider
this: minimizing tension between inside and outside (having them
appropriate to each other) isn't nearly as radical a way to undermine  the
hierarchical binary opposition (nearly as postmodernist presumably) as
deliberately generating conditions where the inside and outside of
buildings are in conflict with each other, as you say the postmodernists
might do. The former is happy harmony. (What reason has the outside to
complain when they have things just as good as us here on the
inside?) However the latter way--EMPHASIZING differences--is at least
symbolically dissident. Again, my example was clumsy.

		P.