Modernist Brutalism was architecture's own Hungerplan East, West, North and South.
A plan to eliminate worldwide all those oddball little gargoyles and spandrels that cluttered up the seamless streamlined moderne eugenic vision of simple, certain, eternal perfection.
There was to be no place for the oddball and the handicapped on this Voyage into the Future : on either humanity itself or on its material culture...
Showing posts with label streamlined moderne. Show all posts
Showing posts with label streamlined moderne. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
What if God was an architect ?
What if the God with an inordinate fondness for beetles (400,000 species and counting, so far) was an architect of domestic buildings : what would those homes look like ?
I suggest that they would look very much like the intensely polychromed and extremely variegated exuberant homes of the Victorian Era.
What Americans tend to call "the Painted Ladies" and we here in Nova Scotia know as "Gingerbread Houses".
And if Hitler was an actual architect and not just an architect manque, what would his homes all look like ?
I suggest they would be the concrete,steel and glass equivalents of Leni Riefenstahl's all-lookalike photographs of the ideal human figure.
Figures all alike in their perfect prime of youth : tall and fit with symmetrical features : rendered in concrete as eternally perfect , frozen in their vigorous youth thanks to either Riefenstahl's stills camera or Speer's massive concrete.
Very 'Thirties' indeed : smooth, seamless, streamlined, moderne.
Function following form - no 'useless' decorations or 'flawed 'gargoyles.
No Romas, no Jews, no Handicapped or Gays : biological synthesis would render a perfect human species and eugenic plenticide would eliminate any mistakes.
In a word : modernist, brutalist architecture : smooth, hard, cold : the ideals of eugenics captured forever in grey grey concrete, glass and steel.
It is not at all a coincidence that when architect Le Corbusier was born in 1887, so was the Age of Modern Scientism and that when he died in 1965, so did it.
For it was his eugenic architectural ideas that can be seen dominating both the 1939-1940 and 1964-1965 New York World's Fairs, sites where his vision of a smooth, grey, perfect World of the Future was most widely propagated .
For there was no sign of 400,000 different kinds of beetles - and no God either - at either of these two Fairs ....
I suggest that they would look very much like the intensely polychromed and extremely variegated exuberant homes of the Victorian Era.
What Americans tend to call "the Painted Ladies" and we here in Nova Scotia know as "Gingerbread Houses".
And if Hitler was an actual architect and not just an architect manque, what would his homes all look like ?
I suggest they would be the concrete,steel and glass equivalents of Leni Riefenstahl's all-lookalike photographs of the ideal human figure.
Figures all alike in their perfect prime of youth : tall and fit with symmetrical features : rendered in concrete as eternally perfect , frozen in their vigorous youth thanks to either Riefenstahl's stills camera or Speer's massive concrete.
Very 'Thirties' indeed : smooth, seamless, streamlined, moderne.
Function following form - no 'useless' decorations or 'flawed 'gargoyles.
No Romas, no Jews, no Handicapped or Gays : biological synthesis would render a perfect human species and eugenic plenticide would eliminate any mistakes.
In a word : modernist, brutalist architecture : smooth, hard, cold : the ideals of eugenics captured forever in grey grey concrete, glass and steel.
It is not at all a coincidence that when architect Le Corbusier was born in 1887, so was the Age of Modern Scientism and that when he died in 1965, so did it.
For it was his eugenic architectural ideas that can be seen dominating both the 1939-1940 and 1964-1965 New York World's Fairs, sites where his vision of a smooth, grey, perfect World of the Future was most widely propagated .
For there was no sign of 400,000 different kinds of beetles - and no God either - at either of these two Fairs ....
Friday, March 6, 2015
Streamlining moderne medicine for war : jettisoning Alston and Aronson September 1940
Whatever strength the movement for Social Medicine (medical care for the small and the weak, even when they can't pay much) might ever had have had in the Anglo Saxon democracies, pretty well died with the Fall of France in June 1940.
By September 1940, medical isolationists, who had earlier so disagreed with medical interventionists over whether it was morally essential to go to the aid of small and weak nations under attack by big aggressors, had come around to at least agreeing that their own nations might be next.
The isolationist doctors even saw this this crisis as the perfect wedge to separate their interventionist colleagues's concerns for weak and small nations from their concern over weak and small patients.
"We simply can't afford to expand Social Medicine for 4Fs in a time of Total War, not when we need ever more resources devoted to maintaining our frontline A1 troops from sickness and injuries."
Dr Martin Henry Dawson was one such colleague isolationists might well have had in mind --- a decorated war hero who wanted medical America to both intervene to protect the small and the weak at home as well as abroad.
Partially for the 4Fs' own sake ----- and partially to show the neutral world the much touted moral gap between the Nazis and the Allies actually had real meaning.
The medical isolationists wanted - by contrast - to abandon the weak and small of America as readily has they had already abandoned the weak and the small of Europe and Asia.
They visualized an eugenically sleek streamlined moderne medicine, as being co-currently promoted at the New York World's Fair, has having no room for the chronically sick poor and minorities : ugly protrusions on their sleek 'average citizen'..
And poor minority patients with invariably fatal SBE, like Aaron Leroy Alston and Charles Aronson , fitted that bill to a T.
When Dawson choose, on October 16th 1940, to buck his colleagues' consensus with the first ever injections of penicillin in history for this pair he ushered in our Era of Antibiotics .
It, in turn, has done more for achieving the goals of Social Medicine than anything else besides the raising of real wages for the poor and minorities.
An unexpected result from the moral ferment thrown up by the World's Fair streamlined new World of Tomorrow....
By September 1940, medical isolationists, who had earlier so disagreed with medical interventionists over whether it was morally essential to go to the aid of small and weak nations under attack by big aggressors, had come around to at least agreeing that their own nations might be next.
The isolationist doctors even saw this this crisis as the perfect wedge to separate their interventionist colleagues's concerns for weak and small nations from their concern over weak and small patients.
"We simply can't afford to expand Social Medicine for 4Fs in a time of Total War, not when we need ever more resources devoted to maintaining our frontline A1 troops from sickness and injuries."
Dr Martin Henry Dawson was one such colleague isolationists might well have had in mind --- a decorated war hero who wanted medical America to both intervene to protect the small and the weak at home as well as abroad.
Partially for the 4Fs' own sake ----- and partially to show the neutral world the much touted moral gap between the Nazis and the Allies actually had real meaning.
The medical isolationists wanted - by contrast - to abandon the weak and small of America as readily has they had already abandoned the weak and the small of Europe and Asia.
They visualized an eugenically sleek streamlined moderne medicine, as being co-currently promoted at the New York World's Fair, has having no room for the chronically sick poor and minorities : ugly protrusions on their sleek 'average citizen'..
And poor minority patients with invariably fatal SBE, like Aaron Leroy Alston and Charles Aronson , fitted that bill to a T.
When Dawson choose, on October 16th 1940, to buck his colleagues' consensus with the first ever injections of penicillin in history for this pair he ushered in our Era of Antibiotics .
It, in turn, has done more for achieving the goals of Social Medicine than anything else besides the raising of real wages for the poor and minorities.
An unexpected result from the moral ferment thrown up by the World's Fair streamlined new World of Tomorrow....
Friday, February 20, 2015
Pushing NATURE out of World's Fairs
Many excellent historical surveys exist about the century long* rise, apogee and decline of the concept of World's Fairs around the globe - more than enough to give proof to my claim.
(*Matching almost in lock step - by no mere coincidence - the century long rise, apogee and decline of the Era of Modernity, also roughly running between the late 1860s to the late 1960s.)
If you are at all green-minded, you will come away from reading such accounts - from it no matters which author or their mode of attack - with a strong sense of the gradual, persistent pushing out of Mother Nature and her wondrous products from these exhibitions.
Pushed far out to the dark Pale beyond the Fair's artificially illuminated gates - to be replaced by the ever more wondrous synthetic inventions of Man.
Sometimes in fact the wonders of Nature were still found inside the Fair gates, on full display, but the culture of the day (and future historians) totally ignored their presence.
The only reason any of us (under the age of eighty) even knows that Australia's pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair features the highly traditional natural fabric "wool" is because, by way of pointed contrast, the building itself was a latest word in 1930s Streamlined Moderne architecture .
That was a much commented upon first for the highly, highly, conservative official culture of Australia of 1939.
The 'fabric of the day 'at this Fair is very well known - well remembered ever since by even those of who were never there : totally Man-made synthetic nylon - nylons.
Rather like the ersatz tires and petro that the Nazi war machine literally ran upon, it was made - as DuPont ads were ever wont to say - entirely from bog-common air, water and coal.
No more American - and soon no more human - abject dependency on the Japanese and their tiny primitive (but oh so clever) silk worms.
Soon no more dependency on the Aussies, their sheep and their wool either.
For tasty, cheap, year around fresh artificial lamb chops were - as always, in what we touching like to call scientific journalism - on their way.
Oh, what a difference a mere 75 years (and perhaps the success of Dawson's natural penicillin and all the other natural antibiotics ?) can make upon the eternally tabula rasa of the scientific mind.
My amused eye caught a story yesterday out of the University of Portsmouth published in one of the Royal Societies journals : it announced the strongest material known was probably not the silk of the humble little spider but rather the teeth of limpet, the ones they use to scrap their microbial food off ocean rocks.
Study lead author, professor Asa Barber, found Nature is an endless source of inspiration for (human) mechanical structures that are strong and enduring because Nature's structures have evolved through century upon countless centuries of ceaseless trial and error advance.
So if World's Fairs still mattered - and currently they don't - perhaps limpet teeth might be the hot exhibit instead of the latest iteration of still tasteless Tang and the never-yet-seen artificial lamb chop ...
(*Matching almost in lock step - by no mere coincidence - the century long rise, apogee and decline of the Era of Modernity, also roughly running between the late 1860s to the late 1960s.)
If you are at all green-minded, you will come away from reading such accounts - from it no matters which author or their mode of attack - with a strong sense of the gradual, persistent pushing out of Mother Nature and her wondrous products from these exhibitions.
Pushed far out to the dark Pale beyond the Fair's artificially illuminated gates - to be replaced by the ever more wondrous synthetic inventions of Man.
Who on earth ever let her (M. Nature) in ???
Sometimes in fact the wonders of Nature were still found inside the Fair gates, on full display, but the culture of the day (and future historians) totally ignored their presence.
The only reason any of us (under the age of eighty) even knows that Australia's pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair features the highly traditional natural fabric "wool" is because, by way of pointed contrast, the building itself was a latest word in 1930s Streamlined Moderne architecture .
That was a much commented upon first for the highly, highly, conservative official culture of Australia of 1939.
Wool or Nylon, ma'am ?
The 'fabric of the day 'at this Fair is very well known - well remembered ever since by even those of who were never there : totally Man-made synthetic nylon - nylons.
Rather like the ersatz tires and petro that the Nazi war machine literally ran upon, it was made - as DuPont ads were ever wont to say - entirely from bog-common air, water and coal.
No more American - and soon no more human - abject dependency on the Japanese and their tiny primitive (but oh so clever) silk worms.
Soon no more dependency on the Aussies, their sheep and their wool either.
For tasty, cheap, year around fresh artificial lamb chops were - as always, in what we touching like to call scientific journalism - on their way.
Green amidst the concrete
But Mother Nature is herself a bit like her weeds - if she is banished in one place, she just springs up anew in another.
Banished from the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, she turns up in northern Manhattan's concrete upon primeval bedrock of the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Centre.
There in 700 two litre flasks, Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his tiny four person team nurtured the blue green penicillium to offer up some of its precious yellow drops of the life-granting penicillin juice , all to save the lives of two boys judged ( by other doctors) as 'lives unworthy of much medical care', as medical America prepared itself for Total War.
It was as if Gordon Gekko and Emma Lazarus had exchanged their normal roles.
For history celebrates only the artificial and the synthetic at 1940's Flushing Meadows' green acres while noting only the green growing at 1940's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Centre's mass of concrete and stone.
It was as if Gordon Gekko and Emma Lazarus had exchanged their normal roles.
For history celebrates only the artificial and the synthetic at 1940's Flushing Meadows' green acres while noting only the green growing at 1940's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Centre's mass of concrete and stone.
Limpet prose
My amused eye caught a story yesterday out of the University of Portsmouth published in one of the Royal Societies journals : it announced the strongest material known was probably not the silk of the humble little spider but rather the teeth of limpet, the ones they use to scrap their microbial food off ocean rocks.
Study lead author, professor Asa Barber, found Nature is an endless source of inspiration for (human) mechanical structures that are strong and enduring because Nature's structures have evolved through century upon countless centuries of ceaseless trial and error advance.
So if World's Fairs still mattered - and currently they don't - perhaps limpet teeth might be the hot exhibit instead of the latest iteration of still tasteless Tang and the never-yet-seen artificial lamb chop ...
Friday, August 13, 2010
PoMo Green versus Institutional Green
We all know institutional or hospital green, though we probably don't know much about it.
Technically it is called Chromium Oxide Green and though it is no longer made (much) it was a technical wonder in its day.
Most chromium paint wasn't green - the green color was selected for the paint used in public institutions like prisons (remember the Green Mile ?), hospitals and institutions for the chronically ill and mentally insane.
Today it gives a bad vibe for being associated with these places of discomfort and shame, but this pastel like shade of green was originally selected because color scientists judged it the most calming shade for institution inmates.
The reason why it was made from chromium oxide was because this paint was tough tough tough and chemically toxic - it resisted stomach contents and common hospital cleaners AND because it was so tough and smooth,that made it harder for germ-sustaining dirt to hang about.
It was the most typical color of the Streamlined Moderne Decade from about 1934-1944 - by no coincidence the Apogee of the Modernist Age.
But that is soooooo yesterday.
Today's green is PoMo Green and it is not a paint at all - it is the natural verdant color of Nature itself - green grass, green trees, green ocean deeps.
The very first PoMo green?
Glad you asked !
It was all those Kodachrome-vivid color photographs of green-blue penicillium molds in the color supplements so popular during the World War Two years (when neither TV or film gave you much color) that appeared post the Spring of 1944.
That was about the time when it became embarassingly apparent that man-made medicine was being eclipsed by life-saving medicine from a humble and slimy low life normally found in our basements --- a shock Modernist Science never really recovered from.
Now it would just take Adorno and Horkheimer to make it official, which they did - in The Dialectic of the Enlightenment.
Move over Mo, Po has arrived.....
Technically it is called Chromium Oxide Green and though it is no longer made (much) it was a technical wonder in its day.
Most chromium paint wasn't green - the green color was selected for the paint used in public institutions like prisons (remember the Green Mile ?), hospitals and institutions for the chronically ill and mentally insane.
Today it gives a bad vibe for being associated with these places of discomfort and shame, but this pastel like shade of green was originally selected because color scientists judged it the most calming shade for institution inmates.
The reason why it was made from chromium oxide was because this paint was tough tough tough and chemically toxic - it resisted stomach contents and common hospital cleaners AND because it was so tough and smooth,that made it harder for germ-sustaining dirt to hang about.
It was the most typical color of the Streamlined Moderne Decade from about 1934-1944 - by no coincidence the Apogee of the Modernist Age.
But that is soooooo yesterday.
Today's green is PoMo Green and it is not a paint at all - it is the natural verdant color of Nature itself - green grass, green trees, green ocean deeps.
The very first PoMo green?
Glad you asked !
It was all those Kodachrome-vivid color photographs of green-blue penicillium molds in the color supplements so popular during the World War Two years (when neither TV or film gave you much color) that appeared post the Spring of 1944.
That was about the time when it became embarassingly apparent that man-made medicine was being eclipsed by life-saving medicine from a humble and slimy low life normally found in our basements --- a shock Modernist Science never really recovered from.
Now it would just take Adorno and Horkheimer to make it official, which they did - in The Dialectic of the Enlightenment.
Move over Mo, Po has arrived.....
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