Thursday, May 1, 2008

Pure

WOW SO CLEAN AND WHITE
can we just leave it this way?
anyway, just to share with you all a very wonderful excerpt that I've read..



Mies on ARCHITECTURE OF TRUTH

IN 1900 there was a group of talented men in Europe who founded the Art Nouveau Movement. They tried to develop everything anew, houses new, dresses new, spoons new, life new, everything new. They thought, however, that it was a question of form. The whole movement didn't last much longer than a typical fashion and nothing came out of it. They were most talented people - there were no finer in the world, and they still could not do it. It then became clear to me that it was not the task of architecture to invent form. I tried to understand what that task was. I asked Peter Behrens, but he could not give me an answer. He did not ask that question. The others said: 'What we build is architecture', but we weren't satisfied with this answer. Maybe they didn't understand the question. We tried to find out. We searched in the quarries of ancient and medieval philosophy. Since we knew it was a question of the truth, we tried to find out what the truth was. We were very delighted to find a definition of truth by St. Thomas Aquinas: 'ADEQUATIO INTELLECTUS ET VEI', or as a modern philosopher expresses it in the language of today: 'Truth is the significance of fact.' I never forgot this. It was very helpful, and has been a guiding light. To find out what architecture really is took me fifty years - half a century.


I can't exactly explain what this Truth is, but I see it in CROWN HALL (IIT). I see it even more in CrownHall than his arguably most acclaimed work, the Farnsworth. This truth can be a sort of silence, aura, or poetics. I don't know how they did it, I think that's why I'm here.

No comments: