Space-Time in Art, Architecture, and Construction

The New Space Conception: Space-Time

Social, economic, and functional influences are vital in human activities, including arts and sciences.
Feelings and emotions significantly impact actions, often underestimated.
The past century's misfortunes stemmed from believing industry and techniques had only functional import, neglecting emotional content.
Arts were isolated from everyday realities, causing life to lose unity and balance.
Science and industry advanced, but the detached realm of feeling vacillated between extremes.
Emotions influence all affairs; speculation is not entirely "pure," and action is not entirely practical.
Emotional life is determined by uncontrollable circumstances, such as being human and living in a specific period.
Integrated cultures produce a common unity of feeling.
A recognizable common spirit runs through the baroque period, influencing painting, philosophy, architecture, and mathematics.
Techniques, sciences, and arts are carried out by people growing up in the same period, exposed to its influences.
The emotional background shared by diverse pursuits should be discovered.

Do We Need Artists?

Some question the possibility of pervasive unity of feeling in our period.
Science and industry are seen as inimical to art and feeling.
Science is seen as taking over the arts, opening new means of self-expression, making us independent of them.
Feeling continues to filter through every activity and situation in any civilization.
Environments opaque to feeling are unsatisfying, just as those resisting practical or intellectual control are.
Emotional frustration has long prevailed.
Official art has turned its back on the contemporary world and given up trying to interpret it emotionally.
The feelings elicited by that world have remained formless, never meeting objects that are their symbols and satisfaction.
Symbols are vital necessities.
Feelings build up within us and form systems; they cannot be discharged through instantaneous animal outcries or grimaces.
We need to discover harmonies between our inner states and our surroundings.
No level of development can be maintained if it remains detached from our emotional life.
The most familiar and ordinary things have importance for genuinely creative artists.
Painters like Picasso, Juan Gris, and Le Corbusier have devoted themselves to common objects.
Natural materials have received the same attention: stones, roots, bark, and bones.
Anonymous things attain stature under the artist's hand.
They become revealed as objets à réaction poétiques, as Le Corbusier stated.
New parts of the world are made accessible to feeling.
Opening up new realms of feeling has always been the artist's mission.
Much of our world would lack emotional significance without the artist's work.
Mountain scenery was once felt to exhibit alarming confusion.
Winckelmann, discoverer of Greek art, couldn't bear to look out at the Alps around 1760.
A century later, Ruskin sought out the mountains as refuge from an industrial world, finding new artistic potentialities in ships, bridges and iron constructions.
Great areas of our experience are still waiting to be claimed by feeling.
We are no longer limited to seeing objects from normal earth-bound distances.
The bird's-eye view has opened whole new aspects of the world.
New modes of perception carry new feelings to be formulated by the artist.
The artist functions like an inventor/scientific discoverer, seeking new relations between man and his world.
The artist's relations are emotional instead of practical/cognitive.
The creative artist doesn't want to copy or make us see through his eyes.
The artist shows us our own souls in a mirror.
The artist finds outer symbols for our chaotic, disquieting, obsessive stirrings.
This is why we still need artists.

Artist and Public: How They Have Lost Contact

The artist seems to have lost contact with most contemporaries.
Ordinary people find the artist's vocabulary incomprehensible.
This is often attributed to the revolt against naturalism.
It dates from the proclamation de la liberté du travail of March 17, 1791, which dissolved the guild system.
The abolition of legal restraints upon trade choice started modern industry growth and artist isolation.
Cut off from crafts, the artist faced competing with the factory system.
One solution was setting up in luxury trades, catering to the lowest public taste.
Art-to-public-order flooded the world, filled salons, and won gold medals.
With no serious aims, such art hoped only for financial success, often achieved.
Favored cultivated drudges saw canvases sold at a thousand francs the square inch.
This was considered the artist's meant work by the public and critics.
The few painters who carried on the artist's real work were ignored.
The constituent facts in painting of our period were developed against public will and almost in secret, from Ingres to Cézanne.
The same situation held for architecture.
Advances were made surreptitiously, in construction.
The architect and painter faced the same long struggle against trompe l'œil.
Both had to combat entrenched styles by returning to pure means of expression.
For decades, painter after painter made the effort to reconquer the plane surface.
The same struggle arose in architecture as a consequence of the demand for morality.
Painters worked toward a new conception of space.
One must grasp the spirit animating painting to understand contemporary architecture.

The Research into Space: Cubism

Modern painting bewilders the public because for a century the public ignored all developments leading up to it.
It would be surprising if the public could read at sight an artistic language elaborated while its attention was elsewhere.
Around 1910, a consciousness that painter's expressions had lost contact with modern life emerged.
In Paris, with cubism, these efforts first attained a visible result.
The spatial relationships presented by cubists led to new space conception principles.
The half-century previous to cubism saw painting flourish almost nowhere outside of France.
The high culture of painting in France formed the fostering soil for contemporary art.
Young talents found inspiration in Paris.
The vitality of French culture served the whole world.
There was no sympathetic response to this achievement among the general public.
Nineteenth-century painting drew its positive strength from a form of art the public despised.
Cubism absorbed this vigor.
Picasso has been called the inventor of cubism, but cubism is not the invention of any individual.
It is the expression of a collective and almost unconscious attitude.
A painter said: "There was no invention… Soon it was twitching in everybody's fingers."
From the Renaissance to the first decade of the present century perspective had been one of the most important constituent facts in painting.
The four-century-old habit of seeing the outer world in the Renaissance manner rooted itself deeply in the human mind.
In the nineteenth century perspective was misused, leading to its dissolution.
The three-dimensional space of the Renaissance is the space of Euclidean geometry.
About 1830, a new sort of geometry was created, differing from Euclid in employing more than three dimensions.
Mathematicians deal with figures and dimensions that cannot be grasped by the imagination.
Like the scientist, the artist has come to recognize that classic conceptions of space and volumes are limited and one-sided.
The aesthetic qualities of space are not limited to its infinity for sight, as in the gardens of Versailles.
The essence of space today is its many-sidedness, the infinite potentiality for relations within it.
Exhaustive description of an area from one point of reference is impossible.
Its character changes with the point from which it is viewed.
To grasp the true nature of space, the observer must project himself through it.
The stairways in the upper levels of the Eiffel Tower are among the earliest architectural expression of the continuous interpenetration of outer and inner space.
Space in modern physics is conceived of as relative to a moving point of reference, not as the absolute and static entity of the baroque system of Newton.
In modern art, a new conception of space leads to a self-conscious enlargement of our ways of perceiving space.
This was most fully achieved in cubism.

Space-Time

Cubists didn't seek to reproduce the appearance of objects from one vantage point; they went around them and tried to lay hold of their internal constitution.
They sought to extend the scale of feeling, just as contemporary science extends its descriptions to cover new levels of material phenomena.
Cubism breaks with Renaissance perspective.
It views objects relatively, from several points of view.
It dissects objects and sees them simultaneously from all sides.
It goes around and into its objects.
To the three dimensions of the Renaissance, a fourth one - time - is added.
Guillaume Apollinaire first recognized and expressed this change around 1911.
The same year saw the first cubist exhibition in the Salon des Indépendants.
The paintings were thought a menace to the public peace.
The presentation of objects from several points of view introduces simultaneity.
Einstein began his work, Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper, in 1905 with a definition of simultaneity.

The Artistic Means

"Abstract art" is as misleading a term as "cubism" is for the beginnings of the contemporary image.
It is not the "abstract" or the "cubical" that is significant in their content.
What is decisive is the invention of a new approach, of a new spatial representation, and the means by which it is attained.
This new representation of space was accomplished step by step.
The cubists dissect the object and try to lay hold of its inner composition.
They seek to extend the scale of optical vision as contemporary science extends the law of matter.
Contemporary spatial approach has to get away from the single point of reference.
During the first period (shortly before 1910), dissection of objects was accomplished by breaking up "the surfaces of the natural forms into angular facets."
Concentration was entirely upon research into a new representation of space, hence the extreme scarcity of colors during this early period.
The pictures are gray-toned or earthen.
Fragments of lines hover over the surface, often forming open angles which become the gathering places of darker tones.
These angles and lines began to grow, to be extended, and suddenly out of them developed one of the constituent facts of space-time representation - the plane.

The Planes

The advancing and retreating planes of cubism, interpenetrating, hovering, and often transparent, without anything to fix them in realistic position, are in fundamental contrast to the lines of perspective, which converge to a single focal point.
Hitherto planes themselves, without naturalistic features, had lacked emotional content.
Now they came to the fore as an artistic means, employed in various ways, at times representing fragments of identifiable objects and at others such things as bottles or pipes flattened out so that interior and exterior could be seen simultaneously as well as at others completely irrational forms equivalent only to psychic responses.
Around 1912, new elements entered; the planes were accentuated, assumed strength and dominance, and were given an additional appeal - to the tactile sense by means of new materials (scraps of paper, sawdust, glass, sand, etc.).
Color was employed meagerly but was often corrugated and roughened to strengthen the pigment.
In such collages, fragments of newspapers, fabrics, or handwriting, and sometimes even single words, achieved the force of new symbols.
The process continued from the grayish background of the first period through the collage to the reappearance of color, which gradually became stronger and more varied, until its brilliant culmination in Picasso's and Braque's still-lifes towards and at the beginning of the twenties.
In this period, perhaps cubism's happiest, color was used in pure strength.
At the same time, curvilinear forms were introduced, taken from such everyday objects as bowls and guitars or were simply invented.
Color no longer had the exclusive function of naturalistic reproduction; used in a spatial pattern, it was often divorced from any object, asserting a right to existence in itself.
Cubism originated among artists belonging to the oldest cultures of the Western world, the French and the Spanish.
More and more clearly it appears that this new conception of space was nourished by the elements of bygone periods.
Its symbols were not rational, were not to be utilized directly in architecture and the applied arts, but they did give force and direction to artistic imagination in other fields.
Following the first efforts of the cubists, there came an awakening in various countries.
In France appeared Le Corbusier and Ozenfant; in Russia, Malevich; in Hungary, Moholy-Nagy; and in Holland, Mondrian and van Doesburg.
Common to them was an attempt to rationalize cubism or, as they felt was necessary, to correct its aberrations.
The procedure was sometimes very different in different groups, but all moved towards rationalization and into architecture.

Purism

When Ozenfant and Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) came together as young painters in 1917, they called their painting Purisme.
In comparison with the movements preceding it (constructivism in Russia or neo-plasticism in Holland), purism, coming out of French soil, was the closest of all to the aim of cubism and, at the same time, to architecture.

Constructivism

Two years after the exhibition of the cubists in the Salon des Indépendants, there appeared in Russia an abstract-art movement, fostered by Kasimir Malevich, which completely eliminated the object.
It was a flight from and a protest against the naturalistic object, with painting reduced to a few signs of symbolic intensity.
What its paintings achieve are fundamentally only pure interrelationships.
Flatly extended rectangles and strips float in continuous interrelation in space for which there is no true human measure.
Interrelation, hovering, and penetration form the basis of Malevich's half-plastic architectural studies, which he calls "architectonics."
These objects are not intended for a particular purpose but are to be understood simply as spatial research.
Interrelations are created between these prisms, slabs, and surfaces when they penetrate or dislodge each other.
They come close in spirit to the so-called megastructures of around 1960.

Neo-Plasticism

Neo-plasticism, an expression used by the Dutch painter Mondrian, signifies that three-dimensional volume is reduced to the new element of plasticity, the plane.
Mondrian sacrifices every contact with illusionistic reproduction, going back to the fundamental elements of pure color, of planes, their equipoise and interrelations.
The small circle of young artists who gathered around Theo van Doesburg and his periodical, Stijl, after 1917 progressed much more radically than the French painters and architects.
Van Doesburg and Mondrian sought "pure art" not in any way deflected by external motives.
With them, everything rests on the distribution and juxtaposition of planes of pure color: blue, red, and yellow.
To these are added black and various tones of white, all being placed in a network of panels.
The Belgian Vantongerloo, who also belongs to this circle, demonstrated with the prisms, slabs, and hollows of his plastic of 1918 that contemporary sculpture, like painting, was not to be limited to a single point of view.
Van Doesburg, the moving spirit of the circle, was a painter, man of letters, and architect.
Although he executed few buildings, he cannot be omitted from the history of architecture, since, like Malevich, he possessed the gift of recognizing the new extension of the space sense and the ability to present and explain it as though by laboratory experiments.
One of van Doesburg's drawings in which an attempt is made to present "the elementary forms of architecture" (lines, surface, volume, space, and time) may very well have appeared to many at that time as so much disjointed nonsense.
The present-day observer, who has the advantage of being able to look back upon intervening developments, has a very different attitude toward these mutually penetrating flat surfaces.
He sees how the enormous amount of contemporary architecture which has since appeared acknowledges this vision of space.
In 1923, van Doesburg, together with van Eesteren, who later became a town planner of Amsterdam, produced a house that is bolder than any other building executed during the period.
The breaking-up of the compact mass of the house, the accessibility of the roof, and the horizontal rows of windows - in fact, all the features that were later to be realized in numerous examples - were indicated in it.
If a collage by Georges Braque, produced ten years earlier, consisting of different papers, scraps of newspaper, and fragments of planes, is placed alongside a reproduction of this house, no words are necessary to indicate the identity of artistic expression.
An architectonic study of Malevich might be likened to it equally well.
The effect is as if the blind surfaces of the Malevich sculpture had suddenly received sight.
It is obvious that in the second decade of this century the same spirit emerged in different forms, in different spheres, and in totally different countries.

The Research into Movement: Futurism

In the first decade of this century, the physical sciences were profoundly shaken by an inner change, perhaps the most revolutionary since Aristotle and the Pythagoreans.

The Notion of Time

Previously, time had been regarded in one of two ways: either realistically, as something going on and existing without an observer, independent of the existence of other objects and without any necessary relation to other phenomena, or subjectively, as something having no existence apart from an observer and present only in sense experience.
Now came another and new way of regarding time, one involving implications of the greatest significance, the consequences of which cannot today be minimized or ignored.
It was in 1908 that Hermann Minkowski, the great mathematician, speaking before the Naturforschenden Gesellschaft, proclaimed for the first time with full certainty and precision this fundamental change of conception.
"Henceforth," he said, "space alone or time alone is doomed to fade into a mere shadow; only a kind of union of both will preserve their existence."
Concurrently, the arts were concerned with the same problem.
Artistic movements with inherent constituent facts, such as time.