Modern Architecture

So, I was asked to rant about "form follows function" on the comments on Bad Catholic, a superlative blog that I follow, and I did. Apologies to everyone who had to scroll past my unexpectedly long post. I wanted to include pictures, so I will write about it here, mostly from cutting and pasting my comment and embellishing it. It is, after all, in my time period of choice.

Form follows function.

The phrase was coined by Louis Sullivan, considered the father of modern architecture. Before you judge the man too harshly, know that he didn't design what we consider "modern" architecture, but rather, a new type of building based on the ability of steel beams to soar, with exterior decorations added to emphasize height, and the function of the building, rather than following the old style of stone courses for each story from when the bricks actually did the work of holding up the building.

He was quite the rebel in 1890s Chicago, and the most (in)famous student of his style is Frank Lloyd Wright. Despite his abrasive personality, he made some gorgeous buildings, far more ornately decorated than the traditional buildings he moved away from. It really looked like art deco and art nouveau, only forty years early. All the decorations framed functional aspects - receding arches and solar patterns around doors, marble everything on banks, vertical courses of stone zooming up between the windows of skyscrapers. My favorite thing he did was take classical elements, like a doric column, and used its form and proportions on the entire building, with a sturdy base, "fluted" sides, and a course of decorative stone on top.

Observe the vertical lines of this building, and the column design.


In this detail, you can really see the way the surface looks like a steel skyscraper frame, only carved. The lines draw the eyes upward.


And capping off the building, look at this cornice!


One of his most famous buildings was the Transportation Building at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. He refused to follow the beaux arts style that the architects agreed upon, and designed what basically looks like an art deco train station. Apparently it was painted with reds and golds radiating out from the arch - it must have been glorious.


Not that beaux arts isn't awesome as well. In fact, it is one of my favorite styles. An example of beaux arts construction from the fair was the Fine Arts Building, which happens to be the only building still standing today (in order to get insurance for all the art, they had to build a real building, not a temporary facade). It is now the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, and words cannot express how much I want to go there! Note the classical proportions and features. Truly beautiful.


Speaking of which, beaux arts also has its skyscrapers. The Flatiron Building in NYC is a nice example. It looks like a blade of awesome thrust into the city. Note how the courses of stonework run horizontally under the windows. That is just a facade of stone, not part of the floor, but it is a holdover from Renaissance architecture. Sullivan thought leaving it on there stopped the eye in its upward journey, so he changed his stonework to vertical. Again, a facade, but one that follows the building's skeleton, and makes the skyscraper look taller. I like them both, but this clearly illustrates "form follows function".


Sullivan was very into using the Golden Ratio and form, unity, harmony (both within the design and with its surroundings), and decoration - all that stuff that architects forgot soon after that...

Enter communism. The internationalist movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were trying to find a style of architecture with no national flavor. Many of Sullivan's students and adherents were into that too, so they started stripping off aesthetic elements to achieve some kind of stylistic unity. This nonsense reached its peak in the 1930-60s, with old buildings being demolished and replaced by monolithic cement and glass skyscrapers. They believed that form was secondary to function, that once you got a building to do what a building does (hold furniture and people, keep out the weather) you can stop, no matter how it looks. Decorating it was aspirational and terribly bourgeois. Some of them went so far as to leave all the "functional" elements, like ductwork, exposed, claiming that as an aesthetic. The really ironic thing is that exposed ductwork is hard to keep clean, huge glass walls bleed heat and rack up huge heating and cooling bills, and flat roofs leak. These buildings are not functional at all - their very banality actually hinders their function. So much for integrity. By any measure of beauty, these modern buildings failed, because the ideal behind them was to erase humanity, not to uplift it.

In this one, you can see how it resembles Sullivan skyscraper, only plain. It actually looks older, because it has the reek of dingy bureaucracy about it.


For a more egregious example, check this out:


Need that flavor out of your mouth? Here's an image search of Sullivan's work. And here's some beaux arts. And what the hey - a little art nouveau and art deco. Enjoy

Some Reviews

I just read what may be the best fantasy story I've seen in years! It's called "Nine Pound Hammer", and it's the first book in the Clockwork Dark Trilogy, by John Claude Bemis. Yes, "clockwork dark" is as cool as it sounds! The author is a musician from the south, so he naturally knows about John Henry, and decided to turn the story into epic fantasy, using all kinds of American folklore, and steampunkish flair. The main character is a boy named Ray, who was is headed south on a train with many other orphans, following the pull of his father's mysterious Lodestone. When he sleeps with the stone, he has dreams about being chased by a monstrous clockwork hound. He runs away and joins a traveling medicine show, where he learns some very interesting things. There are some very cool twists and the characters are all awesome. I couldn't put this book down, and I can't wait to read "The Wolf Tree"!

On to games! I played Red Dead Redemption a while back, and I really liked it, with a couple of reservations. First, the bad, then the good, then the ugly:

The minor complaint I had about this game was the lack of depth. Heresy, they'll say! It's a huge sprawling sandbox style game. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sandbox style games tend to be very repetitive, and this was no exception. Sure, the different environments looked different and had different animals (freakin' mountain lions!) but you pretty much do the same things all the time. I wanted more control over the story - since morality is a big feature of the story, it would have been nice to be able to make a few choices, pick out who your allies are, that sort of thing. They managed it in Steambot Chronicle (not that that wasn't repetitive).

Also, while they do an excellent job establishing time and place, it manages to feel very static. A major feature of the setting is the end of the wild west, the spread of the railroad, the introduction of the car! And yet, I never got a sense of the tension, excitement, or melancholy that should go along with this change, outside of a couple of scenes where it was specifically mentioned.

My more overarching problem was a typical one for Rockstar. Although it seems like their hearts are starting to be in the right place, they still have the puerile tendency to substitute the sordid for the mature. This doesn't make it any edgier, and it certainly doesn't make it any deeper. I would have liked for even one of the Stranger subquests to have a happy ending.

Now for the good: This game is beautiful! Sure, all kinds of games are pretty to look at, and all kinds of games use it as an excuse for lousy gameplay. But this is different - it is like being drawn into the pages of Arizona Highways! It makes the game so immersive and engaging, you can almost smell the greasewood and pinetrees, and feel the gritty wind shift from hot to cold when a monsoon blows in. The graphics and sound design really make a difference here.

I love the story too! The premise is your character used to be an outlaw, and he tried to settle down and be a rancher with his wife and son, but federal agents kidnapped them in order to force you to hunt down your old gang. You have a whole bunch of missions where you do just that, with a few twists and obstacles thrown in. It's all tons of fun, and there's enough variety to keep it interesting - everything to storming forts to herding cattle, from robbing trains to dueling in the streets! There are sidequests too, which start off fun, but after a whole bunch of them ending badly, I started to dread them popping up. Your actions determine both your fame and honor ratings, which change how the random characters and especially law enforcement interact with you. It's way easier if you behave yourself (Hint: if you see a guy running and screaming, make sure the guys chasing him aren't wearing silver stars before you shoot at them.) If things get too hot you can pay off your bounty.

~ Spoiler alert! Highlight to keep reading ~

I really like the last few missions, where you finally find the last bad guy. And then the game keeps going! You go home to your ranch, and do missions for your wife, and teach your boy to shoot and rope, and bring supplies to the neighboring ranch! You start to build a real life, and offer your son more than you had. He wants to be a writer, and is enchanted with novels of the wild west. Or he wants to be a rich industrialist. You tell him he be whatever he wants, but he has to bring the cattle in first. I actually thought this was the most enjoyable part of the game. Of course, the g-men won't just leave you alone, and they come after you. You get your family to safety and a Butch and Sundance style stand-off, and get killed. Your family comes back, and the credits play as they bury you, and the soundtrack is "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie". I cried. It was a great ending.

Or was it?

The ugly: They had to go and ruin the ending. After the credits, four years have passed, your wife has died, and your son has become a gunslinger. You play as him now. You hunt down the retired agent who set you up and murder him in cold blood. Then you ride around and do nothing - no more missions, no more story, no nothing. What the hell did this guy's father fight and die for?!?! It is the worst possible ending they could possibly have had. It pretty much ruined the game for me.

Some steampunkery I have been making

So, all of you who have been hanging on my every post have probably been wondering, where is this series on my growing steampunk collection I promised way back when? Something about jodhpurs? Well, the jodhpurs article has spiraled out of control, and needs an entire spring break to get it done. This always happens to me. In the meantime, heres some steampunk stuff I've been working on.

I've been working on top hats for a while, making them the right size for ladies, covering them in luxurious fabrics, etc. My friend, who's a belly dancer, commissioned some for her troupe, and they are quite fancy! This is probably my favorite:

They are fun to wear, and I've finally gotten them to stay put perched elegantly on top of the head. (The secret of how they did it in Victorian time??? Hair Extensions! No kidding. Not for everyday wear, necessarily, but the big fancy hair? Yep. Fake.) They look like this when you wear them:

A couple of weeks ago I made a fascinator too. It was really easy, except for getting the feathers to all point the right way....

Currently, I'm working on a totally new type of hat!!! I'll get pics up soon.