The news that the newest state house for Rowan Atkinson has been approved by the Oxfordshire Planning Committee despite being encouraged for refusal by the Authority's Planning Officers is in peril of raising again the relatively tired discussion about Modernism versus Classicism in the English countryside. But this is entirely the wrong debate. Dragging out the 2 old conflict horses onto the jousting fields of Center Britain is displacement task that takes the eye away from an even more pressing, modern discussion affecting Western lifestyle more usually that might be shown if the war-horses might be set back their stables for a while.

Atkinson's preparing advisor Terence O'Rourke is described as explaining the newest proposals as 'an item of 21st century high architecture' ;.I'm not sure that this is a helpful or fully appropriate information of the proposals. It is true that Atkinson's architect for the house, Richard Meier, produced around from the US to do this his first developing in the UK, is really a respected architect however training in the 21st century however the ideas that make his function are strongly seated in the first part of the last century. The home could therefore equally be called an item of 20th century architecture or as an item of 'Previous Modernism' ;.

Previous Modernism

The ideas that Meier however uses this season were new in the 1920's and 30's when Le Corbusier and other early leaders of the Contemporary Motion made an architecture that stated the soul of a generation coming out of the first world war. This generation relatively naively thought that they might wash clear the record of record and build a bold new world. Corb's polemical articulation of this architecture was explained in his expert roofing company famous 'Five Points for a New Architecture', first printed as a series of posts in the record he made, named 'L'Espirit Nouveau' ;.These five points put up strong polemical dichotomies, purposefully disparaging of the old buy; the newest architecture was to stand elegantly above the ground on slim 'pilotis' (columns) instead of around moist and rat infested basements, the columned structure could build the 'Free plan' and supersede the constraints of heavy load-bearing structures with their uncomfortable corners, training the structures off the ground on pilotis could make 'free ground' in the town to restore the busy streets. The structural figure could along with liberating up the master plan build the 'free elevation' and the quality horizontal strip windows of the era. Finally, what Corb argued were the useless black roof spaces associated with old-fashioned pitched roofs might be changed by the 'roof garden' the fifth of Le Corbusier's five points. Another principal quality with this architecture that surprisingly doesn't get mentioned as among the five points is that it's 'white' ;.The whiteness enabled this architecture to refuse the materiality of the building's surfaces. The areas are hence regarded as great abstractions, conceptual cases which seek to determine potentially unlimited space. The imperfections of a real substance could undermine the search for a natural statement of utter space, and therefore substance itself had to participate those repressed aspects of architecture's reality.

Needless to say those aspects of architecture's reality that in these five points were condemned by Le Corbusier did not go away. Indeed after the Second World Conflict, Le Corbusier's possess architecture needed a significant change of direction. By enough time he was designing Masions Jaoul in Paris the 1950's the five points had been abandoned. The piloti had faded, in a way that the structures sat solidly on the ground. The houses received fill showing structures, thus limiting the consequences of the 'free plan' and 'free elevation' and at once the roofs were vaulted hence denying the available 'roof garden' ;.Even the 'whiteness' that rejected the structures materiality had faded to be changed by 'Beton brut', a fresh and severe form of architectural materiality that appeared to be named from Le Corbusier's psyche to harmony the earlier denial.

The Small Previous Protect:

Though we can observe that Le Corbusier was able to move on from the severe polemic of early modernism, the vegetables of the architectural language that he had helped to create had been sown and were later to be acquired uncritically by way of a new generation. Richard Meier was part of this new generation. He emerged together of several small architects in New York in the 1960's who stumbled on international attention in 1967 following an exhibition of these work on the Memorial of Contemporary Art prepared by Arthur Drexler and later printed in a guide offering the work of 'The New York Five'; Philip Eisenman, Jordan Graves, Charles Gwathmey, David Hejduk and Richard Meier. During those times this class to some extent provided the reductive language of the first contemporary movement but however some were later to move in to new terrain, Meier used the line. "If I can't be Le Corbusier, then I may be Richard Meier", I seem to recall him saying in the first days of his career, and in a current letter to the Oxfordshire Planning Team he's now clearly claiming the terrain as their own, "Whiteness is among the quality qualities of my work...." ;.

It is now seventy or eighty decades since the removed, architectural language of modernism first surfaced on the mainland of Europe. Somewhat it has since that time been assimilated by modern culture. In the industry world, the metal and glass tower has become the established form for corporate headquarters in our cities but with a couple of notable exceptions on the domestic entrance their power is less evident. In the domestic world modernism has been mainly restricted to the design of kitchens or toilet interiors, it has rarely been permitted onto the High Street. The problem that requires to be requested is just why the assimilation of modernism has been so partial and why does this reductive architecture continue to provoke such vehement reactions; the preparing officer's inside their advice to refuse preparing permission for Rowan Atkinson's house printed the scheme an "ugly space age petrol station." Such inarticulate sentiments really are a damning indictment of the English preparing program; but if we can forgive them their childlike outbursts it really suggests, only much like The King of Wales' 'Carbuncle' and 'Police Academy' comments, a discomfort with something they are unable to set precisely in to words. I'd like to see if I will help them.