Rationalist Approach Towards New Forms : White Prisms

새로운 형태, 백색 프리즘에 대한 이성적 접근에 관한 연구

This is part of a study on the origin of modernist forms and settings. Forms in Modern Architecture are totally new as though they seemed to be originated from some remote culture. Archaeological studies and Laugier's primitivist attitude to the classical architecture provided a way leading, in the end, to pure structures and abstract forms. An application of the classical elements was combined with the ultimate image of nobility, simplicity and rationality. What the seventeenth and eighteenth century theorists realized in the ruines of the classical structures were not the ones with their original organic vitality but the deteriorated, naked and abstracted ones. The essence of the classical structures has been the one of the main references of the modern white architecture. Ration and Nature were the quintessential terms in the design process of the Enlightenment architects of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as they were in the twentieth century architecture. Pure geometric and symbolic forms were new inventions for the new revolutionary age after the development of architectural Styles, successive until Baroque and Roccoco, ceased to go on to the next phase. Many of their buildings appeared so modem in character, for they were omitted all but the essential structure and decoration. Other sides of rationality in the pre-modern age were evolved in terms of the paradigmatic research and the logic in structure. Durand developed a systematic typological approach to the forms. Geometry was the basis of his designs and his illustrations resembled endless simple geometrical problems. One of the other rational approaches was mainly developed by Viollet-le-Duc. To him, Gothic architecture was the model in which each members functioned actively and exerted counterpressure and the Middle Ages invented new fantastic forms. The several ways of rational approaches in architecture were led to the 'tabula rasa' planning in modern architecture. Nature was remained untouched and not deformed as Ledoux's houses in the $H{\hat{o}}tel$ de $Th{\acute{e}}lusson$ were setted on informal gardens. It is part of the modem image that Nature flows or interpenetrates through the white prisms of the strictest classical purity and machines.