Lucio Costa, "Oś Monumentalna" stolicy Brazylii, 1960

Oscar Niemeyer, Katedra w Brasilii

Muzeum Republiki, Brasilia

Kongres Narodowy Republiki, Brasilia

Architecture and aesthetic problems faded into the background. Classics of Modernism (Le Corbusier, Niemeyer, Costa) made his mad visions of urban design (no longer accepted in Europe and America) in India and Brazil.
The two largest projects - Chandigarh (Mayer/Le Corbusier), and especially Brazil (Costa/Niemeyer) implement urban concept formulated in the Charter of Athens (1934), breaking the traditional layout of the city in the functionally distinct neighborhoods, connected by a network of highways, which no one went. Magnificent architectural designs (done by the brilliant architects) were artificial flowers decorating the structure of the dead promenades and baroque axes, which under Communism and Nazism had to be at least the scenery to the marchers of fanatical crowds. Now they become a pure fiction.

Le Corbusier, Chandigarh, High Court, 1963

Le Corbusier, Chandigarh, High Court, 1963

Le Corbusier, Pałac Sprawiedliwości, Chandigarh, 1963

The last CIAM congress was organized in Otterloo (1959) by the so-called Team X - a group of rebels contesting assumptions of the Athens Charter. Team X split into two groups with different preferences. British group gathered around Alison and Peter Smithson focused on architectural issues and contributed to the spread of brutalism. Dutch group centered around Aldo van Eyck and Jacob Bakema devoted to new urbanism and gave the beginnings of structuralism.

Structuralists have created two distinct aesthetics:

- in 1959, Aldo van Eyck created a so-called "aesthetics of numbers" also known as spatial systems architecture, which treats the structure of buildings as a system of living cells. Examples of this idea are: Amsterdam Orphanage by van Eyck (1960), in which dividing cells are growing in any direction, and "Cubic Houses" in Rotterdam, designed in 1984 by a disciple of van Eyck, Piet Blom.

Aldo van Eyck, Amsterdam Orphanage, 1955–1960

Piet Blom, Domy kubiczne, 1984, Rotterdam

While the project of van Eyck is the realization of idea related to reality, so Blom's project is an example of extreme architectural imbecility combined with complete contempt for the future users of these buildings. I bet, Blomit would make a better project for rabbit hutches. Such a project can not be assessed in terms of architecture, and the responsibility for this achievement borne in equal parts designer and his teacher.

- In 1961 John Habraken formulated the basis of "architecture of joyful diversity", also known by the term "structure and chance". This concept assumed the participation of citizens in defining the principles of building, so it is called the "participatory architecture".

Expo'67 in Montreal was devoted to the problems of housing. Habitat, housing complex designed for this exhibition by Israeli architect Moshe Safdie, is a practical realization of structuralist concepts.
Habitat is an attempt to reconcile conflicting goals. On one hand, intensive development, on the other hand individualized living space - one word - an attempt to build a residential block consisting of piled-up, separatem individual houses. Regardless of the aesthetic discussion, this test proved to be very expensive to implement and did not solve the growing urban problems.

< Moshe Safdie, Habitat, Montreal, 1967

/below the panorama of the entire complex/

Kisho Kurokawa, Nagakin, Tokyo, 1972

Buckminster Fuller, Montreal Biosphere, 1967

In 1961, Robert Rauschenberg sent to the gallery Iris Clert (that issued the (closed) tin of sardines as a work of art) the telegram reads as follows: "This is a portrait of Iris Clert, because I said so. "
In 1961, Eero Saarinen died
In 1964, Gerrit Rietveld died
In 1965, Le Corbusier died
In 1969, Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius died.
In 1969, Robert Barry created a "telepathic work", consisting of "thoughts, which can not express a word or image. "

A special place in the history of structuralism takes metabolism, named after a group of Japanese architects working under the direction of Kenzo Tange. In 1960, Tange presented the plan to build a new neighborhood on artificial islands and the footbridge stretched over the bay near Tokyo. The plan resembles a tree trunk from which branches sprout leaves covered with residential buildings - and this is the essence of metabolism, binding individual living spaces with the "bloodstream" of infrastructure and communications.

Kenzo Tange, Plan for Tokyo, 1960

The same concept was realized in one of the few metabolic buildings - Nagakin skyscraper in Tokyo (Kisho Kurokawa, 1972), in which the capsule housing are attached to the stem of the building as a Brussels sprouts. These self-contained steel capsule can be mounted to the supporting structure in a way that enables them to exchange and move, and therefore almost any conversion of the building. This is consistent with the Buddhist vision of continuous volatility of the world.

Another design presented at the Expo-67 gave rise to awe the audience and futuristic Utopian hopes. It was the Montreal Biosphere, designed by Buckminster Fuller, who developed and implemented the concept of geodesic domes designed by German engineer Walther Bauersfeld. This ideal, geometric form has become synonymous with universe, a symbol of Earth and inspired eco-architect, who has repeatedly tried to create visions of the environment independent of the vagaries of climate. These visions were not realized, but the Biosphere has become a symbol of modern architecture, and its example is the roof of the Golden Terraces next to Warsaw Central Station.

Geodesic structure of the Golden's Terrace in Warsaw

A formal impasse of modern architecture was not a quintessential problem. This problem was the city as a whole, and the failure of modernist urban planning concepts contained in the Athens Charter of CIAM.
In 1954, the Japanese architect Minoru Yamasaki (further designer of the WTC in New York) designed for St. Louis so-called Pruitt-Igoe housing, implementing principles of the Charter of Athens, according to which the city is a network of a combined residential, industrial and recreational district. Pruitt-Tgoe was just such a model "bedroom " set, built of rows of apartment blocks. In the so-constructed settlements there is no longer a traditional street frontages, and the bane of nineteenth-century buildings - damp courtyards surrounded by dark wings.

Minoru Yamasaki, Pruitt-Igoe, St. Louis, 1954

Despite the reasonable assumptions and incomparably better housing conditions than in the surrounding complex of old buildings, Pruit Igoe changed over several years in slums devastated by youth gangs, most residents simply fled, and the whole complex was demolished in 1972.

Pruitt-Igoe, St. Louis, Aerial photography and devastated residential apartment block room

Pruitt-Igoe, St. Louis, Destruction of the estate in 1972 (in the background to the left - Gateway Arch, 1947)

Pruitt-Igoe decommissioning in 1972, is considered the symbolic end of modernist urban planning and the era of CIAM. It was the result of an process ongoing for a long time.
In 1961, the American journalist Jane Jacobs published the book "The Death and Life of great American cities." Jacobs first totally criticized modernist urban planning and described the process that led to the devastation and depopulation of Pruitt-Igoe.
In 1966, American architect and theorist Robert Venturi published his book "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture" in which he criticized the aesthetic formula of modernist architecture. Venturi argued that the cause of the disaster of modernist architecture was to focus exclusively on solving the correct function and depriving the building of all these elements, through which architecture "speaks" to people, and thus depriving architecture of its language and personality. The result of this sin was the proliferation of impersonal "machines for living" with which the user can not make contact.
Venturi thought that the language of architecture consists of clear signs and symbols, which are indeed an integral part of the architecture, but there exist "outside" of its utility function.
Venturi book was probably an accurate diagnosis and on its basis can be deduced effective countermeasures - if the architecture has been deprived of language, this language should be recalled, or created.
Although the diagnosis was correct, the medication was invented by the spirit of pop-art and neo-Dada. The problem is in fact more difficult than it seems to be.

Reconstruction of Roman insulae

Insulae fragments preserved in Ostia resemble modern workers' housing

The essence of modernism (defined as an international style) based on the fact that the glorifying function of rejected all tradition identified with the different varieties of historicism.
From a rational point of view, designing a modern railway station, airport, bank, office building, department store or ammunition factory, the correct solution for their function, communication, and composition, and then sticking to these buildings "jewelry" of columns, architraves, cornices, etc. is meaningless.

In general, we know the ancient architectural monuments, but actually we do not know how the ordinary Greek or Roman lived. Ancient Rome, and even gothic or renaissance cities were filled with tacky, flammable buildings, fires and collapsing buildings were on the agenda. In the nineteenth-century Paris, a dozen people lived in one room and in Warsaw to the time of Lindley, sewage flowed along ditches street.

Architectural modernism was born at a time when monumental colonnades were replaced by a convulsive Nouveau ornamentation, futurism broke off from all tradition, and the architecture has become an insoluble problem of mass housing. Four empires lay in ruins after World War I, and Russia, Germany and Hungary experienced a communist revolution.

The development of modernism in architecture has had its delays due to the nature of the investment process. Gropius designed the Bauhaus buildings in the period when most of the revolutionary style of painting had been forgotten. Mies van der Rohe built the Farnsworth House, Lake Shore Drive and Crown Hall at a time when Jackson Pollock's celebrated short triumph, and soon the scene entered generation of figurative expressionist and anti-pop-art artists.

Modernist architecture developed its own hermetic language when modernism was already a historical phenomenon. When other streams quietly engaged in their own development by focusing on "building ", the modernists of the Bauhaus school and Le Corbusier, as the heirs of nineteenth-century and co-founder of twentieth-century social utopias, attempt to resolve the problem of mass industrialized housing. The fact that the modernists could not find the correct solution does not mean, that the problem does not exist.
Venturi could be wise after the fact, but he was not wise.

The real problem od modern architekture and the reason for its defeat lay in the fact that even eminent architekcts sacralized th function, but they brought it to the level of pure biology.
Each architecture is "functional" and each pursues the principle of "form follow function" according to the spirit of his era. The problem lies only in the definition of function. If the "function" of Gothic cathedral was to realize a magnificent liturgy, its form followed the function perfectly. If the function of the palace of Versailles was the creation of scenery to the absurd court ceremonial, it's form perfectly followed function and a magnificent garden was more important than the toilet.
The vision of the man who had inhabited modernist architecture was simple - he was an ant-worker who needed a place and conditions for eating, sleeping and regenerating his power to permanent work.
Theorists of architecture needed many years to conclude that the modernist concept of architecture (and especially urban planning) does not create the right conditions for the development of even the working ants. Astonishing is the fact that the discovery of the truth had to wait so long in the United States, where a fundamental work of Thomas and Znaniecki "The Polish Peasant in Europe and America" was available from 1920, and theory of social groups was well developed.

Las Vegas Club, 1930?

Las Vegas, Hotel Ballys, 1973

Las Vegas, Hotel Luksor, arch. Veldon Simpson, 1993

Las Vegas Hotel Venetian, 1999

Las Vegas, Hotel Caesars, 1966

Contextual and ironic eclecticism are distinguishing features of postmodernism, and Venturi was the first priest.

Las Vegas, Hotel Paris, 1999

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