THE MODERN WORLD AS TABULA RASA: THE AVANT-GARDE

AVANT-GARDE French military term: “advance guard” (those soldiers who go forward into battle before the other soldiers) The group of people in any field, especially in the visual, literary, or musical arts, whose works are characterized by experimental methods. The pioneers or innovators of a particular period.

EXPRESSIONISM Germany A utopian view of modern technology and a Romantic nostalgia for die Volk (the People)

Bruno Taut, Stadtkrone (City Crown)

Exhibition for Unknown Architects, 1919 Hermann Finsterlin, “Traum aus Glas,” (Dream in Glass) Wenzel Hablik, “Exhibition Building”

Bruno Taut, “Glass Pavilion,” Cologne, GERMANY, 1914 exhibition of glass products and a “house of art”

Bruno Taut, “Glass Pavilion,” Cologne, GERMANY, 1914 According to Taut, architecture should develop a new ‘structural intensity’ based on expression, rhythm, and dynamics, as well as on new materials such as glass, steel and concrete.

Bruno Taut, “Glass Pavilion,” Cologne, GERMANY, 1914

Hans Poelzig, “Grosses Schauspielhaus (Big Theatre),” Berlin, GERMANY, 1919 for director Max Reinhardt’s People’s Theater Movement, it held 5,000 people interior meant to be a “fantastic spectacle,” plaster stalactites adorning the ceiling

Hans Poelzig, “Grosses Schauspielhaus,” Berlin, GERMANY, 1919 the purpose was to improve mental and moral issues in the society

Scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Max Reinhardt According to Max Reinhardt, it was the responsibility of the modern stage to recreate a perfect mixture of music, poetry, dance, and song, which he believed to be instinctive to man. He sought to appeal to the senses and the feelings, and the bringing together of all these arts on one stage. Reinhardt rejected the realistic stage and searched for new, expressive, and emphatic ways of visual, scenic, and musical representation, which led him directly to experimentations with ways of mixing the arts.

Eric Mendelsohn, “Einstein Tower, Potsdam (near Berlin), GERMANY,

FUTURISM Italy Total rejection of tradition and “the past.” In keeping with the “Machine Age,” the Futurists saw technology as the basis for a new culture. Speed, noise, machines, transportation, communication, information, and all the transient impressions of life in the modern city excited and intoxicated the Futurists.

Giacomo Balla, “Abstract Speed and Sound,” 1915 Giacomo Balla, “Passing Car,” 1913Anton Bragaglia, “The Cellist,” 1913 Anton Bragaglia, “The Typist,” 1911

Umberto Boccioni, “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space,” 1913 F. T. Marinetti, “Zang Tumb Tumb” (On the Battle of Adrianopolis), 1912 “All these convictions compel me to search in sculpture not for pure form but pure plastic rhythm; not the construction of bodies, but the construction of the action of bodies. Thus, I have as my ideal not a pyramidal architecture (static state), but a spiral architecture (dynamism)...” Umberto Baccioni, 1913

Antonio Sant’Elia, “La Città Nuova” (The New City), 1913 “buildings with external elevators and decks”

Antonio Sant’Elia, “La Città Nuova” (The New City), 1913 “studies for buildings” The Futurists admired speed, technology, youth and violence, the car, the airplane and the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature, and they were passionate nationalists.

Antonio Sant’Elia, “La Città Nuova” (The New City), 1913 “airplane and train station with funicular rail lifts on roadways”