quare id faciam?

Excerpt addendum

Some approaches to architecture – De Stijl, for instance – exclude the idea of hierarchy and of ranked compositional elements; they also eliminate ornaments and contour patterns. Their problematic program to explore and use space is different from that of classicism, and they arrive at different results. Still other approaches, such as expressionism, aspire to contour patterning as almost the single instrument for creating architectural form. These approaches defy taxis, avoid the elementariness of architecture, abandon genera, and declare themselves above the ruling of metric patterns. They try to develop walls, openings, complete plans exclusively out of the very stuff of their ornaments and their contour shape units. They rely on the adventures of the profile, and they also arrive at products quite different from the classical buildings. These are poetics as coherent as the one of classicism and equally complex to talk about in any detail. To do a proper job analyzing such anticlassical poetics is an altogether different enterprise from the one we have undertaken here.

posted by paul bowman @ 5:45 PM