Re: Electric Hand Planers
Posted: Thu Sep 28, 2017 11:13 am
"Putting legs on a table" and "Nakashima" is a potential discussion...
Innovation Within Traditional Practice
https://craftsmanshipinwood.org/
Well, I guess we're on quite different pages there. I have a different understanding as to how/why modernism came out. As I understand it, the Arts and Crafts movement was a reaction to Victorian art and aesthetic excesses, followed by Art Deco, in part reaction to that. Modernism was more a reaction to perceptions as to the causes of the first World War, against social hierarchy, industrial capitalism, and so forth. Modernism came out of the Bauhaus and other cliques which were idealizing socialism as a way forward and wanted to remove all architectural references which were markings of hierarchy. Hence the removal of the eave, dropping the use of elements from classical orders, etc..Brian wrote: ↑Thu Sep 28, 2017 8:40 pmForm divorced from function is known as post modernism. Not a fan.
There are many excellent modernist buildings and homes. Poul Kjearholm's house has long been a favorite of mine, as is the home of Paulo Mendes Da Rocha, Stahl house, Villa Tugendhat, House Lange and House Esters, Johnson's Glass House, Charlottenlund by Jacobsen, Finn Juhl House, etc.
Modernism was brought about as a reaction to the Victorian age and continuation of industrialism, not becuase people lacked respect for their predecessors. Thry were aiming to fix the issues which came about by those two things and were likely made necessary by the need to rebuild with efficient use of material and man power after two world wars.
Not everyone gets a timber framed house when your building for a booming population, if they did we would all be complaining about further deforestation.
The wonderful thing about steel buildings and bridges....we no longer need to cut up redwoods (whatever are left) in mass consumption for state projects.
Anywho I appreciate your comments on slabs, some wood can be nerve wracking to resaw. If it's any consolation I recent sawed 15" wide flat sawn Goncalo and and a bit of bowing but nothing too condemning.
I enjoy frame and panel work especially, your ming inspired table stands out as being one of my favorite works.
Apology appreciated. You may not be trying, but you seem to do quite well at judging me. You previous comment had little in the way of expressing feelings, save perhaps anger. That came through clearly enough.
Interesting, while I also understand Arts and Crafts to be a reaction to the Victorian age, I think both in fact a reaction to it yet Modernism, at least modern architects and industrial designers, hoped to refine the use of industrial process to create better and more appropriate use of its facility and to utilize the new materials such as steel. I believe it did gain significant traction after WWI and further more after WWII as more and more societies had to rebuild. In the case of the US, modern architects and industrial designers were working to accommodate a rapidly growing middle class. So I feel there are multiple reasons why it began to take hold, but really it comes down to a new material and so new uses for that material then being applied.Chris Hall wrote: ↑Fri Sep 29, 2017 4:49 amWell, I guess we're on quite different pages there. I have a different understanding as to how/why modernism came out. As I understand it, the Arts and Crafts movement was a reaction to Victorian art and aesthetic excesses, followed by Art Deco, in part reaction to that. Modernism was more a reaction to perceptions as to the causes of the first World War, against social hierarchy, industrial capitalism, and so forth. Modernism came out of the Bauhaus and other cliques which were idealizing socialism as a way forward and wanted to remove all architectural references which were markings of hierarchy. Hence the removal of the eave, dropping the use of elements from classical orders, etc..Brian wrote: ↑Thu Sep 28, 2017 8:40 pmForm divorced from function is known as post modernism. Not a fan.
There are many excellent modernist buildings and homes. Poul Kjearholm's house has long been a favorite of mine, as is the home of Paulo Mendes Da Rocha, Stahl house, Villa Tugendhat, House Lange and House Esters, Johnson's Glass House, Charlottenlund by Jacobsen, Finn Juhl House, etc.
Modernism was brought about as a reaction to the Victorian age and continuation of industrialism, not becuase people lacked respect for their predecessors. Thry were aiming to fix the issues which came about by those two things and were likely made necessary by the need to rebuild with efficient use of material and man power after two world wars.
Not everyone gets a timber framed house when your building for a booming population, if they did we would all be complaining about further deforestation.
The wonderful thing about steel buildings and bridges....we no longer need to cut up redwoods (whatever are left) in mass consumption for state projects.
Anywho I appreciate your comments on slabs, some wood can be nerve wracking to resaw. If it's any consolation I recent sawed 15" wide flat sawn Goncalo and and a bit of bowing but nothing too condemning.
I enjoy frame and panel work especially, your ming inspired table stands out as being one of my favorite works.
While I don't think everyone should necessarily be owning a timber framed house, the embedded energy inherent in the use of modern materials like steel, glass and concrete, mean they have more severe environmental consequences, many of which are less obvious to us than deforestation. I'm sure you know this. Vastly more trees are cut down and burned worldwide simply to clear land for cattle and other livestock grazing than are harvested for timber. If a lot of people stopped eating meat, we'd have a lot more trees and a lot more fresh water. Again, this is old news i'm sure you know.
I do think that steel and glass and concrete are great materials in their own right and make things possible that timber cannot. The mass consumption of steel you mention, appears to me to have come about not out of any concern for reducing the use of timber, but because, via the Bessemer process, it became possible to produce it relatively cheaply and it is a material better suited to large structures and big spans (bridges, skyscrapers, etc.) than timber.
The houses you mention, well, sorry but they leave me cold. Zero interest. I subscribe to several design websites and see a lot of different modernist architecture, but virtually none of it interests me or compels me to look in more detail. I guess I find it surprising that anyone likes it, especially someone like you Brian who also likes to work with such an old school material as solid wood. It seems slightly contradictory. One would think you would have gravitated towards, I don't know, welding steel, or fabricating composite materials. So, for me, it is a curious thing. We all have our apparent contradictions of course...
I think that last sentence is an over-simplification, especially if we are talking steel and concrete. If it is simply a new material being applied, then one would expect, by and large, it would be applied to existing forms. Just like when cast iron was developed, it was formed to imitate wrought iron. But with modernism, forms changed, and the reasons for those changes to form do not cleanly tie to material.Brian wrote: ↑Fri Sep 29, 2017 9:38 pm
Interesting, while I also understand Arts and Crafts to be a reaction to the Victorian age, I think both in fact a reaction to it yet Modernism, at least modern architects and industrial designers, hoped to refine the use of industrial process to create better and more appropriate use of its facility and to utilize the new materials such as steel. I believe it did gain significant traction after WWI and further more after WWII as more and more societies had to rebuild. In the case of the US, modern architects and industrial designers were working to accommodate a rapidly growing middle class. So I feel there are multiple reasons why it began to take hold, but really it comes down to a new material and so new uses for that material then being applied.
This movement to flat roofs has nothing to do with materials. Corbusier, who saw his individual houses as reproducible, machine-like units that could be configured into apartment blocks, knew that couldn't be done with gabled roofs. Bay area architect Walter Brooks notes, "...in the postwar years, Bay Area architects adopted the flat roof because it could be built with less material and much more cheaply than anything else". Emphasis mine. The cheapness of construction is, in my view, one of the main drivers of modern architecture."The goal of early modernists like Loos, historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock wrote in his 'Architecture: 19th and 20th Centuries,' was to clear "away inherited tradition in order to lay the foundation of an immanent new architecture." That meant stripping away not just applied ornament, but gabled or similarly capped houses. "The neutrality, not to say the negativity of the exteriors of his houses," Hitchcock wrote, provided a starting point for future European modernists.
By the time Le Corbusier, Mies, and Gropius began producing their mature work in the 1920s, no right-thinking European modernist would have produced any kind of roof but flat. For Corbusier, it was all about pure forms. As a painter, he worked with cubes, cylinders, rectangles, circles. One of his Five Points of Architecture was "the flat roof, appropriate to the idea of a house as a cube, since the pitched roof would spoil the desired unity of its rectangular shape."