Fabrikas kaip modernizmo architektūros simbolis
LTNagrinėjama XX a. pradžios pramonės architektūra, jos estetika, meninių idėjų kaita bei įtaka modernizmo architektūrai. Išryškinama Amerikos pramonės pastatų įtaka Europos architektūrai, taip pat skirtumai tarp JAV ir Europos architektų skelbto funkcionalizmo. Aptariama, kaip keitėsi pramonės architektūros supratimas XX a. pradžioje. [Iš leidinio]Reikšminiai žodžiai: Albertas Kahnas; Fordizmas; Funkcionalizmas; Modernizmas; Pramonės architektūra; Racionalus fabrikas; Vytautas Lansbergis-Žemkalnis; Walteris Gropius; Albert Kahn; Architecture; Factory; Fordism; Functionalism; Industrial architecture; Industry; Modernism; Rational; Rational Factory; Vytautas Lansbergis-Žemkalnis; Walter Gropius.
ENThe image of architecture is mostly created in architectural books and magazines. One can notice that modern architecture is often illustrated with the pictures of industrial buildings (AEG Turbine Factory, Fagus Factory, etc.). How does it come that industrial architecture traditionally treated as just a technical innovation and engineering in the 19th century has become a style icon at the beginning of the 20th century? Modern American industry based on the theory of scientific management by F.W.Taylor changed the organization of industrial enterprises in the States at the beginning of the 20th century. Henry Ford together with an architect Albert Kahn created a new building (Ford Factory in Detroit, 1909) in which new organizational (assembly line) and architectural (concrete frame and glazed facades) ideas were introduced. European architects soon caught the image of a „daylight factory". The praise for American industrial architecture was published in a yearly journal Deutsches Werkbund by an architect Walter Gropius who described the „unintentional beauty of American factories". What had most attracted Europeans was that in his designs of factories Albert Kahn combined the functions of an architect with those of an engineer. This long-lasting crisis of the professions of an architect and engineer was prevailing in the European building art since the mid-19th century. Traditionally, the 19th century architect decorated facades of industrial buildings. Kahn's industrial modernism proposed a possibility to give an appropriate appearance to new materials and types of buildings both for engineers and architects.Henry Ford was hardly thinking about creating new architectural or industrial aesthetics. He was more concerned about practical needs of mass production. Albert Kahn also followed the technical and economic requirements of a new organization of work. According to L. Bergeron [9], Kahn's success can be attributed to his firm's organizational principle in which work was entirely rationalized, from the design and supply of materials. "Architecture is 90 percent of business and 10 percent of art", Albert Kahn was in a habit of saying. This can speak for all-American industrial architecture of the new era thus proving its purely functional and practical intentions. But a European architect was still faithful to the system of artistic and aesthetic sources, and to the intention of making industrial buildings a pretext for the discovery of new forms and new symbols. This bid of Modern Movement was criticized by a post-modernist Peter Eisenman who saw "functionality" as just another fiction of representation "With the deductive conclusion that form follows function, modern architecture introduced the idea that a building should express - that is, look like - its function or like an idea of function (that it should manifest the rationality of its processes of production and composition). So we can see two traditions of new industrial architecture: American and European.If an American industrial building was to be rationally designed as a production factor that is equally important as machines, tools and workers, then the early factories of European modernists were something more than just engineering. These factories were not only rational, but they were aesthetic prototypes and symbols of a new era. We can say that American factory buildings were truly functional, while Europeans expressed functionalism symbolically. In the forms of the American industrial architecture European architects found an inspiration and solution of how to unite engineering and architecture. American factories not only inspired European architects to create modern original industrial architecture but also to build imported model-factories. The movement called Fordism also reached Lithuania and had an idea to build a Ford assembly hall in Kaunas. [Text from author]
