There is a significant difference between architecture and art.
There is a boundry between architecture and painting, architecture and sculpture. Nonetheless, there has been a number of generations of architects who tried to transform their buildings into something alike big sculptures.
Results, however have never turned out effective.
The problem of the relation between architecture and art have been previously mentioned on daanico covering Rasmussen’s book “Experiencing Architecture”‘s first chapter. But this time I will refer instead to the architect of my recent research, Le Corbusier.
Architecture works with its very own qualities. Although, on surface it may look like a sculpture, that have generous textural effects, these will be always mere emulations of art, because architecutre will always be devoted to functions.
Texture and colour are only the ways of highlighting these functions. Changing architecture into sculpture ridicule it rather than refine it.
Three Reminders to Frank Lloyd Wright
In Le Corbusier’s famous book,”Toward an Archtiecture“, the author points out the pivotal qualities of architecture. Volume and plan are crucial, he writes. They give the sense of habitability, human-scale, and makes you certain that the structure is made for real people.
The precise translation of Le Corbusier's ideas radiates with tranquility and logic.
However, what Frank Lloyd Wright does is turning the whole order upside-down. His well-known Fallingwater is a ‘house’, which consists of a bunch of slabs, giving no sense of volume, plan, order. It is an expressionistic statement, which allegedly follows the chaotic order of nature around, but losing somewhere the order of architecture.
The programme misses the reality
A shocking truth is that compared with villa Savoye, which is a building that realizes all Le Corbusier’s points made in “Toward an Architecture” it turns out to be much more habitable. Athough its expressionistic form it accommodates people much better than Le Corbusier’s villa.
The contradictory
Built in similar time by the both world-famous, modernist architects villa Savoye and Fallingwater present two contradictory standpoints. Calm and rapid, tranquil and expressionistic, just like Renaissance and Baroque, or Academics and Impressionists these two are the ambivalence, which have been concerning humankind since the beginning of time.
daanico 
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