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The Cultural Tutor

@culturaltutor

Jun 19

This 143 year old church in Glasgow is going to be demolished and replaced with a block of 32 flats.

New homes are needed, but this is surely not the way to do it.

The Hillhead Baptist Church in Glasgow, built in 1883, is not an extraordinary historical building.

It's a typical and relatively plain neoclassical (using the word colloquially) church, made of stone.

But it's still rather pretty and it's been around for a very long time.

It was given listed status in 1970 and concerns over its condition were raised in 2000.

In 2004 the congregation left and it bounced between proposed developers (deteriorating all the while) until 2017, when the current developer took over.

The roof was removed in 2022.

Read 22 tweets

The Cultural Tutor

@culturaltutor

Jun 18

Which would you want to live in?

Art Nouveau was about imbuing every single part of a building, including all its furniture and fittings, with the curves of nature.

Rather than being inspired by the past, by historical decorations, this was about finding a new and authentic source of ideas.

But they didn't just imitate nature; the designers of Art Nouveau adopted its general principles.

And the result is that every single thing they designed makes you feel like you've never seen it before.

A century later and even their fireplaces still look futuristic.

Read 13 tweets

The Cultural Tutor

@culturaltutor

Jun 10

Who's to blame for boring architecture?

Politics and architecture don't map onto one another very well; trying to understand what leads to good architecture through political "isms" doesn't really get us anywhere.

While the USSR was building a baroque metro system, the USA was building modernist skyscrapers:

So the architecture debate is very strange, because opposing "sides" feel obliged to defend things that don't match their other views.

Some people want more "traditional" architecture, and others defend "modern" architecture.

These are, broadly speaking, the supposed "sides".

Read 25 tweets

The Cultural Tutor

@culturaltutor

Jun 8

Taking decoration away from buildings is like creating a world where trees never have any leaves:

The biggest difference between how we build now and how we used to build (in terms of appearance) is that we no longer decorate anything.

There are thousands of other changes (regulations, materials, size) but this is the one that people notice.

And this was, partly, a conscious aesthetic choice.

If you look at the early modernists like Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, they are very open about their belief that decoration was no longer necessary.

As Loos said, famously:

Read 25 tweets

The Cultural Tutor

@culturaltutor

Jun 3

The truth about minimalism:

"Minimalism" is badly misunderstood, but that's not really anybody's fault, because we're living in a time where it feels like minimalism is the dominant aesthetic.

Everything from buildings to bollards are designed the same way: simple, no details, little variety or colour.

And so, because they're simple, we call it "minimalism".

But minimalism was never just about keeping things simple.

The point of minimalism is using beautiful materials to make useful things (like this chair), not making things as bland and greyscale as possible.

Read 25 tweets

The Cultural Tutor

@culturaltutor

Mar 3

Friedensreich Regentag Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser is the best modern architect you've never heard of.

His philosophy was simple. As he said:

"The straight line is godless and immoral."

If there's any building you can think of, he made it look like something from a dream...

Accommodation at a children's hospital in Essen, Germany, from 2005:

A kindergarten in Frankfurt, opened in 1995:

Read 23 tweets

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