Reading Response 13

Frozen Movement

        In this class already, we have studied how architecture is frozen music, but I believe that it can be much more than that. I believe that architects in the 1950s was trying to capture movement in their work. For example, "Saarinen's TWA Terminal at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport was conceived as a bird with its wings spread and poised to take off" (Ching 768). Saarinen was given the task to create an airport, and what is more suited to the task than capturing the movement of flight itself in a building? Another example of The School of Ballet, National Schools of Art in Havana. One of the three rules of design that the buildings had to abide by was that Catalan vaults had to be used as the primary structural system (Ching 773). Even though this rule was followed, it was used in a way to capture the spirit of what the building was by forming the vaults into the shape of ballerina toes and the way they bend when on stage. In Roth, Corbusier was mentioned as following this idea that buildings should embody what they are going to be used for. When Corbusier created the Notre Dame du Haut, he kept in mind when it was going to be used for, which was mostly housing for nuns. On page 552 Roth states, "The swelling roof of Ronchamp suggested many things- a nun's cowl, a monk's hood, a ship's prow, praying hand." Even though architecture can be frozen movement, I still agree that it can be frozen music, and that is exactly what the Berlin Philharmonic is. Each level of the rows is based on how music travels and bounced off of objects and gets redirected (Roth 554). This new movement of architecture being movement is moving away from the modernism, which takes beauty only into account, whereas frozen movement takes the client and the purpose into more consideration.