Midterm

I know it should be farther away, but here's a thought about the midterm. I could imagine a short answer question being any one of the three topics:

Modernism architectural style
Mies Van Der Rohe
Frank Lloyd Wright

Between the lecture and the film these were all extensively covered. What will make a top answer is to link the style to its main proponents, and main achievements/failures, or vice versa. So if you get modernism, explain what it is, what it came after/before, and how the above figures--or others such as Gropius and the Bauhaus architects--mattered to it. Or if you get a modernist figure, explain what s/he did and how s/he fit into the larger movement of modernism.

I lived in Chicago for 6 years, and can speak to how awful Van Der Rohe's buildings are, and how wonderful Wright's are. At least in my opinion, I agreed with a lot of the film today

For example:
On Wright--click on falling water or the Robie house
http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/index/wright/wrightindex.html

Contrast that with Van Der Rohe's Togendhat's house:
http://www.e-architect.co.uk/architects/mies_van_der_rohe.htm

And just imagine going to this campus:
http://www.mparchitects.com/articles/images/campus-iit.jpg

If nothing else, I hope these images show the contrasting styles that modernism included. Remember these architects were unified by certain ideas about the social purpose and possibility of design and planning, even if these ideas took them in different directions. They also represent similarly-inspired oppositions to the earlier, elitist and ornamental era of building...

ac