history | not an easy book |
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Besides specializing forms in relation to materials and structure, Modern architecture separates and articulates elements. Modern architecture is never implicit. In promoting the frame and the curtain wall, it has separated structure from shelter. Even the walls of the Johnson Wax Building are enclosing but not supporting.
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The versatile element which does several things at once is equally rare in Modern architecture. Significantly the column is favored over the pier. In S. Maria in Cosmedin's nave the column form results from its dominant, precise function as a point support. It can direct space only incidentally in relation to other columns or elements. But the alternating piers in the same nave are intrinsically double-functioning. They enclose and direct space as much as they support structure.
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The Baroque piers in the chapel at Frèsnes, residual as form and redundant as structure, are extreme examples of double-functioning elements
which are structural and spatial at once.
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