Architecture and Cubism

A fundamental tenet of the historiography of modern architecture holds that cubismforged a vital link between avant-garde practices in early twentieth-century painting andarchitecture. This collection of essays, commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, takesa close look at that widely accepted but little scrutinized belief. In the first historicallyfocused examination of the issue, the volume returns to the original site of cubist art in pre-WorldWar I Europe and proceeds to examine the historical, theoretical, and socio-political relationshipsbetween avant-garde practices in painting, architecture, and other cultural forms, including poetry,landscape, and the decorative arts. The essays look at works produced in France, Germany, theNetherlands, and Czechoslovakia during the early decades of the twentieth century.Together, theessays show that although there were many points of intersection -- historical, metaphorical,theoretical, and ideological -- between cubism and architecture, there was no simple, direct linkbetween them. Most often the connections between cubist painting and modern architecture wereconstrued analogically, by reference to shared formal qualities such as fragmentation, spatialambiguity, transparency, and multiplicity; or to techniques used in other media such as film,poetry, and photomontage. Cubist space itself remained two-dimensional; with the exception of LeCobusiers work, it was never translated into the three dimensions of architecture. Cubism'ssignificance for architecture also remained two-dimensional -- a method of representing modernspatial experience through the ordering impulses of art.Copublished with the Canadian Centre forArchitecture/CentreCanadien d'Architecture

Eve Blau is Lecturer in Architecture at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University.