focal points, but nevertheless at the base of ail this, lies the separation between Inside and outside. C.W. Moore. The first and most simple act of possession is setting up an inside separated from the outside, putting part of an environment in safety against a hostile and uncontrolled outside. Inside does not necessarily mean indoors but is defined by the idea that the user has of his position. It may be simple and primitive or complicated, but once defined it is the responsability and the right of the architect to choose views towards the outside. Being inside gives us the advantage of selecting an opening on to the outside world. D. Lyndon. THE SEA RANCH. p. 100 Sea Ranch is a scheme for building holiday homes on the picturesque Califorian coast north of San Francisco. Vegetation is second growth after extensive cutting at the end of the last century and intense sheep grazing has accelerated cliff erosion. This stretch of coast benefits from a temperate microclimate, but is subject to high winds. The general aspect of the site is therefore cypress trees planted to provide wind breaks, sheltering fields and woods. Taking these features into consiseration, only two of three areas were favourable for the scheme—in the woods, in the hollows or alongside the hedgerows. But with careful study it was discovered that adapted design could offer its own protection and reports from Halprin, the landscape specialist, helped a great deal in this. The master plan extends from the southern end of the estate with spacious dwellings towards open fields, blocks clustered together near the woods and a golf link. The grazing land between the hedgerows and the slopes below the forest are to remain untouched. Above ail the architects fought to resist the usuel habit of promoters who develop the coastline before building on the hinterland, which in the case of Sea Ranch, of-fers breathtaking views. Alter extensive soit and vegetation tests, plans were drawn up including areas to be used for building, plantation and grazing. The master plan was modified to comply with the indications revealed. These tests detected swampy areas and parts of the coast which would soon suffer from erosion for which special pile design was to be used. Research carried out by Halprin led to a long term scheme since a landcape needs constant attention. To preserve the site from typically bad suburban development, the Oceanic building society has drawn up regulations to control design and protect open spaces. Ail proposed buildings must be submitted to them for approval, and restrictions concern claddings, colours and fentes. The land is divided into three categories—private, private restricted and common. Each owner of a private plot has a share in the common land. Private restricted areas belong to house owners but can only be planted with vegetation advised by the estate committee. These rules a reprovided to bring nature right up to the clusters and avoid breaking the harmony of the surroundings with artificiel gardens and lawns. CONDOMINIUM MLTW. p. 106 The architect’s main task was to study condominium units on a site they had admired for a long time. Al Boeke helped a great deal with his organizing talents and healthy criticism. Each unit was to retain its identity in the site, with a view over the ocean, oriented to the south. The clusters were to be placed to act as windbreaks and the roads bordered with walls and trees where they have a tendancy to violate privacy. Interior space must be open so that each unit gives the impression of generosity. Specific places are created within this general space for the fire, a solarium, a simplified kitchen-bathroom unit, sleeping alcoves. Windows must be pierced to overlook views and create a feeling of wide inside space. The siting of units must emphasize the naturel gradient of the land. Materials used are simple and naturel but the building mass is to stand out in the landscape and not merge into it. The architects quickly recognized a congruence between their ideas and the treatment the site called for. Transition areas between inside and outside also semed desirabie to provide places to watch the wind-beaten coast. The site limited by four hillocks was featured on a model used by the architects, alone with a box of sugar cubes to plot the clusters. These cubes became the basic unit volume. To make necessarily small accomodation seem spacious, they decided to keep a clear sense of the total volume in a main « inside » space—a box with few openings. The Sea Ranch project has much in common with Moore’s own house where two distorted pyramidal canopies, each on four posts, are asymmetrically located beneath an encom-passing quasi-pyramidal roof. ln Moore’s house the aediculae are diminutive structures but in the Sea Ranch the components are enlarged furniture. The blocks are linked by simple shed roofing which transforms these identical cubes into a succession of spaces with varying vertical dimensions. Although most design decisions were taken during informel discussions between the partners, they were formulated in such a way that specific designs could be taken separately by various partners without dismembering the sense of coherent place. Design process began by defining needs then adopting a series of rules which control the fornis likely to satisfy them. Often these rules are derived from the needs themselves, abstracted and ritualized to become a perceptible discipline for shape, more often stil) a consistent geometry is adopted (square box, windows, skylights ail like sugar cubes). The aim of the game is to see if the rules adopted will give life to a convincing image, if they fail, others replace them. Success is attained by pushing the rules to the extreme limit then knowing when to abandon them discretely in favour of a richer vision. This design game generates form and suggests possibilities, and its trace in the built place gives the user-observer an opportunity to play. The most successful game with this project was structural. Whereas schematic plans are astructural, columns and edge beams of the preliminary scheme became powerful ordering elements and served as a framework for redesign. Adroit calculations enabled Patrick Morreau to condone and develop our structure and grace it with remarkable diagonal bracing. The strong interior patterns of the wall structure made possible the eventual transformation of the outer aediculae into bay windows and greenhouses. Chinese art, proclaims George Rowley at Princeton, proceeds from the ldeational to the Empirical, from ideograms to wrinkles. The MLTW group would like to conceive buildings that have the emotive power of the former and design them to the world-warped wisdom of the latter. Sea Ranch is a step in both directions. Pierre RESTANY. POP ART – A NEW AMERICAN HUMANISM p. 121 No generic term can daim to be accepted throughout the world unless it has the assent of the American public. Pop-art has now asserted itself in New York, and has spread rapidly over the last four years, and to-day covers the entire sector of contemporary realism. ln the beginning this basic consciousness was awakened simultaneously each side of the Atlantic but in different cultural contexts, with different leanings. -Realism in Paris gave the European response, making, us see dada in a new light. Artistic negativity became charged with positive meaning. Klein, Tinguely and his friends conferred syntax and poetry on the « objet trouvé ». New Dada transition. In North America, the movement followed another course although the initial philosophical source was identical. Rupture was less brutal and the transcendency od dadaism less defined. This is due to the personality of the artist who assured the transition—Robert Rauschenberg, who early in the 50s questioned the gestuel aesthetics of action painting. Sensitive to the expressive wear of this vocabulary of instinct, he sought to carry out significant renewal by using concrete elements. His first combine paintings offer a masterful solution and led to his encounter with Jasper Johns. With the sculptor Stankiewicz they became known as new-cladaists. Common features are fascination for every day objects and attachment to expressions’ aesthetics. Therefore the transition between the postwar style and the new 1960 trend realistic and objective pop-art, a direct product of urban folklore, was easily made. During the years 1960-62 the discovery of technical folklore became a real epidemic. In less than two years a generation of young artists appeared, surging into the breach opened by new-dadaists, themselves consecrated at the age of thirty. Discovery of modern nature. Who are these artists? « Page-setters » and « stage-setters » of modern American nature, united by a common option, realistic and objective. Their horizons and origins are varied: the cubisto-dadaist collage tradition will be doubled by environment and happening to introduce human action. Along with Rauschenberg, Allen Kaprow, happening theorist and John Cage have played a major part in the search, for an expression integrated more and more in the structure of the social phenomenum. Happening played an important part in the career of Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine and Segal and the works of ail three have been influenced by the notion of environment. Hard objects in plaster and soft stuffed objects in moleskin have made Oldenburg world famous. This Swede came to art at the age of thirty with a rich experience of life—he went into the New York streets never to leave them. He started with what, he called « drawing-objects » and his first theme was called the Street. Jim Dine exhibited with Oldenburg under the title the House, depicting the privacy of the home. He develops the apprehension and comprehension of relationship between beings and things, everyday objects, clothes, furniture, defining even more than his master Jasper Johns in the direction of a volumetric definition of environment and visuel distance. At their best his pluri-dimensional images are like psychosensoriel iabyrinths of everyday life. Segal has now neglected his chicken farm to devote himself to art where he uses plaster to reproduce current human attitudes. Image-object and visuel ready-made. If these three artists are stage setters of urban reality, Warhol, Lichenstein and Rosequist are page-setters of modern nature. Whatever the materials and techniques they use, these artists have axed their research on a objective definition of the image, conditioned, by « mass media ». Warhol came to art already familier with printing and in 1960 decided to use serigraphy techniques in his pictures to obtain an image-object for use in varying combinations. Campbell Soup tins, Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor, the sociological theme of death, the electric chair ail led him to fame. In 1952 Rauschenberg started using the same technique later known as mec-art, evolving in the hands of European artists in the direction of an organic restructuration of the flat image, Warhol’s films are endless spottings of sequences with limited action, illustrating this totally objective vision of externat reality-modern nature designed as a grouping of visuel ready-mades. Lichenstein adopted the technique in his comicstrip faithfully reproducing letterpress and photography grain. It pleased him as an information medium, then as an element of expression and style. Compared with the mechanical process of Warhol, the intervention of the hand appeared as a technical regression, but a skillful regression which led to subtile modulations, skattering the aesthetical prejudices of the spectator. The prestige of painting cornes to the rescue of commonplace. Rosequist goes further producing ready-mades in slices and breaking up images poetically. His pictures with their firm contrasts, endeavour to call up as many primary reflexes as possible, and spectators especially in Europe are attracted since they mistake the perfected recipe of publicity images and the mystery of poetry. The first exemples in the series « Great American Nudes » by Tom Wesselmann which were collage paintings covered the transition between the two pop styles-stage and page setting. His latest works exhibited in Paris show the growing maturity of his style and a deep concern with spatial integration. Grandeur and decadence of a style through the spread of its label. Although only the seven major pop painters have been mentioned, there are of course many disciples. Some outstanding such as Chamberlain and Marisol, Indiana, Conner and Kienholz working in borderline mediums. The test of time is also accelerated by the ultra-rapid succession of modes.; Pop art, like op art is now « out », at New York, which enables us% to bide it. In spite of world-wide repercussions, it must be remembered that pop art is an authentic American expression, having its naturel place in the stylistic evolution of the New York School. It is based on the expression of modern nature above ail conditioned by the North America phenomenurn, one of industrial civilisation. Visual ready-mades produced by the mass media are telt by the American artist like the element of a language inherent to his own culture, the discovery of urban nature came to him without a hitch. That which is a reflex of youth regained for the European is acquired maturity for the American. The greatest pop leader Oldenburg, through the absolutism of his expression and the extremism of his means comes close to the European realist vision. However this is perhaps due to his upbringing in cosmopolitan circles which endows him with certain qualifies of adaptation . The periplus of etymology. Another factor of confusion is linked with the term itself. What is the origin of the word Pop? First used in 1955 by an English critic Alloway refering to artists led by Richard Hamilton, it remained casuel and would have become obscure if Alloway, meanwhile promoted custodian at the Guggenheim Museum, had not used it again in 1963 to diescribe the new generation, for the new-dadaism. It’s narre tuned with pop-corn and pop-songs, boomeranged back to Engiand, crossed the Channel and fought new realism on its home ground. Now the dite are cast—new realist objectors, narrative painters, new figurative ail come under the same heading—ail this is pop for the general public. Pop-Art and contemporary realism. In this ail-in scramble of universel pop-art, each artist is free to discover what he• himself contributed. Ail intentions are good ones. Is pop-art a way of criticizing society? This is the problem of realism, which has its basic law, the objectivity of ascertainment. The realist puts in doubt neither the context nor the decor of life, he identifies himself with reality—intentions, after-thoughts corne tater. André Breton’s generous notion of the « revolutionary independance of art » placed the artist for a long time in a borderline position as regards eternal revoit. This was justifiable up to 1945, even 1960. But the soulless robots who were to destroy everything never came into being, and the technological change after the second world war bears itel first fruits ripening into logical optimism. Abstract art declined reality in favour of an interior world with an individuel consciousness, but this has been replaced by a participing art. Present-day avant-garde, is optimist and realist, the artist has a tendency to become part of society again. In the world of tomorrow where the principal th p of problem will be the use of free time, the artist become must tbheegienngtoineperrepaanrde fore hisoet our leisure, an important personalit H change. Scorning sterile satire, pop artists have returned to the sources folklore, and in sa doing, they have reached the true goal, t of modem nature by turning to the masses, first step toward which is an essentiel preamble to new humanism. FINI) ART DOC
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