About this talk

Running time: 24 minutes

The late Edward Larrabee Barnes trained at Harvard under Gropius (see The Victory Of The Modern Approach Is Sure) and Breuer. Born in Chicago, Barnes started practising architecture in New York in 1949. He taught at Pratt Institute and Yale and received many American awards and honours.

A visit to Persia and Greece after a few years of practice changed his whole view of architecture as taught then at Harvard. He learned about scale and about the importance of continuity in both time and context. As a result, the materials he used are generally homogeneous covering large surface areas of his buildings; unnecessary details are eliminated; buildings are broken down into clusters to achieve human scale. He explains in his talk about architectural ideas, ideas that can't be expressed in any other medium than architecture, and he deplores "the way, in the present confusion in the architecture schools, painterly ideas are considered as substitutes for architectural thought".

Some of the categories of building which he illustrates and to which he has given special attention are museums, skyscrapers and buildings for plants.

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