Pop Art is the abbreviation of "Popular Art" in English. It originated in the United Kingdom in the 1950s. Artist Hamilton used photo collage to create "Why is life so different and charming today?" ” is considered the first true work of Pop Art. The real development of Pop Art was in the United States, where popular culture was the most developed. American Pop Art is directly related to the Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s. When the younger generation of artists tried to replace Abstract Expressionism with neo-Dadaist techniques, they found that the developed consumer culture provided them with very rich resources. They use visual resources such as advertisements, trademarks, film and television images, cover girls, singers and movie stars, fast food, cartoons, etc. They put these images directly onto the screen to form a unique artistic style. Pop art treats the culture of the consumer era and the information age with an optimistic attitude, and narrows the distance between art and the public through realistic images. Pop art means the end of modernism represented by abstract art and the beginning of a new stage of postmodernism.

Written by Frances Anderton

Towards Pop Architecture “The further west we drive, the more Pop images we see on the highways… even none at all. Everywhere... Pop, it's the new art. Once you understand Pop, you'll never look at a logo the same way again, and once you think about Pop, you'll never see it the same way again. America.” —Andy Warhol Andy Warhol made that enlightening trip west from New York to Los Angeles in 1962. By that year, Pop had become an internationally recognized cultural phenomenon that could be seen everywhere. That year, architect Stephen Kanner was still a child growing up in the pop capital of Los Angeles. Despite his young age, he has adapted well to the playful business environment around him and was attracted by Warhol. For Stephen, it was a golden age, filled with miniature golf courses, bowling alleys, drive-in theaters, motels, and futuristic coffee shops, all conveyed by cheerful, giant advertising signs. In his view, Los Angeles is a vibrant new city, with chrome-plated cars shuttling on clean and wide streets. On both sides of the streets are neat residences arranged on grassy fields full of sunshine and greenery. Every household is modern. facilities, and they are used by cheerful and smiling housewives. And, there's Disneyland. "How many cities have Pop Art and Disneyland? How many cities have so much color and sunshine?" Stephen asked. This was before events such as the Vietnam War, the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the oil crisis.

At the time, Stephen's father, Jak Kanner, was a successful and prolific architect. He drew inspiration from Frank Lloyd Wright and the California Modernists Charles, Ray Eames, Richard Neutra and John Lautner, working in California, Arizona and Honolulu. Some commercial centers were built in Lu and other places. He also painted vivid, photorealistic works such as Pepsi bottles, Leyden Johnson and rocket launches, industrial machinery, television screens and fair-skinned women with blond curly hair - drinking ice water, eating oysters Women, women wearing bras, women walking into stores in high heels, etc. Chuck's paintings originate from photographic images in magazines, which help him as "a tool that allows me to capture things that are normally indescribable," just as they help photorealists. His work "blurs the boundaries between photorealism and pop art." He believes that it does not express much potential preference for curvaceous blondes, but more expresses a strong interest in the commercial image of the time. Grams also drew inspiration from the work of his Pop contemporaries James Rosenquist (who had previously worked as a logo painter), Mel Ramos, and Roy Lichtenstein. He believed that the works of these photorealists represented the return of craftsmanship to modern art. Despite being gifted in painting and deeply influenced by popular art and culture, Chuck and his son and collaborator Stephen chose to express this sentiment through architecture. By the early 1980s, their firm, Kanner Associates, had created a large body of work in Los Angeles that paid homage to the commercial modern popism of postwar Southern California.

The projects they create span a wide range of areas—from drive-thru burger joints to community gyms to housing complexes—and are bold, abstract expressions of popular architecture and graphic imagery. Often low-cost, cheerful and humorous, these buildings flaunt exaggerated colors and scale, announcing their presence to everyone who drives by. This is Pop architecture in a nutshell.

Kanna & Associates was not a newcomer at the time. This Los Angeles-based firm was originally founded by Chuck's father Herman in 1946. After three generations, it has built a large number of buildings in various styles and is known for its complete design and context-appropriate design. reputation for design prowess. But their shared goal was to create an architecture that most loudly and accurately reflected the spirit of postwar Southern California. This was an era of pleasant climate, abundant job opportunities, prosperity and comfort. The mood of optimism is reflected not only in art and graphics, but also in architecture. Modernism was popularized and developed rapidly in Southern California, with the rise of the confident and sunny International Style promoted by outside architects such as Richard Neutra and Rudolf Schindler in the 1930s. Topping off the post-war years are the dynamically futuristic designs of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Pereira and Luckman's industrial-themed building for Los Angeles International Airport, and John Lautner (whose "Gucci" restaurant namesake A modernist brand name that would become synonymous with Los Angeles) and a restaurant with dynamic structures and imaginative materials designed by Amat and David.

The social and technological idealism inherent in modernism also prevailed in the residential case study project. An imaginative large-scale residential project, spearheaded by John Stenza, editor of Arts & Architecture magazine, to test the applicability of mass-produced construction methods in residential design. Composed of steel frames and glass walls, these spacious and elegant residences were designed by architects Charles, Ray Eames, Clark Ellwood and Rafael Soriano. The elegant and brisk lifestyle of these buildings and designers had a profound impact on Chuck and Stephen and many other modern architects.

There are also other influences from outside Los Angeles, such as Oscar Niemeyer's poured and twisted concrete in Brasilia as if it were toffee; and the early European modernists Mies Van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Gerrit Rietveld, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, the originator of American organic modernism.

From these rich sources, Chuck developed a more restrained white modernism derived from Pop, and inherited from his father a sense of professionalism and rigorous layout and construction. way guaranteed. In his architecture and planning, his designs are full of creativity and dazzling. Architectural works such as the Baltimore Fashion Plaza, with its square cutaway plans and simplified Wrightian details; and the Copeland Headquarters Building in Los Angeles, with its wood-plywood arch structure and concrete block murals. Even in his 1953 USC School of Architecture project, which used airy roofs and dart-shaped columns set in the streets for the synagogue and elementary school, he tended to be more sober in the 1970s and early 1980s. International grid design. Chuck said: "I will go down the road of modernism and firmly believe that this is the right way." In the early 1980s the practice built Coastal Houses, an interesting, square-plan, open-plan, resident-owned complex, and Government House, a concrete monolith in East Los Angeles. , with light decoration heavily influenced by Corbusier. Stephen, like Chuck, was responding to this architectural influence at the time, and drew on his father's Pop paintings and early design of Pop buildings. To this end, he responded to titles such as Los Angeles' street-front buildings, the "Gucci"-style post-futuristic iconography of the cartoon Jetsons, and the Chrysler Exhibition (1939 New York World's Fair) of Tryon and Perrisfield. Enthusiasm for post-futuristic images such as Tomorrowland in Disneyland and the abandoned Pacific Park, a popular amusement park on the Los Angeles waterfront in the 1950s, has increased.

He favored buildings that were primarily commercial and often unnecessary, and believed that the work of artists who celebrated the mundane and everyday, such as Andy Warhol, Roy Leach, "never got their due" Stein, Frank Stella, Claes Oldenberg, Ed Rush and their spiritual fathers such as the Fauvists, Van Gogh and Monet. For the same reason, he admired the deconstructed architecture Best showroom designed by the American firm Saite in the 1970s, which was famous for its witty and self-deprecating style. He joined the firm in 1992, committed to instilling his popular modernist spirit in his work, and was greatly encouraged by Chuck. Chuck believes that his son's works reflect his early influences and thoughts like genetic inheritance. Together they created a hybrid aesthetic that blended the consummate rigor of early modernist layout with the cheerfulness of Googie. The result was a spiritually extroverted design that Stephen described as " Our own brand of modern popism, leaning into the fun and positive aspects.”

In both built works and imagined plans, the works of the last 15 years have continued to progress, with each project becoming more fully a model of their ideals. First, let’s look at a small-scale renovation project called “Sweet 16” supported by a big idea. Here, a row of decaying restaurants and shops built in the 1940s was transformed into an attractive "bulletin board" by adding full-height glass and huge awnings to support the shop signs, arranged on terraces along the street. On one side of the house, triangular load-bearing steel frames that show the lightness of the facade are left exposed and painted in bright yellows and reds. Its confident and cheerful appearance makes passers-by stop and stare. In the Harvard Apartments project, this "bulletin board" approach developed into a more mature form of modernism and popism. This is a complex of 13 low-cost homes in North Korea, a town near Los Angeles that has created tensions with residents. Built in 1992, it's what Stephen describes as "a modernist white sandwich bread with the rhythm of Los Angeles ham and Swiss cheese." The building is white and modern with an interior swathed in reds and yellows and bouncing circles. A mixture of rectangular and square patterned looks. Sequentially speaking, Harvard Apartments developed from an earlier work - St. Andrews. St. Andrews is a low-cost residential complex in a Korean town commissioned by the same private developer, but it is a renovation project. Kanner Studio did not change the existing plan. They simply adjusted the facade of the building, covering the original dilapidated utilitarian facade with a pattern of softly colored circles and inclined squares. Both were accomplished at extremely low cost, demonstrating Pop Art's taste for cheap and commonplace architecture and its unbridled joy in sheer superficiality.

The idea of ??a "bulletin board" was echoed in several projects, such as the Robbins Automotive Tops showroom, where a giant box was decorated with a green and white sign that symbolized motorcycle racing. A mosaic of squares and a life-like enlargement of a chunky Campbell's vegetable juice can. This "sandwich" or mixture of modernity and "Gucci" is also present in other works. Case studies and completely opposite influences such as "Gucci" and its Tower House 3 are modestly integrated in unbuilt planned projects such as the Copeland House, the third in a series of theoretical house designs. item, which combines modernist planes and expressionist forms. The Plinth House is in turn part of a series of fantastical plans characterized by dynamic structures, soaring highways, flowing shapes, blue skies and bold colors. The plans were inspired by freestyle concrete design master Oscar Niemeyer and appear in the colorful chalk drawings of Stephen's sketchbooks. In Stephen's words, they represent "evocative" buildings, simply meant to "remind people of the good times, when everything was so good." He also designed products and furniture to be placed in these houses - chairs, Lounge chairs, tables and cabinets, all post-futuristic yet solid and workable. With the completion of the IN-N-OUT burger restaurant, Kanner Architects' Pop Modernist voices have recently reached a fever pitch. The restaurant is located on a busy intersection in Westwood Village, adjacent to the gas station opposite. Its, Hipps restaurants and the usual 50 drive-thru restaurants show an interesting sense of inclusion. The building's exterior is a mix of light red, yellow and white, drawing on the colors and dart-shaped arrows of the company's logo.

The building has a lithe roof and a giant sign, with giant "IN-N-OUT" letters creating a divide inside in a way that Claes Oldenberg would have admired. This is a building that functions as a billboard and an expressionist form. My father was attracted by the fact that it was undoubtedly the best hamburger in California, and he also loved this place. One onlooker called it “the most beautiful building I have ever seen,” another described it as “a work of art,” and yet another said, in words that were music to Stephen’s ears, “It Reminds me of Disneyland's Tomorrowland." In perpetuating subject culture in the form of oil paintings, the Pop artists who emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s responded to the narrow and elitist ideas of the New York Abstract Expressionists, who In the past 20 years, his painting style of art for art's sake has won success in the art world rather than in the public. Now, in the 1990s, Los Angeles-based Kanner Associates became one of the few architectural firms like Deconstructivist, seeking commissions and styles that reflected supporting popular tastes. Drawing inspiration from the commercial architecture of the 1950s and 1960s, his work considers itself less than a literal interpretation. Only when Pop went against tradition, changed in scale and medium, and hung on the walls of a museum did "low" Pop become "high" art. Kanner Architects was therefore concerned with creating abstract interpretations of the origins of Pop, as well as hints at the negative and remote character of Pop Art. They are not interested in the design of renovation projects of little value. However, they wanted to build fast-food restaurants and low-cost residences full of power, emotion and spatial drama. Although they eschewed "high art architecture," they still aspired to create architecture.

Many architects, most notably Robert Venturi and Dennis Scott Brown, attempted to blur the lines between highbrow and lowbrow, but it triggered the inherent contradictions of Pop Art . In the words of critic David Deitch, this phenomenon allows "privileged viewers to stand among ordinary people but feel culturally alienated from the same things."

/index.php/action_viewthread_tid_10155.html