sandr037

Having just written a post about tempera rendering in the '50s and '60s, I thought I should note the other styles that were alternatives to the dominance of tempera. As I noted before, modern architecture emphasized the cold orderliness of the machine, expressed in steel, glass and concrete. At the same time, people became accustomed to full, vibrant colors in magazines, books and advertisements, and this led to the dominance of tempera in architectural renderings. Other forces were also pressing society toward uniformity, but there were equally strong winds blowing toward diversity. The most obvious “wind” was the expectation of a new viewpoint in the fine arts. As noted in my post covering 1900 to 1940, there was an ongoing dialogue between the modern and the traditional, as well as between the realistic and the abstract. This conflict has continued throughout my entire life. I started out naturally ignorant of it all, was enamored of it in college and came to an accommodati...

Note: I found surprisingly little published material on this subject. Therefore, please take this post as a preliminary outline about, and a personal reaction to tempera architectural rendering.  Yes, the title is somewhat ironic.   The decades after World War Two produced many design trends, but the central stream of architectural design in the United States was what I’d call “Mass Modern”. The outlines of design in the 30s (clean lines & minimal ornament) were mixed with the large scale mass production of the war effort, and the modern materials which were also developed in the war. Style setters advocated a simpler (and cheaper) way of building, using modern methods and fewer hands. There was an emphasis on machine made things, and a rejection of handmade ornamentation. Natural materials were still used, but they were always mixed with glass, steel and concrete, and always modeled in a simple geometric way. The emphasis was on efficiency, logic and simplicity.  Th...