whyARC?: Movement in Art and Architecture

20th Century Modernism gave birth to art and architecture that seemed to move. As early as 1900, painters employed a new concept of "time and space" in their work. Consider cubist art that introduced a collage effect where multiple perspectives are employed in one painting. This gives the viewer an impression of movement to an otherwise static object.

Not coincidentally, some 30 years later, the moving picture and the advent of commercially available T.V. brought actual moving pictures to the masses. This technological advancement had an impact on art and design that is now known as "Modernism".

Modern furniture and product design came to adopt some of these same sensibilities as a result of technological advances and new materials.

Modern building design had been moving in these same directions as well. Not in the sense that buildings are actually moving, but rather that buildings appear to be fluid. The modernist approach was naturally to move away from the more traditional ideas of solidity, symmetry, proportion and scale, and arrived at buildings like the Guggenheim Museum, NYC (1939)

Naturally, building design has even taken cues from automobile and mass-transit design, where movement and aerodynamics are essential in the design process.