The 1941 Binning House in West Vancouver has long been hailed as a pioneer of
Modernism in domestic Canadian architecture, and an inspiration for much of the West
Coast Architecture that followed. Although it is usually described as product of
Corbusian rationalism and a paradigm of low-cost dwelling, in fact it is neither. Rather, it
is a composite of several competing strains of Modernism and aesthetic values prevalent
in London during the year (1938-39) in which Binning resided there to study fine art. The
Binning House is often misread as an austerely functionalist plan with an orthogonal
layout, but a closer observation and actual measurement of wall and window angles
reveals that Binning actually inflected the orthogonal, generating a splayed geometric
layout with obtuse and acute angles in several corners, trapezoidal forms in the built-in
furniture and studio clerestory window, and a dynamic sense of visual expansion and
contraction. Binning's study with Henry Moore was evidently tremendously influential in
this regard, as Moore avoided the machine-like aesthetic of the orthogonal and instead
imbued his art with oblique, irregular and rounded lines. The oblique motif also manifests
in Binning's own drawings of this time. Also empathetic to this approach was Berthold
Lubetkin, whose Whipsnade Bungalow near London defied the doctrines of orthogonal
functionalism. Binning viewed plans and photos of Whipsnade and other emblems of
early European modernism at a seminal 1939 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in
New York. This exhibition synthesized many of the ideas and forms that Binning had
been exposed to in London and seems to have served as a catalyst for the house plan he
was about to compose. In converging these various strains of early Modernism, Binning
has transcended the dogma of architectural discourse and rendered it meaningful for a
local, individual context. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA), School of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/16216 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Weder, Adele Margot |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Format | 12932016 bytes, application/pdf |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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