ABSTRACT

From a historical perspective, the heady era of architectural theory and theorist's-name-as-architectural-brand was brief, fitting neatly in the last four decades of the twentieth century. In cinema, this period is marked by Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City and his unglamorized depictions of Rome's real streets and the tragic but true-to-life fates of its people. Rossellini served as a transitional figure in Italian cinema in a literal sense. He made films in the brief clearing between the horrors of war and falsities of propaganda just ended and the symbolism-filled and sometimes absurdist avant-garde that soon followed. In architecture, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe valued similar presentations of reality, time, and architectural technologies (I-beams and bronzed plate glass) as both ornament and a unique idiom of architectural language. Mies, too, is a transitional figure, but in less obvious ways; and the analysis of 'Truth' in architecture and the eventual differentiation of this notion from architectural 'Language' does not unfold by obvious routes.