2012.04.09 09:40
Paul Rudolph threatened with demolition: when I see #&*! like this I just want to give up.
...and yes I only had twelve Picassos for breakfast. The dog ate the rest."
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2012.03.30 15:33
Re: Traditional Architecture
Coincidently read these two paragraphs a few hours ago while sitting next to a person in (temporary) isolation hooked up to an oxygen machine:
Having no faith in the efficacy of any single, universal, world transforming principle, Whitehead's obsevation that there is no reason to suppose order more fundamental than chaos would seem to appoximate his [ie, a famous architect] view; and this feeling for the empirical multiplicity of any given situation rather for any cosmic vision of a millennium also carries over into what seems to be anxiety to emancipate architecture from the grip of historicism--meaning not from the styles but from the very Germanic supposition that history, irrespective of persons, is an irresistible force, that obedience to it a moral imperative, that to deny the Zeitgeist is to invite catastrophe, and that the architect's most elevated role is to act as no more than the agent of necessity, as midwife for the delivery of historically significant form.
Given the arguments of reasoned disbelief, the procedure via collage and innuendo is, in principle, not to be faulted, but, if it is a procedure which can produce the most enviable results and also a genuinely Twentieth-Century discovery, the idea of the ironical juxtaposition of things taken out of context has, in general, been profoundly antipathetic to the conscience of the so-called Modern Movement; and, even though Le Corbusier was himself a great master of the architectural collage, the general bias of the contemporary architect's "morality" has contrived to inhibit the use of any technique so obvious and so rewarding.
2012.03.29 14:47
Re: Traditional Architecture
If ours is "an era of decadent, mass-produced, Orwellian mendacity about everything our culture is or aspires to be," then isn't that what our architecture should reflect?
2012.03.28 16:09
Re: Traditional Architecture
"But Lou and Arthur were on my roof talking, so that Lou could meet this interesting South African architect, which was very nice. I was a young widow living in Philadelphia and living at Penn. And I seemed to have been an unwitting member of all sorts of situations, which I didn't know what was happening, but had some intuitive feelings of things happening. Which were men -- married men and unmarried men -- who were seeming -- it seems as if I had figured in their lives in some sort of way that I wasn't quite sure of, and I didn't want to know about. That is, I wasn't interested in the side of being a young, single woman, experienced -- I had been married already -- and of interest to a range of different people on the faculty and around. So within that sort of context, Lou was interested in me in that way, too. It's something a woman professional learns about. Men have other interests in her than as a professional. Oskar Stonorov was like that. I thought I was being invited to dinner to talk about Le Corbusier, and I discovered that that wasn't his agenda. But it had been my agenda. When I met Oskar Stonorov, I thought of him as the American version of Ernö Goldfinger, and Ernö Goldfinger was an English version of Oskar Stonorov. They were very similar people. And sure enough, Oskar Stonorov suggested -- he said, "Oh, yes. I remember Ernö Goldfinger. He was the one who couldn't draw." [laughs] Just the sort of thing Ernö would have said. Anyway, what I'm saying is nothing happened in any of these situations, because I was just not -- that wasn't my role in life. In other words, if I got invited for dinner by Stonorov, who had a wife, and I thought I was being invited to talk about Le Corbusier and architecture, and I found that that probably wasn't what he had in mind -- what he had in mind, I would not let become very explicit. And there was something like that with Lou, too. But what are you going to say? Later he took up with Harriet, and he had been with Ann [Tyng]. He didn't manage to have a relationship of any sort of sexual nature with me, though he would have liked to. And I was just the kind of person he was attracted to. Now, that's one of the sort of things I should probably restrict. It's pertinent, but it isn't. I never know quite whether those things..."
--Denise Scott Brown
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2012.03.27 22:01
Re: Traditional Architecture
Wikipedia has a fairly concise entry on deterritorialization. Some the concepts there relate to how the Philadelphia School will be 'exhibited' via a virtual museum of architecture.
One can look at the history of Classical Architecture as one deterritorialization after another: first the Greeks, then the Romans, then back to Greece (via Constantine), then back to Italy (and the rest of western Europe via the Renaissance), then global (via colonialism), then Communist (via Stalin), then mnemonically (via Post-Modernism), and now artificially (via late capitalist sprawl) and illegitimately (via virtuality). Is each (subsequent) phase a somewhat less inhibited version of the one before?
2012.03.27 10:28
Re: Traditional Architecture
been reading (and writing in) this thread
Last night thought of the architecture of Aldo Rossi, especially the late works; quickly glanced through Aldo Rossi: The Life and Work of an Architect.
Been reading (intermittently the last few weeks) Durand's Precis of the Lectures on Architecture; I now see a strong connection between Rossi and Durand.
This morning, did a google search (see Mies on the front page today) rossi durand precis and 'found' several things including:
Rossi does reference Durand's Precis within The Architecture of the City; it's now many years since I've read this book; should read it again soon.
A pdf entitled "Can the language of classical architecture be used legitimately today?" (1998)
Now imagining a pdf entitled "The joy of using the classical language of architecture illegitimately today."
Otherwise, working on The Philadelphia School deterritorialized.
"Trust me, deterritorialized thinking isn't necessarily brillant, although for the most part uninhibited."
2012.03.26 11:20
Re: Traditional Architecture
I guess the irony here is that pandering to the public is indeed one of the ways to make lots of money these days.
Then again, 'how to make lots of money' isn't one of the things taught in architecture school, is it?
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