2009.08.17 18:04
Postmodernism sucks... discuss
pornography : books, photographs, magazines, art, or music designed to excite sexual impulses and considered by public authorities or public opinion as in violation of accepted standards of sexual morality. American courts have not yet settled on a satisfactory definition of what constitutes pornographic material.
 
orgiastic
1. of, pertaining to, or having the nature of an orgy.
2. tending to arouse or excite unrestrained emotion: orgiastic rhythms.
3. Sociology. (of an expressive crowd) reaching a peak of emotional intensity, often of an ecstatic nature and frequently expressed by uninhibited behavior.
That traditional symbol (like the doorway arch)
actually references
Frank Furness, Gravers Lane Railroad Station (Chestnut Hill, location of Mother's House), Philadelphia, 1883.
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2009.08.17 09:10
Postmodernism sucks... discuss
Took the time to look through Jencks' The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977) and read a little from Part Three: 'Post-Modern Architecture:
"There articles and attacks, lasting from 1959 to 1962, were meant to wipe out these heresies with a little critical weed-killer, but in the event the Italians fought back at this Puritanism, the refrigerator school of criticism.
The kind of buildings which were provoking this debate all had vague or repressed historical allusions..."
"Here is the schizophrenic cross between two codes that is characteristic of Post-Modernism..."
"Saarinen couldn't quite go the next step and design conventional decoration."
"The historicism is attenuated, embarrassed, half-baked--a problem for many of the architects who left Mies setting out for decoration (and never quite arrived)."
"'We can not know history'.
So by 1961 we have at least a camp, laconic statement in favor of eclecticism."
"What, might be asked, is really wrong with the decorative use of traditional elements--indeed straightforward ornament and the Trad styles? No one was prepared in the sixties to pose these questions in a radical way, and so the vague modernist suspicion of ornament and convention remained.
I suppose the first Modernist architect to use the decorative moulding and traditional symbol (such as the doorway arch) in an aggressive way was Robert Venturi. His Headquarters Building (1960)..."
...where the colors have been homogenized, the windows changed, and only faint traces of the mouldings remain.
2009.08.16 18:06
Postmodernism sucks... discuss
Of course architecture and film evolve for the most part independently, as I already referenced Scully and Kahn above.
The relation between film and postmodern architecture I'm here discussing is not one where the architecture emulates the films, rather architects took on the 'realist' frame of mind of 60s and 70s films, again where there are no clear rules beyond the immediate context of the situation.
Architecture today is still very eclectic, diverse even, and, perhaps more now that ever, there are no clear rules beyond the immediate context of the situation.
2009.08.16 15:44
Postmodernism sucks... discuss
Many of the architects who utilized "the application of content and forms and motifs that are deliberately identifiable in cultural and historical terms" 30 years ago still design that way today (if they are still active and/or alive).
The first Greenaway film I saw was The Draughtsman's Contract in 1983, 27 years ago, and that's the kind of murder mystery I'm talking about.
The first Tarantino film I saw was Pulp Fiction in 1994 and soon after that architecture started becoming very virtual.
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2009.08.16 14:07
Postmodernism sucks... discuss
I think you have to first define what 'that' is.
Otherwise, architecture still pretty much operates within the 'realm of no clear rules beyond the immediate context of the situation'.
2009.08.16 12:42
hence creative ingenuity
creative: the vast majority of more recent residential architecture.
ingenutiy: the more recent residential projects of Koolhaas/OMA.
2009.08.16 12:01
Postmodernism sucks... discuss
...where we see Postmodern architecture related to the growing trend of realism in film (including cinematic pornography). Not exactly a parallel development, but more where realism in films opened up designers/architect's minds to a more realistic approach to designing buildings/environments. Prior to realism, most films were an adapted form of theater/stage production. Realism in film presented 'real' situations within 'real' settings. [Yes, there is the omnipresent irony of films themselves not being real to begin with.]
aside: Does anyone else remember the paparazzi catching Jackie O. after she saw I am Curious (yellow).
Outside the stage directions of the Modern Movement there is the quickly found serendipity of everyday living/experience, and this realm of no clear rules beyond the immediate context of the situation made it easy for (what Portoghesi called) 'the end of prohibitionism'.
Postmodern architecture would not have happened without a certain frame of mind, and that frame of mind was becoming more and more prevalent within films of the later 1960s and 1970s.
Strictly within architecture itself, Scully, in 'How things got to be the way they are now', finds the genesis of Postmodern architecture with Kahn and Kahn's Beaux Arts education and Roman-ness (wrapped together via Piranesi's plan of the Campo Marzio).
It seems worth noting that the two most significant architects to come out of the 'Strada Novissima' are Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas/OMA.
2009.08.14 23:04
Postmodernism sucks... discuss
Postmodern Architecture is like Gravity's Rainbow meets Cleopatra...
...with a generous pinch of The Mirror Crack'd.
Yes, it's one of the best unsolved murder mysteries on the books!
"Oh, it's only a movie set."
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2009.08.14 10:44
hence creative ingenuity
creative : resulting from originality of thought, expression, etc.; imaginative
ingenuity 1 : the quality of being cleverly inventive or resourceful; inventiveness 2 : cleverness or skillfulness of conception or design 3 : an ingenious contrivance or device
creative [architecture] by itself; that's relatively easy.
2009.08.12 15:54
Diller Scofidio + Renfro Win Big at the Copacabana
I'm reminded of the new designs for The Old School of Thinking
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