"In the future, all the past (and even the present?) will be a fiction."
architects copy quondam dot com
1477
Bramante
Bramante's Milanese differs so much from his Roman work that it has been ascribed to a fictitious "Bramante of Milan."
1998.04.29
satirically reenacting the misadventures of Messalena
Piranesi places the fictitious horti Luciliani where the horti Lucullani ought to be, and places the horti Lucullani at a location further north. 2726
1999.09.11
Can anything other than light travel at the speed of light?
1999.09.12
...the flow/current/wave pattern of your emitted thoughts...
2000.01.08 13:48
a virtual museum of [disinformation] architecture?
John Young wrote:
Imaginary architecture, Escher, Piranesi, Heaven, Hell, visionary, virtual, has always mesmerized, inspired, perhaps terrified, for being beyond what is accompishable.
To be sure most architecture begins as imaginary and then it's all down hill from there as other brutally realistic forces have their way. Until ruins once again induce fantastic possibilities.
I especially admire Steve's fictional conference........
Steve Lauf continues:
Before going INSIDE DENSITY and while INSIDE DENSITY, the back of my mind was occupied with "what could a virtual museum of architecture be that a real museum of architecture could [or would] never be?"
www.quondam.com presently comprises over 80 megabytes of data in the form of texts and images. As 'director' of Quondam, I'm hesitantly contemplating the (online) deletion of all the data in one keystroke. Seems drastic, but dia(meta)bolically desirable(!) -- kind of like pushing that big red button somewhere in Washington D.C., or where ever red buttons are.
Tabula Rasa is too easy, however. I prefer palimpsest, instead--erasure and then overwriting/overrighting. Of course, replacement would be necessary and necessary in quick order (...don't want those rising web stats to suddenly evaporate).
So what can a virtual museum of architecture be that a real museum of architecture can not be?
I'm at the point where the dissemination of disinformation appears the most appealing. I'm imagining a museum of architecture that curates and displays an 'un-real' history of architecture, you know, among OTHER things, all those buildings Le Corbusier designed since 27 August 1965, and likewise the dies sanquinis urbanism of lights-camera-Africa in 2056 AD which is covertly inspired by the OTTO-man architecture of pre-Christ South America, and don't forget the equinoctial architecture along the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Yes, www.quondam.com may well soon be a 'new and improved' virtual museum of [unscientific fiction] architecture, written and delineated in palimpsest (so the faded 'truth' is nonetheless incompletely 'not there').
I'm becoming more and more convinced that a virtual museum of architecture misses its full virtuality unless it 'calendrically incarnates' other zeitgeists + [or minus] architectures.
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2000.01.20
Wright and historical method
I will now get very 'Freudian' here, and say that just maybe the Guggenheims, like Freud, had this strange love/hate thing vis-ΰ-vis Rome/the Vatican. After all it was Freud, a Jew, who reenacted the Christian Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit by instituting the ego, id, and super-ego. So, one could then imagine the Guggenheims saying, "Mr. Wright, we want you to build for us a Jewish Vatican museum!" And lo and behold, Wright, creative genius that he was, designed the foremost Jewish Vatican Museum in existence, with no one ever being the wiser--quite an accomplishment, (or did it all just happen subconsciously?). [I better stop before I start writing a reenactment novel here.]
2000.02.29
Quondam
create something completely off the wall. My own obscure attitude will guide me, and there is no need to submit to any norms. I can make it all up and even be intentionally false and untrue in the information Quondam supplies. The whole museum as an enormous fiction.
2000.09.12
...a very real and indeed interactive architectural novel...
2000.10.02
ideas
being [an] architectur[al] Duchamp . . . living in a large 3D painting, in a hyper painting, being in a hyperzone, within an environment of many unknown factors . . . "the working title museum" . . . how people will buy their art and architecture in the future . . . Rita Novel Tea [room] - a book of cult fiction . . .
2000.10.16 19:10
baroque (cyber?) theater
At the end of the play, the two braggarts reappeared on the stage together to reaffirm the "reality" of the illusion. Having asked each other how they fared, the impresario of the fictitious performance answered nonchalantly that he had not really shown anything but the audience getting up to leave "with their carriages and horses accompanied by a great number of lights and torches." Then, drawing the curtain, he displayed the scene he had just said he had shown to his audience, thus rendering complete the incredible reversal of reality and illusion to the confused amazement of the real spectators, who were now finding themselves ready to leave and caught in the enchanting act of feigning the feigned spectators."
2000.10.27 12:43
Baroque ending (for sure)
Although most of the current discussion at architecthetics deals more or less with theorizing of how 'style' (might) come to be, generally how things/styles emerge, I nonetheless offer the following as an example of how (a) style ends, in this particular case the Baroque style.
The following is a passage I first read over 23 years ago. It comes from Thomas K. Kitao, Circle and Oval in the Square of Saint Peter's: Bernini's Art of Planning (New York: New York University Press, 1974), pp.22-23. I was reminded of this passage after some reflection upon the recent bit of cyber theater that occurred here at design-l [i.e., the email list I first sent this post to on 16 October 2000--design-l and architecthetics are the double theaters I play in] a month and a half ago.
"In the well know production of the Due Teatri, first given in 1637, Bernini developed a simulated amphitheater of a very elaborate kind. This is, of course, the best known of Bernini's theatrical works, but a recapitulation is in order.
According to Massimiliano Montecuculi, who witnessed the performance, the stage was prepared with "a flock of people partly real and partly feigned" so arranged that, when the curtain had fallen for the opening of the play, the audience saw on the stage another large audience who had come to see the comedy. Two braggarts, played by Bernini himself and his brother Luigi, then appeared on the stage, one facing the real audience and the other the fictitious; and recognizing each other in no time, they went on to claim, each in turn, that what the other saw as real was actually illusory, each firmly convinced that there was no more than one theater with its audience in that half he was facing. The confusions of realities in mirror image thus heightened, the two firmly decided "that they would pull the curtain across the scene and arrange a performance each for his own audience alone." Then the play was performed to the real audience, that is, the main act to which that preceded was only a pleasant prelude. But through the play another performance was supposed to be taking place simultaneously on the second stage introduced by Luigi; the play was, in fact, interrupted at times by the laughter from those on the other side, as if something very pleasant had been seen or heard.
At the end of the play, the two braggarts reappeared on the stage together to reaffirm the "reality" of the illusion. Having asked each other how they fared, the impresario of the fictitious performance answered nonchalantly that he had not really shown anything but the audience getting up to leave "with their carriages and horses accompanied by a great number of lights and torches." Then, drawing the curtain, he displayed the scene he had just said he had shown to his audience, thus rendering complete the incredible reversal of reality and illusion to the confused amazement of the real spectators, who were now finding themselves ready to leave and caught in the enchanting act of feigning the feigned spectators."
Here's my analysis:
Of course, the Baroque style continued beyond Bernini--I believe even the double porticos of St. Peter's Square were done after the above performance. All the same, Bernini's theatrical performance manifests the Baroque's consummate ending. Within his double theater Bernini capsulized the beginning of Western culture's new bifurcation of the real and the illusory, introduced mirroring as a henceforth dominant Baroque (stylistic) theme, and, at base (or should I say at the ultimate end), inverted reality into a reenactment of its own illusory mirror (--is this perhaps also the genesis of historiography?).
Essentially, beyond the Baroque (and still often in our own modern times) architecture at its best is very sophisticated theater, keeping in mind that theater is one of the earliest forms of (man made) reenactment.
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2000.11.07 10:20
Re: two for the road
I like what you say about not recalling "another film that, structurally, collages space and time in that particular way." Two for the Road does indeed collage space and time, but I was never sure how unique its particular method of cinematically doing so might be. In any case, it's worth noting that the collage here very effectively relates a narrative, specifically a 'modern' life narrative. Is the film's "collage of space and time" a (romantic) reflection (i.e., mirror) of modern life itself?
Could it be that the age old narrative journey motif's (Homeric epic) modern replacement is the narrative 'vehicle' motif?
2000.11.18
vehicles of symbolism?
Since beginning this "vehicle" film thread, it has dawned on me that when "vehicles [in films] are both very literal and very symbolic, and, moreover, it is the seamless transition from literalness to symbolism that the vehicles deliver," that this phenomenon is much akin to the notion of the medium simultaneously being the message.
2000.12.15
the stillness of Ulysses' gaze
2003.05.28 11:20
Re: story telling
Piranesi very much utilized/executed a 'narrative' approach to design via the Ichnographia Campo Marzio, which predates Cooper Union/Hejduk by about two centuries. Moreover, Piranesi's approach may well have been inspired/influenced by the mnemonic design methodology of Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, which comes from 1900 years ago. Story telling/weaving/fabricating (like the above) is a very basic form of reenactionary architecturism.
Is reenactionary architecturism essentially an architecture that does not forget?
Key Terms
Migrant Mother
Mimetic vs. Social Constructionist approaches toward representation
Semiotic Analysis
Signifier and Signified
Myth
Ideology
Five components of Marxian thought
Shift in theories about ideology (Marx, Althusser, and Gramsci)
Hall's three approaches toward consumption
Ideological labor: Bricolage and textual poaching
Three terms of spectatorship (scopophilia, voyeurism, and exhibitionism)
Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theories
Male and female gaze
Foucault's institutional gaze (discourse and panopticon)
Colonial gaze: Edward Said's "exotic other"
Victorian era and the "Grand Style" of imagery
City Beautiful Movement
Lithographic "Bird's Eye" views
Photographic Balloon views
Multi-plate panoramas
The cultural fiction of panoramic imagery
Perspective (impact of scientific gaze)
Abandoning the goals of realism and authenticity
Changing values associated with images
Midterm
The role of spectacle in mass society
Media Spectacle constructs a sense of identification among audience members that encounter an extraordinary event marked by change and mystery.
Three critiques of media: media-as-narcotic, media-as-false consciousness, media-as-cultural imperialism
Habermas and the notion of "public sphere"
Four components of modern consumer society
The "flβneur"
Rereading consumer society - Marxist, Pop Art, Psychoanalytical, and Foucauldian approaches
Bricolage
Three reasons why we are architectural critics
Architectural terms: tripartite, domestic, mimetic, regional/historic, art deco, streamlined, international, googie, environmental, postmodern
Four approaches toward modernism
Four components of modern architecture
Five contests of postmodernism
Simulation and simulacra
Pastiche culture and intertextuality
Truth and the themed environment
Market segmentation
Postmodern pastiche
Theme malls: Shift from urban to suburban life
Theme airports: places built on movement
Theme airports: From train stations to shopping malls
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2004.05.18 10:26
REPORTAGE- Rhythm & Gender
I like the list (above); like chapters, like lessons, like evolutionary stages, like different floors of a building I'd love to design, like a row of restaurants while you're perpetually hungry.
Le Corbusier is very high on my list. Go to Harvard's Loeb Library to see my analysis of his unexecuted Palais des Congrθs--they were the only ones to purchase both the slides and drawings published in 1991.
Early Mies still intrigues.
Gropius never really inspired me at all.
What I find historically interesting is a comparison and contrast of Freud's first visit to Rome (gen Italia) and Le Corbusier's first visit to the Acropolis.
I'm not sure the Romans ever built in the Doric order. Composite was indeed their order of choice.
Seutonius relates how a delegtion from India came to Rome during the reign of Augustus. This makes me really wonder why the Mausoleum of Augustus in Rome and the Great Stupa in India are virtually identical in size and design.
Why do you think Piranesi first delineated all the circuses of the first printing of the Ichnographia Campus Martius in a stylized manner, and then (unnoticed for over 200 years) changed all the circuses into copies of the Circus of Maxentius in the second printing of the Ichnographia Campus Martiis? Piranesi sure knew how to paint a quaestio abstrusa!
You know how Eutropia confessed that (her son) Maxentius was a bastard soon after Maxentius died in battle against Constantine? Well, I hear Eutropia recently made another confession as to how Maxentius' real father was Diocletian!
2005.06.16
didja feel that???
un-science fiction
2006.05.23
Villa Savoye at the Dominican Motherhouse
...annexation; a totally fictitious client; who knows what else. ...a narrative inspired by the graphics.
2006.05.28 12:28
bibliopolum
Ludwig's dissertation on reenactment
Trumbauer Architecture Tours
Nudist Camp at the Philadelphia Musuem of Art
"a moldy paper on mildew"
The King pf Prussia Marble Trail
De Spectaculis II
The Marriage of Twisted and Column
Here a Versailles, There a Versailles, Everywhere a Versailles, Sigh
The Promenade Architecturale Formula
The History of Terrorism in Film
Pilgrimage, Reenactment and Tourism
A Quondam Lenni Lenape Land
Learning from Lacunae
Creating One's Own Virtual Museum of Architecture
Ichnographia Romaphilia
The Bilocating Barnes Foundaton
An Architecture of Removement
How Did This Happen Revisited
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2007.01.05
ideas
6. There is the idea of going very easy recombinant with the Quondam cad collection, and in the process generating a new narrative for Quondam. Ottopia is more or less the context, but so is Quondam itself, and so is reality (filtered through the virtual).
2007.01.09
some progress
[recording] The cad databases are taking time, and it is kind of tedious work. There are some inspirations that occur during the process while seeing the databases, but who knows if I'll ever do anything except just forget that I was ever inspired.
I do like the notion of continuing to use the databases as part of an ongoing architectural narrative at Quondam. Right now I'm not sure what that narrative will be, but I'll probably keep it in the context of Ottopia/Romaphilia. The narrative might also be about Quondam itself.
2007.03.12 17:05
...and speaking of random tangents
"In a sense Asimov, Heinlein, and the masters of American Science Fiction are not really writing of science at all . . . They're writing a kind of fantasy fiction about the future, closer to the Western and the Thriller, but it has nothing really to do with science . . . Freud pointed out that you have to distinguish between analytic activity. which by and large is what the sciences are, and synthetic activities which are what the arts are. The trouble with the Heinlein-Asimov type of Science Fiction is that it's completely synthetic. Freud also said that synthetic activities are a sign of immaturity, and I think that's where classical Science Fiction falls down."
--Ballard, Speculation, 1969.
Upon first reading this passage, thoughts of how Piranesi's Il Campo Marzio dell'Antica Roma and particularly the Ichnographia Campi Martii have been largely misinterpreted by 20th century architectural 'scholarship' came to mind. The synthetic quality of Piranesi's archaeology (before archaeology was formalized into a science) is all the critics/theoreticians saw, and they completely discounted the analytical aspect of Piranesi's archaeology. Basically, a non-analytical analysis resulted in a synthetic interpretation.
The wonderful thing about Il Campo Marzio dell'Antica Roma (including the Ichnographia Campus Martius) is that the distinction between the analytical and the synthetic is never manifest--the work seamlessly embodies both natures.
[note to self: think about an updated republication of "Theatrics Times Two" and "Theatrics Times Two, too".]
"Science now, in fact, is the largest producer of fiction. A hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago even, science took its raw material from nature. A scientist worked out the boiling point of a gas or the distance a star is away from the Earth, whereas nowadays, particularly in the social, psychological sciences, the raw material of science is a fiction invented by the scientists. You know, they work out why people chew gum or something of this kind . . . so the psychological and social sciences are spewing out an enormous amount of fiction. They're the major producers of fiction. It's not the writers anymore."
--Ballard, Speculation, 1969.
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