2008.09.05 09:38
MVRDV masterplan in Tirana
the next design...
2008.09.05 09:53
MVRDV masterplan in Tirana
"In September 2001, while seeing a display of quartz crystals (each labeled as to its geographic origin) compiled over 100 years ago, I thought it would be cool if the buildings of any global location started to match the formations of the local quartz. It was after seeing Harz Mountain quartz that the idea crystalized."
2004.10.05 14:54
--excerpt from "Ur-Geo-Mimicry" in Architektur von Vorläufer
2008.09.11 07:50
the concept of surface
or
Tad Hertz, Coming Apart at the Seamless: dissecting architectural superficiality, 2008.09.11.
2008.09.28 16:35
On Formalism and Reenactment
Place the following items in chronological order from oldest to youngest.
a. something original
b. reenactment
c. meme
d. tautology
e. all of the above as something original
2008.09.13 08:20
the concept of surface
thinking of the separate surface...
   
...and the contiguous surface...
 
...and again
the concept of surfing
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2008.09.18 16:32
H & deM in TriBeCa: 56 Leonard
OMA, Idea Vertical Campus, Tokyo, Japan, 2004
2008.09.18 21:03
H & deM in TriBeCa: 56 Leonard
and talking about trusting opinion...
mirror, mirror on the wall
2008.10.02 08:52
Resisting Formalism
[architectural] Pliancy, apt.
[using] Formalism [as criticism], inapt.
[architectural] Formalism is not altogether inept, however.
2008.10.06 10:39
Mixing Design Elements of Different Style Homes-Your Opinion
forget utopian and go ottopian
2008.10.13 23:45
beach reads
"Hey, did you hear the one about another Colonial Williamsburg in Arabia?"
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2008.10.13 23:59
the trajectory of the abstract animal in thirds
omnifrequence
"All the world's a next stage."
2008.11.02 10:05
Reenactionary Architecturism
Strictly speaking, however, the human skull is not an exoskeleton. While encasing/protecting the brain, the skull also provides support and structure for the head, which contains most of the body's orifices. And it is indeed these capital orifices that channel the senses of sight, smell, taste and hearing--all refinements of the sense of touch.
[There is a reason why helmets are still a vital part of military garb.]
Consider too how the rib cage provides protection for the body's most vital organs. And how the hiatus between the pelvis and the rib cage is where the body (both male and female) most expands.
The human body's true vestige of an exoskeleton are the nails, which are at the tips of the extremities, the outer reaches, the points of primal physical contact--touch--with other matter. I have in the past wondered if the genes associated with our nails are among the very oldest of our genome.
Keratin
Is there or will there ever be an architecture that reenacts keratin?
2008.11.02 19:07
Stab one: a thesis declaration
What exactly is "the assumed masculinity of military architecture"?
To clarify my thesis:
So what then is architecture? Is it a [feminine] hard, 'simple', 'natural' protective shell that engenders the continuation of life? Or is it a [masculine] soft formlessness forever (re-)designing an applied shell it doesn't naturally have?"
2008.11.03 08:18
Stab one: a thesis declaration
Judging by the subtext of each of the five paragraphs you just posted above, it looks like "conditioning" is what really permeates your thesis.
aside:
Wondering, will the critical conditioning of a new ideology of space for the 21st century happen more naturally or more artificially?
Speaking of hospitals, currently reading Le Corbusier's Venice Hospital (Hashim Sarkis, editor). It too touches on the notion of a "new ideology of space".
2008.11.07 13:37
New MVRDV high Rise in Copenhagen
School of Intemperate Cantileverage
Home Depot Home Kit?
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2008.12.03 00:44
where is the good new architecture?
Is there really all that much difference between 31 December 1999 and 1 January 2000? They're arbitrary place setters, and not the demarcation of disticnt different times. Metaphorically, the calendar is the cart, not the horse.
Personally, I see the Seattle Library design going back to Kahn's [and Tyng's] mid-1950s Municipal Building designs for Philadelphia. Historical analysis within a space-time continuum is more ongoing productivity and less end-product.
2008.12.03 01:50
where is the good new architecture?
I prefer to watch architecture history as it actually unfolds, and not through the aperture of somewhat artificial markers.
2008.12.03 11:23
where is the good new architecture?
There may be well be a lot of recent built architecture that is uninteresting (to you), but, nonetheless, there is a lot of recent designed architecture that is interesting. I can hear you say that designed, i.e. unexecuted, architecture does not count on this list. Yet I can also hear you say that St. Pierre does not count because it was designed in 1962. That is to say I sense your evaluation process unfortunately includes a double standard. Not all architecture has to be built in order for it to be historically significant.
2008.12.22
more Olivetti reenacted
Herzog & de Meuron's BBVA Headquaters design is the latest reenactment of Le Corbusier's Electronic Calculation Center Olivetti.
  
Plus, the design clearly manifests Alejandro Zaera-Polo's (reenactionary) proposal of a new politics of the envelope.
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2008.12.30 09:00
pragmatists turning political?
context/inspiration
Pier Vittorio Aureli's "Toward the Archipelago: Defining the Political and the Formal in Architecture" (in Log 11, Winter 2008) lays out the context of Alejandro Zaera-Polo's "The Politics of the Envelope" (in Log 13/14, Fall 2008).
within Toward the Archipelago:
Urbs vs. Civitas
Urbanization
Infinity and Enclaves of Urbanization
The Enclave and the Landmark
The Political
The Formal
The Archipelago
Architecture
passages from The Political:
"Politics arises between men, and it is established as a relationship." (Arendt)
The space in-between can only materialize as a space of confrontation between parts. Its existence can only be decided by the parts that form its edges.
In the dual terms of Carl Schmitt, the space in-between is formed by the decision of who is a friend and who is an enemy. This decision does not exist "as found" in between the parts, but arises from the position taken by the parts that form this space.
...the notion of agonism--the counterpositing of parts--functions as a critical mirroring of oneself via the other to the extent that it is possible to say that to make a collective claim of political autonomy, one must first declare one's counterpoint.
The enemy, on the other hand, estranges us from our familiar self-perception and gives us back the sharp contour of our own figure, of our own position. What counters us inevitably constitutes the knowledge of our own limit.
The political cannot be reduced to conflict per se; it indicates the possibility of conflict and as such calls for its resolution. Even if it means slightly confounding the terms of Hegel's dialectic, the political realizes the resolution of conflict not by a synthesis of confronting parts, but by recognizing the opposition as a composition of parts. This suggests that it is possible to theorize a phenomenological and symbolic coincidence between political action and the form of an object.
[This is the space of the politics of the envelope.]
Both deal with the fundamental question of defining the limits that constitute related but different parts. From this vantage point--the question of a composition of parts, the question of limits posed through the knowledge of the other--I propose to redefine the concept of the formal.
aggregate base
2008.12.31 09:38
pragmatists turning political?
The concluding 'Architecture' section of Aureli's "Toward the Archipelago" begins with:
"Let's immediately state that today's iconic building--the building that affirms its own singular presence through the appearance of its image, and that today constitutes one of the primary expressions of architectural culture at the scale of the city--cannot be a valid part of the city. Putting aside moral problems, issues of taste, and the gratuitous character of their forms, the iconic building cannot be considered an exemplary part of the city because its economic principle is to be unique and nonrepeatable."
This may well be what spurred Zaera-Polo's "The Politics of the Envelope".
[What works for me is...] Mixing Aureli's "The political ... indicates the possibility of conflict and as such calls for its resolution" and Zaera-Polo's "For architecture ... to convey that tendencies in the articulation of the building envelope capture the new political affects, to communicate that certain manipulations of the ground and the roof indicate the politicization of nature, or to explain the breakdown of the correlation between interior and exterior and private and public, are legitimate political performances."
Are ZP's categories of the envelope an attempt at repeatable icons?
ricochet:
brise-soleil: the politics of sun breaking
--Le Corbusier
--Kahn at Philadelphia Psychiatric
--Venturi at Frankfurt Arts & Crafts
houses under a common/detached roof
-- Plecnik
-- Le Corbusier
-- Krier at La Villette
osmotic architecture
-- Pantheon
--Versailles Hall of Mirrors
-- Altes Museum
-- Kimball Art Museum
hyper envelopes of UN Studio
--Arnheim Central
--Architecture Faculty Venice
--Music Faculty Graz
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