2005.04.30 11:55
Koolhaas versus the Actor
Otherwise, museums are all about content, aren't they?
2005.06.22 12:54
NON - BUILDING - ARCHITECT - DRAMA
quondam 1 : some incompletely architectural museum 2 : architecture as delivery of content 3 : a practice hypermuseum 4 : the architecture [publishing] domain of Stephen Lauf 5 : a virtual place in architectural history 6 : a premier unbuilding that continually undoes itself 7 : the first virtual museum of architecture online 8 : (from the Latin) once, at one time, formerly; at times, sometimes, once in a while; some day, one day (in the future)
2005.06.23 11:22
original content
I think original content scares people. I think it especially scares people that want to be original themselves. For example, originality in design makes other designers feel inadequate, although mimesis is guaranteed to follow. There is also the guarantee that some will immediately steal the original content and then quickly try to somehow pass it off as their own.
2005.06.23 12:38
Re: question
One of the reasons that original content scares people is because they immediately recognize that they have no control over the original content. Even before the subsequent mimesis happens, there are those that will right away try to control original content.
2005.10.14 13:57
Jimmy Venturi's new website...
In the Football Hall of Fame, the integral electronic billboard is prefect for adapted reuse, just program the sign with new content.
2005.12.08 14:37
serpentOMA's pavillion
contentious
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2006.03.04 12:18
Iconography, or the problem of representation
The surface examples I listed are within the context of electronic screens on buildings, and not meant to imply that iconography cannot have depth as well. Nonetheless, an architecture of just camouflage seems to be an interesting typology.
The main reason for the post, however, was to address the notion of architecture as delivery of content, which was (subsequent to quondam) also addressed by Willem-Jan Neutelings in Icon magazine (January 2006).
Architecture as delivery of content seems to be the opposite of architecture of just camouflage, doesn't it?
2006.03.06 12:13
Iconography, or the problem of representation
I don't recall advocating content disregarding the interior, and I think you're interpolating as to what I did advocate.
'Wallpaper' can be applied both inside and outside, can it not?
Is there some kind of law dictating that 'wallpaper' can only be applied to flat surfaces?
2006.03.16 10:28
Complex Iconography and Contradictory Content in Architecture
Complex Iconography and Contradictory Content in Architecture is the latest addition to The Working Title Museum.
Preface to the online-perhaps-interactive edition:
Helena Augusta began "Pilgrimage, Reenactment and Tourism" at Leaving Obscurity Behind by calling Bethlehem and Jerusalem Jesus event cities, and related the history of her work there. Then she had Judas, the old Jew who told her where the True Cross was buried, present a little history. (Everyone calls him Judas because he constantly denies that that is his name.) Then she had Julian the Apostate present a history of his attempt to have the Temple of Jerusalem rebuilt. (Everyone still gets a kick out of how Helena is actually one of Julian's great grandmothers.) Then she had Ismael Raji Al-Faruqi, the last Palestinian Governor of Galilee, present a very large history, especially about the Dome of the Rock as marker of dream event.
As somewhat of a surprise ending, Helena had Catherine de Ricci reenact her stigmata and ring, and then had Louis I. Kahn reenact his burying of the New Testament in snow.
2006.03.19 12:25
Complex Iconography and Contradictory Content in Architecture
The last Palestinian Governor of Galilee and Koolhaas are the only people mentioned so far that I have ever met or seen in person. I discussed urban planning with the Governor for about ten minutes in 1977--I at least remember he said, "The three different areas should be autonomous."--and Koolhaas heard me discuss "content" with Venturi and Scott Brown 29 September 2001.
2006.03.19 15:28
Complex Iconography and Contradictory Content in Architecture
...the first five chapters are already in the works.
1. Herrenchiemsee
2. From Augusta Treverorum to Constaninople and back again
3. Complex Ichnography and Contradictory Contentment
4. Piranesi takes a vacation
5. Learning from Lacunae
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2006.04.01 13:35
Dwell Magazine: A Slow Commercialised Descent? Has it stoped being a "Nice Modernist?"
Face the facts, all magazines (as opposed to journals) are advertising mediums, and content is pretty much secondary.
2007.04.20 18:27
Featured Discussion: Volume
Because education is today an expensive commodity, and because magazines are at best advertising mediums and because architects are now seeking to commodify their research (abilities), I thought of Leon Krier's "The Consumption of Culture" in Oppositions /14 (1979).
first sentence:
"When the French Revolution ended with the political victory of the bourgeoisie, education, which had been the priviledge of a small class, became compulsory for every member of the new social order.
somewhere in the middle sentence:
"Kitsch must then be identified as the most important cultural phenomenon of the industrial age, as the real Zeitgeist of the machine age.
last sentence:
"In that perspective, the self-destruction of humanity becomes obviously a moment of relief, relief from the urgency, ugliness , and futile agony.
Putting the content of all those old magazines online, now that would be a more worthwhile exhibit.
2007.04.22 19:59
Featured Discussion: Volume
I referred to my stance as an architect as de-territorialized, but not to Quondam.
My de-territorialized stance may be reflected within the content published at Quondam, but Quondam itself doesn't attempt de-territorialization any more than any other virtual place attempts de-territorialization.
If there is anything I learned via de-territorialization and Quondam it's that limits are not worth reaching for.
2007.07.17 10:32
on aesthetics
I like it when content takes on a form that very easily recognized yet not very easily digested.
Yet some people might still argue that anything looks better with a frame.
Did someone mention cocktails?
aesthetics eingeschnudeled
2007.07.17 12:07
on aesthetics
Perhaps that's what the artist/architect does, apply form to content. Yet, in the case of Piranesi's Ichnographia Campus Martius at least, it is the form within a context that discloses the content (if the observer is astute enough to find it)--the content is implied rather applied.
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2007.07.17 12:41
on aesthetics
Any archinecters ever been to Kaliningrad? Apparently the place is completely German in form yet completely Russian in content. (At least that's what a East Prussian descendant told me what his father's return there 15 years ago was like.)
2008.05.16 08:16
Now try taking it to court.
Point one begins with "Media has invaded every aspect of our lives." and ends with "Just think of any architectural magazine today devoted, supposedly, to the environment, and instead one finds media."
More to the point: Advertising has invaded every aspect of our lives, and just think of any architectural magazine today devoted, supposedly, to the environment, and instead one finds advertising.
"In the future, everything will be an advertisement." --Rita Novel
The Guggenheim has very successfully, via architecture, become an advertisement of itself [via free press even]. The Guggenheim's architecture as advertisement has even become an aspect of the Guggenheim's sustainability. The image of Guggenheim buildings are trademarked even.
Perhaps...
Architecture as delivery of content = architecture as delivery of "advertising space" = lucrative sustainability. (We already know this is how a lot of virtual architecture works.)
2008.05.31 08:37
An Amatuer
Content
Content is a product of the moment.
Inspired by ceaseless fluctuations of the early 21st Century, it bears the marks of globalism and the market, ideological siblings that, over the past twenty years, have undercut the stability of contemporary life.
This book is born of that instability. It is not timeless: it’s almost out of date already. It uses volatility as a license to be immediate, informal, blunt: it embraces instability as a source of freedom.
Content is a follow-up to SMLXL, an inventory of seven years of OMA’s tireless labor. In many ways it is structured according to what its predecessor is not – dense, cheap, disposable….
The relentless internal logic that propelled SMLXL is here counteracted by the incorporation of critical, external voices. Subjects are not arranged according to size but by geographical proximity: the trajectory moves ever eastward, beginning in San Francisco, ending in Tokyo.
Content is dominated by a single theme – “Go East” – at once a response to 9-11’s mounting wreckage and an acknowledgement of the eastward momentum that has, through AMO’s political involvement with the EU and an increasing density of Chinese projects, redirected the office’s energy. It is an attempt to illustrate the architect’s ambiguous relations with the forces of globalization, an account of seven years spent scouring the earth--not as business traveler or backpacker, but as vagabond – roving, searching for an opportunity to realize the visions that make remaining at home torturous. Content is, beyond all, a tribute to what are perhaps OMA/AMO’s greatest virtues--its courage, its dogged, almost existential pursuit of discomfort, its commitment to engaging the world by inviting itself to places where it has no authority, places where it doesn’t ‘belong’.
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2008.06.01 11:07
Can you say canonical?
"In this painstaking analysis of an apparent architectural syntax, the author offers a fresh interpretation of one of the canonical works of the Brutalist movement--the Stirling and Gowan Leicester Engineering Building, completed in 1963. Responding independently to one aspect of a theme broached by Manfredo Tafuri in Oppositions 3, Eisenman attempts to uncover the precise manner in which Stirling has rewritten the "words" of modern architecture."
--Kenneth Frampton, an introduction to "Real and English: The Destruction of the Box. I." (1974).
The article was first presented in lecture form at Cooper Union in the spring of 1973 and again at Yale during the spring of 1974.
"The thrust of the argument below will be that the Leicester Engineering Building invokes a similar critical and thus, polemical, intention as Venturi, but does so in a different and perhaps less traditional manner--by distorting the form of the iconic structure as opposed to perverting the form of the iconic content, as in the case with Venturi."
"Much of the work of Louis Kahn, which proposes a classical alternative to a modern eclecticism, can surely be seen..."
"...and more recently in the wall decompositions of John Hejduk, destroys it conceptually."
"Real and English: The Destruction of the Box. I" was a (personal) inspirational motivator for a fourth year design (taken through to working drawings) project, Fall 1979. None of the faculty "got" the design--it was like Leicester Engineering meets Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. Hyper Avant. Very distorted iconic structure fucks with perverted iconic content. Then during "working drawings", Spring 1980, witnessed schizophrenic survival of horrific expressway accident, emergency room lobotomy, subsequent two-week drug-inducted coma, and the commencement of a whole new history (where all that remains canonical is a sense of humor).
2009.02.13 08:24
pragmatists turning political?
Is any of what you wrote closely related to "architecture as delivery of content"?
imaginative
scientific
fictive
Are there architectures that perform assimilatingly? metabolically? osmotically? electro-magnetically? ultra-frequently?
per..........form
re..........present
re..........enact
ars ludi
2009.08.02 14:34
inspiring Maya Linked Hybrid edge
"So an afterlife does not exist for us per se, but instead an afterlife occurs for that which exists between us. When an alien civilization eventually bumps into Earth, they will immediately be able to understand what humans were about, because what will remain is the network of relationships: who loved whom, who competed, who cheated, who laughed together over road trips and holiday dinners. Each person's ties to bosses, brothers, and lovers are etched into the electronic communiqués. The death switches simulate the society so completely that the entire social network is reconstructable. The planet's memories survive in zeros and ones."
from "Death Switch" in Sum
Don't underestimate the oblivion of a deleted archive, however.
2000.01.03:
PD writes:
What about the notion of life? In order to call a composition as a work of architecture there must be a life in it. A life around it does not make it architecture, I think. The composition must embrace a life style, must be an accompaniment of a life style but not be the focus of it. The objects which are for perception only, cannot be called architecture. They are called sculpture.
SL replies:
What PD writes comes across as very true as a reasonably way to approach "what is architecture?" as opposed "what is sculpture?" And for the most part I agree with the notion that architecture accommodates life. So I then ask if this 'definition' must be broadened to include all built forms that once accompanied life and a life style, but over time have come to no longer do so. I am thinking of ancient ruins, be they Stonehenge, the Pyramids, the Parthenon, the cave temples of India, etc. These are commonly referred to as examples of architecture, yet today they are clearly "objects which are for perception only." Have these architectures become architecture/sculpture hybrids? Furthermore, no one now lives in Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, nor, it might be argued, does the life style around which the Villa Savoye was designed to accompany now exist. Is the Villa Savoye a master work of modern architecture that is now an "object which is for perception only?" Or is it merely that the 'life style" the Villa Savoye now accompanies is one where great buildings (if they're lucky) become cultural shrines, where the buildings now accommodate our 'perceptual worship'?
How much of life is really spent in perceptual worship?
"Meanwhile, the question posed in 1918 by the Hermitage's first commissar and futurist Nikolai Punin, "Is a Museum a Shrine or a Factory?" is yet to be answered."
from Content
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