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.
2009.09.30 21:33
Information Architects Talking About Architects and Architecture
Presently, I like to design delivery of content in the enfilade slash labyrinth style.
Perhaps, someday, I'll design some delivery of content following the architecturale promenade formula.
Actually, I've been struggling with a big design/renovation brief, the solution to which has been eluding me for well over a month now. Alas, today, while just stepping out of the shower, it finally dawned on me--delivery of content in the enfilade slash labyrinth style via bilocation.
Is subtext actually text bilocated? 4704b
2009.10.01 11:31
Information Architects Talking About Architects and Architecture
It turns out, for my design at least, that text is subtext bilocated.
Since I actually have two design/renovation briefs, the second project will be delivery of content in the enfilade slash labyrinth style via bilocation and the theory of chronosomatics.
Like 18 January 2005, 19 April 2005 was another trilocation day...
...already made provisions in case anyone attending the lecture comes down with trilocation-sickness.
Looks like there's now no denying that there are architects and there are appositional architects.
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2010.11.06 15:40
Re: Seen and Not Seen
"Seen and Not Seen" immediately brought to mind a provocative passage I read just a few nights ago:
"Le Corbusier's first important building after the war was the studio residence he built for Ozanfant in Paris in 1922. In the following year he published his famous book Vers un Architecture. Probably the most influential architectural book of its generation, its contents add remarkably little to what Violette-le-Duc said in his lectures exactly sixty years before. The beauty of the machine, the importance of geometrical control in the creation of design, the stupidity of academic tradition, the lessons of the past in precision and logic--all these are topics which Violette-le Duc had dealt with. But in Le Corbusier the emphasis is, of course, very different. He is able to put the car, the air-plane and the liner in the foreground of the picture; he insists far more vehemently on the way in which engineering has leapt ahead of architecture and he coins the phrase 'la maison--une machine a habiter'. His technique, too, is lighter and faster, adapted to an age of headlines and headlights. And there is one subject he deals with at some length which would have been perfectly strange to his great precursor--the subject of factory-built houses."
--John Summerson, "Architecture, Painting and Le Corbusier" in Heavenly Mansions and other essays on architecture (1963), p. 188.
I wanted to copy the passage anyway, and now it's with even more implications.
2010.11.13 11:41
I'm apologizing in advance.
Perhaps the days of worthwhile-content-given-freely is steadily on the downswing (perhaps especially when given freely to an otherwise profitting site).
If worthwhile content received remuneration, there'd be lots of discourse.
2010.11.13 18:01
I'm apologizing in advance.
Then again, paying some people to not add content might just engender lots of discourse as well.
The word I'd use to describe this forum is underwhelming, as in "I want to start a thread called Underwhelming Central, but I'm afraid I'll be yelled at and told there are already a whole bunch of threads like that."
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2011.01.08 11:00
"On Criticism" an aggregate thread
...a virtual museum of architecture
collecting
a project
curation
critique
institutional critique, even (perhaps a virtual museum is what a real museum cannot be)
voices
continually reshaped
agendas
globally readable
cado coda
architecture as the delivery of content
2011.04.11 10:22
Ai Weiwei
Are we not now conditioned to see all discontent as an opportunity?
Parenthetically, what is progress without discontent?
2011.07.11 09:03
Question about Charles Jencks' Declaration
"Moreover, its Purist style, its clean, salubrious hospital metaphor, was meant to instill, by good example, corresponding virtues in the inhabitants. Good form was to lead to good content, or at least good conduct; the intelligent planning of abstract space was to promote healthy behavior."
It was indeed such naiveté that "died."
I just happened to have reread the first 15 pages of The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (revised enlarged edition, 1977) last week, and was surprised by how much of Jencks' actual argument has been (irresponsibly?) forgotten.
(My argument is that) Since 15 July 1972, architecture has been in an excessively prolonged period of mourning. The 'fancy-dress' was only part of the beginning. I'll be celebrating the anniversary this Friday via reenactment, of course.
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2011.07.11 15:19
Question about Charles Jencks' Declaration
It wasn't the Purist aesthetic that died with Pruitt-Igoe, rather the Modernist notion that "good form was to lead to good content, or at least good conduct; the intelligent planning of abstract space was to promote healthy behavior" is what died.
Calling out the implosion of several blocks of the Pruitt-Igoe Housing as an historic event and marker of a paradigm shift was rather astute on Jencks' part. I wonder how many other Modernist projects only 17 years old have succumb to implosion prior to that of Pruitt-Igoe. For sure, many fairly young Modernist projects have been imploded since Pruitt-Igoe, but is Pruitt-Igoe perhaps still the youngest Modernist project to have ever been imploded. And, I wonder, how many housing projects like Pruitt-Igoe have been built since the implosion of Pruitt-Igoe. I'd guess very few if not none in the United States, but perhaps such projects remained (or even still remain) in production in lands under Communist regimes.
I was eye-witness to the world's largest building implosion (the roughly 70 years old Sears Philadelphia Headquarters, 1994). It happened so close to where I lived I walked to see it. What's most striking about a building implosion is the immediate and paradoxical manifestation of absence. Jencks advocated that the ruins of the Pruitt-Igoe implosion should remain as "a great architectural symbol. It should be preserved as a warning." Well, I don't think the ruins were preserved, so all that's left are pictures and absence. I think it's fair to say that the implosion of Pruitt-Igoe left behind a certain absence within Modernist ideology as well
2011.08.25 12:37
herzog & de meuron website
The site slows down my system (probably because the files put my anti-virus software into overdrive), so I simplified the project list file, stored it on my own computer, and now the browsing and data delivery is quick and easy. I suppose their files are heavy and organized the way they are (windows in windows in windows) to protect the content from being easily copied, but, you know, copies are right there in the...
Otherwise, if content protection is not the issue, the site design could be delivering its content so much lighter and easier.
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2012.04.18 10:24
Why are we having this conversation?
Regarding chatter, I really don't know much about it because I don't blog, Facebook, Tweet, and I don't even own a cellphone. I'm still subscribed to the late antiquity listserv (which for a while now is more just a bulletin board), and read and sometimes post to archinect/forum.
Regarding online (architectural) discourse these days, it's probably best to also consider whatever interface is involved. Back in the day of heavy listserv activity, the interface was as plain as it could get--an email--and the discourse was a lot just like letter writing, and there was really no social media aspect to it at all.
If you look at archinect/forum of 2003 and 2004, you'll find posts with more text, many of letter length, and there still was no real social media aspect to it.
Within archinect/forum 2005-2006 you begin to see a social media aspect developing within the forum, and this coexisted with ongoing discourse. In 2007 (more or less) you begin to see the social media aspect balloon (a bit out of control) and hence cause some damage to the discourse (in that you start to see some participants no longer appearing).
Also, from 2006 on you see the rise in popularity of blogging, and then Facebook, tweeting, etc. There are now many interfaces for discourse, but there is more of a social media aspect to all of it, even the latest version of archinect/forum.
That said, as far as interfaces go, I'd say the second to last version of archinect/forum had the best design in terms of providing agency for architectural discourse. First of all because it was a true forum (and not a blog)--anyone could start a topic and anyone could comment within a topic (where as a blog is (for the vast majority) always the same person starting a topic). Secondly, the posting (ie, publishing) process was very quick and easy, and there was a was a variety of means for expression. Third, there was virtually no advertising or social media.
I guess my point is that online architectural discourse probably thrives better within an interface/environment that has a low social media aspect to it and where advertising really isn't an issue.
I realize that the online paradigm now is one of the masses providing content freely while at the same time generating profitable advertising revenues for the agency and not for themselves, but is that also a paradigm that engenders worthwhile architectural discourse?
2013.09.28
ShowCase: Louisiana State Museum and Sports Hall of Fame by Trahan Architects
After thinking about it, I've come to realize that I like that there are "docents to explain how the form of the buIlding relates to the local rivers and streams" because the architects' conceptual intent will therefore not fade into oblivion. In fact, every visitor will thus be made aware of the design intent, and then, more likely than not, give the architecture a bit more thought. And, afterall, isn't it a better-architecturally-informed public that ranks high on most architect's wish-list?
I now also have a renewed interest in the notion of "architecture as delivery of content."
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