2003.12.14 17:42
Re: which Acropolis do you prefer?
The explosion of the Parthenon occurred 26 September 1687. It would be interesting to know how many people on Earth 316 years from now will know the date of the attack on the World Trade Center off the top of their head.
Collective memory is a lot more selective than criticism.
For how long did the 'ideal' design of the Acropolis actually exist? Moreover, do we even fully understand what the Acropolis was really like while it manifest it's most ideal existence. For example, how was it all painted? Did a fair amount of the ideal design actually fade as soon as the colors did?
2004.01.06
epiphanies
6. Bottomopolis of Ottopia - a metabolic ichnographia in two states.
9. Bottomopolis comprises the architecture of schizophrenia + architectures.
2004.01.19 14:24
Re: From Earth to the .US footprint on the Cosmos
Gosh, if all the US military bases around the world were turned into .US run tourist resorts (like DisneyWorld or Busch Gardens or Colonial Williamsburg even) US citizens could travel all over the world and still be xenophobic.
sushiland.okinawa.us here I come!
2004.01.19 14:51
Tschumi's renderings
What I see as most unfortunate is that a design (which owns as much to Terragni's Danteum as it does to Mies) to house/display revered ancient artifacts is really no different in effect than a design to house/display Prada artifacts. I suppose this is all a lesson on how to now architecturally treat "very valuable" things.
Isn't it fun living in an architectural era of render and shop till you drop?
2004.02.18 14:28
Re: Kahn
I prefer what the eye really does see as opposed to photography where what is 'unsightly' is omitted.
2004.03.13 13:38
Re: to serve a larger purpose
I wonder when there is going to be an Apostate Architecture symposium.
Let's have a vote:
Do you prefer Republican Architecture or Democrat Architecture or Independent Architecture?
Is it true that someone somewhere is working a book entitled The Architecture of Taxation?
Chapter One: Money Bags
Chapter Two: Hand to Mouth
Chapter Three: The Art of Evasion
Chapter Four: Deductible Dependents
Chapter Five: Attachments
Chapter Six: Chapter Eleven
Chapter Seven: Schloss Schatzkammer 4 sale
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2004.03.14 10:58
Re: koolhaas on charlie
Museums and libraries, architectures as deliveries of content.
2004.03.16 10:20
Re: before or after the Viking invasion ?
...excerpt from the cover notes of Prehistoric Architecture in the Eastern United States:
"It is the first overview of prehistoric earth architecture in the Eastern United States, from about 2200 BC to AD 1500, and presents 82 sites which provide examples of how, thousands of years before Columbus, aboriginal architects used earth to shape their environments and landscapes from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Plains."
...the formations of the earth architecture(s) is most times very geometric, often with groupings of stunted pyramidal mounds, and the arrangements sometimes resemble the patterns one associates with crop circles.
2004.04.14 22:25
Re: "Revivalists..."
"Ludwig did not set out to copy the entire Palace of Versailles; in fact, he conceived Herrenchiemsee as something of a shell, in which only two rooms were of consequence--the State Bedroom and the Hall of Mirrors. He commissioned architect Georg Dollmann and, later, Julius Hofmann, to faithfully duplicate the center block and side wings, He eventually wished to include to longer auxiliary wings containing the chapel and court theater, but money ran short before these schemes could be executed. The king never intended that all the rooms should be completed: From the beginning, Herrenchiemsee was to be a set piece into which certain rooms were to be introduced. Their bare plaster walls, bricked up windows, and vaulted stone ceilings only served to fill out the space behind the palace's facade, providing an eerie contrast to the extravagant rooms of the piano nobile. By the fall of 1885, the palace was ready for a royal visit."
--Greg King, The Mad King: A Biography of Ludwig II of Bavaria, pp. 241-2
Earlier today, while driving to the local post office (which is within a large local shopping center, which years ago was the site of Heinz Manufacturing), I passed by what until a year or two ago was a K-Mart. For some reason the entrance to this place was wide open, and inside was an enormous, cavernous space. I thought to myself, "Gosh, the interiors of these stores are so ephemeral." Then I thought, might it not be interesting if homes were treated/designed like BIG BOX stores. Now, thinking of Herrenchiemsee, why can't all BIG BOXES look like Versailles on the outside and empty shells on the inside. Or, is that what is kind of already happening, and Ludwig was a "dreamer" just a head of his time.
2004.04.22 18:17
Re: Hey!!!
Does (any) architecture come with an owner's manual?
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2004.05.04 10:28
Re: the design of incarceration
It's always interesting and useful to know how things happen, and it's just as interesting and useful to know how things un-happen.
2004.05.10 15:17
Re: ducked around ?
"Imaginative history" is a kind of virtual reality, is it not?
As much as I see the virtual domain as something other, there nonetheless remains the wide held notion that the distinction between the real and the virtual is increasingly blurred in our times.
Reenactment is a kind of "imaginative history", is it not?
2004.05.15 08:43
REPORTAGE- Rhythm & Gender
Regarding Post-Modern Architecture and it's "origin", my first thought was of Jencks' reference of Lubetkin and Tecton's Highpoint II, Highgate, 1938.
Part three of Jencks' The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977), offers a fairly concise 'history' of architecture's seminal works that portend or indeed manifest a post-modernist style.
Some have argued that Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) is the primal manifesto of Post-Modern Architecture, while other's like to point out that Rossi's The Architecture of the City (also 1966) plays an equal role in shifting architecture theory/practice away from strict Modernism.
Post-Modernism in architecture was a much discussed and written about subject. Does it really matter as to what was the precise origin of the "movement"? It doesn't matter to me because official history is rarely as inclusive as it pretends to be.
2004.05.15 15:27
Koolhaas Library NY Times
Compare the new Seattle Library with Kahn and Tyng's design for a Municipal Building, Philadelphia, 1952-57 (as seen on pp. 30-31 of Louis I. Kahn: Complete Works 1935-1974).
Also look at the color sketck on page 27 which is evocative of the other recent Koolhaas architecture of irregular shape.
Is a book entitled Learning from Early Kahn Philadelphia virtually in the works?
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2004.05.18 10:26
REPORTAGE- Rhythm & Gender
I like the list; 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 Congrès--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!
2004.06.30 22:55
Modern Trajectory
Perhaps it's the line from Gordon Matta-Clark to Frank Gehry that should be more recognized.
2004.07.01 14:57
Modern Trajectory
Why not compose a modern trajectory based on individual buildings/designs and events (such as building expositions, publications, schools, symposiums, etc.) entwined with historical events, instead of dealing with architects themselves as a datum?
Is the course on architecture or is it on architects?
A Venturi and Rauch building of the 1960s, for example, is not the same as a Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates building of now-a-days. The same goes for Gehry's career trajectory. An early Mies building is not the same as a late Mies building (although most late Mies buildings are just like each other). Note what building design Kahn was working on while Wright was designing Beth Sholom Synagogue.
A chronological trajectory of buildings/designs will be much more informative than a more or less speculative list of what architect may have succeeded or followed what other architect.
2004.07.01 15:59
Modern Trajectory
MoMA also had a Japanese Design exhibition in 1954.
The Language of Post-Modern Architecture was first published in 1977.
1966: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture - Venturi
1966: Architecture of the City - Rossi
Not only were Le Corbusier's executed works always news-worthy, but each consecutive publication of his Complete Works lead to widespread (i.e., global) emulation throughout the field of architecture.
The necessity of rebuilding Europe after W.W.II lead to an enormous proliferation of modern design.
1925: Towards a New Architecture - Le Corbusier.
The coeval-ness of Art Deco and Esprit Nouveau.
The works of Stirling and Gowen as the ultimate manifestation of Russian Constructivism.
Stalinist Architecture as the ultimate manifestation of Piranesi's Ancient Roman fantasies.
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