2004.07.31 10:36
Peter Eisenman: "Liberal views have never built anything of any value."
Thinking about what architectures these day are really political, I wouldn't count Peter Eisenman's among them. What I would count are "the great wall of Israel", US military bases all over the globe, any secured border checkpoints, architectures like that. Was the USSR the last great political architecture of the 20th century? Could be. And how does Communist Chinese architecture stand up these days?
2004.08.06 07:49
Transnational Spaces
Why not ask Native Americans about cultural erasure and placenessness?
2004.08.30 11:35
Re: the building as burkha
I'm curious as to how much thought, if any, has been given to the design of all the security checkpoints that will eventually be a part of all the new buildings and memorial at Ground Zero. Even without research, I imagine none of the proposed buildings and memorial will exist without many security checkpoints. Perhaps Ground Zero could be surrounded by a new and smaller version of the Berlin Wall (creating an island of Freedom Tower), thus potentially narrowing the number of checkpoints down to three--Alpha, Bravo and Charlie. Even Wall Street would have real meaning again!
Or maybe my imagination has run away and Architecture of the Divided States of America is really completely fictitious.
walls = denial = burkha = ?
Did you ever see pictures of how the first manifestation of the Berlin Wall was a continuous line of armed Communist soldiers standing abreast side by side? Remember Hands Across America? "Ich bin ein Ground Zeroed!"
2004.10.05 14:54
critical regionalism
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 crystallized.
2004.10.12 09:50
MVRDVs Serpentine
Interesting how you mention Harvard in the early 1990s because in 1991 Loeb Library purchased drawings and slides published by Arcadia-Architectural CAD Services which documented Le Corbusier's Palais des Congres and its role in within the promenade architectural formula. [The legal fictitious name Quondam - A Virtual Museum of Architecture is owned by legal fictitious name Arcadia - Architectural Cad Services is owned by Stephen Lauf.]
You write, "'Ideas' are often amalgams of things recently seen morphed with things subconciously absorbed, melded with past innovations from the canon of well-publicized master-works." I've often wondered how many at Harvard since 1991 have "recently seen" Arcadia's Le Corbusier's Palais des Congrès à Strasbourg.
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2004.11.19
ideas
Chronosomatic architecture: circle/square juncture plans, Washington DC 1981, chronosomatic imaginations; could be the next chapters, including architecture of the body and architecture of the theory itself; architecture of the continuum; of course, go through all the notes including BIA. "Architecture of the imagination" as in "there is an architecture to the imagination."
Design some new double basilicas; write the history; ask today's architects what the new double basilicas might be? Arab-Israeli? Catholic-Protestant? Again Latin-Greek?
Architecture is the most 'project' based of the arts. Is there such an established category as "project art"?
2004.11.25 11:51
Re: Deconstruction? no, afterlife
papers of LEAVING OBSCURITY BEHIND
Reenactionary Bilocating Architecturism
Saint Catherine de Ricci and Louis I. Kahn
Nudist Camp at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Marcel Duchamp and C. Paul Jennewein
Learning From Lacunae
Gordon Matta-Clark
De Spectaculis II
Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullianus and John the Baptist Piranesi
The Promenade Architecturale Formula
Le Corbusier
The Marriage of Twisted and Columns
Eutropia and Pieter Pauwel Rubens
Pilgrimage, Reenactment and Tourism
Flavia Julia Helena Augusta
Here a Versailles, There a Versailles, Everywhere a Versailles Sigh
Marie Antoinette, Ludwig II, and Lucretia "Eva" Bishop Roberts Cromwell Stotesbury Dougherty
and maybe
De Spectaculis III
Guy Debord
2004.12.03 11:14
Re: Big Boxing
What is the history of the open-web joist? When was this structural floor/roofing element first used? Big Box architecture depends a lot on the open-web joist, doesn't it?
Ancient Rome had lots of (grain) warehouses in the south-west(?) along the Tiber.
It was said that one could traverse the entire Campus Martius under roof cover because of the many public porticus there. Each porticus had a different name and raison d'être, sometimes even shopping. No open-web joists, but lots of columns, e.g., the Hecatonstylon--hall of a hundred columns.
2004.12.16 11:36
Fantasy Architecture?.....
The subject is fantasy, and fantasy, more or less by definition, does not come with restrictions. Even so, it is 'blurring something familiar with a vision' that was addressed, and the Princeton images indeed do that. The notion that fantasies are not nessessarily dark or cautionary, nor necessarily of the future was also added before the images were presented.
fantasy 2 : imagination or fancy, esp : the free play of creative imagination as it affects perception and productivity usually as expressed in an art form or as elicited by projective techniques of formal psychology
The title Art That is Otto and Einstein at Princeton 5 March 2000 harbors 'clues'--the fantasy is immediately obvious, but don't forget the layer of symmetry (Otto) and of relativity (Einstein), plus the notion of two visions joined.
Piranesi's Ichnographia Campus Martius is not really about fantasy, rather it is a reenactment of ancient Rome's history delineated via ancient Rome's architecture. The plans with their Latin labels within the large plan are all texts that together deliver the history of the city of Rome. Piranesi did a fantastic job of making a history lesson appear as fantasy.
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2004.12.19
idea
Porticus Circulus Quadratum, big guest house; new name for circle/square junction. Kahn, Palladio, Piranesi, Lauf reenactments; chronosomatic House?
2004.12.26 12:20
Re: cityscape collage
It started more than eight years ago when it was realized that Hadrian's Tomb and Logan Circle share the same circular footprint. Then, about two years ago, it was realized that ancient Rome's axis of life, as delineated by Piranesi, and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway share the same length and design articulation, with again Hadrian's Tomb and Logan Circle being the key register.
Now delineation of the 'bilocalopolis' begins. The Tiber and the Schuylkill flow through the cityscape. Augustine's tomb and City Hall have their similarities. Rome's Corso is now the same as Broad Street, the longest cardo in the world. X marks the spot of the first Gothic camp outside the walls of Rome and the no-man's land of the Vine Street Expressway interchanges.
I wrote something on 16 December 2004 which turns out to be a succinctly worded culmination of over 10 years of investigation, and also the touchstone for a finally foreseeable catharsis.
2005.01.21
intermediate 'to do' list
Start incorporating chronological lists of the architectural designs at Quondam. No single list will be complete in and of itself, nor will any single list be making a specific point, but as the lists multiply, their combined information is the point of the exercise. I could start with dating all the architecture within Seroux.
Sort out all the dtm and surface data so far, and begin incorporating the data with more architectural data, thus generating ever now and original (architectural) data. This project is both practical and creative.
Start creating new/original photo images via manipulating any of the existing jpeg collection. Get back in touch with masking and how to create line drawing overlays. This project also builds upon the QA background experimentations.
Begin designing more Houses for Otto, and also begin modeling the existing House for Otto plans.
2005.03.18 12:39
did any artists make reservations?
...in honor of the 14 May 1999 discovery of the two states of the Ichnographia Campi Martii by an outsider.
"De Spectaculis II" will also correct all the mistakes and crafty omissions made by David R. Marshall within "Piranesi, Javarra, and the Triumphal Bridge Tradition" (in The Art Bulletin, a quarterly published by the College Art Association, June 2003).
2005.04.01 14:55
how should someone feel after visiting a museum?
If it's an exceptional avant-garde museum, then according to design appropriateness, and even according to 'sustainable design' standards, the visitor should feel sucked in, confused, inadequate and, of course, an aftershock of wanting more.
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2005.04.08 12:25
modernity/post-modernity
Does it say anywhere that modernism must end as soon as post-modernism begins?
If so, then who writes these rules?
Did Judaism end as soon as Christianity began? Did Christianity end as soon as Islam began?
2005.04.08 19:12
modernity/post-modernity
The religious analogy employed is not a stretch when you consider how this thread began, specifically in reference to a "paradigmatic shift". Christianity is a paradigmatic shift vis-à-vis Judaism, and Islam is (in part) a paradigmatic shift vis-à-vis Christianity.
Interestingly, the rise of Christian architecture did coincide with the end of 'classical' Pagan architecture--not long after Christian basilicas were built in Rome and Judea (under the supervision of St. Helena), the legislature under Constantine I (the son of St. Helena) began to steadily outlaw Pagan cults. Ultimately, under emperor Theodosius I, all Pagan cults within the Empire were outlawed, hence no more classical Temples.
Is what I do modern or is it post-modern? Honestly, I don't care.
Was it European Colonialism that began the end of many indigenous architectures throughout the "non-Western" world? Can the 'international style' of CIAM be seen somewhat as an extension of Colonialism?
These are questions that interest me much more than whether Gehry is modern or post-modern.
2005.04.11 09:22
figure/ground vs field condition
Can you explain why the (so-called) extraordinarily rigid figure/ground relationship outside the Museum of Contemporary Art needed compensating? What about the temporary exhibit was non-rigid? (That's 'non-rigid' speaking figuratively, since the exhibit structure comprised many rigid components. The notion of non-hierarchical also seems a figurative notion, since a temporary condition by definition falls within a hierarchy.)
Exactly what classical figure/ground compositions does the City of Culture in Santiago de Compestela design-as-commentary dissolve? To me, the design looks more like the rethinking of a typical US suburban mall. Suburban malls are more a field condition than a figure/ground composition, aren't they?
Eisenman's Holocaust Memorial is probably more a traditional figure/ground condition inserted into a site-specific inserted field condition, rather than the other way around. Berlin since the end of WWII was/is hardly a 'traditional' place anymore.
If field conditions are somehow non-hierarchical, why do I get the feeling that field conditions are seen (at least by those that design them) as somehow better than figure/ground compositions?
2005.04.11 13:23
modernity/post-modernity
What is the universal truth that Modernity believes in?
What are some examples of relative truths?
Isn't the notion that the world is "complex without objective truth" itself "a belief that there is some kind of objective universal truth?"
So Postmodernity replaces Modernity's certainty of rationality with the certainty of relativity?
Is "the ether" still the playground architectural theory plays in?
What is more truthful, professional architectural photography or the candid snapshot of a building?
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2005.04.13 09:05
Architecture displaying movement?
And what exactly is time without the movement of matter through space?
2005.04.13 09:34
An Architecture of Removement
1. The Odds of Ottopia
2a. Leaving Obscurity Behind
2b. I'm a Big Fat Nobody: The Autobiography of Unbekannt
3. An Architecture of Removement
2005.04.17 09:56
Lebbeus Woods and Piranesi
Piranesi's Carceri have engendered tortured perceptions of the ill-advised since their original printing. Find similarities between the Carceri and the Prima Parti di Architetture e Prospettive and you might start getting somewhere.
2005.05.04 13:29
hejduk?
John Hejduk is definitely among my favorite architects. I met him once in Philadelphia, and got to take care of his slides before a lecture he gave in 1979--the sneak preview of his latest work then was indeed thrilling. I see Hejduk's work (of the late 1960s/early 1970s) as a distinct creative extension of Le Corbusier's late work, specifically the Carpenter Center at Harvard, the Palais des Congrès at Strasbourg (unexecuted), and the Governor's Palace at Chandigarh (unexecuted). (Not until last night did) I see The Berlin Masque as a design related to Piranesi's Ichnographia Campus Martius, and, perhaps it is Hejduk's architecture of Adjusting Foundations that fulfills Venturi's prediction (from the early 1980s within an issue of Casa Vogue, I think) that there will be patterns all over architecture in the near future.
And there's also Hejduk within the Maison Dom-ino Legacy (first published at Quondam 1997.08.18).
2005.05.05 19:40
ideal academic project?
Looks like a lot of you like oxymoron architecture. Anyone into onomatopoeia architecture?
2005.05.08 10:06
Re: Tafuri
Does this so-called "divorce of signs from their signified" create some kind of inferior, less authentic, outcome? Or is it really just a matter of degrees of separation?
2005.05.16 10:47
Koolhaas versus the Actor
Did some spot readings within Heynen's Architecture and Modernity a couple of days ago, the Tafuri "operative criticism" and mimesis parts. And a week ago read some passages from Barthes' Elements of Semiology. I'm beginning to wonder about what phychological effects the devastation of WWII may have had on later-half 20th century European thought, especially regarding the signifyier and the signified.
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