2001.11.02
Plus Ultra Houses
...houses that have morphed into museums... ...the palace at Trier, a(n Imperial) house that morphed into a double basilica... ...plus ultra is the Latin for 'more beyond', or more hyper
2001.12.17
Re: The world's new look.Really?
The last few days I've been archiving all my email letters from the last year. Since I'm on the computer all day, I occassionally check if there are any new emails. After reading Alex's last post I went back to archiving. Within a few letters I came upon "Nostradamus, etc.", an email I sent to design-l [I sent it 13 Sept. 2001 and it arrived at design-l 14 Sept. 2001]. The last line of this email reads:
"For what its worth, when it comes to the double sided nature of horror, it seems, to me at least, that we are all mirrors that have to see ourselves regardless."
It seems that Alex's "The world's new look. Really?" portray's a true double theater of current history. A double theater that, depending on which stage your watching, manifests what is believed. One of the saddest lessons I've had to learn in life is that there are many, many people that only believe what they want to believe, and, what's worse, people do this quite conscientiously, especially educated people.
A couple of Friday nights ago, I had a conversation with Hani Rashid. He and Lise Anne Couture and Karim Rashid were at the opening of Stradascape, an installation by them at Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art. Hani and I discussed virtual museums, particularly the Virtual Guggenheim Museum that Asymptote (the architecture firm of Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture) designed, but has yet to be implimented online. I mentioned the NYTIMES article of about a month ago that itemized the recent Guggenheim cut-backs, and Hani quickly said that the cut-backs actually signify a [virtual???] reversal of fortune for the Virtual Museum. I thought to myself, "Oh, so here is another person that believes only what they want to believe." Hani's explanation gets a bit complicated because there is now www.guggenheim.org and www.guggenheim.com. The dot org is the museum we all know, while the dot com is an independent commercial site that paid the Guggenheim to use their name, etc. The backer(s) of guggenheim.com are not a sure thing either, so the Virtual Guggenheim is still hyper-virtual (if I may again coin a phrase).
Then Hani and I discussed their installation, which for the most part is interesting "furniture" producted using automobile industry CAD/CAM and made of the formed stuff you see in new car trunks. This "stratascape" covers an area of about 60' x 40' and comprises a grid of individual "chairs" approx. 12 across and 8 down. The form of the furniture is all undulating, and a lot of fun to sit in. At one point Hani said the installation "in a perverse artistic way" manifests a reversal where "the people are stationary and the furniture moves." Truth be told, the installation we were both looking at was indeed the exact opposite of what Hani described--the many people present were moving all throughout the "scape", and the "furniture" itself was perfectly stationary. Hani may believe what he wants to believe, however, I believe what I saw.
It appears that double theaters are everywhere, even in architect's heads.
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2001.12.19
nimiety of ideas
Looked at Vittorio De Feo again; saw where inspiration for the House in Laguna stairs came from; is the current architectural revival of the '50s and the '60s going to be followed by a digital redux of the '70s?
Begin an interpretive overlay of Kahn's Center City Philadelphia plans upon Quondam's Philadelphia model; this could produce a next wave of Koolhaas architecture, or will it also be a new wave of Piranesi / Kahn / Lauf.
...hyper surface of the Ara Pacia... Ara Pacia as architecture as the delivery of content.
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