anti-object #2

Brett Steele – AA head honcho – writes in the introduction to Kuma’s text that he is against “self-centred architecture… deliberately distinct from its surroundings”.
He continues:

“‘My ultimate aim’, [Kuma] writes early on in his book, ‘is to “erase” architecture’. Such an ambition couldn’t be further removed from the majority of a younger generation of digital experiementalists today, pursuing a renewal of formalism not seen within architecture for decades.”

As founder of the AADRL, and therefore one of the driving forces behind the pursuit of neo-formalism, and the advance of digital experimentalism, this comment is not without a certain hypocrisy. The younger generation are largely that way because Steele made them so. I am not making a value judgement about the worth of digital experimentalism (which has obviously been a tremendously important force in the recent history of global architecture), I am simply noting my surprise that Steele would distance himself from a movement he helped create.

+++++

In the first part, Max mostly focussed on the division of subject and object as proposed by Kuma’s text: the possibility of relating the subject to the landscape through the power of the floor plane, and the ability to blur formal boundaries of architecture by the ‘particlisation’ of materials and elements.

Both of these main points relate to Kuma’s definition of an object as being something wilfully separate from the ground plane – a finite figure cut off from the earth (as opposed to the earth itself, which is continuous in all directions and thus infinite). However, this definition also excludes burying a building. The new millennium fad of concealing buildings in the landscape by submerging them, or employing other mechanical modes for hiding their structure, does not actually change the nature of the building's limits (a wall is not less definitive because it is underground).

Max discussed what it isn’t, but what is an architectural object?

“Kuma sees new digital and informational technologies as leading us to an aesthetics of disappearance, rather than image or form” Steele notes. Images and forms are the current architectural stock-in-trade, and Kuma makes the historical reason for this quite clear: communication. At a period in Modernism when only black and white images were being published in grainy magazines, the architects that succeeded in drawing attention (and subsequently more projects) were those who could capture the essential forms of their buildings and diffuse them through B+W photographs (Barcelona Pavilion, Villa Savoye, etc). The legacy of this period is the ubiquity of the ‘metalevel’ image: an imagined point of view that portrays the whole building. This manner of viewing architecture necessarily renders it an object for consideration.

Bruno Taut, according to Kuma, lost out to rival Modernists because he “failed to understand the twentieth-century paradox, that individuals as isolated subjects shunned groups in any form. They were sustained in their mediocrity through the possession of attractive products.” Modern architecture became an 'attractive product' by appealing first to the spirit of domestic rivalry – the Modernist home was an object that could be packaged, sold, and used as a means to escape the mediocrity that was the inevitable result of the era of machine reproduction.

I mention the escape from mediocrity because Kuma lets us know that the architectural object is not, whatever Corbusier might argue, for the people. It is the production of one-of-a-kind jewels, founded on capital. It is the Burj Dubai, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Phaeno Science Museum, the Gherkin, and a million other projects – today with no exclusion of function or program.

From the text, I can only conclude this: the architectural object is full of form, but empty of meaning; found in one location, but conceived independently of place; sexy without being in the least bit seductive.

totally rad

Green Room, by lanscape artist collective A12, at the Barbican

The Barbican's got an exhibit on at the moment called 'Radical Nature'. They are quite firm about not taking photos over there, and I was ultimately asked to leave as a result. The focus for the exhibition is examining the physical – and conceptual – separation of nature from humanity, as well as questioning what 'natural' really means.

The show was a mix of hits and misses, but on the whole very good. I highly recommend it. I couldn’t help but think of what a friend of mine, a landscape architect, said recently: “everyday I receive more CVs from architects, but you know they have no feeling for landscape, they only apply because the Crisis forces them to.”

It is certainly true that commercial architecture (probably stemming from Corbu’s laissez-faire attitude to the landscape) has neglected landscape for a long time, only treating it in order to better draw attention to their iconic masterpieces. So while this show presents something new, I can’t help but feel that the disproportionate overrepresentation of architectural firms is its weak point. It needed something fresher, something new.

A group called A12 installed a small wooden chamber to sit beneath a skylight, (the “Green Room”). Inside was something like the art of Yayoi Kusama, but not so well finished, with mirrors reflecting an infinity of Selfs back at me. The interior was a trite English garden, replete with baroque urn and topiary shrub. What I didn’t understand was whether the artists were supporting the English bourgeoisie or mocking them – irony is getting too subtle for me these days. In any case, it was a pretty dubious work, and not indicative of the general standard.

Anya Gallaccio had lovingly collected all the parts of a beech that had been felled, reassembling the tree in the gallery using bolts and plates. It was vaguely painful to look at, the sinewy torsions of the beech evoking an arboristic empathy. Agnes Denes (who I’ve posted about before) was also there, though this is not the first time I have seen her work exhibited at the Barbican).


Anya Gallaccio's butchered beech

One piece that seems utterly redundant is Honeypump in the Workplace by Joseph Beuys. In 1977 he constructed a system to pump 2 tonnes of honey through a ship’s engine and then out round a room in transparent tubes. The display is the original tubes and the original ship’s engine, but no honey. One can only wonder at this act of reification (is all art reified anyway?), and ask why an art piece devoid of the element that made it interesting is still circulated, and particularly why it was included in a show about radical nature.

As a bit of an aspiring psychogeographer, I was really impressed by Lara Almarcegui’s pamphlet (free) on the urban, ex-industrial or natural sites that are under threat by the 2012 Waste of Everyone’s Time & Money. It serves as a great reminder that the natural environment is not static – to be confined, Blade Runner style within the walls of humanity’s white cubes – but an equilibrium in flux.

Final note: the 9 square metres of rainforest, apparently extracted à la Matta-Clark, glued together and then flipped on its side was great, floodlit by sun lamps to keep the trees growing horizontally. As were the Ant Farm projects, and the idea for floating gardens, where plants that collect nutrients from the air are strapped to balloons and sent into space. Go see it, I went 3 Fridays ago with a friend, and we were the only ones there.

studio crit #1: Guggenheim Hermitage Vilnius

image via deezeen

Why is it that in studio one's own architectural projects are always received so critically by peers and professors (well, at least, mine always are) - while professionals that produce work of dubious quality seem to be praised. Why is it that famous architects are not shot down like students?

From time to time I will be taking architect's projects and pretending I am their tutor, and it seemed an easy choice to select everybody's favourite punching bag- Zaha. The facility of this exercise is self-evident: the wave of universal admiration for Zaha has passed, and the tide of the Digital Formalists has turned. It is really too late to be criticising Hadid, she has, I believe, already fallen from the forefront of contemporary architectural discussion. Nonetheless, I was particularly struck by the accompanying text to her project for the Guggenheim Hermitage museum in Vilnius.

"The building appears like a mystical object floating above the extensive artificial landscape strip, seemingly defying gravity by exposing dramatic undercuts towards the surrounding entrance plazas. Large activated green fields flow around the museums sculptural mass, underlining its enigmatic presence with curvilinear lines echoing the elongated contours of the building. Contrasting with the vertical business district skyline it is a manifestation of Vilnius’ new cultural significance.

In the interior a canyon like air space allows for architecturally refined communication and circulation spaces mirroring the Fluxus spirit of informality and vivacity surrounding art. Through manipulations of the ground at the riverfront, towards the park and the bridge, different levels are made accessible. An intensification of public life at the river is our aim. The positioning of the building on the riverbanks, respectively the cities edge, creates a strong sense of place within Vilnius. The exterior spaces are modulated landscape formations creating several imprints or plinths upon which various activities and performances can take place."

My. A moment's pause. I suppose my first question would be, what is an ‘activated green field’? Are these irregular triangles of grass ‘activated fields’? because they look a lot like grass roofs. Presumably retail. Notice there are no people walking on them. They are not portrayed as inhabited spaces, and since they subsequently belong to the order of having (we own them, or consume them by viewing them) and not the order of being (by which we experience them in the act of existing amongst them), how can they be ‘activated’?

I could continue, but I think we all know where I am going with this. High Distinction (A) for presentation (although I would be interested to know Zaha's precise relationship to the drawings- I can't help but think of Milli Vanilli) but a Credit plus (C+) for attention to landscape- and who the hell is writing their press releases?

I was watching a film by Chris Marker the other day (of La Jetee fame) called Sans Soleil, wiki says of the film:

"Sans Soleil is a meditation on the nature of human memory and the inability to recall the context and nuances of memory and as a result, how the perception of personal and global histories are affected."

One of the really poignent remarks was about Japanese poetry. In Western poetry all nouns are modulated by adjectives- but the beauty of Japanese poetry is that the nouns are never modulated, 'rock', 'rope', 'boat', 'chrysanthemum', 'mountain' - they appeal to the infinte, to the thing itself, and not to some adjectival simulacrum.


Early C20- "Shinto priests crossing a courtyard of the Meiji Temple in Tokyo. Snow is falling on the pine-trees and the cloisters and on their paper umbrellas."