For one night, March 4, 2010, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York was changed from a sterile, static, iconic piece of architecture into a fully immersive changing environment thanks to the sounds of the avant-indie group Animal Collective and the visual overlays by video artist Danny Perez. 36 speakers were strategically placed in the museum at varying locations giving the participants a constantly changing sound environment as they strolled down the infamous ramp of the Guggenheim. On the visual side of things there were overlays of video and moving lights projected onto the sterile walls of the museum and the participants in the exhibition. This was not a video screening or laser show, this exhibition filled the whole space completely, the participants could walk in any direction and not escape this spatial experience. This was a very temporal space that was so tied into the reality of the built environment it took place in that it could not be reproduced in any other location. What can architecture take from this exhibition? This was along the lines of the visionary illustrations given by Archigram and others in the ‘60s. It contained the interactive, changing social environments that John Kaliski has been asking for. It included the technological screens which Paul Virilio has warned against while containing the personal interactions with space he has wanted to maintain. This is an examination of how architecture could leave the stasis that it is and embrace the constantly changing environment it takes place in and dictates.
We live in a world that is constantly changing. The urban inhabitant is constantly undergoing a series of changes daily yet the built environment surrounding the urban inhabitant ceases to...
... middle of paper ...
...infrastructure of an area could not cope with an ‘instant’ yet rare occurrence – a musical festival, for example. Instant City was the equipment, ‘60s style, with which to control a flash flood of hedonistic humanity: ‘The programme was seen as augmentary and anticipatory. [It gathered] information about an itinerary of communities and the available utilities that exist (clubs, local radio, universities etc.) so that the city package [was] always complementary rather than alien.
It was this switch from the alien to complementary architecture that caused Archigram’s form of city design to fall in line with Kaliski’s views of city design. Kaliski’s views are shown here, “Utilizing what already exists, city design is a form of bricolage. The city designer reassembles narratives of place in order to intensify and render more visible the ordinary stories of city life.”
Some of these animations add visuals when a complex idea is being described, such as the idea of the ‘lemon dance” or the ‘rubber room’ in New York. Guggenheim also takes the idea of tenure and uses these techniques to twist tenure into somethi...
In “Sacrality and Aura in the Museum: Mute Objects and Articulate Space,” Joan R. Branham argues about the experiences art viewers have in museums based on their surroundings. Her points include how a person is to completely understand and feel a ritual object if it is taken out of its natural context or how someone is able to fully appreciate of work of art if they can’t see it where it truly belongs.
The urban world is about things that are going on within the cities, and the differ...
Using the quote by Habermas as a starting point, select up to two buildings designed in the twentieth century and examine what ‘sudden, shocking encounters’ they have encountered, or created. Analyse the building’s meanings as a demonstration of an avant-garde, or potentially arriere-garde, position.
Connor is concerned with how Sound Art is a vehicle for change in the gallery, in particular how sound can extend beyond the walls of the gallery to ventilate it with the sounds of what lies outside it, or to temporalise place. Connor discusses The Sonic Boom Exhibition held in London in 2000 which featured 23 sound artists who exhibited at The Hayward Gallery. The show featured an emphasis on sculptures or objects that produced sound. David Toop, the curator for the Sonic Boom Exhibition was faced with ‘a positively suburban problem of sound pollution’ says Connor. When one enters the exhibition one is immediately overwhelmed by a dense cloud of noise and sounds. How many sounding objects can one put into one space? David Toop defends his approach with the help of a w...
With these technological advances, increasing reliance on complex technological networks for survival and the connection of bodies with the urban space through electronic and digital mediums, the city cannot simply be explained in terms of physical, tangible territories and material networks. Instead, the city should be thought more like urban systems, circuits and networks operating like a computer matrix, where urban experiences and environments are straddling the boundary between real and virtual, which is becoming increasingly blurred by cybernetic and bio technologies.
...f structure, a museum. The one contradiction in the contemporary design theory that Libeskind dares to fight is that to work in the upcoming century means to work with reduced means. His works pose optimism in the sense that architecture, if filled with a satisfactory amount of reasoning, and justification with the help of the advancement in material technology, and the foremost, creativity, will be able to address the profound of any project seeking for poetic embodiment. While modern architects have tried hard to eradicate the traces of history from the forms, postmodern architects like Liberskind would embody the traces of history in between the forms. In Lisbeskind’s Jewish Museum, the invisibility, the implication, and the embodiment come first, then the advancement of material methodology assists the build of the visibility, and the physical infrastructure.
Sometimes the best revolutions are those that are forgotten. At least in the short run. And so it is with Robert Venturi, a revolutionary and remarkable architect. While he may not be as celebrated as Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, or Louis Kahn, Venturi leaves behind a forceful intellectual legacy that is perhaps more durable than any building. By condemning the functionalism, simplicity, and orthodoxy of modernism in Contradiction and Complexity in Architecture (1966), he instigated an enduring architectural rebellion. This rebellion continues to run its course today. Notably, Venturi’s ideas sparked and profoundly influenced postmodernism, an international style whose buildings span from the beautiful to the gaudy and vulgar. Ultimately, Venturi’s alternative to modernism succeeded because he prized human experience and the interaction of individuals with architectural forms over a rigid, doctrinaire ideology.
If modernism and postmodernism are arguably two most distinguishing movements that dominated the 20th century Western art, they are certainly most exceptional styles that dominated the global architecture during this period. While modernism sought to capture the images and sensibilities of the age, going beyond simple representation of the present and involving the artist’s critical examination of the principles of art itself, postmodernism developed as a reaction against modernist formalism, seen as elitist. “Far more encompassing and accepting than the more rigid boundaries of modernist practice, postmodernism has offered something for everyone by accommodating wide range of styles, subjects, and formats” (Kleiner 810).
Remarkably, unlike in the description of art or music, the notion of atmosphere remains largely unaddressed in architecture. Atmosphere, can be argued, is the very initial and immediate experience of space and can be understood as a notion that addresses architectural quality, but the discussion of atmosphere in architecture will always entail, by definition, a certain ambiguity. After all, atmosphere is something personal, vague, ephemeral and difficult to capture in text or design, impossible to define or analyse. Atmosphere, Mark Wigley says, “evades analysis, it’s not easily defined, constructed or controlled”.
The following essay addresses the discourse around the good city, trying to understand the importance of having a thinking on the topic rather than providing solutions for a good city.
When linking the concept of cultural relativism to architecture, one would realize that both these components depend on each other. One cannot exist without the other (Kohler, 2003). Kohler remarks that in order for architecture to be progressive, The transfer and acceptance of technologies and techniques has to be based on a sound knowledge of regional culture (Kohler, 2003). In other words, the existing architecture or urban environment has to distinguish the features of regional diversity. Cultural exchange must consider the environment. No clash exists between regional and environmental appropriate construction techniques (Kohler, 2003). This is so because traditional architecture has adopted economic and environmental solutions. Conflict can only exist if one considers the ‘international style’ that has popularized the modern era with its high resource consumption. Kohler (2003) also stresses that there should be no regional cultural boundaries in order for architecture to be progressive (Kohler, 2003:86)
Jencks briefly explains post-modern aesthetics from their modernist predecessors’ and pinpoints the instant of modernism’s death, writing “Happily, we can date the death of Modern Architecture to a precise moment in time… Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972 at 3:32 p.m. (or thereabouts)...” (23). Unlike Jencks, literary scholars talk about the first, most original or famous representatives of modernism, but they completely avoid pinpointing an ultimate end to the movement. Due to architecture’s visual character and Jencks’ early, authoritative, and internationally read scholarship, the differences between modern and post-modern aesthetics are often clearer in architecture than in literature. Architecture provides a helpful visual counterpoint for modern and post-modern aesthetics in literature. According to him, architectural post-modernism favours pluralism, complexity, double coding, and historical contextualism.
Constantly judged and evolving, the practice of architecture is forever plagued by the future. The future of people, of culture, technology and its resulting implications on the built environment that more often than not, outlives their creators. Much of the conversation surrounding this future architecture currently hinges itself on the creation of new experiences, forms and spatial relationships brought about by technological innovation.
Behind every architectural work there is an architect, whether the architect is one man or woman, a small group, or an entire people. The structure created by any of these architects conveys a message about the architect: their culture, their identity, their struggles. Because of the human element architects offer to their work not just a building is made, but a work of art, a symbol of a people, a representation, is also created.