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...
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...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...
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...
When entering the room, one cannot help but feel pulled into each and every painting. The realization that the artwork hanging on the walls was created hundreds of years ago, and still exists in pristine order, to me makes these pieces of art, relics. Gazing around the still and almost silent gallery, I could not help but think that each of these paintings are windows into the past. In his essay Ways of Seeing, John Berger states that “An image became a record of how X had seen Y” (136). At the time the paintings in this gallery were painte...
Within new media, there exists the desire and possibility to produce new effects upon the viewer, to grant new experiences. Pipilotti Rist seeks the creation of virtual utopias within the limitations of the video medium in installations such as her recent work at the Museum of Modern Art, Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) in 2009. The work transforms the typically bare atrium of the Museum of Modern Art into an active environment, where a reciprocal relationship between the viewer and the projection can take place. Communication between viewers also forms an essential component in the work; discourse becomes the mediator in the spectator’s relationship to the imagery.
The experience of art is all in your mind. One exhibit featured a couple dozen flickering lamps hanging from the ceiling, while an incessant buzzing noise resonated in the room. We stood, transfixed, by
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.
The essence of modern architecture lays in a remarkable strives to reconcile the core principles of architectural design with rapid technological advancement and the modernization of society. However, it took “the form of numerous movements, schools of design, and architectural styles, some in tension with one another, and often equally defying such classification, to establish modernism as a distinctive architectural movement” (Robinson and Foell). Although, the narrower concept of modernism in architecture is broadly characterized by simplification of form and subtraction of ornament from the structure and theme of the building, meaning that the result of design should derive directly from its purpose; the visual expression of the structure, particularly the visual importance of the horizontal and vertical lines typical for the International Style modernism, the use of industrially-produced materials and adaptation of the machine aesthetic, as well as the truth to materials concept, meaning that the true nat...
Abstract: Contemporary architects have a wide variety of sources to gain inspiration from, but this has not always been the case. How did modernism effect sources of inspiration? What did post-modernism do to liberate the choice of influences? Now that Contemporary architects have the freedom of choice, how are they using “traditional” styles and materials to inspire them? Even after modernism why are traditional styles still around?
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.
B. RUDOFSKY, 1905, architecture without architects, a short introduction to non pedigreed architecture, university of New Mexico press, Albuquerque, p. 40, 41 PEARSON, D. 2000, Earth to spirit, in search of natural architecture, Gaia books limited
However, architecture is not just the future, after all, buildings are intended to be viewed, traversed and lived by us, people. Despite this, many architects today rarely think deeply about human nature, disregarding their main subject matter in favour for efficiency and an architecture of spectacle. In this there seems to be a misconception that underlies much of architecture, that is, human’s relationship with the city, the building and nature. In much of today’s architecture, people are treated with as much concern much as we treat cars, purely mechanically. The post-modern search for the ‘new’ and ‘novel’ has come to disregard the profound affect design has on our lives, impacting our senses, shaping our psyche and disposition.
The aim of this essay is to explain how Post-Modernism has influenced our contemporary built environment and explain what other movements have derived from it.
In Laugier’s book, “An Essay on Architecture,” he addresses early architects’ ignorance. Laugier explains how architects did not study nature and the set rules nature has already created for us. In his Essay, he reveals the flaws that many early buildings throughout Europe posses. Some of the more general flaws he exposes are disproportioning in architectural design, unnecessary placement, and ignoring the primitive and original purpose of a building all together. Therefore, Laugier believes appropriate and appealing architecture can only be designed and crafted when the architect behind the building has followed the rules of nature.
As Nuttgens eloquently expressed, architecture is a “vital…expression of the experience of mankind.” It is more than just buildings used for storage, housing, religious purposes, simple functionality; it is a great manifestation of the commonality of man, the great connecting factor of humankind. However, it can be argued that the ancient and classic forms or architecture are in essence more “profound…lasting… [and] inexhaustible” than those of their modern counterparts, because of some key differences in the ways ancient and modern architecture are practiced.
The role of the architect is a question that evokes a spectrum of answers from Norman Foster’s definition; ‘Architect is an expression of values… the way we build is a reflection of the way we live.’ [Foster, cited in Tholl, 2014: Online] This debate of who and what an architect should be and do is not a recent one to emerge but has lead many architects and designers as far back as Vitruvius [15BC] to produce documentation on what they believed to be the make-up of an architect. In Vitruvius’ ‘The Ten Books On Architecture’ he quickly establishes two fragments that make an architect, the manual skill and the theory and scholarship.