October 2008 Archives

plate _ 01 _ Mies‘s brief for himself. the architect

Mies's secret 5 points of modern architecture:

1) Disorientation -The aim is to design an idealized image of reality that will confuse the observer.

2) Concealment - Put all your energy and creative power into the concealment of load transmission.

3) Camouflage - Through that the building looks more like a conceptual structure.

4) Effect - Only stick to the logic of appearance. A building should aim at effect.

               Effect is paramount.

5) Keep silence about your real intentions.

plate _ 02 _the brief of of the council for a new industrial democracy the program

the program we are specifically looking for today is SPACE,

space and space and still more PROGRAM SPACE

infinity that surrounds us and in which we also exist

a space conceived as void,

the program space should form the framework for the feeling of great freedom

our main concern is freedom

concider the void to become the content the actual statement

the program space should attempt to bring the invisible, the supernatural, into the figural world

the program space is visibly defined - yet empty/invisible

the program space exceeds mere functionality

the program space speaks the language of silence

the program space marks the limit of representation (in that it exceeds every object)

and -indeed for this very reason marks the opening of thought as such

the program space can be conceived as silent theater of the world

plate _ 04 _The muse‘s of higher aesthetics in architecture brief.  the secret

todays architecture collapses in its superficiality

extraordinary supercomplex fast

this is a call for respect

this is a call to respect the detail

this is a call to dematerialise confinement into detail

this is a call to employ detail to identify that which in itself resists framing

this is a call to highlight detail as an internal opening to something other 

a call to think in opposites

this is a call to engage with the dialectic properties of material,

reflection-absorption, suppression-saturation, light and dark

this is a call for contrast

this is a call for emptiness to make the mind dwell on the little that remains

a call for a desert in which all attention would be focused on the horizon line

a call to eliminate sensual properties in order to emphazise their presence

this is a call for reduction almost to vanishing point

this is a call for electrifying effects through detail

...other one's are still in progress...

In an age where cities like Dubai and Beijing are producing record numbers of ‘iconic’ buildings, the status of genuinely iconic architecture is rapidly disappearing. The brand-name, one-liner building has become a ubiquitous presence: the iconic is the new generic.

How to design a truley Iconic building today?

Today there is everything at the same time we are faced with a culture of remix and hybridisation, the new is a combination of everything that was before, combined, connected, joined in a vast excessively demanding concentration we are living the

re vival

re mix

re tro

re turn

which eventually leads towards a disappearance of everything, nothing is really and when it arrives it is gone already. (trends, tastes, lifestyles)

is a building more iconic in its absence?

because it will never fail and become out of fashion...?

or does it become iconic in its disappearance?

through the by-product of nostalgia?

or as in disappearance conceived as a symbolic act?

The world trade center has always been iconic but after 9/11 its iconicity obtained a state out of reach, the erasure of St. Louis‘s Pruitt-Igoe housing complex (Yamasaki) became an icon of modernism failed The palace of the soviets became legendary in its absence, in its pure manifestation on paper-to such an extend that urban planning even in a later state would adapt itself to the non-existing palace, (in orientation and also height).

All these examples of Iconicity are connected to certain events in time and loaded with historical significance and meaning.

But how to design a building in a state of dissolution, a dissapearance that can be experienced not only on a mental but also visual and spatial level? Is it possible to actual design disappearance?

some thought provoking statements from the MOMUS lecture last tuesday; amazing lecture!!!

Richard Hamilton in 1957, The Eleven Commandments of mass culture:

1. Popular (designed for mass audiences)

2. Transient (short-term solution)

3. Expendable (easily forgotten)

4. Low cost

5. Mass produced

6. Young (aimed at youth)

7. Witty

8. Sexy

9. Gimmicky

10. Glamorous

11. Big business

Distinctions collapsed by postmodernism:

HIGH / LOW

HERE / THERE

NOW / THEN

MINE / THEIRS

SACRED / PROFANE (the old and new definitions of „iconic")

ORIGINAL / COPY

FREEDOM / COMPULSION (you can‘t not like the icon)

ARCHEOLOGY OF THE WORD ICONIC

Repetition culture, marketing and PR, instant classics,

branding, celebrity, recognition rather than cognition

now my own thoughts:

The ICONIC Building

The ,iconic‘ is designed for a mass audience

The ‚iconic‘ as an ideology means that,

                  regardless of taste, we all have to pay attention to

The ‚iconic‘ is disabling the will of the consumer

The ‚iconic‘ is recognition rather than cognition

The ‚iconic‘ is a perfect myth performer

The ‚iconic‘ is desire and anxiety at the same time

                 its designer is a capitalist creative.

ICONIC ANARCHITECTURE MONOCHROMINA

disappeared moments fade again, or twinkle obliquely across a great divide:

This work can’t restore the certainties those times appeared to enjoy.

What we might do now, this manifesto vividly infers,

is evolve towards an acceptance of the

restlessly inconsistent"

context, social setting, gestures and meaning are of no interest

the external features have been removed

there is no concrete mission

the interest is focused on the materiality of space-its physics

the aim is an internal richness of imagery

since 500 years, the images have been full to bursting point,

the entire universe forces one inside them (satre)

the mode of dealing with materiality may be able to

escape the images and sounds of the over-semanitification

that we suffer on an everyday basis

the torturous sensory overload that surrounds us

the compulsion to recognize everything possible in images

the constraint to communicate through them

all of these are things to avoid

pure white pure black hissing emptiness nothing

the aim is no abstraction but dissolution/resolution and dissolving

dissolution is that which remains after everything recognizable

and nameable is detracted, erased withdrawn

dissolution is no matter of transformation of form

as it is a matter of processes of disintegration,

of fragmentation and

elimination of signification,

of parameter reduction, of bringing about disappearance

high resolution/dissolution prevails here in a double sense:

more pixel and fewer parameters. what is to be seen are,

for example, surfaces, stripes, vibrations-

primary visual and tonal material

sound is deployed as a model. even if there is none, the space „sounds"

because it is conceived of as sound

the space is hissing

there is a bright white noise that dissolves significance and meaning

black noise hissing is perceived as droning, dark material,

thick consistencies, heaviness, a filtert hissing with fissured frequencies,

a complex picturesque hissing, a high resolution image,

a high degree of visual compression and density

the modulation of this tonal mass takes place

on a high level of arranged intensities

on which minimal things are treated,

the most minute changes occur, and perhaps micro-stories are even played out

as the hissing pours out,

the emptiness escapes-

emptiness,

for one thing,

as complete,

radical

elimination of signification

this comes out when everything that has to do with the ego has been deactivated,

eliminated

the hissing is also to a certain extend aggressive or at least extremely insistent,

something that overlays, conceals and subverts the original ego-gestures

and nevertheless contains them so that they are no longer visible and

yet still dissolved within it

the only order that is present is that of a superordinated architecture,

a sort of meta guideline, though one without intentionality

otherwise there are only the unchanging vibrations

what might be called crystalline order

emptiness emerges

whereby the consistencies of the material employed are diluted

to such an extend that they appear to be empty,

totally white or totally black

and the hissing is gone; what remains is absolutly nothing,

a completly static tone cluster, without animation, without drifting or modulation

thus, when that which has been experienced becomes so

thin,

so blurred and fragile

that it can no longer be located spatially-

which still by no means implies that nothing at all exists- there are still the tones.

and it is still possible to modify amplitudes of light and sound fields

one can still depict something on the temporal level, which means that the emptiness exists too