summary of thoughts
Images and Strategies
We seem to be post-critical now, the problem of how to talk to clients and how to produce an easily consumable, public friendly architecture seems to be the question of today. The clients demand for signature architecture increases incessantly, the architect is supposed to deliver, (or maybe even pushes the demand through an aura of individual extravaganza) - The brand-name, one-liner building has become a ubiquitous presence: the iconic is the new generic.
What alternatives do we have?
Rem Koolhaas latest plan is to set up a third branch in addition to OMA and AMO, called MOA to distribute a copy-free architecture without ego. Koolhaas has stated his resentment of iconic architecture and his love for the ‘background’ architecture of cities like
What would it look like, an ego-free and copyright-free architecture? Would it generate a return to the normal? Would it appropriate the Minimalist style? Stripping architecture from (the artist’s) ego and (the artist’s) copyright would mean a return to the core of building: providing shelter. What would be left of architecture would probably disappear in a formless fabric.
Another suggestion was offered by Jeff Kipnis, he claims to maintain artistic expression and proposes the use of pure sensational affect in order to create a direct connection to the reading audience. He refers to artists like Francis Bacon, Jeff Koons and Matthew Barney and amplifies; These works assign an un-theorized power to the figural element, these works do not mean anything, they do not say anything but neither are they silent. He propagates an architecture that communicates without saying.
What he is looking for is neither an image-based, metaphoric one-liner building nor a silent, self-referential one, like non-figurational abstraction – modernism and minimalism would pursue.
Context
Within the recent debate of how to talk to clients contextualism seems to be dead.
From the picturesque theorists ideal that a landscape should be composed like a picture based on foreground, middle ground and background in the 18th century to the modernist context of pure rationality based on mere function, design with nature, critical, sentimental, nostalgic or copyist response. Context theory has been unstable. Koolhaas said “fuck context” and argues that context is an out of date idea that places too much of a restraint upon what cities might become, a plea for the status quo – to beat down the imagination. The skyline of
Social Impact An Iconic building relates by definition to a broader audience it is supposed to appeal to the masses. It positions itself intrusively in the environment, flashy and big, we don’t have a choice anymore, love it or loathe it, the iconic building forces us to pay attention, forces us to engage, you can’t ignore it regardless of taste.
Info about OMA/AMO/MOA ; Hollandse Meester, Caroline Brakel, JFK Magazine, June-July 2008, p. 130-135 ,
reference www.eikonographia.com
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