November 2008 Archives
Superstudio's furniture range for Zanotta shows how the Supersurface logic manifests itself at the small scale. Orthogonal, unadorned, gridded, extrusions form the material system and the formal language of the volumes. Minimal input on the part of the author plus Superstudio's signature irony complete their notion of anti-design.
creating volume from surface:- Superstudio's translation from white surface to furniture series Quaderna in the name of anti-design formed the basis of these inititial surface experiments. My version of the 'supersurface' looks at a similar translation from digital mesh to volume via a kind of '3-d modelling drop-down menu', again, in the name of anti-design. More explanatory images to follow...
Iconomy and the new flatness:
“Modern architects see everything through the camera. They make decisions on the basis of what they see through the lens. At a certain point architecture internalises the flatness of a 2-dimensional magazine image; the 3-dimensional world becomes a photographic surface.”
“What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.”
Thereupon, supersurface to the rescue!
Iconomical supersurfaces and topological supersurfaces, intractably bound within the contemporary iconic, both underpinned by a notion of depth vs. depthlessness, physical, ideological and visual.
The Modernist grid, brimful of rationalist implications has been ‘Splined’. Monumentalised in the 90’s, the new curvilinear grid has stripped its predecessor of its constructed functionalist value, establishing a new topological flatland.
The iconic of the future continues the idea of iconic scale and is situated formally between the experience of the implied depth of the photographic surface and carefully defined topological viewpoints with their internalised flatness - clocked in the blink of an eye.
We must de-compress depth and rekindle the project of transparency via the re-signification and re-application of the modernist grid in the form of the digital grid (nurbs mesh).
RGH
"What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself".
Contemporary take and subsequent re-signification of the Modernist grid.
