Posts tagged architecture
SITE, Indeterminate Façade.
SITE abandoned architecture’s obsession with the retinal, its fixation on new form, and replaced it with a clear-eyed conceptualism. SITE made use of ‘the ready-made’, starting with generic structures which were then subjected to violent ‘actions’ – cutting, peeling, stretching, collapsing – in order to render them uncanny and strange again. Refreshingly they had no truck with expressionism and subverted the over-bearing idea of originality in architecture. The tired clichés of Modernism – truth to materials, form following function, honest structures – become meaningless in relation to SITE’s work.
“ A building or object should let you use it how you want: a good building, for example, will serve as a backdrop for whatever life people want to lead in it. Instead of making them live as if they were executing a program written by the architect.”
Wanting to reduce the impact of the towers KDa decided to use camouflage, but the difficulty was that the natural environment surrounding the resort changes constantly with the seasons. KDa’s solution was to camouflage one tower to suit winter conditions and the other to suit summer - one tower fades from black to white, and the other from green to white. While KDa wanted to dissolve the building’s mass, they didn’t want invisibility and so inserted a few red panels to liven things up. Their inspiration was the cheerful red baubles on a Christmas tree - rather than being around for just one day a year, the red panels create smiles year round.
“ Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context - a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.”
“ A city’s qualities cannot thrive out of context. A place’s cuisine and architecture and language are all somehow interwoven. But one can dream.”
“ Twenty years in the future, will designing buildings no longer be a part of architecture and will the discourse focus on creating cyber-blobs, driving infrastructure policy, or urban design in video games? Will building and construction become the sole domain of developers and contractors?”
Crompton positions architecture within the cognitive sciences with a fancy for the grotesque / Baroque. In this particular text Crompton is seeking to chart and qualify architectures that elude description through drawing or photograph, instead requiring something more, err, cognitive. (via Inverted Infrastructural Monuments, pt.2)
![0300TV is an Architecture Channel. We don’t want to emulate any kind of TV format, but to provide a channel feeded by different sources in order to frame the current state of the practice; to establish critical links [legit or not] between contexts, arguments and works through unpublished, original material.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/jpsyMjP6xon1z0momhmkxFVZo1_500.jpg)
0300TV is an Architecture Channel. We don’t want to emulate any kind of TV format, but to provide a channel feeded by different sources in order to frame the current state of the practice; to establish critical links [legit or not] between contexts, arguments and works through unpublished, original material.
