![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusJan Kaplicky of Future Systems will build a new library in Prague. The blotchy green and purple building has its opponents in the Czech Republic, Stephen Bayley tells us in his Guardian article, but now looks as if it will shortly rise, like a blob, a noro-viral spore or a jellyfish, in the centre of the city of Kafka.
I have to say I'm a bit tired of this style. It smacks of the recent past, evoking my 1990s Swatch pod-phone, my old JBL Creature subwoofer. Sure, the rounded organic curves of the International Pod style are preferable to the razor-sharp angles of sharkitecture unleashed by Liebeskind, Hadid and co. But blobitecture, over the past fifteen years, has replicated too quickly, mutating its "natural" forms through a whole range of plastic consumer products. It's time for something fresh.
I posed in front of another Jan Kaplicky building -- Selfridges in Birmingham -- a year or so ago, and wondered at the time whether its "panspermian" futurism wasn't already retro (and not in a good way). I can't help thinking of 90s Bjork albums when I look at this stuff; it seems informed by the same collision of techno and the computer-organic. We even have some of it in the London skyline now in the form of the gherkin-shaped Swiss:Re building.
Personally, I'm much more excited by architects and designers who neither blob nor shark, but clutter their spaces with a kind of radical impurity, a cheapness, an equality of all forms, a generosity. I've been watching Mike Meiré talking about his Farm Project in three interesting videos spread out on Vernissage TV:
Farm Project 1
Farm Project 2
Farm Project 3
[Error: unknown template video]
If Kaplicky's blobs smack of the last decade, Meiré's farm kitchen feels very much a product of the current one, with its boredom with minimalism, its desire for human clutter and impurity, its emphasis on sustainability and affordability, its eclecticism rather than didacticism, its post-bit love of the things computers can't do.
In Meiré's farm-lab there's straw on the floor, there are references to Vermeer, there's a Philippe Starck-like use of stuffed trophy heads on the wall, there are parallels with Lacaton and Vassal and Rem Koolhaas in the way cheap plastic panels define a space which is essentially about human interaction -- a space that's relational, communitarian, reassuringly post-digital, and rather shelfish. Think of Liam Gillick's plastic panels and didactic spaces, or Phoebe Washburn's Regulated Fool's Milk Meadow installation.
Meiré's farm kitchen project is a place of plethora and plenty, a place between Dean and Deluca and Chinatown, between children's zoo and fish store, restaurant kitchen and plyboard art installation, manufacturing plant and plant shop. The self-described "professional dreamer" likes crossing inter-disciplinary boundaries and fusing disparate lexes, but says that "architecture is the most creative field we have right now because architects are able to realise physical new contexts". He quotes Krishnamurti and calls Mark Borthwick a friend, which brings in a whole host of other connections (with Cosmic Wonder, for instance, and even the Boredoms crew -- and speaking of them, you might want to know that someone is currently giving away Yoshimi's "Yunnan Colorfree" documentary soundtrack).
Oh, and while I'm signalling cool things, there's a newish "magazine for architectural entertainment" called Pin-Up which I've found interesting recently, and which I think embodies the same spirit of generous clutter and juxtaposition I find in Meiré's work. Read it in your laboratory kitchen before feeding the black sheep.
I have to say I'm a bit tired of this style. It smacks of the recent past, evoking my 1990s Swatch pod-phone, my old JBL Creature subwoofer. Sure, the rounded organic curves of the International Pod style are preferable to the razor-sharp angles of sharkitecture unleashed by Liebeskind, Hadid and co. But blobitecture, over the past fifteen years, has replicated too quickly, mutating its "natural" forms through a whole range of plastic consumer products. It's time for something fresh.
I posed in front of another Jan Kaplicky building -- Selfridges in Birmingham -- a year or so ago, and wondered at the time whether its "panspermian" futurism wasn't already retro (and not in a good way). I can't help thinking of 90s Bjork albums when I look at this stuff; it seems informed by the same collision of techno and the computer-organic. We even have some of it in the London skyline now in the form of the gherkin-shaped Swiss:Re building.
Personally, I'm much more excited by architects and designers who neither blob nor shark, but clutter their spaces with a kind of radical impurity, a cheapness, an equality of all forms, a generosity. I've been watching Mike Meiré talking about his Farm Project in three interesting videos spread out on Vernissage TV:
Farm Project 1
Farm Project 2
Farm Project 3
[Error: unknown template video]
If Kaplicky's blobs smack of the last decade, Meiré's farm kitchen feels very much a product of the current one, with its boredom with minimalism, its desire for human clutter and impurity, its emphasis on sustainability and affordability, its eclecticism rather than didacticism, its post-bit love of the things computers can't do.
In Meiré's farm-lab there's straw on the floor, there are references to Vermeer, there's a Philippe Starck-like use of stuffed trophy heads on the wall, there are parallels with Lacaton and Vassal and Rem Koolhaas in the way cheap plastic panels define a space which is essentially about human interaction -- a space that's relational, communitarian, reassuringly post-digital, and rather shelfish. Think of Liam Gillick's plastic panels and didactic spaces, or Phoebe Washburn's Regulated Fool's Milk Meadow installation.
Meiré's farm kitchen project is a place of plethora and plenty, a place between Dean and Deluca and Chinatown, between children's zoo and fish store, restaurant kitchen and plyboard art installation, manufacturing plant and plant shop. The self-described "professional dreamer" likes crossing inter-disciplinary boundaries and fusing disparate lexes, but says that "architecture is the most creative field we have right now because architects are able to realise physical new contexts". He quotes Krishnamurti and calls Mark Borthwick a friend, which brings in a whole host of other connections (with Cosmic Wonder, for instance, and even the Boredoms crew -- and speaking of them, you might want to know that someone is currently giving away Yoshimi's "Yunnan Colorfree" documentary soundtrack).Oh, and while I'm signalling cool things, there's a newish "magazine for architectural entertainment" called Pin-Up which I've found interesting recently, and which I think embodies the same spirit of generous clutter and juxtaposition I find in Meiré's work. Read it in your laboratory kitchen before feeding the black sheep.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-06 06:58 pm (UTC)I live in Columbus, Ohio which is a rotten place for architecture. Our star buildings are the Convention Center and the Wexner Center for the Arts, both Peter Eisenman creations. I really dislike having to live around tboth of those buildings, and they both require constant bizarre upkeep. Much has been made of the antagonistic debate between Eisenman and Alexander. They are almost presented as a binary. So pardon me if my bias falls on Alexander's side- I may be biased.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-06 07:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-06 07:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-06 08:04 pm (UTC)Belle Isle Conservatory (http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=belle+isle+conservatory)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-06 10:44 pm (UTC)Now, of course we all love orchids. Their smells, their bright colours, their graceful forms! But do they necessarily agree to be used as a turning point between "laboratory" and "conservatory"? Are they being recruited to the cause against their will? Perhaps orchids are radicals too, and love laboratories!
But in the meantime Meiré's installation is being described as "uncomfortably challenging" when in fact it's rather laid back and user-friendly. And I wonder whether the Farm Kitchen project couldn't as easily be choc-a-bloc with orchids as the herbs and straw he's strewn there? Orchids, after all, love change, challenge, and the future! They're natural radicals.
Radikull, dewd!
Date: 2008-01-07 07:07 am (UTC)Meiré's installation is being described as "uncomfortably challenging"
Only insofar as an endless cavalcade of shrill, dreary textures tarted up as 'the next thing' is challenging to one's patience.
I am curious: Where should we look then if the future being sold to us is fixated on bleak minimalism, adolescent sharkiness, cluttered dorm room decor and infantile plastic blobs? Especially since--according to you--previous models which people continue to cherish and replenish themselves with in order to cope with the shabby junkscape left behind by twentieth-century "radicals" are now verboten?
Where's the hope, joy, and pleasure in such a paltry array of choices? Should we just eat the plastic on our plates because it's "radical" to be seen doing just that? And if we do go quietly into that econo-pack of nightmares, how exactly is that "radical"? If that's the case, then most livestock should be considered wild mavericks.
Someone please save us from the tiresome, preening egomaniacs calling themselves "radicals"! "Who's more radical" is such a boyish pastime, akin to competing over who is more punk rock or some other nonsense. As if radical can't also be stupid! Move on, already!
You're welcome to that old twentieth-century, petroleum-slick vision of Tomorrowland, Nick--but just because some of us don't like that particular flavor of Kool-Aid doesn't make us regressive. After all: a freshly-laid turd is still a turd. Forgive us if some of us sit this round out.
And finally: I don't know how many times I must repeat this, but here goes: it isn't about nostalgia, it's about texture. My notion of the future has living things, because a future that doesn't value them really isn't a future: it's an endgame.
Re: Radikull, dewd!
Date: 2008-01-07 02:00 pm (UTC)You've misread my piece entirely if you think that's what I'm saying. I dismiss the Future Systems blob precisely because it's a "petroleum-slick vision of Tomorrowland". And I advocate instead the generous eclecticism of Meiré's Farm Kitchen -- a kind of "affected provincialism" which ought, I'd have thought, to appeal to you. Meiré mixes the kind of clutter you might see in Brueghel or Vermeer paintings with acid-yellow taps, herb gardens, cheap shelving systems, Chinese plates, hay bales.
I am curious: Where should we look then if the future being sold to us is fixated on bleak minimalism, adolescent sharkiness, cluttered dorm room decor and infantile plastic blobs? Especially since--according to you--previous models which people continue to cherish and replenish themselves with in order to cope with the shabby junkscape left behind by twentieth-century "radicals" are now verboten?
Previous models are not at all verboten, but they can't just be revived slavishly. What I find problematical in your response is that a kitchen laboratory which makes an interesting blend of past and present is replaced by images of conservatories which do no such thing. When people then start citing Chris Alexander, we get dangerously close to Prince Charles territory. Prince Charles is undoubtedly an aesthetic conservative. He's lent support to Alexander's ideas in the past -- the ideas of "cosmic order" I reject. His favourite architect is Quinlan Terry (http://images.google.com/images?client=safari&rls=en&q=quinlan+terry&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&um=1&sa=N&tab=wi). Follow that link and you'll see nothing that even remotely admits that the year 1900 ever arrived. Read press on Terry (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1161347,00.html) and find unedifying paradoxes like "Terry is unconventional because he's so conventional" or "he's the ultimate rebel because he fails to rebel".
These paradoxical circles, as I've tried to show many times here, end up chasing their tails to complete dizzy idiocy. An artist -- or an architect, or a designer -- whose response to modernity is a retreat to antiquity in exact detail is a failed artist, just as the monarch who supports him is probably destined to be a failed monarch. Conservatism of this type represents a lack of nerve and imagination, and should be combatted vigourously if we don't want to fall into decadence and mannerism.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-06 10:50 pm (UTC)I've been reading up on the history of glass houses and conservatories recently, and it's interesting how the style varied in Europe. The Germans designed these blocky sort of structures, but the British designs were far more elegant, making the surfaces curved to maximize the exposure to sun, as the light would always strike the glass panes at a perpendicular angle.
Interestingly enough, many were quite ephemeral structures, reaching about twenty years and then torn down. The more elaborate, turnip-shaped ones were demolished as little as five years into their existence.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-06 07:58 pm (UTC)Detroit still has a large concentration of fantastic pre-WWII buildings, but the last six decades have seen only occasional buildings that don't suck.
The Guardian (http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=guardian+detroit), The Penobscot (http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=penobscot+detroit&m=text), Buhl (http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=buhl+building+detroit&m=text), Fisher (http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=fisher+building+detroit&m=text), Michigan Central Station (http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=michigan+central+detroit&m=text)
Urban Ohio is interesting because there are a greater number of smaller urbanized areas than Michigan -- or that, at least, is my perception. I haven't been to downtown Cleveland but Midtown and around the clinic and Case it reminds me of Detroit. I've been through Columbus on my way to Chillicothe but never stopped for long.