Rounding up sharp angles

[imomus]

A round-up of this week's architecture news. Dezeen reported on a plasma TV-shaped 63.02° house in Nakana, Tokyo by Schemata Architecture Office, so named because of the oblique angle it uses to tilt its big windows towards a cherry tree rather than the road it stands on.



In a body-blow to Sharkitecture, Life Without Buildings told us that the Architecture Foundation has scrapped its planned London HQ -- a horribly sharky angular fang by Zaha Hadid. In a piece entitled "Less Hadid, More Giant Women" the site argues that the proposed Lacaton and Vassal structure would have been a much better choice. It featured a giant model of a woman whose body stretched up through four levels of the building.



The Tokyo Art Beat blog reported the use of our old friend the Reversible Destiny Lofts in Mitaka ("live dangerously, live long!") for an art exhibition. It was also the week in which Alin Huma turned his apartment in Ginza into a temporary exhibition space for photographs by Naoki Matsuyama, Pete Toms, Arnaud Meuleman and Gilles Weinzapflen. The show runs until the end of the month. And while I'm namechecking friends, congratulations to Jan Lindenberg, whose bazaar-style recycled furniture project earned him a first class degree from Berlin art school UDK on Tuesday. You can see Flickr images here.



Speaking of Flickr, I also enjoyed the set documenting the construction of a sort of internal sleeping hut in Paul Baron's Tokyo apartment. The hut, by Point Architects (Ben Nagaoka and Masahiro Tanaka) is a space-efficient yet playful combination of a sheltered sleeping area and Atelier Bow Wow's mediapod / mangapod idea.



Speaking of Atelier Bow Wow, they're one of the architectural offices the Friends of the Great Pyramid have invited to submit designs for the buildings surrounding the enormous capsule necropolis being planned for the countryside near Dessau. The pyramid will sell eternal resting places in the form of individual units; the ambition of conceptualizers Ingo Niemann, Jens Thiel and Heiko Holzberger is that this sepulchre should become the world's largest structure, potentially housing the remains of everyone on the planet. Its proximity to the Bauhaus makes it tempting to call this "tomb for all people" the ultimate existenzminimum machine -- an exercise in "irreversible destiny loft dying", if you like.



I'm proud to say that I'll be performing my "timeless" song "What Will Death Be Like?" (the first ever live performance of the dead song) on March 10th at the HAU theatre in Kreuzberg as part of the Great Pyramid Gala, a special ceremony during which architectural designs for the site will be presented by a panel of judges including Rem Koolhaas and Miuccia Prada, and a winner announced. Other performers are Bill Drummond, Christoph de Babalon, Phillip Sollmann (EFDEMIN) and David Woodard.

[Update: the organisers tell me Bill Drummond couldn't make it, alas.]

Comments

internal sleeping hut

[(Anonymous)]

its that show open to the public plebs?

Re: internal sleeping hut

[imomus.livejournal.com]

That's Paul's house, so I guess he needs to invite you to dinner or a pajama party or something for you to see it in the flesh in Tokyo. It's pretty well-documented on his Flickr page (http://www.flickr.com/photos/in-duce/sets/72157602270142788/), though.

Re: internal sleeping hut

[pbaron.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

Thanks Nick for the "inside-outing". ;-)

When we first talked with Point, they suggested making a small room-like space in our studio rather than create a separate walled-room that would have halved the light entering the flat. It was a great suggestion. Then, seeing how many books and clothes we had, they built 5-6 different models, very angular, on which our books and clothes were wrapped around.

We then suggested trying a design with curves. Tokyo is very angular and coming back to a room with curves and sleeping inside an organically-shaped space felt like a natural need. This is what they came up with. Brilliant!
(Uroko means fish scales, like those felt tiles on the "house".)

am i mistaken

[acephale [typekey.com] (from livejournal.com)]

or does Ernst Jünger's "Aladdin's Problem" read like a blueprint for this project?

Re: am i mistaken

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I don't know the story, but from descriptions (http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0941419584/ref=sib_dp_pt/103-9716043-8559053#reader-link) it may well be an inspiration. Junger's Terrestra was in Turkey, though, not at Dessau, so the digs / winks at the Bauhaus don't figure.

[xishimarux.livejournal.com]

The perfomance lineup is crazy. It should be called "Heros of the underground that had some overground exposure".

[nickink.livejournal.com]

I have a big soft spot for 'What Will Death Be Like?'

I wonder if it's the kind of song that could be tweaked and/or updated. It must be tempting to throw in a few extra or different lines, perhaps in the way Billy Bragg does with 'Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards' (please excuse the bizarre musical parallel)?


And congratulations on that event - I like Efdemin's music and Bill Drummond would be interesting to talk to - do you know him personally already?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I do know Bill a bit from our Creation days, yes. He released a folk record called "The Man" (it was originally supposed to be called "The Manager" but the "Ager" fell off).

[(Anonymous)]

pppppffffvvvvtttt foamy fucky mucky arty spunk mess pppppffffvvvvtttt pppppffffvvvvtttt pppppffffvvvvtttt better than everyone else pppppffffvvvvtttt

[mountaintops.livejournal.com]

oh my goodness!

i want that sleeping hut!

[pixelmist.livejournal.com]

That first structure reminds me of Hulot's sister's house in Mon Oncle. I wonder if it has a fish fountain and bouncy pitchers...

[(Anonymous)]

Nah, rather reminds me Helenita's house: http://www.gizmowatch.com/entry/helenita-queirozs-narrowest-house-on-the-planet-just-a-meter-wide/
Kuja

[(Anonymous)]

the pharaohs displayed the lengths of individual hubris, this is the extent of collective hubris.

seriously, this is one of the most arrogant things i have ever seen. the species already has an eternal resting place--it's called the earth itself. absolutely mortifying. like a liberal-humanist new world order for the afterlife.

[(Anonymous)]

not much time....fizzing....heady gush..ohhh there it goes big pile of useless shite all over the momus site.....your absolute rubbish

designs

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

http://gojapan.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?zi=1/XJ&sdn=gojapan&zu=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yomiuri.co.jp%2Fstream%2Findex.htm

Watch the yomiuri shinbum video on new musical instruments that mimic the saw and bow plus accordian and you do a thing for gadgets.

[grzeg.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this post; I very much enjoy your occasional architectural commentary and critique, as well as its eclectic range, from the Goetheanum to Goldfinger!

It’s interesting to see the role-reversal of (stereotypical) gender-attribution with Hadid’s work, which you (and, undoubtedly, a lot others) qualify as being macho, angular (http://imomus.livejournal.com/192432.html), distasteful, showy, and aggressive (http://imomus.livejournal.com/322794.html). I claim no expertise in matters of Freud or Feminism to assess, but are Hadid’s buildings “phallic(-envy) thrusts” or an architecturalization of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party-esque triangular symbolism? Does one interpretation over the other make such forceful pro-activity through form any more or less offensive? Or, is such a reading into the work even valid or moot?

[Also, on the topic of genderism, of Lacaton & Vassal’s proposal: Rather than sexy or humourous, it could be seen as blatant sexual objectification (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_objectification)… though coming from a man-and-woman partner-led firm.]

What I find rather amusing is Liebeskind/Hadid’s affiliation with Deconstructivism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstructivism), and hence, Derrida. Architecture was the last discipline to invoke Derrida and Decon, when Decon is understood to be unproblematically architectural. And it’s the discourse that seems most detached from the philosophy.

However, the Deconstructivist idea of a structure’s surface of non-rectilinearly certainly plays out in Schemata’s oblique 63.02° house. Does the fact that it tilts its big windows towards a cherry tree, or has of a SANAA-esque veneer/feel of yohaku nobi (the beauty of empty space, of extra whiteness) or, more generally, a Japanese sensibility neutralizes the usually-offensive razor-sharp angularity?

(On another note, I know you refuse to go to Liebeskind’s Jewish Museum, but have you been to Mendelsohn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Mendelsohn)’s Einstein Tower (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Tower) in Potsdam?)

[(Anonymous)]

Is Zaha Hadid the New Leni Riefenstahl?
http://hragvartanian.com/2008/02/14/is-zaha-hadid-the-new-leni-riefenstahl/
the term "fascist architecture" was unburied?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think of Zaha Hadid as the Ayaan Hirsi Ali of architecture, and a proponent of what I've called "policewoman feminism". Her double minority status is a sort of hedge, a faux-liberal counterbalance which allows her to go off and express a kind of aggressive normality on behalf of the more reactionary elements of the status quo.

As for Lacaton and Vassal's woman being "blatant sexual objectification", we really have to question our values when a representation of the female form, in and of itself, is "objectification". For me, their proposal for the Architecture Foundation puts the human form (rather than glaciers and mountains) back into architecture, and references both the Parthenon in Athens (which contained a huge statue of Athena (http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/a/a7/250px-Athena_Parthenos.jpg)) and Le Corbusier's Modulor idea.



In other words, this humanist gesture manages to reach out to the source points of both Classicism and Modernism.