citymovement

The Contradiction of Consumerism

Sara — Fri, 03 May 2013 22:45:20 +0000

Bangladeshi volunteers and rescue workers pictured at the scene after an eight-story building collapsed in Savar, on the outskirts of Dhaka, on April 25, 2013. (Munir uz Zaman/AFP/Getty)

With the recent tragedy of Bangladesh much discussion has been centered on the retailers, who need to improve their ability to safe guard and protect the employees. I don’t disagree with this argument; however, there is a lack of critical discussion around the West’s insatiable desire for cheap goods. Quantity has prevailed over quality. What I found more distressing is that in the West we really have lost sight of is the price of a product produced by an individual paid a living wage. I remember a couple of years ago having a discussion with a friend about a particular local clothing store in Toronto that carried their own line of clothing that produced in Toronto. My friend was complaining how expensive the clothing was and while I agreed that the items were more money compared to similar items in chain stores. These particular items of clothing were manufactured in Toronto and the individuals were paid a “Canadian hourly wage” instead of a $.25 hourly wage. I could see a light bulb going off and her realising why this Canadian made clothing was more expensive. As consumers we balk at prices and continually demand them to be lower instead of reducing the amount of purchases we make. I hope that with the most recent building collapse in Bangladesh, that as a society we really start looking at our own consumption practices and instead of demanding the cheapest product we start demanding quality products where individuals are paid a living wage.

I saw this article on a friend’s facebook page and the images captured my immediate interest. The images were of Chinese workers balancing surreal amounts of stuff on their bikes. I couldn’t even image the weight of these loads and was in disbelief (partly because I have attached my son’s tandem bike to my bike and we do errands together and even though it is only about an extra 70 pounds going up hills is extremely painful and kinda unsuccessful.) As I saw more images, I began to wonder if the images were staged because they were too beautifully composed. The images are from a body of work entitled Totems by French artist Alain Delome and upon further reading I found out that the images were ‘photoshopped’ to exaggerate the loads and emphasis consumption and I became less interested. Delome says that his work explores globalization and consumerism but “it is above all a way to make people think about the consumer society we live in via the ‘Made in China’ phenomenon, with all its identical and exchangeable objects produced in big quantities.” I don’t deny that these images speak to consumerism but what struck me with them was how clean and beautiful they were. And with the aftermath of Bangladesh we have learned that consumerism is anything but ‘clean’ and ‘beautiful’ and instead really messy, dirty and destructive. Delome’s images are beautiful but I am unsure if they truly express the reality of consumerism. Or do they? This is where I am having a dilemma of consciousness. I have been having this debate for a while with certain artists who use photography as their medium to depict consumerism. As images, they are successfully composed, technically perfect, and include a compelling subject matter but as an artwork that is critical of the themes of consumerism and globalization do they work? Are they successful?

Alain Delorme, Totem #4, 2010

Alain Delorme, Totem #14, 2010

Alain Delorme, Totem #16, 2010

Alain Delorme, Totem #15, 2010

Alain Delorme, Totem #13, 2010

Alain Delorme, Totem # 8, 2010

One of the artists that I really have difficulty is with acclaimed ‘Manufactured Landscape’ artist Ed Burtynsky, a Canadian photographer, whose work explores the impact of humanity’s expanding footprint and the substantial ways in which humans are reshaping the surface of the planet. When I first saw his quarry and tailings series I was really struck by how powerful his images were. However, I had heard him talk about his work a couple of times and he really side-stepped the ‘politicalness’ content of his work and only talked about it in terms of documentation. I was very unsatisfied about his response and it led me to really think about what the role of an artist was and their responsibility to their content. I don’t think that it is enough to take beautiful, technically perfect photographs of a contentious topic such as consumerism and its effect on the environment without acknowledging the complexity of subject matter and the role of the gaze?

Ed Burtynsky, Rock of Ages #1, Active Section, E.L. Smith Quarry, Barre, Vermont, 1991

Ed Burtynsky, Nickel Tailings No. 31, Sudbury, Ontario, 1996

Ed Burtynsky, Nickel Tailings No. 34, Sudbury, Ontario, 1996

Ed Burtynsky, Oil Fields #19a, Belridge, Califorania, USA, 2003

Ed Burtynsky, China Recycling #7, Wire Yard, Wenxi, Zhejian Province, 2004

Ed Burtynsky, China Recycling #9, Circuit Boards, Guiy, Guangdong, 2004

Tagged: Alain Delome, art, artist, consumerism, Ed Burtynsky, photography, urbanism

Vancouver Matters

Sara — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 19:27:15 +0000

I just finished reading Vancouver Matters a book in which artists, architects, and urban planners presents the city of Vancouver through a variety of uncharacteristic urban elements as a “counterpoint to the highly calculated and constructed mythologies of the city.” As a relatively new comer to the West Coast, there have been a number of unique urban elements that I have observed that are particular to Vancouver. Many of these urban features may seem banal and might not even been “seen” by residents but they add to and define the West Coast landscape.

Many of the chapters examine material elements within Vancouver that are ubiquitous to its landscape and explores the different ways of looking at the city by reframing these elements and allowing the “specificity of the material condition to inform a particular” engagement with Vancouver. Each chapter reveals a hidden feature and are as follows: Andesite, Blackberry, Freeway, Grass, Hedge, Heritage, Horizon, Iconography, Intimacy, Residue, Stucco, Sugar, Trees, Veil, View, and Water. I won’t be highlighting all of the chapters but wanted to speak to the ones that struck me as unique to Vancouver.

Vancouver has a temperate climate, which is really great for growing all types of greenery. Infact, it has amazed me how green the city remains during the winter months because of the many plants and shrubs that don’t lose leaves and the moss, algae and lichen that coats a lot of natural and man made surfaces. I am not sure if it was the company that my strata hired to manicure the hedges infront of my place at an un-godly hour or the fact that when the leaves fell and revealed all the remaining evergreen during the winter months but the ‘manicured’ bushes seemed to have multiplied. I am not sure why hedge grooming is taken to such an extreme out here but the hedges are over groomed and continually remind me of poodle show dogs. Artist Lyndsay Sung revealed this anthropomorphic grooming tendency in her video by adding happy faces on the hedges.

The hollow tree is synonymous with Stanley Park. Many Vancouver residents have had their picture taken in the Hollow Tree which serves as a landmark, not only to the park, but as a tourist attraction since the Park was first opened in 1888. James Eidse argues that while the density of trees in Stanley Park camouflage the park’s interior from its coastline edge, the hollow tree’s “circumambulation turns in on itself” and shifts the focus from an exterior gaze to an interior one.

The Hollow Tree today.

Haddington Island andesite is a grey fine-grained volcanic rock that was used to surface buildings in Vancouver from 1890′s to the late 1930′s. The andesite was used instead of sandstone because of its uniform grey colour, relative softness, and its resistant to cracking, splintering and staining in saline marine climate. I find Annabel Vaughan and Rob Brownie ‘s project particular interesting because they produced a map of buildings based on their material commonality.

Kenneth Terriss focuses on the ‘Vancouver Special’ a housing style that was popularized in the 1950′s. The defining features were “simple two storey stucco box, gable roof facing [that faced] the street with a very shallow pitch, entrance at ground level, nominal decorative stone or brick facing, and a narrow balcony with an aluminum railing to dress-up the street facade.” The Vancouver Special is an example of how local architectural specificity can define a city’s existence.

Tagged: architecture, artist, city, mapping, urbanism, Vancouver Matters, Vancouver Special

Winchester Mystery House

Sara — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 07:07:16 +0000

Knaresboruough, Yorkshire a stairwell that leads to nowhere

Recently, I was a sent a link to this website that depicted 22 stairs that lead to nowhere. While I wrote a similar post here I focused on stairways conceived by artists that were never intended to be functional in the traditional sense; the stairways in this post were built, at one point, I can only assume, with the intention of having a utilitarian purpose. After looking at these stairs I was reminded of the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. The House, which was started in 1884, is a four-story mansion that was deliberately designed as a labyrinth by Sarah Paradee Winchester.

After the death of Sarah’s husband, and until her death 38 years later, Sarah employed carpenters and craftsmen 24 hours a day to build and (re)construct her home. Heiress to her husband’s fortune, the Winchester Repeating Rifle empire, she believed, after a visit to a spirtual medium, that her family was cursed and haunted by all of the people that were killed by the guns manufactured by the business. The medium told Sarah that the spirits were seeking vengeance, and the only way to appease them was to not only build a house for them but that she should never complete it.

Sarah Winchester, was her own architect, and thought that she could ‘trick’ the spirits from finding her by creating a disorientated labyrinth filled with secret passage and stairs and doors that led to nowhere. Doors would open onto walls, or in the case of a second story door, to the outside. A closet door on the second floor séance room opens onto a first-floor sink several feet below. Some stairs reach the ceiling, and then they just stop. The Switchback Staircase, only rises 9 feet but has 7 flights and 44 steps that each measure about 2 inches high.

In 1884, when Sarah purchased the house, it was a nine-room farmhouse and at one point housed over 500 rooms.The house had even reached seven stories by 1906, but the top three floors collapsed after the famous San Francisco earthquake. Some of the other structural oddities to the house was its 47 fireplaces, 17 chimneys, two basements, six kitchens, 10,000 window panes and 467 doorways.

I wanted to highlight a couple of artists who also created installations that play with the notions of ”real” and ”fake.” They create objects that convey an appearance of reality, a constructed illusion – not reality but a fiction of reality. In 2006, French artists Julien Berthier and Simon Boudvin installed a door in the city of Paris—but it was a fake door, leading nowhere, on an otherwise empty wall in the 3rd arrondissement.

Julien Berthier and Simon Boudvin, Les Specialistes, 2006

In Powerless Structures, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset explores and redefines space and its numerous possibilities of definition and function. Their approach is based on Foucault’s thesis, that it is the acceptance of certain behavioural patterns, within given structures, and not the structures, themselves, that restricts human action and activity.

Elmgreen and Dragset, Powerless Structures, Fig. 123, 2001

Leandro Erlich creates spaces with fluid and unstable boundaries. A single change (up is down, inside is out) can be enough to upset the seemingly normal situation, collapsing and exposing our reality as counterfeit. Through this transgression of limits, the artist undermines certain absolutes and the institutions that reinforce them.

Leandro Erlich, Window and Ladder – Too Late for Help, 2008

Leandro Erlich, The Staircase, 2012

Tagged: architecture, art, artist, infrastructure, Julien Berthier and Simon Boudvin, Leandro Erlich, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, Winchester mystery house

Diagram Mapping

Sara — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 00:47:07 +0000

World map by Ranulf Higden, British Library

Recently, in my ongoing researching of maps, I discovered that before the 15^th century, the word “map” did not exist. Instead, what today we consider to be maps were referred to in the centuries preceding the 15th, as “diagrams”. This makes a great deal of sense because cartographic accuracy was less important than the graphic depiction of spatial relationships between not only geographic features but between social, cultural and religious values and symbologies. During the Medieval period maps were produced to depict a particular event or occasion unlike our contemporary notion of a ‘generalised’ map of a territory. Medieval maps included written descriptions and were often accompanied by written itineraries on scrap pieces of parchment that often listed the successive places/sights along the route. These maps were narrative in nature, and combined history, memory and experience to diagram place. This format of mapping is similar to our contemporary notion of a mental map which I have written about before.

What I am really interested in is the notion of a diagram and its use to map the layers of place. In its most general sense a diagram can be defined as a two dimensional drawing or sketch designed to show how something functions. It has commonly been associated with architectural practice. Gregory Cowan defines the diagram as a “visual representation of the way something works, rather than how it looks. It is an abstraction and a reduction of something. It is a mode of notation, but also a model of thought.” Cowan’s definition posits the diagram as a method which requires interpretation instead of being merely a tool for illustration. Subsequently, Anthony Vidler proposes that the diagram is performative rather than representational and operates as a space of possibilities between interpretation and reality.

In a society where we can google earth immediately and see bird eye’s view of geographic landscapes in seconds, Medieval maps offered a narrative to the landscape which did require the viewer’s interpretation of landmarks, commentary and symbols. Looking at the Medieval maps, I thought their was a strong resonance to Swedish artist Öyvind Fahlström’s later map paintings. Fahlström was interested in resistance and excess and diagrammed the clashes between the two extremes. For him, a map was governed by rules but was also an open territory for imaginary interpretation.

Öyvind Fahlström, Column no. 1 (Wonder Bread), 1972

Öyvind Fahlström, Column no. 2 (Picasso 90), 1973

I also thought of Bureau d’études a Paris-based collective founded in 1998 by Léonore Bonaccini and Xavier Fourt. The ‘bureau’ produces maps that depict relationships and ownership ties between transnational organisations and companies. They diagram the links between think tanks, financial firms, regulatory bodies, intelligence agencies, media groups, networks of consumer distribution, weapon makers, and satellite companies.

Bureau d’études, The World Government

Bureau d’études, The World Government (detail)

Bureau d’études, Governing by Networks

Bureau d’études, Animal and Vegetable Programming

Artist Stephen Walter uses historical information, trivia, local knowledge and stereotypes of the area he is creating a map of. Walter focuses on the etymology of place names and local histories, taken from online sources and publications and reveals a myriad of words and symbols and exploits the micro and macro cosmos of the world we live in.

Stephen Walter, The Island, 2008

Stephen Walter, The Island, 2008 (detail)

Stephen Walter, Liverpool, 2008-09

Stephen Walter, Liverpool, 2008-09 (detail)

Stephen Walter, Down River, 2008

Stephen Walter, Down River, 2008 (detail)

Designer and artist Paula Scher painted large maps that depicted continents, countries, and cities with layers of information, place-names, and provocative cultural commentary.

Paula Scher, Tsunami, 2006

Paula Scher, Paris, 2007

Tagged: art, artist, artists, Öyvind Fahlström, Bureau d'etudes, city, mapping, Paula Scher, Stephen Walter, urbanism

Collaging New Forms

Sara — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 01:29:29 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I saw this post from Dezeen about Dutch studio MVRDV ‘s proposal of a 400-metre skyscraper for Jakarta that looks like a collage of many separate buildings. What struck me immediately was the similarity to a series of work I made between 2007-2010. Don’t get me wrong, I am not accusing MVRDV of ripping me off because my series Proposition for a New System were propositional, MVRDV’s proposal is real. At the time I exhibited these works there was some criticism about this body of work (from an art/architect critic) because he believed that the forms were so impossible – how could I seriously propose that these works could offered any possibility of change to the built form.

At the time, when I made the work, I was particularly influenced by the writing of Henri Lefebvre, a French Marxist philosopher and sociologist, best known for critique of everyday life. Lefebvre believed that demanding the impossible was the only way to get all that is possible. In other words the very idea of the ‘impossible’ was an extremely important starting point for action or change. The works in Proposition for a New System were not proposing a new formation of the urban landscape nor did I consider them working plans, rather, they were exploratory and considered the unlimited possibilities of urban design in order to generate a dialogue about the contemporary city.

Sara Graham, Proposition for a New System (01), 2007

Sara Graham, Proposition for a New System (14), 2009

The configuration of my images used recognisable contemporary architecture and collaged the urban space by interlocking the surfaces and layers of the of the built forms. Through the complex interactions of real structures, new urban forms began to emerge through the patterning of perforated spaces. The urban form was not about defining ‘good’ or ‘bad’ architecture but instead was framed by a facade that is shaped by a collage of global sensibilities.

Traditionally, the common definition of collage has been the act of glueing, a simplistic act of reorganization. It has surprised me that many still think of collage as cutting and pasting and not a sophisticated act of inventiveness and transformation. I have had a long interest in collage, not only as a medium in itself but also as a tool for developing ideas. Collage intergrates contradicting or incongruent forms by keeping the edge of the two elements apparent but also producing the sentiment of unity. Usually the elements are diverse and often only fragments that are joined in unlikely or unexpected juxtapositions. I have always been interested in that ‘edge’ – the point where these two divergent forms meet. In my opinion, it is the edge that allows for the transformation of form or space, the contradiction of the two ‘edges’ coming together collapsing planes and fracturing spaces.

However, with the perfection of photomontage using tools like photoshop, designers and artists blur or worse erase the edge and seamlessly integrate their images together. By taking away the physical edge, I feel that the image has lost its ‘edge.’ Collage explores possibilities through the transformation of new forms and the improvisation of forms connecting together. The images I have been compiling are of installations, artwork and built structures that (are not photoshopped) and instead uses the edge from collage to create engaging work.

This installation is by architecten de vylder vinck taillieu bvba studio and unfortunately their website is in Dutch and I am unable to decipher any description. In this incredible installation the room has been divided with mirrored walls so that the wooden infrastructure (that links the architectural installation) looks like it is fractured and distorted.

One Plus Partnership have designed the sales office for a real estate company in Chongqing, China

A residential building in Sanchinarro a suburb on the north east edge of Madrid. designed by MVRDV.

Bjarne Mastenbroek and Christian Müller, from the architecture firms SeARCH and CMA, collaborated in 2009 to build this vacation home near the world famous thermal springs of Vals in Switzerland.

The Ring Mirror Installation by Arnaud Lapierre is a piece sponsored by Audi. It is a reflective cylinder with mirrors placed all around it. Lapierre explained, “The Ring’ is an installation that takes into consideration the urban space networking: the rhythm, flow, organization and spatial hierarchy.

Arnaud Lapierre, The Ring Mirror, 2012

Tagged: architecten de vylder vinck taillieu bvba, architecture, art, artist, city, collage, MVRDV, WAM Architecten

The flow of things

Sara — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 00:03:21 +0000

Sara Graham, StreetFinder: Vancouver, 2012, LJT40 Print mounted on dibond, 32 x 48″

I recently started reading Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information by Manuel Lima. Although the book was recently published (2011) Lima has had a very interesting website which I have been following for awhile. As I have written previously in this post, this one and this, mapping has been a central concern within my artistic practice.

In the summer of 2012, I also wrote about my move across the country. This relocation necessitated a re-location, that is, I had to locate and orientate myself to my new geographic specificity. This investigation instigated my reflection upon a series of work I made entitled StreetFinder fifteen years ago. StreetFinder consisted of mapbooks in which I physically excised everything but the major road systems. Rand McNally, an American company, only published eleven Canadian city mapbooks, most likely because of the marketability and population of each city. The deliberate choice by Rand McNally to print maps for only eleven Canadian cities made clear to me the social and economic agendas behind commercial maps and thus began my critical exploration of mapping. I mention this because I have developed a new series of large scale photographs based on this older series for an upcoming exhibition in Toronto also entitled StreetFinder. Each photograph depicts the first page of the book, in which all of the information of the map had been removed except the expressways, highways and major roads. What remains was a complex, abstract latticework of road networks that are layered on top of each other. By manipulating the map itself, I have intervened in the logic of the city, constructing an alternative geography as well as a providing a different perspective of the city.

Sara Graham, StreetFinder: Ottawa, 2012, LJT40 Print mounted on dibond, 32 x 48″

While my aim is to construct an alternative geography based on one of the most recognised systems of flow, I have also provided a different perspective of the city. In Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information, Lima is presenting ‘information visualizations’ that also provides a different perspective of the city. Lima defines information visualization as a process of compiling complex patterns and data and ‘representing’ them in a highly designed format so that the viewer can easily decipher the data. While I am deliberately trying to confuse the viewer with StreetFinder, the artists, designers and geographers in Visual Complexity are trying to enlighten.

I thought it would be interesting to include some maps (that I have been compiling over the last couple of months) that are very interesting and enlightening.

Larissa Fassler, Regent Street ⁄ Regent’s Park , 2009. The image illustrates the different signage along London’s Regent Street.

These two maps uses color to depict the different courses of the Mississippi River throughout history.

This map shows you the wind flows over the US and if you go to the wind map website you can see it the currents animated.

Elijah Meeks has produced a series of experiments depicting databases in diverse styles. The images show here are mapping the top contributors to the Catalogue of Life and their associated species, references and databases.

A map of part of the northern hemisphere of Venus, based mainly on radar data from the Russian Venera 15 and 16 orbiters as well as data from the Pioneer Venus orbiter and Earth-based radar telescopes. Colours correspond to surface features, including volcanoes (light red and pink), mountains and ridges (purple, green and blue) and plains (yellow and light green).

Artist Mark Lombardi uses dotted lines and broken arrows to chart the paths of illicit deals and laundered money, keeping track of it all in a handwritten database of 12,000 index cards.

This is a geologic map of the far side of the moon based on data from the Apollo space missions, Lunar orbiter spacecraft and Russian Zond spacecraft.

A map of Paris during sunrise based on open data

The map represents an estimate of the total annual building energy consumption at the block level and at the tax lot level for New York City, and is expressed in kilowatt hours (kWh) per square meter of land area.

Tagged: art, artist, city, infrastructure, Larissa Fassler, Manuel Lima, mapping, urbanism, Visual Complexity

Unusual Encounters

Sara — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 07:03:50 +0000

Julian Charriere, Some Pigeons are More Equal than Others, 2012

When I came across this post on iGNANT I was immediately intrigued (and maybe a bit concerned for the welfare of the pigeons.) The series of work entitled Some Pigeons are More Equal than Others is by Artist Julian Charriere who ‘dyed’ 35 pigeons with a mechanic apparatus that trapped the birds and then airbrushed them. Once the pigeons were coloured they were released to resume their daily life with their new colourful plumage in full display. Charriere wanted to provide city dwellers with a new experience – something different injected into their daily routine.

Julian Charriere, Some Pigeons are More Equal than Others, 2012

I imagine the experience of seeing these colourful birds was similar to the way I felt when I first encountered an exhibition by The Atlas Group many years ago, one of uncertainty, but with a desire to learn more, to question what I was seeing. The Atlas Group was a fifteen year project developed by artist Walid Raad that created and presented archives that were about the contemporary history of Lebanon with an emphasis on the Lebanese wars of 1975 – 1991.

The Atlas Group was a fictional organisation with a main agenda of researching and documenting the contemporary history of Lebanon. Through the presentation of documentary fictions as factual documents, Raad explores the dialectical notion of the real and invented, fiction and non-fiction. Raad seamlessly integrates actual documentation with fiction guiding the viewer to look at the lies and to look for the lies.

The Atlas Group not unlike other interventionists groups such as Critical Art Ensemble, Xurban, Bureau d’etudes, and Grupo de Arte Callejero use the everyday world to raise our awareness of social problems and concerns. These artists give us the tools to form our own opinions by providing an alternative presentation of the materials in which to analysise. However, in the foreground of this observation, is the importance of the imagination in questioning and dismantling what is false and true. While Charriere doesn’t have the same political agenda as the above groups I believe he toying with our notion of fact and falsity by providing us with a different perspective, a different way to experience our city.The Atlas Group exhibition that I am referencing had a convincing didactic panel that not only explained the context of the exhibition but situated the Altas Group as preservers of historical information and archivists. The panel further stated that all of the documents (notebooks, films, videotapes and photographs) included in the exhibition were attributed to a central figure, Dr Fadl Fakhouri, who bequeathed the items upon his death in 1993 to the Altas Group. There was a second panel that further explained who Dr. Fadl Fakhouri was which I recently found on The Atlas Group’s website:

At this point, I had not heard of The Atlas Group so I took everything at face value. The first series of black and white photos were entitled, Civilizationally, We Do Not Dig Holes to Bury Ourselves, dated 1958-1959/2003 and were presented as the only remaining photographs of the doctor. Looking at these images, there is an immediate sense that something is odd about the doctor’s ‘presence’ within the photographs.

Walid Raad, Civilizationally, We Do Not Dig Holes to Bury Ourselves, 2003.

Why would someone posse an image of himself lying on a bed in a hotel room reading a book or eating alone in a café or under the Eiffel Tower looking through a set of binoculars in the opposite direction? The circumstances in which these images were taken are uncertain. I immediately started to question who took these photographs? Why hasn’t the doctor acknowledged the fact that he was being photographed? Were they staged? Were they real? Was Dr Fadl Fakhouri real?

On my way home I kept thinking about this work and who was The Atlas Group. During the time of not knowing my imagination was running wild, trying to decipher what I had seen, what was real, what was fiction, it was truly a great experience. I think the same would have occurred when the citizens of Copenhagen saw these pigeons, they would have experienced a suspension of disbelief – believing maybe for only seconds or minutes that these colourful birds really did exist and flew with the pigeons or maybe they were pigeons. I think this would have been a great encounter, a magical moment being suspended in disbelief if only for a few minutes.

Images from Dr. Fadl Fakhouri’s notebook which contain photographs of cars that correspond to the exact make, model and colour of every car that was used as a car bomb between 1975 and 1991.

Walid Raad, Already Been in a Lake of Fire (Notebook Volume 38), 1999

This notebook depicts avid gambling habits of the Lebanese gamblers. It is said that every Sunday Marxists and Islamists bet on races one through seven and Maronite nationalists and socialists on races eight through fifteen.

Walid Raad, Missing Lebanese Wars (Notebook Volume 72), 1996.

The Atlas projects reveals the fragmentation of events that is experienced by war. By collecting certain fragments of truth one can illuminate a whole. By choosing different means of documentation The Atlas Group, reflected the instability of history and how complex events cannot be systematized or condensed into easy groups of information.

Tagged: art, artist, arts, city, Julian Charriere, The Atlas Group, urbanism, Walid Raad

Lebbeus Woods

Sara — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 00:20:08 +0000

System Wein with Christoph Kumpusch , 2005 is an experimental sketch of Vienna’s 1st District, and shows how it might find a way to change, even radically, without rejecting its past.

Visionary architect, Lebbeus Woods passed away last week. He was most well known for his experimental designs that depicted futuristic worlds and dytopic cityscapes. Similarly to Archigram, Woods was known as a ‘paper architect’, a term used to describe a generation of architects who created visionary and fanastical structures but never built anything. Archigram was seen by many architects of the time as dilettantes with unrealistic visions and unpractical for the “real” world application, this was also true for Woods. I believe that the visions of Woods, Archigram, the Metabolists, Cedric Price were all radical (and some were completely unrealistic) but all of these individuals were extremely important in constructing (and instructing) some of the theory and application that is practiced today. Some well known architects designing today, such as Peter Eisenmen, Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaus were not only influenced by visionary architects some even studied under them. Woods a long-time professor at Cooper Union directly influenced generations of students during a profoundly significant period.

I believe that visionaries are the most important individuals. Visionaries break rules, think the unthinkable, design the unimaginable but ultimately they are the people who generate change. Anyone can design a building or build a community (and you don’t even need a degree in architecture or urban planning for that), but without the visionaries, who will push the boundaries and redevelop the way we think about our built form and our cities. I thought that Lebbeus Woods articulated this sentiment in a post from his own blog about working on the periphery of his proffessional practice.

“At the edge, we perform at our peak, our best. We have no choice, really. Anything less and we fall off the edge, plunging into the unknown. The edge is a limit, in the first place of our knowledge. We have to push ourselves to get to it. The closer we come to the edge, the more we have to use the knowledge we have. At the edge only the hard-core knowledge is useful. All the frills and redundancies, the posturings and pretensions, simply get in the way and in fact will doom us to failure. At the edge it is only the essential and the authentic that count.”

While I was familiar with Woods’ work I have to admit I was not a huge fan of the majority of his work but I will not deny how important his contribution was to the field of architecture. On many levels, I always felt that I should have liked his work more because his projects were so tentative, abstract and often collaged together (but in a shattered way), all elements that I find extremely interesting, compelling and thought provoking. However, I think it was his dystopian outlook and futuristic-sci-fi-overtones I had a hard time retifying but not for the reasons you may think. Many of Woods well known projects incorporated war-torn countries with the aftermath of rebuilding. His shattered landscapes reflected the savages of war and the scar left on these landcapes. Many of his structures re-used (and recycled) war machines, and infrastructure that had been destroyed beyond repair or was considered refuge. Lebbeus acknowledged that in Sarajevo, people built temporary structures to shield themselves, an ‘improvised’ repair to provide homes and workplaces. He believed that these makeshift structures created a degraded environment but helped to provide a sense of order to the citizens who needed it. His structures often used these disfigured elements as metaphors for ‘scabs’ that covered the ‘wounds’ of buildings damaged by war but also to recognise the order that the residents needed.

Some of the projects I am including in this post are from his website. They are the lesser known ones probably because they are more experimental and hypothetical. I find these ones the most interesting because I cannot make the connections as easily as the war structures. These works always leave me puzzled, seaching for more, trying to decipher what is being depicted, what was being defined? I feel that with these works, we are only seeing a specific moment in time, that these structures are animated and if we were to look at the work over time we would be able to see the transformation. This body of work is very tentative, parastical in nature, balancing between two points of tension but ultimately it focuses on experimentation through the exploration of the impossible.

One of Woods lasting legacies is the Research Institute for Experimental Architecture which he help found in 1988. RIEA is an institution with the purpose of advancing experimentation and research in the field of architecture, in response to changing political, economic, technological and cultural conditions in the contemporary world.

Siteline Vienna Urban performance Structures, 1998

Nine Reconstructed Boxes, 1999

Experimental Architecture, 2003, Installation for the exhibition, carnegie Museum of Art

UtopX, 2006

Tagged: Archigram, architect, architecture, city, Lebbeus Woods, visionary architecture

Coppernickel Goes Mondrian

Sara — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 06:23:01 +0000