Master Utzon has died

Utzon has died, but his works are alive.

Dinamism in architecture has to do with light, not with buildings that move. Utzon made the stones, the concrete, the bricks and the wood breath under the light. The video is at his Bagsvaerd Church in Copenhague.

Utzon liked to cite Goethe saying: "give me a job, so I can devote my self with love and skill a hundred per cent. Then it is not a job anymore, it becomes an art, an expression of love". The tribute of the Sydney Opera House is worth visiting.

PD: William Curtis has said recently that there were just two Masters alive in architecture: one of them was Utzon.

David Chipperfield at the IE University

Great Sunday. Having Chipperfield in our University has been a quite rewarding event.

Last Friday, at my studio, we were discussing what I've named architectural "didactism". Didactism is the pathology of architecture determined by explanations of the design process . It comes from design competitions: as the juries are normally neophyte in architecture (politicians, bureaucrats, managers) the proposals have to be easily explained, so much so that design teams tend to propose mainly what is easy to explain. Nevertheless, good architecture can't never be totally explained because it is done to be experienced, not to be understood.

Chipperfield, the best British architect at the moment, has perfectly demonstrated with his outstanding work since 1985 that he believes in architecture to be lived. He explicitly agrees with this point of view in the interview below (specially when he talks about recent architecture as "victim of methodological descriptions"). However, one might say that his own CAT Master Plan is sort of didactic (video). Anyway, I'm a sure that at the end the British-Spanish Dream Team (Chipperfield-Perea-Junquera-Sancho) will convert the Segovia CAT in the public paradise they (and we all) want it to be.

I told Mr. Chipperfield that on Friday we were studying his gorgeous Gallery in Berlin at my studio at the IE School of Architecture: that building is, as the majority of his work, one example of authentic architecture to be experienced. He was glad to hear that.

Segovia Contemporary Architecture

"Techné"
David Chipperfield

"XXI"
Andrés Perea (courtesy of Estudio Malla)

The title of this post is quite an accomplishment in itself, as Segovia is usually associated to the history of architecture and not to modernity at all. Well, things are changing.

The reasons for the changes are various: political, cultural, educational and economic. One of the main changes comes form the initiatives taken by the IE School of Architecture. As an example: next Sunday there will be a conference on the CAT design competition won by David Chipperfield, and he and the authors of the three awarded proposals will explain their work at the Aula Magna.

The participants will be the Major of Segovia, Martha Thorne (Executive Director of The Pritzker Architecture Prize), David Chipperfield, Andrés Perea, Juan Carlos Sancho y Sol Madridejos and Jerónimo Junquera. The report of the jury of the competition is in Spanish.

Sundance Channel Architecture School

The initiative of Sundance Channel called Architecture School is of great interest.

The thing is that images, movement, visual contemplation are essential in architecture, however, it is really difficult to find good examples of filming architecture. Internet is the perfect media for making visual contents available, specially those in which architecture is unbeatable. To find the proper tone, the rhythm, the suitable filming style for architecture is not easy. Sundance AS gets really close the ideal.

The link takes you to the presentations of the protopypes done by the students of Tulane University for a house in New Orleans.

Koolhaas and the cinema

The film on the Bordaux House of Rem Koolhaas is an exception on architectural documentaries. Maybe too Dogma style, but the idea of presenting the house through the experience of the person who does the cleaning is great. The most interesting part is the begining because is truly cinematographic. Enjoy it. I am afraid the rest of the film is able to make dizzy because of the abuse of the subjective camera. Curious that the architecture that is supposed to derive from cinema is not so easy to become a film.

CAT Conference in Segovia

The CAT Competition will be the subject of a conference at the IE School of Architecture in Segovia this coming Sunday. The program in Spanish is:

Semana de la Arquitectura
PRESENTACION CAT
fecha domingo 30 de noviembre 11:30
lugar IE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE
Aula magna


AGENDA DEL ACTO

1 Saludo del Alcalde.
(10 minutos)
2 Presentación de los equipos por Martha Thorne. Executive Director. The Pritzker Architecture Prize
(8 minutos)

3 David Chipperfield
(20 minutos) (20 imagenes)
-Presentación del Master Plan
-Reflexiones sobre el Espacio Público. Las tres plazas.

4 Andrés Perea
Nuevos lugares para el trabajo. Espacios para Emprendedores
(10 imágenes, 10 minutos)

5 Juan Carlos Sancho y Sol madridejos
Las referencias singulares. El espacio cultural del CAT. (10
imágenes)

6 Jerónimo Junquera
El control de la escala ó los itinerarios en el CAT. El Centro de
Ocio y comercial (10 imágenes)

7 David Chipperfield
El CAT hacia el exterior. El Palacio de Congresos. (10 imágenes)

8 Mesa redonda y coloquio
los cuatro equipos moderado por Martha Thorne. (40 minutos)
(imágenes de la maqueta colectiva de fondo)
Martha llevará una serie de preguntas preparadas que irá
lanzando a los integrantes mesa y se pueden intercalar las
preguntas del público que recogeremos mediante cartulinas
que pasaremos a la mesa (seleccionadas)

Pure Modernity at the Museum

At the Reina Sofia Museum there is the wonderful exhibition A.C. La revista del GATEPAC (1931-1937). By the title one never would guess the vastness, rigor and quality of such an exhibition. In my opinion it could have been called "The various origins of modernity" or something like this: there are architectural plans, models, photography, painting, sculpture, cinema all originals. And have a look at the names: Le Corbusier, Sert, Gropius, Mies (the full scale originals of the Tugendhant), Man Ray, Neutra (the most amazing original perspectives in pencil of the Lowell House and some urban projects), Arp, lots of the best Miro, Picasso, Aalto, Terragni, exceptional sculptures by Julio Gonzalez, films by Buñuel...

It is almost impossible to see it properly in one day. It should be better advertized the excellence of this fountain of knowledge.

A lasting crisis

The cuts in education expenses, as a measure against current financial crisis, is a sign that the way out of it is not even near.

The despotism of instrumental rationality is still in charge, I am afraid. In a recent article in El País Paul Krugman explains the idea of the Homo economicus, "whose preferences can be expressed mathematically". The world’s view that has driven our lives in the West for almost the last two centuries is based in the negation of the internal contradiction of human nature. Orient has taken the lead in that sense.

For avant-garde artists art is the solution of human internal contradictions in a satisfactory way: the three coordinates of reason, desire and feeling (Ozenfant). I am convinced of the necessity of understanding artistic way of thinking as a way of re-funding humanism in the 21st century.

Only through education our mentality will evolve. If we do not learn to respect emotions, we will never have a truly model of human behavior and no reliable economic and political planning would be possible. In the webpage of Krugman there are lots of his best articles for free.

Le Corbusier, a young 71 years old

It is worth listening, first hand, what the greatest architect of last century wanted to tell us when he was 71 years old. The images that illustrate the video are not at the level of the speech, I am afraid. Nevertheless, it is interesting to find out the balance he does of his own huge work at the end of his life. Creating ideas, those intellectual constructions that resist time and questioning, is a hard job specially for a "visual man" like Le Corbusier. The sound recording is from an interview at the BBC in 1959. Here is the link

Formalism and reflexivity in Economy, not in Architecture

Krugman, by Alan Cordova, Flickr

Georges Soros, adam kesher2000, Flickr

A good thing of current global financial crisis is that it promotes attention to how the world is ruled. Last century John Maynard Keynes said that "little else" than Economy and Political Philosophy does (General Theory, 1936).

It has always been obvious to me that Art and Aesthetics is lacking in this list. Actually, I find surprising that "formalism" and "reflexivity" are terms of great interest in economical debate. Brand new Nobel Prize Paul Krugman and George Soros defend each concept in that arena.

At the end of his book "The Enlightenment´s Wake", John Gray bases his hopes for the future of "western cultures" in the introduction of "some varieties of poetry and mysticism" in modern modes of thinking. Wouldn´t be easier to re-shape our idea of modernity and to include the third aspect of human constituttion Kant discovered in his third Critique: the aesthetic autonomy againt reason and ethics?

Architecture's Week in Madrid

From 6 to 12 of October dozens of famous buildings will be open to the public, guided by architectural students, lots of conferences, films, visit to the site with the designer, etc. The program has more than 35 pages. It is an incredible opportunity to get closer to one of the best architectures in the world explained first hand by its authors and local critics. Architecture's Week is a real festival.

Ghosts in Segovia

Cockle-pickers at Morecambe Bay, Lancashire, UK

A car trapped by the tides at Morecambe bay, 400 meters from shore

Ai Qin Lin, who survived the Morecambe bay tragedy, and main character of the film

Ghosts is the way illegal Chinese immigrants and local British workers call each other. Ghosts is also the name of the documentary shown in Segovia last Sunday at the Hay Festival.

It is the true story of a group of 23 illegal Chinese workers that were killed in Lancashire, UK, in 2004. Nick Broomfield, the Director , said that there are 20 millions slaves in the world right now. He also has created a foundation to collect the half a million dollars the relatives of the killed worker have to pay the lenders. The film is an excellent example of art and politics interacting without contaminating each other: the suspense sequences are one of the best ever shoot.

I first knew about this tragedy few weeks ago while asking Rod Morgan (author of the Oxford Handbook of Criminology) about the exploitation of immigrants in the UK. Do not miss it, it is in DVD.