Bath Spa, Somerset, England

Royal Crescent, photo by David Iliff (click on it to enlarge)

This is going to be the scenario of my summer. Bath is a very special city: all of it has been designed by the same hands and the same eyes. The order in Bath is not just in the space, it extends in many different ways to everyday life. Winston Churchill said in a speech at the Architectural Association in London that "we make buildings and afterwards the buildings make us".

To spend some time in such a beautiful city resets anyone´s soul. In the Abbey of Bath was crowned the first king of England 1035 years ago. How on earth do I remember such a date so precisely? Easy: I happened to be there on the 1000 anniversary. That is the purpose of celebrations isn't it?, to fix things in your mind and in your spirit.

Good summer holidays and see you in September.

The Oxford Conference: ¿ethics vs art?

photo: Tim Waters, Flickr

The conference on architectural education in Oxford has good intentions, but that is not enough I am afraid. The idea is literally to save the planet form artist-architects in the name of sustainability. The answer to this rather old good will is, again, in the historical avant-garde: “they claim to defend nature while poets respect it much more than gardeners”, used to say avant-garde artists at the beginning of the 20th century in defense of artistic abstraction. It is evident that there is still the need of explaining the precise artistic nature of architecture in contemporary times. A good start would be not to oppose ethics and art: that is pre-modern. Referring to Siza or Zumthor when talking about contemporary architecture (instead of Ghery and Starck) could also contribute to clarify what I suppose is our common enemy: spectacle and commoditization in architecture.

It is a pity that the conference does not take place at the St. Catherine´s College, the wonderful master piece by Arnee Jacobsen located precisely in Oxford. That work of architecture is capable of defending contemporary art all alone. By the way, the moralist stand of this 2008 Oxford Conference reminds me of the struggle against Jacobsen´s project in the oxfordian press of the time when the building was being constructed. Fortunately, some English schools have responded to the spirit of the conference: Brett Steele (Architectural Association) and Iain Borden (Bartlett) have struck back.

press release july08OXFORD CONFERENCE - Upload a Document to Scribd

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Arquitecturas del Exilio Español

The Comité International des Critiques d´Architecture, CICA, has given the CICA Award 2008 to the book Arquitecturas Desplazadas, Arquitecturas del Exilio Español by Henry Vicente, at the UIA Congress in Turin, Italy.

The book is the catalog of an exhibition held on May 2007 in Madrid, with the support of the Spanish Gobernment, and is part of the PhD research of Vicente. Besides his, there are also texts of Lorenzo González Casas, Luisa Bulnes Álvarez, Fernando Álvarez Prozorovich, and Juan Ignacio del Cueto Ruiz-Funes.

In the round table in the MOPU exhibition it was suggested to include those exiles who were not architects but did teach architects. I included then, and I do now, those who coached or influenced me in Venezuela: Enrique Domingo Rosich, Máximo Jimenez Labrador, José María Almiñana, Manuel Perez Vila, Pedro Viloria, Pedro Grases, Enrique Martín de Villodres, Pedro Silbert and Luis Reus Díaz. The Jury of the CICA Awards 2008 had Joseph Rykwert as president.

Press Release 3 Winners List 30-06-08 - Upload a Document to Scribd

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The "occult powers of mobile phones" and the New Modern

What to read in the summer...? How about Black Mass by John Gray and Critical Modernism by Charles Jenks.

Why they should be read?. Well, I recomend them for two reasons. First, because it is not so easy to find intense reflexions on the present, on what is happening in our lives. Second, because Gray is considered "the most important philosopher alive" and he is the one Charles Jenks chose to back his new agenda at the Royal Academy in London last autumn. I find fascinating the intellectual moves from the New Right to New Labor (Gray) and from Post-modernism to Critical Modernism (Jenks). There is not better medicine for kantian idealists that big doses of post-ideological thinking: have a nice summer.

Light and movement

Digital animation in architecture is misleading: it "explains" so realistically a building that architectural values normally vanish automatically. The experience of architecture is synthetic and to animate an architectural representation requires truly creative skills. As it is an aesthetic fruition what is at stake an animation of architecture requires an artistic approach to give an account of it.

Just by chance, I am afraid, the video below has this value. It is by Henrik Wann Jensen (Stanford University) and Stephen Duck (MIT) and is intended to show the differences between Ray Tracing and Photon Mapping (the latter invented by Wann). The thing is that the model chosen is a unbuilt work of Mies van der Rohe and the video shows, besides the features of the computational tool, the living spirit of a non existing architectural masterpiece: light.

Architecture, politics and sex

Liebeskind skyscraper Milan, (Archinet)

The politicy of “putting cities in the map” through iconic buildings (gherkins) has finally bumped into an awkward subject for urbanism and architecture: sex. The problem starts when politicians think of architecture as a source of meanings (individual and collective), and not as a chance of constructing artistically.

The polemic on the “impotent” (Berlusconi) skyscraper of Daniel Liebeskind in Milan is the result of forcing architecture to represent almost literally what the public should see: “the meaning of the Holocaust” in the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the “globe shattered into fragments” in the Imperial War Museum in Manchester, an “open book” in the Bar-Ilan University in Israel and “the Orion Constellation” in the London Metropolitan University.

The paradox is that the impulse of being represented by buildings is precisely what keeps architecture alive. Alejandro de la Sota was a expert in doing architecture while people only asked him to do a house, a school or a Council Hall. Konrad Fiedler used to say that "the form, which is the content, does not represent but itself": every architect should remember that when taking the briefing form politicians. This link opens the article "Not manly enough" Berlusconi´s verdict on Libeskind work, by Arifa Akbar in The Independent.

Visuality in the Digital era

Net.art is to our era what Cubism and Purism were to industrialization. Back in the beginnings of the 20th century people were disguised by the formal discoveries of the historical avant-garde, because they challenged what art had been until then. Internet has changed our world because it has changed our relation with it, that is undeniable. Art is still about making visible that part of the world that only makes sense when is seen.

Well, again, people fear to be teased by digital art and new media when they visit the exposition "Souls & Machines" at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. The combination of "art, technology, mystery, emotion and beauty" makes this exhibition, together with Javier Riera´s "Noche Áurea", worth visiting. Visuality is alive, long life to art. Have a look (which means enjoy in this context) to the work of Sachiko Kodama on ferrofluids and electromagnetic camps: it is a film, just a film, that shows what happens in front of your eyes when you are before the work at the museum.

Plastic, plasticity and architecture

Through Archinet I got the news: Zaha on shoes. From an strict formalistic point of view, the versatility of a form is inversely proportional to its artisticity: in a world of commodities pure form serves specially as a “mute critique” to that state of the art (Adorno). From this point of view, to be really artistic, a shoe-work-of-art should be a commercial failure (uuh?). On the other hand, the incursion of deconstruction in industrial design could be interpreted as a return, as almost all it has produced in architecture are but beautiful objects out of scale, out of the scale of the city, out of the scale of the inhabitants, out of scale of the use.

The venture between Melissa and Zaha Hadid is mixing plasticity and plastic with a very profitable horizon, no doubt. The video is interesting as it shows that in the end it is digital technology what makes this new trend of sculpture possible. As a matter of fact, deconstruction could be re-named as de-scaling. By the way, Patxi Mangado is going to be next Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor at Yale, the position Hadid has just left, and he has said they are opposite as architects (here is the article in Spanish)

PhD Summer Course Bergamo 2008

The IE School of Architecture has been invited to the PhD Summer Course of the Politecnico di Milano in Bergamo. The Dean and the Associate Dean of the faculty, Professor Javier Quintana de Uña and José María de Churtichaga, along with professors Miguel Jaime and Eugenia López Reus, will be part of the jury of the final review. This year the theme is the High-rise Buildings and Landscape. The course will take place from the 7th to 19th of July 2008.

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