Architectural Drawing as Art Element

Painter Julie Mehretu uses architectural drawing in her way of painting. Nevertheless, what is more architectural in her paintings is the scale: just as Mies van der Rohe use to do with architectural model and photographs, her paintings are so big and well structured that the spectator feels that  he/she "enters" the canvas. The way she works also is linked to how architects work drawings, projecting images, layering, info, simultaneous data, etc. Surely it is the bricolage nature of architectural way of working what makes it potentially artistic. Julie pushes this potentiality to a beautiful level. 

Even Ugly Buildings have a Photo

I remember a comment by Catalá-Roca, one of the best photographers ever, that he went to visit locations he wanted to photograph before doing so, without a camera, and he saw the photos then. I think I could have gone hundreds of times to this ugly building, the Museum of Natural Science at Barcelona Forum, and I would not have found this picture. It was by chance, in the midst of confinement phase 1 that just bumped into it. I learned from the experience that even the ugliest building have a photo, just have to discover it. 

Back on the Road

Taking advantage of the allowed scrolls I bumped into this wonderful piece of architecture by Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue. Art always takes us back to that essential emotion called aesthetic fruition even when we are unaware that we are in front of a work of art. Enjoy it!

El Árbol de la Arquitectura

Edificio 13, Universidad Pompeu Fabra. Autor: Juan Navarro Baldeweg

Mientras la arquitectura siga haciendo posible espacios como este, la arquitectura no desaparecerá.

Dibujo del bueno

Federico Correa, catedrático emérito de la Escuela de arquitectura de Barcelona, y uno de los mejores dibujantes de la profesión, expone sus últimas obras. Sus dibujos son un prodigio de talento y gusto exquisito. Imperdible.

The Architecture Film Festival of Rotterdam

To connect architecture and cinema is always a feast. At Rotterdam, it's already taking place, maybe, the best of this mixture the AFFR.

From 6 to 9 October the LantarenVenster cinema in Rotterdam on Wilhelminapier is the epicentre of the 6th Architecture Film Festival Rotterdam (AFFR). For four whole days film and architecture devotees can indulge themselves with a programme packed with shorts and feature films, documentaries about glamour architects, debates, talk shows and excursions.

Naive Realism

Population density. Data from the G-Econ project, Yale University

There are innumerable recommendations for surviving current crisis. I propose naïve realism.

Think for a moment that there were 2 billion people in the world in 1940; that we are now 6 and will be 8 billions inhabitants in the world in 2050. Sum to it that our planet can not possibly feed that amount of “animal spirits” (Keynes). John Gray insists (see “Homo Rapiens and Mass Extintion”, 2002, in his last book Gray’s Anatomy, Allen Lane, 2009) that the “plague of peole” is not going to reach the “Era of Solitude” (Wilson), when humankind would be alone because all the rest of animals have been killed, nor the eradication of humankind (Lovelock): The future is going to be a combination of genocide, war, epidemic, natural destruction and the sort of generalized social collapsed that has taken place in post-Comunist Russia.

Just as we do everyday, that we live knowing that we are going to die, we have to choose what kind of life we want to lead in a world that is condemmeded to change radically and violently in the next future. I call it naïve realism, adapting slightly Keynes' “naïve optimism”. Gray puts it this way: "From a human point of view, this may be a discomfiting prospect; but at least it dispels the nightmare of an age of solitude".

What architects and artists should do in such a situation?. Well, maybe to preserve the aesthetic as a value, as some of them have always done: the harmony of the aesthetic experience is the only way humans experiment their subjective unity authentically. There is nothing more we can do, but we should not do either anything less.

El valor de la arquitectura

La dificultad mayor que tiene la economía para dirigir el mundo es su incomprensión sobre la naturaleza humana. Todos sus gurús expresan su desconcierto acerca de la "human nature", como por ejemplo Alan Greenspan (ver post anterior).

La arquitectura conoce a la raza humana mejor que la economía. Ozenfant, que influyó mucho sobre Le Corbusier, hablaba del arte como la integración de las contradicciones internas del ser humano: las tres coordenadas las llamaba.

La autonomía de la arquitectura se refiere a esto. Por supuesto que es la más dependiente de las "artes mayores" ya que se hace con recursos ajenos al autor/a. Pero siempre se puede dar "liebre por gato" (Alejandro de la Sota) y después de satisfacer todos los requerimientos sociales, técnicos, etc. se integran todos en ellos en un todo armónico que nos habla de la riqueza subjetiva por encima de todo. La autonomía de la arquitectura tiene que ver con mantener lo estético como valor en la sociedad actual, una sociedad tan equivocada que tiene su mirada puesta en cada telediario en la Bolsa de Valores.

Nihilism for the Money

The Treachery of Images, 1928, Rene Magritte

Until very recently, nihilism was just a cultural stand that made leftists look culturally elegant. Since 1989, nihilism has become the common ground for right and left wing intellectuals, especially in American and European Universities. In fact, John Gray affirms in his The Enlightenment's Wake (1995) that nihilism is Western's "only truly universal inheritance to humankind", and one of the main reasons why non-western cultures will take the lead in the global world.

In my "Arquitecturas virtuales" in Revista de Occidente (2002), I related Koolhaas's architectural approach to a precise political praxis that had more to do with marketing than art.

Some political analysts consider now as postmodernist the right wing strategy of twisting the meaning of language to impose their ideas: "regulation is bailout" is the new one that tries to stop Obama's financial reform. The best example of the deconstruction of language for the money is Frank Luntz's Memo to kill the bill. The thing is that as a media strategy it really works: the lie of mass destruction weapons allowed already the huge business of the Iraq war. That was another initiative to take the money away from tax payers. Paul Krugman calls it the "black is white strategy".

PD (30/04/2010):

On the 28th Obama gave a strait answer to what I have called "Nihilism for the money". After saying that this crisis is not a cyclical one he responded to the "White is Black, and Up is Down" strategy. The three points of Obama's Wall Street Reform are:

1. Protection to consumers
2. End of bailouts
   
3. Financial Transparency

Have a look at the video:

Disintoxication of Design

It is not just in the architectural realm that experts predict a retreat from recent "vulgarity and ambition" (Ouroussoff), designers too see the coming trends as:

Retreat to the comfort zone

Purism as Self-Therapy

Back to basics

A Return to Reason

No Jokes, No Fakes

Utility

Craftsmanship

Back to Bauhaus

The beauty of reason: Luxury is no longer sought in comfort but in formal and qualitative consistency. Only forms that are beautiful, innovative and durable can be useful as well. Bauhaus classics set the tone, quality workmanship adds authenticity. Slender, simple furniture with as few edges as possible dominates. The materials also indicate a return to the authentic: wood, leather, woven fabrics or ceramics, rounded off with the occasional plastic detail.

Design against design: with experiments, with products and furniture that are driven by artistic rather than market-oriented motives and play with our expectations, designers and their public are rebelling against the slickness of the design world

.

Read more at Dezeen. In Spanish there is good article in El PAÍS.

Mirar para otro lado

The newspaper of Segovia has published and article of mine (in Spanish) that relates the financial and the architectural crisis. The main idea is that the utopia did not started with Fukuyama's "end of the history" but with the oil embargo of the OPEC in 1973. There are two more articles on the subject that are specially interesting: Joe Nocera points out in The New York Times the fallacy of the rationality of markets and Ignacio Sotelo, in El Pais, explains (in Spanish too) the differences between current crisis and the 1929's crack.

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.

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?

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.

The Global and the Blog

Well, this is the first post in English in this blog. Restricted and opened that was the question, and finally the solution is going to be two blogs: one restricted in Spanish for the design studio group, with the students as co-authors, and this one open, in English. The theme of the post could not be better for the opening: A Global History of Architecture by F. Ching, Mark Jarzombek, and Vikramaditya Prakash.

I am going to comment the book after the summer vacations. Now I just want to point out that if we believe in an education centered in the learning process, and need to count on what the students already know, his/her cultural background are essential. If our students come form all over the world a global vision of the history of architecture is basic. The only way European thinking can be useful in global era is converting Eurocentrism in a responsible stand. Welcome to globalization.

Londres fresco

Se está preparando el Festival de Arquitectura de Londres. Se trata de una auténtica fiesta urbana con exposiciones, paseos (a pie, en bicicleta, en barco), conferencias, visitas guiadas, instalaciones urbanas, debates, fiestas...en fin, cuando en Inglaterra le ponen la etiqueta de Festival a algo hay que tomárselo en serio. Los organizadores siguieren que "fresco" es el tema del evento: piden que se vea Londres con ojos frescos para redescubir el talento fresco y que se respire el aire fresco de la ciudad (han logrado descontaminar su aire de una manera notable). Pues eso, a refrescarse.