Temporary and permanent architecture

French Communist Party Headquaters, Paris, 1972. Oscar Niemeyer

Deconstruction is unbeatable in terms of spectacle.

The video below is on the ZHA 2007 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London, and it shows the construction process of such a clever devise. The result could not be more appealing. Koolhaas , Ghery and Liebeskind have done theirs with similar striking results.

For permanent wrap surface buildings, I mean real (not virtual) architecture, Oscar Niemeyer is still the unbeatable one, as his Paris building demonstrates. The picture was taken few weeks ago thanks to Monsieur Benoit kindness.

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)