The Grid Trailer by CritTeam

 

 

Glad to announce CritTeam´s artistic intervention at Barcelona Pavilion, with the support of Mies Van Der Rohe Fundación in the Barcelona Loop Festival 2022. We will present a video, a photobook and make three workshops on The Grid, an unprecedented  way of seeing the Pavilion. Come and see from the 8th to the 20th November.  

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. 

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.

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.