Notes: Contemporary Cultural and Critical Debate

-Transformation of the face of finance – original form of “banking”

into financial services industry, see architecture: banks once brick and
fortified into glass, open curtains and now glamorous (manufacturing
trust).

-Skyscraper as a symbol of perpetual greed.

-Skyscraper as a setting for the narrative of catastrophe.

-World Train Center, and its effect on New York City, tied to secrecy,
nefariousness, and conspiracy.

2/2/17
-Delirious New York: manifesto written by Rem Koolhaas, where he
analyzes the skyline of the City and says its model of development was
nothing new. Koolhaas says New York City has always been a
contemporary city, yet “delirious”.
-New York as a capitol of perpetual crisis.

-Manhattanism: coined by Rem Koolhaas, combination of local

politics, real estate speculation, urban planning, architecture and
grand dreaming as the specific specialty of New York City.
-Hugh Ferriss: Architecture fantasist, case study of Koolhaas.

-Postmodern as erasure of line between high culture and mass culture.

-The Sublime: a quality or sensation of grandness or greatness.

Connected to the contemplation of nature – combination of terror and
ecstasy.

2/16/17
Pompidou Center, Paris: erected by then president Georges
Pompidou in an attempt to restore Paris as an intellectual epicenter,
as well as chip away at the legacy of former president Charles de
Gaulle. Very postmodern, futuristic, and high-tech, hoping to renew the
idea of Paris as the leading city for culture and art.
 -Andre Malraux, (first) French minister of culture, a western
proponent of the decentralization of art and culture by impulse of the
political power.
-Walter Benjamin’s “poetic politics”

-Designed by multinational duo based in London, Italian Renzo Piano

and British architect Richard Rogers who were awarded to the project
in an architectural design competition --- both of whom were very
young, freshly out of architecture school heavily involved with neo-
Avant Garde as well as the Archigram (architectural fantasy)
movement.
-Archigram: an architectural journal started by students in
London that was neo-futuristic, anti-heroic and pro-consumerist,
drawing inspiration from technology in order to create a new reality
that was solely expressed through hypothetical projects. Heavily
involved with movability and structures with flexibility. Meant to
serve a new type of society, a new way of politics and to relate to one
another.
*Influenced by Richard Price, specifically his East London
Fun Palace developed for a theatre with director Joan
Littlewood. Flexible space that could be taken a down
quickly and easily moved. Especially influential to Piano
and Rogers.

-Paris, May 1968: weeklong period of civil unrest –

demonstrations and massive general strikes in Paris and across
France, socialist utopic moment. At its peak, brought the entire French
economy to a halt. Spurred an artistic movement through every
medium, but also violence. --- An important experience for Piano and
Rogers.

-Trying to destroy an elite notion of French culture, a populist

building for the masses to recreate and even institutionalize the social
inversions of May 1968. Idea of not being “fixed”, a fixed monument
-Architectural inversions: high and low, exterior and interior,
social roles, ways of communicating and viewing art

2/23/17
-Berlin in a Cold War world, the bipolar thinking. A “world”
city that became a beacon for western society and capitalism
entrenched deep in Communist East Germany.
 -Berlin Wall as a landmark but equally symbolic as a mental
state. DDR = Communist East Germany

-“Left handed in a right handed society”, sense of un-belonging. Punk

as hybrid of Western and Eastern styles --- “hybridity” in Germany as
it is depicted in geography and style/culture

-“Too much future”: The idea that everything is predetermined,

expanse of fixed ‘nothingness’ as there are no choices to be made.
Prison metaphor, sentenced to life
-“No future”, when there is too much future there is no future.

-To be a Punk meant to unleash happiness --- yearning for creative,

ecstatic experience.

-Eastern modes of Punk Vs. Western modes of Punk:

-Punk to be co-opted, branded, and sold by the west. “How
much revolution can be consumed”...
-Public expression of aesthetics was prosecuted in the east.
Punk becomes an extreme condition that will be politicized because it
was criminalized. Never to be commercialized or passed on.

How does Punk come to the east? --- Through the mix tape cassettes
and bootleg recordings, in the alternative economy, alternative forms
of production and consumption at odds with governing socialist
system. Forced to exist largely in the underground, figuratively and
literally as strange alliance emerges between Punk culture and the
church.
-Formed and meet in the basement spaces of churches, the
physical space attached to the movement in the East. “When you’re a
punk, you cannot be a pop star”

-“Internal exiles”, self exiled from the communist society that

surrounded them
-Punk as an outlet for individual expression in a system that is prided
on the collective. Creates modes of alternative living, to regain a
“future”.

3/2/17
Robert Venturi / Denise Scott Brown: “Learning
From Las Vegas”: Divided architecture into two categories: “The
Duck” and “Decorated Shed”
*Ducks: Evocative buildings that explicitly represent their
function through their construction and shape. Architectural
system of space submerged and distorted by an overall symbolic
form.
*Decorated Sheds: Generic structures with added signs and
decor that denote their purpose. Structure is directly at the
service of the program, and ornament is applied independently.
-Forms the basis for a discourse on post-modern art/architecture–the
embrace of pop art, capitalism, ornamentation, decoration, complexity
and contradiction.

The New York Five, MOMA, 1967 (catalog reissued in 1969, 1975):
Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk, Meier.
-Postmodern group influenced by Venturi and Scott Brown, came to be
known as “The Whites”, all working with whites and Le Corbusier’s
style of ‘Purism’, simple and pure geometric form (i.e. a perfect cube).
-Eisenman most mathematical of the Five: known for I Symmetrical
drawings
-“If they’re using Modern technique and style, what makes them
Postmodern?” ... Of a different time, the notion of missing a mark
-Exaggerated, amplified versions of what they were referencing
/ system of hyperbolized quotations. The attempt to be placed
on a timeline
-Self consciously belated to modernism, isolating motifs of
what they missed and multiplied them. Only being able to quote
and replicate
-Modernism: vacated of any political or leftist ideology,
Postmodern: the act of filling it back up
-Theoretical or clinical study of an old form
-May 1973, five other architects come together to critique The New
York Five, catalog called Five on Five and the intro text called
“Stompin’ at the Savoye”. Led by Robert Stern, the heir of Venturi.
Accused “The Whites” of misreading Le Corbusier, being detached
from culture, and being compulsive with their modernity
-Characterized them as exclusive, European idealists, elitists,
etc.
-Opposed the New York Five, as “The Greys”: American pragmatism,
inclusive, perceptual, and vulnerable. Struggle over who will take the
mantle of Le Corbusier.
Deconstructivist Architecture (MoMA, 1988/89)
-Reaction to Venturi and Robert Stern strand of Postmodernism. It
was an attempt to present an alternative to the conservatism, return
to classical, historical forms and Postmodernism’s
rejection/mitigation of technology.
-Claims to be the more progressive moment. How progressive is a 1.5
million dollar condo?
-Deconstructivists wholly accept the technological --- 7 artists whose
work only slightly resemble each other. MoMA decontextualizes all the
work and yanks them to create an argument about pure form.
“Nightmare form of architecture, contamination between radically
different forms”
-Making simplistic formal analogy not interested nor engaged with
what’s happening in the cities for which these architects are designing
these models.
-Abstraction taking on progressive resources... taking on progressive
politics in the work, though vague and mostly in potential.

3/9/17

Frank Gehry
-Coming out of Neo-Avant Garde and modern work like Duchamp, very
much so concerned with establishing himself as an “artists”.
-Influenced by German expressionist art and architecture – see Bruno
Taut and Hans Scharoun.
-Interested in the concept of found material and incongruity.
-After building the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Gehry’s brand became
extensions or versions of the Bilbao.
* “The Bilbao Effect”: it was an expectation for him to simply
recreate the structure over and over again.

-Architecture’s shift to a currency focus: becoming no longer about

art, but instead about “flow” –– destination architecture.

-Creation of a new cultural capital: the linking of fashion and art...a

consciously exploitative concept: Jeff Koons’ 1997 Puppy Dog in
collaboration with Hugo Boss.

3/16/17
“Seeing has replaced making”

Recording – collecting images as a means of resistance, opening up the

image/image space and releasing it’s revolutionary potential.

“I can gauge the energy of the movement”