SPREAD | ArtCulture » Architecture

A Temple to Godlessness

KisaLala — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:31:50 +0000

Alain de Botton – A Temple for Atheists Image: Thomas Greenall & Jordan Hodgson

The writer, Alain De Botton, famous for his musings on Proust and the nature of happiness, has always had an interest in the way humans are impacted by architectural spaces. De Botton has explored transitional places and the way they affect human emotions – and he has lived in an airport continuously for a week for research on his book A Week At the Airport. But, for his latest project, De Botton has been inspired to create an edifice for atheists to counter the millions of monuments that exist for gods.

For the scores of glorious cathedrals and mosques built by architects there appears to be none that had been built for atheists. Places of worship have been built for Jesus, Mary and for the Buddha, but temples can also be built for love, friendship and calmness…

Alain de Botton – A Temple for Atheists Image: Thomas Greenall & Jordan Hodgson

De Botton intends to build his tower in London at a symbolic height that reflects a scale of 300 million years of life on earth. He explained in the Guardian, “Each centimeter of the tapering tower’s interior has been designed to represent a million years and a narrow band of gold will illustrate the relatively tiny amount of time humans have walked the planet.” De Botton’s idea is to encourage contemplation. He also added, “the exterior would be inscribed with a binary code denoting the human genome sequence.”

Alain de Botton – A Temple for Atheists - Image courtesy of Thomas Greenall & Jordan Hodgson

The Secular Retreat designed by Peter Zumthor, in South Devon for Living Architecture concept for 2012

De Botton has said that he finds Richard Dawkins‘ and Christopher Hitchens’ approach to atheism too aggressive and destructive, and not positively persuasive to people who are just not that interested in religion but not aggressively opposed to it.

He believes that a temple for atheists fits into a tradition of secular places such as Rothko’s chapel. De Botton also manages Living Architecture, which is an organization that invites people to rent and holiday at some of the most innovative spaces designed by contemporary architects, and recently Peter Zumthor has designed a new building for Living Architecture, “Secular Retreat” which will be available to renters later in 2012

Alain de Botton - researching airports

The Balancing Barn, Alain De Botton, Living Architecture

Alain De Botton has a new book out, Religion for Atheists, which poses the idea of whether religions are neither all true or all nonsense – http://www.alaindebotton.com/religion.asp

Detroit – The Ruins of an Empire: A Conversation with Marchand and Meffre

KisaLala — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 17:45:57 +0000

By Kiša Lala

Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, Adams Theater, Detroit

Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre met online in 2002, drawn by their love of contemporary ruins. Meffre was only aged 15 when he met Marchand, and they began visiting ruins in the suburbs of Paris to capture the lost grandeur of old movie theaters and document architecture in decline. In the beginning they took images separately, but after investing in a large format 4×5, they began their collaboration. They spoke to me recently from Paris about their photographic project, “Detroit in Ruins,” published by Steidl in 2010.

Their visions of Detroit are the record of a fallen empire. What makes the duo’s work different from Robert Polidori’s photographs of post-deluge New Orleans and Chernobyl is that their focus is not a record of the aftermath of a natural disaster but of slow decay, caused by neglect. The photographs reveal the exotic in the ordinary and observe what is overlooked: dilapidated habitations, the hidden backs of dwellings, obsolete machinery, utilities in disrepair, the absurdity of once hi-tech systems, the extravagance of architecture devoid of function. The simple poignancy of a disused dentist’s chair seems to reflect on the collective failure of a civilization to rise. But Detroit is only one of many world cities, and these images are universal in their depiction of the fragility of human empire-building.

Working as a team, the photographers have formed a creative bond, sharing a vision so strongly, they tend to finish each others’ sentences in conversation.

I asked, why America? It is a place where old things are replaced quickly, and still a country evolving its sense of antiquity.

“We’d been taking pictures around Paris when we saw images of Detroit,” said Meffre. “It seemed much more a world-city falling apart. In France there were smaller places – but Detroit looked like a ghost town compared with elsewhere.” It was their interest in modern decay that drew them to America. Says Meffre, “It depends on what you are looking for, Americans probably have the best architectural heritage from the 20s. That is the place where big buildings were made. Early American buildings of the 20th century are symbolic in a way you would not find anywhere else.”

In Asia and in developing countries the speed of urban renewal is much faster than in countries with slower economic climates. “Sometimes buildings are around for only 20 years before they are demolished to make something bigger,” continues Meffre, “In Detroit it is the opposite: nothing was rebuilt and very few buildings were made in the 50s – buildings remained derelict, and those that were demolished were replaced by parking lots. It is a very unusual concept of a city.”

Apart from the decline of the automobile industry, Detroit’s story is one of self-destruction that began with its policies of racial segregation. The wealthy whites migrated to the suburbs fleeing the influx of African-Americans seeking economic opportunities, creating a white noose around the increasingly poor black inner-city, choking off funding for its infrastructure and the cultural incentives it needed to survive.

The boom and bust cycles have left architectural residues – collapsing rings around Detroit’s urban sprawl. Still, we rarely let things lie as our civilization constantly looks back on its own traces, reexamining its own recorded past, too busy dissecting and foraging its own history to let things turn into relics. It is rewarding then to see that a few decades of neglect and forgetfulness can reveal such resonant windows into our past.

I asked why they thought the owners of these deserted properties had chosen to forget them. “It depends,” said Meffre, “most of the building owners in downtown are billionaires who own entire blocks. The price went too low, and there were no valuable projects. They were waiting to turn them into condos and new lofts – the owners have been waiting for 30 years…”

They cannot remain vacant forever. I imagined that they would eventually be demolished?

“It might happen in downtown Detroit within a few years,” says Marchand. “Most of the buildings we’ve been to will be converted into luxury condominiums. They try to make rich people from the suburbs move back downtown. But in other areas where they have no money for electricity and rent, they have to close the buildings. So they are sitting empty and decaying, waiting to be demolished or to fall apart.”

On the other hand who can complain when vast tracts of downtown Detroit are being reclaimed by nature. Like the ancient temples of Cambodia the earth always wins against the will of men. The city’s asphalt is cracking open and reverting back to prairie; foxes and deer are making malls and parking lots their new hunting grounds. The green invasion may enable a new vision for urban agriculture.

The pair do extensive research before each trip, and I had wondered how they had come across the dilapidated buildings and gained permission to enter them. “We researched from books,” says Marchand, “and also online Google maps, Bing maps; aerial views where you can find potentially closed buildings. Concerning access, we usually wait for the door to be opened by some scavenger… admits Marchand, wistfully adding that “in Detroit it was just a matter of time [before these buildings disappeared]… Even when Detroit tries to secure them, it will not stay that way for very long.”

They had a similar experience photographing old movie theaters and performance spaces: “It was not possible to modernize or renovate the big theaters. Most of them are sitting there to be developed into a concert hall or a new project but [sometimes] they are too big… In New York, Chicago Los Angeles, it is the same. A lot of them are being demolished.”

In some ways they are modern archeologists, unearthing the forgotten splendors of the past, the abandoned and the discarded leftovers of civilization. Were they interested in going back deeper into the past, to photograph castles and mansions of old Europe?

“Sometimes we go back earlier to the 19th century,” said Meffre. And in Europe they had explored remodeled castles that went back originally to the 16th century: “It is monumental, delusional architecture. [But] we are more interested in the current epoch,” said Romain Meffre.

Though the Detroit premises are largely devoid of people, they remain stained by the lives of those that had inhabited them, which makes them more captivating than the hosed-down artifacts of museum archives. The photographers try to add notes on their histories, their architecture, and function. “We try to find pictures of the place while it was alive just to imagine how it was,” said Meffre, “there are also lots of books concerning how those places were before; and we get a lot of emails from people who tell us they used to live in these places. Quite moving.”

At the Highland Park Police Station they came across blood samples and evidence from the investigation of a Detroit serial-killer who had murdered several women.

So you photograph these remnants, then leave them, and walk away?

“We try – we don’t know what happens – it is on Ebay probably right now… we can find some of the old polaroids being sold on Ebay,” they say, amused by the sudden onset of interest.

Once unearthed, photographed and published, the places are irrevocably changed, and attention can either bring the public’s awareness to the need for preservation, or it can hasten demise. “A lot of the buildings are not very cheap and we hope that some people will buy and restore them,” says Meffre. “Sometimes attempts are made, and at times it doesn’t work. As Detroit is coming back and there is international attention, people will realize maybe there is a lot of heritage buildings and some people want to preserve them – but there just is no money.”

Some of the sites seemed abandoned in a hurry, as though disaster struck mid-day, Pompeiian-style, leaving dusty closets still filled with clothes, kitchens fully stocked, the grand concert halls had suddenly emptied, laboratories appear to be deserted in the midst of experiments. One almost hopes, that like enchanted palaces, they remain buried for another thousand years, preserved as time-capsules for future treasure-hunters to break their spell.

Here is poem that resonates to me on the rise and fall of past ambitions, Shelley’s Ozymandias:

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveler from an antique land  
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
 Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
 Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,  
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,  
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read  
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,  
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
 And on the pedestal these words appear:  
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:  
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
 Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
 Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
 The lone and level sands stretch far away.

View more photographs by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre

Peter Greenaway spices up Leonardo’s Last Supper

KisaLala — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 15:26:59 +0000

By Kiša Lala

Installation view of “Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision By Peter Greenaway” at Park Avenue Armory, on view from December 3, 2010, through January 6, 2011. Photo by James Ewing. Image Courtesy of Park Avenue Armory.

Peter Greenaway’s sound and light dramatization of Leonardo da Vinci’s 1492 painting The Last Supper makes for a breathtaking exhibit inside the monumental interiors of the Park Avenue Armory in New York.

Greenaway’s films, (The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, The Pillow Book among many others) have often encouraged a dialogue between cinema and painting – with nearly two millennia of Western painting and only a century of cinema, Greenway’s work seeks to blend the vocabularies of the two traditions, “To use painting to fix and stabilize and limit and frame the image,” explains Greenaway, “…and to use cinema to make a painting move and change, have a temporal life and have a sound-track.”

Installation view of “Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision By Peter Greenaway” at Park Avenue Armory, on view from December 3, 2010, through January 6, 2011. Photo by Colin Miller. Image Courtesy of Park Avenue Armory.

The Last Supper is not his first installation, and Greenaway has worked on Rembrandt’s 1642 Nightwatch, and Veronese’s 1563, Wedding at Cana– and has future plans of tackling Velasquez’s Las Meninas; nor are his ‘collaborations’ limited to masters of the renaissance as he hopes to work on Picasso’s 1937 Guernica.

To build the installation at the Armory, the painting was ‘cloned’ from the walls of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, where it is on show with restricted viewing because of its fragile condition. A high-resolution scan was made to record the photographic data at 800 dpi and then, after colour-matching, the work was printed on a replica of the original surface. Greenaway then altered the digitized data to animate the painting in incredible detail, adding to the painting’s light sources to create shadow and depth.

Da Vinci’s Last Supper – in which Christ is depicted dining with his disciples at the exact moment just prior to the knowledge of his betrayal – sets up an interesting dynamic of ‘guess-who’ mystery at the dinner table. The lighting adds elements of deceit and drama to the theatrical cast of characters. Greenaway plays with the purported puzzles woven into the painting, the enigmatic constellation of objects – which supposedly conspire and hint at diagrams of the night sky, and he embellishes on the subtext and metaphors in the hand gestures of the dinner guests to create the illusion of a living painting through the rhythm of the accompanying music,

The weight and symmetry of the composition, and Leonardo’s use of two light sources, coincides with Greenaway’s formalist approach to film-making with his emphasis on framing and lighting to animate, examples of which can be seen as far back as in Zed and Two Noughts and most recently in Rembrandt’s Nightwatch.

Greenaway makes the painting come alive, not just with the light but emotionally for the casual or even irreligious spectator, and considering the gaze of the average art viewer is less than 15 seconds, it is remarkable how long one is enthralled by the power of this installation (running at 45 minutes). .

The director’s interest in architecture (for example in The Draughtsman’s Contract) plays a role in the layering and building of the installation to create a riveting architectural cinematic experience.

Greenaway says, “Italian paintings are full of architecture.” Painters from Raphael to Veronese were inspired by architecture. Though at some point after Leonardo’s era, painting overtook the influence and power of architecture, growing beyond just decorative value to dominate past it, But within the island cities of Italy, Greenaway continues, “What these painters saw and experienced and lived in became developed and fantasized, reworked and refashioned, extended and improved, Architecture sheltered paintings of architecture.”

Artist Peter Greenaway in front of his multimedia installation “Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision By Peter Greenaway,” on view at Park Avenue Armory from December 3, 2010, through January 6, 2011. Photo by Colin Miller. Image Courtesy of Park Avenue A

Installation view of “Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision By Peter Greenaway”

A short preview of Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision By Peter Greenaway

Leonardo’s The Last Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway – December 3, 2010- January 6, 2011, Park Avenue Armory

Guerilla Architecture!

KisaLala — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 19:34:59 +0000

Vincent Callebaut Lilypad, A Floating Ecopolis for Climate Refugees, 2008 Digital rendering, dimensions variable © Vincent Callebaut Architectures

Ant Farm's 1969 work, 50×50′ Pillow for the Whole Earth Catalog led to the commission to build the medical tent at Altamont.

By Kiša Lala

The new independent film Space Land and Time: Underground Adventures with Ant Farm, directed by Laura Harrison and Elizabeth Federici is a biography of the renegade architecture outfit Ant Farm that operated in the 60s and 70s counter-culture movement and pioneered the use of many architectural design devices, technologically ahead of their times.

In Europe there were other radical /guerilla architecture organizations around like Archigrams (UK) and SuperStudio (Italy) whose theoretical inventions were then put to practice by AntFarm in the USA. Their subversive, alternative ideas fertilized the possibility of overturning old-habits. As an ‘underground’ collective, Ant Farm, funded most of their own projects and focused on urban designs that were temporary, nomadic and malleable – opposite of the dominant style. They were also exponents of Buckminster Fuller’s assault against the right angles of traditional architecture.

Richard Buckminster Fuller, Shoji Sadao Dome over Manhattan, ca. 1960 Silver gelatine print, 34.9 x 46.7 cm Courtesy: The Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller

Ant Farm (Chip Lord, Doug Michels and Curtis Schreier) Clean Air Pod, 1970 Polyethylene, dimensions unknown Chip Lord, Courtesy Ant Farm

Zaha Hadid, Chanel Mobile Art Pavilion Hong Kong, Tokyo, New York, Paris 2008–2010, New York, Photography © John Linden

Many failed projects and architectural follies now seem more technologically feasible with today’s new plastics and smarter, durable skins. Concepts like Dolphin Embassy a project used to envision one living space for multiple species, in this case, marine and human, can be of potential use to natural history museums. Highly poly-urethaned carved wood molded interiors can be seen as style influences today in Marc Newson’s Aqua Riva speed boat. And Cargo parachutes, supported by wind, used to create living spaces, can be seen as early evolutions of modern inflatables-technology.

Consider other modern day off-shoots of these early precursors in nomadic structures and inflatables such as the Water Cube – Olympic stadium in Beijing, Diller Scofidio’s Bubble, an inflatable event space planned for Hirshhorn Museum, the temporary structures of the Burning Man event, Zaha Hadid’s Chanel mobile art pavilion, and the many pop-up stores and exhibition spaces of today.

Diller Scofidio’s Bubble, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, museum expansion: Washington DC, 2012

Dolphin Embassy, 1974, Drawing, Photo: François Lauginie Courtesy Frac Centre.

More on the history of inflatables and architectural groups: Raumlabor, Ant Farm

The City is My Playground

KisaLala — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 20:28:58 +0000

By Kiša Lala

Still from Kaspar Astrup Schröder’s documentary My Playground

The city is fenced in by walls, carved up by streets, railings and barricades. Paths guide people through the city and prevent them spilling into places outside them. Free-runners transgress spaces off-limits, ascend the sides of dwellings, jump gaps between them. Walls, hurdles, ramparts do not stop them from going through them. Through their bodies the city is made transparent, its skeleton exposed.

Still from Kaspar Astrup Schröder’s documentary My Playground

The animation Virus by Robert Proch, shows patterns of mobility through the city’s corridors.

virus from Robert Proch.

In My Playground (Directed by Kaspar Astrup Schroder), parkour teams from Shanghai and Copenhagen escape through spaces in the city’s architecture.

Says a parkour runner: ‘You don’t stop playing because you grow old, but you grow up because you stop playing.’

MY PLAYGROUND – PREVIEW from KASPARWORKS can be purchased on DVD from http://www.kasparworks.com

Inside SPREAD: Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban, South Africa

Helen — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 20:10:37 +0000