Minoru Nomata

Minoru Nomata is a Japanese artist, he is known for his illustrations of fantastic architectures. Inspired by mythical and archaeological relics to construct these structures, the artist reduces the grandeur of the monuments by using pastel colors, light faded textures and subdued backdrops. Even though he did use shading techniques to convey the 3 dimensional aspect of his work, the ruins are a mix of perspectives and elevations that have this flatness and stillness that only reflects silence and emptiness.

Cement 3D Printing – Anish Kapoor

With the craze of 3D printing for architecture, the British Sculptor has developed a series of cement sculptures. Throughout his creative career, the artist worked on merging sculpture with architecture. In this pproject he created a purpose-built machine that generates form through the integration of digital tools with the qualities of cement.

Visualizing China’s Chongqing by Tim Franco

Tim Franco is a French photographer who is based in China. His photography documents the out of the norm changes that are hitting China, especially with the rise of urban development. Chongqing is one of the largest cities in China that has fallen victim to this world wide spread evolution of the urban. The collection of photographs entitled “Metamorpolis”  follows the city’s transformation by exploring the controversial relationship between its citizens and the urban fabric. These abominable situation was due mainly to the millions of former towns’ people that were hurled from their villages to live in the city. Their own villages were becoming the land of the largest hydro-electric power station of the world. The villagers were thus forced to live and exist in the city- a foreign concept to all of them. As Franco puts it, “My goal was to document how people succeed and adapt when the development of the city around them is just so radical.” He adds “Chongqing may be an extreme character, with its unique landscape and history, but it is the perfect representation of what all of China is experiencing.”. 

Him + Her: Candice Breitz

“Within any consciousness there is a Greek chorus, a mess of intertwined voices” – Candice Breitz.

Candice Breitz, born in 1972, is a South African contemporary video and photography artist. She manipulates video footage and appropriates from popular culture. She’s currently a professor in Berlin where she lives.

The following is an installation video she’s done in 2008 where she manipulates Hollywood movies picking out different characters played by Meryl Streep over the stretch of 1978 to 2008. The characters are cropped out of the movies and brought together as though in an internal conversation. “The resulting narrative [] sees the transformation of the star [] to “her” – gendered stereotypes grappling with introspective [] dialogues.” It is a curious video that sheds light on different aspects of how “She” is perceived in Hollywood movies mainly on the questions of love and marriage. We find these different women, or perhaps the same woman, discussing and the conversation evolves into an argument the flows over different topics related to the female life as per Hollywood’s depiction, which seems to evolve around the woman/wife’s dependance on the relationship with a man/husband. Sometimes the argument breaks out of it but eventually returns back to this dependance on the man/husband.

HER, 1978 – 2008 from Candice Breitz on Vimeo.

Breitz uses cleverly not only words to construct the conversation she depicts to us but also visual similarities which she arranges in specific patterns to magnify the different situations and moments in the conversation.

There is, of course, the counterpart of this installation called “Him” based on characters played by Jack Nicholson, where the dialogue takes on a different turn and sort of swirls down into an overly narcissistic dialogue.

HIM, 1968 – 2008 from Candice Breitz on Vimeo.

Would this be the narrow perspective of Hollywood on male and female characters where one is overly concerned with nothing but themselves while the other’s actions completely depend on their significant other? Breitz gives us the opportunity to at least reconsider by highlighting certain common points that come back in every movie.

The full installation is called “Him + Her” in the format of 14-channel digital video installation. It is currently displayed as part of the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

Vintage Science Fiction: Albert Robida

Science Fiction, amongst other things, goes hand in hand with innovation and science. Therefore it is not a surprise to find it in the 19th century when Europe buzzed and bloomed with science and technology during the industrial revolution. Albert Robida, a French illustrator, etcher, lithographer, caricaturist and novelist, lived during these times from 1848 to 1926. He lived to see some of the advances he had predicted in his work: he “tried to imagine what might happen if the airplane, the submarine, even dynamite and Rontgen rays were developed for use in warfare.”

“Robida imagined a civilization existing on Mars in the article “A la Surface de Mars” in the Journal des Voyages in 1901, although their clothing and telescope – with its intricate, Byantine design – seem to indicate that Robida thought they still had some catching up to do with their technologically advanced neighbors.”

“Un Quartier Embrouille imagines the future of Paris’ red-light district, as this neighborhood of questionable business takes to the air in Robida’s Le Vingtième Siècle.”

“In the 20th century, fish would no longer survive in rivers, and disease-carrying bacteria would poison the air. An all-too-accurate prediction from Robida’s 1890 La Vie Electrique, in which he foresaw the continued rise of the industrialization that had begun to impact on society 50 years earlier.”

“Robida’s imaginative depiction of the military of the future appeared in the 1908 serial La Guerre Infernal. Here we see the Japanese navy and air force. In the same series, he also depicted aircraft and airships over London, prefating the WWII Battle of Britain by over 30 years.”

reference: Sci-Fi Art: A Graphic History by Steve Holland, p. 24-25

The Swallow Fortress: making a memorial

Monuments are an important part of the city’s urban morphology and of a people’s cultural identity. Monuments are symbolic buildings: they are a means of representation and are open to interpretation. They stand for something but are at the same time something in and of themselves. Memorial monument are especially there to provoke emotions by their presence, which then raise personal memories that resonate between the people, bringing them all to the same state of mind, uniting them.

Not too far from the busy capital city’s downtown, on the west bank of river Hrazdan, perched on a hill overlooking Yerevan, stands the Swallow Fortress crowned by a monument stretching over 4500 sqm, built in 1965 for the commemoration of the Armenian Genocide. The building was opened to the public in 1967. After a long debate stretching about 15 years about the possibility of building this monument in a soviet country and debating the candidates’ proposals for the monument, finally young architects Arthur Tarkhanyan and Sashur Kalashyan were chosen to implement their proposal.

Through many funding difficulties and scarcity of materials (mainly of big chunks of basalt stone) and even though there was no patent yet for it to be legal, the construction began without any changes of the project’s initial scale and design sustained only by the willfulness of the two young architects who refused to succumb to any difficulty. As the builders and architects worked together on the illegal site, they kept repeating: “We are building the graves of our grandparents.” Two thirds of the Armenian population had been systematically massacred, drowned, burned… None of them received a proper burial. Crowds of students and professors would come to the construction site to aid. Clearly, the people needed this monument and they worked together to make it happen.

During the excavations for the construction, there were found urns from the Urartian era, pointing out that the location that the architects had chosen to erect the monument was already an ancient cemetery. The mood on site became even graver if it ever could have.

Before the monument at the Swallow Fortress, the people went to the cemetery to seek Gomidas, a well known priest and artist (musicologist, composer, singer, choirmaster) who developed a severe case of post-traumatic stress disorder after witnessing atrocities done to his people. Every year, for 50 years, the Armenians silently flocked to his grave seeking a place to mourn the big wound left in them. The memorial would be built 50 years after the massive massacres took place. Ever since, during the commemoration of the genocide on April 24th, the masses that march up hill towards the monument, pass through the basalt pillars and place their flowers around the eternal fire and continue down hill.

No ornaments disturb the blank surface of the 12 slanting basalt pillars representing the 12 lost Armenian provinces. This blankness stresses the gravity of what the pillars represent. At their center burns the eternal fire in memory of the 1 and a half million who perished. Not far from them stands the memorial column, sectioned into two columns measuring 50 meters in height, darting towards the sky. At first it was clad by charcoal-ed stainless steel to mimic stone but this was later dismantled and replaced by black granite in the 1970s. The structure was strong enough to withstand the earthquake that hit Armenia in 1988. As for the proportions of the pillars and column, they are based on the same proportional scales used for planing Armenian churches.The interpretation of these structures is left to what they whisper to the visitors’ souls.

reference: Rouzan Khachanyan

London at night: the metropolis series

“Lewis Bush wandered the streets of London to shoot these distorted photographs of new construction sites and high-rises, which he believes are causing his home city to “fade slowly away”” [He] spent two months wandering London at night, stopping whenever he came across a new high rise or construction site. He took multiple exposures of half-finished architecture, creating gritty labyrinths of endless steel and glass.”

The overlaying play of light and dark showcase the rhythmic modularity of the structures of buildings or soon to be buildings still under construction. Through the lens of the artist, these modules are abstracted and through the abstraction they are highlighted.

reference: dezeen, wired photo

The unobtainable now crushing into us: Simon Birch

Simon Birch is a contemporary painter and multimedia artist from the United Kingdom and was born in 1975, with Polish and Armenian heritage. He currently is a permanent resident of Hong Kong, China.

His work seems to be an interesting mix between the current hyperrealism movement (which is the production of paintings with an even more clear depiction than a photographic picture) and the juxtaposition of paint color patches next to each other eventually forming and shaping the depiction as was common practice with the Modernist artists (ranging from impressionists like Cezanne to cubists like Picasso).

“Although much of his work is and has been large, figurative oil paintings, over the last few years Birch has ventured into film and installation work. [These] include film, paintings, installation, sculpture, and performance housed in specifically configured spaces.”

“Birch is interested in universal ideas of transition, the ambiguous moment between an initiation and a conclusion, the unobtainable now and the future, inevitably crashing towards us. For Birch these ideas translate easily from oil paint, to film, to installations, which engage with myth, history, circus and science fiction, connection and disconnection. He chooses to explore these themes in an enveloping environment of theater and spectacle, where the process of viewing becomes experiential: overwhelming and complex, yet as spectacle and adventure, also approachable. Birch’s work has been featured and reviewed in many international publications including Artforum, The Guardian, The International Herald Tribune, Time Out and the New York Times.”

 

references: wikipedia, thisiscolossal, FutureIndustries,

 

The Useless Space: Abandoned Potentials

 

A lot of times we find ourselves fascinated by abandoned buildings. The buildings tragically lay around with their impressive structures in decay. They are either buildings that are located outside of the city like factories or power plants or they are located within it… In some cases, even whole cities can be abandoned due to catastrophes or lack of work etc. There are many vital flows that keep a city going and, through it, buildings going. When the flow moves, much like the flow of a river, the abandoned river bed that was been left behind is not only a representative of the past river, but also something new carved into the space network in which we navigate: new and now purposeless. Purposeless means only one thing: infinity of possible purposes. In turn, this means that reusing these new spaces is not only a brave act towards sustainability, but also an access to these possibilities. Mostly we find ourselves lingering on the environmental benefices of reusing and recycling but this is only the one side of the coin that leads to reclaiming the abandoned, the rejected and the waste. The other side of the coin which links back the abandoned, the rejected and the waste back into the social flow of desirables is this new potential of use that is automatically activated when the former use of the object is erased. The object that was created for a purpose and which is now devoid of this use, i.e., useless, in its uselessness, dips into the immense possibility of  uses that it can now take on. It is now an object full of possibilities, potentials and intensities. It is similar to a raw material in its array of possibilities except that it is happening on a whole new level: it is not the same as metal ore because an object that is abandoned/rejected/a waste has many dimensions that are set. It already has a structure, a shape, a color/materiality and dimensions and it is in those that its new potential lay and not only in its raw materiality. The structure/shape/dimension/materiality that are abandoned/rejected/a waste are now ready to be used differently, they are open for new suggestions and new interpretations and therefor for unexpected and new spatial experiences: designing a space or in fact any other object does not only rely on the premise of what a material can achieve or what volumetric design can achieve. Design relies on determined premises whatever their number or nature. The more interesting the premises, the more creative the designed object can become. When we are tackling an object that has a structure/shape/dimension/materiality  these become part of the premises of the upcoming design that is meant to reintegrate these abandoned/rejected/wastes back into the flow of the social life. As such, they will guide the design’s unfolding in the same way that the design guides them back to society, to usefulness and to reintegration into the urban. A smart architect or designer is the one who can unlock fully the now raw potential of the abandoned/rejected/waste.

There are many examples today of adaptive-reuse of spaces and of recycling objects from trash that suddenly re-become desirable by society after hacking into the object’s potential. Alterations and new layers over the abandoned/rejected/waste can naturally either work, work exceedingly well or fail to work completely but that depends solely on the ability of the architect/designer because the potential is always there. In other words, adaptive-reuse is not only a way to keep historical buildings and to be sustainable and responsible towards our environment, but also a way to design spaces that would not have been possible without the premises of the existing buildings, without the potential that they offer.

If we rethink adaptive reuse from the point of view of functionality and design this time, we can notice that every building, as we design them for specific functions, we’re also making an object that can one day fulfill its functionality and become useless: a well of infinite uses waiting to be unlocked. This is probably one of the more intriguing and fascinating things about buildings in general but especially in buildings that showcase this well of potentials: the abandoned buildings.

Can we keep the old brick building? – MoMA P.S.1

Every enclosed space we usually encounter has a specific use or function. These enclosures were indeed made to enclose these functions. However, it doesn’t mean that every enclosure in turn doesn’t possess the ability to transcend, the ability to be reinterpreted, rethought and remade into an enclosure that inhabits a different function, alien to the previous one and completely unintended for it. Such is the case of contemporary museum of art MoMA P.S.1 in New York City.

The abandoned structures of a public school (P.S.) was converted into an art hub by Alanna Heiss in 1976 and after raising the necessary amount of money, in 1997 Frederik Fisher and David W. Prendergast implemented an adaptive-reuse design onto the existing school, which by incident was the first public school in Long Island. The architect’s intervention on the old school building is minimal, which clearly shows the respectful approach to the historic building however, the intervention to the building is crucial: the simple banner stating P.S. 1 makes the building visible to all and the minimalistic concrete entrance links the street to the building with a natural flow. With these simple gestures, the architect was able to replug the building to the city and revive it. Today, P.S.1 caters for young architects and artists as MoMA’s contemporary art branch in New York. P.S.1’s mission is to act as “a catalyst and an advocate for new ideas, discourses, and trends in contemporary art.”reference: MoMA PS1, Frederik Fisher Architects