Huxtable never let her readers, or anyone else who would listen, forget that architecture is not like the other arts. Paintings or dance performances you choose to see or not see, but architecture envelops us all. Everyone sees and experiences it. Huxtable insisted both that architecture is an art and that it is an art that everybody deserves to enjoy precisely because it constitutes the life of our inhabited places.
Showing posts with label criticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label criticism. Show all posts
HUXTABLE
HANDS ON
Thoughts a Year on from the Supreme Court Opening
- 30 June, 2011
It is not easy to avoid hands when you design a building. A little over a year since the opening of the Supreme Court and the adjacent newly-refurbished Old High Court in Wellington and this much is clear. Step inside the Supreme Court and there in front of you, all over the copper-clad shell of the court room, are handprints. Hundreds of them. Smudged, smeared, but definitely handprints. Curiously though, if you step inside the newly-refurbished Old High Court, a building with 120 years of use, you will struggle to find a mere fingerprint.
From the outside, there is little astonishing about the Old High Court building. Where it once would have boasted harbour frontage, its vista today is crowded out by the high rises of the 1980s which make a mockery of its classical arches and hoods in the name of post-modernism. Amidst this sea of new buildings, it is difficult to spot the relatively modest Old High Court. Instead of opening out to the lively, pedestrian Lambton Quay, the entrance is on the less-used Stout Street: less used, because Stout Street happens to be notorious for its wind funnelling functions – a notoriety difficult to earn in the typically blustery capital.
Despite today’s appearances, in 1881, when the High Court was first opened for a service to justice that would last over a century, the classical masonry building would have been a beautiful rarity. Due to flexibility in earthquakes, the majority of building work being undertaken in Wellington at the time was in timber. In fact, the High Court was the first major masonry building commissioned by the New Zealand Government. Architect P.F.M Burrows referenced a highly academic classical style, imbuing the building with dignified proportions, hooded windows and Corinthian pilasters. With its T-shaped plan and hand-sculpted keystones, the High Court brought an exotic taste of the great Italian architect Antonio Palladio to Wellington.
Yet it is the inside, the curved double stairs leading to the public gallery, the detailed carved timber frieze and the broad judge’s bench which give the building its real value. These dark timber rooms were touched by the hands of judges and defendants, nearly non-stop at times, for over a hundred years.
More after break...
TAXONOMY AND GRACE AND CLOUD ROOMS
Cloud Room / Bing Bu
The Cloud Room designed by Shanghai-based architect Bing Bu sits on the roof terrace of the National Art Museum of China, a historical landmark from the 1960’s in Beijing.
http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/taxonomy-and-grace/
ESSAYING ETHICS
Lothar Baumgarten, Tetrahedron, 1968.
Joshua Fausty at Afterall has written a piece Trinh T. Minh-ha and her critical/creative methodologies which reflect the path that, presently, my thesis is seeming to follow. I've reproduced the whole article here, with my own emphases and notes embedded. You can find a link to the original here. Since I was in a stumbling mode, I also stumbled across Cornelia Lauf's musings On Language and the Public Art of Lothar Baumgarten, a beautiful engaged article with equal pertinence to my questions of critical language and sociality. She includes a favourite quote from Baumgarten which I had near forgotten: 'You cannot reflect your own society, unless you know a society that is remote from it. To know that society, you don't want to walk into it, get a PhD and turn the page. You have to jump into the bushes, almost naked, as I did.'
Trinh T. Minh-ha, Reassemblage, 1982, 16mm film, 40min, stills. Courtesy Moongift Films
Trinh T. Minh-ha Essaying Ethics
Writing's slippery, mysterious, protean quality gives it a freedom and efficacy always tempered by specific social and historical settings. Like speaking, acting and teaching, writing creates contexts - and there is no end to context-making. Trinh T. Minh-ha's essay-writing is a clear example of this: through the performance of feminist, postcolonial and post-structuralist theories of language, subjectivity and power, her work reveals that writing constructs its own contexts, and cannot be trusted to illuminate without confusing, to disclose the truth without concealing it. Trinh's intellectual history and artistic production emerge in and out of a multiplicity of national and disciplinary contexts. Born in 1952 in Vietnam and educated there and in the Philippines, Trinh emigrated to the United States in 1970 where she studied French literature, music and ethnomusicology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Trinh is currently Professor of Women's Studies and Rhetoric (Film) at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work with theory, poetry and experimental film centres around a reflection on language and identity - a reflection that emerges through literary performances, most explicitly developed in her pointedly essayistic essays on art and criticism.1
APPLIANCE HOUSE
Call the Appliance House a sub-urban home turned into a shelter from every kind of consumptive adversity the city is able to muster...each room encloses an accentuated state of normal, everyday, sub-urban living, but the rooms have all changed their ceramic nameplates. Where there used to be the cosy nook with an open fireplace, there is a furnace to suit the pyromaniac within us all. Where there was once a study, in which the Toby jug collection and family sports trophies were displayed, there now exists the Kleptoman Cell, a room given over to the face-to-face confrontation of what it means to have in one's possession any object gleaned by any means, fair or foul
CRITIQUING CRITICISM
The Journal of Architectural Education does a volume on the state of architectural criticism today here.
IDEAL CRITICISM
Post-critical theory suggests that THEORY IS DEAD. I propose to address post-critical theory through a combination of two primary themes: the capacity of architectural criticism to function as critical method, and the development of architectural criticism towards spatial practice.
Drawing in particular on the work of Jane Rendell and John Hejduk on the question of criticism as spatial practice, I will inquire into the status of the architectural object as a site for criticism beyond post-critical thinking.
Two models of architecture-space-writing-criticism which will underly and guide this discussion are:
Henri Lefebrve's triptych of spatial practice, representations of space and spaces of representation and Derrida's parallel triptych of space of writing, space as writing and space as the distance of representation.
It is postulated that the implict idealism of criticism springs from the ambiguity of languge itself. By allowing a slipping of architecture towards critical practice, and criticism into spatial practice, can we 'prevent it [the language of criticism] from becoming the instrument of a sacred rite?' - Manfredo Tafuri
And if so, we find a new way to critique the death of theory as post-critical theory defines it.
Drawing in particular on the work of Jane Rendell and John Hejduk on the question of criticism as spatial practice, I will inquire into the status of the architectural object as a site for criticism beyond post-critical thinking.
Two models of architecture-space-writing-criticism which will underly and guide this discussion are:
Henri Lefebrve's triptych of spatial practice, representations of space and spaces of representation and Derrida's parallel triptych of space of writing, space as writing and space as the distance of representation.
It is postulated that the implict idealism of criticism springs from the ambiguity of languge itself. By allowing a slipping of architecture towards critical practice, and criticism into spatial practice, can we 'prevent it [the language of criticism] from becoming the instrument of a sacred rite?' - Manfredo Tafuri
And if so, we find a new way to critique the death of theory as post-critical theory defines it.
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