http://www.wazeone.com wazeone Sat, 17 Dec 2011 21:05:58 +0000 http://www.wazeone.com en http://www.wazeone.com/Sofia-s-Metro-20 http://www.wazeone.com/following/wazeone.com/Sofia-s-Metro-20 Sat, 17 Dec 2011 21:05:58 +0000 wazeone 2431631 Infrastructural Iterability and its Architectural Denouement <img src="http://payload6.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/2431631/splash_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="320" width_o="1000" height_o="500" src_o="http://payload6.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/2431631/splash_o.jpg" align="left" /> The addition of an underground station in any urban context is both infrastructurally trans-formative and aesthetically foundational to the expansion of a new urban district. This project posits the assertion that an expansion to the Sofia Metro requires an architectural gesture that both confronts the city on the scale of an urban gesture and at the scale of the pedestrians who are to interact with it. The site occupies a curious position on what appears to be an edge of the city, though its municipal intentions denote the presence of a new bi-lateral axis. Embedded into the urban context is an architectural figure which responds to and provides a solution for the new metro hub. Largely underground, the figure is stratified into two layers: one at the urban scale (infrastructure) by way of an attenuated pedestrian passage way which folds the urban fabric to an intermediate level which grants access to the subway station proper, and one at the scale of the city (pedestrian) by strategically placed fragments which connect two larger pavilions at either end of the given site. The overall composition is that of an agitated and contorted cross which is articulated (and responds differently) to the three different levels it occupies. [w/ Daniel Markiewicz] <img src="http://payload6.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/2431631/1_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload6.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/2431631/1_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload6.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/2431631/2_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload6.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/2431631/2_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload6.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/2431631/3_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload6.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/2431631/3_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload6.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/2431631/4_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload6.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/2431631/4_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload6.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/2431631/5_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload6.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/2431631/5_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload6.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/2431631/6_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload6.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/2431631/6_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload6.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/2431631/7_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload6.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/2431631/7_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload6.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/2431631/8_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload6.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/2431631/8_o.jpg" align="left" /> http://www.wazeone.com/New-Tower-of-Babylon http://www.wazeone.com/following/wazeone.com/New-Tower-of-Babylon Fri, 17 Jun 2011 01:36:38 +0000 wazeone 1604877 Gestural Autonomy, Informal Verticality <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1604877/splash_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="320" width_o="1000" height_o="500" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1604877/splash_o.jpg" align="left" /> "Everyone who has ever built anywhere a 'new heaven' first found the power thereto in his own hell." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche How architecture inhabits the “ground”, or what constitutes the ground for architecture has been an obsession for the discipline since its inception, with the last major investigation of this complex coinciding with the recession of the 1970s and somewhat apocalyptic, yet highly speculative works by Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, Raimund Abraham, and Aldo Rossi. Perched somewhere between the architectural visions of Piranesi and Malevich, these images of “Babylon” suggest the notorious two-way street architecture represents; albeit, a dialectical struggle between architecture’s relationship to instrumentalized orders (for which it is often condemned) and its gestural autonomy, the latter – arguably – the address for the most salient investigations of the object/subject relations embedded in Architecture proper. The vertical and horizontal axes of architectural production coincide with the same in cultural production; a critique perhaps originating in theories of hegemony, but a theory of formal operations that both underwrite and negate architecture’s co-optation by authorized narratives (cultural apparatuses that elide as much as they reveal). Yet artistic autonomy (as artistic volition) should not eliminate or eviscerate History per se, but, instead, suggest its apotheosis as Spirit (a fully speculative vision of the world beyond all dialectical operations, or, per Hegel, at the End of History). The figure of the Tower of Babylon has been perhaps most perfectly articulated by Brueghel; as a ruin in the process of construction (an always incomplete “project” in the sense of the “intellectual project”). This tower cuts two ways at once: heavenward and toward hell. The figure effectively resides at the crossroads of architectural representation and architectural hubris; en route to the ultimate confrontation with Architecture’s repressions – these repressions always being the same repressions, or the evocation of the singular object of architecture at the expense of everything else. ~Gavin Keeney . <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1604877/7-1_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1604877/7-1_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1604877/7-0_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1604877/7-0_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1604877/1_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1604877/1_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1604877/2_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1604877/2_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1604877/3_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1604877/3_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1604877/4_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1604877/4_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1604877/5_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1604877/5_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1604877/6_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1604877/6_o.jpg" align="left" /> http://www.wazeone.com/Visualizations http://www.wazeone.com/following/wazeone.com/Visualizations Tue, 29 Mar 2011 02:34:39 +0000 wazeone 1222406 Exercises in Reality <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1222406/_splash_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="320" width_o="1000" height_o="500" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1222406/_splash_o.jpg" align="left" /> "It is not true that in order to live one has to believe in one's own existence. There is no necessity to that. No matter what, our consciousness is never the echo of our own reality, of an existence set in "real time." But rather it is its echo in "delayed time," the screen of the dispersion of the subject and of its identity - only in our sleep, our unconscious, and our death are we identical to ourselves. Consciousness, which is totally different from belief, is more spontaneously the result of a challenge to reality, the result of accepting objective illusion rather than objective reality. This challenge is more vital to our survival and to that of the human species than the belief in reality and in existence, which always refers to spiritual consolations pertaining to another world. Our world is such as it is, but that does not make it more real in any respect. "The most powerful instinct of man is to be in conflict with truth, and with the real." ~ Jean Baudrillard ...under [constant] construction... <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1222406/1_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1222406/1_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1222406/2_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1222406/2_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1222406/3_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1222406/3_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1222406/church_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1222406/church_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1222406/earthquake_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1222406/earthquake_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1222406/AFG_SQ_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1222406/AFG_SQ_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1222406/room cracks with books_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="480" width_o="1000" height_o="750" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1222406/room cracks with books_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1222406/factory_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="400" width_o="1200" height_o="750" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1222406/factory_o.jpg" align="left" /> http://www.wazeone.com/In-Search-of-an-Iranian-Modernism http://www.wazeone.com/following/wazeone.com/In-Search-of-an-Iranian-Modernism Fri, 25 Mar 2011 22:32:29 +0000 wazeone 1215768 2009 SOM Prize: Travel Fellowship <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1215768/_splash_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="320" width_o="1000" height_o="500" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1215768/_splash_o.jpg" align="left" /> Abstract Modernism, here to be discussed as an architectural style and way of rethinking the tropes of 19th century design, theory and criticism, spread wider and deeper in the international arena than architectural history cares to remember. Far beyond the canonical works of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Adolf Loos, and Alvar Aalto, exists another realm within which modernism flourished; for Iran, the middle of the twentieth-century saw great influence and exchange with the west – most notably in the realm of architectural design. Presently there is little to no published material that covers the great architecture of this period in Iran. My preliminary research and conversations with colleagues in Iran have yielded several architects whose work deserves to be uncovered and documented. The key figure whose work I wish to detail is Seyhoon Houshang. Born in 1920, Houshang was educated at Tehran University under the guide of Maxime Siroux and continued his training at the Beaux-Arts academy in Paris, where he would later become professor. In working correspondence with Alvar Aalto and Le Corbusier, and ideologically affiliated with the International Style, Seyhoon was commissioned in the pre-revolutionary period for a wide variety of projects, most of which in honor of important cultural figures throughout the country. Although not uniquely affiliated with a purely Persian (rather than Greco-Roman) discourse, Seyhoon offers an interesting insight into the struggles of an architect attempting to infuse the principles ascertained by the Western canon within a lineage that is, on many levels, its contested other. I believe that regardless of the great cultural experience a trip to Iran would provide, recovering one of its architecturally most significant icons and documenting the countless projects within his oeuvre will help diversify the profession’s conception of the Modern movement. Instead of excluding this non-Western historiography on the basis of essentialized difference, as Western modernity has created and preserved the conviction that the non-Western world exists only as modernity’s other, the long-term ambition for this project is to reveal one of the many lost facets of Modernist architecture. Itinerary <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1215768/map_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1215768/map_o.jpg" align="left" /> Projects: 1- Meidan e Azadi (Azadi Square) – Tehran 2- Magbarat Al Shoaram Monument - Tabriz 3- Ohadi Maragheh Pavilion - Maragheh 4- Tomb of Bo Ali Sina – Hamedan 5- Tomb of Baba Taher - Hamedan 6- Nader Shah Mausoleum – Mashad 7- Ferdowsi Museum (+ Park and Memorial) - Tous 8- Tomb of Attar - Neyshabour 9- Khayam Memorial - Neyshabour Excerpt of Travel Report The following day I took a bus to the city of Tous to visit the tomb of the ancient poet Hakim Abu’l Qasim Ferdowsi, writer of the great ancient Persian ‘National Epic.’ The site of the memorial is rather plain – a typical neo-classical structure situated in the middle of a traditional beaux-arts style garden, elongated vistas and symmetrical flora and all. This paled in comparison to a small museum on the site for which Seyhoon was also responsible. A modest one-story construction of rough concrete, this rather small project was full of formal complexity and swagger. Only after walking around its outer perimeter and entering it do you realize it is merely an agitated nine-square in plan that is disrupted as it grows vertically. Each of the twelve outer segments of the nine-square are separated and transformed – elongated, bent, rotated, or further fragmented – to create a symphony of partial-walls that come together to enclose the interior volume. The four columns that frame the central void (or central bay of the nine-square) are conceptually split, doubling each column and creating what looks like a chamfered square if you trace them. Circulation is pushed to the center of the remaining eight bays, similar to that of Palladio’s Villa Rotunda. Everything from artificial lights to skylights, partitions and furniture, are built into the architectural form. The exterior of the building is very austere and cold, strategically hiding any fenestration to create a less direct one-to-one reading of the interior to the exterior. I would be curious to know more about the project’s conception, from a purely formal point of view; it is truly the most contemporary structure I have seen throughout my time here in Iran. This is also Seyhoon’s most “architectural” project; there is a clear sense of interior and a less whimiscal - less figurative - space is the result. Where as the work we have seen thus far (lesser so with Nader Shah) seems to be a radical (modern) reinterpretation of traditionalism, this building, I believe, is Seyhoon’s most ‘critical’ - not to overuse an already exhausted word - project. It is most emblematic of his architectural hand and the most signfiicant from a discplinary point of view. Overall there is something very raw about this work which is the reason why it’s more accessible on an analytic level. I feel better equipped to dissect this project because it recalls my graduate training and is the most ‘normative’ of Seyhoon’s body of work. <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1215768/1_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1215768/1_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1215768/2_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1215768/2_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1215768/3_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1215768/3_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1215768/4_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1215768/4_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1215768/5_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1215768/5_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1215768/6_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1215768/6_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1215768/7_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1215768/7_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1215768/8_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1215768/8_o.jpg" align="left" /> http://www.wazeone.com/Opulence-and-Excess http://www.wazeone.com/following/wazeone.com/Opulence-and-Excess Thu, 24 Mar 2011 04:05:48 +0000 wazeone 1212925 Architecture of the Techno-Romantic Yale School of Architecture: Mark Foster Gage Investigating issues of beauty and aesthetics, this seminar focused on valorizing the current theoretical discussions in this arena through a series of design problems. In turn, my interest lay in capitalizing on the Kantian notion of beauty to produce images compelling enough to dismiss the pragmatic concerns of architecture. <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212925/1_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="320" width_o="1000" height_o="500" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212925/1_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212925/2_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="320" width_o="1000" height_o="500" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212925/2_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212925/3_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="320" width_o="1000" height_o="500" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212925/3_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212925/4_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="320" width_o="1000" height_o="500" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212925/4_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212925/5_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="320" width_o="1000" height_o="500" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212925/5_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212925/6_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="320" width_o="1000" height_o="500" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212925/6_o.jpg" align="left" /> http://www.wazeone.com/_A-City-Apart http://www.wazeone.com/following/wazeone.com/_A-City-Apart Thu, 24 Mar 2011 03:54:31 +0000 wazeone 1212840 The New Industrial City Yale School of Architecture: Alan Plattus <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212840/_splash_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="320" width_o="1000" height_o="500" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212840/_splash_o.jpg" align="left" /> Avoiding the urge to normalize, or naturalize, the relationship between the site and the fabric of the surrounding city, this project - centered around the abandoned 'Public Place' - exposes the troubled history of the site and presents the 'ground' as both a physically inaccessible site undergoing remediation and a visually surveyable, polluted terrain. Hence, the project focuses specifically on the boundary conditions of the intervention, creating two programmatic nodes to the north and south of the central, elevated spine while also including urban "ha-ha's" to the west and a new Public Place to the east. [w/ Jack Brough] <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212840/0_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212840/0_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212840/0a_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212840/0a_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212840/0b_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212840/0b_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212840/1_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212840/1_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212840/2_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212840/2_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212840/3_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212840/3_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212840/a_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212840/a_o.jpg" align="left" /> <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212840/e_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="640" width_o="1000" height_o="1000" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1212840/e_o.jpg" align="left" /> http://www.wazeone.com/Counter-Modernism http://www.wazeone.com/following/wazeone.com/Counter-Modernism Wed, 23 Mar 2011 18:11:26 +0000 wazeone 1209913 TBD (forthcoming, TBD) "Counter Modernism: Tradition, Contradiction, Synthesis" <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1209913/_splash_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="320" width_o="1000" height_o="500" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1209913/_splash_o.jpg" align="left" /> "There is a mode of vital experience – experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life’s possibilities and perils – that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will call this “modernity.” Modern environments and experience cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology; in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity; it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish." ~ Marshall Berman The year 1978 marked the beginning of the emergence of what is referred to as “crisis tendencies” in Iran’s economy, diplomacy, and its practices in the realms of art and architecture. The perils of the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq conflict that followed froze all strata of progress. A dramatic decline in both capital goods and domestic output; technological isolationism; the lack of foreign productive and human capital due to war and its absorption of scarce resources; and a divided socio-political class structure were the results of these conflicts, external to, yet not exclusive of, oil and the desecularization of national politics. In the aftermath of the turmoil of the 1980s, Iran inherited an outmoded, dysfunctional, noncompetitive, and bankrupt industry – and the artistic and intellectual classes were the first to suffer. A handful of architects have had the opportunity to work within such a tumultuous political landscape; while some benefited professionally – most notably Giuseppe Terragni, under the rubric of rationalism in interwar Italy – others, such as Iranian-born modernist Houshang Seyhoun, were repudiated at the hand of political atrophy and are slowly being lost in the ether of history. The proliferation and importation of Western ideas was free under the Shah Reza Pahlavi’s Iran (1941-1979), with the country enjoying a vibrant and progressive architectural discourse. Victor Gruen developed a proposal for Tehran’s master plan in 1967, Moshe Safdie translated his experimental Habitat in Montreal to provide for low-income housing outside of Esfahan, and the likes of I. M. Pei, Louis Kahn, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown, and Jaquelin Robertson were invited to work on the country’s burgeoning capital. In the late 1970s to the early 1980s, as architecture struggled through the stylistic crusade of postmodernism, a period that roughly coincides with the establishment of Iran’s Islamic Republic, which was instituted on April 1, 1979 (shortly after the return of Ayatollah Khomeini from Paris on February 1, 1979), artistic freedom and progress in Tehran ground to a halt and was amputated overnight. Revolution, war, censorship, and a fear of Western influence diluted the development of built form from both a theoretical/experimental level in academia and in practice. Few new works were commissioned thereafter, and those that were, were built by the hand of the state. The authorized institutional origins of architecture, in the Foucauldian sense, came full circle – the relatively open years of Western domination and the Shah’s repressive regime transformed over the course of the revolution into reactionary xenophobia. Yet, in terms of critique, it is one continuous process, as Antonio Gramsci would see the repression that followed the Renaissance, or others would see the Terror as part of the French Revolution. I. Forms of Autonomy "Many here [in the West] and some in Iran are waiting for and hoping for the moment when secularization will at last come back to the fore and reveal the good, old type of revolution we have always known. I wonder how far they will be taken along this strange, unique road, in which they seek, against the stubbornness of their destiny, against everything they have been for centuries, something quite different." ~ Michel Foucault Developmentalist discourse in the 20th century incorrectly promoted the modern-traditional binary, effectively separating and polarizing the two, an approach crucial to the historical ethos of imperialist colonization. Modernity – as a tangible reformation in the arts, politics, and society – became an operative logic by which to separate the savage from the civil – to overthrow a native modus operandi in search of one that equally values economic (materialist) developments (and concomitant exploitation), which are often derivative of culturally constructed axioms. Modernization has largely become subsumed by the West’s paranoid need to serve its own hegemony; yet, the reality is that modernity’s history and its lineage should be both nonlinear and autonomous, effectively evading exploitation and capitalist appropriation. Especially in the last decade, the developing nations of the Second and Third World have emerged as sites for anti-intellectual movements, ¬ both socially and politically, clearly declaring that the path to modernization in the “developing” world has differed, and will continue to differ, from that of its Western neighbors. It is the destruction of autocthonous cultures and regimes (homegrown economic-cultural systems) and the banality of the apparatus of modernity (transnational capital and its appurtenances, inclusive of architecture as commodity) that is at the base of much of the rebellion worldwide against the last vestiges of colonial hubris. Modernity, as an overarching humanist project, needs to be critiqued differently. The binary logic of ‘one’ to ‘another’ is no longer adequate in processing the multi-variable make-up of a civilization; a broad in-between exists which poses the question, ‘How is it Modern?’ rather than simply falling back on the antecedental, ‘Is it Modern?’ It must be understood as a conglomerate of inter-related and co-dependent movements which allow for modernization in varying degrees. Crucial to the thesis of this essay is the need to unravel the multiple threads of Modernism as it has existed in Iran. The modern movement in pre- and post-revolutionary Iran cannot be adequately discussed without a firm understanding of the specificities which allowed it to occur, in whatever forms it could. Various weak concessions were implemented toward the end of the century with no substantial outcome until, finally, an expedition led by Englishman William D’Arcy led to the discovery of the first Middle-Eastern oil field in the Ahwaz region of Western Iran, with the contract for exclusive rights to the exploration, production, and refinement negotiated between 1901 and 1908. Shortly thereafter a new enterprise, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) began operations for the extraction and refinement of oil, the first production of which began in 1912 and preemptively encouraged the British Empire to switch from coal to oil in the precursory shifts in industry prior to World War I. As such the still nascent British Petroleum (BP) saw vindication practically overnight – not without its price. As sole oil concessionaire, BP devoted an immense amount of its resources in maintaining and operating within Iran; “retarded in the development of its non-oil economy, labyrinthine in its politics, gripped by conflicting forces of tradition and modernization, this unfathomable country of seemingly inexhaustible oil reserves commanded and absorbed” the company’s attention to such a degree that equivalent investments and projects elsewhere were deemed impossible. The nationalization of Iran’s foreign productive capital was the preemptive step toward high modernization – it was thought to mean “channeling profits” (which, for national and international reasons, were exaggerated) “into national coffers,” yet according to historian Robert Graham, “no one had any real idea what nationalization meant or entailed.” The reality was that the entire economic fabric of the country was negotiated, structured, and operated from completely outside of its political and geographical boundaries. The technology and skilled labor required for the extraction and refinement of oil came from abroad, and the marketing of both crude and refined products was in the hands of an international cartel (later dubbed the Seven Sisters). In effect, Iran, its natural resources, and the wide range of goods and services that existed under oil’s umbrella, including the education of workers, were controlled by an international market whose interests were totally exterior to that of the country. The Iranian state developed during the early years of the oil industry without a coherent and systematic economic ideology; after 1925, when Reza Kahn became king, somewhat misadvised state initiatives went “towards the creation of a ‘national economy’ by providing the basic politico-legal and infrastructural requirements of a modern economy” and were interrupted in their accession between both world wars. During World War II, direct foreign investment in Iran, a much needed exigency for the development of a rentier state, was reduced, yet the country was empowered because of its geographic proximity to Europe, the former Soviet Union and the East and its abundance of natural resources. But as a result of channeling state and private initiatives toward an almost strictly oil-based export economy, revitalization in non-oil markets was improbable, if not impossible, and led to structural weaknesses in the Iranian economy. British muscle and influence left almost none of the affluence afforded by Iran’s oil fields for the country itself. With the global depression in the ‘30s, Britain’s role and accumulated wealth in the oil-markets of Iran faltered. Wild fluctuations in profit-margins for the Iranian government combined with a general disdain for Western imperialism and exploitation – namely by one of Iran’s foremost political philosophers, Mohammad Mossadegh (1882-1967) – led, in turn, to an uneasy détente with the West. Mossadegh called for the wholesale nationalization of the oil industry. BP stood to lose the most in Iran’s restructuring plans; even after they annulled contractually agreed upon concessions for the next quarter-century, Iran was able to demand further renegotiations due partially to the fact that both the natural resource were clearly their own (within their natural borders) and the British were at their mercy due to poor managerial decisions reflected by a lack of diversification in industrial development. More importantly, a renewed Russian interest gave Iran the necessary bargaining chip; the Cold War and the Great Game effectively merged after World War II. Nationalization officially occurred, after a series of sanctions were implemented and then removed (as hollow threats by the West) on Iranian oil. As Iran’s ties grew stronger with the Soviet Union, the US joined Great Britain in its quest to topple the newly rebellious, semi-autonomous, nationalist government of Mossadegh. An American-aided coup under the authority of Winston Churchill and Dwight D. Eisenhower, codenamed Operation Ajax, to overthrow and reinstate the formal power of the monarchy in 1953 ousted all opposition to the monarchy in the postwar period; the United States “directly intervened to restructure the Middle Eastern oil industry, not only towards increased concessionary access for the US oil companies, but also in terms of geographical reorganization of the world oil markets and the allocation of the thus determined aggregate Middle Eastern exports amongst the various oil-exporting countries.” As such, Iran, now under the rule of American-backed Shah Pahlavi, sought to reassert its independence: for the first time the country began negotiating its own terms with other private institutions, marking the beginning of “new style” oil deals that became important precursors to the creation of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1960. The new organization enabled the West to maintain power over oil-related diplomacy. A renationalized (however, not truly modernized) Iran now had the flexibility and capital to work semi-autonomously toward internal development. For the Shah, modernization was almost purely economical: “a process of reform which helped change Iran from an agrarian-based, pre-industrial capitalist society to a semi-industrialized, capitalist society ready to be integrated into the world economic system.” However, the country was unable and unwilling to completely expel its foreign investors because it still lacked the technical expertise and operational skills necessary to maintain its oil fields. Although Iran had full control over its natural resources, OPEC maintained a relatively high profile, benefiting as a cartel as oil prices climbed worldwide. The reality, however, was that the so-called “real power, and the real locus of Iran’s continuing dependence,” contrary to all the rhetoric of full independence, was to be found in the companies that controlled distribution to the world markets to which Iran exported its oil. Ultimately these transnational organizations, however much dependent on the producer states in terms of the actual goods, maintained reciprocal power by acting as intermediaries between the production of those goods and regulating their pricing and distribution in the marketplace. Bitter resentment toward opaque and perpetually reformist foreign policies ushered in the beginning of multiple, often conflicting, resistance movements from all corners of Iran. The imperial regime (the Western-sponsored and brokered Kingdom of Iran), once peaceful and open, became totalitarian in response to the many reactionary groups that opposed a Westernizing Iran. This brief history is important insofar as it defines the foundations that enabled some facets of modernization to occur: a boom in technological advancements and a newly trained working class, which both allowed for and sustained the sharp rise of international influence in private economic redevelopment and the consequent proliferation of consumer goods to the populace. Due to its role in geopolitics after World War II, Iran’s path to modernity swiftly changed course and followed, albeit a few steps behind, the tracks of its Western business partners. Without any other cultural recourse, its people were immediately forced to adapt to a new social model – one that ultimately antagonized their traditional cultural values through creeping Westernization. The post-coup period was characterized by intellectuals as one of degeneration: “Thus in an age of republicanism, radicalism, nationalism, the Pahlavis appeared in the eyes of the intelligentsia to favor monarchism, conservatism, and Western imperialism.” As per usual, the US exported its most egregious forms of economic-political largess – the conversion of citizens to consumers, the construction of a working class to support the apparatus of industrial capitalism, and the arming and training of the military and police to maintain order. II. Forms of Resistance "What does need to be remembered is that narratives of emancipation and enlightenment in their strongest form were also narratives of integration not separation, the stories of people who had been excluded from the main group but who were now fighting for a place in it. And if the old and habitual ideas of the main group were not flexible or generous enough to admit new groups, then these ideas need changing, a far better thing to do than rejecting the emerging groups." ~ Edward Said The rise of the Iranian Left – that is, the broadly categorized anti-imperialist political guerrillas who garnered influence after the fall of Mossadegh – garnered support from a vast number of very different social groups, including lower-class youth, the professional middle class, women, and the intellectual and artistic vanguards. A true crisis of cultural identity and anomie, however, emerged as a result of the arrogant and deeply conservative political machine that would come into power in 1979 with the Revolution, amplifying what the people perceived as social and cultural alienation and displacement. The fact that this “revolution” was sponsored by years of repression was not lost on most observers. The flickering oscillation between the desire for an autonomous passage toward a non-Western modernity (a vague sense of cultural autonomy and resistance to imperial and late-colonial regimes of control and exploitation) and the imposition of an externally driven Eurocentric ideal (the equally vague and pernicious social-democratic ideals of Europe) foreshadowed what was to become an explosive political reform during the 1979 revolution. What may be understood as the genesis of modernization, the principles of the Enlightenment and its consequent universalization, began unraveling in Iran; this cultural crisis “compelled progressive intellectuals to espouse a critical attitude and to look for local answers,” at once shifting the paradigm of progress toward an internal historical resuscitation. Artists and intellectuals alike turned to Iran’s rich cultural heritage for answers; this return to romanticism and nostalgia offered new thinkers – most notably Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Ali Shari’ati, whose movement symbolized the term Gharbzadegi (Westoxification) – a means to react against the Western-centered project of modernity. What it meant to be developed, yet not simply be a reproduction of an alien model, generated a new foundation by which to critique modernization. The evermore autocratic state, ignorant of the critical need for cultural and social development, as well as economic and political reform, allowed for “modernization in some spheres of life,” but without “a resulting ‘modernization’” in political-cultural terms (that is, the edicts of centralized power favored only those forms of modernization that reinforced that power). How, then, is this fissure to be understood? Until 1979 the path to modernization, albeit shaken seemed clear; it had developed as prescribed on many fronts: technologically with the importation of oil-related technologies which expanded over the course of the century into other fields; politically with the instatement of a Western-backed Republic under Shah Pahlavi; and economically with the transformation from an agrarian marketplace to a Keynesian economy. Socially, however, a rise in fundamentalist Islam supported a derailment within the arts. This radical, uncomprimising shift went against the grain of how the arts were expected to ‘modernize.’ Ali Mirsepassi’s acute observations on how a culture ‘modernizes’ on its own terms are the cornerstone of the notion of counter-modernism as it is being presented here, more broadly as a discursive ideological framework. Similarly, Jeffrey Herf’s notion of reactionary modernism – a negation of the utopic vision of modernity as developed in interwar Germany, which he argues was the philosophical theater responsible for the rise of National Socialism – suggests that there exist parallel (and dialectical) vectors of the same incipient ideology; that is, there exist multiple threads – of varying spheres of influence – to the established canon. Just as Germany took a different course in its social development in the ‘30s, creating a splinter in Modernism’s legacy, Iran witnessed a similar estrangement several decades later.An important distinction to make, but which will not be explored here, is that this ideal operates at both ends of the spectrum: just as the Third Reich was emblematic of the project of Western modernity’s dark side, the geneses of socio-political problems in the Middle East and other developing sovereignties – for example, the proliferation and motivation behind ‘nontraditional’ terror networks in the Caucasus, the rise of radical, far-right political Islam in Iran, the splinter cells of national militarization in Colombia, to name a few – all find their teleological origins in the conflicted terrain of negotiating modernism and/or attempting to détourne it for productive or repressive means to other ends. To be progressively counter-modern, the plastic arts need to adhere to certain principles: to expand their spheres of influence and subsume, not directly import, their respective (external) lessons; to retain the traditional values of their own historical narratives while expanding on the lineage of their native aesthetics in all artistic vanguards; and, most importantly, to accommodate – not suppress – the critical, intellectual (internal) syndicate. Because those who have operated on this level – architects Rogelio Salmona in Colombia, Boris Magas in Bosnia, Balkrishna Doshi in India, Carlos Raúl Villanueva in Venezuela, Jože Plečnik in Slovenia, for example – have rarely embraced the international discourse (or quite possibly were barred from fully participating), the selective hands of history have inadequately preserved their respective legacies. III. Houshang Seyhoun "Our dilemma today is how to understand the gap that has been developed between us and the West since the Renaissance. On the one hand, we need to re-link to this part of our tradition that also inspired the West. On the other hand, we should come to terms with modern Western values... Historically, we are in an era similar to the German “Kulture Kritik.” It is not until we pass this stage that we can expect the emergence of a new mode of thinking and new thinkers who can revolutionize our language and our thoughts." ~ Hassan Taromi In apparent defense of postmodernism, however weak, the late Museum of Modern Art curator Kirk Varnedoe claimed that the West was experiencing “a continuity of what began as a revolution from around 1880 to 1920.” By opening up “a new set of languages and questions and options” (and his argument is that those options remain in force) the question of postmodernism’s validation falls away, as it becomes part and parcel of a longer process. Curiously, this critique can very well be extended to the project of modernityl, as it crosses boundaries, geographic and otherwise. Architects in Iran from the early ‘60s to the late ‘80s faced a crisis: to support the development of built form as it has evolved on the international scene and eschew an emerging intellectual program, or revert to an archaic design pedagogy to support the local artistic vanguard. One architect was able to navigate between both communities, pacifying the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia of the new left with his prowess in traditional aesthetics while simultaneously embracing the burgeoning international design community. Houshang Seyhoun was born in 1920 in Iran where he trained as a painter under French scholar Maxime Siroux; his induction into the world of architecture came during the Allied Forces occupation of Tehran during World War II where commissions to design the interiors of cabarets and other similar attractions built for the foreign personnel as well as to paint their frescoes established the young artist/architect’s career. Seyhoun won numerous architecture competitions and was recognized by various institutions (most notably the Iran-Soviet Cultural Society in Tehran), valorizing his efforts and securing his place as the eminent architect of the early-to-late ‘50s. In post-war France Charles de Gaulle, in reestablishing the country’s prominence in the arts, invited talent from around the free world to come to France; in 1946 Seyhoun, under the sponsorship of André Godard and Otello Zavaroni studied in Paris and went on to complete his Docteur d’Art in 1949, fully immersing himself in the classical training of the École des Beaux-Arts and widely traveling in Europe. Seyhoun established an atelier in Paris to begin realizing his earlier projects back in Iran. He returned to Iran in the 1950s to continue his practice and in 1962 was appointed Dean of the School of Fine Arts and Architecture at Tehran University where he “introduced new academic fields such as Musicology, Urban Planning, and the Dramatic Arts and was a mainstay in the [artistic] modernization of the entire university.” The uncensored Iran that Seyhoun flourished in had begun to change: with the rise of subversive political machines engaged in usurping the Shah’s dominance came a rise in the Islamic clergy’s power. As such the intellectual landscape began to shift to the right, slowly ousting those practices deemed un-Islamic, too Western, or otherwise alien to the traditional fabric of the country’s artistic history. The Shah’s project of modernization began facing severe opposition and anything (and anybody) who was to be identified with even remotely sharing in his ideals was cast away. Eventually denouncing his tenure in Iran in 1969 for politically motivated reasons related to changes in governance (both on the federal/national level but also in terms of those in power in Iran’s universities), he began to concentrate on his artistic endeavors and by the late ‘70s his architectural practice acted more in an advisory capacity until 1980 when it formally ceased altogether. In 1980 he left Iran for good and took up a brief residence in Paris where he reestablished his atelier. As his non-architectural work gained interest he began exhibiting internationally, the most prominent of which was a traveling exhibition featuring himself, Salvador Dali, and Pablo Picasso. Over the course of his career Seyhoun came into contact with modernism’s greats: Richard Neutra toured Iran and was even commissioned to do several houses in the countryside; Alvar Aalto lectured in Tehran on numerous occasions; even Le Corbusier is believed to have been in touch with the young Seyhoun over the 36 years he spent between Tehran and Paris. He learned high modernist design from those responsible for cementing its tropes into the ledger of history, yet operated as a “populist who [remained] open and accessible ... who [revered] his heritage without enslavement to it.” Seyhoun’s work clearly reveals a Western influence in terms of composition and organization, though latent in his formal language there is a tension with modern and historical Iranian precedents. “Seyhoun was generally regarded by the international architectural fraternity as one of the few architects to go beyond the rote application of western modernism to his region,” Arthur Erickson writes, because, like many designers who adapted to and learned from the “outside,” Seyhoun “sought an adaptation of modernism’s universal ethic” to the “native sensibilities of Iranian culture.” This evocation of how formal terms become translated to new circumstances (times and places) is in many ways the secret history of modern art and architecture. It is also the basis for Varnedoe’s weak defense of postmodernism. IV. Counter-Modernism "There is no such thing as modernity in general. There are only national societies, each of which becomes modern in its own fashion… Dichotomies – tradition or modernity, progress or reaction, community or society, rationalization or charisma – predominate in sociological theories of European modernity." ~ Jeffrey Herf It is important to try and situate Seyhoun’s work outside of the context within which it was conceived and beyond its impoverished political theater. To discuss it in this broader realm, on the objective plateau of form and tectonics, enables its reciprocity with other contemporaneous architectural work to become evident. Due largely to Iran’s unwillingness today to preserve the rights and reputation of the now black-listed architect, most of his projects have had limited exposure outside of Iran beyond rare photographs, while those able and willing to travel Iran must search them out in an almost “archaeological” manner. His varied collection of built works exhibits the architect’s ability to interpolate between a traditional ethos and modern technique in the pursuit of form. His work is highly baroque; the manipulation of historical elements in an “incorrect” way both makes it a transgression of agreed-upon and time-tested rules and pushes it into a new formal realm altogether – in a way similar to the “explosion” of light, mass, color, decoration in the 1600s with the emergence of the Italian Baroque, especially in the case of Borromini. Several themes recur in Seyhoun’s projects: the manipulation of Persian calligraphy as a decorative motif, the use of the Golden Ratio and Rectangle in his compositions, scalar iterations of formal gestures, and, most emblematic of his ability to be both regressive and modern, traditional yet avant-garde, his distortion of the Islamic vault. In what may be the greatest transgression of this endemic form, the Magbarat Shoaram Monument in the northwestern province of Eastern Azerbaijan rises from the desert city of Tabriz like a pristine white beacon. Prominently located on the cusp between the East and the West, Tabriz encompasses a rich cultural mix of contemporary and ancient civilizations, and its inhabitants speak a combination of Farsi, Turkish, and Russian. Its context is a reflection of the project’s conflicted thesis and the architect’s ability to minimally express a complex. The entire project is composed of one element, a one-bay vault fractured and bent symmetrically to make a bracket which is multiplied, scaled, and rotated to create an aggregation of open pieces that frame a central void. Individually each piece only begins to define a partial space; only when they are nested one in another do they begin to imply some limit to a greater whole. The resulting spatial construct recalls the Barcelona Pavilion’s overlapping “open” spaces and its ambiguity of enclosure. The entire aggregation sits on a striated plinth that reinforces this notion of partial spaces and completely separates itself from the urban fabric. The iterative use of the vault, traditionally used to frame a focal point, undermines its historical intent; here the vaults become part of a sequence whose internal logic supersedes that of the resulting structure. In elevation, the scalar quality of the vaults causes them to “complete” each other, in a way similar to the nesting of Russian dolls. The autonomy of the traditional Islamic motif is only maintained in the project’s representation; in built form it becomes distorted beyond recognition. It is an architecture of contradictions, where the implied movement and fluidity of the composition is rendered in forms that materially elicit stasis and create something entirely new from an established formal lexicon. Like the Magbarat Shoaram Monument, Seyhoun’s work directly confronts the modern paradigm, assertively embracing and rejecting it simultaneously. It is an attempt at recasting the chronicle of modernization and universalizing its lessons. The genealogy of the Western narrative has been depreciative of non-Western cultures and societies and as a result has limited the ability of those cultures and societies to be modern. To believe that the Iranian state (or those sovereignties of other groups) is not “modern” reflects the attitude that modernity is to be experienced through the prescribed historiography of Western societies – that is to say, if one isn’t prepared to take the same steps as the US or Europe, one will never be fully modern. Yet the breakdown of modernism takes many forms, and the form it took with Seyhoun was dictated by institutional practices as much as personal aspirations. In many ways, consistent with Foucault’s critique, the architect disappears in this institutional mélange (the three consecutive regimes ruling Iran, the schools Seyhoun attended and taught at, and the overall modern project to erase difference in pursuit of an idealization of pure architectural agency). Architecture here, more rhetorically, serves as an important tool for investigating a hidden rift in the project of modernity – Seyhoun as pluralist and idle observer, was able to capture the desolated identity of Iran and both react to and prophesize its caustic history. His diaspora is not unlike those of other modernists who worked (and possibly still are working) in the margins of history; and thus, who he is secondary to what he represents – an unmined, reflexive source of criticism that can sharpen the lens by which the modern canon is to be understood. The possibility of As the result of a tumultuous series of transformations, either in the dissolution of the Shah’s regime and the consequent shift in the stratification of its social classes, or in the desecularization of its political machine as witnessed by the Revolution, Iran is emblematic of a sovereign state whose multi-variable conflicts fertilized the emergence of a new artistic icon. The work of Seyhoun, given its context, carries the illuminating torch of tradition – a historically derived formal language with a culturally embedded aesthetic – into the constructed reality of contemporary practice without fear of invalidation. This is what it means to be counter-modern. http://www.wazeone.com/The-South http://www.wazeone.com/following/wazeone.com/The-South Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:51:41 +0000 wazeone 1209861 Log 19 "Observations on 'The South'" <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1209861/_splash_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="320" width_o="1000" height_o="500" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1209861/_splash_o.jpg" align="left" /> The pilgrimage: hand drawn maps, insatiable curiosity and cobblestone roads winding underneath the canopy of Paraguay’s sweltering forest lead one to traces of Corbusier haunting the unadulterated wilderness. Past the post-modern shopping malls of new young affluence and the petrified hand-built brick homes on the city’s working-class periphery sits the work of Javier Corvalan. Indoctrinated with the lessons of architecture's formal history, Corvalan envisions a brave new interpretation of the Swiss master's Dom Ino prototype. Elongating the famous diagram and folding it onto itself reveals a discursive new approach to framing space. The almost austere simplicity of the house's structural expression is eclipsed by its diagrammatic candor. Hanging walls of unfinished concrete flank and "enclose" the house's interior, paradoxically coexisting with the surrounding jungle. Architects in not only Paraguay but also much of the rapidly advancing countries of South America have been particularly prolific in the past decade. Those like Corvalan tread on virgin soil, only now emerging and (re)building their cities and ushering in a renaissance of formal conscientiousness. Busy working in the shadows, backs turned to the critical voices that can so easily hamper the proliferation of new ideologies, or in this case, fresh interpretations on those deemed untouchable, a new class of thinkers exists here – free from the cultural baggage of Euro-American academics and free to adopt the (formal) tropes of architectural history. http://www.wazeone.com/Technology-and-the-Apolitical http://www.wazeone.com/following/wazeone.com/Technology-and-the-Apolitical Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:51:40 +0000 wazeone 1209809 Log 18 "Urban Follies: Technology and the Apolitical" <img src="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1209809/_splash_640.jpg" border="0" width="640" height="320" width_o="1000" height_o="500" src_o="http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/3107/1209809/_splash_o.jpg" align="left" /> A century has passed since the planning and partial execution of Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett’s 1909 Plan of Chicago. To celebrate the legacy of Burnham with “new ways to look at Chicago today and new visions for the Chicago of tomorrow,” the Burnham Plan Centennial Committee selected the self-proclaimed avant-gardists Zaha Hadid and Ben van Berkel (UNStudio) to design and install temporary pavilions in Millennium Park last summer. While both architects attempted to engage the public in “boldly imagining a future for us all” (a statement repeated in the official rhetoric for public consumption), questions remained: Precisely what kind of future was imagined by these two architects? And for whom did this vision of the future hold weight? While the resulting pavilions were obviously invested in the audacity of experimental form and geometry (as spatial prototypes), it was not clear how these structures might be understood within the larger context of the city – their stated purpose. Typologically, the pavilion (alongside follies, public art installations, and other temporary structures) has a long history of both subtly and aggressively occupying space and time; as objects, pavilions often act as harbingers of a not too distant future or a forgotten, even mythical, past. Such typological and formal experimentation leads to progressive speculation, pro and con, about the inherent capacity of a pavilion to reorganize, index, and affect a much larger area and condition than its own limited site. In this sense, the pavilion must be – quite literally – “far-fetched.” Thus, the central conundrum regarding the Hadid and van Berkel pavilions – despite their nascent “objecthood” and vague urban nature – was how their shared site and context altered anything at all. The Burnham Plan was an attempt to reconcile a European Beaux-Arts approach to urbanism with a rapidly evolving, somewhat laissez-faire American conception of the city. It restructured the fabric not only of Chicago proper but also of the infrastructural threads that enabled the city’s dominance of the region. Given the technological and social advancements of the last century, one might well ask, what did the two Burnham pavilions say about the evolution of architecture and the city today? Built only months before a 2040 plan was to be revealed by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, the pavilions could have been seen as microcosms for larger ideas about public space, with implications at an urban scale. But given the rapid techno-social and econo-political advancements of today, much of which bears on architecture, can something as minor as a temporary pavilion be a catalyst for ideas? In the history of modern pavilions, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion and Le Corbusier’s Phillips Pavilion stand out for their formal and technological achievements. Given the enormity of Burnham’s contribution in Chicago, one could assume that similar import was implicitly asked of van Berkel and Hadid, even though architecture’s ability to express and communicate a nontotalizing zeitgeist is under suspicion today. Chicago is a suspiciously conservative city with a way of isolating its newer iconic projects to a very limited, very public arena – one removed from the city proper, which eliminates the sort of cohesion that was crucial to the architectural ethos of Burnham’s time. With the exception of a handful of projects in the largely gentrified south and west sides, the city seems to keep close tabs on the development of its own built form. The two Burnham pavilions were sited no more than 30 feet apart on what has been commercially dubbed the “Chase Promenade.” Stranded between Anish Kapoor’s popular Cloud Gate sculpture, Frank Gehry’s Pritzker Pavilion bandshell, and the new Nichols Bridgeway (leading to Renzo Piano’s Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago), the pavilions were largely disengaged from not only the city but also the very park that sequestered them. They simply became part of the spectacle that Millennium Park embraces, primarily for tourists, and had little or nothing to do with the stated goal of being socially progressive and forward-looking “experiments.” While Hadid’s project superficially responded to the site by claiming to align with a lost major axis of Burnham’s original plan, and thus to resuscitate some vague notion of “history” (at least structurally), van Berkel intelligently responded to the context both formally and conceptually. He positioned an “entrance” ramp, rotated 90 degrees across the grain of circulation in the park, off center from the massing of his open, polymorphic pavilion, creating an effect of momentary hesitation and isolation upon entering. The pavilion hovered above the ground on a “classic” plinth, which in this case acted as both a large-scale pedestal for a monumental, highly sculptural form, reiterating its (un)groundedness, and part of the ensemble itself. The project clearly defined an engagement with the immediate context while simultaneously opening up to the city beyond, even through the roof plane, which was cut open and pulled down to create the spaces of the pavilion and to frame views of the city. UN Studio concerns itself with manipulating and distorting modernist diagrams into largely formal (and less often, conceptual) design strategies. This reinterpretation of history is a method to ground their interest in a contemporary formal agenda while still holding on to, albeit loosely, flickering traces of architecture’s past. In Chicago, with one eye closed the pavilion could be seen as an interpretation of the “Miesian sandwich,” though van Berkel referred to a childhood encounter with Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House and its cantilevered forms as part of its genesis. Like the work of Mies, however, the attempted eradication of columns and the introduction of the free plan, made possible by a suspended roof plane, suggested an embodied architectural ether – pure space. Van Berkel’s Burnham Pavilion lacked any real hierarchy, and the ambiguity of its structural logic vaguely recalled the delamination of column and wall in Mies’s most Barcelona Pavilion. Drawing on the indeterminate boundaries of Mies’s free-plan spaces, van Berkel’s pavilion functioned as a series of more ambiguous, partial spaces; spaces that overlapped within the boundaries of the plinth and extended through the apertures in the roof plane to greater Chicago. The pavilion shared an interest in the sublime spatial effects of Mies, but explored those through a contemporary interest in topology and the deformations possible with computer modeling. While van Berkel’s pavilion sought to offer a moment of hesitation and reorientation in the city via its formal rigor, Hadid’s pavilion offered a more expedient connection to its site through its placement (mythical axis or not) and its immersive qualities, part and parcel of the mediatic tradition inherent to most parametric design. But apart from its somewhat crude siting, the actual form and mechanics of the pavilion were completely other to the park and to Chicago. Despite its virtuoso exterior form, Hadid’s pavilion was better understood as an immersive interior environment (like the traveling “space-age” Chanel Pavilion commissioned by Karl Lagerfeld in 2007). Though a high degree of technical innovation and digital precision was required for its execution, ultimately the completely autonomous interior environment – through the use of lights, colors, and other theatrical effects – superseded the specifics of its formal élan or the highly technical apparatuses behind its construction. The stretched and ever-changing interior surface functioned as a technological apparatus for distorting the information projected onto it, and indicated Hadid’s desire to alter the nature of how architecture and technology intersect. In this sense, technology was the means for the production of an architectural sensorium rather than an end in itself. The pavilion resisted being understood through the conventional qualifications that define architecture – that is, solidity, groundedness, orientation, etc., no mater how deformed – and performed as an occupiable screen – something as ephemeral as the messages and images projected onto it. If architecture and urbanism in Burnham’s time physically organized the field of proximate social exchanges among the public in a coherent fashion, what can be said of this role today? The rare event of showcasing high-profile architecture in the form of temporary public works today would suggest the opportunity for questioning spectacle and reinstating probity, but van Berkel’s and Hadid’s respective project descriptions were vague and largely irrelevant regarding the role and place of such architecture today. Given the increasingly physically disconnected “culture of communication” that architecture contends with, it is evident that what has trumped interest in the social is the use of technology – in the creation, execution, and habitation of form. It is, as such, the apolitical par excellence. The new pavilions succeeded on the grounds that they introduced an otherwise oblivious public to the emergence of new formal strategies and technological advancements in architectural design, but ultimately they operated as empty objects caught somewhere between urbanity and the landscape. For architects, they offered explicit commentary on the state of present-day architectural form. But whether they will resonate within the larger culture in which they were grounded, and succinctly and eloquently translate this possible “political” agency into an architectural statement, remains to be seen. [w/ Alexander Maymind] http://www.wazeone.com/wazeone-1 http://www.wazeone.com/following/wazeone.com/wazeone-1 Wed, 23 Mar 2011 04:09:48 +0000 wazeone 1207330 BIO Parsa Khalili (b. Tehran, 1984) received his MA in Architecture from Yale University in 2009 and was awarded the William Wirt Winchester Travelling Fellowship, the school’s most prestigious award. During his time at Yale, he also received the George Nelson Scholarship for the research and exhibition of an independent thesis under the mentorship of Peter Eisenman, 'Aberrance + Autonomy: In Search of a New Formal Language'. Parsa was awarded the 2009 SOM Prize for Architecture and chosen as one of Wallpaper* Magazine's 2010 'Next Generation Designers.' Currently a designer for Richard Meier & Partners, he additionally writes freelance (architectural theory and criticism – Log, Anyone Corporation) and is expanding on a number of independent projects in the visual arts, painting, and sculpture. CV CONTACT Parsa Khalili Artist : Designer : Writer Chicago : New York City +1.312.520.1770 parsa.khalili@gmail.com www.wazeone.com