What About Form?

what about form?

Hugo Lemes | Victor Ramos | Hanjoon Kim

Arch 5110 – Pre-thesisInterrogation 4

Somol and Aureli’s Readings

somol

Somol crushes the mythology in architecture and urbanism – the mask which covers a mere landscape of shapes.

A mask generated by anthropology, sociology, technology, etc (all the ‘isms’ of the world).

shape vs. formShape is simply cool or boring

Shape is void of information, low-resolution

Shape requires participation

Form is always serious

Form results from generative process and some sort of ‘ism’

Form must be reasoned, always

shapeTraced to calculated vagueness in renderings of Hugh Ferris and the hollowness of minimalist art

Monumental (Superstudio’s Continuous Monument)

Arbitrary, ambiguous

shapeInside inconsistent with the outside

Intensive (OMA’s approach in CCTV to proportionately increase volume and envelope by using large voids, holes, etc)

Melnikov House

shapeExists in the material world, unlike form, which can be abstract, theoretical

Evidence of the effect of entropy in architecture.

Buoyant, must float

SHAPE ‘MUST’ FLOAT?

“A shape is hole in a thing it is not. People look through them or from them, and not necessarily at them.” (Carl Andre)(As contrary to a form/massing)

The WhitneyMuseum

shape is hieroglyph

=

“Shapes can be interpreted as hieroglyphics; incomprehensible, yet their stubbornly figurative and symbolic character wants to be deciphered.” (Aureli)

Architecture and Content, Aureli

Urban scene did not take the object of architecture.

Monumentality is being brought back into focus, particularly after 9/11

Contemporary architecture divided into shapers and movers.

One side bound to the super rational (movers) and the other, free (shapers)

Shapers? mover?

Herzog and De Meuron Richard Meier

-isms

neo-classicism – romanticism – realism – symbolism – impressionism – post-impressionism – cloisonnism – synthetism – art deco – fauvism – cubism – maximalism – minimalism – post-

minimalism – orphism – futurism – synthetism – expressionism – vorticism – suprematism – neo-expressionism – dadaism – surrealism – tachism – lyrical abstraction – constructivism –

deconstructivism – rationalism – critical regionalism – regionalism – blobism – modernism – neomodernism – postmodernism – classicism – neo-classicism – romanticism – realism –

symbolism – impressionism – post-impressionism – cloisonnism – synthetism – art deco – fauvism – cubism – maximalism – minimalism – post-minimalism – orphism – futurism – synthetism –

expressionism – vorticism – suprematism – neo-expressionism – dadaism – surrealism – tachism – lyrical abstraction – constructivism – deconstructivism – rationalism – critical regionalism –

regionalism – blobism – modernism – neomodernism – postmodernism – classicism – – romanticism – realism – symbolism – impressionism – post-impressionism – cloisonnism –

synthetism – art deco – fauvism – cubism – maximalism – minimalism – post-minimalism – orphism – futurism – synthetism – expressionism – vorticism – suprematism – neo-expressionism – dadaism

– surrealism – tachism – lyrical abstraction – constructivism – deconstructivism – rationalism – critical regionalism – regionalism – blobism – modernism – neomodernism – postmodernism –

classicism – urbanism

blobism – architecture in which buildings have an organic, amoeba-shaped, bulging forms

critical regionalism – an approach to architecture that strives to counter placelessness and lack of identity in modern architecture by utilizing the building’s geographical context

deconstructivism – is a development of postmodern architecture that is characterized by ideas of fragmentation, an interest in manipulating ideas of a structure’s surface or skin, non rectilinear shapes which serve to distort and dislocate some of the elements of architecture, such as structure and envelope

-isms

Sage Gatestead, Norman Foster

blobism – architecture in which buildings have an organic, amoeba-shaped, bulging forms

critical regionalism – an approach to architecture that strives to counter placelessness and lack of identity in modern architecture by utilizing the building’s geographical context

deconstructivism – is a development of postmodern architecture that is characterized by ideas of fragmentation, an interest in manipulating ideas of a structure’s surface or skin, non rectilinear shapes which serve to distort and dislocate some of the elements of architecture, such as structure and envelope

-isms

Vitra Design Museum, Frank Gehry

UFA-Palast in Dresden by Coop Himmelb(l)au

“Following the defeat of other types of false-consciousness, including functionalism, organicism, realism, pragmatism, supermodernism, minimalism, populism and utopia, there is nothing left to be had except a sublimation of all such residue, that is, an autistic and self-referential universe made up of fragments and drifting babbles, incapable of transmitting any sense. This is a universe nurtured by the tired regimes of words and meanings that, beyond their evident hermeneutic paranoia, do not propose any new ideas”

-isms

|Questions|

Do notions of –isms now propagate new architectures or are they simply pedagogical means to classify an otherwise unclassifiable assembly of forms and shapes?

Pertaining to pedagogy, what is good design and how does/should one teach it? Shapes or forms? Both?

-isms

what am i? mover or shaper?

Libeskind: I like deconstructivism

Zaha: I am driven by deconstructivism also!

what am i? mover or shaper?

Peter Eisenman: I like deconstructivism, and conceptualism

what are we?

We like conceptualism too!

Diller Scofidio + Renfro: floating shape

what am i?

Frank Ghery: I favor Blobism andDeconstructivism

Norman Foster: I go for Blobism and Structural Expressionism/Late Modernism

/High-Tech Architecture

what am i?

Niemeyer: I have breathed modernism Rem Koolhaas: I like Conceptualism and Deconstructivism

architectural optimismEnvisions a world in which the architect can reappropriate spaces without having to rely on the intellectual taboo of the difficult and their many responsibilities to society, technological resources, program, and the moral blackmail of utopia

NO MORE ISMS! But then….architectural optimism is yet another ism

|Questions|Would an architectural thesis devoid of any major ‘ism’ and speculation, be as acceptable as any ‘minimalist’, monolithic ‘shape’ architecture now being executed by the most renown architects?

There has been a teaching about visual representation in architecture schools; “A drawing has to speak itself.” Does a building have to speak itself about what “ism” it is? As an architect, do you expect for the public to interpret architecture and understand how its form is driven other than experiencing by just looking at its shape?

what architecture is really aboutSomol suggests that we need to pay attention to what architecture is really about – not the false image provided by diagrams, logos, software, installation, mappings of urban realities, etc, or the intellectual data.

shiftShift from the mapping-fetishism of the 1990s to a new shape-fetishism in the zeros of the new millennium

Value in large shapes lies in their superficiality, emptiness, nothingness

contentToday the content of the easy contributes to an economy of information that, behind the mythology of accessibility, the ordinary, the spontaneous, and the self-organizing, hides an unconvincing ideological and political opacity.

Koolhaas, Herzog & de Meuron, Jean Nouvel, Toyo Ito, Diller + Scofidio, MVRDV and all of their followers – is pure content, or contenthood, as Fried might say today.

Also:

EXCESS OF CONTENT = LACK OF SENSE

OMA

Herzog & de Meuron

Jean Nouvel

Toyo Ito

Diller + Scofidio

MVRDV

form – object to form-indexRudolf Wittkower, Colin Rowe, or Peter Eisenman = difficult form or form-object

Present ‘shape architects’ = form-index

Aureli’s conclusion

We must concentrate on the idea of form, determining the specific sense of it for each case, in such a way as to salvage it from its own already tired and self-referential drift into content.