During next week’s gallery crawl, the Pittsburgh Architectural Club is hosting its first event! Steel City Suppositions is an exhibition of young designer’s imagation for the city. Hope to see you there!
Download postcard [PDF]
Mies van der Rohe / Barcelona Pavilion + Installation by SANAA from 0300TV on Vimeo.
Well done film of Sanaa’s amazing installation at the Barcelona Pavilion. link.
Max Abramovitz’s 1963 proposal to fill Panther Hollow in Pittsburgh would, without any modesty, “transform into one of the architectural wonders of the world a desolate ravine.. The net result will be a center for research which aesthetically and functionally will have no equal.” While researching the site of my thesis project, I found this great promotional pamphlet for the project.
The cover:
Courtesy Carnegie Mellon Architecture Archives
The cover itself was enough to amaze me, it felt exactly like a concise thesis for the project. Knowing the site makes this project more amazing than just seeing these images,but imaging that where the building is currently is a very large ravine.
Courtesy Carnegie Mellon Architecture Archives
As the description continues, “According to architect Max Abramovitz, Panther Hollow may well become the nucleus of the nation’s first 21st century city, a city in which the individual can find rewarding employment, recreation, culture, and higher education, all within walking distance of his home. A person could live his whole life within a half-mile radius of this center – and an extraordinarily rewarding life it would be.”
Courtesy Carnegie Mellon Architecture Archives
Courtesy Carnegie Mellon Architecture Archives
In a way, I think its great to see this modernist project of Utopian life pop up here in Pittsburgh in a way that possibly would have transformed Pittsburgh. But like all those projects, it seems like there a few drawbacks of living deep in the guts of the building. Also, the hollows of the city highlight the topography’s connection to the urban fabric, and negating it completely ignores the potential of this condition. Either way, it blows my mind.
Courtesy Carnegie Mellon Architecture Archives
And the final trademark image:
Photography has a clear relationship to architecture: the documentation of space for those who are unable to experience it. It provides an opportunity for people to understand the physical relationships of a certain situation. Its use allows architects to publish their work, for news agencies to inform the public, and for google to document the world. Slowly, the physicality of the world is collected in images and stored in databases, accessible to everyone.
Backwards and forwards.
Architects rely on representational forms of art to design. Drawings, models, virtual reality, and photography enable viewers to understand architecture they cannot experience. The architecture lives in an imagined arena manifested by each representation. Viewers piece together this information and create their own imagination of the architecture. Each medium creates a different understanding of the architecture that another medium cannot give. None of the mediums, however, allow a viewer to understand the architecture as an experienced reality. More interestingly, the experienced architecture will not tell you what a drawing or photograph can tell you.
Each medium edits reality and displays the most pertinent information that the medium can explain. A plan of a building allows us to understand the circulatory relationships between spaces, their various sizes, etc. A plan, however, cannot help us to experience to the architecture, it enables us to understand a holistic interpretation of various aspects of the architecture. A plan is important, however, because experiencing architecture will not make such relationships obvious.
These images are both inside and outside.
Photography, on the other hand, can only document the reality of the world, not our imagined proposals for it. In architecture, photography comes after the fact, once the design (the imagination phase) is complete. It is used to document the product and to inform people about the architecture.
A house in Mongolia is not important unless it has been photographed. This same house in Mongolia need not be visited if it can be seen in a photograph. The house has become important because of the photograph, but at the same time the photograph denies the importance of experiencing the house. The photograph of the house is more important than the architecture of the house.
These are dark.
I think it is important for architects to challenge photography’s assertion over the reality of architecture. The process of creating a photograph alters reality. A few examples include the altered perception of time, the flattening of space into two dimensions, viewing the world from a single viewpoint, and the distortion the camera lens creates. These are aspects, among many others, that separate the medium of photography from the reality it represents.
These are also the aspects which make photography an interesting medium. I think it is interesting that unlike any other medium, photography begins with reality. It alters and distorts many spatial relationships, but it must always have the trace of the real located within its representation. Unlike drawing or painting, the essence of photography is its distorting relationship to the real world.
Ignore the dramatic narration and skip to about 4:00 to find out what happens when you Rachel Whiteread an ant colony.
Mies Van der Rohe, Barcelona Pavilion Interior Perspective, 1928
©2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
I’ll open the log with this fascinating montage from Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion. The level to which this drawing reveals both Mies’ intention and his investigation of space is a one time clarity of process that I wish I could find for so many other projects.
The radical nature of the drawing is how Mies describes space. He places general elements around the empty plane of the drawing without a ground or ceiling. The ground plane, arguably the basis from where architecture is experienced, is not there. Its absence in a drawing meant to relay an experience of architecture is a clear shift away from the issues painters had experienced in portraying realistic foreshortening of the ground previous to the invention of perspective. In this drawing, the most important plane is the drawing itself – the plane from which space is experienced. By removing the representation of the ground, Mies separates the difference between the experience of a representational drawing, and the experience of the thing itself. What the ground is in architecture, the image plane is in a drawing.
Although I haven’t been there, I’m interested in how the representations of this project, from analytical drawings to photographs, have created its relative importance in architectural history. The pavilion has a history of challenging the documentation of architecture, from Mies’ constant editing and cropping of published photographs, to its resurrection after an almost sixty year absence. Only a small number of documents existed in that time, and are still the only remnants of the actual pavilion constructed in 1929. The original pavilion had its photographs, and now its duplicate has duplicate photographs. The building, unlike most others, has been represented not only through photographs and drawings, but also through architecture. Its duplicate does not exist to serve as anything except to re-present a previous architecture. Much like the duplicate Eiffel Towers around the world, the current pavilion exists as an allusion to another reality. Little did Mies know that the pavilion would not only disrupt the connection of a representation from its subject, but also the reexamine the reality of the subject. Is the current pavilion as fulfilling a representation as photographs of the original pavilion? Is the drawing deeper than the plane we see?
My ffffound
