1. Arch 5110 – Pre-thesis
Interrogation 4
what about form?
Somol and Aureli’s Readings
Hugo Lemes | Victor Ramos | Hanjoon Kim
2. 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).
3. shape vs. form
Shape 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
4. shape
Traced to calculated
vagueness in renderings of
Hugh Ferris and the
hollowness of minimalist art
Monumental (Superstudio’s
Continuous Monument)
Arbitrary, ambiguous
5.
6. shape
Inside inconsistent with the
outside
Intensive (OMA’s approach
in CCTV to proportionately
increase volume and
envelope by using large
voids, holes, etc)
Melnikov House
7. shape
Exists in the material
world, unlike form, which
can be abstract,
theoretical
Evidence of the effect of
entropy in architecture.
Buoyant, must float
9. “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)
11. shape is hieroglyph
=
“Shapes can be interpreted as hieroglyphics; incomprehensible, yet their
stubbornly figurative and symbolic character wants to be deciphered.”
(Aureli)
12. 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)
15. -isms
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
18. -isms
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
21. -isms
“Following the defeat of other types of false-consciousness, including
functionalism, organicism, realism, pragmatism, supermodernism, mi
nimalism, 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”
22. -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?
23. what am i? mover or shaper?
Libeskind: I like Zaha: I am driven by
deconstructivism deconstructivism also!
24. what am i? mover or shaper?
Peter Eisenman: I like deconstructivism, and
conceptualism
25. what are we?
Diller Scofidio + Renfro: floating shape
We like conceptualism too!
26. what am i?
Norman Foster: I go for Blobism and
Frank Ghery: I favor Blobism and
Structural Expressionism/Late Modernism
Deconstructivism
/High-Tech Architecture
27. what am i?
Niemeyer: I have breathed modernism Rem Koolhaas: I like Conceptualism
and Deconstructivism
28. architectural optimism
Envisions 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?
29. what architecture is really about
Somol 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.
30.
31.
32. shift
Shift 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
33. content
Today 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
40. form – object to form-index
Rudolf Wittkower, Colin Rowe, or
Peter Eisenman = difficult form or
form-object
Present ‘shape architects’ = form-
index
41. 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.
Editor's Notes
So if you were to take all the isms out of architecture, what we would be left with would be plain shapes.
Minimalist art was trying to be better than theatre in terms of dealing with the real. However, I do not really see the point of doing that, since we are dealing with two different art types, one not really less deserving of attention and respect than the other.
Agree very much with this quote, and Koolhaas emphasized this in his most recent lecture.
A shape carries with it an embedded symbolic meaning, even though not expressly linguistic as set by the grammatical structure of a language. In this case, a language of architecture. Some sort of ism.
Distinction a bit blurred, because some movers, like Peter Eisenman, has become kind of a shaper, and everyone cannot deny the influence of some kind of ism in their lives.
These two examples show how two people can produce very different architecture using the same ism, making it kind of difficult to separate what is object/form, versus what is shape sometimes.
Given the present state of architecture, we can say that its content consists in the precision with which architectural form replicates the low-resolution of information (in other words, our reality), obliterating the condition and the convention of its form-objecthood.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.
Therefore, “difficult form” which has embedded in it all of the formal architectural theory of the past 50 years – positively symbolized by the likes of Rudolf Wittkower, Colin Rowe, or Peter Eisenman – is founded on the belief that it is necessary to construct a complex “dispositif” for form, a whole system of virtual objects to support it and which are proof of its existence: a diagram of its own constitutional process.
Interesting conclusion, because for most of the article I thought he would make the case that we are on the right track. Then, suddenly, he says the contrary – that we should be careful with shapes and remind ourselves of forms and their importance also.