Arkitektur 4

SKETCHES ON THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT – SKETCHES ON THE TIME – BASED ENVIRONMENT Lying here awake in the middle of the night still trying to patch together all the ideas I stumbled upon during the day. Read a myriad of articles, bits and pieces all over the net, asked for three information interviews, looked through different sites, amassed info. Felt sometimes like something close to an industrial spy. What stood out and grabbed my attention was the text in Wikipedia on Bernard Tschumi. He is basically viewed as a deconstructivist architect (whatever that means), he trained at the ETH, the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, widely regarded as the equivalent of MIT in German-speaking academe, he used to teach at the Architectural Association in London during the 70’s and 80’s. He won a competition to build the “parc de la villette” in Paris in 1983 and worked with deconstructivist philosopher and cultural theorist/literary theorist Jacques Derrida in having the philosophical backbone for his disjuncted and disjointed architecture. He wrote “The Manhattan Transcripts”, a text, theoretical musings that draw very close comparisons between film and architecture. Basically what he does is he compares the frame-by-frame imagery that precedes the shooting, the making of a film and compares it to the arrangement of concrete, glass, shingles, the like in a building. The same kind of arrangement that an editor uses when he montages audio bits, pauses, images and constructs a new entity is the same concept that informs the decisions of an architect to arrange and manipulate and assemble static elements. The same can be said for the making of a book, a magazine, there is a myriad of elements that can be arranged and rearranged to make for the final product: the magazine. It is kind of like composing a symphony, like choreographing “Swanlake”. Tschumi was heavily influenced by Sergei Eisenstein of “Battleship Potemkin” fame who devised a lot of rules about how to go about a montage of images which will finally lead to a 7

finished film. This kind of approach to architecture inadvertedly composes a very utopian, very experimental, very poetic construct out of concrete and glass. One could say that the urban fabric of any city is like that, orchestrated not by one planner, but by a myriad of assemblages that often happen so very serendipidously. In the afternoon I was in Chapters on Granville and Tenth and I stumbled upon a copy of Wallpaper, which had an article on Zaha Hadid. What she did as one of 3 guest editors of the magazine, she basically called for having a multilayered hole smack in the middle of the magazine, thus reinventing the concept of what a magazine in the traditioinal way should be like, how it should behave, so to speak. To come back to Tschumi and the concept of deconstructivist architecture what interests me most and holds my attention, grabs my fascination is the fact that one can manipulate static elements in the same way that we as animators mix and match images, sound bites, how we time them and retime them until we are close to being satisfied with the results. This is so very close, I imagine, to trying to figure out how to assemble the elements that will finally result in the bigger unit, the built construct, be it a house, a bridge, a tunnel, basically all the units that when put together make for our urban fabric, the man made environment, the city. - At this point I think I should once more read up on Nigel Coates’ City in Motion, I was about to check it out of the ecu library this morning. I am too busy these days with assembling all parts of the blog, with trying to secure infointerrview dates, with drawing my animations, with reading bits and pieces and with putting together all this info in a semi-coherent manner, vying for both fashioning new ideas and rehaching accurately what I learned,depicting it accurately.

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