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FutureHouse via jetset modern
atomic ranch launch
Simmons Hall dormitory at MIT
..."Holl said his design was inspired by a bath sponge."
"Thomas Pynchon's novel, Gravity's Rainbow, declares an ambition to make physics become metaphysics; Douglas Huebler's work relates to Pynchon's in a vital respect, which is that Huebler seems to want to make the "sociological" achieve an analogous transcendence. By this I mean that Huebler wants to make ways of documenting events stand for a larger paradigm, one that can contain enough of the conditions of experience in the real world to stand as a sort of model for ordinary language itself. In Huebler, sociology—events in the real world—becomes a sort of phenomenological linguistics—language in the real world. This happens via a procedure which in Huebler's recent work, of which Duration Piece #7, 1973, is a useful example, employs a metonymical structure to present an event in the real world, and, by doing so, illustrates the incompleteness—reflexiveness—of ordinary perceptual experience in a way that is newly clear. Huebler's work is about the "deconstruction" of the familiar."
A bearded hippy wearing only his underpants emerges from what appears to be a subterranean concrete bunker. He's followed by a shaggy man in overalls, a topless woman with long hair, and another, and another, like clowns from a Volkswagen. A voiceover informs us that these people are leaving behind an "indescribably large house...with all the possible comforts, and with all the pieces of modern furniture on the market...built following all ancient and modern styles, forming a homogenous and pleasant whole."
The movie, Ceremony, is one of five films (together called Fundamental Acts) that the Italian avant-garde architecture collective Superstudio planned in the early 1970s to communicate their radical vision of an ideal world: one devoid of architecture. This vision is chronicled in
Superstudio: Life Without Objects, an ambitious retrospective of the firm's conceptual work from 1966 to 1978 currently spread across several New York galleries.
Vanity and Validation
Films celebrating the design and construction of projects by celebrity architects are now ubiquitous. But do we actually learn anything from them?
(spoiler: "no")
scrapping noguchi bayfront park miami
whole-town makeover