Schwarz
View current page
...more recent posts
In the first part of the paper I will discuss how the universalist attitude toward town planning, as stated in Le Corbusier’s La Charte d’Athènes (1943), was challenged by the younger CIAM members who were looking for an approach that would take into account the individual, as expressed in their “Statement on Habitat/Doorn Manifesto” (1954). In the second part I will examine the manner in which they balanced this thinking with universalist ideal as demonstrated in the project they presented at CIAM 9 (1953) and CIAM 10 (1956). In the third section I will examine their stance against universalization as expressed in their critique of the CIAM “grid,” both as an epistemological framework and method of presentation. The protagonists who made contributions to this new way of thinking are referred to as the ‘younger members’ before September 1954 – when they were first recognized as Team 10.
hiving mesh
The utopias proposed by [Yves] Klein and Superstudio are rooted in an architectural systems aesthetics that mobilized the immaterial as a form of instrumental and political critique. Its origins can be found in the challenge to entrenched modern planning ideals launched by the Team 10(7) architectural group in postwar Britain, a time in which new techniques of military Operations Research and cybernetics were being made public. These had advanced a form of systems thinking that saw complexes of people and machines as information processing systems governable through procedures of decision and control. For Team 10, cities and buildings were no exception. Social change, previously imposed top-down by an avant-garde who assumed an a priori agency of architecture in bringing it about, was now seen as emerging bottom-up from society's own internal processes, which architecture and planning were to steward. The task of the designer was to build the hardware—the amplifiers, attenuators, and gates that regulated the rate and intensity of flow within those systems. At minimum, architecture was to be designed to not get in its way.
renzo piano for the hour on charlie rose
De l'Ecotais reveals the difference between the working methods of the two pioneers of the absurd: "Marcel Duchamp looked for his ready-mades in department stores, randomly, at a given moment. He then gave them titles and signed them. Man Ray, on the other hand, usually constructed images from everyday objects, which were then deliberately transformed by photography. It is the fact of being reproduced and relabelled which gives life to the objects."
So I guess Man Ray, who died in 1976, would have been delighted at the two dates on the Canberra label. But would he insist on the new versions being destroyed so that a third date might be added in future? As Umberto Eco famously wrote: "When originals no longer exist, the last copy is the original."
.........................................................................................................................................................................
"Gentlemen, I will now show you this text. Forgive me for using a photocopy. It's not distrust. I don't want to subject the original to further wear." "But Ingolf's copy wasn't the original," I said. "The parchment was the original." "Casaubon, when originals no longer exist, the last copy is the original."
-- Foucault's Pendulum, Chapter 18