Schwarz
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TV and its role in popularizing modernism in America (this is a huge overstatement)
What does it mean to destroy a building? How do we read a damaged version of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye at Poissy? For architecture historian Andrew Herscher, destruction is a type of language, a "form of design" that is "at least as significant as any of the elements from which buildings are constructed for living, for the living." [1] But let us take this further. If a building calls attention to itself when it has ceased to exist, is there a middle ground, an intermediate representational stage that not only forecasts a language of destruction, but that also evokes the purely conceptual urgings that inspired the design of the building in the first place?detroit
More recently at 7 World Trade Center there were constraints and requirements such as making the electronic wall blast proof, and this slowed me—constructively. I could think more about how the piece should look and about what content it should offer for this tragic but optimistically restored site.The newest complicated sculptural LED arrays require that I try to marry form, function, information, beauty, time, transcendence, realism, legibility, phantoms and more—and then make sure the stuff works. It’s routine for function or lack thereof to affect the look, for the look to demand better function, for the shape to change content, for the content to require different colors, for the programming to need more speed, and around we go. But I attend to what has failed in the course of the electronics and then use what has come to be right. Sometimes it’s a relief these days to make the silk-screened paintings that are relatively simple to produce.
untitled (still men) bill schwarz 2009