Architectonics (Spring 2012), Selected Projects Professors Lebbeus Woods, Aida Miron, Uri Wegman “When I graduated from Cooper, in 1999, I received a scholarship for a master’s program in geotechnical engineering at UC Berkeley. That summer, a major earthquake devastated Turkey. The first day of classes, the first thing one professor said was that Turkey smelled “like 40,000 dead people” and that “engineers who know that smell do their work a lot differently than those who don’t.” It was this sense of social responsibility that led me to pursue engineering, but also to leave it from time to time. A Cooper education freed me from debt, and allowed me the freedom to pursue purpose, not profit-driven endeavors. Its Union, for me, not only united the arts and the sciences but also was about making connections between the technical, the political, and the social.” (via n+1: Save Cooper Union) — Photo from Architectonics: Spring 2012 | Cooper Union
2 ♥
James Corner Field Operations, High Line Park (2009)Early model ‘A painter has just a canvas and a regular architect has just a site, and in many cases those sites aren’t very complex. With landscape architecture, you’re in a specific, unique environment. There’s weather. There are seasons. There’s soil ecology and chemistry. There are a whole slew of factors that mean, as a designer of a living space, you not only have to amplify existing conditions, but be creative and respond to what you find.’ (via James Corner’s High Line Park - The Atlantic)
1 ♥
Paisajes Emergentes/Luis Callejas, Weightless (2009)Submission for Greenpeace UK Heathrow Airplot competition ‘…(or a project for an effective demonstration to stop all air traffic)… ‘Property owners may waive (or purchasers may be required to waive) any putative notion of “air rights” near an airport, for convenience in future real estate transactions, and to avoid lawsuits from future owners who might attempt to claim distress from overflying aircraft. This is called a navigation easement. ‘At the same time, the law, and the Supreme Court, recognized that a landowner had property rights in the lower reaches of the airspace above their property. The law, in balancing the public interest in using the airspace for air navigation against the landowner’s rights, declared that a landowner owns only so much of the airspace above their property as they may reasonably use in connection with their enjoyment of the underlying land. In other words, a person’s real property ownership includes a reasonable amount of the airspace above the property. A landowner can’t arbitrarily try to prevent aircraft from overflying their land by erecting “spite poles,” for example. But, a landowner may make any legitimate use of their property that they want, even if it interferes with aircraft overflying the land.’ (via LONDON / Weightless ✪ - LCLA OFFICE)
0 ♥
“There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember, carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any changes then? I don’t want you to remember these days, you know, like “Oh. we were young and it was beautiful.” Remember that our basic message is “We are allowed to think about alternatives.” If the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want. But what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want?” —Slavoj Zizek, 9 Oct 2011 (text | image)
1 ♥
Vito Acconci, Bad Dream House (1984) ‘[Acconci Studio] started because I thought if I want something that results in a public [reaction], I don’t think it can start private.  So I needed to have people around me, specifically people from an architecture background. I needed them for two basic reasons. ‘Number one, I wanted to do architecture, but I really didn’t know how. Number two, I thought if I’m really going to take this seriously, I can’t be a single agent, a single artist, even a single architect. And I made this assumption that the public starts with the number three. One is a solo, two is a mirror image; the third person starts an argument. Once an argument starts, probably public has started.’ (via The ArchRecord Interview: Vito Acconci)
5 ♥
Filip Dujardin, Untitled #13 ‘These are groves of architecture, weird islands of form, like the city as seen from a rail line: sheds and retaining walls, stained by rain, their bricks chipped away behind piles of rubbish, their corrugated steel repeating ever onward in infinite ridges.’ (via BLDGBLOG: Resampled Space)
31 ♥
Oswald Mathias Ungers, The City Within the City—Berlin, the Green Urban Archipelago (1977) (via Exhibitions - KOW)
9 ♥
Robert Ryman, Yellow Drawing Number 5 (1963) “The peculiar power of the grid, its extraordinarily long life in the specialized space of modern art, arises from its potential to preside over this shame [of art and spirit]: to mask and to reveal it at one and the same time. In the cultist space of modern art, the grid serves not only as emblem but also as myth. For like all myths, it deals with paradox or contradiction not by dissolving the paradox or resolving the contradiction, but by covering them over so that they seem (but only seem) to go away. The grid’s mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction).” (via Rosalind Krauss – Grids)
5 ♥
Hussein Chalayan, Cartesia (1994)Tyvek ‘airmail’ dress (via Marilane Borges)
6 ♥
Bernard Tschumi Architects, Spartan Villa (1992) (via Bernard Tschumi | RNDRD)
34 ♥
Laetitia Molenaar, Sunlight in a Cafeteria (2011 - 2012)from series Here Comes the Sun [ it is all right ] ‘Imagine being able to recreate Edward Hopper’s paintings into actual places. That wonderful light. To experience it in a different way. This idea started the project. ‘One of the things I fell in love with in Edward Hopper’s work is the interrelation of light and space. To translate his painted models into actual illuminated places, I built three-dimensional cardboard scale models.Then I turn on the light (for most of the exposures only a small lightbulb) on this artificial cardboard world, my attempt to grasp that magical light.’ (via Laetitia Molenaar - Works)
18 ♥
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Surrounded Islands (Project for Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, Florida)Drawing in two parts (1982)Pencil, charcoal, pastel, wax crayon, enamel paint, aerial photograph and fabric sample ‘Since April 1981, attorneys Joseph Z. Fleming, Joseph W. Landers, marine biologist Anitra Thorhaug, ornithologists Oscar Owre and Meri Cummings, mammal expert Daniel Odell, marine engineer John Michel, four consulting engineers, and builder-contractor, Ted Dougherty of A and H Builders, Inc. had been working on the preparation of the Surrounded Islands. The marine and land crews picked up debris from the eleven islands, putting refuse in bags and carting it away after they had removed some forty tons of varied garbage that included refrigerator doors, tires, kitchen sinks, mattresses and an abandoned boat.’ (via Christo and Jeanne-Claude)
0 ♥
Léopold Lambert, Lost in the Line (2010) ‘The labyrinth, in its classical representation, is the quintessence of the architect’s absolute control. The line is traced from above, its author has a total vision of the space, and he is amused to see bodies below subjected to his architecture. When he writes The Trial and The Castle in the 1920’s, Franz Kafka reinvents this notion of labyrinth by creating a maze that escapes the control of its developer, the giant administrative system. This maze will find a space in 1941 through Jorge Luis Borges and his Ficciones in which space is composed both by the notion of infinite and the random. Eventually, during the 1950’s, Constant Nieuwenhuis brought an architecture to this labyrinth by the creation of his New Babylon, the territory of the Homo Ludens’ continuous drift. Those three labyrinths, whether they are administrative, spatial, or architectural, all own the characteristic of not being controlled by their creators.’ (via Lost In the Line | LAS*12)
7 ♥

“For Miralles, elements are not equal: each is heavily freighted, with allegiances that lie outside the game. There is a process of learning to live with givens, things drawn from the pocket of a coat, things that come from somewhere else, import their own contexts, embody their own rules.” - Operative Drawing I: Enric Miralles

0 ♥
Enric Miralles and Carme Pinós, Igualada Cemetary (1985 - 1994)Plan and sections (via Drawings by Enric Miralles | The Funambulist)
5 ♥