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Weekly Update
Madness is afoot this weekend. I have been at school 24/7 working continuously. It has been, for the most part, incredibly productive. I’ve was able to do a lot of work on the Harbor Light Center project, however within the project, which we are supposed to be wrapping up, I sort of created a hectic situation for myself, as have nearly reworked the entire design. So I will now be presenting two options of my own. As for now, I’m keeping the details top secret, but you can take my word for it, the concept in my opinion are pretty interesting.
As side from that, I wanted to mention something about an article that I was just reading this morning. It was written by architect and architecture critic Robert Campbell who writes for the Boston Globe. The article was from 2004 and was titled “Why Don’t the Rest of Us Like the Building Architects Like?”
Just the title alone grabbed me. I was immediately able to draw personal links to that very question. For as long as I have been involved in architecture, I knew that the people in my life never really seemed quite into the aesthetic ques or spatial concepts that I was interested in. I would ask my friends and family to tell me of buildings that they felt they liked. For the most part, they were very conservative. If I had given them the option to pick one or the other and I presented them with images of Monticello beside the Villa Savoye, they will have all picked Monticello.
It was an apparent pattern. As my brother and I would debate about the modern homes that you find in architectural publications like Dwell, he would as was say something along the lines of “Yeah, perhaps spatially the building really works, but I would still like to live in a house.” I always felt that celebrated modern architecture of today is a bit detached from real people. Architecturally they are great, but they are hardly attached to the memories of most people. Dwelling should be, of course, direct reactions to their current time periods, reflecting the immediate ideas and technologies, however they shouldn’t lack temporal, cultural, traditional, and economic context. I other words, buildings shouldn’t be foreign to the place where it sites and more importantly the people.
The way Campbell, in his article, put it was that “There is always memory. There is always invention. The question is the relation between the two. The tension between them is where the energy comes from. There is no energy in architecture if it is only a memory of the past. There is no energy if it is on invention.” He further adds that the readers of his articles who send him email seem the miss the point on either end falling into two sides. “Either they hate modernism and love everything old - that’s by far the majority - or they think it’s boring to imitate the past, and they want everything to be new and daring and experimental.” He calls them “rads” and “trads,” pastists and futurists.
Personally, I think this is true across the board. Just about everywhere you go you will finds rads and trads, and they are rads and trads for just about any subject fo contemplation, whether it is art, movies, music, et cetera. Campbell further points out that generally anything new is found ugly, paraphrasing Picasso.
In agreement with Campbell, I feel the aim of design is to present progression in creative works by means of extracting from memory while incorporating the new. I think the automotive design industry is a perfect example of this kind of design philosophy in practice. If we look at the different models of the BMW 3-series cars that have been released over the years, we can clearly see the evolution from the first interpretation to the current, and no one can argue how far more advance the latest 3-series is compared to a 70’s model.
I thing that it is important for things to be visually familiar. I’m going to promote the idea of visual evolution, introducing new ideas and technologies, yet referencing what came before, acknowledging the significance of precedents and traditions. In fact, since even before I started studying architecture most of my favorite design had that characteristic. I always like the idea of a new old. I liked it in the 2006 Ford Mustang and certainly I liked it in the architectural works of David Adjaye’s Dirty House, I.M. Pei (His new work in Doha, The Museum for Islamic Art), and Rocha Tombal’s Bierings House. Even something like the Vitrahouse by HdM, makes the cut.
Campbell explains that the rads and trads are two factions that are equal and opposite. One finds utopia in the past and the other finds utopia in a supposed future. On both sides the individuals want to live in their utopia rather than live in the present. There a gap that we have to bridge presents itself.
I think, we have to face it and understand that we are living in neither utopia and we have to come to a historical and cultural meeting point that lies in the center of both know as the present.
