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anghelos
video review
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INTERNATIONAL
OBSERVATORY living between
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Programme
by Marco Brizzi
Selection of videos realised in the architectural field and presented by iMage on the theme "inter-action between man and space". - Francisca
Benitez, Sukkah, USA 2001, 12'00''
This video project is a portrait of an ephemeral city that appears within the 'permanent' city. It was filmed in New York, before, during, and after the annual festivities of Sukkot in October 2000, in the Jewish neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Every fall, the neighborhood undertakes a drastic transformation. In order to commemorate the Exodus, a temporary dwelling structure, known as Sukkah, must be built outside the house and inhabited for seven days. This tradition originates the temporary existence of an ancient nomadic settlement, superimposed in the fabric of contemporary New York. Its intermittent continuity on time is ensured by the precise set of codes contained in the Talmud, establishing every aspect involved in the ritual, from construction to behavior. This ephemeral city grows from within the voids of the 'host' city. New York's narrow courtyards, residual spaces, firescapes, rooftops and sidewalks become the grounds for this fragile urban tissue.
""Bubblehouse" is an architectural experiment based on two aspects. On the one hand it is the plan of an elastic house, without a typology, in which forms and functions blend into a single liquid substance and generate a fluid space. On the other hand, the idea of a house that is able to represent the personality of the person living in the house and to establish a relation between the house and other people, thus making it become a tool of courtship. "You are no one, these days, without a beautiful home, you have no charm". In the attempt of exploring new ways of communicating architecture, these two aspects become an ironic and romanticised story set in the future. This story faces even subjects like digital technology and virtual reality, in a highly critical way. The results are stage designing and screen play on two different levels; they are interwoven and are able to exchange places according to the narrative rhythm.
Desert House is KDLAB's first short film focusing on the relationship between architecture, filmic narrative and technique. The Desert House is built on the site of a once prosperous silver mining town. In a studio concerned with issues surrounding nostalgia, this project began with investigations into the issues of blending disparate programs through the techniques of landscape painting, and the correlation between scale and thickness as related to objects of mass production. Layered within three complementary industrial programs, the domestic units are distributed along the natural river basin of the terrain with fresh water pumped up the hill from the abandoned mines returning to the reservoir via grey water channels passing through each unit. The prefabricated units, manufactured in the same manner as fiberglass pools, are organized programmatically around the line of fresh water that enters the home through the garage and exits at the swimming pool.
This conceptual animation explains architect Zaha Hadid's idea behind the design to create a 500-room hotel by the shore of an artificial lake in Guadalajara, Mexico. Seeing the guest rooms as single cells of a large conglomerate the animation shows the evolving of the texture and the creation of the building. An especially composed soundtrack by sound-artist Andrew Lagowski underlines the drama of this process.
Derma represents a project strategy able to translate in architectural terms the factors of a 'medial' truth in which information, communication, interconnection and interaction are by now part of the ordinary. In Derma the artificial and the natural, technology and emotion, are melt into one sensitive, reactive and elastic structure with an organic behaviour. Derma starts, grows and develops in a territory in which it is mutation, excrescence and pure personality. Derma modifies with the passing of time, carrying the signs of its experiences, its memory. Through the exploration and the sensory acquaintance of its surface, a Derma structure allows such an interaction level to create an identity between man and space. Like on a body, on a Derma structure you can recognize the most comfortable and welcoming zone for yourself, more or less soft, cold to the touch or warm as an embrace. Like your skin, it reacts vibrating to the solicitations in a mutual exchange of information. Touch it. Pull it. Feel it. Welcome.
The diagram of the double-locked torus conveys the organisation of two intertwining paths, which trace how two people can live together, yet apart, meeting at certain points, which become shared spaces. The idea of two entities running their own trajectories but sharing certain moments, possibly also reversing roles at certain points, is extended to include the materialisation of the building and its construction. 1-Family lifestyle 2: the walk in the wood The Möbius house integrates programme, circulation and structure seamlessly. The house interweaves the various states that accompany the condensation of differentiating activities into one structure: work, social life, family life and individual time alone all find their places in the loop structure. Movement through this loop follows the pattern of an active day. The structure of movement is transposed to the organisation of the two main materials used for the house; glass and concrete move in front of each other and switch places. Concrete construction becomes furniture and glass facades turn into inside partition walls. As a graphic representation of 24 hours of family life, the diagram acquires a time-space dimension, which leads to the implementation of the Möbius band. Equally the site and its relationship to the building are important for the design. The site covers two hectares, which are divided into four areas distinct in character. Linking these with the internal organisation of the Möbius band transforms living in the house into a walk in the landscape. The mathematical model of the Möbius is not literally transferred to the building, but is conceptualised or thematised and can be found in architectural ingredients, such as the light, the staircases and the way in which people move through the house. So, while the Möbius diagram introduces aspects of duration and trajectory, the diagram is worked into the building in a mutated way. The instrumentalisation of this simple, borrowed drawing is the key. The two interlocking lines are suggestive of the formal organisation of the building, but that is only the beginning; diagrammatic architecture is a process of unfolding and ultimately of liberation. The diagram liberates architecture from language, interpretation and signification.
IChaos is the universal magma, the origin and the end of everything; it causes uneasiness and confusion but at the same time an unexpected combination of senses rich in implications. Chaos, for man, contains the irresistible calling to search for sense, it pushes him towards interpretation, forces him, once and for all, towards the creative act and therefore towards communication. The Chaos Is Communication. Communication can be associated to the moment in which worldy things began to exist. The excess of communication leads to incommunication, to the inability to comprehend. Communication Is Chaos. True communication is seen as the relational moment in which, because of the comparison, one acquires identity. Chaos and Communication. C2C is the three-dimensional representation of these concepts. Two curvilinear and complex surfaces interpenetrating, determining an ambience in which the inside and the outside are indistinguishable. The visitors are invited to enter this space and to cross the stages of chaos, of communication and of hypercommunication.
This video documents the contribution of Clio Straat to "Mappe e Percorsi Urbani '98", a project of the municipality of Catania for the re-qualification of different urban areas. The operative site is the popular area "Trappeto Nord". Clio Straat decided to build a Barbie house, scale 1:1, a sort of new playing yard in mid of the huge buildings. The project intends to include other architects, musicians and collaborators who are invited to propose installations so that at the end there might be a big street party. The structure is made by hanging cables, a texture cover and the ground is covered by synthetic grass. In front of the Barbie house some sand has been put. The furnishing has been realised with old furniture donated by the inhabitants of the area. The building, painted with vivid colours or decorated with polychrome tiles, has been achieved with the active co-operation of a large number of people who afterwards have dedicated their time to the maintenance. |
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