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"architecture" Category


Construção


Saturday, May 25, 2019

Searching here on the Designblog I tried to find something about my home country, Brazil. I did research about it but found very little significant posts, one mention over here another one over there. Tried something about my hometown Goiânia but there were no results at all. My wish is that in the future a student from my area bump with some content about us in here and get surprised.

So here I’m going talk about housing in the area I come from, Goiânia, more specifically about construction, I think it’s a good starting point to build some content I would like to see in here too and it also goes along with what I’ve been researching through drawing.

 

 

A FOREIGN IN MY OWN PLACE

Living here in the Netherlands for almost 2 years already without coming back to Brazil really sparkle something about my hometown inside my brain. I like to remember about how the landscape looks like, cause it’s just so different from everything I see here, then suddenly I start rediscovering the place where I come from.

Compared to Holland or Amsterdam everything is more precarious, Brazil and the majority of people doesn’t have the same economic background that Holland has, the material situation is much different, what shapes and sculpt the land in a totally different way.

There was a initial city plan that started to be followed but because of many factors people themselves started to change the surrounding the way they could.

 

 

Living on a foreign country makes you be able to see with fresh eyes the place where you come from. My family never really traveled around so despite the images that I would see in movies, television or internet everything I would see was Goiânia, Goiânia and Goiânia. I never realised how come the place was so embed visually inside my brain. It came for me very strong recently, everything I would always see but take it for granted, it came back now for me as such a powerful visual source of inspiration.

 

 

1. HUMAN FORCE

 

Construction work is normally made by man in Goiânia. It can be normal that the owner also works with the bricklayers and workers. My dad did help to build our house and others too, I remember that my neighbor too, it’s funny because in my dad’s house some of the walls are not so straight and there are always some sort of imperfections around. It’s also possible to build the house in the way you want, there are some protocols to follow but very little people follow it.

The human force can be found everywhere, there are many people working in the service sector in Brazil. It’s also very normal that a lot of jobs happens out of formality, so many times there is no contract or third parties behind the bricklayer and who is paying for the house to be build.

 

 

MAKING SHELTER

It can be pretty common that man work without necessary protection in constructions. Jaime was our home-keeping for a long time, and I remember when he did fall from a scaffolding during some work he was doing in my house. He was not specialized on that kind of service at all, he lost some nails in the fall, but he was fine.

Not only people can fall but houses that are build downhill can also fall and get destroyed, that happens often in some areas.

 

 

 

2. MATERIALITY

 

6 HOLES BRICKS

It’s the most used kind of bricks the 6 holes bricks as my dad says on the video above. I find it quite pretty, they are made out of clay and have a beautiful orange. The sun also make it shine when it’s pretty new.

It’s normal that families start constructions and sometimes the money is over but the house not. You can see many properties with unfinished houses and some material left. These days for me they look like beautiful contemporary sculptures. Symbol of something for the future. Makes me think about some of my plans and goals, the ones that if they were a house, they would be like this sculptures right now. Why did this action was stoped? Is the family taking care that the work continues? What are they dreams and visualisations for when the sculpture it’s done?

 

 

UNDESIREBLE BELLYS

Protection is necessary. Against the weather, non wanted looks and also from non invited people and it’s many non wanted actions. My grandmother lived in Urias Magalhães and she had pieces of broken glass on the top of her walls. The pieces were out of green glass and had a pretty colour, even though it did look quite frightening.

“Grandma, why are there pieces of broken glass on the top of your wall?”
“This is to cut the thief’s belly’s”

 

 

 

3 . GRAVITY 

 

THE LAST FACTOR

Gravity is an important law of physics, every act or move we do is subjugated by the laws of gravity, we are subordinated by it all the time, so wouldn’t be the case that constructions are out of nature laws.

 

 

One important part of a construction that also strikes me visually are water tanks. It’s something necessary once many neighborhoods don’t have sewage treatment sometimes. Water tanks have normally a wonderful blue that goes along with intense blue skies too. It can be normal in some areas to bring water fresh from the ground. It’s also normal that you dig holes and take a look if there is in your area some fresh water, then you are lucky!

I did drink water fresh from the ground my whole life and I prefer it’s taste then the water in Holland. Anyways, socially it’s more interesting that every single house has drinkable tap water available like Holland. In Brasil many people can’t drink water from the tap because it’s not healthy to do it on longterm, it has also a weird taste.

Some Brazilians living abroad are so culturally used to not drink water from the tap that even in countries like Holland they still buy water from bottles.

 

 

IT’S NECESSARY TO REST

Hammocks were items designed by indigenous people in Brazil to sleep, rest, relax or even to see the time passing. It’s still a highly used item nowadays between Brazilians that normally put it in their porches. It’s not so used to sleep at night by most of the people but it is for naps in the afternoon after a huge almoço on a Sunday, together with the family, that’s a moment that hammocks are quite disputed, for example.

Even though people don’t sleep so much at night on it, the acupuncturist I used to attend told me that many back problems I was having by that time could be solved having a hammock in the room instead of a bed and mattress, he had one himself.

 

 

“To work is good but to rest after it’s even better”

 

blank spaces


Thursday, December 6, 2018

At first, I wanted to find something by using the catalogue, but It wasn’t very long until I realized that it wasn’t relevant knowing that the tags were only subjective,

How could it work without generating something too literal?

At least, this process of research wasn’t the right one with the tags that I chose.

For this book, it took me less than one hour to pick it, as each time I wasn’t able to select a piece without already having a specific idea of what I wanted in my mind.

But still, I felt frustrated

Frustrated by the impossibility, or more precisely the struggle of being opened,

Being able to see, to take the time to observe the books that were surrounding me.

There were so many information and possibilities around that I wasn’t able to decide or to think about what I wanted or at least to consider those things.

I think that, in a way, that book happened to me because of this frustration.

I see this choice as the translation of my state of mind at this precise moment.

Fortunately, this book might have been what I was searching for, I just saw this thin white line between all those imposing and colorful editions.

I needed something simple, purified, that’s precisely, in my view, what I found.

 

All those blank spaces, accentuated by those vibrant black lines

Those micro architectures, in the form of sketches.

I was struck by a drawing when I opened this book, it is a drawing of the sun.

That reminds me of le Corbusier’s sketches concerning the housing units of Marseille and the principle of the sunshade.

I like this simplicity and this clarity

I also see those lines which I like a lot, thin, imperfect, instinctive.

aerial forms


Wednesday, December 5, 2018

I firstly liked this book because of its simplicity
I was mostly attracted by the cover, a roll hanging on by a thread attached to a thin layer slightly curved. It could have been a jewel or an installation, all I could see was the beauty of the gesture.
It took me some time to find a book, I was going through the library and the bookshelves but I think I already saw this book once or twice, I was still, unable to see it.
I was despite me, looking for something specific, Something more colorful, more filled Something that could strike me instantly. I was really frustrated, I decided to leave the library and come again the next day when eventually I could be more open minded, then I found it.
The book in its shape and its composition gets me back to the finesse of the glass and its conception. Composition of thin intersected lines initiating a meditative relationship,
The grain of the image becomes part of the aerial forms.
The space remains, allow the eyes to contemplate the shapes.
The blank spaces on the pages exist as much, to me than those structures; that’s one of the main things that I like about this piece, including a space through the page.
It brings me back to the work of the Japanese architect Junya Ishigami and the plans he realized for Church of the valley, through his drawing you can find similar ideas;
Inscription in the landscape
Inclusion of the earth
Dialogue with nature
There is also something happening in terms of managing the materials between
Raw material, minimalism and delicacy of the glass
I see the transformation through the pages,
The light is perceptible,
The shapes merges together,
Intermingle,
To create architectural shapes
Superposition of thin layers on off white paper

 

.

working space 708


Thursday, November 29, 2018

 

The book has been rent just one time, twenty years ago, the stamp says FEB.1998.

I don’t really understand what it is about,

I don’t understand the language either, it is written in Deutsch.

all I know, is that it’s related to architecture.

In a way I like the fact that I’m not clear with the subject, it allows me to establish a universe only by looking at the images and their disposition.

I see chairs,

I see radiators,

I see tables,

I see tennis courts,

It reminds me of working space universe, because of all those trials to organize the surrounding and the contents.

I like the fact that the images are moved in the space of the page, that page is not full filled by colours but sometimes just by blank areas.

I see that as an experimentation of the object

It as something common, to my sense, to the user’s guide aesthetics, but in a way, i find something strange about this book.

As if it was telling a story

As if it was about the absence of the person

The presence of this objects evokes me the absence but it is also because of their nature, especially concerning the round tables and the chairs

Everything is deconstructed and re-constructed

The lines are merging together

The shapes evolve through the pages

You can distinguish objects

From abstraction to objectivity

The thin black lines on the radiant white paper

 

assemble,

cut,

paste,

disassemble,

rebuild,

understand,

edit

708.5 hoo 1

Grey Hypocrisy


Thursday, November 29, 2018

Continuing my Quest for the Dull. I did not find any books by the tagwords connected to my previous result: ’Boring’ or ‘Seductive’. Only the third and less subjective ‘Interior Architecture’ gave a match. Though, this match wasn’t the ‘right’ book for me, in the sense that it was maybe too mediocre, but its neighboring book did catch my eye. It looked kind of dull, but at the same time demanded an autonomous authority. Not so dull after all, and therefore forcing me to adapt the definition of my Quest. Perhaps it was the rather small size (15 x 15 cm.), or the textless spine. I realized how the blanco spine is actually quite a sensation in this library, considering that most books contain either a title, some text or other imagery on this part the book. At the same time did this book blend in well with the rest. Just like all other copies, it is plasticized, and then some: front, back, top, bottom – everything drenched in the monotonous clammy layer by the name of adhesive cellophane. A perfect recipe for blending in, at least in the world of books.

Even though this grey square of about 50 sheets of paper could be considered boring, there are a few elements that make this otherwise invisible copy stand out by its demand for adapted care-taking. For example, the thinness of the book made it impossible for the librarian to place the code sticker in its entirety on the spine, the rest of it had to be placed on the cover. I can imagine when doing this job, the irregularity of books like this is quite bothersome. A visual rupture in the repetitive rhythm of the surrounding stickers. Besides, because of this invisibility, it is harder for a person wanting to look up a book only by the code he/she was given by the library’s database. Maybe that’s why I was drawn to it, the code was missing, or at least not visible at first sight. Maybe that’s why this book has this size; it only wants to be noticed by people who don’t follow the code, but choose by its appearance only. A stubborn little fella, this “cDIM Valencia”. Hypocritical even. Its innocent appearance, yet sneaky way of asking for attention.

774.4 cat 17

Twist and turn over


Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Starting with the research on architecture magazine ‘Wendingen’,

First I checked the context of this magazine in design history at Stedelijk.

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Stedelijk museum

Among the interior objects with distinctive decoration style,

the magazine was closely reacting with similar shape, form, and motifs.

This type of arrangement was effective to show the design objects

existed under the same style called ‘Amsterdamse School’.

In the exhibition space, I could get the concentrated information

mostly in the visual aspect with the short description.

Stedelijk Library

After that, I went to Stedelijk library for more specific information

about magazine ‘Wendingen’. At the library, I could actually touch and

read the whole series of original magazine.

 

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When compared to looking through the showcase in the museum,

It was very different experience. While reading the magazine, I found out that

under the same format of design, it had it’s own playfulness and freedom.

Amsterdamse school

‘Amsterdamse school’ is the design movement flourished from

1910 through 1930 in the Netherlands, with the advent of

industrialization in 19th century. It started with the aim to lift the

living condition of working class, covering from social housing complex, school,

church, bridge, monument to furniture, textile, objects. It’s playful, romantic

and organic style gave rise to expressionistic architecture.

Published in Amsterdam during 1918-1932, Wendingen mainly

functioned as a mouthpiece of this movement.

Emphasizing emotional resonance and playful imagination, several

authors in the first issue of Wendingen criticized rationalists for

overly rigid and austere rules they apply in design.

Het Schip

Het schip is one of the most iconic buildings of Amsterdamse school.

It’s built as social housing complex, currently used as residential building

and museum of Amsterdamse school.

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Main focus being settled on Amsterdamse school and magazine Wendingen,

the museum offers overview about the history of advent in design movement.

Based on the historical timeline of Amsterdam in design aspect,

the museum shows very detailed and broad range of information.

I could get the answers about questions aroused

while I was reading the magazine Wendingen:

how this movement cultivated?

why it lasted only for short term,

how did the public association and private dedication are correlated?

During this era, flourishing book design culture in Netherlands left

numerous masterpieces, including ‘Wendingen’.

You can find an article about book design exhibition

also held in Museum Het Schip through this website.

https://hart.amsterdam/nl/page/47320/boekbeeld-in-jansma-s

Self-guided tour of Amsterdamse school architecture is possible

If you enter this website.

https://amsterdamse-school.nl/
 

website

It is a website dedicated for Amsterdamse school, made and supported by

museum Het Schip. You can find digital image archive of buildings, bridges,

furniture, and artists of this movement.

I used information in this website as a foundation of my research plan.

amstelveen_map

Map around Gerrit Rietveld Academie with the Amsterdamse school spots.

Biking or walking around the city, I occasionally found some remarkable

buildings, bridges or sculptures that drew my attention. But I used to pass over

regarding it as just nice city design of Netherlands.

After this research, the perception about the city totally turned over.

The vague interest became clear, enabling myself to respect and

understand the city I moved in.

Typography and beyond


Monday, May 21, 2018

We tend to relate typography to alphabet, in fact, according to the definition of Wikipedia,

typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable, and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing, and letter-spacing, and adjusting the space between pairs of letters. The term typography is also applied to the style, arrangement, and appearance of the letters, numbers, and symbols created by the process.”

So typography can actually be more flexible than the letters we are used to.

GW_Pict_1_750 static1.squarespace.com

Ghost(s) writer, 2013

This work is a work from Karl Nawrot, a French graphic designer who now works in Paris. He was inspired by three dimensional grids when he made Ghost(s) Writer, which is “an object dedicated to the act of sketching… It rejects the idea of a definitive form and its function is left to the user or the viewer and can be approached as a typewriter, a construction game or a sculpture.” The typographic work of Karl Nawrot expands past normative visions of what the alphabet is, into multi-dimensional visions of what it could be. Having trained as both an illustrator and a graphic designer, as well as having taught drawing at Gerrit Rieveld Academie, Nawrot is prolific in the way he combines narrative and storytelling, drawings, line, space and sculptural architectural forms with type design. The way he works with material is particularly innovative, often creating forms that resemble architectural models, which then become a basis for type.  An example is a model that derived from Le Corbusier’s Domino House, where the staircase is translated into a cave-like form. Instead of looking at a lay-out, two-dimensional alphabet, static on a screen or paper, we are looking at a process, which is given much emphasis over outcome. Because for Nawrot, it is crucial he gives himself a physical narrative to work with, so that whatever the ‘final product’ is, it is linked to a fiction.

Similar to the Domino House model, Nawrot created the Breu for Marcel Breuer font by making plaster model interpretations of Breuers abandoned building, The Parador Ariston, where he saw the rooms as instead ‘nests and caves’, which forms were illustrated in the letters. This playful, almost childlike, but acutely refined, material approach to the alphabet is what makes Nawrot unprecedented in todays typographic realm.

 

The infinite potential of the tools and ways we use to communicate through words and letters is being pursued in a similar way by Guy Rombouts, who created the Azart programme.

Guy Rombouts’ work can be spoken about under the term of ‘visual arts’, however throughout the mid 20th century he worked as a graphic artist with an ongoing fascination for communication systems. He is principally known for his Azart alphabet, which questions the way we interact with letters by adding multiple dimensions to how we ‘read’ words and sentences. Perhaps this is what makes his sculpture work fascinating- Often Modern sculptures will be associated with ideas, feelings or explore pure materiality, yet Rombouts creates 3d forms which may appear abstract or indirect, but in fact according to Azart, directly communicate something. Also his ‘typographic’ sculptures have often been put into public spaces, for example the 9 foot and bike bridges on Java Island in Amsterdam. Just like language bridges the gap between people, Rombouts forms connect the land together. Language doesn’t just have to come from the mouth.

 

millienina_1300

Azart alphabet

 

This new alphabet gives letters new and double meanings, related to objects and colour, which when strung together as words and then sentences, creates a loaded and complex shape of values and connotations. Like Nawrots process, Azart embeds narrative into characters, and new shape and more dimensions to letters. With this programme a user is put into a position of eradicating their memory of ‘normal’ character shapes, and take on a new vision where, like when we speak, each sounds from a letter is influenced by the one before and after it, thus the form of the word uses 3 dimensions to resemble this. We must question, is typing on an electronic document static or moveable, is it personal or objective? Just because we have fed a computer images into its memory does not mean it is fixed there. As important and useful as they are, in the age of computers, it is important to use creativity to expand and question what it means to communicate.

 

This leads us to discuss the work of Émilie Ferrat and François Girard-Meunier, who graduated from Graphic Design at the Rietveld academie with a collaborative ceramics project, ‘Ceramics with Émilie / Ceramics with François.’ They explored the way language can become material in an installation, in which there was a video where the two designers talked about some clay forms they had sculpted. In the videos, the idea of ‘meaning’ is broken down. They explore, in a new way, the on-going puzzling relationship between words and objects. How do they relate to each other? What do they mean? What is meaning? By translating the idea of a known object into another form and material, there are many questions to be asked, to which answers and messages can be found within the material. Hence, a form prompts a dialogue. You can find their work here https://designblog.rietveldacademie.nl/?p=47725

 

Suprisingly, we made a work which is closely connected to those ideas.

The work is inspired by the game kids use to play in order to learn alphabet. They have to associate a random letter with an object that begins with that letter.

Here’s an example with the letter C

game to learn alphabet

The fact that we have learnt our whole life to associate specific words to specific objects can be very limited, that’s why our work is meant to show the variety of forms and shapes and stories you can give to typography.

 

objects

We followed the same concept as the game for kids, but instead of focusing on the words, we focused on the objects.

We made a list of random words following the letters of the alphabet, and then sculpted abstract shapes out of it.

A=apple                                                   N=nose

B=bed                                                      O=olive

C=candy                                                   P=pickle

D=diamond                                               Q=queen

E=egg                                                       R=rainbow

F=fish                                                       S=shell

G=glasses                                                 T=tree

H=hairdryer                                               U=umbrella

I=icecream                                                V=violin

J=jar                                                         W=window

K=keyboard                                                X=xylophon

L=locker                                                     Y=yellow

M=moon                                                     Z=zucchini

pickle_1300

Pickle

 

But of course you can go further with the idea and play with the words which surround us in our daily life. Here’s an example of how a character would look like with our system

character

With this system, you don’t visualize just one thing anymore. The first thing your brain wants you to think it is is a character, but by being more attentive you can see a whole set of signs, of objects within one object, words within one word. At the end it makes clear for us with this experience and Azart alphabet that typography can actually be seen from different perspectives. With the shapes that Guy Rombouts creates, he makes an assemblage which gives the word another way of seeing it. The shape Azart alphabet gave us with Millie’s name might look like a rabbit, and mine, well… It’s up to the viewer to decide what it can be. All those systems want us to think differently, there is still something hidden behind the shapes we see at first, there’s a meaning even if it might not be obvious. Another example of that can be calligrams, drawings made by handwriting. You can choose to relate the writing to the drawing, but it’s not a necessity. With our character, the idea was to see what else you can obtain by replacing the eyes by eggs, legs by lockers, arms by apples, etc. But maybe the clay objects could have communicate something ? As for the pickle example above. Maybe this system can be considered as a new way to communicate with your lover, while other people wouldn’t understand what you are trying to say.

Eye Movement and Words


Monday, May 21, 2018

When we read, our eyes do not move left to right in straight steady lines; the eye goes back and forth. The movement is a combination of small rapid jerky movements, saccades and fixations, where our eyes actually stop.

When we read a text, our eyes do not move in a straight line across the page. They make skips from words to words call saccades. They also skip words, repeat words, and fixate on words.

In the image, the dots show the fixations.

 Image 1

The brain creates the illusion of smooth line and that we read every word. But the eyes fixates on only about 60% of the words we read. The eye will fixate on the less familiar words. The brain will complete, fill in the blanks.

The are three regions of  perception:

  • the Foveal region takes up only 1 to 2% of your total vision, which is around 3 to 6 letters we can see very clear;

  • the Parafoveal region is around  24 to 30 letters which are not perceived very clearly;

  • the Peripheral region is everything else we perceive, such as gross shapes.

The page, the screen where the letters are written on, give us a frame in which our eye will stay in during the reading process. But what happens when this frame disappears?

20curtain12 large_9232d231-14e0-4598-9bd2-9a1b592dc775

Arktype Curtain and "Fire Basket"by René Knip

René Knip challenges this idea with his Curtain Arktype typeface. This typeface is meant to be hung up in a space. It is taken out of the paper into a 3D world even though the typeface itself stays flat.  The work balances between the 2 and 3 dimensional. One could call it 2,5 dimensional. The white negative space of the paper around the letters does not apply to this typeface anymore, as so is the frame given by the paper or screen in which a text is normally written on/in. The negative space is the breathing room around the subject that determines how appealing it looks.

Now that it is hung in the air, you will have to determine the frame.  You will perceive the surrounding and the text as a whole. The eye will change the way how it is perceiving the text. This is also due to the fact that the letters are connected vertically even though the words are placed horizontally, still, this will guide your eye in a different way.

An interesting thing happens to the text that has now lost it frame. It is no longer just the text that creates the visual narrative, since the text is immediately influenced by its surroundings. The two are inseparable. The Curtain Arktype makes the viewer experience reading of text in a different way. As said before, the eye does not pay equal attention to every part of a text or every letter. The eyes move around, locating interesting parts of a scene.

When reading a text created with René Knip’s 3D typeface, there is almost too much for the eye to focus on. The eyes of the beholder make jerky saccadic movements from the text to the background, finding interesting parts everywhere. The words become truly visual, where meaning is created not only by the meaning of the text, but also by their sight. Furthermore, negative space has become positive, as it has become defining creator of context.

The text and the surroundings become equally important and following that you will look to it more as a composition between the text and space. Your eye movement will be guided by the shapes around it, an eye movement which is closer to one looking at a painting, sculpture rather than one reading words.

 

The birth of the Intrinsic Colour System


Friday, March 30, 2018

When thinking about colour  I immediately become somewhat insecure. For me colour has a strange randomness to it and therefore every choice I make based on or about colour becomes almost arbitrary. There is also this common colour psychology theory people start quoting when talking about colour. Maybe it is because they are just as uncertain about the subject as I am. Or maybe it is because they do know what they are doing when using colour.

In order to keep evading the subject of colour during this project I had to figure out how I used colour in previous works. It turns out that most of the things I made aren’t colored. Of course they have a colour, but that is because the material of which the object is made has this colour as a natural property. If a thing I make is made from wood it will have a wood colour. If it is made from metal it has a metal colour. Not choosing a colour doesn’t mean you have to pick white, but it means to not cover the intrinsic colour.

Now with this new revelation about my colour use I had to think of a way how to put this in a system. A couple of weeks before this project I did some research about the DIN colour system. Which was an interesting experience. There was nothing to be found about it on the web or in libraries. This meant that I had to define what the system was about by combining multiple contradicting sources. Although that feels like you are just making up something it gave me some understanding of the general structure of colour systems. Most modern colour systems combine 3 parameters: hue, saturation and brightness.

glass  plastic  wood

brick  clay  marble

concrete  metal

The First step in translating these intrinsic colours to a system was to just combine the two ideas I discovered. I tried to find three parameters, not necessarily hue, saturation and brightness, in the materials I would qualify as materials I would use. The list got longer than I anticipated. And I started to notice something else; these aren’t materials I would use, these are building materials. The focus of my materials shifted from sculptural perspective to a architectural perspective. Not held back by this discovery I tried to put the materials in a circle as if they were colour hues. This led to a couple of interesting connections and contradictions.

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Now that the hue parameter was replaced by material I still had to come up with a replacement for saturation and brightness. This is where things started to go wrong. It didn’t take long before one of the biggest philosophical themes entered this soon-to-be colour system: time. I came up with the idea that the use of material changed over time and that the amount of a material that was used could make great graphs. Now brightness became time and saturation became the amount of the material that was used.

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Because this may sound a bit abstract I will try to explain it with an example. Glass was used in small quantities during the middle ages. With several improvements in the production process and by improvements in building construction larger pieces of glass were used in buildings from the end of the middle ages. An even better production process because of the industrial revolution combined with the modernist ideas of the first half of the 20th century lead to a enormous increase in glass use. Our obsession with high buildings, great views and daylight lead to the highest amount of glass used in architecture since ever.

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I made timelines like this one for all the materials in my material circle. Now I could make the step from theory to a specimen. It seemed logical to make the graphs of amount of material over time out of the material they are about. I figured out a way to do that but I still needed something for these physical graphs to be presented on. Within half an hour I went from a graph to a maquette with 12 buildings in the middle of Paris.

IMG_9522kopie

As I said when I had to come up with 2 other parameters, it already went wrong after the first step. The parameters where to abstract, farfetched and maybe with this last step to applied. I got stuck in an object that was just there as an object instead of what a colour system should be: a tool.

So now what? As with colour in general I decided not to use it. I did nothing with the project for a couple of weeks. But one day before the deadline of the project I had to come up with something. It was clear that the project was way to much thought and far to little hands on with the subject. I had to get out. Check out how these materials are used in the city and try to find transitions in material. So I took my camera out on this lazy Sunday, jumped on my bike and went on a slow journey into Amsterdam.

I just took photo’s of every building that used a material because of it’s qualities. This resulted in about 300 photo’s of bricks, metal sheets and glass. The selection could begin. By deciding whether or not I picture was more than just a registration I could narrow it down to about 60. Which I then sorted based on material and colour. Just like I did when making the material circle in the first step weeks ago. In the end I had about 35 images which made a colour circle that could start anywhere in the series.

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It could be because of the medium or traditional ways to show colour systems, but it seemed logical to make a book of these photos. I tried to make spreads in which it would be sometimes difficult to see where one image starts and the other ends. To create this illusion of a gradient, but also to make them more abstract. They are not about the building that is depicted, but about the material of its facade.

An intrinsic colour being covered by another while both are being slowly smuggled away.

An intrinsic colour being covered by another while both are being slowly smuggled away.

 

I printed the spreads on separate sheets which then were connected like a leporello. Just because I didn’t know any better I connected them with a nice wide piece of double-sided tape. This made the leporello almost a structure, something that could stand on its own instead of having a cover. When installing it in a circle it didn’t work for me, it wasn’t as self supportive as it was in a book form. So I decided to add a cover that was attached to the last page and would wrap around the first page. This would complete the circle, it could still be viewed as a structure and it would still feel as a book. The material circle is printed on the back and is incomplete, for new materials to be added. I think this fits in the idea of it being a tool instead of just an object.

If there is one thing I learned from this project it would be that it is important to materialize the process. This project, for a major part about thinking, turned at the end into one about doing. Though this thinking was needed for the doing in the end I would like to experiment with reversing this process. Do first and analyze afterwards.

 

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Interview to Mr. Martelli


Wednesday, February 21, 2018

 

A few weeks ago I had a really sensible idea. I would have a sit-down with one of architecture’s most progressive faces, ask my questions and occupy their precious time, all in the name of a little assignment. I sent this email out to some emails pulled from the internet:

 

“I know that Mr. Koolhaas and Mr.Martelli (as would be anyone at OMA reading this) must be supremely busy, what with a world filled with commitments, responsibilities and the occasional pause for breath, but I was hoping you could spare a few minutes to a young, art enthusiast with lofty expectations, and help me in contacting him.”

 

Several fumbling attempts at communications; email, Instagram, other emails; (and a flash sighting of him at a crowd at SM some weeks later): I had secured a meeting with Federico Martelli, a proper, nice lad, in Rotterdam the next day. That Sunday I was quite nervous, the interview seemed to have fallen through altogether and only materialised in the last 12 hours. Federico was scheduled to jet off somewhere exotic that day, and I had never conducted an interview. The anxiety gripped me, what to do? I got on a train before I knew where to go, cleared it up with Federico en route, and finally met him in person. I asked Federico Martelli if he was Italian, he said “No.”. Misleading names are a rare sign of genius. After formalities and inviting him to cake and coffee, we presumed to the interview.

Throughout, Federico would emphasise certain things that were of importance to him. Among them are some I would like to focus on: temporality, durability and that architecture makes up the foundation on which him and Rem Koolhaas designed Base °1 and °2.

Martelli explained me how He, Koolhaas and the Stedelijk curators approach the project since the beginning. The collections is recognised as one of the most important in Europe,

the walls are filled with the history of the Stedelijk’s past; more than a century of choices made by directors and curators. What has grown is a 90,000 piece archive to choose from, a supremely diverse catalogue of art reflecting the individuals who have shaped the museum’s existence. The new approach can properly adjust to this diversity as free-choice pathways do away with traditional ideas of how we are guided in our experience. It rids the audience of rooms that follow formulas, instead creates open mazes in which “each wall is a theme”. New meanings can be created by the visitor as two or more walls make relations. Clusters of relation can converge as themes relate to a multiplicity of closely placed others. To summarise: The collection is on display with purposively selected highlights and clusters created by the walls. Two or more walls implies spaces, so relations. These relations are not obligatory and the route around the space remain undetermined and personal.

 

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diagram

 

Federico stresses this point, him and Rem are architects. They have designed and built “walls”, not free-standing art display cases, hangers or frames.

The walls are constructed to be solid, Federico and the team spent ages testing re-design to be durable and immutable. They are meant to look solid, some arch over unmoving, as free-standing extensions of the building’s skeleton. This perceived solidity for the audience is a reaction to a fragility in how artwork has been displayed in the past. Free-standing wall within museums, including ones used at the Stedelijk for decades, are seen as aesthetically temporary, provisional. They allow for flexible re-constructions for new exhibitions or for creative freedom in presentation. Bases °1 and °2 extend this trend of mobility and flexibility, yet attach a material solidity that optically asserts permanence. The new walls further allow for greater threshold of art to be displayed, being heavy enough to support differently weighted works. The team faced another challenge to its goal of perceived permanence in the bases’ lighting. Martelli tells of internal discussions with some offering critique of a lack of natural light, arguing that certain, special, artworks would suffer in a space without openings for natural light to filter through, thus being in constant exposure to artificial light. On the other hand, artificial lights if implemented smartly, were found to be able to highlight some works more efficiently, say a cold light that could expose a Mondrian’s vibrant colours. So while the base lacks the natural setting that windows and openings for light to filter through, it can control the direction of light completely thus maintaining the base in one state over time.

All that internal debate, discussions and the good amount of compromises the result of almost 2 years of work is clearly visible today inside Stedelijk.

At this point everything turns out to look like a confidential chat between friends in addition of some little secret funny stories that of course I am not gonna reveal and I will preserve together with the memories of my “official” first “serious interview” of my life

This experience teaches me how many factors are as important as the final result, how many things for the viewer are imperceptible in their individuality but essential to make the whole well balanced and produced by smart studied choices. I hope I successfully find out a bit more about this project and maybe  answer to some of your questions…

 

stay tuned for the next one

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Final Selfie with Mr. Martelli

 

Where order is born is born wellbeing.


Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Alvar Aalto, one of Finland’s most famous people who reshaped architecture and furniture of public buildings on the basis of functionality and organic relationship between man, nature and buildings, is now called the “Father of Modernism” in Scandinavian countries.

 

He was born Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto, on February 3, 1898, in Kuortane, Finland (at that time Finland was part of Russian Empire). He was the first of three children. His father, J. H. Aalto, was a government surveyor. His mother, Selma Hackestedt, was of Swedish ancestry, she died in 1903.

Hence, Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto was educated a lot by his grandfathers. His grandfathers were both very close to nature, one of them was a forest guard. Alvar Aalto has a child use to play a lot in the forest. It was obviously through him that the outdoor world, particularly the forest became so important in Aalto work. The forest with his towering tree trunks and his various rock shapes is a world a constant changing forms which inspired Aalto a lot. Aalto probably found in nature the basic geometrics patterns for his architecture and furnitures.  The forest thought him also that nature is a sensitive ecological system in which men must find his place.

Aalto’s relationship is pretty clear according to the paintings he did as a child. He hesitated few years either to become a painter or an architect. According to his saying, he decided at the age of nine that he wanted to become an architect.

Aalto has been educated in the idea of National Romanticism, the Finnish version of Art Nouveau. Aalto rejected it, such as pretty much his whole generation. However he took one important feature from his predecessors : the idea that his creation should perfectly fit into nature.

Around 1920 a softer version of the strict modernist aesthetic emerged in Scandinavia, characterized by the use of (curved) wood in combination with shapes, colours, and decorations inspired by nature. The resulting furniture arose from the ambition that design should offer both beauty and functionality, and be affordable to everyone.

Aalto rejected a lot of furnitures of his time, he wanted to find a material that makes chairs pleasant to sit in. A lot of Aalto’s furnitures were also inspired by the shapes of nature. He often solved practical problems with abstract experimentation of forms with wood. Aalto experimented with bending a bunch of wood to create chairs.

Through experimentation with wood Aalto discovers specific properties which could be useful of men. For instance, in the interior of the Viipuri Library Aalto created rooms inspired by nature which specific functions. Such architectural solutions as a sunken reading-well, free-flowing ceilings and cylindrical skylights, first tested in Viipuri, would regularly appear in Aalto’s works. Aalto differed from the first generation of modernist architects (such as Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier) in his predilection for natural materials: in this design, « wood was first introduced into an otherwise modernist setting of concrete, white stucco, glass, and steel ».

Aalto’s work with wood, was obviously influenced by early Scandinavian architects; however, his experiments and departure from the norm brought attention to his ability to make wood do things not previously done. He was one of the first architect/designer to be able to find a way to bent wood in order to create theses beautiful organic shapes. Aalto studied architecture at Helsinki University of Technology, however during a large part of his career Aalto created a lot of furniture. Like Le Corbusier, Aalto considered that furnitures and architecture should be a collective and cohesive ensemble that creates order. His experimental method has been influenced by his meetings with various members of the Bauhaus design school.

After traveling through Europe, he was exposed to International Style and soon adopted the natural materials and organic forms of this approach into his aesthetic.

Design and Pattern


Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Pattern, cell of design

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Living creatures have evolved as a result of adaptation to daily environment surrounding them. Creators are often inspired by those forms of nature, which is not only aesthetic but also functionally appropriate. So some design objects get to resemble living things. Looking into them deep, we can perhaps find that they both have a powerful element which does not appear on the outside at first glance but still has its influence on the overall appearances.

It is the cell that constitutes the whole body, which also can be called the pattern in design. The knotted chair of Marcel Wanders, made in 1995, shows good example of 3D pattern design. One unit that makes up the chair could have been no more than a twisted line, but it acquired more durability when several units are gathered and patterned under the certain and repetitive rule. (Of course, there was a process of hardening with thermosetting resin.)

It is also noteworthy that a cord, which is not very expected material for furniture, was used to make a chair which can withstand loads over 100 kg. Could this be possible if there wasn’t composed unit with consistent rule? Apart from this, how Teo Jansen could achieve to make kinetic sculpture that shows flexible movement with hard wood? I think a patterned design allow creator to be able to explore the materials and thereby can have its own texture. I would like to mention ‘knotted chair’ as one of the designs that can provide us with vision and tactile sense simultaneously on the basis of its pattern.

To continue with the research on connection between ‘design’ and ‘pattern’, I come to ask first,

“What is pattern?”

Then, look up the dictionary definition of the word-
Pattern is a particular way in which something is done, is organized, or happens; is any regularly repeated arrangement, especially a design made from repeated lines, shapes, or colors on a surface;

The word ‘pattern’ can be regarded as the particular way something is generated or as the regular arrangement that include continuous rules inside. What I can find from those selected meaning of the word is that; whatever we call as pattern has to have regular and repetitive factors, which makes it predictable, organized, and look stable.

So, what does pattern mean to art and design?

It could be one of the foundations that construct the way we see the image as well as deliver it. To explain this, let’s look at a few principles of design. The formative elements such as dot, line, surface, shape, matter can be said to be materials that is used to create image or object. Here, the ways we arranged those material- principles of design- are involving. Some of them are unity, repetition, harmony, rhythm, symmetry, balance, proportion and so on. Each of them, at some point, is related to allowing materials to look similar and coherent. We intentionally or intuitively use those principles for organizing a clear image to deliver our message efficiently. At the same time, our eyes receive those similarity, without even noticing it, and store it as groups in our mind. Therefore, we can realize that discovering the coherent image and patterning it is the basic method how we perceive visual information.

Pattern on 3-dimension

My research have had more focused on pattern in 3D design object than any other kinds of art pattern. It is not only because that the starting point was the knotted chair by Marcel Wanders, but also dealing the pattern in terms of its relation with object’s shape and texture are worth to watch. With the development of technology, more than any other times before, designer can now easily explore the new materials and create their very own way to use it.

Marcel Wander’s various way of using pattern are illustrated well with Knotted chair, Crochet chair, Flower chair, Cybrog chair and Cinderella broke A Leg bed.

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Earlier, Alessandro Mendini used his fabric pattern on the baroque style chair, Magis Proust. By seeing the pattern as ornament, he was marked as the one of those leading the postmodernism. In this case, ‘pattern’ became the mean to deliver the designer’s concept.

Cappellini-Proust-Geometrica-Armchair

Then, Zaha Hadid presented her colorful patterned furniture, Tide, at 2011 Milan Design Week. This work obviously shows the great promise of using pattern in design. The symmetric shelving module that one can create different compositions through rotations on itself allows individuals to build and rebuild the module to fit the space around them.

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Last but not least, I would like to refer that 3D pattern is also opening the door from craft to industrial design. 2D pattern design can be easily processed and completed on the screen while 3D pattern still needs to be experimented by hands at the first stage, especially if it is for the furniture or architecture that should ensure the stability. For example, the Knotted chair of Marcel Wanders is actually known as a result of handwork knot. Creator, as a human, they also make mistakes, sometimes do fail but later approach the point where they can create the most safety and aesthetic cells. This process is happening with hands. So I can see that link between handwork and industrial design is generated if the design happens under the conditions that need to be experimented and proved before it is systematized to be a mass production.

So far I looked through the definition of pattern and the how important it is on the art and design field, especially with the context of design objects. Also I found that how differently each designer handle the concept of pattern. Some of them would use it as their identity, other see it as a way to express their design philosophy, and another can develop it to interact with users.

At the beginning of the post, I made a connection between ‘cell’ and ‘pattern’. Just as the cell breath, nourish and endure the living body, pattern also function as indispensable part of whole (design object). It can be always developing and has endless possibilities, because there are still numerous ways to make a new rules and compositions out of it.

All is to happen


Saturday, February 3, 2018

French version:

Sillonnant depuis plusieurs heures les allées sans vraiment en connaître la raison, je décidais je hâter le pas en direction de ce qui semblait être une cage d’escalier. Je m’y engouffrais, et toujours dans la hâte commençait à grimper les hautes marches, deux par deux.

« Trente-six, trente-huit, quarante, quarante-deux…soixante-quatre,soixante-six, soixante-huit..quatre-vingt-deux! » m’écriai-je, le souffle haletant. J’étais arrivée au bout. Mais rien. Il n’y avait rien; rien d’autres que de nouvelles allées, semblables à celles que j’arpentais quelques minutes auparavant. Je m’asseyais, afin de reprendre mon souffle, suffoquant toujours de ces quatre-vingt-deux maudites marches que je venais de monter. En m’asseyant, je m’adossais contre la paroi murale et sentis un léger glissement. « Ce doit être mon imagination: je n’ai presque pas dormi et je ne sais guère à quand remonte mon dernier repas» me dis-je, en m’appuyant plus fortement encore. Mais cette fois-ci, la paroi eut un glissement soudain et cette fois-ci ce ne pouvait être mon imagination: je me retournai, et la paroi s’était ouverte sur un nouveau dédale de ruelles. « C’en est assez, de ces allées! » D’un bond, je me levais et passais le seuil de ce qui ressemblait fortement à un labyrinthe. Je me mis d’un mouvement frénétique à pousser les parois murales qui m’entouraient et sans m’en rendre compte je créais ce qui pouvait être associé à un repère un abri, une maison, ou toutefois quelque chose qui me servirait d’habitat.  « Cela manque tout de même de couleurs, ces teintes grisâtres ne m’inspirent pas. » Il suffisait de le dire, et une lueur vint teinter l’enclos de couleurs que je ne saurais nommer. J’exaltais, et m’empressais de pousser à nouveau le mur qui me servait de sortie, dévalait à toute allure les allées à la recherche de quelqu’un avec qui je pourrais partager ma découverte. Personne à l’horizon, mais je continuais à explorer la cité avec engouement. « Hey! » m’écriai-je. C’est alors que j’aperçus quelqu’un: elle ne m’entendit pas, et semblait déambuler avec candeur tout en bousculant, abaissant, inclinant plus de parois que je ne pouvais en compter moi-même. Je restais béate, devant l’architecture qui se créait peu à peu sous mes yeux. Et je décidais de la rejoindre. « Ludens » me présentai-je. « Babylone » me dit-elle sans un regard tout en continuant gracieusement à articuler ses mouvements, créateurs d’une architecture que je ne saurais qualifier. Nous continuâmes sans un mot à assembler, élever, courber, soustraire, façonner pendant un temps qui me semblait ne durer que quelques secondes mais qui m‘aurait pris une éternité à décrire.

C’était comme si mon esprit s’était dissocié de mon corps, et que je pouvais me voir, près de Babylone, des structures suivant harmonieusement nos gesticulations jaillissant de part et d’autres de cette superstructure. Il me semblait participer à un tableau architectural, où le temps ne faisait pas raison et où nos envies seules motivaient notre initiative.

Quatre heures dix-huit. Suffocante et moite, je me réveillai d’un souffle haletant, me précipitai dans la salle de bain et m’aspergeai le visage d’eau, me contemplant dans le miroir. « Qu’est-ce qu’il t’arrive, Ludens? » me demandai-je dans un bégaiement. J’avais passé la soirée à écrire jusque tard mon roman, et m’étais réveillée au beau milieu de la nuit, avachie dans mes brouillons éparpillés sur mon bureau. Un sentiment étrange me transperçait: avais-je bien écrit cette histoire que je ne cessais de me répéter en boucle, ou n’avais-je que rêvé cette incroyable cité? Je me dirigeais à nouveau vers mon bureau, avançais ma main vers le tas de papier gisant sur le bois luisant dans l’obscurité. Je ne trouvais qu’une pile de papiers, griffonnés du mot Babylone.

Je m’asseyais une fois encore derrière mon bureau, saisis une feuille vierge et sans hésitation me mis à écrire cette histoire que je venais de rêver. « Sillonnant depuis plusieurs heures les allées sans vraiment en connaître la raison, je décidais je hâter le pas en direction de ce qui semblait être une cage d’escalier » étaient les premiers mots de mon roman que je nommais New Babylon.

English version:

Roaming for several hours across the aisles without having any clear the reason, I decided to hasten and go into the direction of what seemed to be is a staircase. I rushed into it, and still in a hurry began to climb the high steps, two at the same time. “Thirty-six, thirty-eight, forty, forty-two … sixty-four, sixty-six, sixty-eight … eighty-two! » I yelled, gasping. I had arrived at the end. But there was nothing: nothing but some more aisles, similar to those I had been striding across just a few minutes before. I sat down to get my breath back, still suffocating because of the eighty-two wretched steps I had just climbed. As I sat down, I leaned against the wall and felt a slight slip. “It must be my imagination: I’ve hardly slept and don’t even remember when was the last time I had food” I said filling dizzy, slouching against the wall. But this time, the wall suddenly clearly slipped and this time, that wasn’t my imagination: I turned around, and the wall opened on a new maze of aisles. « Enough! » In a single bound I jumped crossed the threshold of what looked like a labyrinth. I started pushing in a frenetic move the walls around me, and before I could even realize I’ve created a shelter, a house, or somehow something that could be a living place. « I’m still missing colors, though ». All I had to do was saying it and the walls started to slowly get tinted into colors I couldn’t name. I exalted, and hastened to push again the wall that seemed to be the exit, ran down the aisles searching for someone I could share my discovery with. Nobody was around, but I continued to explore the city with enthusiasm. « Hey! » I yelled, stopping my race. She didn’t hear me, and seemed to move with candor while jostling, lowering, tilting more walls than I could even count. I remained blissful, in front of the architecture which was slowly being created under my eyes. And I decided to join her. “Ludens,” I introduced myself. “Babylon,” she said without a glance, continuing gracefully to articulate her movements, creating this architecture any word couldn’t invent. We continued without a word to assemble, raise, bend, subtract, shape for a while, that seemed to last only a few seconds but that would have taken me an eternity to describe.

It was like my mind had been dissociated from my body, and I could see myself near Babylon, the structures following harmoniously our gestures springing from both sides of this hyper structure. It like participating to an architectural painting, where time wasn’t serving any purpose and our desires alone motivated this initiative.

Eighteen past four. Suffocating and clammy, I woke up gasping, rushed into the bathroom and sprayed my face with some water, contemplating myself in the mirror. “What’s the matter with you, Ludens? I asked myself in a stutter. I spent the whole evening working on writing on my novel, and had woken up in the middle of the night, slumped over my drafts scattered on my desk. A strange feeling was running through my body: have I written this story that keeps looping in my mind, or have I only dreamt this incredible city? I headed back to my desk, moving my hand toward the pile of paper lying on the wood glowing in the darkness. I had only found a pile of papers, scribbled down with the word Babylon.

I sat down once more behind my desk, grabbed a blank sheet of paper, and without hesitation began to write the story I had just dreamed of. “Roaming for several hours across the aisles without having any clear the reason, I decided to hasten and go into the direction of what seemed to be is a staircase” were the first words of my novel that I named New Babylon.

 

spatiovore

Spatiovore,1958 / Constant

Astonishing, humble yet clever form, presented in a corner of the basement of Stedelijk museum, behind a translucent display case with a black background, its shape appears to be like two convex lenses of a thick and rigid perspex, half-opened almost like a shell; containing a fragile installations of metal shafts, of which stands out a thinner layer of orange perspex; the whole forming like a complex machinery lying on a wooden base.

I lingered over it for quite a while first because I didn’t, couldn’t understand it at first sight. I just found it beautifully standing there, laying inert.

It appears as being paradoxical to me though: its whole shape, so geometrical and immobile because of this thick and stiff perspex seems at the same time setting in motion; its metal shafts seem to slowly get activated, rotating and could be like seeing a painting taking physical spatial shape and rise. Forming a whole thing where each fragment becomes complementary to perfect the machinery. I fully appreciate its size, neither excessive nor ridiculously small; I appreciate the interplay of lines; alternating between transparencies and opacities, its colors as being injected with a syringe into the space. But I still don’t get it.

Now I do. Constant has effortlessly been trying to assert and establish what reality could be with New Babylon 1, and I would like to salute his attempt of creating alternative life experiences, what he called situations. I could only merely explain his lifetime project consisting into megastructures where « the bourgeois shackles of work, family life, and civic responsibility would be discarded. The post-revolutionary individual would wander from one leisure environment to another in search of new sensations. Beholden to no one, he would sleep, eat, recreate, and procreate where and when he wanted. Self-fulfillment and self-satisfaction were Constant’s social goals. Deductive reasoning, goal-oriented production, the construction and betterment of a political community-all these were eschewed. » 2. In other words his city of future was placed under the guidance of playing, adventure, mobility, as well as all the conditions that facilitate the free creation of the own life of its inhabitants who would have at their disposal a large collection of material and tools to freely shape and reshape their own environment.

In a lecture given by Constant at Delft University, he summarized his retrospective thoughts about New Babylon as follows:‘… it is possible to form a fairly clear idea of an as yet uninhabited world. It is more difficult to populate this world with people who live so very differently from ourselves: we can neither dictate nor design their playful or inventive behavior in advance. We can only invoke our fantasy and switch from science to art. It was this insight that prompted me to stop work on the models and to attempt in paintings and drawings, however approximately, to create some New Babylonian life. This was as far as I could go. The project exists. It is safely stored away in a museum, waiting for more favorable times when it will once again arouse interest among future urban designers.’

 1 – Wigley Marx in Constant’s New Babylon, The Hyper Architecture of Desire:

« the conception of the city and its effects is based on the autonomy of the single building, or on the interrelation of individuals in a social matrix of extreme functionalism, derived from one-way political thinking »

2- Wikipedia article: New Babylon, Constant Nieuwenhuys

 

 

Judge a book by its cover


Saturday, November 25, 2017

Book Cover     Illustration 2

Sound file: ‘Front Cover’

[audio:https://designblog.rietveldacademie.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Front-Cover-Audio.mp3|titles=Front Cover Audio]
The blue colour of the spine was the first thing that attracted me to the book ‘Walls That Teach’. I reached up to grab the book and upon closer inspection I discovered a beautiful cover with an interesting layout of text and attractive illustrations. The layout of text on the back of the cover for example runs horizontally, forcing you to turn the book to the side to read the text – something that reoccurs occasionally within the book. Despite the title of the book and the topic – architecture of youth centres – being an unknown topic to me, the design of the cover intrigued me enough to give the book a chance and look within it.

Typo 'w'

I opened the book and ran my fingers through the pages to feel the paper. The book felt light and the paper felt thin. The colours of the paper were the next thing that I noticed – they vary between green, white, and black paper. The main texts appear on the green and black paper. The illustrations and images appear on the white paper. The white pages are laid out horizontally requiring the reader to turn the book to its side in order to look at it.

Sound file: ‘Chronological’

[audio:https://designblog.rietveldacademie.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Chronological-order-paper-choice-and-consequences.mp3|titles=Chronological]

Young Pioneer Palace 3

The way the font (Gil Sans, Gill Sans Infant) is used and the strokes of the letters, the layout of the paragraphs, the letter spacing, word spacing and line spacing give a feeling of space on the pages without giving the impression that the page feels empty. The letters, words and lines are spaced quite far apart. The Paragraphs are centred on the middle of the pages, leaving a space of about an inch on either side. The strokes of the letters are also light (there are specks of white on the text that is black). All of these factors contribute to the appearance of the pages not looking cluttered.

Sound file: ‘Playful Typography’

[audio:https://designblog.rietveldacademie.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Playful-Typography.mp3|titles=Playful Typography]

Illustration 4

The illustrations throughout the book are very imaginative. The first illustration is on the front cover. it is an architectural drawing of a youth centre with illustrations of people demonstrating how the space would be used – people are dancing in a disco, some people are playing table tennis, some people are sitting around and some people are working.

Sound file: ‘Illustrations’

[audio:https://designblog.rietveldacademie.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Illustrations.mp3|titles=Illustrations]
However, these illustrations change inside the book. The people depicted in the illustration on the front cover are no longer contained within the walls of the ‘youth centre’, but are left to roam freely over the pages. Sometimes at the bottom of the page you will find a couple walking hand in hand. On another page there are people playing table tennis. On another page beside a paragraph about the planning of a youth centre there are a group of people meeting around a table discussing something.

Illustration 5

The contrast between these illustrations and the more practical architectural drawings within the book is really amusing. For someone like myself who doesn’t know much about the topic of architecture, small details such as the people wandering through the pages really capture my attention and encourage me to read. The different photographs of the youth centres under construction, how they were used and exterior shots of the buildings punctuated throughout the book also adds another dimension. The combination of how the text is put together, the illustrations, drawings and photographs really brings the book to life for me.

Sound file: ‘Images’

[audio:https://designblog.rietveldacademie.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Images.mp3|titles=Images]

Book Images 2 Book Images 3

My first impression of the book was that it appeared to be playfully made. This struck me as being funny because the topic of the book is about youth centre architecture, but the topic of the book suggested that it could be heavy to read. Upon opening the book and reading it, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the playfulness of the cover continued throughout. All the different elements brought together really encouraged me to read. I think that the intention of the design element of the book is to inspire the audience to interact with the book and create discussion. All in all a very well designed book.

 

Walls that Teach, designer: David Bennewith & Sandra Kassenaar, Rietveld Library Cat. no: 718.5 pie 1.8 met 1

Purpose


Thursday, October 26, 2017

266px-J.J.P._Oud 260px-Landing_of_De_Vonk_by_architect_Oud Cafe_De_Unie

Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud is a dutch de stijl architect. In his early career he was mainly inspired by Berlage. Buildings he designed were really geometric, he used long staright walls, rounded corners, horizontal and vertical lines. And these elements would cover an open space inside. He was interested in using unexpensive building materials and on the buildings he didnt want a trace of human hand. He was also interested in how the light comes in the building, how clean and fresh does the building look and feel. In his sketches you can see how he also sketches the entrance of the light into the space. Between 1918-1933 he was Municipal Housing Architect of Rotterdam. During these times the country was getting a lot of labor so he worked on mass housing for the coming workers. He didn’t want to use the traditional way of using bricks. Other two examples of his known works would be: Vakantiehuis De Vonk, it was made for working women so they could spend their weekends outdoors and be involved with the countryside. What makes this building special are the tiles on the main hall. They were painted by Theo van Doesburg to include painting in architecture and they thought this would make people interested in art when they were staying there. The other example would be Cafe de Unie. It was not really liked when it was built. Outside of the building looks like a Mondriaan painting. With the use of these primary colors and illuminated signs they wanted to attract attention. The building was destroyed during the 1940 bombardment and was reconstructed later.

What I want to investigate further is the situation in Vakantiehuis De Vonk. Can we really make people interested in something by just putting it “there”?  Or did the answer to this question change in time? In one of Oud’s projects (Vakantiehuis De Vonk), they painted the floor tiles on different colors and it was designed by Theo van Doesburg. They wanted people who go into the building get into art by experiencing it. When I think about it, the purpose of commercials is the make the consumer interested in the product. Does this really work now in 2017 ? We have internet and social media. We are living in times that is extremely easy to reach people. So you would think that it would work amazingly because when you think about it a lot more people actually see the commercials now therefore the sales should go up right? Well, online commercials are everywhere but people are not seeing it. A personal example would be: when i am just scrolling through social media, I don’t stop scrolling until I see something that immediately grabs my attention. Let’s say an AD grabbed my attention, as soon as i realise that it is an AD I would just go back to my endless scrolling to the depths of the internet. More general example would be Adobe’s researches about ADBlocking. In the graphs they made as a result you can see that adblock users keep growing daily and in January 2015 monthly active users were 181 million. So in conclusion I would say in 2017 ads are definetely seen by a large group but it doesn’t interest people. The reason i am giving an example from online advertising is according to the research done by Nielsen(2013-2015) shows us that the most effective way of advertising is online. By these information I could say that these days placing something somewhere to make people interested in it doesn’t work really well.

So in the making of Vakantiehuis De Vonk, the artwork became a commercial and art became the product. But this is not the only way to use art. I think we can all agree on that in contemporary art doesn’t carry this purpose of making people interested in it but also we can’t deny that artists, sometimes in groups and sometimes indiviudually give art their own purpose. So I can say that art is subjective. Therefore, using art for a purpose would only work if the audience had the same ideas in art with the artist.

PRPS

Adolf Loos vs Hansje van Halem and the importance of ornament in the contemporary world


Thursday, October 19, 2017

Adolf Loos was an Austrian and Czech architect and an influential European theorist of modern architecture. One of his famous buildings, Looshaus, is now one of the most representative architectures of the modernist movement, although at the time it was established it had received great opposition and contempt.

 

 

The industrial revolution, the sudden accumulated wealth, and the people who longed for the appearance of the nobleman came to the city to compete with the idea that they should be more splendid than anyone else and it is natural that such people despised Looshaus. Anyhow, Loos was established with his opinion, he believed that the ornaments were not beauty, but more as a self-display and that if an artist made commodities for aesthetic purpose, it would not reflect the way people live and would not have the necessary function. The ornaments were a crime for Adolf Loos, a waste of the craftsman’s time, they were made for the main purpose of aesthetic pursuit and must be eliminated from architecture and design. He said that if an artist produces household items for aesthetic purpose, it does not reflect the way people live and it is a crime to make the worker spend so much time on such a useless thing. Therefore, he can not be called extreme functionalist, rather, his ideals were to produce household goods and to build buildings by reflecting the people’s real life at the time. Alfred Loos want to send his message to people who are captivated only by their splendid ornament and life and who are trying to forget their past without being true.

 

59291451bfcde2e8a4f4df61c4343021-loosbuilding-535x408

 

Hansje van Halem is an Amsterdam based graphic designer, she is mainly interested in typography, book design and other printing techniques but she also experiments with computer processed graphic patterns and drawings. Her work is centred on “exquisite” typography, it is a fusion of ornamental patterns and letters which become more then letter-forms, they are ornaments wth a specific function, they are meant to be read.

 

Ornamentismeanttoberead

 

There are 100 years between the idea that Adolf Loos had about the use of ornament and the way Hansje van Halem is using it today, and it is very interesting to see how, although their point of view regarding it is so distant from each other, there’s still a big connection between two, both indeed are giving great importance to the “function” of their work, Loos eliminates the ornament because there is no function in it and van Halem on the other hand gives a function to it though the use of typography.

 

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But how are the contemporary artists and architects actually reacting to the Adolf Loos’s ideas nowadays ? There are different manifestations of the ornament’s resistance in the contemporary architecture, The London-based FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste) for instance consider ornaments as an important and indispensable part of architecture, Charles Holland, partner of the FAT says in an article from the Financial Times: “The Loos argument is very interesting. As I understand it, he was saying that ornamentation was a waste of labour, effort and craft. With contemporary techniques and manufacturing it is possible to achieve a lot of complexity and intricacy with very little effort, so there’s a weird reversal of his argument. We regard ornament less as a guilty pleasure and more as a communicative tool. There is traditionally a kind of puritanism in the UK, a rather macho approach in which engineering and high-tech appliqué is OK. It can all be justified in practical terms but I think we can look more critically now at a modernism in which the motifs of industry were applied to architecture to make it look modern, which in itself is a kind of ornamentation.”

The current computer technologies are also playing a big role in the contemporary w  orld, this modelling and manufacturing technologies has allowed the mass production of the most complex forms and ideas. Evan Douglis is using this technologies to create new strange, forms which recall baroque and rococo decoration in their own new digital world, he also says: “The technology and the software at our disposal now gives us enormous control over form, equations can become a material presence. We’re interested in that intricacy between pragmatism and retinal exuberance – it’s something that bridges the disciplines, from architecture to furniture, interiors and product.”

 

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This new digital tools are helping designers and artist in their work as never before in our history and are also an easy way to experiment with forms, letters and of course ornaments, it makes the whole procedure more interesting and exiting, this is how Loos’s position, after a century, is slightly starting to become invalid, and the ornament on the other hand is on it’s way to decriminalisation.

a cooperative research by Yuriy Krupey & Eun Seo Lee

Architecture and Environment Coexisting


Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Presenting itself as the architecture of the future, the new ideals of De Stijl privileged man-made realities, and therefore they had to be detached as much as possible from anything that might recall elements we find in nature. But is it really the best solution for a human, which is to all extents a natural creature, to be living in an environment which denies such a big part of its essence?

Imposing

Theo Van Doesburg, one of the founders of De Stijl movement, believed that because you can’t imitate nature, and you therefore need to move as far away from it in your design. There should therefore be a clear separation between nature and culture. A building with clean geometry, primary colours and curated composition was in his opinion the best way of creating a holistic experience. Studying his theories, sketches and actual buildings it appears that the surroundings should fit into the atmosphere the building creates, rather than the building into its surrounding. Van Doesburg followed his theory mercilessly. And maybe this strict praxis is the reason that only a few of his architectural designs actually got build.

It makes sense that, considering the time frame in which De Stijl developed, artists promoted a radical new approach to design and art, disclaiming anything that might refer to the past. This is true for De Stijl but also for the futurist movement and many others. We are forced to recognize that any movement in any context has an influence on what follows. The idea that a space should be as impervious as possible to any organic shape or colour, advocates an understanding of the world where humans are placed diametrically opposed to nature, and justifies a sort of alienation from it. In a way this is still just a residue of the dialectic of the Enlightenment. Evolution in this mindset is seen as the process of placing humanity as superior to its surroundings, and as consequence, of marginalizing it to new self-made environments with no regard to the old ones. Examples can be seen in Van Doesburg’s works such as the Huis Van Zessen, the project for the Maison d’artiste, and in L’aubette Cafe. This multifunctional cinema and dancehall presented a minimalistic interior and bold decoration of diagonally squares in strong colours were not normally seen in public spaces. And even though the creation is considered a masterpiece today, customers did not feel comfortable when visiting the Café. The atmosphere of the place was not considered cozy. The L’aubette Café makes you wonder if Van Doesburg’s theory is simply too strict and fierce to execute in real life. This manner of not taking the surroundings and people into account, has without doubt stimulated a big development in the way we think about design today. But is this challenging style too distant from the user’s demands to actually work?

aubette cafe

 L’aubette Cafe

Combining

Even though De Stijl has become very influential, and we see elements that allude to it in many modern design and architectural works, the issue of the role of nature has been re-considered in different ways. For instance, Frank Lloyd Wright represents a more organic approach of  doing this. His works mirror his belief that structures should reflect harmony between humans and nature. He achieved this by incorporating the present natural elements into the design of the structure. Each new design was carefully thought into the environment it should be in. The most famous example is the praised Falling Water House, built in Pennsylvania in 1935. The house is built on top of a cliff from which a waterfall originates. And although the modern house consists of inorganic geometrical rectangles, it seems perfectly in harmony with the surroundings. This is achieved by the use of rock-like bricks and the synergy between the position of the house and the waterfalls helps it to both stand out and to fit into its surroundings. This approach of placing minimalistic houses in the middle of wild nature has since become popular. For many it’s seen as the ideal way of achieving architectural serenity and a way to be in touch with nature, which is paradoxical considering the contrast between the unstructured wild nature and the inorganic shape of the these kind of houses.

fallingwater-3

 Falling Water House

Incorporating

Another compromise is to literally immerse the structure into nature, making the whole as homogeneous as possible. This is evidently the opposite of Van Doesburg’s philosophy. As an approach it dates back to primitive housing, when nature itself had to provide shelter. Turf- houses were used as dwellings for thousands of years. Because of the turf’s biodegradable properties, this tradition has been lost. Still in countries like Iceland it’s not difficult to encounter traditional turf houses that blend completely with the surroundings.

turfhouses icland

Icelandic Turf-House

In modern architecture these principles of integration have continued to develop. An example could be Malator Earth House in Druidston, Pembrokeshire, Wales, built in 1998 and designed by architects Future Systems for a former Member of Parliament; or Villa Vals in Switzerland, which was designed by Bjarne Mastenbroek and Christian Müller, respectively of the architectural offices SeARCH and CMA. Their design plan was to completely integrate the villa into the landscape to avoid disturbing the unspoiled nature.

malator earthhouse

Malator Earth House

villa vals

Villa Vals

Rethinking

Aside from the aesthetical differences between the architectural typologies we have analysed, what really is relevant is the interaction between the building and nature. The fact that nature determines the building’s survival, as well as ours, can’t be ignored, and now it’s clearer than ever. The sort of ideology promoted by movements like of De Stijl, that didn’t take into consideration nature and its resources, represents in a way the cause of all the major ecological issues we are facing today. Turf houses and eco-houses that merge totally with nature are not only an architectural achievement but also an ideological one as most of the resources aim to be sustainable. It’s necessary now to find a new way of incorporating sustainability in our lifestyles and as consequence in our architecture.

a cooperative research by Thea Knarberg & Emma Sardoni


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