an unusual resource

Wayne Barlowe's classic INFERNO, is a wonderful fantasy epic depicting hell, and all it's minions. The book contains some wonderful forms and some nontraditional buildings..its something to look at if you can get your hands on it.

A New World Trade Center

This fascinating books contains the first round of new world trade center designs. I remember how inspired i was by the works of Williams/Tsien and Carlos Brillembourg.If you get the chance, buy, rent or steal this book... it will inspire you, not just for this project but in general.

From the Library: Monolithic Architecture

Marios's inspirational images continually return to monolithic building.   Which has propmted me to dig through my stacks to find the catalog from a show at The Heinze Architectural Center @ The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania.   The show was all the way back in 1996.  Many of the building proposals presented in the exhibition have now becoem realities.   

While I don't think the building examples are all that relevant to The IMTA project, the essays at teh front of the catalog discuss the nature of monolithic structure and warrant some review in relationship to this discussion.  I have posted the essay by Detlef Mertins titled Open Countours and Other Autonomies. (click on title)

It is intereting that he also returns to Michael Fried's writting about minimalism.

Museum Typology Model II: White Cubes

Museum Typology Model II: White Cubes

Emerging as Modernism transitioned into minimalism the white cube of International Style architecture became the preferred building vessel for the containment of art in the 20th century.   As art work shifted away from a historical representations and narratives to more conceptual and philosophical operational grounds a neutral was deemed important. 

The white cube is an abstraction of a building.  It is vague rendering of space which allows the contents and viewer to project themselves upon the space.  Michael Fried made some assertions regarding shifting role of the viewer  in his 1967 Artforum essay Art and Objecthood*.  It is interesting that he work he chose to use to exemplify his argument was Tony Smith's sculptural cube, Die.

Fried was against this new relationship which required the engagement and participation viewer. He preferred the more transmissive, now nearly extinct, arrangement in which the art delivered a message and the viewer received the message without any regard or thought of them self.   

I wonder though if the artist have given over too much control in how work is viewed.   Can in be shifted from place to place, wall to wall, city to city,  culture to culture, and time to time and still maintain it's same intent and integrity?  Is the white cube too amorphous of space allowing too little control of the viewer's experience and allowing to much of the viewers personal history to simultaneously come into consideration?  Or does the white cube operate as an index triggering the clearing of the viewers mind in preparation for the intake of something new?

Above:

The Getty Museum In Los Angeles by richard Meier and The New National Gallery in Berlin by Ludwing Mies Van der Rohe.

wow.

FUTURE DREAMS

http://dreams.honda.com

THE FUTURE OF THE ARTS

The Future holds many dramatic events, from the extinction of 20% of all creatures of earth , the coming collapse of all oceanic fisheries, to the advent of 9 Billion humans beings on earth. One understands the pressing concerns of governments will be to feed and police their huge populations, so what will become of public art venues? Will our leaders keep supporting the arts? What about the general population attitude towards the arts in turbulent times? One wonders if the arts will fall upon a similar fate shown in Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron ). How will the Arts be presented in times ahead? What will happen to the thousands of art museums that dot the world?How will art be presented to possibly traumatized masses? Will art be safe? What is the future of the Art Museum?