Hetze und Rastlosigkeit (Agitation and Restlessness)
Zurich, Summer 1946
From Rene Groebli: Visionen : Photographien 1946-1991
Source: liquidnight
Old 3D Maps Of New York
Codex 99 continues it’s historical look of New York maps with a collection which adds an extra dimension.
(via vellum)
Source: codex99.com
This is Marc Quinn’s most famous piece of work, Self, made using 4.5 litres of his own blood, which was slowly extracted from his body over a period of five months and frozen in a cast of his face. Quinn has been making these roughly every five years since 1991, and each one must be maintained carefully in fridges. The fragility of the media means exhibiting is difficult - the head has to be placed into a glass case which is chilled from underneath. It reminds the audience of the fragility of existence and the precise conditions necessary for the flourishing of life
(via 7knotwind)
Source: marcquinn.com
WHY COOPER UNION MATTERS
Since the 1980s, universities have responded to the pressures of economy by increasingly commercializing themselves, selling their educations as a product. That education has faltered as a result of this is evident all around us. The discourse has become one of investment: Exorbitant loans are justified on the grounds of the value of the product they purport to put out—namely, students that generate income (which then, in theory, enables them to pay off their educational debt). This model keeps education squarely in the place of an instrument within a distinctly capitalist frame, and it has far-reaching consequences. It has already shaped the way schools prioritize disciplinary weight inside the curriculum so that humanities and arts budgets have dwindled to almost nothing. It has limited the nature of discussions in the classroom and the priorities of the students so that it has become commonplace for students to demand higher grades for mediocre work, because of an over-concern with their own marketability once they pass through the institution’s walls. The difference, at Cooper Union, is that because education is regarded as a higher good and not exclusively as a marketable product, the learning process is able to move outside of a solely capitalist frame. An all-scholarship school makes other kinds of thought possible because of the freedom it allows for thinking and learning to roam outside of mere supply and demand, investment and product.
Excerpt of text by Litia Perta
Via LW: http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/why-cooper-union-matters/
Source: lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com
Medina, Malta, 1986
From Evelyn Hofer
Source: liquidnight
“Architecture and war are not incompatible. Architecture is war. War is architecture. I am at war with my time, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms. I am one of millions who do not fit in, who have no home, no family, no doctrine, no firm place to call my own, no known beginning or end, no “sacred and primordial site.” I declare war on all icons and finalities, on all histories that would chain me with my own falseness, my own pitiful fears. I know only moments, and lifetimes that are as moments, and forms that appear with infinite strength, then “melt into air.” I am an architect, a constructor of worlds, a sensualist who worships the flesh, the melody, a silhouette against the darkening sky. I cannot know your name. Nor you can know mine. Tomorrow, we begin together the construction of a city.”
-LW
Source: lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com
Source: speakingruins
3D & Vermona Demo by Massive Attack released 11/11/11
Source: SoundCloud / Euan Me
Koolhaas, Delirious in Beijing
Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV building in Beijing, headquarters of China Central Television, has a beguiling and powerful design and is a metaphor for a country racing headlong into the future.
Source: The New York Times
The revolution was cybernetics, a transdisciplinary field of research and theory that, in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, changed the way we think about both knowledge and information, and how they are communicated between individuals and social groups. It enabled the advent of ‘the Information Age,’ and paved the way for the use of the computer in every aspect of daily life, including the Internet.
While the direct impact of cybernetics on architecture has so far been limited to concepts of ‘virtual reality,’ ‘intelligent buildings,’ and ‘simulacra,’ its indirect impact has been enormous in the use of the computer as a tool of architectural design, representation, communication, and education.
In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera wrote: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” This perspective—one that bears the marks of life under a totalitarian regime in which repression often took the form of enforced forgetting—assumes that remembering is always a virtue and that not doing so is necessarily a failing. But despite dominating much of the debate on cultural memory, this perspective elides the many differences between all the various acts that we cluster under the term “forgetting.” Are all acts of forgetting similar enough that we can think of them, always and necessarily, as a failure? Can forgetting in fact even be a virtue? And how do we understand the relationship between what needs to be forgotten in order for other things to be remembered?
