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November 19, 2003
Now this would give dreary, provincal Adelaide a bit of a design boost would it not? It would put it on the map in a different and more way than the sponsored major events, such as publicly subsidised car races (eg., Formula 1) that lose heaps of money every year.
Thomas Mayer, Der Neue Zollhoff, Dsseldorf, Germany 1999 2000
From Architecture in Photography Review here
What is outside architecture is not the facade or exterior of the buildings: it is the outside of the field of architecture and the inside of history, culture, politics and nature.
It is from the outside of architecture that we can ask how can we organize our urban spaces differently so that we can organize and structure our living arrangements in different ways.
Why not think of architecture and urban planning in terms of time, temporal flow or becoming rather than the usual measurable and calculable space?
Space is a part of historical time and it bears the mark of that time--the coastal playgrounds of the big cities were once accessed only by trains. Now they are primarily connected by, and accessed through, freeways. Space is produced through matter and movement. The landscape between coast and city changes and is transformed: scrubland gives way to then bare hills of dairy farmers then the vinyards of wineries and tourist towns.
It is still too hot. The rain has come and gone. The cooling winds have yet to arrive. I cannot concentrate anymore on this.
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This is an argument about globalism, isn't it? Part of the messianic claims about architecture is that it includes history, culture, politics and nature. And some contemporary architecture - who did the American ruin stuff? - makes a claim on the temporal as future ruin, as unchanging power like Hitler's models, as referencing the past like neogothic, or simply as inside time and space as it changes during the day - the reflected shards of the Rialto.
I think you are positing the absence of particularity and place as the problem. The modernist, globalised, "International" style conceptualised since the Bauhaus and Le Corbousier, is what gives you an architecture which is exterior to change, or the processes you speak of.
There's a funny irony about Gehry. He builds unique and particular buildings, like his model for the new Getty in Manhattan, now I think not to be built, and now WE ALL WANT TITANIUM..
I think the building you have posted above was probably given legitimacy by Hundertwasser. It leads me to a really silly speculation. Given that revivals - neo Palladian, gothic revival - are so legitimate we are really waiting for neo art nouveau. Adelaide could become the world centre for this, and build endless replicas of Gaudi, and maybe even Hundertwasser - though that is a long bow.
BTW, theres a heap of archisnaps here:
http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/index/index2.html