Al-Wakrah Stadium Qatar, Zaha Hadid theguardian.com |
Before I get going today, I would like to remind of my latest challenge, breaking 15,000 page views by the end of the summer, September 20, 2014. We're closing in on 13,000, so let's see if we can add about 2,000 more. Now for today's subject "Real Estate as Infrastructure as Architecture." Below is a post on the first part of a rather difficult article, littered with English grammatical errors and oblique references. I've tried to make some sense out of it in hopes that it'll make sense to you.
Modernity, if it could be said, is many things all at once. Mostly, it has engendered the magical , occasionally violent transformation of substance into money and back. The substance, in this case, being architecture. Sometimes this architecture is built, other times is exists in the computer or in model form. "Fundamentals #13" posits the question when the power to make the invisible visible (i.e architecture), how and when is it possible to resist this power, limit it, redirect or neutralize, or at the very least not be seduced by it?
Al Wakrah Stadium interior youtube.com |
Where architecture and the world collide is typically in the multi-national, multi-local, cross border world of real estate, which sometimes can take the form of a cultural monument, places of recreation, or other places of political-economic significance. One example of a building as infrastructure is Zaha Hadid Al-Wakrah Sports Complex, designed for the 2022 World Cup Football (Soccer for you Americans) Competition in Qatar. Ms. Hadid recently commemorated the deaths of hundreds of migrant workers, killed during the construction of the infrastructure, by issuing a rambling statement about power in the cultural realm being exchanged for silence in the political realm, the role of architecture in rising nation-states, finally divesting herself from solidarity with the workers after she famously declared her unity with them.
Foreign workers in Qatar theguardian.com |
Rem Koolhaus dezeen.com |
However, Mr. Koolhaus is not advocating and Nietzschean-type "transvaluation of values" serviced by history, rather he seems to have interpreted fundamentals as an eternal recurrence within the "architecture of twelve subsets: floor, door, wall, ceiling, toilet, façade, balcony, window, corridor, hearth, roof, and stairs." The basic components of any building, large or small, from the dawn of time through today. In the case of the Biennale exhibitions, the "Elements of Architecture," as they represent what the architect refers to as "the fundamentals of our buildings used by any architect, anywhere, anytime." They are understood are "unstable compounds" guided by heterogeneous forces. The article wonders if this list is not some particular way of giving order to things. Is this list some artifact of the very same modernity that is supposed to be absorbed in the sixty-five pavilions by an unsuspecting world? By the time the Biennale program was announced, the list had grown to fifteen, with the more banal fireplace substituted for hearth and the addition of the more modern escalator, elevator, and ramp. Still, the question remains, let's pretend those additional elements are folded into the "stair" component and go back to the original twelve.
Poster for the 2014 Venice Biennale labrj.org.br |
The modernity that Rem Koolhaus has in mind is focused on a tightly encapsulated one hundred year "phase-change from distinct national architecture to a 'single modern language,' with 'hidden ways of remaining 'national..." The "Fundamental #13" dismisses this as an elitist cultural argument saddled with the European nineteenth century concept of style regardless whether it is international or national in character. The modernity that Rem Koolhaus is referring to is globalization. Quoting Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Globalization takes place only in capital and data. Everything else is damage control." (Spivak, 1, 2012) This simplified approach clarifies the idea of "land" or "real estate"are temporal "global" things like money. If this is the case, then why is no land or ground on the Biennale program, except those of the disappearing nation? "Fundamental #13" calls this triskaidekaphobia-fear of the number thirteen. A fear that "Fundamental #13" will perform some sleight-of-hand to ward off the erasure of history by capital. Uncharacteristically for Mr. Koolhaus, this hesitation presents itself as a hesitation before a globalizing force, bracketed in order to study its secondary qualities as they were the main focus.
Model of Venice Biennale Rem Koolhaus dezeen.com |
Like me on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/lenorelowen
Follow me on Twitter http://www.twitter.com/glamavon and on Pinterest http://www.pinterest.com/glamtroy
Instagram- find me at hpblogger
No comments:
Post a Comment