- Description
Architecture and a new Vanity Fair survey naming the 5 most important buildings in the last 30 years. At the top of the list is Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Matt Tyrnaur from Vanity Fair joins us
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asa 07/06/2010 03:21 AM Report
an incredibly superflous analysis of architecture. architecture is not "form fetishism"
architecture cannot be reduced to discussions about isms!
robdverity 07/02/2010 04:44 PM Report
Why do I always conflate architectural discussions with English and English majors. The ability to use descriptors seems to outstrip the ability to design. Kudos to whom? The architect doesn't have a chance. Wordsmiths seem to dominate.
REMant 07/02/2010 02:41 PM Report
I'm very glad to hear that "post-modernism" is dead, but I think you'll need to publish an obituary. I've never used the term myself. It is relativism and historicism in general, and, of course, in the process of ganging up on positivism (absolutism, etc), it threw out all idea of natural law. It is exactly the same whether you are talking about social science, philosophy, politics or poetics. But the movement is hugely sentimental, and therefore exudes a kind of authoritarianism all its own, as well as being hidebound. It is as though they have trouble thinking. Functionalism bothered the post-moderns, and so we got buildings with handles on them like shopping bags and little Gothic or Egyptian ornaments, brick pagodas, and other things reminiscent of a drive down the old US highway system, and that seem to pick up where the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings left off. But I have to suppose that the reason why so much modern architecture is ultimately uninteresting is akin to why so much modern music is, because it has no roots in ordinary human experience and thus seems devoid of meaning. Yet I don't think nostalgia is the answer. We have always had our runs of neo-this and neo-that and Bauhaus swept all of that away. Cold as the latter may seem tho, it was based on meeting needs, and, as always, form followed technical innovation, whether domes, flying buttresses, steel skeletons, and monocoque. I doubt anyone really wants to drive Model T's again, tho it has been tried a number of times by American car builders. I notice that most of the homes built in the past few years are right out of the 19th c, tho I know that's in part dictated by the cost of materials. Fundamentally the question is whether the building is to be the message, or what it does, and esp in the particular case of museums and libraries, whether there is anymore point to them, than to zoos, or are they just monuments to the builder's vanity.