Archinect
anchor

Graffitti & Calatrava

Tim DeCoster

What is it with people?

http://www.jsonline.com/news/daywatch.asp

I couldn't find any more news about this, I think they just discovered it.

What they don't mention is that besides the Calatrava (as it's referred to locally) being hit, I noticed at least one other building along the lakefront that was tagged too. I hope this isn't the start of more racial problems in Milwaukee....

How do we prevent this? I suppose there is the crowd that says it SHOULDN'T be prevented because graffiti is art. Though I don't know that most architects would agree. Thoughts?

 
May 9, 05 12:15 pm
Tim DeCoster

oh crap, I just noticed my title. Spelling Bee Champ is going to scold me. Graffiti..... not Graffitti.... Go ahead, hit me - I deserve it... lol

May 9, 05 12:17 pm  · 
 · 
higgsARCH

your right, graffiti is art.
i gotta check it out though, lakeside of building?

May 9, 05 12:30 pm  · 
 · 
AP

at least it was just a Calatrave...lol

May 9, 05 12:34 pm  · 
 · 
mauOne™

well maybe the graffitiers were trying to make thing better after being offended by a calatrava :op

May 9, 05 12:47 pm  · 
 · 
higgsARCH

HAHAHAHAHAHA, oh man, making fun of calatrava is so much fun. i wish i could join the calatrava haters of the world.
you may not like his work, but the art museum in milwaukee is a definate stepping stone to better architecture in the city. it was exactly what miltown needed

May 9, 05 12:50 pm  · 
 · 
Tim DeCoster

yeah, it was on the lakeside. I sure would think whoever did it would be on camera. I know that their security system is quite extensive there - both on the interior and exterior. This really is hardly on the news here... not really something they want to advertise, for good reasons.


and higgs - yes, I definitely agree; this building has its faults (many) but certainly was a stepping stone. now every new building seems to have white or aluminum cladding....

May 9, 05 3:44 pm  · 
 · 
higgsARCH

NEXT STEP....KILBOURN TOWERS

May 9, 05 4:08 pm  · 
 · 
Tim DeCoster

eh, one can only reach so high... they'll only have to get graffiti off the first & second floor levels. The graffiti artists here aren't smart enough to figure out how to get any higher.

Besides.... those condos are selling for $780,000 (STARTING price). I pretty sure they have the money to remove the tagging immediately, so I doubt that anyone would even try. Not to mention that the first level is all glass... razor blades remove paint pretty easily from glass.

May 9, 05 4:26 pm  · 
 · 
T Hunter

This raises an interesting question regarding the validity of graf, from the perspective of architects...

Apparantly in my town (Toronto), the current Festival of Architecture and Design is being used as a way to hype some anti-graf city legislation... It would be interesting to hear from the design community, as I suspect this has more to do with local politics than the opinions of local designers.

http://www.toronto.ca/fad/pdf/graffiti_ad.pdf

May 9, 05 4:48 pm  · 
 · 
liberty bell

Graffiti CAN be art, just as building can, sometimes, be architecture.

Graffiti, to me, approaches art when it shows some knowledge of the CRAFT of the medium: displays shading to imply volume, employs decorative surfaces and an understanding of color theory, composition, visual perception relative to distance, etc.

On the other hand, just spray-painting your name on something is straighforward vandalism. IMO, tagging, while it may have roots in calligraphy, is basically as artful as a dog lifting its leg on everything in its path.

I also tend to be more forgiving of graffiti placed on infrastructure: highway overpasses, retaining walls along trains tracks, etc., where there is little of visual interest existing already. Of course then we can get into a discussion of whether a long blank railway tunnel wall is any more or less visually pleasing than a long blank wall on a modern museum! I'm thinking of leftover spaces arond infrastructure, views that have not been considered by any designer but are blank becuase nobody thought they were important - that's where a "graffiti artist's" work can be considered an improvement.

May 9, 05 5:05 pm  · 
 · 
e

i'm fine with graffiti as long as it is okayed by the property owner otherwise it's just vandalism.

if you had a piece of property house/business/whatever, would you be okay with someone coming up and painting whatever they wanted wherever they wanted?

May 9, 05 5:09 pm  · 
 · 
higgsARCH

graffiti is a media of self expression. graffiti reflects the most primal of local feelings and emotions.
ever hear of free speech.
the placement of billboards and advertisements are just as inconciderate as those of the graffiti artist

May 9, 05 5:11 pm  · 
 · 
el jeffe

now i understand the brilliance of alsop's OCAD.

May 9, 05 5:13 pm  · 
 · 
higgsARCH
http://www.banksy.co.uk/
May 9, 05 5:16 pm  · 
 · 
e

i'm not a fan of billboard either and i'm fine with freedom of expression, but if i own a piece of property you don't have the right to spray paint whatever you want on my property without my say so. that is called vandalism.

May 9, 05 5:19 pm  · 
 · 
onecentJay

did it say "SANTIAGO RULZ!"

May 9, 05 5:20 pm  · 
 · 
RNNR

it's interesting this story should come out around the same time as the press surrounding eisenman's holocaust memorial.

to such a superficial gesture of a building (calatrava) graffiti is an equally gratuitous aesthetic gesture - petty and rebellious at best

to a holocaust memorial however... according to eisenman

"Despite Mr. Eisenman's objections, for example, the pillars are protected by a graffiti-resistant coating because the government worried that neo-Nazis would try to spray paint them with swastikas. For Mr. Eisenman, graffiti would simply have testified to the memorial's impact."

May 9, 05 5:34 pm  · 
 · 
ether

what horse shit.

May 9, 05 6:14 pm  · 
 · 
cobra

I think the apparent carelessness involved is interesting. If this building has such an impact on the local building industry, why do the people creating the graffiti not recognize it so? Or maybe they do recognize the supposed significance and believe the spray paint adds in some way to the character of the structure?

If not, it once again raises the question of the impact design has on people outside of the design community. If these people are oblivious to the importance of the architecture, what is the importance?

Why would the Calatrava be untouchable to spray paint, and not urban infrastructure?

May 10, 05 3:50 pm  · 
 · 
mauOne™

ok, ok, too much speculation,

I DID IT !!!

May 10, 05 3:53 pm  · 
 · 
tzenyujuei

haha, mau you should let those 3 people the police are holding in Mil. know... im sure they would be most grateful for your admission.

RNNR - i totally agree with that quote you put up by Eisenman... the raw emotions and contraversy of the monument should incite such thoughts and perhaps action (socially proper or not). But I suppose the government dosn't want something they put so much money into get defaced. On another note.... I saw this going up last year when I was in Berlin, it looks to be a very interesting project indeed.

May 10, 05 4:53 pm  · 
 · 
mauOne™

aww gosh i didn't mean for anyone to get beat up, i did it for all you guys

:op

May 10, 05 6:12 pm  · 
 · 
RNNR

it's also interesting that the significance of the monument could be effective (and perhaps more so?), with or without graffiti

in calatrava's case, this doesn't seem to work. people just want to deface something beautiful and it's elevated status makes it a target. it underscores the attention paid to architecture, but also the fact that it can be frivolous.

perhaps somebody can significantly deface the hideous eyeball known as the PATH station when that's built too...

May 10, 05 6:58 pm  · 
 · 
vado retro

time to do some tagging and huffing

May 10, 05 11:22 pm  · 
 · 
inkwray

i cant believe the stones are still playing...aren't they in their 60's????

May 11, 05 1:24 am  · 
 · 
vado retro

my brothers back home with his beatles and his stones
he never got off on that revolution stuff...

May 11, 05 6:56 am  · 
 · 
rutger

Maybe MVRDV did it... in an interview after receiving the Marcus Prize Milwaukee Winy Maas said:
"We are the anti-Calatravas, I admire his aesthetics, but he can almost be considered one of the 'hairdressers' of architecture, like Gehry - they are doing coiffures."

May 11, 05 10:47 am  · 
 · 
mauOne™

ahahahahaha, thats so hilarious

but MVRDV's lack of originality should make them more humble, Mr. Gehry has style, we may not like it, but the man has style.

calatrava on the other hand, maybe could get some inspiration from grafitty artists.

May 11, 05 11:06 am  · 
 · 
Tim DeCoster

just an update for anyone who's interested. All the graffiti was cleaned up the following day... and here's a
PICTURE OF WHAT IT LOOKED LIKE

It was interesting. The museum aparently had a hugle volume of calls from concerned people, and had hardware stores, etc offerining donations of supplies and free use of equipment to pressure wash, sandblast, and repaint. It was kind of nice to see. The entire beach station north of the museum was also sandblasted the next day I drove by it. That tagging job was even worse because it was pretty much the whole building.

May 12, 05 1:55 am  · 
 · 
higgsARCH

or crack heads

May 12, 05 1:49 pm  · 
 · 
ether

you have something against crack heads? they're people too you know.

May 12, 05 1:56 pm  · 
 · 
higgsARCH

not artists though

May 12, 05 2:17 pm  · 
 · 
kix

Why can't we all just tag virtually?

tagging

May 12, 05 2:40 pm  · 
 · 

I'm with j, to call that graffiti is to give too much credit to whomever did it. Thats just messy, crappy lettering work with no artistic merit in my opinion. This is what I consider vandalism, not graffiti...

May 12, 05 5:19 pm  · 
 · 
phreak125

did anyof you actually look at the image? that's like calling a kindergarten classe's lincoln log project "real architecture."

the idiot(s) couldn't even spell "represent" correctly. is 414 the area code up there? and his/her tag is MONGO. how much closer to retarded can you get? even if this was a "graffiti" artist attempting to vandalize the museum, regardless of how you and i feel about calatrava's work, the utter lack of technique (read SKILL) shows that this is just some punk kid(s) pretending they are "gangstas" who represent hiphop by doing this kinda crap.

try looking up the word "toy" in reference to graffiti culture. or better yet, just click here.

sidenote: my work blocks www.graffiti.org for some reason? maybe they think i will be inspired to tag all of our CD's in the process? hmmm...

May 18, 05 1:25 pm  · 
 · 
phreak125

pixelwhore beat me to it... ;oP

May 18, 05 1:25 pm  · 
 · 
Tim DeCoster

414 is the area code for the downtown. The ironic thing is... they caught the people who did it, and live in the western suburbs, so their area code is actually 262.... And their ages were something like 25, 28, and 30.

I agree... just wreckless un-talented idiots.

May 18, 05 3:27 pm  · 
 · 
mdler

tagging is vandalism, bottom line.

May 18, 05 4:15 pm  · 
 · 
e

unless you are the owner of the building and you give someone permission to do it.

May 18, 05 4:33 pm  · 
 · 
mauOne™

or unless the building is extremely ugly or it make a great effort to look like a bird or some kind of animal skeleton

May 18, 05 4:42 pm  · 
 · 
Tim DeCoster

maybe Calatrava came to them in a dream and told them to do it.

May 18, 05 7:09 pm  · 
 · 
e
bomb the system
May 26, 05 3:12 pm  · 
 · 
liberty bell

This existing thread seemed like the best place to post this item which is not worth its own thread:

Saw this on my way to work this morning - stencil graffiti comes to Indianapolis!!



And it's not a half bad image, though a bit rough around the edges. Yay, I DON'T live in an alt-culture wasteland (entirely). Between this and vado moving to town Naptown is soon going to be solidly kinda cool!

Dec 15, 05 10:10 am  · 
 · 
Dec 15, 05 1:19 pm  · 
 · 
architecturegeek

mdler- tagging is vandalism, bottom line.

Correct and it has too be for graffiti to remain a true avant-garde form of expression. To except it legally is to debase the whole meaning of the thing in the first place.

As for only hitting gov't buildings, etc. I think that's more of an urban legend. A lot of people claim, there was at one time, a code among writers in New York to only hit ubiquitous objects in the urban framework (i.e. trains, underpasses, electrical boxes, etc.) But because grafitti/street art grows by someone seeing something and saying, hey! I can do that., the "rules" aren't really passed along.

As for having my own work tagged, I think in some ways it represents the city accepting or criticising the architecture, and allows it to become part of the fabric. Then again if someone's going to spray on my building I'd rather it be someone with talent as opposed to random kids with spray cans and a longing to be "cool"

I know of one building around here that had a graf artist paint the side when they opened, there hasn't been a single tag placed over it.

Dec 15, 05 1:37 pm  · 
 · 
e

i'm sure graffiti is all fine for some people until someone you don't know destroys something you own and love.

Dec 15, 05 3:48 pm  · 
 · 
snooker

How about those clients who tear down you buildings with out letting the architect know....It could happen to you, cause it has happened
to every architect I know....even the star architects six foot under.

Dec 15, 05 8:41 pm  · 
 · 
snooker

Actually I do find this mode of design interesting....graffo-architecture.It is an extremely inexpensive way to make extemely ugly architecture look better than it did. I'm not saying the ugly architecture was designed by an architect, most likely it was not but
was a mind fart of an engineer or other untalented which has left a scar within our enviroment. Whom ever the controling artist is usually it is done in a style which takes a considerable amount of concentration and gifted ability to formulate a design and carry it out
in usually a very short period of time. It is in a way an Architectural Sketch on Humanity. Yes it is a language in itself much like the Mayan or Egyptian or worldly civilizations. Maybe it was that we just took a break from graffitti during our life time and now it is back pleading for us to do something more with our designs....to embellish them to give them soul, feelings...all the things we seem to be lacking in this profession as the Star Architects march forward.

Dec 15, 05 8:50 pm  · 
 · 
mdler

if i only had a tazer and some zip-ties

Dec 3, 06 4:25 pm  · 
 · 
binary

people complain about graf but yet the whole society is graffed by shit designs/building/etc.......

too bad shitty designs are ridiculed by society ..... but yet the lay-men eyes arent trained for design........

if my knees werent as bad as they are, i would be out there........

2:37am

Dec 3, 06 5:01 pm  · 
 · 

Block this user


Are you sure you want to block this user and hide all related comments throughout the site?

Archinect


This is your first comment on Archinect. Your comment will be visible once approved.

  • ×Search in: