In honor of Her winning best original screenplay in the Oscars last weekend, I am going to finally post this.
Spike Jonze's Her is a masterpiece of a movie that lends itself to comparison to Brazil. At least, architecturally and urbanistically, it does. One could also develop a comparison in terms of the role of commerce (Her) versus the state (Brazil) in these two narratives of a technologically-driven future, but here I am more interested in the film's ability to produce an analogous city.
The phrase 'analogous city' is one I am borrowing from Aldo Rossi's The Architecture of the City. Rossi famously cites the Canaletto painting above as evidence of the autonomy of architecture. Canaletto deploys the architecture of un-built projects and projects sited elsewhere to produce a recognizable image of another Venice - an analogous Venice. Michael Hays replaces Rossi's notion of the analogous city with the phrase virtual city, which he links to the capacity of architecture to produce or engage with a model of ontology. (See Hays' stellar October 2012 lecture on that here.)
The world of Her presents a city that is more virtual Los Angeles (Hays) than analogous Los Angeles (Rossi), since the architectural forms avoid specific reference.
Her takes place in a hyper-dense Los Angeles that looks like a contemporary East Asian city - endless towers, massively efficient infrastructure. Amazingly, Her shows its characters moving through Los Angeles without a single car. Still, Los Angeles is recognizable as itself. (Though, one of the many towers visible from Theodore's apartment may look a lot like the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco.)
As much as the cityscape panoramas of Her present the virtual Los Angeles, the interiors show us something that might be closer to the Rossi idea of the analogous. In these corporate interiors the color palettes and affinity for acrylic point toward a dot-com aesthetic that looks already passe. The interiors are similar to the costumes in this sense. This passe-ness is part of the speculative dimension of the film that makes its architecture so empathetic to the narrative.
Her is a science fiction that dares to acknowledge nostalgia.
View full entryWhat is it about failure that is so seductive in art and such anathema in architecture? Perhaps there is something about the relationship between client and architect that makes failure so…. taboo, so unthinkable, and un-seductive.For the past few months I have been part of an... View full entry
Inspired by the flexibility of uses for houses in Detroit, in proximity to the major cultural institutions for opera and diverse forms of performance, this project stages an opera as a house, the house and its dramas of occupancy and vacancy, demolition, and re-purposing, as an... View full entry
This "Another Architecture" blog started as an intermittent chronicle of my architecture fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude. I was back in New York for the summer, preparing for the next phase of my fellowship in Zagreb Croatia, when I got a call from U. of Michigan to teach the Fall... View full entry
This summer in New York we are having a rare dose of major works from the West coast's "Light and Space" movement. That phrase Light and Space always makes me think first of Light and Air, that penultimate duo of Depression-era tenement reform and the 1916 New York City zoning. The... View full entry
This is a brief summary of Primate, the plugin that I created to integrate Leap Motion with parametric design in Grasshopper. For me there are 3) big break-throughs that Leap enables. 1) bringing to digital processes an intuitive access to 3 dimensions. That is very... View full entry
Primate demo
My residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude has ended for the moment. I am back in New York for the summer, will be in Europe again in the fall. Here in NY my office is mobile. I am mostly at either the main library at Bryant Park in Manhattan or at one of the Goethe Institute... View full entry
How much of the history of urban design as a discipline can be traced back to Corbusier's reading of foreground and background in Istanbul? He took his first research trip abroad to Istanbul in 1911 and wrote of the relationship between the massive forms of the mosques and the repeated typology... View full entry
Crossing Bosphorous by taxi
It's sort of 2 and a half buildings in one. A functional envelope that might remind one of the Eames' house, if the Eame's house were 4 stories and all glazed. Outside of that are the overlapped panels of glass that come all the way down to the sidewalk. Inside is concrete - interior... View full entry
There is not much I could add to Herzog + de Meuron's own description of their Messeplatz Basel project, which is quoted in length here on Dezeen, along with photos. Often in our field a project description can sound a bit like an artist statement, heavy on intent and concept, but maybe... View full entry
[Not Luxury] concept furniture line, on view with exhibition design for chessmaster Vera Nebolsina's performance next Saturday for Lange Nacht der Museen 2013 (Long Night of the Museums) at Römerstasse 2 gallery space, Stuttgart. The furniture is based not only on affordable recyclable... View full entry
A month ago already in this blog I mentioned a collaboration I had started with a chessmaster. Here's a video of her visit to the workshop I led at Stuttgart's Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste. Presented in the context of a workshop that I directed at ABK Stuttgart... View full entry
A friend of mine, a colleague who also manages a practice in Brooklyn, asked me to contribute to his collection of manifestos and influences for a presentation. Here are the instructions, followed by my own manifesto below. What would yours be? (1) Write a theory... View full entry
Photo by Vera Nebolsina, Grandmaster As I've alluded to before (Brunelleschi = BIM), I tend not to see digital design methods - such as Building Information Modeling or parametric design - as paradigmatic ruptures within architecture and its history. The capacity of parametric modeling as a... View full entry
The Tanks at Tate Modern opened this past summer. They are spaces dedicated to performance that also launch the next phase of the Herzog & de Meuron expansion. As Herzog & de Meuron explain one aspect of this connection to the expansion " A row of new and inclined... View full entry
Am I the only person who mistakenly thought Coop Himmelb(l)au had designed both the BMW Museum and the Porsche Museum? I saw Wolf Prix present the BMW Museum project 7 or 8 years ago. Maybe it's because some of the structural feats are similar that I got them mixed up. (UN... View full entry
Last week I had the great fortune to go to Pisa, Italy, for the first time and Florence for the second time. I am struck by many parallels between the era of the early 14th century and our own time, more than I can go into in this brief post. I am not talking about the... View full entry
Is there any more concise record of globalization and its various militaristic and managerial operations than the Coordinate Reference System options in your standard GIS software? For a project sited in Detroit, I have started building a Geographical Information Systems (GIS) map focused... View full entry
On November 23rd, a biologist, an economist, a media theorist, a composer and a few other academics came here to Akademie Schloss Solitude to make a symposium on RhythmAnalysis. The title references Henri Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, but the presenters talked... View full entry
Before coming to Stuttgart I didn't know anything about the Weißenhofsiedlung (residential development curated by Mies van der Rohe in a collaboration between Deutscher Werkbund and the state). It's a fascinating predecessor to the Case Study Houses, as well... View full entry
1927 in Stuttgart, Germany. I'll give the answer in my next real post. View full entry
For the past few weeks I have been thinking mostly about modernity and ideology. We talk often in architecture about the relationship between theory and practice. Like the opposition of public/private or political/autonomous, the duality of theory and practice feels both important and... View full entry
Posts are sporadic. Topics span architecture, urban design, planning, and tangents from these. I sometimes include excerpts of academic articles.