I am working on a video essay of multiplicating architecture, identical buildings in different places.
Already included are some of the opies of monumental landmark buildings, such as the DC Capitol , rebuilt in Shanghai, the -slightly different- copy of the Peter's Dome in Yamoutsukro, and the Parthenonin Nashville, Tenn.
I am in search of any case of (post)modern architecture that was rebuilt once or even several times in different world locations.
Once I came across the rumour that interior designer Phillippe Starck had build his own holiday mansion four time identically all over the world, but I found absolutely no proof on that story.
Equally to Howard Hughes who supposed to have done the same. But no story with facts on this to be found on-line..
Ah, sounds like you'd profit from reading through (the 1st edition so far of) THE ODDS OF OTTOPIA, beginning at http://www.quondam.com/02/0126.htm . But, more to the point is "Here a Versailles, there a Versailles, Everywhere a Versailles, Sigh", one of the papers to be presented at the forthcoming Horace Trumbauer Architecture Fan Club Convention-- http://www.quondam.com/09/0833.htm .
this idea was originally put forward by the people of maxis games who invented sim city 3000. if i knew how, i'd post some of my cities so you could see the monuments i placed in them....all i do is play sim city all day. yeah!
bye bye
Jun 13, 04 12:09 pm ·
·
The State Capitol of Pennsylvania is fairly exact though shrunk copy of the St. Peter's Rome. See also the Cathedral of Montreal.
Herrenchiemsee of Ludwig II, the ultimate Versailles, sigh.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is very similar to the Academy of Athens.
There are reenactionary Choragic Monuments in (at least) Philadelphia and Berlin.
The Free Library and the Family Courthouse of Philadelphia reenact the Place de la Concorde.
[just many the 'inventors' of SimCity 3000 have been visiting http://www.quondam.com since 1996 where 'reenactionary architecturism' has always been an issue.]
I recently saw a presentation on Chinese architecture.....in which there was a place shown in China, where local architects have reproduced the Ronchamp...and apparently a whole lot of other modern masterworks.....
Originality, What does that mean? Don't we all search for "inspiration" from other buildings? Mostly we have to use the standard doors windows and shapes prediscribed by others, codes and climate. I don't believe in originality. That is just a myth.
Sorry to say this, but I do mean it. Our "inspirations" end up being very, very similar to the "original" building which in turn looks like the real original one and so on.
archiwoman - did you even see the link to the chinese ronchamp?? Thats not " searching for inspiration from other buildings "!! Thats a 3D colour copy! You have to be joking.
by the way, i asked a chinese friend to interpret the website about the chinese ronchamp that was posted on archinect weeks ago - its actually like an architecture theme park - most of the buildings are at some other scale, but for some reason ronchamp is at 1:1
this should be actually the topic of a bigger discussion - most people in china, or india etc. cannot afford to go visit the actual buildings, hence the need for such 'theme parks' - its sacrilegous to architecuture per se, but if done at a different scale, as models, i think its okay to do so...
any thoughts?
Architecture should be able to cope with that kind of "abuse".
I think it's the architects who are having a difficult time, mostly because if somebody just copies "good architecture" to suit their needs from a library of masterworks of the past, the need to have an original building and an original architect seems to vanish.
This is a good point for the defence of agressively local architecture and architecture that focuses on the site and the overall context. Copying destroys the myth of the unique art-object.
...and thus... harks back and serves the discussion on Walter Benjamin and the aura of an original and proving the relevancy of the discussion of his writing to architecture.
this should be actually the topic of a bigger discussion - most people in china, or india etc. cannot afford to go visit the actual buildings, hence the need for such 'theme parks' - its sacrilegous to architecuture per se, but if done at a different scale, as models, i think its okay to do so...
any thoughts?
before waving that big moral stick around, let us remember where this all started...
About the cloning done in the east: I wonder is the thirst for architecture so great that it's necessary to construct theme parks? These parks are most likely just something comparable to "it's a small world" or a freakshow, not a balanced "enjoy architecture-experience". It's about capitalizing on the prestige felt to be associated with the great works of history (or modernity), in the east (or in Las Vegas).
There is a Bank of America in Palm Springs that pays homage to Ronchamp.
Although not modern, Independence Hall on Ohio States campus which is a 3/4 scale replica of the one in Philadelphia. I think it burned down once and they rebuilt it.
after all, Ronchamp itself is a 'theme park' of itself. Self righteous snobbery towards explicit cloning -"its sacrilegous to architecuture per se"-hardly makes up for implicit cloning.
In fact, at the moment..I think I would prefer a cloned 1:1 . At least there is a trace of irreverence and humour and a little bit of interesting anguished violence..deliberate or not. Too much righteous reverence bores me....but then again I am fickle.
And do you know how worn out my prada loafers were after the 'uplifting spiritual' trip to the Ronchamp? Pft...Le Corbusier lives up to his assholic reputation.
But then again, the only things that 'uplifted' me there were the Miro-esque attachments to the building..and the way my falsetto sounded when everyone was drawing the elevations outside.
Cloning assumes that there are some "divine properties" in the building; considering this and the amount of work to create a 1:1 clone, I would say that it has nothing to do with high-brow ironic statements (these are usually delivered with actions that require only a light wrist and a gentle grip...)
So, cloning is the way a rich cousin from the country tries to show off ("I made me a Rooonshaamp!) AND at the same time (possibly) questioning the original, in a way he never intended (that questioning might devalue also his dear clone, ferchristsake.)
tsk...no need to be crass :oP
be it a maverick inspired by her Eco, a rich cousin with acres of cowcountry land or a savy corporation...does not matter. Thats the sweet thing about clones..they no longer have an author...more like works of nature than works of architecture.
I know a village somewhere in the Lebanese moutains full of rich cousins who build mansions that look like aeorplanes, yachts and windmills.
Rich cousins are cool,cute&funny to have. In fact, I wish I were a rich cousin with golden locks and could trail out that Roooonshaamp in such a charmingly naive way...
About the cloning done in the east: I wonder is the thirst for architecture so great that it's necessary to construct theme parks?
I doubt it, they have plenty of great architecture in the 'east' from ancient to supermodern. have a search for some of the projects going on in Beijing for the 2008 olympics.
Cloning assumes that there are some "divine properties" in the building...So, cloning is the way a rich cousin from the country tries to show off ("I made me a Rooonshaamp!)...
You seem to assume you are superior and those from the east (analogising them to a cousin from the country, complete with hick/slurred speech to reinforce your view-point) are just jealous and trying to emulate you.
As far as most of China goes, they certainly have their own great architecture, older and newer than the rest of the world, BUT the trend at the moment seems to be that everything western is great and worth copying to the detail (not the quality of the detail, of course). Is that a good attitude, I wonder? I'm not making fun of the chinese (or trying to somehow be a superior being), but I'm making fun of these theme parks and the attitude I presume is behind it.
We all live in countries that have done their fair share of copying and culture-importing in the past, and we have also gone to laughable extremes, so there.
Jun 15, 04 6:42 am ·
·
Which came first, the Great Stupa of India or the tomb of Augustus in Rome?
Both are very similar and both are from the first century BC.
Seutonius mentions a delegation from India at Rome during the reign of Augustus.
REENACTIONARY ARCHITECTURISM has a long history. 'Cloning' is only one of its more recent chapters.
[Saint Catherine de Ricci and Louis I. Kahn are presenting 'Reenactionary Bilocating Architecturism' at the forthcoming Horace Trumbauer Architecture Fan Club Convention.
Saint Helena will deliver 'Pilgrimage, Reenactment and Tourism'.]
I don't know if this has been mentioned but you should check out The National Museum of Australia. The designers collaged all kinds of buildings to form this monstrosity. I know that Villa Savoy and the Berlin Jewish Museum are within its form. There may be others but you have to weed through all its gestural crap to see it. Here's a couple of links.
The National Museum of Australia has 'pilgrimage, reenactment and tourism' written all over it.
I was at Canberra for a couple of days back in January 1987, right after the great flagpole of the Capitol was erected--remeber how at first it was leaning backwards. I wish I had a camera with me.
the Sanchi Stupa is actually from the mid second century B.C. So it must..duh...have come first.Also, there is such a remarkable difference ... the Mausoleum is a penetrable much more autochthonic structure that stands much closer to being a building than does the stupa..
As for the whatever architecturism u refer to...enclosing 'cloning' within it as a chapter is whimsical ..and it 'assumes' (since 'assume' is the word of the day) that there is a constant of cultural signification across distant times and places...that marks a continuity between the cloning chapter and the others. I can't see what or where it is. Differences beget differences, not similarities..unless you fall into a mishmash soup of 'a basic human drive to reenact'...whereby, if I might point out..the reason why cloning is a book by itself is because it does not at all reenact. To reenact means to still believe in the mythical origin..whereas a cloned piece of architecture questions the necessity of having the origin...there is no reenaction; reenaction maintains the veil of rituals that seperates the origin-al from its reenactment.
Cloning,rather than the clone, is a dumb transparency ..there is no thought or deliberation behind it except for the decision to clone. It is..like its product,the clone..a process that begets itself...a nonchalant epistemology where the process is of virtual thickness&transparency yet its product is an opaque obscuring device.
Reenactment, however, reeks with incense and the vestige of the divine.
By all means widen the historical scope..but not to whimsically dismiss other persons' points where yours is more whimsical (and I dont mean the 'clever' wannabe-isms).
it's definitely intriguing to see the villa savoye reproduced as an "element" within a museum. it makes me think about one of the initial concepts of the modern. that of ubiquity and sitelessness. the potential of architecture to be produced to the same quality and with similar ability to solve problems regardless of site or context, yet corb typically espoused this and negated it in the same breath. putting forth villa savoye (an experiment in typologies of industrial production and its internationalist possibilities), yet designing a house to be built of stone walls using "traditional" techniques to a modern end just a few years later. it makes me think of a story michael speaks tell often. of the colin rowe's discussion of the postmodern in american architecture as a search for the social theory which was lost in modernisms trip across the atlantic. the current process of manufacturing cultural icons as objects devoid of program is a next step of the tendency towards the re-reading of the modernist phenomenon. the object devoid of program, theory, social conscious. in some ways like frank gehry's alter-ego. the maker of empty signs and cultural destinations at odds with use...although frank is way more suave and innovative about his manufacturing of iconic symbols. it all makes me think of jon jerde's eponymously named firm and it's tendency towards cultural reproduction and the creation of spectacles. frank and jon both came out of similar backgrounds with similar training and built their offices along similar lines (housing developments, shopping malls,etc.)...the story is often told of frank calling up jon jerde and saying "that's it jon, i'm gonna do it. I'm gonna shake things up, do you want to come with me" then frank built his house.
my own bit of stream of consciousness this morning
Jun 15, 04 10:34 am ·
·
REENACTIONARY ARCHITECTURISM is a study in degrees of separation.
I particulary like how architecture theory bullshit, especially the tafurian type, etc., is continually reenacted these days. Now there's a bunch of veils and rituals for you.
So, is Benjamin the original or the veiled ritual?
How many Benjamin clones are out there these days?
A lot of Plato's writings are reenactments of dialogues Socrates had, aren't they? Or are they cloned dialogues?
[I love it how I'm always so wrong. God forbid I'm cloned.]
In general, we know little of Socrates except that which is filtered through Plato (though scholars would crossexamine with other concurrent sources) . But what we DO know is that plato was devisive enough to make Socrates into a half-fictional character. That is not to say that there might not be similarities, or prominent interesections between the truth and the dialogues..but to call it reenactment would be just false.
however, in your strain of thought....then you have the best examples of 'transformative' reenactment in greek tragedies..in the tales of Medea, Iphegenia, Oresetes, Electra...as they, like the masks of Dionysus, surface as different people driven by different motives and gods...by the differing temperaments of the playwrights.
Perhaps, this is one of the subtelties of this 'reenactment' that our wordly culture lacks...though it still is there in the form of musical variations perhaps..to a certain extent..(strictly speaking, variations as a prominent art died with bach..to become predominantely simply a musical motif) .The ability to open up the shell of a narrative and make it your own. ...so imagine..taking on Libeskind's Musuem and making it your own....reconfiguring it....altering it. It might be an interesting exercise, but we have so gone to the other extreme ..that we can accuse any semblance of being ,legally, an infringement of copyright and ethically, a copy-paste rip-off.
(and that itself is an intruiging topic in architecture....u can clone the architecture..no problem..the blueprint is the actual object of the patent...but once built..the blueprint is rendered empty..devoid of being realised, it becomes devoid of everything; that is what blueprints are:promises...unless it is, like Hadids blueprints, elevated into becoming itself a representation of itself.With its own Kantian moment of disinterestedness. That is why I feel clones are like works of nature..they can just occur without interrogation. They are the very opposite of art..they are not feats of anything but a mechanism for replication..Like sex, you might philosophize much about what cloning is...but the clone itself is a something that can only point to its prescence there, but not why or how)
I realise I digress and am not being pedantically neat with my points...I'm getting overexcited. However, if you can please sweetly drop that juvenile 'architecural theory bullshit' part, it would be really quite yummy of you...its just too juvenile and litters the canteens of architecture schools..know warra mean? Either you know what u talkin about, or you don't. Otherwise, this 'Bullshit' terminology is simply a ..yes...veil for hiding one's insecurities and industrial working class 'no frills' heritage. You're an architect..u use language every moment in your career that might be deemed 'bullshit' by others...no need to be hypocritical now, dear.
Jun 15, 04 3:54 pm ·
·
Libeskind does a good enough job himself of reenacting his own architecture.
I'm only virtually an architect, so maybe I'm just virtually hypocritical.
My viseral knowledge of reenactment began on my birthday just over 24 years ago when I witnessed a reenactment of my own birth. Uncanny to say the least, just like Ludwig I of Bavaria witnessed a reenactment of his birth on his birthday in 1845.
I think everyone should just go write their own book(s).
"Here a Versailles, there a Versailles, everywhere a Versailles, sigh"
see: beatriz colomina's privacy and publicity, pg. 115 for le corbusier's sketch of several ville savoyes replicated on the argentinean countryside. he dug his own grave.
see ville savoye. there is a shed at the entry that looks like a bad savoye jr. i have no idea who built it but it looks like some sort of caretaker lives there.
finally: piranesi's campo marzio... he was probably way ahead in this discussion anyway. and it was tafuri who brought him back in the discussion.
but: australian museum: why oh why did you post that link? now i have to erase those images from my brain... maybe chocolate ice cream will help? nope, didn't think so...
Corbu worked with the idea of blueprints for a modern architecture, and the replicable savoye, the citrohan villa and his "five points" are all part of the same pattern. I think it was quite un-sissylike of him to plan a suburban grid of his beloved villas...
the cloning discussion focuses on these dacapo-masterpieces, suitable for musings of varied kind, but the most profound acts of cloning occur in the realm of mcmansions and "package homes" (I don't know the exact term in english, but I mean homes you can buy from catalogues with plans and visualisations). There cloning faces a whole new scale and "it finds it's place", somehow... Acting as backrops, trophies and tombs the clones form a gated community, with architecture (as understood in schools and the trade press) firmly locked outside.
not sure whether it is strictly speaking the same topic. This is an architectural mass production that positions architecture alongside electronic appliances, or highstreet furniture or etc...But there is no ptototype..no process of copying. The plans were drawn up not for one, but for many. There is no surreal jolt associated with cloning the canonic. The relationship these houses have to each other is that of siblings...whereas there is a sort of paternal one (be it incestuous and perverse) linking former examples to their repetitions.
And as u say..this sort of building en masse has a very backgrounding-itself aspect. Unlike the true blue clone, it does not seek attention. Rather, the intention is for it to become the very scenography of mediocre everydayness.
Funny...that all those humanely-motivated architects overdose on Hiedeggar's worse, most banal texts- a philosophical 'reenactment' of the forthcoming new-age -in hope to justify how their works stem from an appreciation of the 'beauty in the ordinary and in Nature' (overworked arts&crafts ideals) when the Black Forest house is more perfectly reenacted in those nonchalant army of affordable-luxury items.
Jun 16, 04 8:38 am ·
·
I too was thinking of McMansions last night. Swamps of clones sprawling over the US suburban landscape. But notice too what these homes try so hard to reenact, essentially the 'lifestyle' of very wealthy people from quondam times.
Picking up on Helsinki's last sentence, it's interesting that the German word Schloss means 1. castle, palace; chateau, manor-house 2. lock.
[On the Campo Marzio issue, I've (already) compiled a bibliography of architectural literature on Piranesi's large plan. Briefly, before Tafuri there is Fasolo in 1956 (who Tafuri in places reiterates, but he did not note any of the 1956 mistakes), and Scully on Kahn in 1962. Tafuri's ARCHITECTURE AND UTOPIA was first published in Italian in 1973, and his THE SPHERE AND THE LABYRINTH was first published in Italian in 1980. Since 1980, most architectural writers have sprouted off the Tafuri branch, and there is only one architectural writer who, in 1981, began to sprout off Kahn's branch of investigation intwined with reenactment.]
I am very happy that my "case search" sparked off such a lively discussion on architectural cloning.
Forgive me to go back to Ronchamp one more time and delay the "clones as in mass production of homes" topic.
Whatever strong arguments were made against this mysterious copy of the chapel and the notion of cloning / pirating world architecture, bottom line is how exciting and controversial the outcome is. I strongly believe that we are missing the point when comparing is to appropriation of design elements and even the often used notion of the "almost identical" .
In the Ronchamp case, imagine what a feeling it evokes to look out the entrance of Notre Dame du Haute and not to see the rich green hilly landscape in Southern France but the landscape of a flat dirty Chinese suburbs, unfortuantely not far from the replica of the campanile di San Marco , however not in Vegas fashion (arguably... Pas de "Zeropolis" and enough of Venturi.)
Themepark architecture is definitively another subject, a mock up façade with a casino on its guts has very little to do with this cloning comparison. From the images on ths site I would even say that the Chinese Ronchamp will not be theme park. However,..it is not finished and appearantly stalled. The cruicial point is to see how it will be used. This question may link this pair to the Peter's dome (-inspired!) cathedral in Yammousukro, Africa.
What frustrated me is to het so little inof on these examples. Its almost exclusively confusing blog blurbs. The Ronchamp case in Zhengzhou is mentioned nowhere else than in this one link. In my search for this project I also came across many rumors similar to the one of Phillippe Starck (see first post on top) recently the same story around the late -eccentric- Howard Hughes. Where? Not in a single on-line biography but In a teenage-blog. ("I like Huges because he built four identical houses for four Hollywood starlets")
As for Chinese appropiation, I also found a very fascinating story on another blog that featured Ronchamp in China - On the same page it mentioned a replica of the Forbidden City near Houston, Texas (!) yet it left these two cultural phenomena without any reference to each other. http://lekkerdesign.com/hippoblog/2004_04_25_kive.htm
Now theres cloning..and theres reenactment.
If I still believe that after all this...'reenactment' actually still holds meaning then=>
Cloning..in a manner..is necessarily a sort of reenactment
Reenactment is not necessarily cloning
Personally )here sheltering behind a word of subjectivity( I never thought of themeparks as reenactments or cloning. They are concocted realities that serve their own function (entertainment-education..) rather than reenacting, emulating or cloning.
It is actually far more likely that the original is the themepark, than its cloned offspring. Unless the cloned offspring has something to offer that exceeds cloning. For instance that gorgeous sexy australian musuem- there is an underlying ambition that exceed mere cloning..and that is why it is its own themepark. Its a unique experience..its essence is far from reenacting or cloning, though it is a collage of clones. But this is not a merely postmodern situation...the Weisenhoffsiedlung is a themepark of modernist architecture (of coure, an inhabited one). And that too has nought to do with cloning or reenactment.
I would disagree with Novel ... I think that the core of a themepark is simply the unnatural/unusual intensification (deliberately designed into it or not) of a particular feature/s that are marketable. The genesis of themeparks, I bet, starts with sites that witnessed an intensification of holiness...Jerusalem,Lourdes,Mecca are all such archaic themeparks. The difference between an archaic and a modern themepark is simply in the fact that we have substituted reverence with irony.
Helsinki,
the issue here is not whethere the east has better architecture than the west or older architecture than the west, but its just that people want to know whats going on in the outside world too...so i think its perfectly fine to have model references as exhibits for say, general knowledge.
of course it traces back to walter benjamin;s discourse, but then why should we be so uptight about this issue, its just like buying a print of a jeff koons painting - but well, to each one his(her) own
and to an earlier poster, the ronchamp case in china, IS a park with many famous buildings - call it a theme park (actually id trace back myself to calling it so) - or whatever
Jun 16, 04 1:40 pm ·
·
Oh the many letter on 'reenactionary architecturism' since 1999 within the online archives of the design-l and architecthetics list serves. Prior treatment of almost all the about subjects is found in these places. There were also many reenactment letters in the now defunct Archipol archive at http://www.archis.org , and these are now in http://www.quondam.com 's collection.
Oh to St. Helena and Eutropia, the great architects of the Christian Jerusalem and the Christian Holy Land. [Six of the pink columns picked by Helena are still at the Church of the Nativity. What's left of Helena's palace in Rome is now Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, the first Calvary reenactment.]
And Oh to the many subsequent Roman Empresses that reenacted Helena's and Eutropia's holy church architecture both east and west.
A short clarification of reenactment: have I understood correctly that reenactment actually refers to a point outside architecture? In this way positioning reenactment apart from the clone by the sheer impossibility to "clone" something of mythical substance.
But how does reenactments differ from architecture that embodies something? For an example architecture that in it's form, structure and use embodies (/reenacts) the social/power structure of the community where it's situated. Is reenactment a somehow more potent term?
A short clarification of reenactment: have I understood correctly that reenactment actually refers to a point outside architecture? In this way positioning reenactment apart from the clone by the sheer impossibility to "clone" something of mythical substance.
But how does reenactments differ from architecture that embodies something? For an example architecture that in it's form, structure and use embodies (/reenacts) the social/power structure of the community where it's situated. Is reenactment a somehow more potent term?
Jun 17, 04 2:40 am ·
·
Helsinki, I for one have not seen 'reenactment vis-a-vis architecture' thinking pursued along the lines you suggest above. Personally, I think you're on to something.
this may go back to terragni's casa del fascio as a reenactment of fascism? was it? [i don't think so]
...or terragni's reenactment of dante's divine comedy in the danteum?
moisei ginzburg's narkofim was maybe trying to reenact a more balanced power structure brought by communism?
if we are talking power structures, walter benjamin [obviously lurking behind several areas of this debate] brings forth the argument that the link between art and politics can be interpreted different ways..but i feel that bit would veer away from this discussion.
Fascism itself isn't an original entity, but as a political structure is itself a reenactment of something un-nameable, but that's the rough idea. There's undoubtedly a connection between reenactment of ideas in material form and the general concepts of "a spirit of the times", "genius loci" and such, but somehow reenactment has an air of ritual, different from the rather pragmatic action of translating site, social conditions and users particularities into architecture. No idea what these under/über-ideas could be, though...
But back to cloning, what's really interesting in the idea of the clone and the "will-to-clone" is the attitude: a strange combination of appreciation for the original, belief in it's value, and total lack of understanding for the context and reason of it's creation in the first place.
yes but phenomenon benjamin was pinpointing was the lack of the original: photography, film, no longer have an original + clones, but all iterations are considered 'originals.' the medium is made to be reproduced [as opposed to painting, etc, which was always reproduced but where you did have an original with an aura]
would corbu's savoye drawings mean that he had also meant that the house would have no original but be 'meant to be reproduced' in the same way as any prefab, mass produced house? it was dissapointing to me because savoye has such a strong connection with its site [the windows put you at the height of the trees, the entry forces you to surround the house and walk the site...].
so, the clones stand in between... they are like posters of paintings [i think somebody else already mentioned that]. there is then a will to imitate the formal shell but not the word [to go back to colin rowe as also mentioned above].
maybe the point here is the involuntary appropriation. if i do art/arch meant to be reproduced [photography, the savoye, prefab] i have stated my intentions. if the work is meant to be tied to its site, the reproduction/clone has appropriated something and stripped a part of it [site, context connections].
Jun 18, 04 12:51 pm ·
·
I (again) read some of Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" yesterday, and it appears that including the notion of reenactment would have aided the essay. Also, the notion that magic is no longer a part of the "human condition" seems more and more to be a modern myth. Modern man has (by training?) become oblivious of where to find the magic, that's all.
Everytime I read of 'aura' I'm more and more reminded of the(now mythological) 'ether' that physicists used to so rely on.
Terragni's DANTEUM very much reenacts the 'promenade architecturale' forumla, as does Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye and (unexecuted) Palais des Congres.
cloning architecture - a global search
Hello everybody.
I am working on a video essay of multiplicating architecture, identical buildings in different places.
Already included are some of the opies of monumental landmark buildings, such as the DC Capitol , rebuilt in Shanghai, the -slightly different- copy of the Peter's Dome in Yamoutsukro, and the Parthenonin Nashville, Tenn.
I am in search of any case of (post)modern architecture that was rebuilt once or even several times in different world locations.
Once I came across the rumour that interior designer Phillippe Starck had build his own holiday mansion four time identically all over the world, but I found absolutely no proof on that story.
Equally to Howard Hughes who supposed to have done the same. But no story with facts on this to be found on-line..
Any comments / leads much appreciated.
kasbah stracke
New York
http://www.videokasbah.net
Ah, sounds like you'd profit from reading through (the 1st edition so far of) THE ODDS OF OTTOPIA, beginning at http://www.quondam.com/02/0126.htm . But, more to the point is "Here a Versailles, there a Versailles, Everywhere a Versailles, Sigh", one of the papers to be presented at the forthcoming Horace Trumbauer Architecture Fan Club Convention-- http://www.quondam.com/09/0833.htm .
Rita Novel, unmasked!!!
Yeah, but who is Crystal Vanish? One flush and she's a goner!
Anyway, keep your hands off Dora Nob, even if one good turn deserves another.
this idea was originally put forward by the people of maxis games who invented sim city 3000. if i knew how, i'd post some of my cities so you could see the monuments i placed in them....all i do is play sim city all day. yeah!
bye bye
The State Capitol of Pennsylvania is fairly exact though shrunk copy of the St. Peter's Rome. See also the Cathedral of Montreal.
Herrenchiemsee of Ludwig II, the ultimate Versailles, sigh.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is very similar to the Academy of Athens.
There are reenactionary Choragic Monuments in (at least) Philadelphia and Berlin.
The Free Library and the Family Courthouse of Philadelphia reenact the Place de la Concorde.
[just many the 'inventors' of SimCity 3000 have been visiting http://www.quondam.com since 1996 where 'reenactionary architecturism' has always been an issue.]
what is cloning if not reenactment?
How about everything in Vegas?
I recently saw a presentation on Chinese architecture.....in which there was a place shown in China, where local architects have reproduced the Ronchamp...and apparently a whole lot of other modern masterworks.....
http://www.b-board.net/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=382
Originality, What does that mean? Don't we all search for "inspiration" from other buildings? Mostly we have to use the standard doors windows and shapes prediscribed by others, codes and climate. I don't believe in originality. That is just a myth.
archiwoman.....you don't really mean that...do you??
We all get inspired by other buildings.....but that does not mean that we replicate what inspires us...
Sorry to say this, but I do mean it. Our "inspirations" end up being very, very similar to the "original" building which in turn looks like the real original one and so on.
archiwoman - did you even see the link to the chinese ronchamp?? Thats not " searching for inspiration from other buildings "!! Thats a 3D colour copy! You have to be joking.
the chinese ronchamp is a joke...a sad sad joke! anyways check out miniature golf courses, they are a mecca for scaled down reproductions.
by the way, i asked a chinese friend to interpret the website about the chinese ronchamp that was posted on archinect weeks ago - its actually like an architecture theme park - most of the buildings are at some other scale, but for some reason ronchamp is at 1:1
this should be actually the topic of a bigger discussion - most people in china, or india etc. cannot afford to go visit the actual buildings, hence the need for such 'theme parks' - its sacrilegous to architecuture per se, but if done at a different scale, as models, i think its okay to do so...
any thoughts?
Architecture should be able to cope with that kind of "abuse".
I think it's the architects who are having a difficult time, mostly because if somebody just copies "good architecture" to suit their needs from a library of masterworks of the past, the need to have an original building and an original architect seems to vanish.
This is a good point for the defence of agressively local architecture and architecture that focuses on the site and the overall context. Copying destroys the myth of the unique art-object.
...and thus... harks back and serves the discussion on Walter Benjamin and the aura of an original and proving the relevancy of the discussion of his writing to architecture.
any thoughts?
before waving that big moral stick around, let us remember where this all started...
LAS VEGAS
About the cloning done in the east: I wonder is the thirst for architecture so great that it's necessary to construct theme parks? These parks are most likely just something comparable to "it's a small world" or a freakshow, not a balanced "enjoy architecture-experience". It's about capitalizing on the prestige felt to be associated with the great works of history (or modernity), in the east (or in Las Vegas).
There is a Bank of America in Palm Springs that pays homage to Ronchamp.
Although not modern, Independence Hall on Ohio States campus which is a 3/4 scale replica of the one in Philadelphia. I think it burned down once and they rebuilt it.
why not?
after all, Ronchamp itself is a 'theme park' of itself. Self righteous snobbery towards explicit cloning -"its sacrilegous to architecuture per se"-hardly makes up for implicit cloning.
In fact, at the moment..I think I would prefer a cloned 1:1 . At least there is a trace of irreverence and humour and a little bit of interesting anguished violence..deliberate or not. Too much righteous reverence bores me....but then again I am fickle.
And do you know how worn out my prada loafers were after the 'uplifting spiritual' trip to the Ronchamp? Pft...Le Corbusier lives up to his assholic reputation.
But then again, the only things that 'uplifted' me there were the Miro-esque attachments to the building..and the way my falsetto sounded when everyone was drawing the elevations outside.
Cloning assumes that there are some "divine properties" in the building; considering this and the amount of work to create a 1:1 clone, I would say that it has nothing to do with high-brow ironic statements (these are usually delivered with actions that require only a light wrist and a gentle grip...)
So, cloning is the way a rich cousin from the country tries to show off ("I made me a Rooonshaamp!) AND at the same time (possibly) questioning the original, in a way he never intended (that questioning might devalue also his dear clone, ferchristsake.)
tsk...no need to be crass :oP
be it a maverick inspired by her Eco, a rich cousin with acres of cowcountry land or a savy corporation...does not matter. Thats the sweet thing about clones..they no longer have an author...more like works of nature than works of architecture.
I know a village somewhere in the Lebanese moutains full of rich cousins who build mansions that look like aeorplanes, yachts and windmills.
Rich cousins are cool,cute&funny to have. In fact, I wish I were a rich cousin with golden locks and could trail out that Roooonshaamp in such a charmingly naive way...
the voice of ...a bourgeois manque....
Helsinki wrote:
About the cloning done in the east: I wonder is the thirst for architecture so great that it's necessary to construct theme parks?
I doubt it, they have plenty of great architecture in the 'east' from ancient to supermodern. have a search for some of the projects going on in Beijing for the 2008 olympics.
Cloning assumes that there are some "divine properties" in the building...So, cloning is the way a rich cousin from the country tries to show off ("I made me a Rooonshaamp!)...
You seem to assume you are superior and those from the east (analogising them to a cousin from the country, complete with hick/slurred speech to reinforce your view-point) are just jealous and trying to emulate you.
not a good attitude at all.
As far as most of China goes, they certainly have their own great architecture, older and newer than the rest of the world, BUT the trend at the moment seems to be that everything western is great and worth copying to the detail (not the quality of the detail, of course). Is that a good attitude, I wonder? I'm not making fun of the chinese (or trying to somehow be a superior being), but I'm making fun of these theme parks and the attitude I presume is behind it.
We all live in countries that have done their fair share of copying and culture-importing in the past, and we have also gone to laughable extremes, so there.
Which came first, the Great Stupa of India or the tomb of Augustus in Rome?
Both are very similar and both are from the first century BC.
Seutonius mentions a delegation from India at Rome during the reign of Augustus.
REENACTIONARY ARCHITECTURISM has a long history. 'Cloning' is only one of its more recent chapters.
[Saint Catherine de Ricci and Louis I. Kahn are presenting 'Reenactionary Bilocating Architecturism' at the forthcoming Horace Trumbauer Architecture Fan Club Convention.
Saint Helena will deliver 'Pilgrimage, Reenactment and Tourism'.]
I don't know if this has been mentioned but you should check out The National Museum of Australia. The designers collaged all kinds of buildings to form this monstrosity. I know that Villa Savoy and the Berlin Jewish Museum are within its form. There may be others but you have to weed through all its gestural crap to see it. Here's a couple of links.
http://australianmapcircle.org.au/images/garden2.jpg
http://www.archmedia.com.au/aa/aaissue.php?issueid=200103&article=10&typeon=2
The National Museum of Australia has 'pilgrimage, reenactment and tourism' written all over it.
I was at Canberra for a couple of days back in January 1987, right after the great flagpole of the Capitol was erected--remeber how at first it was leaning backwards. I wish I had a camera with me.
Wow! that's absolutely horrible! I have blinked repeatedly but the images stay on may poor retina...
It would be interesting to see other buildings from the same architect, I wonder if his designs follow the same logic as this one.
the Sanchi Stupa is actually from the mid second century B.C. So it must..duh...have come first.Also, there is such a remarkable difference ... the Mausoleum is a penetrable much more autochthonic structure that stands much closer to being a building than does the stupa..
As for the whatever architecturism u refer to...enclosing 'cloning' within it as a chapter is whimsical ..and it 'assumes' (since 'assume' is the word of the day) that there is a constant of cultural signification across distant times and places...that marks a continuity between the cloning chapter and the others. I can't see what or where it is. Differences beget differences, not similarities..unless you fall into a mishmash soup of 'a basic human drive to reenact'...whereby, if I might point out..the reason why cloning is a book by itself is because it does not at all reenact. To reenact means to still believe in the mythical origin..whereas a cloned piece of architecture questions the necessity of having the origin...there is no reenaction; reenaction maintains the veil of rituals that seperates the origin-al from its reenactment.
Cloning,rather than the clone, is a dumb transparency ..there is no thought or deliberation behind it except for the decision to clone. It is..like its product,the clone..a process that begets itself...a nonchalant epistemology where the process is of virtual thickness&transparency yet its product is an opaque obscuring device.
Reenactment, however, reeks with incense and the vestige of the divine.
By all means widen the historical scope..but not to whimsically dismiss other persons' points where yours is more whimsical (and I dont mean the 'clever' wannabe-isms).
:)
salut,salut,demeure chaste et peure
it's definitely intriguing to see the villa savoye reproduced as an "element" within a museum. it makes me think about one of the initial concepts of the modern. that of ubiquity and sitelessness. the potential of architecture to be produced to the same quality and with similar ability to solve problems regardless of site or context, yet corb typically espoused this and negated it in the same breath. putting forth villa savoye (an experiment in typologies of industrial production and its internationalist possibilities), yet designing a house to be built of stone walls using "traditional" techniques to a modern end just a few years later. it makes me think of a story michael speaks tell often. of the colin rowe's discussion of the postmodern in american architecture as a search for the social theory which was lost in modernisms trip across the atlantic. the current process of manufacturing cultural icons as objects devoid of program is a next step of the tendency towards the re-reading of the modernist phenomenon. the object devoid of program, theory, social conscious. in some ways like frank gehry's alter-ego. the maker of empty signs and cultural destinations at odds with use...although frank is way more suave and innovative about his manufacturing of iconic symbols. it all makes me think of jon jerde's eponymously named firm and it's tendency towards cultural reproduction and the creation of spectacles. frank and jon both came out of similar backgrounds with similar training and built their offices along similar lines (housing developments, shopping malls,etc.)...the story is often told of frank calling up jon jerde and saying "that's it jon, i'm gonna do it. I'm gonna shake things up, do you want to come with me" then frank built his house.
my own bit of stream of consciousness this morning
REENACTIONARY ARCHITECTURISM is a study in degrees of separation.
I particulary like how architecture theory bullshit, especially the tafurian type, etc., is continually reenacted these days. Now there's a bunch of veils and rituals for you.
So, is Benjamin the original or the veiled ritual?
How many Benjamin clones are out there these days?
A lot of Plato's writings are reenactments of dialogues Socrates had, aren't they? Or are they cloned dialogues?
[I love it how I'm always so wrong. God forbid I'm cloned.]
In general, we know little of Socrates except that which is filtered through Plato (though scholars would crossexamine with other concurrent sources) . But what we DO know is that plato was devisive enough to make Socrates into a half-fictional character. That is not to say that there might not be similarities, or prominent interesections between the truth and the dialogues..but to call it reenactment would be just false.
however, in your strain of thought....then you have the best examples of 'transformative' reenactment in greek tragedies..in the tales of Medea, Iphegenia, Oresetes, Electra...as they, like the masks of Dionysus, surface as different people driven by different motives and gods...by the differing temperaments of the playwrights.
Perhaps, this is one of the subtelties of this 'reenactment' that our wordly culture lacks...though it still is there in the form of musical variations perhaps..to a certain extent..(strictly speaking, variations as a prominent art died with bach..to become predominantely simply a musical motif) .The ability to open up the shell of a narrative and make it your own. ...so imagine..taking on Libeskind's Musuem and making it your own....reconfiguring it....altering it. It might be an interesting exercise, but we have so gone to the other extreme ..that we can accuse any semblance of being ,legally, an infringement of copyright and ethically, a copy-paste rip-off.
(and that itself is an intruiging topic in architecture....u can clone the architecture..no problem..the blueprint is the actual object of the patent...but once built..the blueprint is rendered empty..devoid of being realised, it becomes devoid of everything; that is what blueprints are:promises...unless it is, like Hadids blueprints, elevated into becoming itself a representation of itself.With its own Kantian moment of disinterestedness. That is why I feel clones are like works of nature..they can just occur without interrogation. They are the very opposite of art..they are not feats of anything but a mechanism for replication..Like sex, you might philosophize much about what cloning is...but the clone itself is a something that can only point to its prescence there, but not why or how)
I realise I digress and am not being pedantically neat with my points...I'm getting overexcited. However, if you can please sweetly drop that juvenile 'architecural theory bullshit' part, it would be really quite yummy of you...its just too juvenile and litters the canteens of architecture schools..know warra mean? Either you know what u talkin about, or you don't. Otherwise, this 'Bullshit' terminology is simply a ..yes...veil for hiding one's insecurities and industrial working class 'no frills' heritage. You're an architect..u use language every moment in your career that might be deemed 'bullshit' by others...no need to be hypocritical now, dear.
Libeskind does a good enough job himself of reenacting his own architecture.
I'm only virtually an architect, so maybe I'm just virtually hypocritical.
My viseral knowledge of reenactment began on my birthday just over 24 years ago when I witnessed a reenactment of my own birth. Uncanny to say the least, just like Ludwig I of Bavaria witnessed a reenactment of his birth on his birthday in 1845.
I think everyone should just go write their own book(s).
"Here a Versailles, there a Versailles, everywhere a Versailles, sigh"
a little late in this discussion:
see: beatriz colomina's privacy and publicity, pg. 115 for le corbusier's sketch of several ville savoyes replicated on the argentinean countryside. he dug his own grave.
see ville savoye. there is a shed at the entry that looks like a bad savoye jr. i have no idea who built it but it looks like some sort of caretaker lives there.
finally: piranesi's campo marzio... he was probably way ahead in this discussion anyway. and it was tafuri who brought him back in the discussion.
but: australian museum: why oh why did you post that link? now i have to erase those images from my brain... maybe chocolate ice cream will help? nope, didn't think so...
It is the caretakers house. and it's quite neat.
Corbu worked with the idea of blueprints for a modern architecture, and the replicable savoye, the citrohan villa and his "five points" are all part of the same pattern. I think it was quite un-sissylike of him to plan a suburban grid of his beloved villas...
the cloning discussion focuses on these dacapo-masterpieces, suitable for musings of varied kind, but the most profound acts of cloning occur in the realm of mcmansions and "package homes" (I don't know the exact term in english, but I mean homes you can buy from catalogues with plans and visualisations). There cloning faces a whole new scale and "it finds it's place", somehow... Acting as backrops, trophies and tombs the clones form a gated community, with architecture (as understood in schools and the trade press) firmly locked outside.
Hel.
not sure whether it is strictly speaking the same topic. This is an architectural mass production that positions architecture alongside electronic appliances, or highstreet furniture or etc...But there is no ptototype..no process of copying. The plans were drawn up not for one, but for many. There is no surreal jolt associated with cloning the canonic. The relationship these houses have to each other is that of siblings...whereas there is a sort of paternal one (be it incestuous and perverse) linking former examples to their repetitions.
And as u say..this sort of building en masse has a very backgrounding-itself aspect. Unlike the true blue clone, it does not seek attention. Rather, the intention is for it to become the very scenography of mediocre everydayness.
Funny...that all those humanely-motivated architects overdose on Hiedeggar's worse, most banal texts- a philosophical 'reenactment' of the forthcoming new-age -in hope to justify how their works stem from an appreciation of the 'beauty in the ordinary and in Nature' (overworked arts&crafts ideals) when the Black Forest house is more perfectly reenacted in those nonchalant army of affordable-luxury items.
I too was thinking of McMansions last night. Swamps of clones sprawling over the US suburban landscape. But notice too what these homes try so hard to reenact, essentially the 'lifestyle' of very wealthy people from quondam times.
Picking up on Helsinki's last sentence, it's interesting that the German word Schloss means 1. castle, palace; chateau, manor-house 2. lock.
[On the Campo Marzio issue, I've (already) compiled a bibliography of architectural literature on Piranesi's large plan. Briefly, before Tafuri there is Fasolo in 1956 (who Tafuri in places reiterates, but he did not note any of the 1956 mistakes), and Scully on Kahn in 1962. Tafuri's ARCHITECTURE AND UTOPIA was first published in Italian in 1973, and his THE SPHERE AND THE LABYRINTH was first published in Italian in 1980. Since 1980, most architectural writers have sprouted off the Tafuri branch, and there is only one architectural writer who, in 1981, began to sprout off Kahn's branch of investigation intwined with reenactment.]
I am very happy that my "case search" sparked off such a lively discussion on architectural cloning.
Forgive me to go back to Ronchamp one more time and delay the "clones as in mass production of homes" topic.
Whatever strong arguments were made against this mysterious copy of the chapel and the notion of cloning / pirating world architecture, bottom line is how exciting and controversial the outcome is. I strongly believe that we are missing the point when comparing is to appropriation of design elements and even the often used notion of the "almost identical" .
In the Ronchamp case, imagine what a feeling it evokes to look out the entrance of Notre Dame du Haute and not to see the rich green hilly landscape in Southern France but the landscape of a flat dirty Chinese suburbs, unfortuantely not far from the replica of the campanile di San Marco , however not in Vegas fashion (arguably... Pas de "Zeropolis" and enough of Venturi.)
Themepark architecture is definitively another subject, a mock up façade with a casino on its guts has very little to do with this cloning comparison. From the images on ths site I would even say that the Chinese Ronchamp will not be theme park. However,..it is not finished and appearantly stalled. The cruicial point is to see how it will be used. This question may link this pair to the Peter's dome (-inspired!) cathedral in Yammousukro, Africa.
What frustrated me is to het so little inof on these examples. Its almost exclusively confusing blog blurbs. The Ronchamp case in Zhengzhou is mentioned nowhere else than in this one link. In my search for this project I also came across many rumors similar to the one of Phillippe Starck (see first post on top) recently the same story around the late -eccentric- Howard Hughes. Where? Not in a single on-line biography but In a teenage-blog. ("I like Huges because he built four identical houses for four Hollywood starlets")
As for Chinese appropiation, I also found a very fascinating story on another blog that featured Ronchamp in China - On the same page it mentioned a replica of the Forbidden City near Houston, Texas (!) yet it left these two cultural phenomena without any reference to each other.
http://lekkerdesign.com/hippoblog/2004_04_25_kive.htm
Wasn't Larry Ellison (Oracle) building himself a replica of Katsura Villa in Silicon valley?
not to mention how many statues of liberty and eiffel towers populate the globe...
The core essence of theming (theme-ing) is again reenactment.
degrees of separation limits:
as close as one can get to the original
as far as one can stretch the truth
Now theres cloning..and theres reenactment.
If I still believe that after all this...'reenactment' actually still holds meaning then=>
Cloning..in a manner..is necessarily a sort of reenactment
Reenactment is not necessarily cloning
Personally )here sheltering behind a word of subjectivity( I never thought of themeparks as reenactments or cloning. They are concocted realities that serve their own function (entertainment-education..) rather than reenacting, emulating or cloning.
It is actually far more likely that the original is the themepark, than its cloned offspring. Unless the cloned offspring has something to offer that exceeds cloning. For instance that gorgeous sexy australian musuem- there is an underlying ambition that exceed mere cloning..and that is why it is its own themepark. Its a unique experience..its essence is far from reenacting or cloning, though it is a collage of clones. But this is not a merely postmodern situation...the Weisenhoffsiedlung is a themepark of modernist architecture (of coure, an inhabited one). And that too has nought to do with cloning or reenactment.
I would disagree with Novel ... I think that the core of a themepark is simply the unnatural/unusual intensification (deliberately designed into it or not) of a particular feature/s that are marketable. The genesis of themeparks, I bet, starts with sites that witnessed an intensification of holiness...Jerusalem,Lourdes,Mecca are all such archaic themeparks. The difference between an archaic and a modern themepark is simply in the fact that we have substituted reverence with irony.
Helsinki,
the issue here is not whethere the east has better architecture than the west or older architecture than the west, but its just that people want to know whats going on in the outside world too...so i think its perfectly fine to have model references as exhibits for say, general knowledge.
of course it traces back to walter benjamin;s discourse, but then why should we be so uptight about this issue, its just like buying a print of a jeff koons painting - but well, to each one his(her) own
and to an earlier poster, the ronchamp case in china, IS a park with many famous buildings - call it a theme park (actually id trace back myself to calling it so) - or whatever
Oh the many letter on 'reenactionary architecturism' since 1999 within the online archives of the design-l and architecthetics list serves. Prior treatment of almost all the about subjects is found in these places. There were also many reenactment letters in the now defunct Archipol archive at http://www.archis.org , and these are now in http://www.quondam.com 's collection.
Oh to St. Helena and Eutropia, the great architects of the Christian Jerusalem and the Christian Holy Land. [Six of the pink columns picked by Helena are still at the Church of the Nativity. What's left of Helena's palace in Rome is now Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, the first Calvary reenactment.]
And Oh to the many subsequent Roman Empresses that reenacted Helena's and Eutropia's holy church architecture both east and west.
A short clarification of reenactment: have I understood correctly that reenactment actually refers to a point outside architecture? In this way positioning reenactment apart from the clone by the sheer impossibility to "clone" something of mythical substance.
But how does reenactments differ from architecture that embodies something? For an example architecture that in it's form, structure and use embodies (/reenacts) the social/power structure of the community where it's situated. Is reenactment a somehow more potent term?
A short clarification of reenactment: have I understood correctly that reenactment actually refers to a point outside architecture? In this way positioning reenactment apart from the clone by the sheer impossibility to "clone" something of mythical substance.
But how does reenactments differ from architecture that embodies something? For an example architecture that in it's form, structure and use embodies (/reenacts) the social/power structure of the community where it's situated. Is reenactment a somehow more potent term?
Helsinki, I for one have not seen 'reenactment vis-a-vis architecture' thinking pursued along the lines you suggest above. Personally, I think you're on to something.
this may go back to terragni's casa del fascio as a reenactment of fascism? was it? [i don't think so]
...or terragni's reenactment of dante's divine comedy in the danteum?
moisei ginzburg's narkofim was maybe trying to reenact a more balanced power structure brought by communism?
if we are talking power structures, walter benjamin [obviously lurking behind several areas of this debate] brings forth the argument that the link between art and politics can be interpreted different ways..but i feel that bit would veer away from this discussion.
Fascism itself isn't an original entity, but as a political structure is itself a reenactment of something un-nameable, but that's the rough idea. There's undoubtedly a connection between reenactment of ideas in material form and the general concepts of "a spirit of the times", "genius loci" and such, but somehow reenactment has an air of ritual, different from the rather pragmatic action of translating site, social conditions and users particularities into architecture. No idea what these under/über-ideas could be, though...
But back to cloning, what's really interesting in the idea of the clone and the "will-to-clone" is the attitude: a strange combination of appreciation for the original, belief in it's value, and total lack of understanding for the context and reason of it's creation in the first place.
yes but phenomenon benjamin was pinpointing was the lack of the original: photography, film, no longer have an original + clones, but all iterations are considered 'originals.' the medium is made to be reproduced [as opposed to painting, etc, which was always reproduced but where you did have an original with an aura]
would corbu's savoye drawings mean that he had also meant that the house would have no original but be 'meant to be reproduced' in the same way as any prefab, mass produced house? it was dissapointing to me because savoye has such a strong connection with its site [the windows put you at the height of the trees, the entry forces you to surround the house and walk the site...].
so, the clones stand in between... they are like posters of paintings [i think somebody else already mentioned that]. there is then a will to imitate the formal shell but not the word [to go back to colin rowe as also mentioned above].
maybe the point here is the involuntary appropriation. if i do art/arch meant to be reproduced [photography, the savoye, prefab] i have stated my intentions. if the work is meant to be tied to its site, the reproduction/clone has appropriated something and stripped a part of it [site, context connections].
I (again) read some of Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" yesterday, and it appears that including the notion of reenactment would have aided the essay. Also, the notion that magic is no longer a part of the "human condition" seems more and more to be a modern myth. Modern man has (by training?) become oblivious of where to find the magic, that's all.
Everytime I read of 'aura' I'm more and more reminded of the(now mythological) 'ether' that physicists used to so rely on.
Terragni's DANTEUM very much reenacts the 'promenade architecturale' forumla, as does Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye and (unexecuted) Palais des Congres.
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.