-In his article Network Fever ( grey room 200) Mark Wigley, accuses the architects of the day of having forgotten / disregarded such 1960's developments like ekistics or the metabolists in japan . He says contemporary work is a naive echo of stuff that was hashed out in the Delos conventions by people like Fuller and McLuhan (continuing in the spirit of the CIAM ) - and that similar work today (theory & built) neither acknowledges it's predesessors, nor in fact, is even aware of them .
-Any takes on this critique of his ?
-He doesn't name any names, but i've the impression he's talking ab the greg lynns , the foa's the , morphosis, coop H etc...
-Are we to consider these current bad-asses as nearsighted as he would have us, or rather, is he leaving out info for the sake of his argument?
aemkei
Feb 16, 05 5:19 pm
I haven't read the article you're referring to, but isn't the whole thing with not acknowledging similar work or work that has inspired the architect a reaction to the post-modernism and it's rather eclectic ways? That it's just what is expected of us - that we at the very least should play along as if our work really WERE as original as we wish it were.
rtdc
Feb 16, 05 5:41 pm
Could you post the article?
c
Feb 16, 05 5:42 pm
-Wigley doesn't seem to consider their lack of originality in light of historic precedant as a reaction against pomo - ( this is my reading of what you said ..) at least, he doesn't come out and say it as such - But, as a bit of a pomo himself - perhaps his is this critique, and as an uninfrmed reader, I've missed that part...
c
Feb 16, 05 5:56 pm
reedtimothy- as far as i can tell it's locked up in the mit grey room files and you have to pay to get it- I've only a hard copy.
the general line of things goes like this:
delos symposium , doxiadis, fuller, McLuhan, Tyrwhitt, Kahn and others have regular pow-wows on a boat.
Ekistics is going bonkers
metabolists, megastructuralists, archigram, Isosaki , fumiko maki, Tange and so on pick up the thread, enter discussion. out of this dialogue comes Plug In City and the likes
recent work (which he never names) in a similar vein, considers itse;f a pioneeer in the field, oblivious to (paraphrasing here) how trodden their trail has been- long before their time.
of this thread stays up long enough i can post some of the points straight from the paper
c
Feb 17, 05 5:09 pm
[some main points from Wigley's article:]
Nowhere escapes the net...Invisible networks seemingly threaten visible means of defining space dissolving the walls of buildings The architecture of borders, wall, doors and locks gives way to that of passwords firewalls public key encryption and security certificates.Indeed the idea of a space occupied by networks or superimposed by them has been replaced by that of overlapping networks whithin which physical space appears only as a fragile artifact or effect. ... the modern perforation and lightening up of architecture in the face of speed , industrialized technology, and mass production at the turn of the 20th cent. has gone a step farther as buildings dissolve into information flow , to be either discarded as a relic of previous time or nostalgically preserved as a quaint memento.
... [the internet] grew exponentially ever since [ the cold war] and now bounces from school to house to car to plane to beach. But what if we are actually at the endpoint of network logic? what if contemporary discourse about the net simply relizes 19th century fantasies that were acted out through most of last century What if the much advertised dissolving of architecture occured long ago? what if much of our net telk is just an echo? An echo of an echo?
[on Fuller meeting McLuhan @ doxiades' delos symposium in '63...] They voiced so much of what is said today. They wrote a lot of our script.
[then wigley covers the symposia various debates , who's who etc. here is some lines from the arguments being covered:]
Buildings are but shells for movement patterns that reach out far beyond them . Whereas buildings house function , networks are pure function , function without shell.If modern architects [c.1963 architects]are serious about their commitment to function, they will have to reduce their fixation on shells, and become responsible for networks.
This concern for networks became clearest in the 'City of the Future' project that Doxiades launched in 1960... first published just a month before the Delos event it predicts the emergence of a single city covering the whole earth like a lava lamp network , a fluid biomorphic growth extending itself everywhere.
[goes into details of ekistics]
In 1966 Tange, who would polemically have himself photographed against a dense weave of triangulated scaffolding to open his monograph, said exactly that 'Creating an architecture and a city may be called a process of making the communication network visible in space.'
[then towards the end , writes this:] It took decades to forget such experiments so that a new generation could present itself as the first to engage seriously with the architecture of electronics . Much of what we hear today is an echo- but sso delayed that it sounds fresh. It is as if the discourse forgets its own history ....
The architectural species has survived by ignoring a century of intense discourse about networks. In a kind of Warholian dream every echo has become an original artwork.
[ sorry for typos & the un-uploadable text . sorry too, that nobody seems particularly interested in this thread. ]
jerryzhao1
Dec 15, 20 6:24 pm
Im 15 yrs late, but this is a great thread
vado retro
Feb 17, 05 7:05 pm
hmmmm i forgot japanese metabolism on purpose. that stuff is brutal man.
-In his article Network Fever ( grey room 200) Mark Wigley, accuses the architects of the day of having forgotten / disregarded such 1960's developments like ekistics or the metabolists in japan . He says contemporary work is a naive echo of stuff that was hashed out in the Delos conventions by people like Fuller and McLuhan (continuing in the spirit of the CIAM ) - and that similar work today (theory & built) neither acknowledges it's predesessors, nor in fact, is even aware of them .
-Any takes on this critique of his ?
-He doesn't name any names, but i've the impression he's talking ab the greg lynns , the foa's the , morphosis, coop H etc...
-Are we to consider these current bad-asses as nearsighted as he would have us, or rather, is he leaving out info for the sake of his argument?
I haven't read the article you're referring to, but isn't the whole thing with not acknowledging similar work or work that has inspired the architect a reaction to the post-modernism and it's rather eclectic ways? That it's just what is expected of us - that we at the very least should play along as if our work really WERE as original as we wish it were.
Could you post the article?
-Wigley doesn't seem to consider their lack of originality in light of historic precedant as a reaction against pomo - ( this is my reading of what you said ..) at least, he doesn't come out and say it as such - But, as a bit of a pomo himself - perhaps his is this critique, and as an uninfrmed reader, I've missed that part...
reedtimothy- as far as i can tell it's locked up in the mit grey room files and you have to pay to get it- I've only a hard copy.
the general line of things goes like this:
delos symposium , doxiadis, fuller, McLuhan, Tyrwhitt, Kahn and others have regular pow-wows on a boat.
Ekistics is going bonkers
metabolists, megastructuralists, archigram, Isosaki , fumiko maki, Tange and so on pick up the thread, enter discussion. out of this dialogue comes Plug In City and the likes
recent work (which he never names) in a similar vein, considers itse;f a pioneeer in the field, oblivious to (paraphrasing here) how trodden their trail has been- long before their time.
of this thread stays up long enough i can post some of the points straight from the paper
[some main points from Wigley's article:]
Nowhere escapes the net...Invisible networks seemingly threaten visible means of defining space dissolving the walls of buildings The architecture of borders, wall, doors and locks gives way to that of passwords firewalls public key encryption and security certificates.Indeed the idea of a space occupied by networks or superimposed by them has been replaced by that of overlapping networks whithin which physical space appears only as a fragile artifact or effect. ... the modern perforation and lightening up of architecture in the face of speed , industrialized technology, and mass production at the turn of the 20th cent. has gone a step farther as buildings dissolve into information flow , to be either discarded as a relic of previous time or nostalgically preserved as a quaint memento.
... [the internet] grew exponentially ever since [ the cold war] and now bounces from school to house to car to plane to beach. But what if we are actually at the endpoint of network logic? what if contemporary discourse about the net simply relizes 19th century fantasies that were acted out through most of last century What if the much advertised dissolving of architecture occured long ago? what if much of our net telk is just an echo? An echo of an echo?
[on Fuller meeting McLuhan @ doxiades' delos symposium in '63...] They voiced so much of what is said today. They wrote a lot of our script.
[then wigley covers the symposia various debates , who's who etc. here is some lines from the arguments being covered:]
Buildings are but shells for movement patterns that reach out far beyond them . Whereas buildings house function , networks are pure function , function without shell.If modern architects [c.1963 architects]are serious about their commitment to function, they will have to reduce their fixation on shells, and become responsible for networks.
This concern for networks became clearest in the 'City of the Future' project that Doxiades launched in 1960... first published just a month before the Delos event it predicts the emergence of a single city covering the whole earth like a lava lamp network , a fluid biomorphic growth extending itself everywhere.
[goes into details of ekistics]
In 1966 Tange, who would polemically have himself photographed against a dense weave of triangulated scaffolding to open his monograph, said exactly that 'Creating an architecture and a city may be called a process of making the communication network visible in space.'
[then towards the end , writes this:] It took decades to forget such experiments so that a new generation could present itself as the first to engage seriously with the architecture of electronics . Much of what we hear today is an echo- but sso delayed that it sounds fresh. It is as if the discourse forgets its own history ....
The architectural species has survived by ignoring a century of intense discourse about networks. In a kind of Warholian dream every echo has become an original artwork.
[ sorry for typos & the un-uploadable text . sorry too, that nobody seems particularly interested in this thread. ]
Im 15 yrs late, but this is a great thread
hmmmm i forgot japanese metabolism on purpose. that stuff is brutal man.