With titanium facades swinging like jiving skirts and windows staggered like towers of toppling coins, the chaotic energy of the latest apartment designs for Battersea power station can only mean one thing: Frank Gehry is in town.
As the 85-year-old visionary architect behind the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao outlined plans for 700 apartments in London – his first English buildings – he walked straight into a raging debate about the capital's affordable housing crisis.
— theguardian.com
61 Comments
quondam, i said aesthetization not anesthetization...i never had anesthetization in mind (was it a misspelling on my part?
Uh oh, looks like the bromance is over.
Or maybe it's just a lover's quarrel?
me previously: , I do not refer to stylism or contingent features of aesthetic but rather the aesthetization of the object/architecture to the point where discourse is defined by its development and presence solely within an aesthetically rhetorical discourse
and prior to that : however, there is, more demurely (and i have a few individuals in mind - very very few) who approach the projects/posts with a supremely aesthetically based intellect.
Also, lastly on this particular issue, my intention was not to assign culpability or not. i was wondering why complement Patrick Schumacher exactly at the point where the topic was on PAtrick Schumacher paying a backhanded "compliment" to someone who was doing humanitarian work (Ban) where it exposed Patrick Schumacher's unsavoury political -and not, as he purports it to be apolitical- stance. It was not my intention to get personal - i felt there was a knot there that was concerning. anyhow, your request, quondam, will be respected.
Miles I'll respond to your post since I could read it in 10 seconds...
Miles it's actually easier than you think...you get the commission based on imaginary agreements about what the theme is, then you get to know each other, a little education on both ends, and before you know you're buying the client Morphosis books for the holidays drinking beer in design sessions.
Sure this method of sealing a deal is full of hypocrisy and compromise, but you have to see the larger picture...that's the only thing I've digested from t a m m u z so far...lot of reading to do...between that poster and Quondam...
t a m m u z - I believe what you did here we call a rope a dope, lean back on the ropes, take a few punches until the opponent wears out.
then strike
I prefer to be an angry cog
specifically the one that hangs in limbo one day, throwing the whole system out of whack because of the Question of Being (Heidegger all day)
I get the neoliberalism, but this is easy population control, I am sure you agree...
it starts with the cog and it starts in small out of synch adjustments.
politics is too aggressive for this profession, see my response to Miles.
In Gehry Talks he mentions how he wouldn't pay the few dollar few to go see FLW's studios because he is a socialist, so he went and saw that Finnish architect.
This post began with him right...do you think he really isn't trying? your role is limited by the role you find, you can't be Dionysus, Jim Morrison, or some other social poet, well at least most of us.
give me a day in the life of this architect, we're almost there.
the post was not addressed to you nor do I have you or your posts in mind OBO. Again, I'm not interested in your kind of engagement.
Quondam, noted. But perhaps in mind I had the aesthetics of an idea....appreciating an idea for itself - although i realize i did rashly precise aesthetization of an architectural object...and here i see your objection. . On one level, yes design. On another, I observe that you also operate on the basis of linking ideas, where sometimes that linkage is the source of valour. as such, the aesthetization of the intellectual practice...does that make more sense? In any case, it doesn't detract from the active parts of the questions posed (which you have answered already.
Tammuz, nice post!
Tammuz, I think it's unfair to argue that anyone who pursues architecture has to have hardcore Socialist political views in order not to be horrible people. Like any occupation, there are architects who hold all kinds of political viewpoints. The key word here, in my opinion, being occupation. Architecture is a job that people do for a living, it's not a political movement. Just because you have a very dramatic and negative opinion on international trade doesn't mean that any architect who doesn't share your viewpoints is a bad person. Some people get into the profession solely out of a passion for experimenting with aesthetics. Clearly you have different ambitions for your work. Different strokes, I suppose.
Also, just some food for thought, the social benefits vs harm of neoliberalism is legitimately debated in the ivory towers of economics by PhDs who have been reaming through data for decades. Even though there surely are negative consequences of the ideology, to characterize it as the source of all the worlds evils is fundamentally incorrect.
Actually after finding and looking at the more detailed plans, I think Gehry did a very good job on creating a purely mall-ifed gin fizz urbanism with his forte of bringing in disparate building parts together and all. We have Americana in Glendale with apartments build over shops. It will be well marketed for a specific and homogeneous group of buyers. Of course the power station and the river are god send. But the socialization and the life style is definitely gin fizz, hi end, disconnected, defensive and surveilled, highly sanitized and anesthetized. That much is obvious from that master plan rendering and this one below. "Is that a museum at the top floor?" What if they pump this from the chimney, offering the full sensory experience? You could also read Charles Moore's "You Have To Pay For The Public Life" if you didn't already. I had the fortune of hearing Mr. Moore few times as a student. He was an amazing storyteller, critic, historian, collaborator, great architect . His students became prominent advocates of "Everyday Urbanism."
Frank got his inspiration from The Jetsons.
Is this as step up from crumpled paper or a pile of garbage dumped from a waste bin?
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