Being-in-the-world [architecture thread]

[bels]

Birmingham is built on a hubristic vision of post war Britain which began to disintegrate before it was ever finished. All hail the Aston Expressway, may it raise us above the boarded up terraces of our past. All hail the number 11 bus, may we find ourselves encircled by the slow drudgery of its routine. All hail John Madin, may he encase us all in concrete, in stone, in rebar, that we may be consigned to this city and have our lives buried with it.

[bels]

The security doors in my building all have narrow glass panels but the angles you approach them at mean you can never see if there's someone on the other side or not so I keep smashing people in the face when I barge doors open.

[dbcooper]

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[Syeknom]

[Syeknom]

[bels]

http://www.architectural-review.com/not ... s4.twitter

Topic has been done to death ofc but I enjoyed this article for its references to the previous attempts to claim public spaces as private and vice versa

[ramseames]

https://www.ft.com/content/e0112c50-9f5 ... e238dee8e2

Little interview/profile of Tadao Ando in ft

[costanza]

[bels]

My office has metal floors underneath the carpet (I dropped a magnet). Why would you build an office building with ferrous floors? Isn't that ludicrously expensive? I don't think it's just a beam as it seems to be most of the office.

I'm on the ground floor if that makes any difference.

[pirxthepilot]

^ yeah that's what i was going to say. artist i worked with was once asked to consult on creation of a warning for buried radioactive material that would remain toxic for around 10000 years. Over that timespan it would be reasonable to assume all human language/records could be destroyed/lost. so they had to come up with some kind of 'universal' keep-away that would survive the death of all existing signification.
maybe look around for one of those?

earlier mexican civilisations loved skulls, used them as ornamentation.

nah. quite the opposite. when she came on board the preferred solution was to scatter a bunch of cds with full explanation around the surface site. you can barely even find a cd player now let alone in 10 millennia

[sagc]

is that document, presumably - an internet classic.

[pirxthepilot]

she was born 67 so might've been a bit young in 1990.possible she was drawing on internet myth just to lead into the idea of 'language without existing signifiers'.. which would fit with her practice anyway. (her work often references john titor etc). that borges-ian slippage we talked about with cameron jamie etc. this is what artists do....(homer/plato/everyone since)

edit: seems fairly obvious this was actually a 'reference' to internet legend that i just didn't get.
do we think this ever happened at all? presumably origins are lost in the mists of internet time?

[bels]

It has an entry on wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Iso ... ure_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time ... g_messages so it's probably real (weak citations) but the idea that an interdisciplinary team without an artist would think that they should store the warnings on CDs is pretty laughable. Are artists particularly known for their understanding of data format integrity?

I say it's a waste of money to get an artist on board (I understand the people involved here are dealing with so much money that one artists salary for an entire lifetime is meaningless so why not bring one aboard) because isn't this a project which needs the least amount of art (transformation of symbols or cave shadows or whatever) possible? There may be some evolution induced aversions humans have (though obviously in 10k years we wouldn't know if they still existed because people might be floating roboheads in jars or whatever) but you would almost definitely need science (unbiased, causally isolated observation) to work these out. The idea that one sole artist would have much useful input (outside of relevant book knowledge that you need no artistic ability to synthesise) seems unlikely. And eventually, probably you would discover that as there's not much you could guarantee would warn humans away (because even if you could make a warning, plenty of people will see a warning and walk straight towards it) so you would try to just build something really secure.

What's kind of interesting is that instead of doing the above and leaving it (because really who cares if some guy 9 thousand years from now gets wasted by radioactivity) they make a big deal of assembling an interdisciplinary team to sit and think about the issue and publish magazine articles and DO involve an artist, making it kind of clear that the whole enterprise is actually a kind of art project in the end rather than a real, rigorous attempt to communicate with the future.

Sort of relevant http://longnow.org/clock/

[pirxthepilot]

see what you're saying about the artist bit now but i suppose there are figurative cave paintings from 35k-40k years ago so if you were genuinely trying to communicate across many millennia 'art' in the broadest sense has been shown to be some kind of common language (obviously we have no idea what those painters were trying to convey...)
i agree that if the project did even happen it was mostly performative, which as you say is interesting in itself. (although i suspect a lot of govt thinktanks are basically performative anyway)

[bels]

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/9/wall.php

Googling red roofs found me this article which is kind of interesting.