Archive for the 'architecture' Category
Warburg 2.0
“Warburg was a technophile. He was interested in telecommunication, the press and travelling; all these new technologies enabled new forms of travelling, but also prolonged the old idea of migration that connected civilizations from the beginning.”
Mathias Bruhn – Aby Warburg (1866-1929): The Survival of an Idea
In Part 1 of this article published in Le CENTQUATREVUE we saw the cultural worldview ripening to welcome back Warburg’s avant-garde ideas 70 years after their conception. If he was alive today, taking a quantum leap through time and space and technology, what would his project be?
Warburg wanted to break down disciplinary boundaries, allowing meaning and ideas to flow freely across academic and ethnic cultures, across geography and history, and particularly, across value systems. His procedural technique required the meticulous collection, storage and tagging of randomly accessed archives of various sources and media. He tried, with relatively limited success, to keep snapshots of the relationships themselves that he found between cultural elements.
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When I visited Glasgow School of Art, designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh at the close of the 19th Century, it made me very conscious of the power of design. The building was full of innovative devices, which once inside, brought comfort. For instance, the library ceiling was supported by four timber columns and you can hear the squeaks from people walking across the floor above, which gives you an illusion as if you are close to nature - in the middle of a wood maybe. The famous Mackintosh chairs with the long backrests were designed to create an enclosed and confidential space when placed - 4,6 or 8- around a table, creating an intimate atmosphere for people to concentrate on socializing or discussing the series social issues of the day. Traveling up and down the building, following a tour guide, listening to her talk, I felt as if the architect himself was looking at us – scrutinizing our behavior to ensure his intention to influence us through the devices he built – from chair to building – from school to church.
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Nightmare 1
In his memoir, Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure, the American post-modern novelist Paul Auster
clarifies his understanding of failure by stating that in his late twenties and early thirties, he went through a period of several years when everything he touched turned to failure .
Temporary relief
As Colin MacCabe noted at a conference titled “The Value of Failure” in June 2005, “success has become one of the key terms by which people evaluate their own and other lives”. When MacCabe refers to failure, he posits it as a crucial component of both the development of knowledge in science and of creative experimentation in the arts. He ends on the question to which degree contemporary society demands success and what happens when, in contemporary Britain (and indeed Europe), both public and private funding for projects in the cultural and educational sectors becomes increasingly success oriented.
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