socks-studio

Thomas Carpentier’s graduation project at ESA questions the normatization of the human body proportions introduced by early Modernist Architectural manuals such as Neufert‘s, or the “Architectural Graphic Standards” or by the anthropometric scale of proportion devised by Le Corbusier with the name of Modulor.

The ambition of identifing an idealized human proportion was the alleged basis upon which building a new rational and sanitized architecture, but the mere concept of finding a norm out of an ideal body is in fact paradoxical and even discriminatory. Despite that, the Neufert’s manual easily encountered a widespread success, and the standardization today involves not only the human anatomy but also men’s behaviour.

Without futher addition to what has been already and more exhaustively written by Léopold Lambert twice in his blog (“The Modernist Ideology of a Normative Body” and “A Subversive Approach to the Ideal Normatized Body“), we leave you with the work of Thomas Carpentier.

As a parody to the normatization of the body, Thomas focuses his attention to out-of-standard but iconic character’s bodies, such as the one of a culturist, Jabba the Hutt’s, Oscar Pistorius’, Borg Queen’s or David Toole’s. Around their real or fictitious proportions he then re-imagines or create architectural spaces whose main purpose is to accomodate their other standards.

Related:

Frederick Kiesler. Architecture, “Biotechnique”, and a Peek into the Future of the Computer, 1940. Thanks to Ethel Baraona for signaling!

Friends of Think Space, the annual conceptual competition program from Zagreb, Croatia (see our project Grundrisse), have recently unveiled the theme of their 2012 cycle: Past Forward.

Curator Adrian Lahoud looked back to the recent history of architecture and asked the participants to revisit “three competitions that radically transformed architectural culture: The Peak (1982), Yokohama Port Terminal (1994) and Blur Building (1999).” All three winning entries emerged under unique conditions to take up critical positions on the predominant tendencies of their time.”







From the brief:

“The last three decades saw significant change across social, political, and environmental registers. The conjunction of capital flows, mass urbanization and increasingly interconnected cultural and financial networks have reshaped the way we understand, produce and discuss architecture resulting in a breathless cycle of formal and aesthetic transformations. This restless appearance of change conceals an increasing sense of inertia or perhaps even of confusion, in that an intellectual project has yet to accompany the overiding sense of technical virtuosity.”

More infos on Think Space 2012 site.

We’re glad to use this occasion to bring back into surface an old article from the 60′s, 70′s and 80′s architecture magazines archive of the Fabrizi family: here’s the winner of one of the three competitions: The Peak, by Zaha Hadid, a hard-edged suprematist vision for a leasure club in Hong Kong, (Domus 642/1983)

Click to enlarge:

David Gissen, teacher at CCA, author of Subnature and editor of HTC Experiments, proposed a project of radical reconstruction, a pragmatic statement “drawn from the idea of radical history, the history of politically radical social movements“.

From the descriptive text (read below)
“The term radical reconstruction draws from the idea of radical history — generally, the history of politically radical social movements. A radical reconstruction relates to this tradition but further suggests the reawakening of radical historical thought through acts of architectural or urban reconstruction.”

I’m personally doubtful about the possible outcome of such a project: in fact rather than suggesting the reawakening of radical historical thought, I guess it would end up facilitating the fetishization of radicals spontaneous manifestations.

The following texts are the description of the project and a Petition.

The Mound of Vendome
David Gissen

Following the column’s reconstruction in 1873, various groups have called for the Vendôme Column to be destroyed again. But instead of destroying this rebuilt monument once more, we ask that another reconstruction join the reconstructed column: We, the undersigned, ask that the Mound of Vendôme be rebuilt in the plaza to commemorate the historical and radical events of 1871. The mound is a symbol of revolution and the column’s destruction, but it is also a symbol of the Communard’s interest in urban care, preservation, and the future of their city. It should be built again.

Already blogged on Socks:
LANDSCAPE FUTURES. INSTRUMENTS, DEVICES AND ARCHITECTURAL INVENTIONS

Electric machines and light installations, mechanic sidewalks, ramps and escalators, metropolitan lines and hot air ballons were among the urban scale technological achievements showcased at the 1900 World Fair in Paris.

The excitement procured by the merveilles at the Exposition was so high that the concomitant Olympic Games came almost unnoticed by the public.

On an opposite (small) scale, the exposition also introduced the widely famous Matryoshka doll (Russian Nesting Doll).

There’s a lot of material available online, thanks to Things Magazine

Back to Socks from Rome and the lecture!

We remember, from our time as students at the architecture school, a typical lecture in “Descriptive Geometry”, on the perspective restitution of Velazquez’s “Las Meniñas“.  From the supposed, (historically established), height of a single stair’s step we were able to derive a whole plan and section with the proper positions of the characters and the real point of view of the scene. The science of representation was in a mutual dialogue with artistic historiography.

Lately a lot of collective effort has been focused on the reconstruction of the scenario of Hitchcock’s classic Rear Window, bringing to light the architecture behind the hidden secrets of a demanding plot.

Marialuisa Pacini was able to build a set model for a an adaptation of the drama in modern London.

Jeff Desom used modern video editing tools for dissecting the film and stitching back together. What he obtained was a single panoramic view of the entire backyard.

Here’s the video and some scene of his READ WINDOW Loop 2011 installation:

The “Wrong House, The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock” provides a plan and section of the Jeffries apartment complex:

Things Magazine, from which this post is inspired, informs us that this movie features “diegetic cinematography”. This is the case of movies whose denotative narrative material does not include only the narration itself , but also the fictional space and time dimension implied by the narrative. See Wikipedia.

Rhizome.org voice on “diegetic cinematography” features an analisys of the recent movie Chronicle and opens the speculation to uncharted territories, questioning the relationship between truth and representation, violence and entertainment : “Unlike Carrie, which was made for a generation that grew up watching the Vietnam War unfold in one hour nightly episodes,  Chronicle was made by, and for, the generation who was sitting in home room when the World Trade Center was attacked. And more than the content, the way Chronicle was filmed reflects psycho-social terror of that experience.”