socks-studio

As a companion to previous post, here’s more drawings of the same iconic project.

From the description of the project:

OMA received an honorable mention for Très Grande Bibliothèque, a competition to build a new national library in France. The program called for the creation of various smaller libraries contained in one building envelope; including libraries for moving images, recent acquisitions, reference, catalogues and scientific research. The immense amount of information to be stored within these spaces (books, films, digital databases) became the impetus for the overall concept design. The library is imagined as a solid block of information, a dense repository for the past, from which voids are carved to create public spaces – absence floating in memory.

Partner in charge:
Rem Koolhaas
Competition Team:
Art Zaaijer, Xaveer de Geyter, Georges Heintz, Heike Lohmann, Ron Steiner, Alex Wall, Christophe Cornubert, Ramon Klein, Yushi Uehara
Engineers:
Cecil Balmond, Mohsen Zikri of Arup

Sources:
Afasia and OMA.

“Bigness is no longer part of any urban tissue… Its subtext is fuck context.”
– Rem Koolhaas

The CCA in Montréal just opened a retrospective exhibition on the famous OMA entry for the 1989 French National Library competition. A cubic 100 meters tall building characterised by the distinction between book storage (solid) and public space (voids). “A building that marks the beginning of the ‘big’ period and the shift from urbanism to conceptual formalism that Rem Koolhaas would retroactively name in his infamous remark on context.”

The exhibition features the four original anonymous panels, hundreds of working drawings showing design process moving through different media, digital and physical models.

The following is the timelapse of the plaster model construction for Très Grande Bibliotheque.

Hipcescu, ‘The city of Thousand Suns’, is spoof urbanism.
Conceived by an architect, urban planner and arguably a despot, the city is the result of a well-balanced mix of Soviet propaganda and Dubai capitalism.

“On the sunny shores of the Caspian, a mere four hour flight away from Western Europe, the City of a Thousand Suns awaits you. Hipcescu, a thriving 21st century metropolis, home to the world’s highest building, the iconic Hipcescu Tower (850 m).

Please feel free to download our most recent print ad. You are hereby granted permission to use or duplicate it any way you deem appropriate. If you wish to publish it in a newspaper or magazine and pay for it yourself, you will be granted life-long Honorary Citizenship of Hipcescu.”

More infos on “hipcescu.com“, a site devoted to the cult of Hipcescu, its tower and the personality of its creator. (“Let us bear in mind V. Hipcescu’s words: “Before we build a city, we contemplate the notion of a city.” Thank you.”)

Via: Things Magazine

“Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz (from ‘A Tribute to Zdenko G. Fibich’)”, by American John Stump is a parody of a composition, meant to be impossible to play and including, in the score notations, absurd indications such as “release the penguins” and “Like a Dirigible” and “Gong duet.”.

And yet, there’s someone who actually played it. (From 3’50″)
Related:
John Stump Composer of Faeries Aire and Death Waltz
Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz – John Stump
absurd scores.

My Pinterest gallery of Absurd Musical Scores.

Here’s a page from the score and some other nonsense compositions by the same author:

“Beam Drop Inhotim” is the recreation of an original work that artist Chris Burden displayed at Art Park (New York) in 1985 and that was destroyed three years later.

For twelve hours a crane dropped 71 junkyard beams from an height of 45 meters onto a fresh cement pit. The random fall of the beams echoes abstract expressionism gestural acts as Jackson Pollocks’ paintings and is equally the result of both the control of the artist and the chance.

The violence inherent in the beam’s falling recalls past extreme works of the seminal artist, namely: “Shoot”, a 1971 performance in which he asked a friend to shoot him in the arm inside a gallery, or the “anti-architecture” work Samson (1985), (read “Art against architecture: Chris Burden 1985′s Samson“, on Socks), a sculpture meant to millimetrically destroy the gallery it was installed in, each time a visitor entered. In the case of “Beam Drop”, the beams are like the artist’s body falling and crashing against Earth.

From an online interview conducted by Tiffany Barber:

Chris Burden: For my next project, Beam Drop: Brazil, I’m recreating a piece I originally constructed in 1985. The piece is meant to be both a large abstract expressionist painting and a steel sculpture… constructed by filling in a 10-foot deep pit with loose dirt and wet concrete and dropping 100 vertically-raised steel I-beams into the pit. The process and end result are filmed.

Beam Drop is a significant work because the I-beam is the building block of corporate architecture. The capricious way in which the piece is enacted – the serious, rigid, precise process and using the material, steel, in a light-hearted way – is anti-architecture and anti-corporate architecture. Not many artists have used steel. Everyone is very careful because the material has so much potential for danger.

Read another interview on Flash Art.

The 1984/5 Beam Drop. Another iteration of the performance/sculpture took place in Antwerp in 2009.

Via: Installator tumblr