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Architects (and artists) dressed as buildings.

August 7, 2010 by Fosco Lucarelli Leave a Comment

As an ideal complement to the Dreamlands exhibition on Centre Pompidou, which we strongly suggest you to visit today, (since tomorrow will be the closing day), here you can see a video showing:

“Architects of important landmarks dressed as their designed buildings at Beaux- Arts Ball. They include, left to right, Leonard Schultze as the Waldorf-Astoria, William Van Alen as the Chrysler Building, Ely Jacques Khan as the Squibb Building, Ralph Walker as the Wall Street Building, Arthur J.Arwine as a low pressure heating boiler, A. Stewart as the Fuller Building and Joseph Freelander as the Museum of the City of New York. They all wore helmet like constructions of the building they had designed. 23 January 1931.”

Rem Koolhaas wrote extensively on the subject in his 1978 milestone essay Delirious New York, A retroactive manifesto for Manhattan.

In 2006 the British artist Lali Chetwynd reimagined the Beaux Arts Ball as a skyscraper cocktail party in her performance piece, “Delirious!“, staged under the giant inflatable canopy of the temporary Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, designed by (guess who?) Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond.

In the same year Lali Chetwynd changed her name to Spartacus. Frieze had an interesting report on the artist’s work and change of identity.

Read more:
Delirious DC
A new age of Architecture ushered in financial gloom
Retropolis: Architects
From Archiworld.tv and Critical Past.

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SOCKS is a project by Fosco Lucarelli and Mariabruna Fabrizi of MICROCITIES, Architecture Cityscape, Landscape.
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