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Elias Zenghelis: The Aesthetics of the Present, 1988

November 5, 2011 by Fosco Lucarelli Leave a Comment

A beautiful article signed Zenghelis on the 1988 Architectural Design monograph “Deconstruction in Architecture” (AD profile #72, published as part of AD Vol. 58 3/4-1988), that I just happened to find in a remainder.
(Just note that Zenghelis and Oma parted company just a year before this publication)

The article features drawings and model photos of Berlin’s “Checkpoint Charlie apartments” project by OMA, which just started construction in 1987. Finished in 1990. See here on OMA site.

More in general, based on the first International Symposium on Deconstruction organized by Academy and the Tate Gallery in London, this landmark AD profile takes a critical look at deconstruction, featuring an animated interview of witty Peter Eisenman by Charles Jencks, plus articles on Derrida’s philosophy, Russian avant-garde, works by Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelb(l)au, la Villette by Tschumi, Site / James Wines, Emilio Ambasz and OMA. We’ll come back with more scans in the future.

“Claiming to be connoisseurs of an apocryphal humanism, we search for solutions in styles to problems that need ideas. The proposals we offer, whether in the guise of “Post-Modernism,” “New Classicism” or “New Modernism” are nothing but style revivals drawn from models that become simultaneously devalued and undecipherable. By ignoring the reality of the world out there (the real context), these proposals miss the point of architecture altogether; they do nothing to promote the betterment of this reality. Instead of ideas that relate to its life, the public receives a lot of dogma for which it has little use, but do we offer these proposals to the public or to ourselves? The community of architects has become a self-congratulatory fan club, involved in ritual rallies, inventing its own imaginary antagonisms, prides, jealousies, and insecurities: like a bourgeois caucus isolated within the limited horizons of a suburban enclave where the urban landscape is out of sight and the action out of mind. A caucus without paradigm”

Download a PDF of this article from hi-res scans.

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