Christopher Hawthorne re: 2012 Biennale

He wrote “feels limited, exclusive, stiff…political content is feather-light” and features work from too many of, the expected star-architects. Hawthorne also highlighted one significant failure, which was to explore contemporary implications of digital design and networked culture and the resultant “nascent postmodern revival“. Is this perhaps the description of a architecture of #New Aesthetics?…

“the way younger designers think about history, memory and intellectual recycling is poised to change architecture in some profound ways. For architects in their 20s and 30s, born into a digital age, architectural culture no longer spins in cycles of fashion and taste…they dip into architectural history, effortlessly pull out buildings, theories, images and texts and reuse or remake them in a carefree and pragmatic way. As the wall text accompanying the installation by FAT puts it, ‘FAT and their collaborators are relaxed about copying: the sources are out there to plunder.’…This approach to history and memory is very different from the one the postmodern pioneers Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Charles Moore and Aldo Rossi brought to architecture in the 1970s and ’80s…Chipperfield’s exhibition, though, never explores the implications of this important shift in much depth“…

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Sam Jacob of FAT on “London’s re-tarmacing”

Mr. Jacob’s writes about the pleasure and beauty to be found in all the new miles of rejevenated roadway and fresh laid tarmac.  In London as a result of the upcoming 2012, Olympics.

He writes “Maybe it is even possible that all of London’s roads will, for a moment at least, be new. And that sensation of newness, in London at least, is an exotic and alien sensation. London is a city whose surface is scoured with complicated psychogeography. It’s the world capital city of psychogeography, full of Sinclairs, Ackroyds and Selfs wandering its rutted paths and scribbling in the margins.”

Then continued with this line “Smooth tarmac is like the deepest of vinyls, the highest of fidelities, a way of experiencing the contours and vectors of the city with crystal clarity.” which seems to be deeply about the paratexts of modern sub/peri/feral urbanism…

via BDonline.co.uk (here)

Charles Holland on the port of Dover

RT @fatcharlesh First and Last, on port of#Dover http://bit.ly/hsRjHc #nationalised #industry#landscapes #logistical via @owenhatherley

I posted this already to twitter but wanted to highlight this passage in particular because I think it gets to the issues of scale. In that the human made infrastructures dwarf in scale and realism the natural “cliff side”

“The cliffs have a slightly un-real quality to them at ground level where they come into sharp contact with the port infrastructure. They look as if they’ve been hand-made from chicken wire and papier mache by a slightly incompetent giant. He keeps his modelling equipment in the caves.”