Fantasy and reality. Architectural detective work. Does the Kingsford Venue look familiar? This 'uniquely designed' concert hall in the Cornish theme park Flambards is actually the 'radical reinvention the accepted idea of a tent or a marquee', courtesy of one Zaha Hadid. ZH's structure (one, two) was the first of the gallery's series of 'mini-icon' commissions, and perhaps the most pavilion-like. The series has become steadily more diaphanous and permeable, culminating in Frank Gehry's deliberately obtuse ode to deconstruction, a building that both harks back to his own earlier work (think woody, exploded fragments, rather than rolling metallic waves) and acknowledges how the Serpentine commissions have strong parallels with the trajectory of contemporary architecture on its journey from shelter to spectacle. Along the way, the avant-garde has been co-opted into becoming an ally of commercial forces, a vessel for sponsorship and branding. More past pavilions, not including MVRDV's entertainingly daffy 'steel mountain'.

Modernism has always walked a fine line between avant-garde swiping and the thrilling reinvention of mass culture. Compare and contrast two recent reviews, 'Modernism and the 'lure of heresy'', versus 'Sufferin' satellites! We've built the future!'. On the one hand, it fits the modernist narrative to describe the emergence of a new cultural force that was dependent on 'the dissolution of a ... 'living relationship to the real life of the people'' in favour of the lure of the heretical (to quote the Peter Gay book reviewed at Sp!ked). But, as Peter Ackroyd's review in the Guardian notes sagely, 'High culture may have excoriated the money-grubbing middle class, but it needed 'conservative consumers'.'

On the other hand, it's also convenient to believe that modernist artists, writers, architects, etc., were infused by the spirit of the populist imagination, in thrall to the more outlandish vectors of the newly minted American pop culture, a rich stew of space age imagery and futuristic Empire building. The Dan Dare exhibition is a case in point: '[Frank Hampson's] imaginings were eagerly lapped up by some of the youngsters who would go on to create Britain's highly regarded school of hi-tech, space-age influenced architecture'.

*
Finally, Core77 rounds up the 'awful truth about la tour', trying to establish who believed exactly what in the curious case of the rendered proposal that never was, as well as nail the lid shut on the deluge of increasingly ludicrous concept renders that entered the public realm, largely as a result of design and image-led blogs. The shift to image-driven reportage has created entire careers, perhaps even genres, no doubt about it: 'I was completely, 100% convinced that there was no way in hell that wobbly table came out of what looked like a vat of lard fitted with a laser pointer. But why wouldn't I post it? What did I have to lose?' Thanks, Alissa Walker.

Demolition is one area of visual culture that hasn't been consumed by rendered imagery, yet. Mathieu Pernot's series Implosions takes the classic shot of Pruit Igoe (via High-rise Hell) by contextualising the demolition into the wider surroundings, the trees, roads and low-rise structures that are briefly engulfed by pulverised masonry before settling down to a dustier post-Utopian existence.

*
Other things. Infiltrating a pet psychic / 'more than one hundred years of film sizes', especially the '8.75mm film used in the seventies in The People's Republic of China for educational, propagandistic and other purposes' / photography by Jeannie Rusten. We especially like the Automobiles series / portraits by Thorsten Overgaard / On the Horizon, photography by Sze Tsung Leong at tmn / amazing bridge / Dulwich on View, local interviews and information.

Art by Dan Fern / Primitive Machine, a weblog / no words, a picture blog / Details, a French architecture weblog / Stashpocket, an architecture weblog / download and use British motorway fonts / English Buildings, 'meetings with remarkable buildings', a travel around the pleasingly prosaic vernacular of the English roadside structure.

Labels: architecture

posted by things at 09:39