All posts tagged: Architecture

Hélène Binet’s Chinese Landscapes

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Architectural photographer Hélène Binet’s new book capturing her photographs of Suzhou Gardens of China, a UNESCO World Heritage Site has portrayed something which very few photographs can convey- the transcendental meditative qualities of these gardens. While paging through the photographic essay, I found myself immersed in the tranquil nature of the gardens around the stucco walls, telling stories of yesteryears. It reminded me of the importance of shadow. With modern aesthetic obsession with everything neat and clean and white, we have lost the charm of growing old with ageing. The walls of Suzhou Garden are reminiscent of graceful ageing and that is what make them so timeless. The ephemeral quality of photographs have a dream like imagery which take the viewers beyond what is seen. It is upto us to dream, imagine and dwell in what Gaston Bachelard has called revery.

Cafés and Country Houses: Vincent van Gogh’s Enduring Appeal

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There are things, some of them passing strange, what happens when one confronts a work of art: (i)unfolding of the heart; (ii) its expansion; (iii) its agitation; and, finally, (iv) vibration.    — from a reading of Kavyartha (Theory of Poetry) Introdution: Vincent van Gogh was a complete and utter failure in everything that seems important to his contemporaries. He was unable to start a family, earn his own living, or even keep his friends.[1] Yet in his paintings, he was able to establish his own concept of order against the chaos that apparently surrounded him. His art was an attempt to come to terms with a world in which he was endlessly ridiculed and laughed at. In the face of harsh criticism and bare recognition, his aim was not to escape the real world or suffer by renouncing it, but instead to make it tangible in an inclusive sense. In this way, his art enabled him to accept the once so hostile world as his own. His artistic talents were only recognized after his death. …

250 things that an Architect should know

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Michael Sorkin, the noted architectural critic and educator who passed away last month in covid-19 wrote about 250 things that an architect should know in his book What Goes Up . I have to admit that I myself don’t know probably 50 percent of items listed. but it’s fun to go through this list once in a while and assess our knowledge and position in this regard. Hold your breath. Here are the 250 things: 1.The feel of cool marble under bare feet.2.How to live in a small room with five strangers for six months.3.With the same strangers in a lifeboat for one week.4.The modulus of rupture.5.The distance a shout carries in the city.6.The distance of a whisper.7.Everything possible about Hatshepsut’s temple (try not to see it as “modernist” avant la lettre).8.The number of people with rent subsidies in New York City.9.In your town (include the rich).10.The flowering season for azaleas.11.The insulating properties of glass.12.The history of its production and use.13.And of its meaning.14.How to lay bricks.15.What Victor Hugo really meant by “this will kill …

Architecture of Memory: On the Relevance of Memory in Architecture

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The link between Architecture and Memory is quite ancient. Numerous accounts have been written on how architecture was used as a memory tool. We learn from stories of the Greek poet Simonides, who identified from his memory every visitor in a banquet associating them with architectural setting. This art of memory often called “memory palace” was transmitted from Greeks to Romans and then into European tradition of storytelling. It was common to rehearse speech associating it with the landscape, the porch, the steps, the bedroom or balcony. Hypneretomachia Poliphili, a fifteenth-century Italian text shows Poliphilo in a dark forest, describing ancient marvels “deserving of a place in the theatre of memory” who encounters ruins of classical buildings in search for his beloved Polia in his dream. After the invention of the printing press, with books readily available, memorization techniques were less in demand. Later, memories were distrusted and frowned upon as an unreliable source. Frances Yates claims in Art of Memory that we, moderns, have no memory at all. Giordano Bruno, a sixteenth-century Italian polymath, …

Office US Atlas

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OfficeUS, the U.S. Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, was conceived as a working architecture office that explored the ways in which U.S. architectural practice has influenced the discipline around the world over the past 100 years. OfficeUS Atlas is a new book that compiles and interprets the research assembled in the exhibition’s OfficeUS Repository, an archive of nearly 1,000 projects produced by U.S. offices abroad between 1914-2014. The publication is the second in the four-volume OfficeUS book series, following Office US Agenda,  published last year. A massive, 1,232-page compendium, Atlas is structured around a highly organized mix of firm profiles, project data, press records, and infographics that detail the transformations of the U.S. architectural office and its international impact over the past century. At the U.S. Pavilion, the Repository was presented as a system of 1,000 binders that lined the walls of the installation. Rather than preserve this material as an unchanging collection of data, the editors wanted Atlas to bring it to life and expand on the goals of the exhibition—to present an untold …

Modernism Rediscovered: Julius Shulman

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TASCHEN’s Modernism Rediscovered brought to light for the first time some 300 forgotten architectural masterpieces, drawn from photographer Julius Shulman’s personal archives. Paying tribute to houses and buildings that had slipped from public view, Shulman’s stunning photographs uncovered a rarely seen side of California Modernism. This extensive volume brings hundreds more architectural gems into the spotlight. The photographs, most of which are published here for the first time in a book, depict buildings by Albert Frey, Louis Kahn, John Lautner, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Richard Neutra, and more, as well as the work of many lesser known architects. Not just restricted to the West Coast this time, the images were taken all across the United States as well as in Mexico, Israel, and Hong Kong. Widely considered the greatest architectural photographer of our time, Julius Shulman has once again opened his archives so that we may rediscover the world’s hidden Modernist treasures. The buildings burned in our memories, which to us represent the spirit of the fifties and sixties architectural design, were …