Anarchitectural Experiments

Maciej Stasiowski

Description

The book investigates speculative filmic architectural projects and animations that go beyond representing buildings, touching upon issues concerning medium, act of representation, or conducting criticism on history, culture, society, or urban politics, along with the mediated character of contemporary spatial experience – interpreting it primarily through protocols of architectural imaging.

The book centres on the influence of simulation and cinematic design on visionary or speculative architecture.  It outlines the impact of film and animation in architectural representation through key projects. The opening analysis is useful in contextualizing speculative architectural projects, while the later chapters link the theory to the imagery. Stasiowski uses a diverse collection of interesting case studies that are easy to read and well-chosen to support his argument.

This is a well-researched work and comprehensive review of speculative architecture and various media that describe it. Stasiowski makes a thorough argument about the use of cinema and animation as a method of architectural visualization.

Stasiowki’s book sets itself apart from other work in the same area by in discussing speculative projects in relation to cinema. and specifically, the effect that modern technologies are having on the subject now and in its potential futures.

The borderline between material environment and spatialized imagery becomes progressively more blurred, while demand for visionary works that would make sense of this merging, has never been greater.

It will appeal primarily to architects and designers, filmmakers and academics. It may also be of interest to artists, set designers, and film production designers.

List of Figures

Introduction: Lebbeus Takes Us Outside

1. On Techniques of Architectural Representation

2. Architecture in Filmic Space

3. Leaving Buildings on Paper

4. Inscription Deconstructed by Means of Cinematography

5. Case Studies, Part One: ‘Analogue’ Projects 

6. Digitalia

7. Case Studies, Part Two: Speculating with Architectural Animation

Notes

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Filmography

Index

Sujets

• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinema
• Architecture
• ART
• Animation
• History of film
• Criticism
• Architectural theory

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 05 juin 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789385441
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Anarchitectural Experiments
Anarchitectural Experiments
When Unbuilt Designs Turn to Film
Maciej Stasiowski
First published in the UK in 2023 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2023 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2023 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copy editor: Newgen
Cover designer: Maciej Stasiowski
Cover images: 1. Detail from The Red Wall series depicting La Muralla Roja (Ricardo Bofill) © Sebastian Weiss, 2020. / 2. Detail from Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Veduta Dell’Interno Dell’Anfiteatro Flavio Detto Il Colosseo (H. 78), 1766. / 3. Detail from John Mallord William Turner’s Shrewsbury: The Old Welsh Bridge , 1794.
Production manager: Debora Nicosia
Typesetting: Newgen

Hardback ISBN 978-1-78938-542-7
ePDF ISBN 978-1-78938-543-4
ePub ISBN 978-1-78938-544-1

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This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
List of Figures
Introduction: Lebbeus Takes Us Outside
1. On Techniques of Architectural Representation
2. Architecture in Filmic Space
3. Leaving Buildings on Paper
4. Inscription Deconstructed by Means of Cinematography
5. Case Studies, Part One: ‘Analogue’ Projects
6. Digitalia
7. Case Studies, Part Two: Speculating with Architectural Animation
Notes
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Filmography
Index
Figures
I.1 Lebbeus Woods, Inhabiting the Quake , 1995.
I.2 Riet Eeckhout, Process Drawing , 2012.
I.3a-i Raoul Servais, Taxandria , 1994.
I.4 Len Wiseman, Total Recall , 2012.
I.5 NaJa & de Ostos, The Hanging Cemetery of Baghdad , elevation, 2007.
I.6 Soki So, Spacetime Hybridity (chronogram), 2012.
1.1 NaJa & de Ostos, The Hanging Cemetery of Baghdad , site plan, 2007.
1.2 Christopher Nolan, Inception , 2010.
1.3 Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, Wandering Turtle , 2015.
1.4 Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, Habitable Columbarium , 2015.
1.5 Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, A Glass Tower , 2015.
2.1 Terry Gilliam, Brazil , 1985.
2.2 Francis Lawrence, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 , 2015.
2.3 Andrew Niccol, Gattaca , 1997.
2.4–2.7 David Fincher, Panic Room , 2002.
3.1 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carceri Plate XIV , 1745.
3.2 Étienne-Louis Boullée, Cenotaph for Newton , section cut (day) , 1784.
3.3 Antonio Sant’Elia, La Città Nuova , 1914.
3.4 Hugh Ferriss, The Science Center from the Metropolis of To-morrow , 1929.
3.5 Bryan Cantley, TypoGraph No. 2 , 2011.
3.6 Tobias Klein, Contoured Embodiment [outside], 2008.
3.7 Tobias Klein, Contoured Embodiment [interior/cutaway], 2008.
4.1 François Schuiten, La Fièvre d’Urbicande , 1985.
5.1 Lebbeus Woods, Berlin Free Zone , 1990.
5.2 Lebbeus Woods, Underground Berlin , 1988.
5.3–5.5 Lebbeus Woods, Underground Berlin , 1990.
5.6–5.8 Lebbeus Woods, Underground Berlin , 1990.
5.9 Michael Webb, Façade of the Real Temple, Partly Unveiled , 1966–84.
5.10 Michael Webb, Section through Cone of Vision , 1966–95.
5.11–5.21 Michael Snow, Wavelength , 1967.
5.22 Superstudio, The Continuous Monument: New New York , 1969.
5.23–5.26 Superstudio, The Continuous Monument [storyboard], 1969.
5.27–5.32 Supersurface: An Alternative Model for Life on Earth , 1972.
5.33–5.38 Ceremony , 1973.
5.39 Gian Piero Frassinelli/Superstudio, Twelve Cautionary Tales for Christmas (12 Ideal Cities ), 1971.
6.1–6.6 Alex Roman, The Third & The Seventh , 2009.
6.7–6.10 Mamoru Oshii, Twilight Q: Mystery Article File 538 , 1987.
6.11–6.14 Mamoru Oshii, Ghost in the Shell , 1995.
6.15–6.18 Satoshi Kon, Paprika , 2006.
7.1–7.6 Chris Kelly, Rubix/Tardis , 2013.
7.7–7.8 Jonathan Gales, Speculative Landscape , 2010.
7.9–7.14 Jonathan Gales, Megalomania , 2011.
7.15–7.17 Paul Nicholls, Royal Re-formation , 2010.
7.18–7.26 Paul Nicholls, Golden Age: Somewhere , 2011.
7.27 Terry Gilliam, Zero Theorem , 2013.
Introduction Lebbeus Takes Us Outside

FIGURE I.1: Lebbeus Woods, Quake City . From San Francisco : Inhabiting the Quake , 1995. Graphite and pastel on paper. © Estate of Lebbeus Woods.

Drawings [...] can be exhibited, published, filmed, digitized, and therefore widely disseminated, when the architect is ready to place them in public domain. Until that time, the architect is freed by drawing’s inherent intimacy to explore the unfamiliar and the forbidden, to break the old rules and invent new ones.
( Woods 1997 : 30)

The dynamics of contemporary urban life have shown the inadequacy of existing languages in dealing with rapid and continuous change, except by producing self-contradictory – paradoxical – constructions. [...] However, by insisting on the manifestation of paradox in architecture, architecture’s language can be expanded to include the unpredictable arising from a dynamism that has become the essence of modern existence.
( Woods 1997 : 28)
As one surveys the cityscape, he is likely to find anything but modesty in regards to monumental, massive structures in plain sight. Urban theory urged us to look at metropolitan scenery and infrastructure as a spatial mapping of ideologies. And nothing exposes ideology as fervently as manifestos and their visual equivalents on paper. The speculative line of architectural drawings has always been a haven for criticism, reflecting on the built environment and reconsidering alternative lines of urban development. Lebbeus Woods opted for a more challenging, less acquiescent and thus predictable kind of building enterprise; for an architecture that would go ‘rogue’. In the course of his practice, interrupted by his sudden death in 2012, opportunities for embodying Woods’s theoretical projects were rather scarce. His proposals were mainly targeted at ruined urban districts, combat zones and post-traumatic sites – places that would benefit from architectural surgeries much more than from developers’ schemes. Oddly enough, the ‘failure’ of Woods’s blueprint for architecture-to-come cannot be attributed to usual or ‘natural causes’ (for this line of work) – costs and material constraints. ‘Guilty’ was the scope of his proposals, and their radical character echoed in a call for reconstruction without demolition. Woods preferred refurbishing, patching up and fixing damages inflicted in urban war zones and disaster areas. Tabula rasa politics erases visual remnants of conflict, while at the same time reinstating the mode of living that has been so violently ruptured. This is among the most straightforward ways to distort history. Woods designed with an architectural ‘year zero’ in mind, envisioning an anarchitecture one could set his expatriate compass to.
Just like many architects before, equally reluctant to silently support the established order of things, Lebbeus Woods became symbolically relegated to the drawing board and labelled a ‘theoretician’. Derogatory term in some circles, perhaps, yet in this context it denotes a profound heritage. Eventually, this activity is much more than an end in itself, as it is of use in crystallizing one’s vision, spreading ideas in academia and portraying present violence of architectural practice in dystopian rhetoric by means of graphical language (even though, for many contractors, Woods’s designs must have seemed like acts of graphic violence themselves). Architectural domain, since rediscovering Vitruvius in the fifteenth century, has increasingly relied on visual aids – plans, technical drawings, perspectival renderings, seen not only as records informing proper construction but also as means to communicate between the architect and the client (besides other parties involved). Especially architectural renderings, as they rely on pictorial arts to the furthest degree, have been regarded as instruments of seduction. Depicting the finished building in a joyous, semi-utopian environment, supposedly brought about by nothing else other than the architect’s in(ter)vention, always incorporates a glimpse into a retouched future that enchants the addressee. In comparison, speculative works of paper architecture seem like a negative, dystopian mirror which counters such enthusiasm. Lebbeus Woods’s designs for traumatic, post-disaster sites of Sarajevo, Havana or San Francisco are intriguing, yet ruthless. Instead of depicting accomplished futures, they recast contemporary anxieties, feelings of fracture and incompleteness into the form of makeshift spaces that challenge permanent, although ruined settings.
Even though these projects were destined to remain on paper, exhibitions, magazine publications and art book portfolios proved to be enough of a ‘vessel’ to pass on the notion of ‘freespaces’ and ‘radical reconstruction’ – Woods’s main concepts – spreading his philosophies along with the imagery accompanying them. Not illustrations but visual representations of spatial forms resulting from precise ideas on architecture’s shape and role. These days, iconicity and overall circulation of imagery is a phenomenon of a viral nature. Woods was not upset with the rejection of his architectural projects. The immunological system of architectural practice would fight off his propositions, but in order to do so, first, it would have to ingest, ‘consuming’ them visually. His imagery needed to circulate inside the discipline’s vast body, nourishing imaginations of students and his fellow artisans not only with prospects of what can be built but what is at all possi