discussion

this is the jewish museum in berlin, it’s a beautiful building made by Daniel Libeskind.The museum is really impressive and some spaces were almost making me cry. You totally loose your orientation because the building has so many weird spaces and in a way it feels like your al the time not walking straight, especially in the garden. If you are going to berlin don’t miss this museum but be prepared because it totally knocked me of my feet.

In her lecture, Merel Mirage spoke about her experience of being surprisingly moved by poem that she heard in Chinese, a language that she did not understand. She went on to explore her response to the poem in a project that is still up on the web after more than a decade. (Think back to when the first visual browsers were being released and Yahoo was a start-up).

This inspired our seminar to speak about art that had elicited a surprisingly strong reaction from us. I was recently surprised by my own response to the Lucien Freud painting ‘Portrait of the Artist’s Mother.’ It made me cry. Surprisingly, I was not alone: two other women were crying with me. I had never seen a painting that made me cry before, even though I had seen paintings that awed me, surprised me or made me laugh.

This is the painting that made me cry:

In connection to the talk about the hotel project in the area Transvaal in The Hague I thought about the book The Tipping Point. The author, Malcolm Gladwell, talks about the way in which trends are spread and developed. He does not speak mainly of fashion trends but also trends within all sorts of areas. The way he sees it trends spread in the same way as an epidemic develops, and at one point something that was before just a small thing tips and becomes popular.

As an example he mentions a housing area. If one window within this is broken, and then left broken for a long period of time, this will signalise that this is ok. The risk that other windows in that area are broken are much higher than in an area without broken windows.
This is of course interesting and valid in the opposite way as well, like in the Hotel Transvaal project. Interesting to see when it reaches the tipping point.

For you who haven’t read the book I warmly recommend it.

some images of the work I found, I talked about these artist last week.

this project in some sense or another sort of reminded me of the animation lecture from a couple of weeks ago, allowing kids through art to have a voice where as otherwise they would not be capable of doing so. Many of you may know the film born into brothels, which is through the same organization.
Here is their website:
http://www.kids-with-cameras.org/home/

mission statement:
Kids with Cameras is a non-profit organization that teaches the art of photography to marginalized children in communities around the world. We use photography to capture the imaginations of children, to empower them, building confidence, self-esteem and hope. We share their vision and voices with the world through exhibitions, books, websites and film. By linking with local organizations, we work to strengthen the children’s education and general well-being, providing financial support through sales of their prints or by developing our own homes with a focus on leadership and the arts.

If you have not seen born into brothels, I highly recommend watching it.

http://www.bodyworlds.com/en/gunther_von_hagens/life_in_science.html

Pay a litle attention on the word “NEED”

At 13 of February we could hear with not hidden terror and fascination how our civilization grow up and if we want it or not it change our landscape for ever. Building of giant windturbines awakes a fear by its largeness, but cities also are climping up cuting our field of view (expecially of nature).But first of all those huge “windmill” are certain more friendly for surrounding, and do those can terrify by their growth more than a view of nuclear power station, a ticket bomb?

A few weeks ago we were talking about De Bijlmer and that it is based on city designs from Le Corbusier.

Last semester during Architectural history class, I had to give a presentation about city planning by Le Corbusier. This is the text I had written about it for the presentation:

In the late 19^th and the early 20^th century, the city was in a process of transformation. Industrialization brought a lot of workers into urban areas. At the same time, the automobile was introduced. It destroyed historic street patterns, causing a gridlock and a dangerous situation for pedestrians. When Le Corbusier went to Paris and the United States, the large complex city’s convinced him of the need for modern housing and a modern city. Partly, this was a response to what he called the chaos around him, the enormous amount of traffic and the squalor of the industrial workers’ housing.  In the United States he admired the luxury apartment houses, but he said: ‘My own thinking is directed towards the crowds in the subway who come home at night to bad housing. The millions of beings sacrificed to a life without hope, without rest, without sky, sun, greenery.  He also believed that the only way to block a worker revolution was to formulate a machine for living, a living area that would bring the worker’s home life in line with the discipline of the factory. To this end, he created the Dom-ino housing concept. It  should be a cheap, efficient way to house workers that would provide a modern ethos. He wanted houses to be mass-produces.

According to Le Corbusier, the historic city, then, was seen as something that had to be cleared away if the modern age was to fulfill its true duty - unlimited production of human needs and wants.  His first attempt at city planning came in the form of the Contemporary City Plan for Three Million People, followed by the Voisin Plan. In these early theories, he attempted to show how his plan would be beneficial to business sector of the city. The Contemporary City was based upon clearance of most of the Parisian landscape (a few historic monuments could be kept), and the birth of twenty four steel and glass skyscrapers that would house the business and artistic elite. The workers were placed at the edges of the city in modern apartment structures, based on the Domino, close to their workplace–the factory. Most of the land, around eighty-five percent, was left to natural landscapes and playgrounds. He assumed that the plan would garner support from capitalists interested in arresting the workers’ movements and instituting a factory-like discipline onto the whole of society. No one took him up on it. With the depressions of the late 1920s.  Artists like Ebenzer Howard and Frank Lloyd Wright had believed that once the environment had been designed for the people in a city, the sources of disorder in society would be minimized and individuals could be left to pursue their own initiatives. This believe rested on a faith in a ‘natural economic order’, a faith which Le Corbusier no longer shared. He confronted a world threatened by chaos and collapse. It seemed that only discipline could create the order he sought so ardently. Coordination must become conscious and total. Above all, society needed authority and a plan.In 1930 Le Corbusier had a new appreciation of workers’ rights. He joined the syndicalist movement. Syndicats were groups of workers in a particular trade that elected their “natural” leader to a regional trade council. From the regional council, the most able individual was chosen to represent the regional’s at the national council. The pyramid like conception reached an apex with the “natural” elites making scientific plans on how and what the factories should produce. For Corbusier, this meant that capitalism would have a plan and thus, would be ordered and harmonious. No longer would factories be able to overproduce and create depression.  This hierarchy of administration has replaced the state.  The Radiant City is based on this theory.  Every aspect of productive life is administrated from above according to one plan. This plan replaces the marketplace with total administration. Experts match society’s needs to its productive capacities. The citizen in Le Corbusier’s syndicalist society experiences both organization and freedom as part of his daily life.This plan for Le Corbusier was more than a collection of statistics and instructions; it was a social work of art. It expressed the full range of exchange and cooperation which is necessary to an advanced economy.  He said that the plan was necessary because the Machine Age requires conscious control.The plan had much in common with the Contemporary City, like clearance of the historic cityscape and rebuilding using modern methods of production. In the Radiant City, however, the pre-fabricated apartment houses, which he called Unités  were at the center of “urban” life. Like the Dom-Ino house, the Unité represents the application of mass-production techniques. The Unités  were available to everyone, not just the elite, based upon the size and needs of each particular family. In designing these apartments, Le Corbusier said that he ‘thought neither of rich nor of poor but of man.’ He believed that housing could be made to the ‘human scale’, right in its proportions for everyone. No one would want anything larger nor get anything smaller. Sunlight and recirculating air were provided as part of the design. The building would be placed upon pilotis, five meters off the ground, so that more land could be given over to nature.Inside the Unités were the vertical streets, the elevators, and the pedestrian interior streets that connected one building to another. Corridor streets were destroyed. Automobile traffic was to circulate on pilotis supported roadways above the earth. The entire ground was given as a “gift” to pedestrians. The business center was positioned to the north of the apartment houses and consisted of glass & steel skyscrapers.

Corbusier spends a great deal of the Radiant City theory elaborating on services available to the residents. Each apartment block had a catering section in the basement, which would prepare daily meals for every family and would complete each families’ laundry chores. The time saved would enable the individual to think, write, or utilize the play and sports grounds which covered much of the city’s land. Directly on top of the apartment houses were the roof top gardens and beaches. Children could be dropped off at the apartment houses ’ day care center and raised by scientifically trained professionals. The workday, so as to avoid the crisis of overproduction, was lowered to five hours a day. Transportation systems were also formulated to save the individual time. Because of its compact and separated nature, transportation in the Radiant City was to move quickly and efficiently. Corbusier called it the vertical garden city. The most basic services which the Unite provides are those which make possible a new concept of the family. Le Corbusier envisioned a society in which men and women would work full-time as equals. In the Unite, cooking, cleaning, and child raising are services provided by society. In the Radiant City the family no longer has an economic function to perform. It exists as an end itself. The Unite is thus high-rise architecture for a new civilization, and Le Corbusier was careful to emphasize that its design could only be truly realized after society had been revolutionized. He therefore never concerned himself with such problems as muggings or vandalism. In the Radiant City, crime and poverty no longer exist.     Arna

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCJVtAWzLic

for more video about his collection you will find them by input the key words “Hussein Chalayan”