Submitted by Berrin Chatzi Chousein

Post Icons (Signals) Ideological

Turkey Architecture News - Jul 21, 2014 - 14:26   10299 views

Post Icons (Signals) Ideological

"When things, signs and actions are freed from your idea, your concept, your idea, your courage, your reference, its origin and its end, enter an infinite self-reproduction. Things are still running when your idea has long disappeared. Continue to operate with a total disregard for their own content. And the paradox is that work much better. "

Jean Baudrillard  [1]

 

It is almost a century since the air was saturated with the gas fuel of ideology. Almost a hundred years have passed since everything from movies, to art, architecture and urbanism were less susceptible to atmospheric friction to explode in endless manifestos and multiple versions of the perennial "new beginning". But what happens when the ideological fuel fire resulting architecture is extinguished, and instead is only the smoke of nostalgia? What remains after the flames of the avant-garde idealists have disappeared and we were dead ideologies necrophiliacs icons? Why we are not able to see the striking similarities and contrasting disparities between the avatars of the hyper-ideological vanguards yesterday and icons poparchitecture today?

Post Icons (Signals) Ideological

Architecton (Lazar Khidekel, Moscow, 1927), Gazprom HQ (OMA, St. Petersburg, 2006)

1920 Vanguards

In the twenties, post-tensioned cables, structural steel trusses and concrete shaped muscle monuments of a vanguard potemquinesca . Utopia had form. First, it looked like a steel tower twisting spiral rushed skyward, then took the form of an inclined Lenin Tribune, became a Wolkenbügel whose overhangs are raised without fear over the people of the past and transformed into a flying city, floating weightlessly through the sky. Not only the vanguard announced a victory over the sun, but is committed to using the architecture to fill the void left in the sky. [2] [3]

However, just when all kinds of fantastic structures were about to take off into the stratosphere of dreams, the vanguard crashed an ideological wall. If dreams were in the forefront an improbable mission even when his idealistic longing was at its peak, the path to its realization became almost impossible with the economic crisis was coming, with the stifling ideological persecution and sudden preference the authorities for a neoclassical kitsch. [4]

Amidst the suffocating pessimism of the sociopolitical atmosphere of the postwar avant-garde mustered hopes on a plateau ideologue and develop a final plan on it (desperate). With the catastrophic effects of World War II, Utopia had to change shape.

If before the war, architecture was an instrument of tabula rasa and new cities ideals proposed replacing the old urban fabric with ideological monuments, the new generation of visionaries promised to leave untouched the old cities. The vanguard of the postwar disguised their ideal cities as colossal buildings that could be developed ad infinitum ; urbanism as endless ideological architecture.

Post Icons (Signals) Ideological

Wolkenbügel (El Lissitzky, Moscow, 1924), Museum of Art and Architecture (Steven Holl, Nanjing, 2002-09).

1960 Vanguards

The second-and final-coming of the ideological iconography in architecture of the 20th century happened fifty years ago. Seduced by a promising future by improved communication technologies, transport and construction, the new ideological icons were embodied in new forms.

Buildings grew to the size of cities as scaffolding clouds hovered serenely on the Champs-Élysées, mirror coated monuments roamed ceaselessly through the streets of Graz, megaliths shaped pixels, helical and fungi-atomic metabolically proliferated over Tokyo, geodesic domes that sequestered complete areas of Manhattan Island, and urban machines tirelessly walking on the surface of the oceans and rivers of the world.

However, the proposals were so suspicious of so far from reality, as uneconomic, as ideologically innocent vanguard, just found (outside of Japan) any possible application or devoted enough to believe his client ambitious project. The vanguard had to face a world traumatized by the scars inflicted by the war; a world too skeptical to embrace another utopia.

Post Icons (Signals) Ideological

Helix City (Kisho Kurokawa, Tokyo, 1961), Logistic City (JDS Architects, Shenzhen, 2006).

Palimpsest

The current generation of economically competent architects, advertising with amazing talents and "politically" incorrect has decided to resurrect the most subversive and energy icons of the last century ideological forms.

As an opportunistic exquisite corpse (started by one, finished on the other), contemporary architecture has unearthed under his philosophy "the stronger is the ideal, clearer icons" some of the most provocative proposals of the avant-garde and has been reused as simple and harmless propaganda paraphernalia. Icons recycled magazines to fill. Monuments transformed into iconographic ideological palimpsest.

Like any banal in a world driven by an insatiable diffusion apparatus mass product, facsimiles icons ideological vanguards have been served to a hungry paraphernalia audience that devours ignoring its potential, reinforcing the assertion Karl Marx that all the great events of history occur twice, first as tragedy and then as farce. [5] prosthetic Appendices ideologies that expired decades ago, these architectures captivate the flash of cameras and earn the praise of critics for its bold shapes, his iconic presence, and its ideological-historicist references.Exhaustively photographed, printed and discussed, these spacecraft have mutated from being a revolution icons to become the beautiful faces of the media; hardcoristas ideological icons transformed into soft porn.

Post (ales)

Provocations as post (ales) architecture, the following images have been structured to encourage critical understanding of the ideological icons to recognize the use of iconographic architecture as a deus ex machina and to identify recycling its most intense proposals by contemporary architecture.

By meticulously select two formally related buildings and insert together as portraits of an alternate reality, the images have the potential to expose two opposite cases in the evolution of the icons; first as a tour-de-force ideological and then as harmless architectural paraphernalia.

On the left side of the post (ales) icons of the avant-garde of the 20th century. Their product are erected zeitgeist , these buildings share an intense and turbulent history that saw them rise from the collective nostalgia of the naive optimism, for then be collapsed like sand castles in front of a tsunami by the inexorable forces of modernity. The images show hardcorista iconographic manifestations of ideology in the form of wolkenbügels constructivists architectons Metabolists objectives and non-helical.

On opposite side of the images, a series of contemporary architecture appear remarkably similar to their predecessors ideology. Just like body without organs, the absence of clear ideological manifestos reveals not only as contemporary architecture borrows its forms, but as through overexposure and overuse image, neutralizes the inherent potential of the methods of previous ideological icons. New icons have no hidden subversive messages not postulate unpublished manifestos, or represent some kind of underground avant-garde philosophy. The show's conceit about his own image, but become mere post (ales) architecture.

 


[1] Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans.James Benedict (London: Verso, 1993).

Jean Baudrillard, The Evil Transparancia. Essays on extreme phenomena Trad.Joaquin Jorda

[2] The Victory Over the Sun, Kruchenikh futuristic opera presented in the park one in December 1913, included scenery and costumes designed by Malevich. It was in this opera where Malevich Suprematism born asserts that, when first presented a white square and black square. For more on the victory over the sun see Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863-1922 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962).

[3] The heady optimism of the arts during the early years of the Bolshevik revolution is detailed by The Lisstisky in his explanation of the operation: "The Sun as the expression of the old world energy is torn down from the heavens by modern man, who by virtue of his technical superiority Creates his own energy source "El Lissitzky, Russia:. An Architecture for World Revolution, trans. Dluhosch Eric, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970), 138.

[4] Who can forget the project for the Palace of Soviets of Boris Iofan? After winning the competition with a much more abstract proposal, draft-Iofan allegedly under the influence of Joseph Stalin-was deformed in a neoclassical ziggurat of over 1400 feet.For further information about the competition and the project of the Palace of Soviets Deyan Sudjic see, The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful-and Their Architects-Shape the World, (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 77.

[5] "Hegel remarks somewhere That all great world-historic facts and personages Appear, so to speak, twice. I forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce "Karl Marx," The Eighteen Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte "(1852), The Karl Marx Library, Vol.. 1 ed. Saul K. Padover (McGraw Hill: New York, 1972), 245-246.Translation of the author.

 

This article originally published in PLOT

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