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As some of you who have been around here for a while will remember, some time ago (years, actually) my beloved Peter Reyner Banham made his entry into this blog by means of a cartoon that sprang from a suggestion by Kazys Varnelis, who was doing his annual re-reading of Banham’s ‘The Great Gizmo’ along with Alison and Peter Smithson’s ‘But today We Collect Ads’. That cartoon led to another (A home is not a Mouse), and then it became a series entitled “The Bubble Adventures of P. Reyner Banham”. But only in my mind. I sat down, took some notes, drew and colored the next cartoon in the series… and then my volatile attention flew somewhere else and I completely forgot it.
Finally, it has been put to much better use as part of MAS Studio’s last issue of MAS Context: OWNERSHIP, where editor Iker Gil and his team were so kind as to feature it on the cover. All the contents of MAS Context: OWNERSHIP can be read online on their just-revamped website here, including an essay by Denise Scott Brown. Make sure to check it if looking for a compelling read.
Cover of Mas Context: Ownership (I actually lifted the image from a post by our friends from Spanish Magazine METALOCUS, who voiced the news in their blog)
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MAS Context, a quarterly journal created by MAS Studio, addresses issues that affect the urban context. Each issue delivers a comprehensive view of a single topic through the active participation of people from different fields and different perspectives who, together, instigate the debate. MAS Context is a not for profit organization based in Chicago, Illinois. The concept of ownership, the exclusive rights and control over a property of any kind, has existed for centuries and in all cultures. Whether state, collective or personal, ownership is probably one of the most determining factors not only in defining our built environment but in the way we have shaped our society. But what if the way we live has changed? Can we redefine ownership to adapt it to the needs of the society? Can that redefinition provide new opportunities for our built environment? This issue will be dedicated to examining ownership in our current culture, ancient traditions, legal system and physical environment.
MAS Context: OWNERSHIP fatures contributions by Martin Adolfsson, William F. Baker, Kate Bingaman Burt, Eleanor Chapman, Santiago Cirugeda, Killian Doherty, Kirby Ferguson, Pedro Hernández, Jeanne Gang, Iker Gil, Network Architecture Lab, Quilian Riano, Denise Scott Brown, Richard F. Tomlinson II, XAM, and KLAUS.
MAS Contex is published by MAS Studio | Editor in Chief: Iker Gil | Editor: Paul Mougey | Contributing Editor: Andrew Clark | Art Director: Plural | Graphic Design/Layout: Iker Gil | Website: Plural
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Previous collaborations for CLOG: BIG here and here
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“Et in Arcadia Ego”
Poussin
“And it’s a question of how far we’re willing to go in order to let the ego shine, in order to let that beacon penetrate not only the local scene but the world.”
Taylor Hackford
For all its promise of unlimited connetivity, Apple´s design seems to leave almost everything out. Apple has built a style on impenetrability, providing us with sleek, polished technological gizmos that are not only, a product of design, but a symbol of designed obsolescence.
Apple is itself a brand and a symbol, a signifier of future and Buzz-Lightyear-ian progress towards infinity. However, its approach to design takes us back to a past, long gone vision of future utopia bred in hardcore modernism. When Apple´s New Wave was launched in 1984, cyberpunk had started to reshape the image of the future and future technology according to a postmodern sensibility. Star Wars, Alien and Blade Runner introduced an image of the future as a layered, additive and textured place, a dark but rich metropolitan –megalopolitan- reality whose productive (thanks, Chen&Young) dystopianism provided us with an inclusive approach to postmodernism, as opposed to the exclussiveness of academic PoMo, and a new way to conceptualise (a new eye to look through) our urban postmodern reality.It´s extraordinarily fitting that the man chosen to inaugurate the era of Apple Design in a commercial reminiscent of Owrell´s 1984 was precisely Ridley Scott, who touched in the lapse of two years on the two poles that, as Peter Lunenfeld notes, still rule contemporary culture thirty years after.
Apple´s present-future is not the system of constant retrofitting dictated by the permanence of every-thing that Syd Mead designed for Blade Runner, but the clean, plastic and semi-translucent reality of Alex Proyas´s I Robot, a reality of immutable and ephemeral objects designed to shine and die, as user-friendly as they remain impermeable to change (…the light that burns twice as bright, burns half as long). And in doing so, Apple leaps over postmodernity to recover the dream of a clean, antiseptic, white utopia dreamt in the age of pulp. Jobs´s dream of the future is that of William Cameron Menzies´s Things to come, of streamline design, of Norman Bel-Geddes´s Futurama, where Roman togas have been substituted for Mao collars and turtlenecks.
Looking like an alien mothership hanging gently in the middle of Arcadia, the new Cupertino campus resounds with echoes of Steve Jobs sitting in peaceful yoga position in his empty apartment in the 80s, and it really speaks of a dream of ascetic-aesthetic plenitude that goes back to modern utopianism. Foster´s design, bred in a sensibility nourished by Dan Dare, Werner Von Braun and the visionary 60s conjures an ultimate state of the Corbusian cult of the liner as a model for architectural assertion. The platonic exactitude of Cupertino´s rounded shell conjures the old ideal of ectopic utopianism: a technological eutopia of isolated perfection in an anthitetic relationship with natural beauty. Apple leaves behind the organic, anarchic ambiguity of postmodernity, substituting the visceral for the virtual; and somehow, this renewed dream of an (old) brave new world scares me a little bit.
But then, I´m a PC guy.
Image Captions: 1. Cupertino: Apple Campus 2. Foster and Parners, 2011. 2. Things to Come. William Cameron Menzies, 1936. 3. Heliopolis. Project for an Olympic Village in the Mountains of Tatras. Alex Mlynarcik, 1968. 4. Werner Von Braun et al.: Space Station. Across the Space Frontier, 1952. 5. Thalassa: Project for a Floating City. Paul Maymont, 1959.
Image credits: Heliopolis photographed by the artist. In RAGON, Michel:Histoire mondiale de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme modernes. T.3. Prospective et futurologie; 350. Thalassa: Photo by P. Joly/ Vera Cardot. In RAGON, Michel: Les Cités de l’Avenir. Paris: Editions Planète, 1968. Space station: Illustration by Chesley Bonstell. In KAPLAN, Joseph et al.: Across the Space Frontier. New York, Viking Press, 1952. Everytown: Frame from William Cameron Menzies´s Things to Come. London Film Productions/United Artists, 1936.
Luis Miguel Lus-Arana: “Return to Ectopia: Apple Design and Futurist Classicism”. Published in MAY, Kyle et al. (edited by): Clog: Apple nº 2. NY: February 2012, pp. 96-7
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CLOG: APPLE. On 7 June 2011, Steve Jobs presented Apple Campus 2 to the Cupertino City Council. Due to Apple’s high profile – not to mention the scale and iconic nature of Foster + Partners’s design – the online reaction to the “spaceship” was immediate and strong. While Apple has been building retail stores throughout the world for over a decade, discussion, even among architects, has typically focused on the company’s famed product design. With one of the largest American office projects in history underway in Cupertino, it’s time to talk about Apple and architecture.
Contributors: Michael Abrahamson, Paul Adamson, Gary Allen, Collin Anderson, Haik Avanian, Rachel Berger, Freek Bos, Gabrielle Brainard, Tom Brooksbank, Keith Burns, Marcus Carter, Haiko Cornelissen, Philippine d’Avout D’Auerstaedt, Erandi de Silva, Kevin Erickson, Matthew J. Giordano, Hanny Hindi, Julia van den Hout, Allyn Hughes, Axel Kilian, Klaus, Austin Kotting, Michael Kubo, Jimenez Lai, Nicholas Leahy, Christopher Lee, Frank Lesser, Michael Ludvik, Luis Miguel Lus-Arana, Kyle May, Adam Nathaniel Mayer, Nicholas McDermott, Mark McKenna, Samuel Medina, Louise A. Mozingo, Rob Nijsse, The Office of PlayLab, Inc., Glenn Phillips, Graffitilab, Nina Rappaport, Jacob Reidel, Erin M. Routson, Mika Savela, Chris Shelley, Noam Shoked, Mike Treff, Kazys Varnelis, Ronald Wayne, and Human Wu.
Clog: Apple edited by Kyle May, Julia Van den Hout, Jacob Reidel and Human Wu. Design by PlayLab, Inc. Find it here.
The New City Reader: The Weather Forecast Inception
January 7, 2011
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Cartoon for The New City Reader: Weather Section, a continuous 3-spread graphic that includes a large city expanse with magnified close-ups pertaining building materials/architectural objects and their relation to weather. The weather section has been guest-edited by Jeffrey Inaba/ C-LAB, and put together with the collaboration of Justin Fowler, Simon Battisti, Nathalie Janson, Amanda Shi, Lauren Turner, Jeffrey Yip, Neeraj Bhatia, Charles Holland, Rory Hyde, Wes Jones, Sean Lally, Andy Lantz, Jürgen Mayer H., Markus, Miessen, Nicholas de Monchaux (http://nicholas.demonchaux.com/), Philippe Rahm, and Dong-Ping Wong.
You can read it by clicking on the images below:
Or download the full pdf at C-Lab’s Weather Patterns.
Also, inside this issue you’ll find the Obituaries Section, guest edited by MOS (yes, these guys).
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The New City Reader: A Newspaper of Public Space is a project curated by Kazys Varnelis and Joseph Grima. The New City Reader is a performance-based editorial residency designed as a part of the Last Newspaper, an exhibit running at New York’s New Museum from 6 October 2010‒9 January 2011. It consists of one edition, published over the course of the project, with a new section produced weekly by alternating guest editorial teams within the museum’s gallery space. These sections are available free every Friday at the New Museum and will also be posted in public throughout the city for collective reading. The permanent staff and list of guest editorial teams can be found in Varnelis.net.
The New City Reader: (Un)Real Estate
November 23, 2010
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Cartoon for The New City Reader issue VII: Real State, with contributions by Peter Tolkin, Mabel O. Wilson, Carmen Argote, Chloë Bass, Brigette Borders, John Cantwell, Catherine Ingraham (not this topic, this time), Marisa Jahn/CUP, Olalekan Jeyifous, Alexandra Lange, Elizabeth Lasater, Zoe Malliaros, Mitch McEwen, Minna Ninova, Daniel Payne, Alan Rapp, Cassim Shepard and Matthew Vaz.
Available since November 19 at the New Museum. A peek at the cover and contents here.
Klaus in eVolo Magazine 03: Cities of Tomorrow
November 1, 2010
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The above is a (slight variation on a) cartoon just published in the Fall/Winter issue of New York- based, Carlo Aiello-directed eVolo Magazine. Other than the cartoon itself, the magazine focuses, under the title “Cities of Tomorrow”, on recent works by Arup Biomimetics, AS/D, BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group, LAVA – Laboratory for Visionary Architecture, MAD Architects, Matter Management, MONAD Studio, NH Architecture, Rojkind Arquitectos, SOFTlab, Ted Givens, Terreform One, Trahan Architects, UNStudio, Vincent Callebaut, Will Alsop or WOHA Studio among others. Of course, all these are just an excuse to publish the cartoon (magazines usually require a certain minimum amount of pages to be considered as such), but the editors disguised it so well that it’s impossible to notice. You may want to check the complete list of featured works here.
EVolo also launched their 2011 Skyscraper Competition. Registration and submission will be open till January 11, 2011.
A preview, with the article “Lincoln Road: Envisioning Infrastructure Sensuality” on MONAD Studio’s Lincoln Road Capacitors Project written by Eric Goldemberg can be found here.
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UPDATE: Below you can find the cartoon in its original context as a companion to the article API – AR 2050, by John Hill, creator of A Weekly Dose of Architecture and its sister website A Daily Dose of Architecture. You can read it by clicking on the images or download them in .pdf form here, by courtesy of Carlo Aiello and John.
Click to Read
Click to Read
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