Mad Girl's Love Song
"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
I should have loved a thunderbird instead;At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
I should have loved a thunderbird instead;At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"
MoMA
'ONE LEG COCKED HER ARSE SWAYING OUT LEFT SO THE SKIN FOLDS WHERE HER RIBS MEET HER HIP FACE SOAKED IN SHADOW HALF INDIVISIBLE FROM HAIR LIGHTLY SWAYING FROM LEFT TO RIGHT. SHADOW SHIFTING LIGHT COMING DOWN ONTO THE CROWN OF HER HEAD, AND FOREHEAD. HAIR FALLING DOWN OVER HER SHOULDER AS IF SPILLED. FOREHEAD. SO THAT HER EYE IS COVERED. THE OTHER EYE JUST BYSECTED, JUST BLINKING, FLASHING WHITE WET EYE, SMEARED SHADOWS SHINING UNDERNEATH, FRINGED DARK, SKIN AT THE LEFT EYES EDGE. SHATTERING INTO A ZILLION CREASES TO MAKE TINY BLACK LINES, RESTORED FOR AN INSTANT HER EYES FLASH CLOSED, LIDS PALEST VEIN BLUE, SO THIN, LIPS JUST TOUCHING SEPARATED BY A PUCE SEAM, NOT SMILING, BUT ALMOST, KNECK, THIN, MAUVE, BONY, CHEST LIFTING AND FALLING AS THE AIR PASSES THROUGH IT. FROM HEAD TO TOE SHE'S HALF CLOAKED IN SHADOW, SO IT'S HARD TO DIVIDE HER FROM THE SHADOW BEHIND, BLUE, GRAY, BROWN, ALL COLOURS ROLLED INTO ONE. BRIGHT COLOURLESS HIGHLIGHT STRIKES HER OTHER SIDE, SILVER ON HER CHEST AND STOMACH. LIGHT CRACKING BETWEEN HER LEGS, WIDENING TO A TRIANGLE, ENDING AT THE FLOOR. FEET APART SUCKED TO THE FLOOR. TOES TURNING OUT JUST SLIGHTLY. SHADOW ARCHING UP THE INSTEP. VEIN SNAKING UP O TOP OF THE FOOT BUSTING THROUGH THE SKIN, DISAPPEARING THEN APPEARING AGAIN AT THE BONY ANKLE, CALF CURLING HAIR STRAGLING OUT ONTO HER SMOKE GRAY THIGH. PINK SKIN BEHIND, DARK PURPLE, RED, BROWN, WHATEVER, SHADOW RUNNING DOWN HER INNER THIGH, TAPERING AS IT GETS TO HER KNEE, THEN BLOOMING OUT ONTO HER CALF, AND RUDDY ANKLE. UNTIL IT MERGES WITH THE POOL OF BLACK ON THE FLOOR. SHE'S LEANING BACK ONTO THE HEEL OF HER FOOT. SO THAT THE WEIGHT RUNS ALONG HER LEG, AND UP HER SPINE, LEAVING THE LEFT SIDE OF HER BODY TO HANG LOOSE. ARM DANGLING SLACK AT HER SIDE; THE AIR DARK BETWEEN HER HAND AND HER THIGH. FINGERS SO BONY AND RUDDY COMPARED TO THE RUDDY WHITE THIGH. HER HIP, FINGERS SPLAYED ON THE WHITE FLESH. EVERYTHING, EVEN THE SHADOW BEHIND BREATHING WITH HER AS SHE STRETCHES AND CONTRACTS STOMACH RISING AND FALLING UNEVENLY, ALMOST INVISIBLY WITH EVERY LITTLE BREATH.'
space is process
olafur eliasson is a designer and artist who is concerned with space. how we measure space, react to space and interact with it. what makes a space hospitable, comfortable, intriuing, hostile or undesirable? does the way people behave in a space make a difference?
project in the tate modern, london. a mirror sphere illuminated like the sun hangs from the ceiling and fog is distributed evenly across the space. the fog makes the space visibe whilst the mirror shows us how we react to the space and our impact on it.
in new york a temporary waterfall was installed under the brooklyn bridge to 'measure' space. flowing water has a fairly consistent speed which can be understood differently at different distances. in this way we can perceive how far away the waterfall is and grasp some kind of notion of the distance between you and the water or the distance between brooklyn and manhattan.
advertisements for architecture
in the 1960s, a small oppositional element in architecture forged its own counterculture by turning its energies away from building and towards writing. born of a desire to foreground the intellectual dimension of toward writing soon engaged architecture with broader questions of pop culture, mass media, advertising and emerging technologies.
architecture cannot be fully understood through two-dimensional representation. until experienced, architecture only exists within our imagination, from pictures and drawings. a person's desire to experience architecture comes from the idea displayed in a photograph or drawing, which advertises the building.
can words and images that do not relate to the building sell architecture in the same way?
tschumi explores the language of advertisements to discover if they can create the desire to see or to be inside a building. with reference to the strongest of human emotions, such as desire and fear tschumi provokes and intrigues as a method to explore the boundaries of architecture in the human psyche.
'it is not the clash between fragments of architecture that counts, but the invisible movement between them. desire.'
'the value of all things lies in their purpose
in the germinating seed
the fundamental principle is
from the inside out
everything in life is in essence biological
the biology of the plan or section
its as necessary or as obvious as that
of a creature of nature.
the introduction of the word biology
illuminates all researches in the
field of building.
living, working,
cultivating body and mind,
moving from place to place, are
parallel processes to those of the blood,
nervous and respiratory systems.'
corbusier 1960
saint peter's seminary cardross, 2011
now derelict, saint peter's seminary has become an icon of scottish architecture. the building was completed in 1966 by architects gillespie, kidd and coia. the building served as a seminary for twenty years and then a drug rehabilitation unit after that.
the destructors
"They worked with the seriousness of creators and destruction after all is a form of creation. A kind of imagination had seen this house as it had now become.”
mediator project
this is a snippet from the final video for the mediator group project in first year. i have been trying to get a hold of the final piece which had quite a successful outcome.
home is where the heart is
lilybank terrace, glasgow
this building was my primary school. i grew up here.
this was the first building i learned about. it comprised of 4 victorian styled apartments - 3 storeys high. corridors were opened between each 'house' to make the building a whole and function as a school.
the windows to the front facade face west to enjoy the evening sunset. bedrooms were orientated east to catch the sunrise.
each house hosted an entertainment room for guests on the first floor, big enough to play music and serve dinner.
maids worked in the basement, where the kitchens could be found, and slept in the attic.
there was a special billiards room in the first house and each house still possessed ivory fireplaces and original, ornate ceiling sculptures.
the building was a beautiful, affluent victorian residence and was later to be used as a school for girls with due respect and pride for its history.
the school closed in 2005 and was set on fire after several months of lying empty. the original sandstone facade remains and is now being renovated and turned back into apartment blocks.
these are the architects drawings for the new 3 bedroom apartments.
minimum
the minimum could be defined as the perfection that an artefact achieves when it is not possible to improve by subtraction. this is the quality that an object has when every component every detail and every junction has been reduced or condensed to the essentials
striving to achieve the highest level of disappointment because paradoxically failure is equal to success.
'there is as much of a romance of failure as there is success'
'try to fail better the next time' samuel beckett
during a trip to london this january we went to the aa to get a feel for the place. luckily for us there was a lecture running that we managed to attend. mark wigley and brett steele discussed the architecture of failure. issues such as how to define failure were raised and the question of measuring success.
the failure of architecture: in its styles, in its movements, in its projects, in its personality, as an engine to try and draw us forward to the next level and try to solve the problems of a previous generation. all architects fail in nearly every project they undertake in a sense that they rarely realise the form to which they are drawn
erwin wurm celebrates the failure of modern architecture, a failed lifestyle.
architectural competitions are machines for failure. one entry is the winner - the rest in effect losers. unrealised projects: something that architects have to accept repeatedly in this discipline, so how do we learn from it and use it as a mechanism to excel?
steele and wigley look at failure as a topic in itself to be taught. the two founded the institute for failure. how best to achieve failure is taught in the curriculum, students are given the option to enroll for either three hours or three years. the expectation being that three years is what some people need to fail spectacularly whilst others can do it quite quickly.
failure manifesto:
1. where others teach success, the institute of failure (ioff) will teach not only the benefits of but the actual ability to fail.
2. where other schools beat their competitors by being a step ahead, the next fashion, the ioff will always be a step behind.
3. where other schools suceed in attracting the best and the brightest, the most ambitious, the ioff will actively seek out the meekest, the laziest, the least capable.
4. techniques of failure are as difficult to teach as are the principles of success. our curriculum is strong - but our alumini aren't.
5. the coming digital age offers architects entire new worlds of architectural failure but failure has a history which the ioff tries to avoid as much as the future.
the school was a failure but is to be relaunched this summer.
one of the ideas put forward to celebrate failure was to launch a counter version of the pritzker prize. the problem being that the architects nominated for the pritzker prize were the same ones suggested for the top failures. these architects manage to fail so well, producing uninteresting work when given the most interesting opportunities. through their success they are given many opportunities to excel and yet take little advantage of them. therefore success and failure in architecture are inseparable. to master architecture is to master failure.
the conclusion = i still don't know what good architecture is. so i am failing but therefore succeeding?
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