FOA kit
não li, não quero ler (estou muito ocupado a ouvir saxofonistas...) mas não (me) custa nada acreditar na opinião (gratuita!) da (!?) kely
a sort of do-it-yourself FOA kit
yuk, how wet can you get?
a sort of do-it-yourself FOA kit
yuk, how wet can you get?
posted by AM at 7:30 da tarde
6 Comments:
Farshid Moussavi’s new book focuses on form
05 March 2010
By Tony McIntyre
FOA partner Moussavi has thoroughly explored in The Function of Form how ‘affects’ can create more inclusive architectural forms
The Function of Form
By Farshid Moussavi
Actar, 384pp, PB £29.95
3/5 stars
Farshid Moussavi, partner in Foreign Office Architects, starts the introductory essay in this book with a denial of Louis Sullivan’s aphorism form follows function, and then asks: if not function, what does form follow?
As a founding partner of Foreign Office Architects, creators of some of the most why-didn’t-I-think-of-that forms in recent history, she should be in a pretty good position to answer that question, and sets out to do so here.
The Function of Form is the result of a course she has been running at Harvard over the past few years, and following on from her introductory essay is a bulky catalogue of structural typologies, explored and compiled largely, it would seem, by her students.
Her main concern is that all past architectures have been formally unresponsive to pluralist inputs, and she runs quickly through the history of architectural theory to make her point. Like all good theorists she has a political mission, in her case towards “inclusiveness”. Architects must “move design beyond the construction of a static identity and the representation of a single critical position” by creating “a kind of political physiology… forms that allow people with differing views and sensibilities to develop an affective relationship with their environment.”
Although she discusses Durand and Ledoux — among many others — she omits any mention of Quatremère de Quincy, a far deeper thinker and one whose ideas of marrying the universal and the particular are not so very different from her own.
As that word “affective” might suggest, her philosophical guide is Gilles Deleuze — nothing wrong with that — but it has left her text groaning beneath the weight of academic verbiage. For Moussavi, architectural forms have characteristic “affects” — which surely for our use could be translated as properties — that exist objectively within them and therefore create universally valid impressions on their users/viewers. This is a handy way to get universal values into a system that has subsequently to cater for all those people with their “differing views and sensibilities”.
Following on from the essay is the bulky catalogue, some 400 pages illustrating structural systems, classified as Grids and Frames, Vaults, Domes, Folded Plates, Shells, Tensile Membranes and Pneumatic Membranes. These are further subdivided and each type is given a two-page spread presentation. Most are purely theoretical types, some are examples of actual buildings — Buckminster Fuller’s 1967 Expo Pavilion, for example, illustrating the Curved/Double Layer Grid. The idea is that these systems provide the “affective” bedrock of built form, and that “given the increasingly pluralistic nature of society,” they can be tweaked, deformed, modified locally and so on, according to programmatic requirements, thus “providing society [sic] with the means to conduct an autocritique”.
Each example is laid out with the left-hand page listing “affects” and showing a shaded perspective of a random section of the system. The drawings are depressingly computer, and the “affects” far from revelatory in appearance (in the Expo example they are: universality, enclosure, repetition, lightness). To the right are wireframe axos and plans, with useful information such as “the pyramidal cells are regularly repeated to produce a spherical form”. It makes for an interesting — if not visually very stimulating — catalogue, in a tradition of such volumes, though something tells me the dull visuals are intentional. They are what the students of architecture will see on their screens when they input these “base systems” to their cad programs. It’s a sort of do-it-yourself FOA kit.
While I have the greatest admiration for the work of that practice, the depressing outlook must be that far from remaining a unique aberration, the bizarre and freakish Shuttleworth style — for which this volume provides a cookbook — may soon become the norm.
AM:)
E se a kely é só uma galinha ciumenta :)))))
uma galinha escolhe o risco :) e antes ciumenta que sem cabeça :)
aposto numa galinha ornamentada :)
já encomendei LOL
farsolas intelectu-ais!? :)
ornamentada, só a cozinha :) do Barthes, o crítico :)
concorda, "em" Kahn :) que a alheta é o princípio do ornamento? :)
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