Manuelle Gautrand, Origami Building, Paris, France, 2011 (via subtilitas)
About
chronicling a labyrinth of architectural + personal contemplation based in atlanta
Meta
Following
Accessories
Yorgos Loizos + Marie Vic, Twofold School, Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture, Paris, France, 2012
Christo and Jean-Claude, Project for a Wrapped Public Building, Paris, France, 1961 (via archiveofaffinities)
Rem Koolhaas / OMA, Models of the Très Grande Bibliothèque, Paris, France, 1989
“Dear Diary, Do we want to win this competition or not?”
Georges Heintz + Rem Koolhaas, First Formal Drawing for Très Grande Bibliothèque, Paris, France, 1989
“Astonishingly absurd, astonishingly beautiful. Beyond all exploitation, there is also altruism at work: OMA - a machine to fabricate fantasy - is structured for others to have the eurekas.”
Rem Koolhaas, Sketch for ZKM / Très Grande Bibliothèque, Paris, France, 1989
“An old sketch for ZKM, suddenly pregnant.”
Hana Nemeckova + Rem Koolhaas, Très Grande Bibliothèque, Paris, France, 1989
"Imagine a building consisting of regular and irregular spaces, where the most important parts of the building consist of an absence of building"
Rem Koolhaas / OMA, Section of the Proposal for the Bibliotheque de France, Paris, 1989 (via joostmeuwissen)
André Lurçat, Maison a Paris, France, 1926 (via archiveofaffinities)
Bernhard Leitner, Le Cylindre Sonore, Paris, France, 1987
Walter Benjamin, Passagenwerk / Arcades Project, 1927-40
“The Passagenwerk or Arcades Project was an unfinished lifelong project of philosopher Walter Benjamin, an enormous collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the 19th century, especially concerned with the iron-and-glass covered “arcades” (Passages couverts de Paris). Benjamin’s Project, which many scholars believe might have become one of the great texts of 20th-century cultural criticism, was never completed due to his death under uncertain circumstances on the French-Spanish border in 1940. Written between 1927 and 1940, the Arcades Project has been posthumously edited and published in many languages as a collection of unfinished reflections. These arcades began to be constructed around the beginning of the nineteenth century and were sometimes destroyed as a result of Baron Haussmann’s renovation of Paris during the Second French Empire. Benjamin linked them to the city’s distinctive street life and saw them as providing one of the habitats of the Flâneur (i.e., strolling in a locale to experience it).”
Rem Koolhaas / OMA, Jussieu / Two Libraries, Paris, France, 1992
“In the award winning scheme for two libraries at Jussieu, a technical university in Paris, OMA radically reconfigures the typical library layout. Rather than stacking one level on top of another, floor planes are manipulated to connect; thus forming a single trajectory - much like an interior boulevard that winds its way through the entire building. The implantation of the new library represents the insertion of a new core, which should at the same time resuscitate the original significance of Albert’s project. However beautiful, Albert’s campus is windy, cold and empty. Rather than being a singular building it is a network. Its endlessness psychologically exhausts in advance of any attempt to ‘inhabit’ it. Intended as the essence of the campus, the pedestrian parvis is experienced as a residual, a mere slice of void sandwiched between sockle and building. To reassert its credibility, we imagine the surface of the parvis as pliable: a social magic carpet. We fold it to form a stack of platforms, which is then enclosed to become a building, which may be read as the culmination of the Jussieu network. These new surfaces - a vertical, intensified landscape - are then ‘urbanized’ almost like a city: the specific elements of the libraries are reimplanted in the new public realm like buildings in a city. Instead of a simple stacking of one floor on top of the other, sections of each floor are manipulated to connect with those above and below. In this way a single trajectory traverses the entire structure like a warped interior Boulevard. The visitor becomes a Baudelairean flaneur, inspecting and being seduced by a world of books and information and the urban scenario. Through its scale and variety, the effect of the inhabited planes becomes almost that of a street, a theme which influences the interpretation and planning of the Boulevard as part of a system of further supra-programmatic urban elements in the interior: plazas, parks, monumental staircases, cafes, shops.”
Jakob + MacFarlane, Renovation of Central Docks, Paris, France, 2004-7
