09010801.db
Trivilla Savoye, level 5 plan.
| |
pragmatists turning political?
2008.12.24 20:29
"Instead of a revolutionary architecture, an architecture of explicitation would imply more complex political directionalities as it transforms the space and the material organization of the built environment, even if those transformations cannot be inscribed in a holistic political program. For architecture to express the domestication of density and high-rise life through specific massing strategies in tall buildings, to convey that tendencies in the articulation of the building envelope capture the new political affects, to communicate that certain manipulations of the ground and the roof indicate the politicization of nature, or to explain the breakdown of the correlation between interior and exterior and private and public, are legitimate political performances."
--ZP,
That is what I assume to be the gist of the so-called general theory of the building envelope as expressed within 'The Political Agency of Dimension' within "The Politics of the Envelope".
Because I see all this relating to Le Corbusier's late Olivetti project first, I looked again at UnStudio's Intramural Centre (project, 1994) as presented within the "Effects" book of MOVE (1999), since this project too reenacts the Le Corbusier paradigm. And then, as I looked through the rest of MOVE, I began to see that the 'envelope' was already often taken into a kind of 4th dimension, a kind of hyper-envelope. Somewhat ironically, UnStudio's proposal for the Yokohama Port Terminal already portends what ZP is now espousing.
Although now going on ten years old, MOVE is still very timely. There are even projects vis-à-vis icons.
[The above is just a broad outline of connected but not-so-random thoughts. I hope to pursue a further analysis of the "politics of the envelope" through the inclusion of UnStudio's precursive work.]
|