Re: Louis Kahn's son
2001.11.11 12:54
Brian, commenting further on your remark:
"I have been wondering where is the dean of the architecture school, the teachers, the students. well, not wondering. Realizing why they are not there. They are not told to be there. They are silent. Doing what is popular at the moment, going with the flow, that is it is a cultural sewer is irrelevant, as long as things fit in."
Here, even if architectural deans and students are not able to save a building from demolition (i.e., if they were actually putting up a fight), the educational institutions should nonetheless still be 'saving' the building virtually, this most easily accomplished via digital image taking and archiving. This should now be a standard policy of architectural institutions everywhere because it is something that can be done presently with very low cost (no more film and processing cost) and very high efficiency (e.g., it is easy to take several hundred images within an hour).
Brian, I know full well that you have long advocated a gigantic/global sharing of architectural data, and you are right to do so, especially because the technique of data generation now literally at all our fingertips goes way beyond even our most previous dexterity. As much as architecture schools teach about 'good' design and 'famous' buildings, there is now ample opportunity for every architecture school to generate its own regional archive (i.e., virtual museum)--following the whole notion of thinking globally and acting locally--with the result being hundreds of archives accessible online that hold vast amounts of locally collected data.
Over the last two months I have probably taken more 'pictures' than at any other time in my life. Quondam's digital image collection now has at least a couple thousand more image files. All these images depict architecture in and around Philadelphia. The point being that I am trying to document that which is most readily available to me. Granted there happens to be a whole lot of significant architecture in the Philadelphia area (Kahn, Giurgola, Venturi, Furness, etc.), but even as I go out to various sites, I'm constantly passing (unknown) buildings that are worth digitally recording, and now I'm trying to make time to go back to the more anonymous places.
If this exercise (which has be building up since I first got my digital camera March 1998) has taught me anything so far, it is that our (urban) built environments now change with increasing rapidity--there are several buildings in Quondam's digital collection that now no longer exist, but I didn't originally take pictures of these buildings because I already knew they were going to be soon demolished. I now see these images as suddenly being increased in value because these images may well be all that is left.
I have a strong feeling that the whole digital dexterity revolution will eventually fully sink into the architectural system, however, the task remains one of 'the sooner the better' because what should be recorded may well not be there tomorrow.
Steve
ps
I may get in trouble for saying this, but sketching classes in architecture schools are now largely anachronistic. Get the students to really learn about their immediate environment by repeatedly sending them out on photo shoots.
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