Hi
Apparently the first day was really good, everyone seemed
kind of "hyped-up", a level of excitement bubbling away
bouying up the animated discussions at the end of the day.
Beatriz Colomina spoke last night, not Mark Wigley.
Here's who spoke, when, where ans what...
Thursday 6 July
9:00-10:30am Session A (Design Theatre)
Mike Linzey
Some Binary Architecture -sites for possible thought.
Vanya Steiner
(Mis)appropriation: an incriminating cite.
Paul Walker
The "Maori House" at the Canterbury Museum.
10:30 Morning Tea
11:00am-12:30pm Session B (Design Theatre)
Bill Taylor
The Nature and/or Culture of Architecture.
Tracey Maughan
The Witch in the Wardrobe.
John MacArthur
The Butcher's Shop: disgust in picturesque aesthetics and
architecture.
12:30pm Lunch
1:30-3:00pm Session C (run in parallel sessions)
Design Theatre
Barry Jackson
A Myth of the Development of Architectural Language.
Michael Ostwald and John Moore
Mathematical Misreadings in Non-linearity:
architecture as accessory/theory.
Tim Adams
In the Wake of the Fold.
ALR3
Joanna Merwood and Victoria Bernie
How Do I Look? Art as accessory: a critical
recosideration of architectural space.
Gillian McFeat
Accessory/Architecture: fringe.dweller.
Christopher Kegan
Dancing on the Threshold of Thought: theory as access of
accessory.
3:00pm Afternoon Tea
3:30-5:00pm Session D (Design Theatre)
Anna Miles
Aping Architecture.
Brent Allpress
Accessory to the Crime/The Ornament Conditions of
Architecture.
Lawrence Simmons
The Monument of Ornament -Michaelangelo's Moses.
5:30pm Drinks
6:00pm Keynote Address:
Beatriz Colomina
Last night's performance was full, this one was packed.
Colomina has a strong local following here.
Colomina opened her talk by telling us where it came from,
how the central theme of the talk had grown inordinately large
out of a footnote in her recent pulication "Privacy and Publicity".
The footnote was a reference to the Corb murals in Eileen Gray's
E1027 house. A casual reference to the origin of the works in Corb's
studies of algerian women at an earlier time in his life.
As was pointed out by some people at the end of the conference, Colomina
was sharing her detective work.
She began with a reference to Heidegger's "Building Dwelling Thinking",
talking about horizon, about limits.
This lead on to boundaries, how architecture deals with boundaries
all the time, how architecture can be used to define regions of
"control", and through these "enclosing" (rather, dividing)
mechanisms, is able then to subjugate the surrounding "matter"
simple eg. a landscape framed in a window is less threatening
than being in that landscape... etc.
(an interesting observation I have made of this conference is a
return by many to the ideas of the picturesque, a "resumed" interest
in it, Bloomer , the night before, Colomina last night, several
of the speakers during the day, the resurgence of Ruskin...)
basic stuff...
From horizon, she expands to the notion of city walls, etc, and
eventually ends up talking about (of all things) "public space"!
A lengthy quote from Jose Ortega y Gasset introduces the notion
of TV as having changed public space. Public space is the TV
room, balconies on which the public sit to watch the war in the
city square.
The city square is a hole formed by wrapping the fabric of the
city around an epmty space, obscuring the horizon (replacing it?).
------sudden jump------- (it slipped by last night but shows up
on recollection..., there were slides
and then slides, and then postcards)
Now we are in Algiers, Corbu is sketching prostitutes on
graph paper, tracing images from postcards...
Now we are on la Cote d'Azure at E1027.
Badavicci and Gray have built a house, funded, designed and
constructed by Gray, but given to Badavicci. A house hidden
away unobserved, no roadway, hanging over the Mediterranean,
beautiful...
Corb desecrates this house with his work. Transcribed images of
algerian prosititutes making allegorical reference to the
owners and builders. The act of art is an act of violence, by
which Corb takes control of this house.
His later writings referring to this house, seem to purposefully
obscure the authorship of the house...
The lecture basically examined this story in detail. The obsessive
relationship Corbu had with this wonderful house.
Architectural theory was not really addressed, but Colomina gave
a wonderful performance.
She also skirted around fertile areas of research.
The fact that a house built by a lesbian is some how "marked"
(like what a dog does), with images of exotic women in
sexual arrangemnets These women being prostitutes, therefore
somehow the inversion of the notion of the domestic, what are
they doing on these walls?
Corbu described the walls he chose to taint as the less significant
and tender walls of the house....?!!
It was a good story.
Mat
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Matiu Carr m.carr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
University of Auckland
http://archpropplan.auckland.ac.nz/People/Mat/
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