Oscar Niemeyer by Max Dewdney

Oscar Niemeyer died recently a few days short of his 105th birthday. Apart from his longevity, he was an extraordinary architect. His inspiration as he liked to say came from the curves of women. Max, unit master in first year and undergraduate coordinator recently visited and stayed in one of Niemeyer's works. Below are some images and a short text by Max.

Oscar Niemeyer (15 December 1907 – 5 December 2012)

"Here, then, is what I wanted to tell you of my architecture. I created it with courage and idealism, but also with an awareness of the fact that what is important is life are friends and attempting to make this unjust world a better place in which to live." (Oscar Niemeyer)

During a recent trip to São Paulo, I stayed on the 29th floor of Copan, Oscar Niemeyer's (1955) housing complex in the heart of São Paulo. Copan was conceived as pure spectacle whose image has created an afterlife in art and advertising. The 32 storey 1700 unit block includes nightclubs, art galleries, 500 parking spaces and a shopping centre. For me, Copan acts as much as sculpture as it does architecture.

“It is a modernistic world in miniature, the Unité d'Habitation relocated to the tropics, twisted, and blown up...” (Brazil, 2009 by Richard.J.Williams, p202)

The concrete, brises-soleil, serpentine facade creates a distinctive figure amongst the grey blocks of the cityʼs fabric that stretches as far as the eye can see. The 'S' shape plan operates in the register of an unconscious stitch in a wounded urban fabric, attempting to provide unity in an otherwise unplanned and divided city. Copan's defiance of both the urban grid and status quo typology of the city bravely inserts a degree of humanity and still offers a glimpse into an alternative future vision in an otherwise faceless city.

"The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed" (William Gibson, extract from interview in the Economist, Dec 2003)

Max Dewdney (December 2012)


 

First year unit four news

On tuesday Group 4 were given a tour of Deptford Creek lead by Creekside Education Trust Ecologist Nick Bertrand.

In addition unit 4 also visited Anthony Gormley's new exhibition Model at the White Cube ,Bermondsey. Here you can walk, crawl through an interpretation of the Artist's body.

read a review of the work in The Financial Times.

Afterwards the  unit went on to view the current exhibition on Death : A Self Portrait at the Welcome Collection.

Andrew Holmes @ Plus One gallery

The Plus One Gallery is exhibiting the hyper-realist paintings of Andrew Holmes, demonstrating his interest in the impact of ‘an oil hungry civilisation’. The artist has recently constructed a mobile sculpture in California from four ‘Ford Thunderbird Landau Coupes’ built in the 1970s, the era of the first oil crisis. Entitled ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’, the sculpture plays upon the mythological story in which the horsemen come to announce the end of the world. The paintings included within this collection express a continuing descent into corruption and poverty and include four drawings representing different aspects of the four horsemen - Victory, War, Pestilence and Death. The artist’s skill with coloured pencil is enviable and visitors to the exhibition can expect to be impressed by dramatic drawings of motor vehicles, rendered in minute detail.

Andrew Holmes

“Andrew Holmes is Britain‘s leading SuperRealist artist. He is also an architect and one of the original Richard Rogers four-person practice, a long time unit master at the Architectural Association and latterly at the University of Westminster. For three decades he has been working on, …, a 100-picture series called Gas Tank City. It records the storage tanks, trucks and trailers of the highways of the West Coast desert and that artificial urban oasis, Los Angeles, which Holmes has visited annually since he was a student at the AA. These, says Holmes, have replaced such traditional buildings as the barn and have, in some ways, become architecture. If that sounds like an echo of Reyner Banham and Archigram and Cedric Price and their interest in architectural transience and mobility, that is because it is. But it is also to put too architectural a gloss on his work which is sheerly beautiful. Holmes says anyway that the early Rogers connection is more relevant. ‚The truck epitomises more what those early ideas were originally about‘: simple steel construction, ready-mades, ad hoc-ness, design-as-accruing.”

http://www.realisticpictures.co.uk/

Sun, Sea and Piracy

Simon Withers of Architecture Diploma Unit 15 at the University of Greenwich, talks about working with Vivienne Westwood and Malcom Mclaren, 16th Century armour, the Kelly Gang, and making universes out of one's studio.


Sun, Sea and Piracy from Jonathan Hagos on Vimeo.

film shoots at Greenwich

Being at Greenwich can have it's surprising moments as every other week there is something surprising happening on the front lawns. This week it was strewn with wrecked cars for a film shoot.

Wolf Prix of Coop Himmelb[l]au

Wolf Prix of Coop Himmelb[l]au will be giving a talk at the Architectural Association titled : 

In two days tomorrow will be yesterday. 

The lecture will be given in the lecture hall at 18.00 27.11.12

Wolf D. Prix, born in Vienna in 1942, a co-founder, Design Principal and CEO of COOP HIMMELB(L)AU. He studied architecture at the Vienna University of Technology, the Architectural Association of London, and the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles.

First year tutor Lawrence Lek is Designer in residence at the Design Museum

Lawrence reviewed in Dezeen

Unlimited Edition

Lawrence Lek

Designer in Residence 2012 Commission at the Design Museum

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Lawrence Lek is a sculptor and architect who experiments with processes of natural growth and industrial fabrication through sculptural objects and environments. His work employs modular structures which connect to create larger forms or experiential installations that define the visitor's awareness of the surrounding spaces.

For the Design Museum's Designer in Residence 2012 programme, Lawrence has created Unlimited Edition, a series of bent-plywood modules that combine to form objects and environments that users can customize, including a pavilion and seating. Referencing psychological Rorschach tests, which ask subjects to interpret unfamiliar inkblot shapes based on things they already know, Lawrence channelled the element of subjectivity into shaping the organic structures that compose the project.

Throughout the design process, Lawrence constructed numerous maquettes in paper and thin plywood to experiment with form before progressing to full-size pieces. Combining digital design techniques, such as computer controlled (CNC) routing and laser cutting with hand assembly, Lawrence can easily customize the modules to expand or contract. The full-size modules were made from a single cut of standard 8-feet tall plywood sheets, minimizing costly fabrication time. Each plywood module is soaked in water before it is bent and braced in place while it dries.

Working with the inherent symmetry of the material, which bends along the grain of the wood, Lawrence was able to achieve a consistent molding of modules. The shell-like shapes provided rigidity while allowing them to be stacked for transportation and storage. When erected they create uncanny forms, spaces and tool-like objects that invite the user to nurture individual responses within an artificial environment.

During the residency, Lawrence moved into a studio in the White Building, a new arts centre across the canal from the Olympic Park. He is currently evolving Unlimited Edition at two different scales - as a system for site-specific urban installations, and as prosthetic objects that modify both our bodies and mental awareness of surrounding Nature.

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Lawrence Lek . Prosthetic Aesthetics . 2012 Design Museum Designer in Residence

A . Studio 3, The White Building, London E9 5EN  |  M . +44 (0) 7592 572329

W . www.lawrencelek.com  |  T .  @lawrence_lek  |  E . lawrence.lek@gmail.com

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www.lawrencelek.com

The importance of design education

Ron Arad and Antony Gormley discuss,,, worth listening while working

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01nx5jv

Image - Yves Klein experimenting with Fire Architecture

Keith Arnatt

Self Burial ( Television Interference Project) 1969                                                    copyright The Estate of Keith Arnatt

If you are interested in finding out what this about please follow this link provided by the TATE.Thanks

Rem Koolhaas

Happy Birthday

Rem Koolhaas celebrated his 68th birthday on the 17.11.12.

He is well known for his critical and provocative thoughts on architecture.

Interview in WIRED July 1996
In WIRED 2000
Review in WIRED June 2003

In the Smithsonian

newsletter + diary

Dear all,
The newsletter and diary has landed.
Susanne

Barbican -Random International: Rain Room

Barbican -Random International: Rain Room

Lina Bo Bardi

Lina Bo Bardi was an Italian Architect that practiced predominantly in Brazil.In London there is currently an exhibition of her work that is well worth a visit. Here is a review from the Guardian by Rowan Moore.

The exhibition is on at the British Council Gallery in London until the 30.11.12

Lebbeus Woods

Below is an image of the Solohouse by Lebbeus Woods.

Here is his wikipedia entry.

Sadly he died Tuesday in his sleep and he will be sorely missed. He was an architect that was best known for his exqusite drawings and polemical thinking. Please take a look at the commentary by Geoff Manaugh from BLDGBLOG.

PRINT MATTERs 001

On the 23.10.12 Simon Herron gave a talk on books and magazines.These are some of the books that were discussed.

01. Towards a new architecture by Le Corbusier
02. Leque an architectural enigma by Phillipe Duboy
03. The League of Nations, Architectural Competitions
04.Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by Robert Venturi
04. The Decorative Art of Today by Le Corbusier
05. Archigram Magazin 04
06. Architectural Design Magazine February 1967
07. Architectural Design Magazine September 1968
08. Architectural Design Magazine November 1970
09. Architectural Design Magazine March 1970
10. Architecture 2000 predictions and methods
11. This is Tomorrow exhibition catalogue 1956
12. Living Arts magazine
13. Archigram Magazin 09

competition open to students

if you are interested please press this link

Xerox David Green

courtesy of the Archigram Archive

Archigram: Inflatable suit / Suitaloon

ALSO

check out the Archigram archive

http://archigram.westminster.ac.uk/

Ben Nicholson Interview and other Links

Excerpt from interview. Ben Nicholson recounting his student days:

"Libeskind mentioned I should look at the drawings of Jean-Jacques LeQueu and all of the French Revolution-era architects. I got the book and realized this does look interesting! I started producing - producing work with an ecstatic addiction. I made this project that was sited at Trafalgar Square with these creatures and animals, which included a text about these buildings that were in the shape of creatures, such as the consumption bird, the palindromic urinator"

 Left: Jean-Jacques Lequeu, Section perpendiculaire d'un souterrain de la maison gothique
Right: Jean-Jacques Lequeu, Elevation of the tomb of Porsenna, king of Etruria, known as the Tuscan Labyrinth, 1792


I wanted to go to Paris to investigate these LeQueu drawings closer. Once again a girlfriend - I told her I want to see these drawings, and she said, "Well go and see them," and I say, "I don't have any money." She was traveling there the next day by airplane and said, "Why don't you come with me and go on your bicycle." I said, "Okay I'll race you." This is at 9 o'clock at night after a bottle of wine and literarily I ran downstairs got on my bicycle and I just started cycling to Paris. And this bicycle was an old five-speed or something. It wasn't even a ten-speed - it was a trash bike. I was fit at that time - I mean domestic fit, I didn't exercise or anything. I got on to the five o'clock ferry from Dover to Calais, got to the other side and just started cycling. When I was overcome with exhaustion I'd pull over to the side sleep in a ditch, eat a bar of chocolate, and get on the bike. [Laughs] Anyway, I arrived at 3 o' clock in the morning the next day, like 32 hours riding or something, solid cycling. In the middle of the ride - in the middle of the evening, a beautiful evening, the pedal freezes up, and I had no tools or anything. [Laughs] So I limped into this farmyard and this farmer - just as in America, they can fix anything. He took the pedal off and replaced it with a pedal from his daughter's tricycle. [Laughs] And I say, 'Thanks buddy I'm out of here!'"

here is link to whole interview:

http://archinect.com/features/article/14916/ben-nicholson-s-faith-based-initiative

His Labyrinth project where he draws every possible Labyrinth


image courtesy of 'Design boom'

http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/9/view/4060/venice-architecture-biennale-08-ben-nicholson.html