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.