The facade clearly reveals its underlying structure with broad windows set in a framework of narrow piers and spandrels. In this building an appropriate exterior expression for the new skeleton-framed skyscraper was found. Inside, the words are flat, clipped, and impersonal: “Marquette Building, Holabird and Roche, Architects, 1894. On the outside of the Marquette Building in the center of Chicago, we are immediately addressed by the narrative theme carved into the bronze panels over the doors. The contrast between the stately images that accompany these solemn words and the official landmark plaque inside the door is the first clue to our riddle. Bronze plaques at the entrance to the Marquette Building, Chicago, 1894 Passing two leagues up the river we resolved to winter there. To explain that we had not come as enemies. Which will henceforth lead us into strange lands. It is a delicious riposte to the riddle we shall unravel, which begins to pose itself, properly, in 1894. That Eisenman probably did not intend or really believe in this split at all is beside the point. Social Realism here, functional abstraction there. You can see them separated in the ghostly columns of the old Armory resurrected by Peter Eisenman, the main designer, beside the long grid-sheathed glass column that snakes out behind them. If the sign and the signifier became fused in the “high” Modern period-when ornament and symbolism were nailed deep down inside the structure itself-they have properly divided, in the Visual Arts Center, after many fitful and failed attempts elsewhere. Yet the answer might be stated immediately-and metaphorically-in the linguistic terms misappropriated years ago by architects, artists, and their critics. Why? What is it about the design that has loosed the floodgates of a new rhetoric-or, to put it precisely, a familiar, lately rejected rhetoric? Of course the answer is complex, reaching back beyond this moment, like ripples spreading across a lake from a forgotten stone thrown long ago. But the perception itself, being widely held, is a signal event. Though I was a committed juror, I deny it. Program of Requirements, Center of the Visual Arts Design Competition, Ohio State University, 1983ĮVEN THOSE WHO HAVE NEVER seen the drawings or models of the winning entry in last year’s competition for the Ohio State Visual Arts Center are saying that it has broken the modernophobic chain of recent history. The programs of the center will focus on contemporary experimentation, collaboration, and production rather than the programs of the traditional museums. That is, the desire for meaningful simplicity, amidst the noise of the world. It may therefore be that the rule we feel the need of is first and foremost the desire to think of our actions as necessary. That is to say, the notion of neo-avantgarde takes the form of a radical anti-formalism: an explosive widening of development towards the phenomenon of de-artisticization. True, the Principle of Form is destroyed, but it is replaced by a structure as a field, open to multi-use and to linguistic pluralism (and hence to user participation). Conversely, if interest is focused not on the epidermis but on the structural skeleton, rendering it independent of function and form, then unexplained horizons are opened up.
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