{architecture} – Page 132

Lenin Rising

More monumental relics from the former Soviet Union. In March last year I posted some pictures from a film by Takehiko Nagakura who used CGI to show how St Petersburg would look if Vladimir Tatlin’s enormous Monument to the Third International had been built. Architectural megalomania didn’t abate with the collapse of that project and Stalin had his own plans for a number of vast buildings and monuments, including this colossal statue (or is it a building?) of Lenin intended to tower over Moscow.

These pictures come courtesy of Englishrussia.com. You can also see there a collection of (uncredited) pictures like the one above which follow Nagakura’s example and show how the Moscow of today would look had this structure been built. There’s also this strangely antique design for another vast Lenin memorial, which looks like Hugh Ferriss by way of ancient Egypt, and dizzying pictures from the top of the very large (62m tall) and very real ‘Mother Motherland’ monument in Kiev.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dead Monuments
• Enormous structures II: Tatlin’s Tower

Vedute di Roma

Three views of the Ponte Sant’Angelo with St Peter’s basilica in the background and the Castel Sant’Angelo (Hadrian’s Mausoleum) to the right. All from this site, a very thorough guide to Rome’s historic buildings with different views through the ages to the present day. Dover Publications had a book available for a while (now out of print) showing Piranesi’s views of Rome beside photographs of the modern city. In a similar vein, there’s the fascinating Now and Then pool on Flickr, the same idea applied to different places (and people!) around the world.

Giuseppe Vasi.

Piranesi.

Luigi Rossini.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Cult of Antinous

Frans Masereel’s city

Pages from Die Stadt (1925), a “novel in woodcuts” by anarchist artist Frans Masereel (1889–1972). See the other ninety-six pages here. And by the same artist, Die Idee.

A pacifist in World War I, he tried to make his art accessible to the ordinary man. His works were banned by the Nazis and widely distributed in Communist countries. But he rejected “political” art and party affiliation, condemning all enslavements, oppression, war and violence, injustice, and the power of money.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Radical architects and their magazines

Such Cheek! Those Were the Days, Architects
by Nicolai Ouroussoff
New York Times, February 8th, 2007

IF YOU ARE revolted by today’s slick and fashion-obsessed architecture scene, hurry over to ‘Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines‘ at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. You’ll feel even worse.

Organized by the architectural historian Beatriz Colomina, the show examines the world of those small magazines from the early 1960s to the end of the 1970s, when the field of architecture was still marked by a playful intellectual and political independence. It’s packed with gorgeous cover images, from copulating robots to an elephant attacking the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan to a skyscraper made of Swiss cheese. Often thrown together on a shoestring budget, the magazines have an intoxicating freshness that should send a shudder down the spine of those who’ve spent the last decade bathed in the glow of the computer screen.

But this is not an exercise in nostalgia. It’s a piercing critique, intended or not, of the smoothness of our contemporary design culture. These magazine covers map out an era when architecture was simmering with new ideas. You’re bound to leave the show with a nagging sense of what was lost as well as gained during the electronic juggernaut of the last three decades.

Part of the magic of this show, which was recently extended for three more weeks, is in the works’ crude immediacy. One side of the gallery is wallpapered in hundreds of colorful magazine covers. On the opposite wall a more detailed timeline maps out the evolution of the culture of architectural magazines, from an obsession with politics and pop culture to a descent into increasingly abstruse and self-involved theoretical debates. The rarest magazines are encased in clear plastic bubbles (made of cheap plastic skylights that the show’s curators bought on Canal Street), evoking time capsules descended from outer space.

Continue reading “Radical architects and their magazines”

How to disappear completely

Talking to a friend recently about Photoshop reminded me of this picture experiment I made a couple of years ago. The photo above was a Prague street scene (no other details known) that I cut from a newspaper. I liked the atmosphere of the narrow street but couldn’t help wondering how it would look without all those people standing there. After some diligent copying and pasting I ended up with the version you see below. You can view it at a larger size here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Karel Plicka’s views of Prague
• Atget’s Paris