Radical architects and their magazines

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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.

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How to disappear completely

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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

The art of Erik Desmazières

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La Place Désertée (1979).

Yet another French artist specialising in etchings with a focus on imaginary architecture. No dedicated website, unfortunately, so I’ve posted more images than usual. Of note is Desmazières’ illustrated edition (now out of print) of the Borges’ ficcione, The Library of Babel, published by Les Amis du Livre Contemporain in France and David R Godine in the US.

Erik Desmazières was born in Rabbat, Morocco, son of a French diplomat. He spent his childhood in Morcco, Portugal, and France. Desmazières studied at the Institute d’Etudes Politique, political science and took an evening art course at the Cours du Soir de la Ville. After graduation he decided to pursue a career as an artist.

Considered to be one of the finest printmakers of his generation, Desmazières was strongly influenced by artists such as Giovanni Piranesi and Jacques Callot. Erik Desmazières work is represented by galleries in Europe, the United States, and Japan and is collected by important museums worldwide.

Update: Erik Desmazières at Velly.org.

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Exploration (1984).

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Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux

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La Rue du Tramway (1938) by Paul Delvaux.

Taxandria (1994) is a feature-length fantasy film by Belgian animator Raoul Servais that’s received little attention outside his native country, possibly because it failed in the marketplace and has been deemed too weird or uncommercial to export. You only have to compare the export version of Harry Kümel’s Malpertuis with his original cut to see how inventive Belgian films are treated by US distributors.

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Servais had previously made an acclaimed animated short, Harpya, using a combination of live actors and painted backgrounds. Taxandria elaborates on this process (called Servaisgraphy by its inventor) using settings designed by one of my favourite comic artists François Schuiten, creator (with Benoît Peeters) of Les Cités Obscures. Taxandria intrigues for a third reason, the inspiration of Surrealist master Paul Delvaux whose paintings served as the origin of the project. And it also contains a remarkable detail in the screenplay credit for Alain Robbe-Grillet, a man better known for making Last Year at Marienbad with Alain Resnais, and the kind of fierce intellectual one imagines would usually run a mile from this kind of extravagant whimsy.

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