The Tension Between Form and Function
10 November 2009 - 7:00am
Prizewinning architect Thom Mayne says that tension inspires him, while admitting that he'd love to design more demanding, artistic buildings.
In an appearance at Cornell, Mayne talked about his desire to explode convention.
"However, Mayne's oeuvre shifts such concerns away from being purely formalist abstractions and employs them in a 'systems' approach that looks toward reshaping the possibilities of the public sphere. Architecture, he believes, is integrally involved in the process of 'prioritiz[ing] what to make coherent in public space.' He claimed there is a perennial conflict in architecture between the 'autonomy' of the discipline and its vision of 'connectedness.'"
Source:
The Cornell Daily Sun, November 9, 2009
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speaking in architectural tongues
"there is a perennial conflict in architecture between the 'autonomy' of the discipline and its vision of 'connectedness.'
"a 'systems' approach that looks toward reshaping the possibilities of the public sphere"
If you buy that, I've got a bridge to sell you.
Required Course For Avant-Garde Architects
As I have said before, avant-gardist architects must be required to take a special course that teaches them how to make pretentious, meaningless statements.
Ordinary people would describe Mayne's work using an ordinary word: Ugly.
Eg, see the pictures at http://preservenet.blogspot.com/2008/08/thom-maynes-federal-building-in-...
Charles Siegel
Litter
Too many of our cities are littered with "ugly" modern high rises with little aesthetic merit.