Jisuk Lee (Rahim Research Studio, University of Pennsylvania), Mixed-Use Complex, Moscow, 2008

 

Jisuk Lee (Rahim Research Studio, University of Pennsylvania), Mixed-Use Complex, Moscow, 2008

 

 Digital Virtuosity

 

The celebration of exuberance defines an architecture that begins where common sense ends. With the ambition to establish conditions beyond the usual, the known, the rational, the obvious and the simple.

 In the current global situation, the biggest danger lies in giving up creativity for inventiveness.

It could be argued that architecture is not good at inventing things; engineering, philosophy and politics of course do it better. But it is unbeaten in its ability to create, rediscover and reinvent itself, the environment and the human spirit.

In fact, the issue debates a plethora of intelligent ways in which experimental architecture manages to cope with the contemporary turmoil in global politics, economics and ecology. Here occurs the wonder: ‘stuff’ we are mostly familiar with is stretched to its absolute extent.

Common sense becomes the experiment;
beauty becomes the sublime,
the grotesque, the blissful;
the digital becomes the experiential;
the anecdotal, the non-techy and non-geeky.

 Bring forth the new virtuosos (although curiously some of them happen to be the old masters, and some others still students). In ‘Interiorities’ , Ali Rahim confesses the purpose to generate architecture as rich in its ‘level of designed luxury’, ‘coherence and precision of formal organisation’ as the best-known precedents; yes even ‘the most filigree Gothic spaces or the most exuberant Baroque or Rococo interiors’.

In ‘Surrealistic Exuberance – Dark Matters’, Neil Spiller explores the exuberant dark eroticism and its poetic potential of Baroque and religious imagery, and exploits them in the narratives and design of his Communicating Vessels project.

 In ‘Cultivating Smartcities’ , CJ Lim calls out for ‘a new formal, textural and experiential exuberance’ of urbanity with nature – a sensibly exuberant approach to deal with the exorbitant demand for food, and space, in the Far East. While in ‘Relying on Interdependencies’, Kjetil Trædal Thorsen and Robert Greenwood mandate architects to ‘act within the spirit of cooperation and dialogue, alongside contemporary values without compromising longterm qualities or architectural integrity’.

The King Abdulaziz Center for Culture and Knowledge is a showcase project for how environmentally complex scenarios like the Middle Eastern desert can be engaged with by imaginative solutions far beyond common sense.

King Abd Al Aziz Center for Culture and Knowledge

In ‘Baroque Exuberance: Frivolity or Disquiet?’, Robert Harbison introduces us to some of the many ‘facile games’, or ‘profound exposures’, that the Baroque spirit staged.

The Baroque wish to defy gravity echoes also in Wolf D Prix’s article ‘Let’s Rock over Barock’, which highlights a cultural phenomenon of Austrian ‘space inventors’: the ‘desire to celebrate space’. 

  

 

In ‘Exuberance, I Don’t Know; Excess, I Like’ , Hernan Diaz Alonso links exuberance to emergent qualities and to the notion of affect, yet at the same time rejects it for excessiveness and arousement; aspects of greater intensities in his work.

Also more towards the extreme than the exuberant tends Tom Wiscombe’s ‘Extreme Integration’ , its performance depending on ‘messiness, excess and jungle thinking’.

 In ‘Diving into the Depth-Scape: Exuberance and Personalities’ , Yael Reisner states that it is ‘personality, character and poetics’ that ‘take part in exuberant expression’.

The article is a clear invocation for emotion and intuition, evocatively illustrated by her Depth-Scape Interactive Time-cycled Light & Acoustic installation project.
Personality does certainly come across in fashion design, where couturiers are more often than not eccentrics. In ‘Exuberant Couture’, Judith Clarke, reveals that in fashion ‘exuberance, in order to stay exuberant, is always seeking new forms’, as it is ‘by defi nition performative’.

 For decades Peter Cook has lectured on cheerfulness in architecture, and his oeuvre will leave an astonishing legacy of exuberant, flamboyant, clever projects. Out of his ‘creative tank’, New Delfina, purposely designed for this issue, did ‘burst forth’ . 

 

https://www.archdaily.com/399329/ad-classics-the-plug-in-city-peter-cook-archigram/51d71b74e8e44ed538000023-ad-classics-the-plug-in-city-peter-cook-archigram-image

Yousef Al-Mehdari (Unit 20, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL), The New Polyhydric Body, 2008–09 below: The New Polyhydric Body study attempts to reinterpret the complexity of overlapping anatomies through repeated and non-scripted digital computations (such as extrusions, rotations and progressive scaling) in order to generate new types of architectural form. ‘Polyhydra’ is a generative term deriving from poly (literally, multi), and Hydra (the many-headed serpent).

Tobias Klein (Unit 20, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL), Synthetic Syncretism/Our Lady of Regla Chapel, Havana, 2005–06 opposite: The narrative background is based upon the hybrid Cuban Santeria religion – a mixture of Catholicism and saints, and African Yoruba tribe beliefs and animal sacrifi ces. Due to lack of burial space in Havana, a ceremonial processional funerary route through the city is proposed. Slotted inside an existing cross-shaped courtyard, the inverted chapel acts as an architectural highlight. Its formal and structural expression is provided by a series of designed Santerian relics held inside the sacristy – skeletal and visceral utensils, 3-D modelled and 3-D printed in order to perfectly fit 3-D-scanned animal bones.

Graham Thompson (Unit 20, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL), Synthetic Sustainability – Bio-Farm, Turin, Italy, 2008–09 right and bottom: The biotech centre proposal includes a biofuel production facility to explore new ways of breeding strains of algae to produce a sustainable biofuel that can be employed in the depleting fossil-fuel market. Left: Detail of nutrient intent soft system. Pliant adaptive parts are responsive and evolve – specifi c mechanisms help maintain the health of the living capillaries and their internal growth status. Right: Detail of bio-robotic machine consisting of multifunctional and rotational amateurs. These artifi cially intelligent machines are programmed to maintain and increase lush synthetic growth within an architectural bioscaffold.

Book Reference:

Exuberance New Virtuosity in Contemporary Architecture (Architectural Design March   April 2010, Vol. 80 No. 2) by Marjan Colletti.

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