The heathen Israelites of 3500 years ago stood before an idol, a calf cast out of solid gold. Even today we can understand the appeal of such an object—in the absence of their spiritual leader, they wanted something tangible to represent their hopes and beliefs, even if it was the admittedly secular apotheosis of wealth …
“Serve the public trust. Protect the innocent. Uphold the awesome.” Read More »
In a previous post we wrote that Bjarke Ingels (1974), founder of the relatively young architectural practice BIG, is amongst the most prominent representatives of a generation of architects that tries and surpasses postmodern conventions, attitudes and strategies. Ingels’ approach to architecture is perhaps best described, in his own words, as Yes is More, sustainable hedonism …
Metamodernism is above all about oscillation. Or at least for me it is. It is about the oscillation between the modern and the postmodern, history and ahistoricity, optimism and pessimism, sincerity and irony, the concept and the material, the figurative and the formless, narrative and the plotless, discursive originality and individual intertextuality, meaning and meaninglessness. …
‘It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye’, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in his famous novel “Le Petit Prince”. The same can be said of Lucas Ossendrijver’s designs for Lanvin Homme. While from the outset his work has been turning-heads and singular in a number …
A few days ago, Gry Rustad wrote about cynical, “bullying” irony (“the joke that wasn’t funny anymore”) falling to the wayside as comedy focused on “community” and delivered with (nearly) wholehearted warmth has taken its place. This same shift caught my eye a few years ago. Ever since Napoleon Dynamite, my sensibilities were alive to the …
Between October 3rd, 2010 and January 3rd, 2011, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York held an exhibition entitled ‘Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement‘. The show presented eleven projects, across five continents, and sought to highlight both the social commitment of the architects (and others) involved and the functinonal, …
