Word: archilab
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Dates: during 2005-2005
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...history of architecture is filled with visions and then revisions. As each generation of architects corrects the utopias of the one before them, razor-edged towers are followed by biomorphic houses and sky-platform cities give way to clustered yurts. There are lots of these heady innovations in "Archilab: New Experiments in Architecture, Art and the City," the highly entertaining exhibition now at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, where it runs through March 13. Organized jointly by the Mori and the FRAC Centre Collection in Orl?ans, France, it brings together more than a half-century of attempts to utterly...
...backdrop for much of what appears in "Archilab" is the mid-20th century triumph of consumer capitalism and what was then its house style, classic Modernism. By the late 1950s the iconic Modernist building?an unadorned box, made of glass and concrete or steel, typically perched upon an empty plaza?was springing up in every part of the developed world. It was a style that could produce individual works of great beauty, but in the aggregate could transform whole city centers into visual and spiritual dead zones...
...critique of Modernist architecture, often joined to a deep suspicion of capitalist culture generally, was under way among younger architects. They wanted to imagine a cityscape that was not merely sane and rational but that acknowledged and accommodated human desires, even if imagine was all they could do. So "Archilab" opens with a section called "The Pulsating City," full of models and drawings based on organic forms or made from flexible materials, like David Greene's witty Living Pod. The point of such work was to unlock the imprisoning grids of Modernism, to make the soap bubble as plausible...
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