Hejduk's Chronotope

Finally, some half decent Hejduk scholarship online

http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic496136.files/Somol_One_or_Several_Masters.pdf

Jan Duiker, Cineac

"Johannes Duiker’s Handelsblad Cineac was built in Amsterdam in 1934. This is a cinema building located on a street corner that offers the observer on the street a glimpse of the cinema’s functioning mechanism: Duiker makes the projection booth visible from the outside around the cinema entrance. The Handelsblad Cineac clearly corresponds to Baudry’s ideal apparatus, undertaking its own demystification by displaying its technological means."

-http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/handelsblad-cineac/images/1/

garden/walls/staircase

Neues Museum

Neues Museum

expressive walls

Following on from a much earlier discussion about Muf's wall in Barking, I have come across some more examples of walls that, while blind (or almost blind) in respect of opes, can make generous contributions to the particular sense of the street.

The London-based designer and artist Gitta Gschwendtner built a 50 m long wall filled with 1000 bird houses to surround a new apartment complex in Cardiff, an idea that is reminiscent of the accidental function of the middle wall of our site at the moment.

In the Can Framis museum in Barcelona, BAAS architects restored two preexisting factory buildings while creating a new one to link them, coinciding with the site of another former warehouse which forms a courtyard in between, paved with stones recovered from the former factory.

mistakes/myths/lies

The above images are an extract from the London Met's 2009 summer exhibition catalogue. They outline the work of one of the design studio units that dealt explicitly with many of the issues we have been discussing, including narrative as an architectural device, and the creation of histories, both true and false.

"Jenny, I think I have an idea."

How's this for a first stab at programme...

I've been thinking about the ideas of third space that we discussed, and happened across the cinema as one example. The more I thought about it, the richer it seems as an architectural construct, particularly with regard to our idea of the cast of characters (not in the literal sense of the shared device of 'casts' between our approach and that of the typical film, but rather how the cinema could act as deeply authentic idea of a place where the lives of the characters can intersect, both with each other and, simultaneously, with lives of characters on screen) and also as the ultimate liminal space, a space of suspended narration, where notions of real and unreal collide, enmesh, slip by, and then, when the lights come on, the world as we know it is restored (see your earlier reference to 'Alice in Wonderland' perhaps?).

It also seems to embody many of the notions espoused in the brief. I have always found the forced intimacy and faux-domesticity of the cinema situation fascinating; it really seems to tread the ground between 'house' and 'common room' in a way that no other programmatic element I have come across thus far can do. In addition, it is a facility that the city of Limerick is lacking, and one for which the need is evident, at least to me. The typology of cinemas in Limerick is very much that of the vernacular 'pedimented shed', and so it seems as though there is something there to work with on that front too.


The following beautifully evocative quote about the pull of the cinema is by Elizabeth Bowen, from J. Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace, p.23, as quoted by Tom de Paor in the essay entitled Delay, contained in 'The Lives of Spaces'

"I go to the cinema for any number of different reasons - these I ought to sort out and range in order of their importance. At random, here are a few of them; I go to be distracted (or 'taken out of myself'); I go when I don't want to think; I go when I do want to think and need stimulus; I go to see pretty people; I go when I want to see life ginned up, charged with unlikely energy; I go to laugh; I go to be harrowed; I go when a day has been such a mess of detail that I am glad to see even the most arbitrary, the most preposterous pattern emerge; I go because I like bright lights, abrupt shadows, speed; I go to see America, France, Russia; I go because I like wisecracks and slick behaviour; I go because the screen is an oblong opening into the world of fantasy for me; I go because I like story, with its suspense; I go because I like sitting in a packed crowd in the dark, among hundreds riveted on the same thing; I go to have my most general feelings played on. These reasons, put down roughly, seem to fall under five headings; wish to escape, lassitude, sense of lack in my nature or my surroundings, loneliness (however passing) and natural frivolity."


I think that a lot of the experiences Bowen describes here dovetail very neatly with our initial discussions on the temperaments and motivations of our characters, and there is also a very nice sense of the mercurial nature of the individual, which the Invisible Cities discussion, and the expression of that in the cast (as both discrete entities and united whole simultaneously), were beginning to get at.

Muf's Barking town square

http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=3153931

Muf's brick wall in Barking town square establishes a dialogue between the user and the memory of the site, while also playing on established notions of time and history. The wall is a contemporary intervention made to resemble, in a most superficial sense, a Roman construction, while, upon closer inspection it is so formally playful as to almost be mannerist. It reflects the rich history of Barking, while also questioning ideas of truth and rejecting received ideas of a singular 'history'.