Click, Stamp, Fold: Exhibition at CAG Vancouver
The subtitle of the Contemporary Art Gallery (CAG) Vancouver’s exhibit is ‘radical architectural magazines.’ The show is extensive: the 1.5 hours I spent there was no where near enough time to even get through everything, let alone have time to contemplate.
The main gallery’s displays of original radical architecture magazines from the 60s and 70s was nicely laid out. The magazines were deployed in acrylic bubbles throughout the center of the floor space. Lining the walls were facsimiles of magazine covers with brief text descriptions of the contents. I got about a third of the way through these. There were also 6 ’sound domes’ distributed throughout the space, hanging from the ceiling. These were acrylic bell shaped chambers with a downward facing speaker in each. Recordings of interviews with the various architects/publishers were being played back on a continuous loop in each of the sound domes. This produced a cacophony of voices as one walked into the gallery. It produced the effect of walking into a train station. The acoustics of the space were quite reverberant, although there was none of the strong slapback echo effect typical in most galleries with parallel flat reflective walls. The wall mounted displays were half-tubes which produced diffuse reflections of the sound albeit quite strong. The intelligibility of the recorded interviews became stronger as one approached any particular sound dome and intensely clear when standing immediately below one. The sound domes articulated the space in a very architectural way: almost like columns of sound and even almost visual and tactile in some sense. I felt as if I could ’see’ and ‘touch’ these columns of sound as I walked around the space. The cacophony of the voices matched the visual cacophony of all the magazine covers on display.
A number of the magazine descriptions caught my attention.
op.cit. no. 1 Sept 1964. As this was the first issue they laid out their theoretical agenda: “…to reduce the visible to the realm of the spoken, based on the argument that perception cannot be abstracted from conception.”
op.cit. no. 38 identified “four different lines of contemporary architectural research: conceptual architecture, rhetorical architecture, anthropomorphic architecture and the architecture of catastrophe.” I was very curious to read the full text to see how these notions were developed, particularly the architecture of catastrophe.
Design Quarterly No. 63 purported to investigate “…the relationship beetween technology, art and design…and offered a theoretical context for conceptualizing an architecture of indeterminate form assembled from expendable components.”
Architecture Principe 1966 had articles by Paul Virilio and his ‘crew.’ Stated theme of the issue was to “…reconsider the importance of human orientation in relation to the inclined plane and oblique axis as a platform for creating a new urban order.”
Metabolist Architect featuring the work of Fumihiko Maki with a focus on “three prototypes of morphological forms: compositional, mega form and group form.”
As expected no strong themes really emerged from such a diverse range of publications and interests. It all had a ‘fresh’ feeling to it: as though the young architects of the time were newly engaged with the theoretical themes in the literary and visual fine arts worlds. A palpable sense of adventure and seeking for the ‘new’ whatever that may be ran through the texts. Often the focus seemed to be on generating ‘what if’ scenarios. What if one were to look at architecture as a biological form, or a literary form, or a 2-dimensional form, or a social form etc. I got the sense that the writers themselves had no answers before they launched into these investigations or proposal, but were thinking out loud in a public, somewhat collaborative forum (as much as magazine publication can be collaborative).
This was echoed in the associated talk held at Inform Interiors in Gastown. The talk began by addressing issues of a ‘changing zeitgeist’ within society and reflected in the architectural community. A spirit of collaboration, but also of the pursuit of self-fulfillment or the betterment of one’s self as opposed to societal concerns. They saw the growing cult of the individual emerging in the 60s, where the individual was the master of their own destiny. There was questioning of modes of operations in relationship to the workspace of architectural production. It was suggested that the ’small’ magazines with quick publishing turnaround led to much collaboration among architects, and that it was a form of professional networking relying on current technologies (ie not having to rely on large offset web printing presses to make copies) enabling small and inexpensive production runs. This was seen as almost a precursor to the internet and its collaborative properties. This suggestion led into the consideration of blogs currently. I was expecting a valorization of blogs, but instead the discussion devolved into a criticism of blogs as ‘not being really collaborative.’ I found this highly strange as a blog certainly has more collaborative potential than small magazine runs in my opinion.
The discussion definitely showed the ocularcentrism of the participants. Architecture seems to still be dominated by the visual medium which produces a very particular bias in the representation of architectural spaces. Of course magazines and blogs lend themselves to visual representations, but there is an increasing contingent of architects who specifically address the multi-sensorial nature of architectural experience over the merely geometric forms of visual representations (Peter Zumthor etc.) How to represent and explore this is, of course, a difficult question. We have developed technologies to record sound and image, but how to communicate the more haptic aspects of architecture? Comments are welcome.
