Anthony Gormley @ White Cube/Bermondsey

This exhibition is not to be missed!

Anthony Gormley

White Cube Bermondsey

28th November 2012 - 10 February 2013

White Cube Bermondsey is pleased to present ‘Model’, an exhibition of major new works by Antony Gormley. Challenging the physical possibilities of the gallery space, this ambitious exhibition investigates our experience of architecture through the body and of the body through architecture.

Made in direct response to the space of the South Galleries is the vast, new work Model (2012), which is also the title of the exhibition. Fabricated from 100 tonnes of weathering sheet steel, the work is both sculpture and building, human in form but at no point visible as a total figure. Visitors will be able to enter the work through a 'foot' and journey through its inter-connected internal chambers, the sculpture demanding that we adjust our pace and bend our bodies to its awkward yet absolute geometry. The experience of this analogy for the 'dark interior of the body' is guided by anticipation and memory and the direct and indirect light which penetrates the structure and which leads us on, as if through a labyrinth.

The central corridor of the gallery will hold new sculptures built of solid iron blocks whose uncompromising orthogonals belie their emotional punch. Propping up the architecture, articulating a corner or lying flat on the ground, these dark works test the bounding condition of the space. Their sculptural language is highly reduced, in some cases so schematic that the body form is rendered purely abstract, but without any loss of human empathy.

The exhibition also features a selection of Gormley's working models, installed on a series of tables. Revealing processes that can be both playful and disciplined, the installation suggests a workshop full of ideas and procedures, methods and materials. 

These works, together with a series of new expansion pieces, create an exhibition which powerfully extends Gormley's exploration of the body as a site of transformation.

Andrew Holmes @ Plus one gallery

The Plus One Gallery is exhibiting the hyper-realist paintings of Andrew Holmes, demonstrating his interest in the impact of ‘an oil hungry civilisation’. The artist has recently constructed a mobile sculpture in California from four ‘Ford Thunderbird Landau Coupes’ built in the 1970s, the era of the first oil crisis. Entitled ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’, the sculpture plays upon the mythological story in which the horsemen come to announce the end of the world. The paintings included within this collection express a continuing descent into corruption and poverty and include four drawings representing different aspects of the four horsemen - Victory, War, Pestilence and Death. The artist’s skill with coloured pencil is enviable and visitors to the exhibition can expect to be impressed by dramatic drawings of motor vehicles, rendered in minute detail.

Andrew Holmes

“Andrew Holmes is Britain‘s leading SuperRealist artist. He is also an architect and one of the original Richard Rogers four-person practice, a long time unit master at the Architectural Association and latterly at the University of Westminster. For three decades he has been working on, …, a 100-picture series called Gas Tank City. It records the storage tanks, trucks and trailers of the highways of the West Coast desert and that artificial urban oasis, Los Angeles, which Holmes has visited annually since he was a student at the AA. These, says Holmes, have replaced such traditional buildings as the barn and have, in some ways, become architecture. If that sounds like an echo of Reyner Banham and Archigram and Cedric Price and their interest in architectural transience and mobility, that is because it is. But it is also to put too architectural a gloss on his work which is sheerly beautiful. Holmes says anyway that the early Rogers connection is more relevant. ‚The truck epitomises more what those early ideas were originally about‘: simple steel construction, ready-mades, ad hoc-ness, design-as-accruing.”

http://www.realisticpictures.co.uk/

Two Projects

Max Lamb's Hexagonal Pewter Stool & Markus Kayser's Solar Sinter project





An important point that should be made is that both these projects were developed by the designers whilst they were at University and the themes raised have continued to be the key polemics for both, going some way to prove that your interests explored whilst a student needn't be discarded in practice.

Neighbourhoods

Tom has found an interesting video by Vera Danilina, which portrays 'two contrary places that are connected by stylistic features. It is about the metropolis New York City (USA) and the provincial Dessau (GER)'

Atelier Urban Nomads

A quick post with some links to the work of Lisbon/London based architect Luísa Alpalhao, who kindly presented her work to us in during our field trip.

www.alinhaalfama.wordpress.com

www.jogosderua.wordpress.com

Dismantling Landscapes

...trying to figure out how to take apart the landscape they stand on, reducing it to a raw geometry of cubes and blocks, measured shapes juxtaposed with the wilderness beyond....

link to bldgblog article -  go!!

Where discovery begins...

....just in case you had forgotten

Ingenuity and Invention

The proposed quarry installation will require ingenuity and invention:

Surveying

Charting

Envisaging

Proposing

Making

Defining

Sequencing

Testing

Highlighting

Curating

Recording

Disguising


Imprinting

Gesturing

Field Trip Booklet

The Unit H field trip booklet is now available to download.

Daily Dose of Architecture

Announcement to Unit H students.....

As you may have noticed the blog is now up and running. The function of the blog is to supplement conversations had in tutorials and to provide some food for thought (or Vitamins as we tend to call them with my unit at Greenwich.)

Either way we must stress that it is really down to you all to make use of this and to take regular supplements! We will certainly be posting and updating frequently, at least once a week so do pop by regularly.

We have also now uploaded a recommended film list under the heading 'Video' - films (as I am sure you are already aware) are fantastic viewing during moments of lethargy. Hopefully these films will expand on ways of reading the city.

As with all the contents of the blog, and in particular the reading lists and film list there is no requirement to go through all of them. Do research prior to purchase/borrowing to ensure that at least there is some relationship to your individual project agendas.

J

The City as a Metaphor

City Metaphors....

"I would like to be able to read maps the same way that I read photographs. Meaning, to enable my first impressions to be filled with analogies, metaphors, and symbolism but instead, the rational mind takes over and I see measured facts and deadpan reality. For the German architect Oswald Mathias Ungers however, bridging imaginative perception and a blueprint from a city planner produced a fascinating book titled City Metaphors just re-published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig.

Originally appearing in 1982, City Metaphors presents over 50 pairings of various city maps throughout history with images from science and nature. Each of the pairings is then "titled" with a single descriptive word printed in both English and German.

In Ungers' mind, the division of Venice becomes a handshake, a spirally designed city in India becomes the universe, the plan of the city of St Gallen, Merian from 1809 becomes a womb and so on. Easily, the formal similarities can be seen in each pairing but there is the third level of perception introduced by the title. The factual reality (the plan), the perceived reality (the image), and the conceptual reality (the word). 

As Ungers writes in his foreword; The way we experience the world around us depends on how we perceive it. Without a comprehensive vision the reality will appear as a mass of unrelated phenomenon and meaningless facts, in other words, totally chaotic. In such a world it would be like living in a vacuum; everything would be of equal importance; nothing could attract our attention; and there would be no possibility to utilize the mind."

Text taken from 5b4.blogspot.co.uk

Note to all - it is only from the initial observation that we are able to perceive, abstract and posit.

Taking Measures....

Taking Measures Across the American Landscape by James Corner (Field Operations - look them up)

and Alex MacLean.

The Unfolding House

Movement 2 from Thailand Unfolding House [1994-1996]

Movement 3 from Thailand Unfolding House [1994-1996]

Movement 5 from Thailand Unfolding House [1994-1996]

Movement 7 from Thailand Unfolding House [1994-1996]

Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Barcelona (ETSAB) drawings

Exploratory drawings from the Barcelona school.....

EMBT

Calderon Folch Arquitectes

Flores Prats

Flores Prats

           EMBT

           EMBT

           EMBT

        Flores Prats

    Flores Prats

Gordon Matta Clark Drawings

Gordon Matta-Clark - Cut Drawing: 1976 Cycle cuts paper with cuts 

Gordon Matta-Clark - Cut Drawing: 1973 A W-hole House (cut drawing)

Reading List Post 1

Suggested Reading....


Follow these links for selected chapter downloads - http://www.mediafire.com/?87k6s5znusv6g

Robert Taverson: Smoot's Ear - A Measure of Humanity 

Georges Perec:  Life a user's manual

PO1: GEOMETRY & PRECISION

GEOMETRY & PRECISION as architectural instruments

location: Photo of interior of apartment, Bronx, NY (Photo)

A

Individual work. 

Work out the dimensions of the room(s) from the photograph above and draw precisely the spatial relationships in plan, sections & perspective to scale. Refer to the entire “Bronx Floors” project for more images. Study details and relate to other work and references and use to inform drawings to a greater degree of precision. Allow your working lines, proportional rules, measurements & geometry to be included in the final drawings as an integral part of them. Make it a beautiful as well as a comprehensive piece of work, which clearly demonstrates a creative and individual approach to drawing. Pay attention to line weights and study good draftsmanship. Challenge yourself and your colleagues. 

portfolio: draw geometry, scale, architectural spatial sequences & detail precisely and comprehensively. In plan, sections & perspective. Include actively used reference material.

time: 1 week (introduction project+ pin up + final tutorial)

techniques: creative exploration of working drawings, detailed drafting, manuals & instruction drawings. 

B

Individual work. 

Begin a catalogue of recorded measurements of your own physical surroundings. Use a camera (camera phone) to photograph anything and everything with a measuring tape, ruler or scaled string. Organise photographs in types and continue to add to it throughout the year. Use this record in your design development to apply and test new spatial, material and constructional knowledge. 

portfolio: to supplement and inform design portfolio and technology submission

time: to continue through out the year

techniques: photographic record of measure and material properties & hand sketches to scale

Download brief for P01

Indicative project references: 

Bronx Floors (Gordon Matta Clark),

Le Bal (film),

Vitruvius,

Cartography,

Life; a users manual (George Perec),

The Georgian Town Houses (D. Cruckshank & P. Wyld),

Sewing patterns.

Traces Of Dance: Choreographers’ Drawings And Notations.

Borromini drawings,

Leonardo da Vinci drawings. 

Test

Testing, testing, 1,2,3......

...welcome all unit H students to the unit Blog.
Treat this blog as a key resource for the Unit.
Keep up to date regularly for information, reading lists and project briefs.