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TEMPTING SHADOWS
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Architecture is becoming more and more a matter of smooth and translucent skin
on a structural and lithe body rather than a matter of stereometry.
Take for example Frank Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao and Ginger and Fred in
Prague, Alvaro Siza's EXPO 1998 building in Lisboa with its foulard of concrete, and don't
forget the sensual Casa do Baile de Pampulha by Oscar Niemeyer with its frills of oba-oba
dancers.
The volumes are moulded as clay and as organisms in continuous metamorphosis,
living and breathing. This represents a step forward, which is allowed and strengthened by
modelizing software, just as de-constructivism has done with right angles.
Today architecture seems to long for being dressed andundressed, exactly as we
do every morning and every night, one way in winter, and another in summer, waterproofed
when it rains, and shaded when there is sun.
The dressed space is a breakthrough in the formal language, especially if this
clothing is also communication as well as fashion.
The buildings become thin and fat, they would like to talk using thousands of
loudspeakers.
TO wear perfume
TO seduce
TO wink at possible night performances.
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Are long clothes a la mode? Well, the anorexic pilotis disappear and the
coating extends to the feet, complete with a slit down the side.
Is sexy lingerie fashionable? Well, the facades become semi-transparent revealing silk
boleros and intimacies in metallic textiles.
What a seduction! So architecture, after having shown us its symbolic power
during the "glorious past", its cartesian mind in objective rationalism, its
high-tech muscles in postmodernist hedonism now it likes to excite us, to be transformed
in a seductive body.
But the main rule of seduction, is not merely to be erotic, but to be played in shadow.
Tempting Shadows is a project for creating seductive shades for a building in
Bangkok, which enables this peculiar architecture to express its own wish for vitality.
Shadows are not merely drawn from shapes but dress the sublime and involving expression of
all the senses.
The design tool that will be used to make up these shadows will be Burda, a
magazine of paper patterns.
Indeed Burda is the magazine that allows everybody to play, creating, a personal and
unique style, in line with actual suggestions of fashion.
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E(stia)123 will draw up special issue of the magazine, entitled Burdarchitecture. Inside
can be found the patterns for creating sensorial shadows to be sewed at the base of the
buildings. This special number will be published on September 30th. The logistics will be
developed in detail in Bangkok during the next few months, with the co-operation of the
other members of the group.
Laura, Savina, Paola, Anna
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