[EN] - Taking Shape, Susannah Hagan (2007)

Peter Doig, Concrete Cabin,1994

Oil on Canvas - 198 x 275cm

 

Peter Doig’s paintings of Le Corbusier’s classic modernist apartment block offer a mysterious Utopia: cosmopolitan dream architecture nestled in (or imprisoned by) tangling wilderness. In Concrete Cabin, it’s the nowhereness of the scene which is strangely uncanny: the bright minimalist grid of the building beaconing through the dark shadows of the trees; an everyday glimpse from a suburban sidewalk twisted into something magical; a set from a contemporary fable. Peter Doig paints this scene with chimerical effect; cropping the image to exclude ground or sky, it has no physical orientation or weight, only the intangible presence of a fleeting moment.

 A week ago I was at the Beyeler Foundation to see an exhibition on Peter Doig, as a painter Robbin Van Den Akker and Thomas Vermeulen talked about in their publication about a new-romanticism, it was an exhibition I could not miss, furthermore one painting particularly striked me, "Concrete Cabin", as it shows the negociation between culture and nature, The romantic sensibility and oscillation the philosophers talk about. 

Furthermore the relation between Nature and Culture in contemporary architecture is interesting to note, I recently made a post about Herzog&DeMeuron and the Signalbox, and recently I've discovered a book called called "Taking Shape" by Susannah Hagan, during my researches on "Landform Building"

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Overview

In recent times, the architecture/nature discussion has encouraged a dual response: architects have built in the image of nature - a token environmentalism while environmentalists have focused too narrowly on the technologies of ecology and sustainability, invariably without paying sufficient attention to spatial and visual issues.

In this book, Hagan argues for a new relationship between architecture and nature: a contract that renegotiates the tension between environmental processes and their formal consequences. Taking Shape makes a major and provocative contribution to the debates concerning the ethics and aesthetics of environmentalism within architecture and urban design. Mohsen Mostafavi, Chairman, The Architectural Association

Review : Booknews

Arguing for the idea that environmental architecture should be as innovative intellectually and aesthetically as it is technically, Hagan (architecture, U. of East London, UK) begins by placing environmental architecture in historical and theoretical perspective. She discusses a number of general historical and theoretical issues, including the environmental challenge to assumptions about the value of the new to architecture, modernism, and consumerism. She then suggests criteria by which to identify and produce environmental architecture. The final chapter evaluates how new models of nature might influence not only contemporary architectural theory and practice but also sustainable urban development

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http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/taking-shape-susannah-hagan/1112333702?ean=9780750649483