Architecture and Spectacle: A Critique by Gevork Hartoonian

Author:Gevork Hartoonian [Hartoonian, Gevork]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781409422938
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2016-12-05T05:00:00+00:00

The breadth of this subject cannot be given complete justice here. The reader should, however, be reminded of two historical moments in Dutch visual culture. In the first place, mention should be made of the portrait paintings where, to follow the art historian Alois Riegl, the internal figurative composition seems pregnant with a sense of theatricality that draws the spectator’s attention.24 In Rembrandt’s paintings, for example, an anamorphic use of perspective curtails the expected spatial distance between the subject (spectator) and the object (painting). In the Syndics of the Clothmaker’s Guild (1662), the depicted figures are doing their best to reach out, and at the same time to invite the spectator to enter into the painterly scene imaginatively, thus closing the painting’s spatial circle. In the second historical moment we are reminded of the visuality propagated by the De Stijl movement. Consider the Café l’Aubette in Strasbourg, designed by Theo van Doesburg in 1928, where the spatial experience is informed by the physical body of the building—that is, its form and geometry—and by the virtual space evoked by the colorful diagonal lines furnishing the café’s horizontal and vertical surfaces.

Of these strategies of visual sublimation and their architectonic implications mention should be made of the corridor behind the two main auditoria of the Educatorium. The space is dramatized using non-linear and non-homogeneous materials. The continuous concrete curve covering the rear of the ramp and auditorium recall the earlier suggested analogy with Le Corbusier’s villa. The volume is cut halfway by a projected rectangular glassed volume clad in wood on the inside. The ensemble pumps visual continuity between floor and ceiling. The same volume’s profile, however, simulates the egg-shape projection room, located on the opposite side, as if it is extruded from the curved volume of the rear end. The spectacle experienced in this corridor is also at work in the auditorium’s ovoid interior, the walls of which are either clad in wood or are panes of glass allowing visual access to the landscape.

If the recoding of the modernist idea of open-plan and frame structure is the strategy underpinning the projects discussed thus far, a radical turn to totality helps in grasping the OMA’s understanding of modernity at the time when capital and information are distributed and consumed globally. In addition to the implied shift in Eisenman’s formal interpretation of Koolhaas’s architecture, the projects discussed in the following pages attempt to emulate what Marshal Berman has discussed in terms of “socialist realism,” connoting a strategy by which one should make the best out of given circumstances. This is important not only in reference to the idea of “dirty realism” attributed to Koolhaas’s design strategy,25 but also in consideration of his sympathy with Russian constructivist architecture, and the global real (good and bad) permeating present everyday life. What this means can be phrased in the following words: if the common thread running through today’s architecture is the internalization of the visual spectacle permeating the cultural products of late capitalism, then one way to

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