Rebecca Horn, ‘The Bright Wounded Star’
Tag Archives: houses
Joseph Gandy
Joseph Gandy, ‘Buildings of Sir John Soane’ (1818)
Watercolour of an imaginary room filled with the architect John Soane‘s models.
Thom Andersen
Scene about modernist California homes from ‘Los Angeles plays itself’ (2003) by Thom Andersen
‘Los Angeles plays itself’ is a video essay, finished in 2003, exploring the way Los Angeles has been presented in movies.
Kamikaze Loggia
Photograph by Levan Asabashvili.
Photograph by Krzysztof Weglel.
Some examples of informal structures called “kamikaze loggias”, the vernacular extensions of modernist buildings characteristic of Tbilisi. These extensions have been created since the 1990s as an organic response to the new, “lawless” times after the fall of the Soviet Union. They increase the living space and are usually used as terraces, extra rooms, open refrigerators, etc.
It is said that a Russian journalist named them “kamikaze”, drawing a parallel between the romantic and suicidal character of such an endeavour and the typical ending of most Georgian family names “-adze”. This architecture also refers back to the local palimpsestic building technique, which since the Middle Ages has allowed new houses to be built on top of existing ones on the steep slopes of the Caucasus Mountains thus not monumentalising the past but expanding on it for the future.
Read more about the Georgian Pavillion at the 2013 Venice Architecture Biennale here.
Mircea Nicolae
Mircea Nicolae, ‘Glass globes’ (2008)
Brick fragments from 25 demolished houses, shaped with an electric power tool, and then placed inside 25 glass globes found in a deserted glass factory. The project questions the destruction of private houses built at the end of the XIXth century and in the first part of the XXth century in the central area of Bucharest, Romania. Currently, these buildings are being demolished and replaced with blocks of flats or business headquarters, thus evicting an important segment of the built memory of the city.
Alex van Warmerdam
Alex van Warmerdam, ‘De Noorderlingen’ (‘The Northerners’) (1992)
A surreal black comedy set in a decrepit 1960’s housing development. When his mother is drawn into sainthood and the resulting frustrations of his father become too difficult to manage, Thomas, a young boy, becomes obsessed with events on the broadcast news. The liberation of the Belgian Congo is taking place and Thomas becomes Lumumba, one of the contenders as the Congo’s new leader. He is encouraged in this escapism by Plagge, the postman who reads all the mail and knows all of the bizzarre and intimate secrets of the eccentric inhabitants of the estate.
