the re-surfacing of Teddy Cruz

A friend sent me this article on Artkrush, an interview with Teddy Cruz. I wrote about him last year when he was in town and still find his work fascinating; he experiments with and highlights the difference between the uber-planned, government/developer spaces (formal) and the socially determined (informal), and although he doesn't go for the jugular, hints at the corrosion of our democracy reflected in these regulated spaces and the inability of citizens to responsibly make these decisions in modern planning. The current paradigm strikes me as disturbingly contrary to the core values of democracy, and suggests that the inhabitants of the informal might be better in touch with true democracy than those of the formal. I also really enjoy his description of possible 'pixelization' of these mcmansions, possibly the first of many 'pixelizations' and a movement toward a high-resolution built world: designed not for magazines and elevations, but for experiencing up-close. I recommend you read it.

architecture and the modern experience

David Claerbout is currently exhibiting at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, which I just visited (I figured I may not be in Boston that much longer, so I should take advantage of all the free awesomeness that I can). His work, from what I could tell, deals a lot with the passage of time, light as a marker/narrator of a sequence of images or scenes, and from my brief visit a lot about modern loneliness (a condition that is thoroughly modern, I have recently come to realize and will address individually at some point).

Naturally his emphasis on light creates a great deal of emphasis on space, inserting something architectural into many pieces. One seemed to comment directly on a question modern architecture has been dancing around for a while: the role of self-determination, community determination, and variety.

“Sections of a Happy Moment, 2007”, is a series of images, like a slide show, of a blissful afternoon shared by an extended Chinese family in the courtyard of a massive, urban-renewal/Corbusian housing development. After a few slides pass, emptiness begins to undermine sincerity, both of the activity (a few children toss a ball, all watch) and of the housing project (thousands must live in the complex, only one other party is seen). It begins to seem set up, promotional, propagandistic.

While this calls into question many aspects of modern living, for me it highlighted the role of self-determination in modern architecture: in our scale-crazed development paradigm, do we really deliver usable assets to clients? Did this family choose this bleak community of their own free will, and would others? Modern Americans do not, a visit to any of these archi-dictatorial creations will reveal.

Who does the architect serve, and who should be served?