CLRLSS is the collection of multiple design tangents - bringing together ideas and inspirations from a range of styles, cultures, media, materials, and fields. From all aspects of space and living: finding those which form our contemporary composite lifestyle. Defining the colors in our world. Projects and thoughts by Dionysus Cho.
China / Dalian / Day 02 Food time! We headed downtown to hit up a cluster of malls for some exploring and consuming of food court dishes. Crazy food overload. Mmmmmm.
From Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, comes Escape Plan – an action movie where they are firstly intellectuals and secondly action heroes. Focused around (you guessed it) an escape plan, this movie puts forth an interesting prison concept.
From Piranesi to Bentham (creator of the Panopticon), the design of prisons have been a curiosity for architects. As architecture is already heavily based on control – be it experiential or wayfinding, etc. – the prison is the ultimate test for designing a comprehensively controlling device where structure is pitted against human behavior.
As an undercover prison escape artist (or, the official title: structural-security authority), Ray Breslin (Stallone), matches wits with the architect, prison warden Hobbes. Coincidentally, Hobbes has studied Breslin’s works thoroughly and has designed the perfect prison based on his books.
This is the design. Here’s my thoughts.
For maximum transparency, each cell is constructed from thick acrylic (or glass?) panes at each cell face held together by a heavy industrial metal frame. Seams run vertically along the center of each face, for some minimal ventilation. A fluorescent light box overhead drowns the prisoner in perpetual brightness. Oh yeah, and each prisoner is provided a toilet and a bed.
While transparent to surveillance, prisoners are also given visual access to the infrastructure, guards, and each other. As Bentham might suggest, the visual isolation of the prisoner from his surroundings would be ideal in that he would be constantly unaware of the authority. In this way, he would be unable to determine when he was actually actively watched or when the guards were otherwise predisposed – he would consider himself constantly under surveillance.
The cell configurations are an interesting take on the radial Panopticon approach – if only just a little. According to the drawings, pods of six cells are arrayed radially forming a hexagon. This is modified in the “built” structure where one pod is replaced with a staircase module for access to the central platform.
This cell cluster is inefficient spatially while providing little benefit in terms of control. The prisoners are in full view of the guards who make their rounds above or below, but the inverse is true as well. While radial, the center has no importance, except for access, and the radial geometry is not performative. The choice of weaving staircases in the circulation is likewise inefficient, as dragging drugged or unruly prisoners is made that much tougher. For the prisoners, the seams of the panes on adjacent cells provides opportunities for communication, which would be detrimental for control.
Oh, and plumbing for the toilet would be a nice addition!
Hinting at the Panopticon, though updated with surveillance technology, each pod is serviced by what looks like a soccer ball with multiple cameras. This can be seen hoisted above the center of the pod, and descends intermittently for prisoner inspection.
Here, Breslin get’s a startling introduction to the Eye as it drops into view. An industrial mechanisms with cameras pointing randomly. A friendly reminder that one is being remotely watched – in addition to the numerous masked and armed guards, of course.
The descending camera ball is strangely low-tech and cluinky. I hope they’re 3D lenses – at least they look like it. While the sudden appearance of the camera ball is startling the first time it drops down, it also provides a clear sign of when surveillance is and isn’t active. Surveillance should be constant or have the appearance of such: make it always present or always hidden. The Panopticon watch tower accomplishes this through obscurity of the watcher while CCTV deters through constant monitoring.
A fly-through of the prison block reveals that the overall pod organization is an aesthetic one. Each pod is either resting on the ground or elevated – steel stilts or suspended from above – creating a sparsely populated ward with a random scattering of clusters. While this amounts to a slick scene, industrial steel with cold streaks of light and glowing highlights of yellow rails, this provides for a pretty inefficient system.
Five cells take up an enormous amount of room, since no clusters are stacked or adjacent. This may be to enforce the feeling of isolation (for the viewer), but this is a huge waste of space and manpower. Winding circulation connecting all the units increase travel distance and times for guard patrols, while the maze of disorganized clusters compounds the confusion. This would be remedied by generating a more efficient layout and organization of circulation and cameras. If all the glazed panes were also layered with a one way mirror or similar material, this would instantly render the outside world invisible (and be super annoying).
While it was fun to look at this design pseudo-seriously, it’s obviously just a movie and not a prison design competition. Pointing out the flaws in a supposedly perfect design was the entire point of the movie, and since the concept was provocative, it got me thinking. Cool concept art doesn’t have to function, but it sure does look stunning.
Of course, if all this is sealed up in a boat in the middle of the ocean…then hardly any of this matters. But any flaw turns into an escape route for the notorious Ray Breslin!
Re-Cycle is a Silent-Hill-esque horror/fantasy that lingers in the world of nightmares. I won’t really go into the movie, which I also wouldn’t quite recommend, but one thing that it has going for it is a handful of great visuals.
While not definitively architectural, Re-Cycle is broken into dream stages with distinct environments that are reflective of the title – a broken world. Though I like to fault the entire film for being derivative (a conglomeration of horror cliches, one after another), I enjoyed the decaying backdrops through which the author meanders.
The first, a maze of staircases the author falters at, somewhere between a Piranesi Prison, an Escher, and a Harry Potter – with the unmistakable tinge of Hong Kong and CG.
Ruins of a carnival/tenement. Broken down Ferris wheels on the ground, pendulous pirate ride above. I have to admit that the ship was an ominous touch (like some swinging scythe) which I also wouldn’t mind riding.
Hm. I didn’t care much for the rationale for this junkyard – a world generated from the author’s discarded childhood toys? – but the heaps of decomposing doll corpses was convincingly dystopian-y. The glories of capitalism.
Donate your old stuff, yo!
Books! Books, books, books! The library of abandoned ideas. Not so much action going on here. While not visually arresting, and while piles of books in movies aren’t new, a Tetris-style shelving methodology combined with the haphazardly looming tower – sporadically raining volumes – reflected the jumbled thoughts of an author’s mind. Like Stephen King’s memory palace in…that movie…
And to top it off, pre-Avatar Avatar floating islands. There wasn’t any reason for these, beyond aesthetic bonuses for the viewer, but who doesn’t like a landscape decapitated mountaintops hovering in the distance. Gratuitous eye candy. Mmm.
Oh, and they rain zombies. That’s a plus.
Re-Cycle is a little dated now, coming out in 2006, so the CG has a real aftertaste of CG. That’s why the screencaps give off an air of concept art illustration rather than some seamless hyper-reality. Nevertheless, it tried hard and I enjoyed some (ugh. fetus world wasn’t cool) of these fantasy worlds in ruins.
I picked up a book at a thrift store last Christmas in Vancouver with the intent of gleaning collage material. I wasn’t in the market for such a thing or in the middle of such a project, but flipping through these images – they just screamed: “MASH ME TOGETHER!!!“. And so I bought it and brought it with me to New Haven.
And here we are.
Before I trim them down for whatever nefarious reuse they’ll end up facing, I thought I would scan a few of my favorite pages in their original state. The book is a collection of folk art from Yang Liu Qing village, which specialized in these lively woodblock prints dating from as far back as 400 years from the Ming Dynasty.
The theme of these prints are all focused on the New Years festivities and folk lore – hence (I assume) the slightly creepy overly smiley undertone. Appropriately, a chubby boy cuddles a huge fish while donning a nightmarishly casual grin. Just another day.
This is the image that sold the book. I love this take on the tiger. The colors of an uncooked shrimp (tiger shrimp?). The braided back hair marking the spine. The strange folding of the teeth. That one large molar. The human nose. The mischievous reverse-unibrow (shaved?) coupled with oddly feminine lashes.
I can’t blame them though, because if I were drawing tigers without knowing what they looked like first, it would probably look about five times less tiger-y than this. I have Google images and the zoo, though.
Okay. This is interesting in pretty much every way. A Chinese ninja is popping out of a portal in the top right. People are running from the background to the foreground in leaping poses. Some sneaky business is going on within the gates on the right. One guy lost is sword and is about to get chopped in half. Another is being tied and simultaneously beaten with a brick. On the far left, an old guy is sneaking away stealthily on manback.
This painting is wonderful in the background architecture. I am sure it is depicting imagined historical architecture, but the strange proportions/perspective and colors makes it seem like a retro-futuristic temple landscape of buildings housed within huge climate controlled shrink-wrap bubbles.
And this pair is just amazingly invigorating. The combination of the intensity of the figure – both in expression and pose – along with the exuberant patterning which lifts off of the textile, creates a lively couple. The odd bat-like creatures with which each is focused on – mysterious demons they are guarding against. The damage and weathering only adds to the texture of the piece.
That’s the collection, and the bits of imagery and history that drew my attention to them.
Pulling them out of context and intention is the next step.
I finally had the chance (note: reposting a post from my old blog) to make it to the Ai Wei Wei exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, Ai Wei Wei: According to What?; I loved it. Of course. Now that the exhibition is coming to a close, I thought it would be a good time to dust off the photos I had snapped and unpack the thoughts and inspirations from the viewing.
There is a directness in the pieces that I like. It is easy to consume. The message is clear. On point. It is as lumbering and in your face as the artist is (that’s clear in the confrontational documentaries we sat through).
For example, the devaluation of the single pearl by placing it within two heaping piles is simple – the valuation of an item is the result of an artificial human market construct playing on our perceptions of rarity. Despite this notion, the message is contrasted by the solitary guard which looms persistently over the glowing pots and the eager viewers peering (somewhat lustily – they’re pearls after all, and not diamonds or gold doubloons) at the treasure. It’s giving us a message and at the same time daring us to try and see through it. We don’t. We lose.
Neat.
Or the Tea House. Of course, this is another piece I didn’t take a photo of, so let me explain it a little. The Tea House is not an architectural design, but the literal compression of tea leaves into the form of a simple house extrusion. Tea. House. Ha! Having read the Book of Tea (randomly, I don’t know why) and touched on the architecture of Japanese tea hoses in a school course here, I find it a fresh take on the much beloved tea house. Ai Wei Wei’s piece abandons the weight of the endless layers of traditions and rituals that usually accompanies the architectural – both traditional and contemporary – design of these almost religious pavilions. Tea is not that. It is cheap and just another product to be vacuumed packed into a compressed cube for mass export and consumption. There is no beauty here, nor is there house beyond a reference.
Forget value. Forget ritual. Forget Architecture. This is everyday and now.
That’s my thought on it, anyway.
I did have one complaint, though. Why was the exhibit so small?? I wanted more and more, but two floors only stretched through a few larger installations and some smaller sculptures. On my way out, though, I went through his diorama boxes, which were in the lobby, and his unfortunately placed bicycle array in a separate hall (easy to pass by and why was it so cramped?). Two bonus pieces. I guess one can never be satisfied.
I took photos of the rest which caught my eye, so I’ll just end with a stream of photos. If you missed it in Brooklyn, then you can soak these up. If you saw it, then you know what’s up.
An adaptation of the adventures of Theseus from Greek mythology, I enjoyed the Immortals despite its rather loose plot, but for its strikingly and beautifully out-of-place architecture.
After watching 300: Rise of An Empire in theaters (note: reposting from my old blog), memories of Immortals came to mind. This resulted in an immediate re-watch. While the plot holes hadn’t sealed themselves up, nor had the strange god-helmets been erased in post, I soaked up the incredibly fresh take on the architecture of pre-history (1228BC).
The Sybelline Monastery, housing the four Seers, takes on a very modern aesthetic of sharp rectilinear cuts and seamless detailing. The interior (above), takes this further, with hovering panels forming dramatic cruciform voids in the chamber entrance, while a tiled platform rests on a bed of stones.
The exterior form reveals an intersection of cubes – massive monoliths with slits of shadow reveals. As Hyperion and his army approaches (conveniently for scale), an equally massive classic statue greets them.
Of course, this tranquility doesn’t last long. The quarrying of the site, however, enhances the monastery, as it now seems to protrude from the fractured rock as some crystalline structure. Here, one of the gods makes a meteoric entrance.
Theseus’ home is cut into the side of a cliff. While it would be an obvious stronghold, it isn’t very well defended. The diagonal passages cut into the cliff, leading to the Labyrinth temple and the clustering stacks of houses built in the carved void, but not cut out from the rock (as, perhaps, the tufa grottoes of the Greeks might have been). This feels like a good homey base. Earthy.
The oasis tower, somewhere in the desert mines, is a strikingly simple, but beautiful moment of respite. Why slaves get to linger here, is beyond me. A curved wall wraps the tower, with a single slice pulled out as the entrance. This entrance changes later in the movie, but oh well.
Magic.
From above, the glint of the pool is overlooked by a richly textured octagonal room. I don’t really understand what it’s for, but the place is a pleasant mix of geometries and random fish reliefs, and blends into the endless desert sands.
I’ve never imagined what Mount Olympus should look like, but this looks about right. On some infinitely high peak, a viewing platform is entrenched into the rock, allowing for the gods to gaze down while looking godly gold-tinted. Nice.
The Labyrinth isn’t as labyrinthine as one might expect, but that’s quickly forgotten. At the center, a circular room lined with urns and divided by intersecting stairs (over a huge wax head? weird.) makes for a dramatic Minotaur death spot. It’s also interesting that this Minotaur isn’t the beast you would imagine, either.
Hyperion. He’s a king, after all, so he gets the sweet tent. A sweeping wall at the base stretching the bright red fabric, an armored entrance and some crazy tripod holding up the central peak. I saw this and thought to myself, this is what I want in my life.
Camping like a BOSS.
The final stand. This wall itself was pretty tame: a dam without water. However, on top of this dam is revealed the temple which also, conveniently, secretly fronts the path into the mountain. This mountain houses the imprisoned Titans. Not much here, but the arcing walls that mediate this intersection, and the two fins which flank it, made it a pretty grand entrance.
The interior is dramatic. Four giants hoisting a domed ceiling with a Pantheon-style oculus. Standing guard over a Titan pit? Presumably excavated from the mountain itself, this is would make for an appropriate communist/fascist monument, if not for Zeus.
Well. I enjoyed this movie a lot. Of course, being another Hollywood action flick, it’s easy to dismiss it for its obvious lack of substance, but the designs behind the shots were incredible, without being overtly wacky or predictably accurate (who wants to see the same bland marble temples?). A period piece, per se, foregoing the period. I like the approach, and it worked well, giving an otherwise meh movie a good kick.
Sometimes, it’s hard to look back when you’re into the future – to see the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright as a hero in the age of Zaha. But digging out these drawings provides an (odd) breath of fresh air. While doing a little bit of precedent research, I was found a couple vintage sketches and drawings from Wright. This is not the smooth organic digital formalism that’s pervasive in our schools and beginning to bleed into real life; sharp angular cuts and tight geometric arrays reveals a retro-futuristic aesthetic that remains inspirational.
These are from an unbuilt project from 1926, The Steel Cathedral for a Million People. Mainstream Architects would view this as just another Wright drawing – intricate linework and meticulously laid out proportions and angles. This is true, but other theorists (me) wonder if there is a more, otherworldly undertone – there is an eery quality to it; this looks rather like the groundworks for an HR Giger-esque Alien temple.
An Alien beauty.
Sinuous and interweaving.
Perhaps it’s the overbearing symmetry. The relentless mirroring that is so alien. Or maybe the texture of the paper or the quality of the hand drafting – that fading sepia ink – that makes it strange.
Or maybe it’s the megalithic scale. At first, distracted by the drawing itself, one misses the telltale halftone sketch of the Egyptian Pyramid or the Parisian Eiffel tower easily dwarfed in both height and mass by the Cathedral.
Unlike the cruciforms of classical cathedrals or stadium bowls of contemporary ones, the Steel Cathedral employs a strange organic form. Within the pyramid, the radial symmetry is less Church and more hive – a honeycombing of spaces. Which religion is this cathedral for?
Oh, and all in a rainbow of colors.
Not much like a human church, but a more alien architecture. Which makes me wonder if the Million People were meant for People – in a different way. More…sinister way.
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