hipercroquis

1. Beyond a certain critical mass, a building becomes a big
building. Such a mass can no longer be controlled by a single
architectural gesture, or even by any combination of architectural
gestures. This impossibility triggers the autonomy of its parts, but
that is not the same as fragmentation: the parts remain committed to
the whole.

2. The elevator -with its potential to establish mechanical rather
than architectural connections- and its family of related inventions
render null and void the classical repertoire of architecture. Issues
of composition, scale, proportion, detail are now moot. The art of
architecture is useless in Bigness.

3. In Bigness, the distance between core and envelope increases to
the poin where the facade can no longer reveal what happens inside. The
humanist expectation of “honesty” is doomed: interior and exterior
architectures become separate projects, one dealing with the
instability of programmatic and iconographic needs, the other – agent
of disinformation – offering the city the apparent stability of an
object. Where architecture reveals, Bigness perplexes, Bigness
transform the city from a summation of certainties into an accumulation
of mysteries. What you see is no longer what you get.

4. Though size alone, such buildings enter an amoral domain, beyond good or bad. Their impact is independent of their quality.

5. Together, all these breaks – with scale, with architectural
composition, with tradition, with transparency, with ethics – imply the
final, most radical break: Bigness is no longer part of any urban
tissue. It exists; at most, it coexists. Its subtext is fuck context.

SMLXL by OMA

powered by performancing firefox