inequality landscapes

Christo and Jeanne Claude’s floating piers /  Art has the power to change the landscape. Whether they were wrapping the Reichstag in a million square feet of fabric, or raising a 365-foot-high curtain across a valley in Colorado, Christo and Jeanne-Claude produced visual feats that resonated with the public in a way few artists ever have.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude waited 32 years to shroud 161 trees in black and white polyester mesh in a park in Basel, Switzerland; nearly 25 years to get the green light to install “The Gates” in Central Park; 24 years for the German government to give the approval to wrap the Reichstag in Berlin in aluminum-colored fabric; 10 years for French authorities to approve their vision for shrouding the Pont Neuf in Paris with 454,178 square feet of champagne-colored textile; seven years before they were able to plant a forest of umbrellas in the rice paddies near Tokyo and along the hillsides of Southern California.

Given the ephemeral nature of these installations, all that remains is the indelible memory. “It creates an incredible urgency,” Christo said, “because it will never take place again. That’s why it’s so exciting.”

text via http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/arts/design/art-that-lets-you-walk-on-water.html?_r=0

More on this project:

Superstudio / Anti-architecture /

HALF A CENTURY AGO, a group of 20-something architecture students from Florence decided to assume the small task of conceiving an alternative model for life on earth. Contemptuous of the long reign of Modernism, which they felt had sold itself as a cure to society’s ills and never delivered, they were jazzed by American science-fiction novels and the political foment of the 1960s. They gave themselves the colorfully assured name Superstudio... — the New York Times 

 In recent decades “landscape” has taken on an expanded definition in architecture. In the first half of the twentieth century, the architectural avant-garde celebrated autonomy from nature, and architects devised utopian schemes for creating urban realms ex novo, with little consideration for their surroundings. More recently, however, the challenges of a threatened environment and rapidly expanding cities have fostered a revised understanding of landscape. Harmony between the spatial, social, and environmental aspects of human life has become a priority in political thought, and this has had profound reverberations in both architecture and landscape design. "Landscape"—no longer understood merely as nature untouched—now encompasses complex interventions by architects and landscape architects in urban and rural surroundings.

Links to know more about them:

http://www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/2011/03/22/radical-visions.html

Moscow's Narkomfin building: Soviet blueprint for collective living – Designed by architects Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis in 1928, the building represents an important chapter in Moscow’s development – as both a physical city and an ideological state. Narkomfin was a laboratory for social and architectural experimentation to transform the byt (everyday life) of the ideal socialist citizen.

In the years following the 1917 Russian revolution, living conditions in the newly established Soviet Union left much to be desired. Newcomers moving from the countryside with the promise of a new life arrived in an overcrowded and underdeveloped Moscow with very little infrastructure or housing. Architects were tasked with developing a solution for the housing shortage – and a framework to support the changing face of Russian society.

Enter the “social condenser”, an idea developed by the Organisation of Contemporary Architects, who spearheaded revolutionary ideas of collective living through standardised Stroikom units, confining private amenities to a single cell while facilities like kitchens and living space were communal. Thanks to this design, the Narkomfin building appears as one long apartment block, connected to a smaller communal structure by a covered walkway and a central garden space.

But communist values were not the only ideals behind the Narkomfin: women too were set to be emancipated. “Petty housework crushes, strangles and degrades … chains her to the kitchen”, wrote Lenin in A Great Beginning. “The real emancipation of women, real communism, will begin only where and when an all-out struggle begins ... against this petty housekeeping.”

Yet the communal and feminist values behind Narkomfin went stale almost as soon as the building was completed in 1932, and only a handful of such projects were completed before Stalin’s Five Year Plan halted the experiment. After Stalin’s rise to power, the communal and emancipatory values the architecture intended to inspire were quickly rejected as “leftist” or Trotskyist, and Narkomfin’s communal spaces fell in disrepair. Residents illegally installed makeshift kitchen units into their homes and the recreation space originally planned for the building’s rooftop was instead dominated by a penthouse apartment for the commissar of finance, Nikolai Milyutin.

Having since suffered years of neglect, Narkomfin is now caught in a tug-of-war battle between developers seeking to capitalise on the building’s central Moscow location, and those campaigning for its full restoration.

text via the guardian

other sources to learn about Narkomfin:

http://engineer-history.ru/blog/2015/07/16/house-of-narkomfin-photos-from-the-tour/

http://calvertjournal.com/comment/show/2294/narkomfin-moscow-constructivism-renovation

https://thecharnelhouse.org/2013/10/05/dom-narkomfin-in-moscow-1929/