#massimoscolari

Collage of Manisty Street scheme. Peter Smithson, 1963. Smithson Family Collection.

“Climate change is real, but so is our power to change it. Take action today.”

Should we give up flying for the sake of the climate?

The Climate Changed Architecture

Architecture has always begun with a drawing. Music, as we know, begins with a score. In this manner, both architecture and music have completed a work. Architectural drawings and musical scores live a life of perfect solitude even if in a drawer or an attic. Their future is yet to come. Strangely enough, people cannot conceive of architecture or music without a physical performance. One can build a building and yet wind up without any architecture. A composer may write a score which may never be performed, but it’s lack of being performed does not disqualify it as a piece of music. Herein lies the paradox of unbuilt and unperformed works. They live their own existence, oblivious to time. The power of a drawing and its creative force does not lie merely in its use as a tool for practical purposes. It lies in the beholder’s imagination. A drawing might lodge itself in the mind and build itself to great heights within it. Beethoven composed his last works without physically hearing them played. He heard them in his mind; in his being. So, too, architecture. The contents of architectural drawings, be they realised or not, can enter the imagination of the public. Drawings thereby inscribe themselves as pro-jects: future actions. Just like music, an architectural drawing can wait a long time before revealing itself. Bach’s scores lay for some 200 years, unplayed and unperformed, until Mendelssohn rediscovered them and made them public through performance. Piranesi built only one building; Chernikhov built none - yet their creations are seminal to the history and production of architecture. Architectural drawings have and will continue to act as a spur to the built world. #massimoscolari #glider #daniellibeskind #venice

I am entertained by the association of Scolari's glider and the proportion of its wing, to the principles of area transformation that geometry has left hidden from architectural development. It appears we are only left with the signifiers of a much maligned argument in the repression of a truth.

The sky is cloudy, yellowed by the smoke. Without a break to hang a guess upon. Or rest a little on the lap of life. All closed, in multiplied identity. George Eliot #massimoscolari #glider #architecture #london #georgeeliot