Hasta La Creative!

(TrendHunter.com) Taking a break from ridiculously tall buildings, Dubai has unveiled the region’s first Museum of Middle East Modern Art. The impressive project was launched by His Highness Shaikh Mohammed bin Rashid…

(TrendHunter.com) Architecture has always been one of the most alluring categories of design. Some believe that architecture represents the pinnacle of man’s achievement.

This delicious gallery features the top 30 architecture…

(TrendHunter.com) Innovations in architecture and construction materials are always welcomed because of the growing interest into going “green”.

The rammed earth construction for buildings is incredibly old. It can…

Another season, another exhibition worth taking the train to Florence for at Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina.

Marnix de Nijs‘ latest installation, Exploded Views – Remapping Firenze, spectacularly recreates a visual and dynamic body experience of the city. Minus the added visual layer of the hordes of tourists who walk through its cobbled streets every day.

See for yourself:

Two industrial treadmills in front of a huge screen display renderings of a deserted Florence. The 3D images are put into motion by the physical effort made by the viewer(s)/runner(s)/performer(s). The speed of his or her movements directly guides the intensity of the aesthetic experience. Sensors placed in the handle bar detect movements, and allow the viewer to determine which direction should be followed and what will be the intensity of the images traversed.

Exploded Views – Remapping Firenze

That might sound a bit like de Nijs’ famous installation Run, Motherfucker Run.

There are some similarities of course. There’s the irresistible element of risk. Don’t be fooled by the cushion which gently inflates behind you as you run…. Runners don’t have much more control on the probability of their fall as they have on its location (i did witness some “lateral falls” but they were totally benign.) I actually wonder what would happen with this installation in “risk-management” crazy Britain. But that’s another story.

Just like in RMR, the runners meets with the emptiness of the city, with an almost total absence of any human imprint on the spaces. In Remapping Firenze however, the human presence is crawling back into the city through a store of sounds registered in the city by audio designer Boris Debackere.

Run Mother Fucker Run

The runner can only hear the field recordings when navigating slowly through the geometry of the streets and buildings. When they accelerate, contact with human voices and noises is lost. Which touches upon one of the most impressive characteristics of Remapping Firenze: running and slowing down/stopping on the treadmill provides the public with a totally different perspective.While you adopt a gentle walking pace, the city looks real and recognizable in all its touristic cliches and beauty but once you run, you enter a new dimension, the one of modernization and globalization which Florence, just like any other city, has to live up to, no matter how fascinating the history lurking behind its thick walls can be.

RMR shows a modern city. It was in fact Rotterdam but unless you intimately know Rotterdam there was no hint of the actual location. It could have been anywhere. As its name attests, Remapping Firenze is deeply grounded in its location.

Exploded Views – Remapping Firenze

The images on the screen are part film, part computer graphics re-creation. They were created using a brand new scanning software, developed both at the Technische Universität Darmstadt and at the University of Washington. The system generates a kind of extremely detailed 3D. Its functioning is very different from the usual procedure to generate 3D images. This one works with image recognition. When a peculiar spots in the picture is recognized in different pictures, it become the reference point of the 3d meshes.

Marnix de Nijs, Rendering Exploded Views Remapping Firenze, 2008

Exploded Views – Remapping Florence was made especially for the CCCS. It’s the first of a series of works by leading international artists who have been invited to Florence to create site-specific works that reflect the diverse realities of this city’. Catch it while you can. The exhibitionis open until June 30 at Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina in Palazzo Strozzi, Florence.

(TrendHunter.com) A ridiculously tall building that is not in Dubai? Yes. As the name suggests, standing at 2000 feet (610 meters) tall, the Tokyo Sky Tree will actually be in the heart of Tokyo.

Set to finish in 2011…

(TrendHunter.com) The U.S. National Park Service wants to add a luxury hotel to one of the world’s most famous islands: Alcatraz. Plans are to offer accommodations like the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park.

Alcatraz…

(TrendHunter.com) BSB Design has developed a low-cost, high-quality, prefab house for South Africans. The entire home is shipped in one box and can be easily assembled in one day by four people, using only a supplied s…

The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock, by Steven Jacobs (available on Amazon USA and UK.)

010 publishers write: In the films of Alfred Hitchcock, architecture plays an important role. Having worked as a set designer in the early 1920s, Hitchcock remained intensely concerned with the art direction of his films. In addition, the ‘master of suspense’ made some remarkable single-set films, such as Rope and Rear Window, that explicitly deal with the way the confines of the set relate to those of the architecture on screen. Spaces of confinement also turn up in the ‘Gothic plot’ of films in which the house is presented as an uncanny labyrinth and a trap. Furthermore, it became a Hitchcock hallmark to use famous monuments as the location for a climactic scene. Last but not least, Hitchcock used architectural motifs such as stairs and windows, which are closely connected to Hitchcockian narrative structures (suspense) or typical Hitchcock themes (voyeurism). Apart from dealing with these issues extensively, Steven Jacobs discusses at length a series of domestic buildings with the help of a number of reconstructed floor plans especially made for this publication.

1966 “Torn Curtain,” Director Alfred Hitchcock. 1966 Universal. – Image MPTV.net

This is one dangerous book for people like me who don’t need an excuse to jump in the sofa and watch a Hitchcock movie instead of staying in front of the computer to work. Still, no matter how many books have been written about the “Master of Suspense” i never felt compelled to read any. Until this one.

Author Steven Jacobs claimed that he had written a monograph about an non-existing architect which make more sense than one might think at first sight. After all, movie directors and production designers have been known for using film sets as an intermediary to reflect on the city of the future. Having designed more models than built houses didn’t prevent architectural studio Archigram to be one of the most influential and iconic architectural studios ever. Hitchcock didn’t advance the slightest step in that direction. His art did not explore possible or futuristic architecture but remained grounded in what was available at the time of films, with a marked preference for old-style furniture and bourgeois mansions (think Victorian or his own house near Guildford.)

Lobby Card from Vertigo (1963 reissue). Image tcmdb

The Wrong House (a title referring to the 1956 movie The Wrong Man) is roughly made of two parts.

The first part of the book, the theoretical one, is by far the most fascinating. It explains in details how Hitchcock regarded set design as crucial element of the drama, used both domestic elements and touristic sites as protagonists in the story but also extended the architectural language to camera movements and positions, editing and other cinematographic practices.

1954, Rear Window

Most of the settings for his movies were mounted in studio, where Hitchcock had total control over the shooting conditions. The most bourgeois house was often represented as a space of oppression, danger and a provider of the uncanny. The interior is stuffed and closed, keys give the viewers access to the murder room, and each step on a stair advances the denouement as much as it delays it. Other buildings, even the public ones, are not necessarily safer, perversion lurks behind motel doors, museums are made for mysterious encounters.

1948 James Stewart, Alfred Hitchcock, and Cast on the set of “Rope.” 1948 Warner – Image MPTV.net

In location shootings, the film director had a field day toying with crowds and playing with urban icons. The former gave him some great opportunities to insert his famous cameos. The later included the Golden Gate Bridge, the British Museum, the UN Headquarters, Mount Rushmore which are so intimately connected to the films shot there that it can be said that Hitchcock tailed tourism as much as it stimulated it.

Still from Vertigo, 1958

1959, North by Northwest (via filmposters)

The second part of the book, made of case studies that dissect meticulously the architecture and internal design of 26 houses from 22 different films, is a bit overwhelming. When Jacobs hasn’t been able to trace drawings of sets built in the studio, he reconstructed the floor plans of these houses, mostly on the basis of what he saw in the films. Each movie is investigated from an architectural point of view. That’s how The Balestrero House in The Wrong Man is analyzed under the perspective of Kitchen sink claustrohpobia, Bates house and motel are defined as schizoid, Sebastian house in Notorious is a place for Nazi hominess and that’s how Rebecca discovers that Manderley is in fact Bluebeard’s Castle.

Plan of the ground floor of Manderley in the film Rebecca

I wouldn’t say that The Wrong House is an architecture book. As i am much more interested in architecture than cinema i was surprised to see how metaphorically the term “architecture” was used along its pages. But then i also like to be surprised once in a while….

(TrendHunter.com) The Maxdoor by Nódesign, a Brazilian design firm, is an ultra-modern take on the door for luxury loft apartments. Not only does it integrate sophisticated security touch-sensor lock technologies, but…

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