Jean Dubuffet’s definition of art brut for la Compagnie de L’Art Brut, formed in 1948. His Collection de l’Art Brut is in Lausanne. www.artbrut.ch/fr_CH/art-brut/qu-est-ce-que-l-art-brut
ON SITE r e v i e w
call for articles on site review 36: our material future
We have, right now: habitat loss fierce weather complex diversity political chaos populations on the move
Denys Lasdun felt his best building was the 1960 Royal College of Physicians, set into the Georgian terraces of Regent’s Park, London. We don’t get this kind of photograph of outside space anymore, noir-ish, uncompromising, heroic, concrete: terraces for the dark life of the soul. The public spaces of modernism were adult spaces. They weren’t spaces of power but of public access, and that was, given the history of European property ownership and display, a serious business in a serious material. Concrete is critical here: no nostalgia, nor sentiment for any past. There was a time, briefly, in the postwar era, when the future was not tasked with pulling the past, no matter how glorious, into the present. There had been a rupture; everything was on the move: populations, society, industry, technology: the material language in architecture that responded to this upheaval was a new language. A similar response occurred in Spain after the end of the Franco regime: the architecture of 1980s Barcelona in particular was unlike anything seen before. These periods are brief. The future is heady, possibilities are open. Mourning for the past is done.
What structures, materials and forms will persist, and what needs to be replaced? This goes way beyond social desires, fears and beliefs: it is a material conversation where beloved tropes such as narrative, identity, myth, textuality – things that have sustained architectural discourse for decades – are luxuries we can not afford right now; they seem irrelevent in the face of both the present and our future. What will survive? Can we design an architecture for survival that will itself survive? Is there anything that we see around us now that can guide us?
Denys Lasdun. Royal College of Physicians, London, 1960
deadline for proposals: 1 August 2019 use the contact panel at onsitereview.ca
On Site review 35 : the material culture of architecture
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