“Another sky” for Santiago
In regards to performance, we know that there is a level of multidisciplinary work that you must be aware of to think about issues like these. Designing public spaces is also a negotiation between many different agents or factors. How you see it in political terms when architects are doing their job? The profession is increasingly restricted, but also more open to new strategies. And, with the strategies that have been developed, how do you see the future of architecture in terms of how to produce new types of work? How, in a sense, to resist traditional practices that were more or less what you were practicing before entering the studio? - This issue could take several days... We are going through an interesting moment. When Liz and Rick began they were very interested in new technologies, in media, in the way that media invades our lives, and how we appear through media. This is previous to the era in which the Internet became so important for everyone, before social networks. What happened is that today everyone is transmitting their own image everywhere, people are tweeting their lives everywhere. Somehow it has become something very banal, media has become banal to the point where it’s become irrelevant. Then, one area of opportunity is to turn media around or think of what was lost. Or even play with the ubiquity of media and somehow link it to certain uniqueness, and perhaps relate it back to space, which is very particular.
These are very general terms, but I will give an example. Many years ago the Blur Building began as a media pavilion. There is a rule about these pavilions at world fairs and it refers to the claim that they pretend to be technologically advanced, they are based on true technology and high definition. We anticipated the discourse on media saturation in what referred to pictures, digital images and the universality of this material in our lives and culture, and we decided to go in the opposite direction. So instead of making a media pavilion about technology and images, we made one about non-technology, non-images. For this, we took the water from the lake where the pavilion sat and we sprayed it with sprinklers to produce a fog, so we made a cloud. That was it: a great and absolute cloud. One entered the cloud and was blinded, you could not see. It had an interesting impact; it brought the notion of sight closer to the observer, showing it’s an acute sense. But we made it without images. We made it possible by taking from the viewer the ability to see. I believe this project represents an important approach as to create something new, without using either new materials or new technology. In fact, in some ways it’s moving backward with regard to materiality.
101
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online