Images for September 10th: Tales of Architecture in the Tradition of Vasari

Late breaking update: no sooner had I spoken of Ray and Charles Eames, and their movie The Powers of Ten but that Alice Rawsthorn's article about the Eameses and this very movie appeared in the Sunday Times supplement!

Talk about having the pulse of that aspect of contemporaneous context - of being zeitgebundet - of which I also spoke~!

Here's the link to the Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2009/09/13/style/t/index.html#pageName=13rawsthorn

Back to the original thread of images to accompany the chat of September 10th:





Giorgio Vasari, architect, painter and author of "Lives of the Artists" circa 1550, in which he chronicled - and commented upon - the quirks and personalities of the Renaissance. In fact, it was Vasari who coined the term - "rinascita".










John Hejduk's favorite dismissal of poor student work - "it's a flat experience" and the story of marching with the penguins is one of my least opaque experiences of the long-time dean of Cooper Union.















Here's a fairly indicative snapshot of Hejduk, taken before his renovation of the Cooper Union Foundation Building - the gesturing, the sweater, the tie - all vintage Hejduk. Note the original wall decorations in the background, all of which were removed during that modernization:











The sort of presentation drawing so in vogue (and expected by Mr Graves when he visited our museum design class at Harvard Design School) at Cooper, Princeton and Cornell in the 1970s are best illustrated by these drawings, contemporaneous with Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit:

A Hejduk drawing - Half House



















And as seen in an early Eisenman drawing.










And last, as a parting image - Ray and Charles Eames (for you cannot speak of one without the other.)









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But, as a footnote - Jerzy Soltan's limerick, to be used only at an Italian stone quarry:

Aqua fresca
Vino puro
Ficca stretta
Cazza duro.

Fresh water
Pure wine
Fuck straight
Shit hard.

I leave it to you, dear listener, to determine how best to use this limerick.

Your host,

Curtis B Wayne