Bwog could not help but notice architecture students toiling in the spartan studios of Buell Hall in the early morning hours last week on something very much like this vaguely geodesic sculpture, which has now managed to find its way to the puny lawn in front of Avery. Is it someone’s desperate attempt to stand out during midterms? A piece of cultural commentary on landscaping invoking skeletal meta-shrubbery? Or does it mark the potential return of former arch school dean Bernard Tschumi, who designed the almost equally deconstructivist Lerner Hall and whose books include notoriously impenetrable philosophical diatribes on the nature of “man and object”?
Perhaps we will only understand once we, too, swallow architecture students’ patented nightly melange of Adderall and Red Bull and wander their still-crowded studios at 4:30AM…
-CJS
9 Comments
@derrida Derrida could be turning (or not turning… ok he is simulataneously doing both) in his grave. a piece of architecture is not “deconstructivist”. deconstruction is a process, a living moment and a building is not accurately described as such
@yemm I beg to differ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstructivist
@arch students are douchebags
@Isn't Tschumi off busy with that big museum in Athens?
@yeah …which he believes will somehow *actually* lure the elgin marbles back from london…so he’s not really returning. just seemed like an odd harbinger of his presence
@llllllll I don’t really understand what’s deconstructionist about Lerner.
@the ramps plus the fact that the glass wall is like a hole in its otherwise sturdy masonary facade make it seem like a typical columbia building that’s being torn or is falling apart- hence “deconstructionist”.
other deconstructionist buildings make far less reference to what, exactly, they’re deconstructing, and merely look as if they’re falling over and being shredded apart. think of it as the visual manifestation of derrida.
@I should make clear that the term is technically “deconstructivist”…whoops.
@wirc Uhh… the ramps have nothing to do with deconstruction. The glass is there because it is supposed to look like the courtyards of the original quads. The ramps themselves have something to do with the abstruse concepts of “vector,” “envelope,” and “event,” the meaning of which Bernard Tschumi keeps in his red scarf.
That stupid column on the corner, or the window in ferris booth, or the glass block wall on the back of building are. Bernard Tschumi really does not do much deconstruction.