AI-Architects lead Istanbullu responds, "Once in a while an article makes delightfully refreshing connections between works that we care about - "Along the Lines of Architecture" by Richard Weston frolics through and around some of our 20th + early 21st Century icons and makes us want to re-visit a few - cerebrally if not corporeally."
Richard Weston's article is below:
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A year or two ago I heard an interview with Zaha Hadid about her Aquatics Centre for the London Olympics in which she observed that ‘there’s nothing special about the right-angle’. Tell that to Mondrian, I thought! I bet even Ms. Hadid sleeps on a horizontal bed and walks in a vertical posture – her load centred under the influence of gravity unless a strong wind demands otherwise.
Sometimes, of course, structural or other requirements do demand otherwise – as in Nikolaus Pevsner’s notorious misunderstanding of Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia. In Pioneers of Modern Design he criticized the inclined columns as irrational, clearly unaware of Gaudí’s admirably simple explanation of the rationale behind his brilliant elimination of the ‘crutches’ of buttresses deployed in medieval Gothic: ‘my columns lean for the same reason that I place my walking stick at an angle if I wish to lean on it for support.’
These thoughts were prompted by the shortlisted designs for the V&A’s Boilerhouse Yard – site of Daniel Libeskind’s ambitious, ill-fated and determinedly anti-orthogonal ‘Spiral’ extension. As befits our economically straitened times the new brief calls for a far more modest underground gallery with public plaza above. Tony Fretton’s proposal, not surprisingly, is of Miesian probity in its observance of traditional orthogonal norms, but all the other finalists opt for swirling angles, flowing curves or the unashamedly biomorphic.
