Dimensies

Steie van Vugt made a mirror installation that played with the dimensions of a space: the mirrors pull the space apart like a kaleidoscope and display conflicting images. The installation emphasizes and blurs angles and holes, creating both calmness and complexity. Dimensies gives an empty concrete space a unique finishing touch and lets people reflect on how they experience a space.

emmanuelle moureaux architecture & design: 'kaleidoscope' exhibition

emmanuelle moureaux architecture + design designed offices and showrooms of
nakagawa chemical CS design center, in tokyo which displays 1100 colors in the space.
the 'kaleidoscope' exhibition which was recently held at the center focused on
one color at a time such as yellow, red, green, blue or black. every month, the space
displayed a different color, changing hues like a kaleidoscope. the exhibition
aimed to rediscover ordinary colors.

360° kaleidoscope

360° kaleidoscope from Frank Freitag on Vimeo.

nicholas de larmessin

Surrealist architecture

(Claude Nicolas Ledoux Théatre de Besançon, vue de l'interieur)

Antoni Gaudi
Ferdinand Cheval
Simon Rodia
Bruno Taut
Hermann Finsterlin
Frank Lloyd Wright
Bruce Alonzo Goff
Frederick Kiesler

Surrealist architecture includes : designs for towns or for houses which the painters and poets of the movement set out in their works : the work of both classical and contemporary architects whom they admired; and finally various constructions from the designs of decorators and builders who were connected with the surrealist movement. It is an irrational architecture which does not fall in with any ideas of comfort; it is figurative, even metaphorical. Its aim is to make habitable monumental pieces of sculpture, preferably representing creatures or objects.

The surrealists were always interested in architecture; but, before making any practical proposals for this form of art, they used it mainly to achieve an effect of exile, of disorientation, in their painting and poetry. Many of their paintings are based on fantastic architectural landscapes, as detailed as the engravings of Piranesi. In La Peinfure аи defi (1930), Aragon remarked that 'a juxtaposition of the early paintings of Chirico would result in the creation of a town whose plan could be drawn'. Andre Masson and Max Ernst both made drawings of imaginary cities, and in the canvases of Dali, Delvaux and Kay Sage there are all manner of unexpected buildings. In his series of Dwellings (1966), Georges Malkine evokes imaginary houses conceived as particularly suitable for various famous people.

Kaleidoscopic internal Spaces

(above, Kaleidoscopic internal Spaces, drawing)
(below, the Regent Palace, Hotel under constuction 2009)

According to the chosen site, the Regent Palace Hotel, which is still under construction (2009-2012) (Figure 19), people are able to see the demolish situation inside but remain the old façade outside. This drawing (Figure 20) represents inner parts of the building reconstructed via a verity of interior constitutions such as doors, curtains, toilets, rooms, decorations, and lobby and so on in the hotel. The internal power of this building keeps combining interior elements together. Therefore, viewers are able to redefine or re-imagine the interior of this hotel from stereotypical historical images and perceptions.

After taking apart the interior elements of this historical hotel, the distorted mages blur the boundary of different spaces. The definitions of rooms, toilets, shops, kitchens, lobbies and so on are none existent anymore. Just like the under construction site, the preserved façades is the meaning of “The Regent Place Hotel.”

And when the chaos and mess factors are combined, the combination provides a chance to inspect the relationship of interior and exterior, architecture and cityscape. The internal architecture could be treated as a collector or generator, which contains cityscape, memory images beside physical objects.

Blasted Architecture

(Lee Miller,Bridge of Sighs, Kinghtsbridge, Lonson,1940)
Tristan Tzara suggested that the pantheon should be cut in half vertically, and the two halves set 50 centimeters apart, and the poet Paul Eluard predicted that “one day house will be turned inside out like gloves”. The house has a cosmic wholeness that we apprehend in childhood—four sides, four windows, a door, a pitched roof and a chimney. But it is also subject or attack, fragmentation, conflagration and collapse. The house that goes up must come down; this is especially true if we think of the house as a mirror of our won fragile being.
The first manifesto of surrealism in 1924 celebrated “psychic automatism” as central tenet of movement. Breton and fellow surrealists experimented with so-called “sleep séances” to induce automatic speech at the same time as in a trance. The ideal was to access the unconscious as far as possible unmediated by the rational mind. Although later rejected, it being impossible to deny the imposition of reason, the “sleep séances” certainly served as a playful and instructive way of loosening inhibitions and subverting convention.