Monday, January 4, 2010

Vampire Weekend


I will be donning the v-neck and knitted tie combo again this week as our design studio at Yale starts on Thursday. I will be off to New Haven roughly once a month from now until May. This will hopefully result in posts on Louis Kahn, VSBA and Paul Rudolph, amongst others, all of whom have buildings in and around New Haven, as well as the fabulously Hogwartian campus itself. Rudolph's car park, in particular, is a beautiful thing, surely the best multi-storey in the world.

This weekend though we're off to the woods of New Canaan to visit Philip Johnson's Glass House, a building brilliantly deconstructed by Jeff Wall in his essay Dan Graham's Kammerspiel, and one I've long wanted to visit. The photo above captures Johnson's spectral, vampire-like presence on post-war American art and culture, seemingly connected to every one from Mies van der Rohe to Andy Warhol.

The focus of the studio - which has been plugged here before - is on Dover, looking specifically at the town's status as a gateway to the UK, with all the contradictions and conflicts that that implies. We have a studio blog here which will be added to as the term progresses.

4 comments:

owen hatherley said...

Warhol, Mies, Huey Long, Peter Eisenman...I'm writing about Philip Johnson at this instant, for PhD purposes. A very, very bad man. Still, The Philip Johnson Tapes is very funny, in the way only the utterly shallow can be funny. 'Well, gee, that Hitler, he could really give a speech'...

Charles Holland said...

Yep. Have you seen the TV documentary where, having finished the Garden Grove church he is interviewed choking back the crocodile tears and mock-humbly admitting that he had a little help from God in its design!? Totally priceless in its shamelesness.

Wall's essay lays bare his fascist sympathies of the 1930's very clearly too.

Jimmy Stamp said...

Welcome back to the town of churches and car parks, Steeple bells and police sirens. I'm looking forward to meeting you all in person this semester - I only wish I could take the studio! Can't wait to see what everyone produces!

Hopefully you'll be in town for the After Las Vegas symposium this month. It looks like its going to be a fun weekend of pop culture, art, and conjecture.

Charles Holland said...

indeed we shall. be good to meet up.

maybe breakfast in the atticus bookshop!?