Conversations on Urban China: Doug Aitken & Catherine Opie

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Babble Notes

UCLA School of Architecture and Urban Design

0:00:40

Changing global realities are causing paradigm shifts that redefine the interaction between culture, politics, economics, and the environment. These changes constantly alter the boundaries between disciplines, creating new perimeters of knowledge that will define the conditions of future inquiries into architecture and urban design. At UCLA, we are deeply immersed in a research environment that anticipates change and can move from the realm of ideas to their application, from present situations to emerging new realities.

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Form Follows Libido

0:00:47

Sylvia Lavin's Form Follows Libido argues that by the 1950s, some architects felt an urge to steer the cool abstraction of high modernism away from a neutral formalism toward the production of more erotic, affective environments. Lavin turns to the architecture of Richard Neutra (1892-1970) to explore the genesis of these new mood-inducing environments.

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Richard Neutra

0:00:56

Neutra was born in Vienna on April 8 1892. He studied under Adolf Loos at the Technical University of Vienna, was influenced by Otto Wagner, and worked for a time in Germany in the studio of Erich Mendelsohn. He moved to the United States by 1923 and became a naturalized citizen in 1929. Neutra worked briefly for Frank Lloyd Wright before accepting an invitation from his close friend and university companion Rudolf Schindler to work and live communally in Schindler's Kings Road House in California.

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Hammer Exhibitions: Urban China

0:04:43

Urban China: Informal Cities is an exhibition that explores the dynamic and innovative content of Urban China, the only magazine published in China devoted to issues of urbanism. The magazine’s global, cross-disciplinary network of correspondents and collaborators merge rigorous methods of data collection and analysis of rapidly developing cities in China with witty graphic representations of their findings.

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Doug Aitken

0:06:34

Aitken’s body of work ranges from photography, sculpture, and architectural interventions to films, sound, single and multichannel video works, and installations.[3] He has described his work as "reflecting a world that is harmonious, mysterious, mesmerizing, passionate, and sometimes rough and violent."[4] His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world, in such institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

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Catherine Opie

0:06:35

Catherine Opie (born 1961) is an American artist specializing in issues within documentary photography. Throughout her work she has investigated aspects of community, making portraits of many groups including LGBT community; surfers; and most recently high school football players. She's also interested in how identities are shaped by our surrounding architecture. She is currently a professor of Photography at University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Her works are displayed in both museums and galleries internationally.

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Bejing National Stadium

0:07:45

Beijing National Stadium (simplified Chinese: 北京国家体育场; traditional Chinese: 北京國家體育場; pinyin: Běijīng Guójiā Tǐyùchǎng), also known as the National Stadium (国家体育场),[4] or colloquially as the Bird's Nest (鸟巢), is a stadium in Beijing, China. The stadium was designed for use throughout the 2008 Summer Olympics and Paralympics.

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MoMA

0:08:53

Founded in 1929 as an educational institution, The Museum of Modern Art is dedicated to being the foremost museum of modern art in the world.

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Guggenheim Museum

0:09:04

An internationally renowned art museum and one of the most significant architectural icons of the 20th century, the Guggenheim Museum is at once a vital cultural center, an educational institution, and the heart of an international network of museums. Visitors can experience special exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, lectures by artists and critics, performances and film screenings, classes for teens and adults, and daily tours of the galleries led by experienced docents.

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Sleepwalkers Exhibitions

0:10:03

The Museum of Modern Art and the New York–based public art organization Creative Time present Doug Aitken: sleepwalkers, a major public artwork comprising eight large-scale moving images that will be projected onto the exterior of MoMA, enlivening the building’s architecture with the nocturnal journeys of five characters representing city dwellers—a bicycle messenger, an electrician, a postal worker, a businessman, and an office worker. Conceived by Doug Aitken (American, b.

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Olmstead's Los Angeles

0:29:56

In 1930, the firm started by the sons of the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted proposed a comprehensive and coherent network of parks, playgrounds, schools, beaches, forests, and transportation to promote the social, economic, and environmental vitality of Los Angeles and the health of its people.

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Gehry Concert Hall

0:33:24

Located on a historically and culturally prominent downtown site, the Walt Disney Concert Hall is to become the permanent home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The Concert Hall is situated on historic Bunker Hill at the intersection of First Street and Grand Avenue, adjacent to the existing Music Center of Los Angeles.

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Venice

0:42:30

Venice (Italian: Venezia, IPA: /Ve'nεtsia/, Venetian: Venesia) is a city in northern Italy, the capital of the region Veneto, a population of 271,367 (census estimate January 1, 2004). Together with Padua, the city is included in the Padua-Venice Metropolitan Area (population 1,600,000). The city historically was an independent nation. Venice has been known as the "La Dominante", "Serenissima", "Queen of the Adriatic", "City of Water", "City of Bridges", and "The City of Light". Luigi Barzini, writing in The New York Times, described it as "undoubtedly the most beautiful city built by man".

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Canaletto

0:43:05

Giovanni Antonio Canal (Venice, Republic of Venice, October 28, 1697 – April 19, 1768, Venice), better known as Canaletto, was a Venetian artist famous for his landscapes, or vedute, of Venice. He was also an important printmaker in etching.

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The Cultural Revolution

0:49:30

The Cultural Revolution had a massive impact on China from 1965 to 1968. The Cultural Revolution is the name given to Mao’s attempt to reassert his beliefs in China. Mao had been less than a dynamic leader from the late 1950’s on, and feared others in the party might be taking on a leading role that weakened his power within the party and the country. This probably explains the Cultural Revolution – it was an attempt by Mao to re-impose his authority on the party and therefore the country.

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Serpentine Gallery

0:55:25

Serpentine Gallery is one of London’s best-loved galleries for modern and contemporary art. Its Exhibition, Architecture, Education and Public Programmes attract approximately 750,000 visitors a year and admission is free. In the grounds of the Gallery is a permanent work by artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, dedicated to the Serpentine’s former Patron Diana, Princess of Wales. The work comprises eight benches, a tree-plaque, and a carved stone circle at the Gallery’s entrance.

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Vito Acconci

0:59:00

Vito Acconci’s extraordinary career—poetry, art, architecture: a sort of triathlon of the arts—began in the Bronx, where as an aspiring author of seven years he wrote stories about cowboys and athletes. At his Catholic college, he published sexy stuff about priests and nuns that got the school magazine banned for three issues running. He went on to write fiction in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. But when he came back to New York in the early ’60s, something changed, and he began writing poems.

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Dérive

1:07:45

One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive,(1) a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll. In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.

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Urban Morphology

1:07:59

Urban morphology is the study of the form of human settlements and the process of their formation and transformation. The study seeks to understand the spatial structure and character of a metropolitan area, city, town or village by examining the patterns of its component parts and the process of its development. This can involve the analysis of physical structures at different scales as well as patterns of movement, land use, ownership or control and occupation.

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Guy Debord

1:08:55

Self-proclaimed leader of the Situationist International, Guy Debord was certainly responsible for the longevity and high profile of Situationist ideas, although the equation of the SI with Guy Debord would be misleading. Brilliant but autocratic, Debord helped both unify situationist praxis and destroy its expansion into areas not explicitly in line with his own ideas. His text The Society of the Spectacle remains today one of the great theoretical works on modern-day capital, cultural imperialism, and the role of mediation in social relationships.

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The Burden of Dreams

1:14:32

A documentary on the chaotic production of Werner Herzog's epic 'Fitzcarraldo' , showing how the film managed to get made despite problems that would have floored a less obsessively driven director. Not only does he have major casting problems, losing both Jason Robards (health) and Mick Jagger (other commitments) halfway through shooting, but the crew gets caught up in a war between Peru and Ecuador, there are problems with the weather and the morale of cast and crew is falling rapidly.

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MacArthur Park

1:16:41

MacArthur Park (formerly Westlake Park) is a park in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, named after General Douglas MacArthur and designated city of Los Angeles Historic Cultural Monument #100.

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Robert Venturi

1:18:25

In contrast to many modernists, Venturi uses a form of symbolically decorated architecture based on precedents. He believes that structure and decoration should remain separate entities and that decoration should reflect the culture in which it exists. In contradiction, Venturi also considers symbolism unnecessary since modern technology and historical symbolism rarely harmonize.

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Channels: Architecture Catherine Opie Contemporary Art Doug Aitken Photography Talks

Director of Critical Studies and MA/PhD programs in UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design, Sylvia Lavin engages artists, architects, and curators in a series of lively discussions on how cities are increasingly molded by images rather than buildings; on whether art and architecture are converging to form an integrated type of cultural consumption; and if the concept of the masterpiece has finally been destroyed by the sheer quantity of global design production. Catherine Opie is engaged in issues of documentary photography and in how aspects of identity and collective behaviors are shaped by architecture. A Professor of Photography at UCLA, Opie was featured in a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2008. Widely known for innovative installations such as Sleepwalkers, presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2007, Doug Aitken utilizes a wide array of media and artistic approaches, leading us into a world where time, space, and memory are fluid concepts.

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