New Frontiers
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 | New Frontiers |
| Designer | Explicit Architecture |
| Location | Bratislava, Vienna, [[:]] |
| Date | 11.03.2010 |
| Building Type | Exhibition and Exposition |
| Context | Urban |
| Street Address | |
| Notes | Travelling Exhibition |
Contents |
[edit] New Frontiers
Main focus is the experimental demands of individual issues, processes and developments. The objective is to compare and contrast the results from and questions raised by architectural-artistic production as objectively and comparably as possible.
Exhibition Design
The L-ement exhibition element is intended to offer a platform, defining a space of about 1.6m³ for the participators to design a statement for their work in. The whole L-ement is slightly angled towards the viewer, which requires a certain sensibility regarding the exhibited statement in a spacial aspect. The requirement of the exhibition design was explicitly for every participant not to present projects, but to create a statement for their work, work methods, for their point of view and approach to topics in architecture and design.
Aim
The New Frontiers exhibition is designed as a travelling exhibition. In every stage 2-3 local protagonists join the exhibition. - Aiming at the creation of a unique selected overview of contemporary young architects, artists and designers.
[edit] Participators
Philipp Aduatz - Austria /// Tomas Amtmann, Slovakia /// Archimera, Slovakia /// BEEF - Slovakia /// Hubert Blanz - Austria /// Byro - Marek Bohunicky - Slovakia /// Explicit Architecture - Austria /// Gabu Heindl - Austria /// Hein-Troy Architekten - Austria /// heri&salli - Austria /// Kraft, Austria /// Clemens Kirsch - Austria /// Malaga Lukac, Slovakia /// moh-architects, Austria /// N/A - Slovakia /// soma, - Austria /// Sputnic - Austria /// Peter Stec - Slovakia /// tat ort - Austria /// t-hoch-n - Austria /// Totalstudio - Slovakia /// Under Construction - Slovakia /// Florian Unterberger - Austria /// Markus Leixner - Austria /// colombosnext - Austria
[edit] Images
New Frontiers, Design Factory, Bratislava |
New Frontiers, Design Factory, Bratislava |
New Frontiers, Design Factory, Bratislava |
New Frontiers, Zumtobel Forum, Vienna |
New Frontiers, Zumtobel Forum, Vienna |
New Frontiers, Zumtobel Forum, Vienna |
 New Frontiers, Zumtobel Forum, Vienna |
 New Frontiers, Zumtobel Forum, Vienna |
 New Frontiers, Zumtobel Forum, Vienna |
 New Frontiers, Zumtobel Forum, Vienna |
 New Frontiers, Zumtobel Forum, Vienna |
 New Frontiers, Zumtobel Forum, Vienna |
 New Frontiers, Aftershow Party, Fluc, Vienna |
 New Frontiers, Aftershow Party, Fluc, Vienna |
 New Frontiers, Aftershow Party, Fluc, Vienna |
 New Frontiers, Aftershow Party, Fluc, Vienna |
[edit] New Frontiers/Sleeping Beauties
Fifty years after John F. Kennedy in 1960 coined the term ‘New Frontier’, in a year in which Barack Obama struggles with the heritage of his famous predecessor and is severely criticised for it, it is quite ambitious to use ‘New Frontiers’ in (plural) as the title of an architectural exhibition. Not just because the New Frontier is often referred to in the context of the conquest of space. Kennedy’s New Frontier was mainly found on earth, in the everyday economical and social realm. As at the start of Obama’s presidency in our days, the conditions in which Kennedy had to begin his presidency just after the 1958 recession were extremely difficult. As Kennedy himself stated it, he United States were the most resourceful industrialized country on earth but ranked among the last in the rate of economic growth. “But”, he said: “We will do what must be done. For our national household is cluttered with unfinished and neglected tasks.”1) An important task was given to architects and urbanists, in the quest for “a decent home and a suitable environment for every American family”, in the building of schools “for two millionmore children who for the moment have no proper room to be taught”, planning for urban and metropolitan areas, public facility projects and urban renewal. 2) Kennedy even wanted to establish a new Housing and Urban Affairs Department to be established in the Executive Branch – which was denied by the Republicans, just like the health care programs Kennedy proposed. As far as architecture and urbanism are concerned, under Kennedy, the New Frontier program was a political and administrative program of policies and provisions. It even already provided for land reserves and a “long-range program and policy for dealing with open space”, to control “persistent patterns of haphazard suburban developments....contributing to a tragic waste in the use of vital resources now being consumed at an alarming rate.”3) Public transport was more seriously supported than ever, breaking with the predominant role the car had for most of the century in the United States. Kennedy was seen as a charismatic cultural figure comparable to Pablo Picasso, spokesman for a new generation and symbol for a new culture, which was considered as a Renaissance after the darkness of the years before. Certainly, New Frontier politics are still associated with one of the most successful periods in American architecture and urbanism today, as Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre demonstrate in their book “Architecture in North America since 1960”: “The architecture of the decade was an invitation to rethinking. It looked at buildings from the programmatic point of view and addressed issues of technology, the environment and community.” 4) A generation taught by the modern architects and artists that had left Europe before the Second World War to settle in the United States was now ready to develop a modern style of their own to suit the American conditions. Buildings broke with the paradigm of the box and opened up to the environment, not just formally but also in the way they functioned. Forms facetted and freed themselves from old restraints, facades developed into membranes and cities were no longer considered as hierarchical tree structures but as complex networks, structures and megastructures. Last but not least, the period marked the rise to fame of a new generation of architectural theorists, like Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown, Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman. The New Frontiers exhibition today, in contrast, is not so much a political program at first sight, but an exhibition by architects. Politically, it stands in the tradition of the Reform movement in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century and the Werkbund. It presents series of projects that deal with new technological opportunities and try to find a new, suitable aesthetics for it –even if this is not necessarily a generally applicable or valid aesthetics. It does not even address politicians so much, it seems, but a new generation of entrepreneurs as it rises in central and eastern Europe over the last decades. This makes sense, as the changed political situation in Europe, in which after a long dominance of the public sector the market became the dominant factor in architecture and urbanism. The architecture we see in New Frontiers is of course the result of political changes as much as the New Renaissance in the United States was but it is also its back side or reversal in many ways as it does not so much address community building but claimed individual freedom instead: the right to the individual freedom to develop and express oneself in the first place. The architects in New Urban Frontiers studied not with the generation of architects that was part of the New Renaissance but with the generation that came afterwards and revolted to it: hippies like Coop Himmelb(l)au and the like. What they seem to share is the old activist idea that freely formed and administered spaces guarantee and provoke a freer and more creative inhabitation and use. It is an idea that goes back to at least Bruno Taut and the expressionists and was taken up by Coop Himmelb(l)au again in the nineteen seventies, when they wrote that they could not prove it, but strongly suspected that “self confident forms, freely available to use and shape – not with repressive management but with friendly administration – must affect the occupants in their development of a creative self-concept”. 5) Therefore, the political and social program remains largely implicit, waiting like the Sleeping Beauty to be kissed and woken up by the prince or the princess who sees the potential hidden behind the bushes and the thorns and wants to go to war with it. Different from most of their predecessors, the potential of this architecture seems largely to consist of fun, if we look at the photographs of the people behind the projects. The projects offer intensive, inexplicable spatial experiences in the first place. As such they fit in and adapt to what B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore called the experience economy that still rules our society. 6) This is an architecture that has more, a surplus value: an architecture that “bleeds, that exhausts, that whirls and even breaks. Architecture that lights up, that stings, that rips and under stress tears”; it is an architecture that is “cavernous, firey, smooth, hard, angular, brutal, round, delicate, colourful, obscene, voluptuous, dreamy, alluring, repelling, wet, dry and throbbing”. 7) Sustainability seems not really to be an issue here; this is all about immediate consumption and momentary feelings. New Frontiers may offer the work of a generation; it also offers very different positions. Very different from the generations before them, that always carefully looked to surround themselves with similar company or embed themselves in it and fought the rest of the world in more or less refined debates, the participants of New Frontiers do not seem to find any problem in the differences among them. On the contrary, this accumulation of differences seems to add up to the image of freedom and fun they strive for. The city that corresponds to this architecture must look like an enormous fair, with one attraction after the other. Similarly the exhibition and catalogue have more in common with trade fairs, world fairs and architecture blogs than with anything else. The client picks from the works on offer the ones he or she likes and may be able to afford. If Kennedy’s New Frontier program was expansionist and ambitious, with the conquest of space as its most quintessential symbolic program, the New Frontiers main symbolic program today seems to be the conquest of cyberspace for now. Just as with Kennedy and Obama we have to wait where this leads to on earth –or that most of it remains Spoken into the Void, send off by a kind of HAL like the astronaut in Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey on an eternal drift between the stars, improbable to be found by any prince.
BART LOOTSMA
Footnotes
John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Adress, 1960, as quoted by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre in: Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, Architecture in North America since 1960, Thames & Hudson, London, 1995.
Idem.
John F. Kenndy, The President’s Message on Housing and Community, as quoted by Tzonis and lefaivre, see note 1.
Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, Architecture in North America since 1960, Thames & Hudson, London, 1995.
[edit] Discussion
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[edit] External Links
