Dear Subscribers,
Welcome back to the new season of Representations of Architecture, a weekly newsletter investigating how architecture is represented in different mediums. If you are new (Welcome!) and you don’t know the fixed structure of the newsletter give a look at the first post.
This season will see a growing number of Takeovers (each one more interesting than the one before) and a wide variety of themes that will keep you entertained until the month of July!
Yes, if everything goes smoothly you’ll receive a fresh newsletter every Saturday morning from now to the moment you’ll be wearing flip-flops to go to the beach.
Enough chit-chat, let’s start a joyful walk under the sun.
Insights
New Tokyo City Hall, 1985. This project by Isozaki was never built. It actually didn’t won the competition either (Kenzo Tange, Isozaki’s master, won), but the drawings produced are something pretty amazing. In this perspective a bright sun shines from the skylight invading the scene. The drawing in exam is actually a silk-screen (beloved printing technique by Isozaki) that in this case uses 4 layers. The sun is probably the last layer, squeegeed on paper in white with a bit of transparency.
This great article by Matthew Allen describes the types of drawing (both analog and digital) that Isozaki produced for the competition.
One of the features of Mackintosh’s mature drawings is the total absence of sun, and therefore shadows. This absence of shadows makes his drawings like if they are frozen in time. An heavy sky of lines give to the composition a severe atmosphere where the only things that seem to move are tiny particles in the air and near the vegetation. The drawing dates back to 1900 but preserve today all its modernity.
You can have a look at the whole of Mackintosh’s ouvre via the Glasgow School of Art Archive.
Very beautiful links
Did you ever wondered how the show Teletubbies was made? I did. This video shows us some behind the scenes unveling all the visual tricks that made the show so compelling and disturbing at the same time (someone said GIANT RABBIT?).
And what about the Baby Sun that popped out at the beginning of every episode? The toddler was a She and her name is Jess Smith. She is now 27 yo 🌞.
This behind the scenes is actually from Teletubbies most recent installment: the reboot from 2015. It lasted 4 seasons for a total of 120 episodes. The first series (1997-2001) lasted 5 seasons for a grand total of 365 (365!!!) episodes.
The name of the house where Teletubbies live is: TUBBYTRONIC SUPERDOME, a bombastic name for a Po-Mo nightmare in the english countryside.
How architect Luis Barragan became a Diamond 💎. You might wanna read this story.
Do you ever feel you don’t have any time?
This article explains why: It’s being stolen from you.
Sweet IG pages
If there is a Good Sun there oughta be an Evil Sun too, right? Bartosz Zaskorski imagined what will it happen if our regular bright sun was replaced by “A terrible angry sun which hates everything” (this joyful fella right here 👇)
In his disturbing graphic novel Postapoland Zaskorski depicts a weird world populated by horrible mutant creatures. His drawings are something halfway between Moebius and H.R. Giger . A couple of spreads of the graphic novel are jaw-dropping.
It was published a few months ago by the italian publisher Hollow Press that is specialized in underground weird comics. On their website you can discover other great artist and also purchase original artworks.
Misc
Have you seen The Hand of God, the latest movie by Paolo Sorrentino? It’s a compelling, poetic, beautiful movie. It’s on Netflix but I saw it at the cinema1. It’s a cinematographic movie and it deserves to be seen on a huge screen, dipped in dark and (hopefully) in holy silence.
One of the main characters of the movie is the city of Naples. Sorrentino doesn’t give us a voyeuristic, fulffiling, goduriose view of the city as he did with Rome in The Great Beauty. The Naples of The Hand of God is more personal, intimate, melancholic. The movie is the fictionalized story of Sorrentino himself, and this resonates in every shot.
A song that is obsessing me since November. I’ve no idea why, maybe because of the weird faces by Kate Bush… I can’t stand it anymore, I hope that linking it here will end this curse 🦇.
That’s it for today! See you next week with a labyrinthic Takeover!
Take care,
Federico
Before all cinemas that are not huge megaplex will close for good.