Peter Zumthor's 'Thinking Architecture'

Dari buku 'Thinking Architecture', yang terdiri dari 4 kuliah Zumthor. Sayangnya sudah lama out-of-print... di abebooks harganya GBP 857.22

To me, buildings can have a beautiful silence that I associate with attributes such as composure, self-evidence, durability, presence, and integrity, and with warmth and sensuousness as well; a building that is being itself, being a building, not representing anything, just being.

The sense that I try to instil into materials is beyond all rules of composition, and their tangibility, smell, and acoustic qualities are merely elements of the language we are obliged to use. Sense emerges when I succeed in bringing out the specific meanings of certain materials in my buildings, meanings that can only be perceived in just this way in this one building.

When I concentrate on a specific site or place for which I am going to design a building, when I try to plumb its depths, its form, its history, and its sensuous qualities, images of other places start to invade this process of precise observation: images of places I know and that once impressed me, images of ordinary or special places places that I carry with me as inner visions of specific moods and qualities; images of architectural situations, which emanate from the world of art, or films, theater or literature.

Thank you arcspace.com.

To Build is to Destroy

(* All photos are Evelyn Pritt's. For more info on her, go here and here. Many thanks, pel, for letting me put this here.)

The photographs in this collection represent the changing topographic contours of a particular landscape as it becomes subject to development. The paradoxical dynamic of land development is the central theme that interests Pritt. To develop doesn’t simply mean to cause growth or expansion, but also to demolish and take apart what was already there. The act of building, in other words, essentially implicates destroying.

Foto-foto di koleksi ini adalah representasi akan perubahan bentuk topografis sebuah lahan yang sedang menjadi objek pembangunan. Dinamika pembangunan yang penuh paradoks adalah tema utama yang menjadi daya tarik untuk Pritt. Membangun tidak semata berarti menghasilkan pertumbuhan atau pengembangan, tapi juga membongkar dan memporak-poranda apa yang sudah ada disana. Tindakan membangun, dalam kata lain, pada dasarnya selalu melibatkan tindakan memusnahkan.

Pritt’s ‘no-frills’ approach presents a unique way of inviting the viewer’s contemplation. Although it is essentially a response to the social practice of human’s intervention into natural environment, the observatory tone remains detached and objective rather than overly sentimental. The neutrality of the photographer’s eye represents these places in their own terms, uncluttered by emotional excess. Pritt’s account is above all else documentative, offering a detailed accuracy and stark reportage stylization.

Pendekatan Pritt yang tanpa ‘embel-embel’ menghadirkan sebuah cara unik untuk mengundang renungan. Meskipun foto-foto ini sebenarnya adalah sebuah tanggapan terhadap praktek sosial campur tangan manusia pada lingkungan alam, nadanya yang ‘dingin’ dan penuh observasi tetap objektif. Pandangan si fotografer yang netral menggambarkan tempat-tempat ini tanpa beban emosional. Karenanya, foto-foto ini terlihat seperti sebuah dokumentasi, menawarkan ketelitian mendetil dan gaya reportase yang jujur.

The impersonal air evoked in these photographs is also created by the lack of human figures. Yet their presence may still be sensed through the representations of their needs and ambitions. It is a person’s specific way of life that requires the motorcycle in the photo above, for instance, just as the construction occurring here is a product of the human will towards progress. Even though the person is absent in the photographs, he remains thoroughly felt.

Suasana ‘berjarak’ yang hadir disini juga terbangun karena tidak adanya figur manusia. Tetapi keberadaan mereka tetap bisa dirasakan melalu representasi akan segala kebutuhan dan ambisinya. Misalnya, gaya hidup seseorang yang membutuhkan sepeda motor di foto diatas ini atau konstruksi yang terjadi sebagai produk keinginan manusia akan perkembangan. Biarpun tidak ada manusia disini, kehadirannya tidak dapat dipungkiri.

Impersonal yet intimate, the photographs in this collection beckon us to reflect upon a pressing contradiction that is inherent in the human drive to develop: how do we negotiate the thin line between building and destroying?

‘Berjarak’ namun tetap intim, foto-foto ini mengajak kita untuk mempertanyakan sebuah kontradiksi mendesak yang melekat pada kemampuan manusia untuk membangun: bagaimana kita menegosiasi garis yang tipis antara membangun dan menghancurkan?

Jarak

Candida Hofer

One of the things I like best about German photography after the Bechers (quick Wiki here) is the avoidance of sentimentality. To my eyes, this emphasis on detached neutrality allows so many readings to be introduced. In this way it highlights the impossibility of a totalised, definite understanding of things. Our perspective is loaded with limitations, and and never remains static. But alongside this, the various manipulation techniques used here also come across as a mockery towards objective neutrality itself: what we take to be 'reality' or the 'truth' turns out to be manipulated. A contradiction that speaks of a specific era in history.

Salah satu hal yang paling menarik dari Fotografi Jerman setelah Bernd dan Hilla Becher (wiki disini) adalah penghindaran dari sentimentalitas berlebihan. Di mata saya, fokus pada 'jarak' dan 'netralitas' mempersilahkan begitu banyak interpretasi. Dengan begini, foto-foto ini menekankan tidak mungkin adanya sebuah pengertian yang absolut dan pasti. Perspektif manusia sarat dengan segala keterbatasan, dan tidak henti bergerak. Tapi disamping ini, bermacam teknik manipulasi yang digunakan terlihat seperti ejekan terhadap keinginan akan objektifitas yang netral sendiri: apa yang kita lihat sebagai 'kenyataan yang benar' ternyata hasil manipulasi. Sebuah kontradiksi yang melambangkan suatu era historis yang spesifik.

Thomas Demand

Thomas Struth