WA/SA [waldrip architects/ s.a.] [architecture- los angeles]
Alberti, Sandro Sharp City; 18 April, 2003 [text32]
Working 9-5, at...
‘WA/SA’, ‘Aloha8’, and ‘Working 9 to 5, at...’
Between narrative and data, that is how I had framed ‘it’ recently for a group of design students. Is it the warm poetics or the cold, hard facts? Which do you prefer? Which of these extremes might best be employed in representation? Beyond these, it seems that, evermore so, method, or framework, has been privileged over either scientific or personalized Sharp-Cibic: citizens. content. The ‘diagram’, of course. Very important in the escape from iconic. And yet now a brief respite is desired. Almost as if the very diagrams of our liberation had begun to extinguish the breath out of life itself. It should not be
one or the other, of course. Balance, in life. And so it is that the trends are beginning to reveal ‘content’ (something hinted at in the ‘click-click-click’ of Effervescent motion sensors and embodied in the sojourns of ‘LA Now’ texts + exhibits). On its own, narrative lacks depth. Charming, tales of a city’s natural habitat, people, and money, but really only worthwhile if coupled with facts. More interesting still if all this rises out of a sea of data that readers might be allowed to cross-reference and interpret. Personalization is being derived from very personal narratives (the ‘hook’; something to relate to), and from ‘personalizable’ data (the ‘content’; something to make something from). And so it is that the city begins to be reinterpreted by Aldo Cibic (Memphis founder; super-designer) and Erin Sharp (designer, architect, muse), with a title that tells all, in a sense: ‘Citizen/ City’; a study of the city as derived of citizen experiences; the gnomonic/ rhizomatic consideration of the human parts that make the urban whole. Not the circulation flows, not the facades, nor massing or regulations. The citizen. Man/ woman. Living. An analysis of urbanism through its effects (how it is being lived), as well as, simultaneously, its essential components (who is living it). Worth taking a look at, this personalized urban project, that is currently showing at the Salone del Mobile and has a spot reserved at future biennales and triennales: www.cibicworkshop.com · Improving the interaction between human beings and their context (“cities have no meaning outside of their relationship with the people that inhabit them; architecture itself is not the protagonist.”).
are fictions of fen-om: [www.fen-om.com]
Dinner at my house?
Dinner at my house- 1.
