In
the age of media and global production, architecture abandons its stylistic
or canonic limits and enters the field of profane civic services. Qualifying
it by speed, colour or smell, means stepping away from the realm of
professional exclusivity, towards efficiency of the free market. Touching
off a wide range of association, architecture by colours is a kind of
topological survey of field conditions, more than a typological concern.
The greens represent the whole variety of such options. Standard green
for the landscaped sites, supergreen for the recycled ones. Understatement
green for the areas of minimal impact towards nature, ultragreen for
the extreme conditions given. Fake green as an exercise on artificiality
of environment, forbidden green for the zones of limited access and
platonic consumption. Blue for aquatic strategies, becoming purple to
update the inert and heraldic. Yellow stands for openness, modesty and
Sachlichkeit in social housing. Harnessing infrastructure, taking advantage
of it, understanding and supporting the urban dynamic, its flows and
speeds, is what orange register stands for. Time, as the fourth dimension,
essential for contemporary design, puts colours in motion, subject them
to the daily or seasonal change or weathering - distorted, fragmented,
blurred, rippled, multiplied, pixelated, stylized, textured, interlaced.
The
projects shown tackle the themes such as those of dis-continuity, subversive
lite-ness and programmatic inexactness, examine the interdependency
of signs, the apparent breakdown of ideologies, question the modern
legacy and validity of monofunctional systems, stressing the interchange
modes, being interactive themselves, too, via various plateaus and different
epidermal depths : the soft fabric of church elevation in Zagreb, lit
up at night, the ever-changing multicoloured layers of the urban hill
in Den Bosch, slopes and the "inhabited" glazed sections of
the Yokohama project, protectiveness and independency of different field
conditions in Glasgow or herbal nature of elevations as condensed gardens
of pharmaceutical faculty in Zagreb, all polemize the viability of concepts,
on one hand interactive and event-ual, or unstable and generative on
the other, understood as an accumulation of strata, performing the new
urban presence.
The
scary accumulations of the web city are taken to their limits in order
to leave a fair amount of the territory over. Beyond the post-architectural
there are notions of nature, occasionally collonized or simply used
as a camping site for global tourism.
Territories of immense densifications, architecture-free zones, landscaped
environments and the residual ones, constitute the trajectories of the
present-day urban concerns : to initiate (Zagreb), to prepare (Den Bosch),
to stir (Yokohama), to condense (Zagreb), to re-shuffle (Glasgow) -
as possible key-words of a new (secret) vocabulary...
