http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/minority_report/film_clips/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,889980,00.html
London Ghanaian Architect Ghanaian Adjaye
"Adjaye is the next generation, one he thinks is ready to disobey. And one brought up with a different way of seeing - trained, through films, computer games, CGI, the media, to expect different kinds of spaces, a sci-fi world of responsive environments. "I'm telling you, films like Minority Report, you know, with those interactive environments, where billboards know your name and you can play on those glass screens. They're coming. It's just been done in a building in Tokyo." Here's that kid in the toy shop again. "A segment of glass actually has scripts running through it. You don't know where it's coming from, but it's being pumped through the circuitry." It's a future in which private and public spaces, from bars to town halls, become fluid things, controllable by you as much as imposed upon you by architects and developers, a little like interactive TV.
It's happening. Very slowly. For now Adjaye pins his faith on his materials, felt and chocolate fudge paint, and his ability to treat emotive architecture like conceptual art, embodying in stone the different interpretations and identities required for new civic design. "I don't mean that literally. It doesn't happen in this utopian, heroic sense of the architect willing the right form, shoving up icons of culture. It's like being a conductor. There are different instruments that one has to bring together."
It's quite a task to pull off and, verbally at least, Adjaye's solution sounds woolly. I can hear his critics rubbing their hands. But, with his background, his own "inability to have roots", if anyone knows how to make sense of such complexity, it's Adjaye. This, he says, was the real strength that his convoluted childhood gave him.
His first crack at it debuts later this year, a series of libraries in east London. Except they're not libraries. They're Idea Stores, "which absolutely irritated countless people," he booms, laughing. "But there is a world out there that feels disconnected from this particular brand, the library. So you have to set up a new model. Branding is the world that we live in, as much as people hate it and want to slag it off." The Idea Store will, he says, be like a "marketplace". The first, for Whitechapel, is outside Sainsbury's. The offputting, monumental "symbolic grand narrative" of civic buildings will be replaced by something more fluid and vague, for the new fluid and vague consumer-citizen. "There are several ways of getting in. There is no front and there is no back. It's like a billboard. It projects. It has electronic messaging. It has videowalls. It has an egalitarian facade. If they decide to go and read a book, then I'm really thrilled. But if they decide to go and play on a computer game, I'm thrilled, too." He doesn't mind dancing with the devil of capitalism. But he's cynical enough to acknowledge that his ideal future of manipulable Minority Report environments might be less of a two-way conversation between architect and user, and more about you, the consumer-citizen, being manipulated by something bigger, to get you to buy."
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,889980,00.html
London Ghanaian Architect Ghanaian Adjaye
"Adjaye is the next generation, one he thinks is ready to disobey. And one brought up with a different way of seeing - trained, through films, computer games, CGI, the media, to expect different kinds of spaces, a sci-fi world of responsive environments. "I'm telling you, films like Minority Report, you know, with those interactive environments, where billboards know your name and you can play on those glass screens. They're coming. It's just been done in a building in Tokyo." Here's that kid in the toy shop again. "A segment of glass actually has scripts running through it. You don't know where it's coming from, but it's being pumped through the circuitry." It's a future in which private and public spaces, from bars to town halls, become fluid things, controllable by you as much as imposed upon you by architects and developers, a little like interactive TV.
It's happening. Very slowly. For now Adjaye pins his faith on his materials, felt and chocolate fudge paint, and his ability to treat emotive architecture like conceptual art, embodying in stone the different interpretations and identities required for new civic design. "I don't mean that literally. It doesn't happen in this utopian, heroic sense of the architect willing the right form, shoving up icons of culture. It's like being a conductor. There are different instruments that one has to bring together."
It's quite a task to pull off and, verbally at least, Adjaye's solution sounds woolly. I can hear his critics rubbing their hands. But, with his background, his own "inability to have roots", if anyone knows how to make sense of such complexity, it's Adjaye. This, he says, was the real strength that his convoluted childhood gave him.
His first crack at it debuts later this year, a series of libraries in east London. Except they're not libraries. They're Idea Stores, "which absolutely irritated countless people," he booms, laughing. "But there is a world out there that feels disconnected from this particular brand, the library. So you have to set up a new model. Branding is the world that we live in, as much as people hate it and want to slag it off." The Idea Store will, he says, be like a "marketplace". The first, for Whitechapel, is outside Sainsbury's. The offputting, monumental "symbolic grand narrative" of civic buildings will be replaced by something more fluid and vague, for the new fluid and vague consumer-citizen. "There are several ways of getting in. There is no front and there is no back. It's like a billboard. It projects. It has electronic messaging. It has videowalls. It has an egalitarian facade. If they decide to go and read a book, then I'm really thrilled. But if they decide to go and play on a computer game, I'm thrilled, too." He doesn't mind dancing with the devil of capitalism. But he's cynical enough to acknowledge that his ideal future of manipulable Minority Report environments might be less of a two-way conversation between architect and user, and more about you, the consumer-citizen, being manipulated by something bigger, to get you to buy."
--
The Design-L list for art and architecture, since 1992...
To subscribe, send mailto:design-l-subscribe-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.
To signoff, send mailto:design-l-unsubscribe-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.
Visit archives: http://lists.psu.edu/archives/design-l.html