Today is about dancing.
In class, Tate draws a series of lines on the board. It is a simple diagram of the top of a BMW 3 series convertible closing. “It is a dance,” says Tate.
We move on. Tate talks about Josef Hoffman, who grew up in Brno in what is now the Czech Republic, and went to the same school that Adolf Loos flunked out of. After coming to Vienna and becoming involved in the Secession, he helped found the Wiener Werkstätte (Viennese Workshop). Hoffman loved patterns, and was known for drawing on graph paper. One contemporary remarked that he drew “like a frog laying eggs.”
Tate talks about a book about a woman who makes a pilgrimage to Vienna in the 1920s to work with Hoffman. She goes, not knowing whether Hoffman will give her work or turn her away at the mere idea of taking in a female student. Female architects at that time were absolutely unheard of. Hoffman ends up taking her in. I start to think about how to circumvent accepted social norms to find and work with the best.
We are shown slides of chairs. Of a spoon. Hoffman once said, “The beauty with which we surround ourselves should be the fruit of awareness, and not a pack of lies.” How do we find language in an object? How does a thing work? How is it connected? You have to test chairs with your butt. You have to test spoons with your tongue.
At the end of class, Tate reminds us, “Stay on the move. Be inventive, be spontaneous, be a stranger. Don’t get comfortable with Vienna. Draw architecture as if it had already been built. Build architecture as if it had never been drawn. Create the vernacular.”
After class, we hit the MAK. The MAK is the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna. It is rather unassuming from its façade. Inside, there is so much. I have a checklist in one of my sketchbooks of things to see. A cantilevered table. An exhibition by Lebbeus Woods. A hall of chairs produced by Hoffman and others. A room of furniture. The Frankfurt Kitchen. Wiener Werkstätte. A room of architectural models, including some by Frank Gehry. A room with a stairwell, designed by Gregor. Hermann Czech’s café. Drawings by Pichler. Chairs by Philippe Starck. I see it all. I take it in.
The Woods room is incredible. Lengths of steel rebar crisscross the room, pipes snake through the rebar, the walls are black. Woods challenges us: how do we move through space? How do we treat it? There are spaces of spectacular openness and tension and intense energy. Everything is dynamic, and weaves through the room like a spider’s web. Woods invites me to dance among the rebar and pipes. And yet, rarely is there anything random in this chaos. It is deliberate and there is a sense of order moving me through it. I am guided along, but there are no walls, no set paths. There is a constraint within the freedom to move. It is unlike anything I have ever experienced.
After leaving the MAK, we cross the street and follow Tate to a corner. He has that mischievous, knowing smile on his face. “You are standing very close to a landmark of modern architecture.” We look around, but don’t see anything particularly exciting. Then he directs our attention upwards. It is a roof office designed by Coop-Himmelb(l)au.
You can find a better image of the space on Coop’s Web site.
Bravo. We take in how the office dances, with the skyline, with the building supporting it, with the past and the present. “Sketch it quickly,” instructs Tate. “That’s how they came up with it.”
By this point I have finished my first sketchbook. I have to go get new ones.
Later that night, we meet at the Burgtheater to see a modern ballet called ImPulsTanz. It is based on remixes of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Old and new dancing—as Tate puts it, “Mau and Mackintosh.” The dance relies heavily on the incorporation of mobility aids, such as canes, walkers, and crutches. There are no wheelchairs.
An artist in the traditional sense expresses him or herself with paints, or drawings or clay or ink or video. A dancer expresses him or herself with his or her body. What are they expressing? I suppose the reason why it’s known as interpretive dance is that we all interpret it differently as we see it and experience it. What means one thing to me might be seen as something completely different to someone else, and there is a value to that. One thing is for certain—I will never look at a person using crutches or a cane or a walker in the same light.
The dancers’ movements are raw and primal. There is an element of sensuality to the dance, almost to the point of being explicitly sexual. Seeing the dancers move reminds me of an exercise that I did once in a summer theatre workshop in high school called the mirror exercise. Anything goes, there is no holding back. It is pure and complete exploration of movement. It is choreographed randomness. For me, it raises questions of not why, but why not? What if…?
W.B. Yeats once asked, “Can you separate the dancer from the dance?” I think Mr. Yeats would indeed be very interested to see this dance.
In class, Tate draws a series of lines on the board. It is a simple diagram of the top of a BMW 3 series convertible closing. “It is a dance,” says Tate.
We move on. Tate talks about Josef Hoffman, who grew up in Brno in what is now the Czech Republic, and went to the same school that Adolf Loos flunked out of. After coming to Vienna and becoming involved in the Secession, he helped found the Wiener Werkstätte (Viennese Workshop). Hoffman loved patterns, and was known for drawing on graph paper. One contemporary remarked that he drew “like a frog laying eggs.”
Tate talks about a book about a woman who makes a pilgrimage to Vienna in the 1920s to work with Hoffman. She goes, not knowing whether Hoffman will give her work or turn her away at the mere idea of taking in a female student. Female architects at that time were absolutely unheard of. Hoffman ends up taking her in. I start to think about how to circumvent accepted social norms to find and work with the best.
We are shown slides of chairs. Of a spoon. Hoffman once said, “The beauty with which we surround ourselves should be the fruit of awareness, and not a pack of lies.” How do we find language in an object? How does a thing work? How is it connected? You have to test chairs with your butt. You have to test spoons with your tongue.
At the end of class, Tate reminds us, “Stay on the move. Be inventive, be spontaneous, be a stranger. Don’t get comfortable with Vienna. Draw architecture as if it had already been built. Build architecture as if it had never been drawn. Create the vernacular.”
After class, we hit the MAK. The MAK is the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna. It is rather unassuming from its façade. Inside, there is so much. I have a checklist in one of my sketchbooks of things to see. A cantilevered table. An exhibition by Lebbeus Woods. A hall of chairs produced by Hoffman and others. A room of furniture. The Frankfurt Kitchen. Wiener Werkstätte. A room of architectural models, including some by Frank Gehry. A room with a stairwell, designed by Gregor. Hermann Czech’s café. Drawings by Pichler. Chairs by Philippe Starck. I see it all. I take it in.
The Woods room is incredible. Lengths of steel rebar crisscross the room, pipes snake through the rebar, the walls are black. Woods challenges us: how do we move through space? How do we treat it? There are spaces of spectacular openness and tension and intense energy. Everything is dynamic, and weaves through the room like a spider’s web. Woods invites me to dance among the rebar and pipes. And yet, rarely is there anything random in this chaos. It is deliberate and there is a sense of order moving me through it. I am guided along, but there are no walls, no set paths. There is a constraint within the freedom to move. It is unlike anything I have ever experienced.
After leaving the MAK, we cross the street and follow Tate to a corner. He has that mischievous, knowing smile on his face. “You are standing very close to a landmark of modern architecture.” We look around, but don’t see anything particularly exciting. Then he directs our attention upwards. It is a roof office designed by Coop-Himmelb(l)au.
You can find a better image of the space on Coop’s Web site.
Bravo. We take in how the office dances, with the skyline, with the building supporting it, with the past and the present. “Sketch it quickly,” instructs Tate. “That’s how they came up with it.”
By this point I have finished my first sketchbook. I have to go get new ones.
Later that night, we meet at the Burgtheater to see a modern ballet called ImPulsTanz. It is based on remixes of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Old and new dancing—as Tate puts it, “Mau and Mackintosh.” The dance relies heavily on the incorporation of mobility aids, such as canes, walkers, and crutches. There are no wheelchairs.
An artist in the traditional sense expresses him or herself with paints, or drawings or clay or ink or video. A dancer expresses him or herself with his or her body. What are they expressing? I suppose the reason why it’s known as interpretive dance is that we all interpret it differently as we see it and experience it. What means one thing to me might be seen as something completely different to someone else, and there is a value to that. One thing is for certain—I will never look at a person using crutches or a cane or a walker in the same light.
The dancers’ movements are raw and primal. There is an element of sensuality to the dance, almost to the point of being explicitly sexual. Seeing the dancers move reminds me of an exercise that I did once in a summer theatre workshop in high school called the mirror exercise. Anything goes, there is no holding back. It is pure and complete exploration of movement. It is choreographed randomness. For me, it raises questions of not why, but why not? What if…?
W.B. Yeats once asked, “Can you separate the dancer from the dance?” I think Mr. Yeats would indeed be very interested to see this dance.
Comments