–John Marx 2020
A collection of poems and watercolors by John Marx have been recently published by Oro Editions: http://bit.ly/EtudesJohnMarx
European Dialogues
Recollections from World Architecture Festival (WAF) in Amsterdam (4-6 December 2019) and Freiburg’s “Creative Communities” workshop (28 – 29 November 2019)
Another WAF behind us and we’re happily thinking back on increasingly familiar faces amongst regulars and the deepened friendships that we have been fortunate to make through the Festival.
This year, John Marx presented his Burning Man project for The Golden Cage (see our previous blog post) and joined an illustrious panel of judges to select the winner for the best “Use of Colour” Category at the World Architecture Festival Awards.
Fellow judges included Axel Demberger from Eastman and Marcos Rosello of aLL Design. The jury was chaired by Sir Peter Cook, a Royal Academician and Founder of the celebrated studio Archigram. As the winning scheme, the group of four judges picked Archimatika’s project, “Comfort Town.” It is a vibrant 180 low-rise apartment building development located in Kiev, Ukraine. Archimatika say the project represents the “first daring color solution for a residential neighborhood in the country.”
The WAF “World Building of The Year” was selected from the 20 winning completed building category entries and is local to the Festival’s host country: The Netherlands. A public library in Tilburg, the project is the result of a successful collaboration between Civic Architects, Braaksma & Roos Architectenbureau as well as Inside Outside/ Petra Blaisse.
Called LocHal, the library, a former locomotive hangar dating from 1932, responds to the current interest in an architecture that minimises its environmental impact through the imaginative reuse of existing building stock. The WAF Awards super jury suggested this in their statement. “This project transformed a significant building which had been planned for demolition. The result has created a physical facility in which a variety of users can meet for a variety of purposes, in this sense the building has become a social condenser.”
The call for architecture to be conducive to social interaction is something that is being increasingly acknowledged and perhaps in the face of the widespread problem of loneliness that is apparent even in the most densely populated urban metropolises. It is something that we at Form4 Architecture strive to address in our projects through placemaking that has a grassroots approach.
Our Creative Communities Workshop in Freiburg took place just before WAF. It was hosted by Ideal Spaces an ongoing research project that is focussed on how we experience and foster togetherness through architecture and art as well as through our communities.
Interestingly, Ideal Spaces is interested in both the design of physical spaces conducive to well-being and the idea of a good place. The catalysts and conditions that lead to designing a better environment are at the heart of much of the work Ideal Spaces carry out through exhibitions, artworks, research events and supporting both interdisciplinary and collaborative methods to challenging dystopia. We look forward to building on this further and to our next WAF in Lisbon in 2020.
An Architecture of Inclusion
Next month, we’re presenting Golden Cage at the World Architecture Festival in Amsterdam. We designed the pavilion-like sculptural structure for Burning Man. It is rich and lyrical in its symbolism in response to Burning Man’s 2019 theme of Metamorphoses. Five concepts are interwoven to create the central structure, loosely based on Ovid’s tales.
The aim has been to create something expressive of the nature of transformation and its associated mystery and ambiguity. We welcome the idiosyncrasies afforded by these qualities and believe that they are essential to art and perhaps little understood by contemporary architects. Yet the idiosyncratic, the personal, the extraordinary are what give life meaning and make us human.
Burning Man has grown to such an extent over the years that it can be described as a city. Caveat Magister’s book title suggests this clearly: The Scene That Became Cities. A book that suggests that Burning Man addresses something essential that is missing in our lives, something that brings us together, makes us feel compassionate and thus human; and allows us to discover a sense of awe and purpose free of conventional notions of usefulness and success. A way of being that is less about rules and more about shared principles or values. This sort of thinking is at the heart of making a strong and thriving community and it is something architects and designers should be more attuned to – particularly in how they conceive a sense of place.
We are involved in workshops—through the AIA, at Esalen and internationally—addressing some of these concerns and thinking on the possibilities that come with communities that are envisioned from within. Our question to ourselves is: “What if we built a community based on participatory art and the fundamental principles of Burning Man?”
We’re interested in a range of experience and appreciation that is about inclusion instead of exclusion. As around the world, we are seeing politically and economically increasingly divided communities, we feel the role of culture in bringing people together is vital for our well-being, our sense of belonging. In this way, culture is an important glue that makes us resilient and, yes, more human.
Improvisations
In this post we are featuring a few of John Marx’s watercolors and poems from his forthcoming book: ETUDES – The Poetry of Dreams + Other Fragments published by Oro Editions
The works selected for this post focus on the sublime and the notion of origins.
John Marx describes the abstract paintings as “A mad series of dense brushstrokes that compress the emotional energy of painting into one intense burst of unforgiving creativity”, adding that “They represent the other side of our emotional range, the messy paradox of the human condition, of both the darkness and the light that manifest themselves in our inner being.”
Where You Come from Sets a Tone, 2019
I grew up
in the Midwest,
that vast and transient moment
between two precious coasts
In many ways,
not much happens there.
In those rural areas,
people sustain themselves off the land,
and what little that offers
In its own way,
it is also a profoundly beautiful place,
in the quiet elegance of a simple life
in the deep integrity of the people who live there
This was a place to learn to dream
to seek the world that appeared
so far beyond your grasp
On those gentle plains
the pure will of your imagination
can find the extraordinary
by chasing the tumultuous drama of clouds
that pass over
this slow and persistent landscape
– John Marx
Origins, 2019
The Midwest
is a setting
where dreams
of faraway places form,
where the land
will live in your heart
and sustain your destiny
in unpredictable ways.
– John Marx
Summer Reading I: “Against Notopia”
This summer we are posting a series of extracts from essays featured in “The Absurdity of Beauty – Rebalancing the Modernist narrative”, our advocacy monograph published with The Architectural Review. To launch this series of extracts we have chosen an essay by the monograph’s Editor, Catherine Slessor, on the idea of place.
Called “Against Notopia”, Slessor’s essay touches on many of the ideas that recur in different contexts elsewhere in the monograph. Ideas about a growing ambivalence to the legacy of much of what the Modern Movement has achieved in terms of creating a successful, engaging and emotionally meaningful built environment. Ideas about how corporate forces have high-jacked the Modern Movement’s aesthetic whilst leaving behind its ethos. Ideas about how we might better reconnect with the very people whose communities we are designing. Slessor’s often provocative and always perceptive style offers a fresh perspective on these issues and adds a new dimension to the discourse on the notion of ‘nowhere place’ or ‘Notopia’ that has been examined on the pages of Architectural Review in recent years.
“Against Notopia” by Catherine Slessor – Extract:
“In an age of increased cultural and social homogenisation, the elusive and often contested notion of place has assumed a renewed importance. The current era is dominated by rapacious globalisation, the systematic erosion of difference and the commodification of culture. While representing material advancement and social liberalisation, these forces also invariably involve the destruction of traditional cultures and a disengagement with the past. What is now prized most by the multinational corporations who stalk the globe are universal systems of value-free exchange and profit.
Left to the mercy of market forces, the commercialisation of land has spawned the selfish city, as described in the AR’s recent ‘Notopia’ manifesto as being ‘disfigured by the interests of bankers and stillborn in vision and unable to cope with mass urbanisation … one building next to another does not make a place and many buildings do not make a city’. Notopia is ‘a warning sign that the metropolis as place of exchange dialogue and delight between diverse groups of people is being exterminated. Buildings alone do not support life.’
Architecture’s ambivalent relationship with modern capitalism and its growing dependence on arcane treatises and self-justificatory theories has also resulted in the neglect of a diversity of physical environments that have the potential to deliver empirical inspiration for art and invention. To an extent, architecture has become a marginalised freemasonry, its creative potential reduced to eclectic wrapping paper adorning slabs of dehumanised corporate space planning. From Dallas to Dhaka to Dubai, the outcome of this banal hegemony of the built environment is only too apparent.”
Read more at theabsurdityofbeauty.com
Why Architects should pay attention to Burning Man…
As architects we (and I am hoping this includes most of us here) strive to create buildings and cities that have a high degree of vibrancy, authenticity, and a strong sense of community. We desire an engaged population that not only loves their environment, but also participates in its creation, and in its ongoing evolution. The extension of which means they feel responsible for its maintenance and improvement and are inspired and empowered to infuse it with their cultural and artistic energy. They create traditions and rituals which carry this collective effort forward to successive generations. Ideally, this vibrancy extends across the full range of socio-economic strata, so that everyone participates and enjoys these benefits.
If they are successful, they will extend this caring sense of community beyond the physical environment, towards caring for each other’s well being, because they sense how each of us contributes to the success of our communities.
As architects, we contribute the physical structures that contain the workings of humanity, but more importantly, we contribute our own creativity and imagination to imbue emotional meaning, which in turn adds to the energy and excitement of the community.
This is our goal set, a lofty and noble dream.
When we broadly look at what gets built by architects, we can sometimes fall short of these objectives.
Burning Man, on the other hand, succeeds.
For one week, a city of 70,000 people organically forms in the desert.
For one week, 70,000 people create a community that creates vibrancy, authenticity, participation, and a deep caring, all of the things we strive for …. at a level of intensity that is frankly “off the charts”.
There are many misconceptions about Burning Man, as to why people go and what they do there. From my personal experience, Burning Man serves to teach us about “Community and Kindness, thru Participatory Art”. On one extreme, some people come to party, to play, to be self-indulgent. Even these people come away changed from the experience of a strong caring community based on kindness. They come away inspired by the vast range of self-expression, be it Playa Art, Art Cars, Theme Camps, Dance Camps or people’s creative outfits.
Burning Man is not a laboratory to simply “understand placemaking”, it is not an “architecturally” rich environment in the normative formal sense we use in our profession, but in spite of this, and in some ways because of this, a city of 70,000 people build their own vibrancy, in the most deeply authentic way possible, with the work of their own hands ……. if we ignore this, if we don’t take an opportunity to study what makes this work and thrive, we may find ourselves to be irrelevant to the people we pledged to serve.
–John Marx, Chief Artistic Officer at Form4 Architecture
Reflections on Shared Purpose 