From the description of the project:

OMA received an honorable mention for Très Grande Bibliothèque, a competition to build a new national library in France. The program called for the creation of various smaller libraries contained in one building envelope; including libraries for moving images, recent acquisitions, reference, catalogues and scientific research. The immense amount of information to be stored within these spaces (books, films, digital databases) became the impetus for the overall concept design. The library is imagined as a solid block of information, a dense repository for the past, from which voids are carved to create public spaces – absence floating in memory.

Partner in charge:
Rem Koolhaas
Competition Team:
Art Zaaijer, Xaveer de Geyter, Georges Heintz, Heike Lohmann, Ron Steiner, Alex Wall, Christophe Cornubert, Ramon Klein, Yushi Uehara
Engineers:
Cecil Balmond, Mohsen Zikri of Arup

Sources:
Afasia and OMA.

The CCA in Montréal just opened a retrospective exhibition on the famous OMA entry for the 1989 French National Library competition. A cubic 100 meters tall building characterised by the distinction between book storage (solid) and public space (voids). “A building that marks the beginning of the ‘big’ period and the shift from urbanism to conceptual formalism that Rem Koolhaas would retroactively name in his infamous remark on context.”

The exhibition features the four original anonymous panels, hundreds of working drawings showing design process moving through different media, digital and physical models.

The following is the timelapse of the plaster model construction for Très Grande Bibliotheque.

“On the sunny shores of the Caspian, a mere four hour flight away from Western Europe, the City of a Thousand Suns awaits you. Hipcescu, a thriving 21st century metropolis, home to the world’s highest building, the iconic Hipcescu Tower (850 m).

Please feel free to download our most recent print ad. You are hereby granted permission to use or duplicate it any way you deem appropriate. If you wish to publish it in a newspaper or magazine and pay for it yourself, you will be granted life-long Honorary Citizenship of Hipcescu.”

More infos on “hipcescu.com“, a site devoted to the cult of Hipcescu, its tower and the personality of its creator. (“Let us bear in mind V. Hipcescu’s words: “Before we build a city, we contemplate the notion of a city.” Thank you.”)

Via: Things Magazine

And yet, there’s someone who actually played it. (From 3’50″)
Related:
John Stump Composer of Faeries Aire and Death Waltz
Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz – John Stump
absurd scores.

My Pinterest gallery of Absurd Musical Scores.

Here’s a page from the score and some other nonsense compositions by the same author:

For twelve hours a crane dropped 71 junkyard beams from an height of 45 meters onto a fresh cement pit. The random fall of the beams echoes abstract expressionism gestural acts as Jackson Pollocks’ paintings and is equally the result of both the control of the artist and the chance.

The violence inherent in the beam’s falling recalls past extreme works of the seminal artist, namely: “Shoot”, a 1971 performance in which he asked a friend to shoot him in the arm inside a gallery, or the “anti-architecture” work Samson (1985), (read “Art against architecture: Chris Burden 1985′s Samson“, on Socks), a sculpture meant to millimetrically destroy the gallery it was installed in, each time a visitor entered. In the case of “Beam Drop”, the beams are like the artist’s body falling and crashing against Earth.

From an online interview conducted by Tiffany Barber:

Chris Burden: For my next project, Beam Drop: Brazil, I’m recreating a piece I originally constructed in 1985. The piece is meant to be both a large abstract expressionist painting and a steel sculpture… constructed by filling in a 10-foot deep pit with loose dirt and wet concrete and dropping 100 vertically-raised steel I-beams into the pit. The process and end result are filmed.

Beam Drop is a significant work because the I-beam is the building block of corporate architecture. The capricious way in which the piece is enacted – the serious, rigid, precise process and using the material, steel, in a light-hearted way – is anti-architecture and anti-corporate architecture. Not many artists have used steel. Everyone is very careful because the material has so much potential for danger.

Read another interview on Flash Art.

The 1984/5 Beam Drop. Another iteration of the performance/sculpture took place in Antwerp in 2009.

Via: Installator tumblr

Unfortunately the original article lacked a translation of the images’ captions. Due to the interesting informations they provide, we decided to present here their translation.

Of related interest:
Architecture in Uniform. Designing and Building for the Second World War. Jean-Louis Cohen.
Exhibition (on Domus, too).
Paul Virilio: Bunker Archaeology
Paul Virilio: the Negative Horizon. An Essay in Dromoscopy
Camouflage of Boeing plant in Seattle during World War II

First page:

1)Air defence aerostatic balloon over a mobile field during WW I (West front)

3)This direction was not followed by the Belgians who preferred to build huge and complicated fortresses (Liege and Namur) developed mostly on the surface, of rectangular shape with a diversified concentration of artillery; they proved unsuitable for a systematic defense of the long front, that in fact was defeated on the Belgian side.

Second page:

4)Plan of the trenches dug by the 126th British Infantry Regiment in the War of 1915-1918.

7/8)The codification of deception is represented by the vocation of the “military” to camouflage: men disguised as trees, casemates looking like dunes, etc. These examples of camouflage made ​​on the English coast in 1940 use less natural fields to create a curiously untrustworthy urban camouflage . The Trojan Horse.

Third and fourth page:

9)Successive stages of placement of a British naval fortress. The bottom of the cylinders is filled with water, letting the platform sink and sit on the bottom of the sea.

17)In the reassuring journalism of wartime, the ideology of the shelter has its own particular iconography. While the house is burning you can chat, watch the fire and host friends. In this macabre contrast, destruction and war belong to the category of natural disasters against which you try just to survive … to begin again as before.

Yes, until some days ago, because it happens that his first book – “Il signore dei colori” – is out now and we bet it’s as good as it looks.

“Il signore dei colori” (Lord of colors) is the story of three youngsters becoming adults during a summer. A summer bound to reveal their weaknesses: one will understand he’s not as cool as he thought, another will be humiliated by a little girl, and the third will discover that the love of the adults may hide dark zones, pulsions that one can defend from, only if armed by a genuine naïvety.

The following is the last issue of Mosso, Roberto’s and friend free online magazine, featuring a presentation of the work with comments by Igort, Vincino, Ferruccio Giromini, and Daniel Pellegrino.
Click to download:

The ambition of identifing an idealized human proportion was the alleged basis upon which building a new rational and sanitized architecture, but the mere concept of finding a norm out of an ideal body is in fact paradoxical and even discriminatory. Despite that, the Neufert’s manual easily encountered a widespread success, and the standardization today involves not only the human anatomy but also men’s behaviour.

Without futher addition to what has been already and more exhaustively written by Léopold Lambert twice in his blog (“The Modernist Ideology of a Normative Body” and “A Subversive Approach to the Ideal Normatized Body“), we leave you with the work of Thomas Carpentier.

As a parody to the normatization of the body, Thomas focuses his attention to out-of-standard but iconic character’s bodies, such as the one of a culturist, Jabba the Hutt’s, Oscar Pistorius’, Borg Queen’s or David Toole’s. Around their real or fictitious proportions he then re-imagines or create architectural spaces whose main purpose is to accomodate their other standards.

Related:

Frederick Kiesler. Architecture, “Biotechnique”, and a Peek into the Future of the Computer, 1940. Thanks to Ethel Baraona for signaling!

Curator Adrian Lahoud looked back to the recent history of architecture and asked the participants to revisit “three competitions that radically transformed architectural culture: The Peak (1982), Yokohama Port Terminal (1994) and Blur Building (1999).” All three winning entries emerged under unique conditions to take up critical positions on the predominant tendencies of their time.”







From the brief:

“The last three decades saw significant change across social, political, and environmental registers. The conjunction of capital flows, mass urbanization and increasingly interconnected cultural and financial networks have reshaped the way we understand, produce and discuss architecture resulting in a breathless cycle of formal and aesthetic transformations. This restless appearance of change conceals an increasing sense of inertia or perhaps even of confusion, in that an intellectual project has yet to accompany the overiding sense of technical virtuosity.”

More infos on Think Space 2012 site.

We’re glad to use this occasion to bring back into surface an old article from the 60′s, 70′s and 80′s architecture magazines archive of the Fabrizi family: here’s the winner of one of the three competitions: The Peak, by Zaha Hadid, a hard-edged suprematist vision for a leasure club in Hong Kong, (Domus 642/1983)

Click to enlarge:

From the descriptive text (read below)
“The term radical reconstruction draws from the idea of radical history — generally, the history of politically radical social movements. A radical reconstruction relates to this tradition but further suggests the reawakening of radical historical thought through acts of architectural or urban reconstruction.”

I’m personally doubtful about the possible outcome of such a project: in fact rather than suggesting the reawakening of radical historical thought, I guess it would end up facilitating the fetishization of radicals spontaneous manifestations.

The following texts are the description of the project and a Petition.

The Mound of Vendome
David Gissen

Following the column’s reconstruction in 1873, various groups have called for the Vendôme Column to be destroyed again. But instead of destroying this rebuilt monument once more, we ask that another reconstruction join the reconstructed column: We, the undersigned, ask that the Mound of Vendôme be rebuilt in the plaza to commemorate the historical and radical events of 1871. The mound is a symbol of revolution and the column’s destruction, but it is also a symbol of the Communard’s interest in urban care, preservation, and the future of their city. It should be built again.

Already blogged on Socks:
LANDSCAPE FUTURES. INSTRUMENTS, DEVICES AND ARCHITECTURAL INVENTIONS