The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism - Frederick Jameson

An excerpt.

Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime - Immanuel Kant

In full.

Preface to Cromwell by Victor Hugo (English Translation)

Where Hugo defines the modern and the grotesque, especially where the latter acts as a remedy for the beautiful and the sublime.

In full.

Niagara Falls, Barren Illusion

Source.

On the Sublime by Friederich Schiller

Essay in full.

Beauty enslaves us, but the Sublime will set us free.

American Architect Marshall Strabala Designs China's Tallest Building - Shanghai Tower

Source.

Official website.

Gensler blog entries on the Shanghai Tower. c/f Shanghai Architecture - Selection.

29 Nov 2008

AMERICAN ARCHITECT MARSHALL STRABALA IN AWE OF SHANGHAI TOWER, CHINA'S TALLEST BUILDING

Shanghai Tower's November 29th Groundbreaking Marks Start of Construction Of World's First Double-Skin, Super-Tall Building

SHANGHAI, China -- With the groundbreaking of the 632-meter (2070 feet), Shanghai Tower, China's tallest building, Marshall Strabala, the building's Director of Design, will achieve another significant milestone in an illustrious design career.

This will mark the final stretch of Strabala's latest and most important project to date.

With the Shanghai Tower, the Houston-based architectural designer has designed three of the world's 10-tallest buildings, including the 160+-story Burj Dubai, the world's tallest building now under construction in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and the 420-meter (1380 feet) Nanjing Greenland Financial Center in Nanjing China to be completed in 2009.

However, Strabala says Shanghai Tower will be different than the others. 

"Shanghai Tower will represent China's dynamic 'future,'" said Strabala. "It will be an impressive building where China looks ahead to both the future of this bustling and ever-changing metropolis, but also to the future of the dynamic Chinese spirit. There will be no other such unique and well-conceived tower like it anywhere in the world," he added.

Featuring a soft triangular shape, the tower rotates as it juts skyward and concludes with an open-top design. As the shape rises, a "strike" or open notch curves up and around the building which is an engineering feature to control the wind up and away from the building.

The 120-story tower will feature office space, luxury residences, a high-end hotel, retail space, restaurants and a public observatory. The development will be separated into nine distinct bioclimatic zones, with each having its own atrium, lush gardens, indoor air controls and panoramic 360° views of China's largest and most populous metropolis.

Green Building Design

Shanghai Tower also will be the world's first super-tall building with a "double-skin," according to Strabala. Part of an environmentally friendly, "green building" approach, the double skin has two glass walls. "Green building" is the practice of improving the efficiency of how buildings use resources such as energy, materials and water, while reducing the impact that buildings have during their lifespan -- on health and the environment.

"With the double skin, the building will function much like a thermos bottle," said Strabala. "This allows us to harvest and use daylight, reduce artificial lighting to a minimum, increase the insulation of the building's interior, and, long-term, dramatically reduce energy consumption and energy costs."

Expanding on the green building concept, wind turbines will be placed on the roof to generate windpower. And, the building will be situated within a 10,000-square meter (107,600 square feet) open green space that will become both a public park and the front entry to the tower.

The project will seek LEED certification from the China Green Building Council, in association with the US Green Building Council. Strabala, who has earned his LEED certification, has incorporated green building concepts in his designs for many years.

"Vertical City"

According to Strabala, Shanghai's central city is running out of space so it is therefore efficient and economical to build super-tall, mixed-use buildings, instead of multiple smaller buildings spread out across the area.

"Shanghai Tower's upward spiraling form will become a 'vertical city," a structure comprised of eight separate neighborhoods that become plazas in the sky," explained Strabala. "The spiral derives from not only the smallest of things, the smallest atom, but also the largest of thing, the collective universe. Every element of the building needs to perform two purposes. It integrates art and science, aesthetics and function, technology and beauty and knowledge and perception."

Shanghai Architecture Treasure

Strabala has no doubt that when it is finished in 2014, the Shanghai Tower will be viewed as a city landmark and treasure.

"Looking ahead, Shanghai Tower will be seen as one of the city's great architectural treasures, and mentioned in the same breath with the city's Yuyuan Gardens, the former French Concession, and theBund."

Shanghai Tower will be located in the Lujiazui section of the city's Pudong district. It will be adjacent to, and taller than, two other super-tall buildings, the 421-meter (1380 feet) Jin Mao and the 492-meter (1614 feet) World Financial Center. Together, the buildings are referred to as the "three brothers," and are situated east and across the Huangpu River from the city's historic Bund area. 

Strabala's team of designers from the US-based Gensler architectural firm was selected following an intense 21-month-long competition among local and international design firms. Strabala managed the design team including Jun Xia, principle of the Shanghai office, Xiamomei Lee, project manager, and Grant Uhlir, consultant manager.

Holderlin in Translation Online

 A selection, translated, by David Constantine.

Conviction

Remembrance

Hyperion's Song of Destiny

All the Fruit...

Bread and Wine, Part 7

More Translations
As On A Holiday
At The Middle Of Life
Bread And Wine
Celebration Of Peace
For Zimmer
Homecoming
Human Applause
Hyperion's Song Of Destiny
Looking outward
Mnemosyne
Once Gods Walked...
Out For A Walk
Patmos
Remembrance
The Course Of Life
The Neckar
To The Fates
To The Sun God
When I Was A Boy

From Wilhelm Waiblinger's essay: "Friedrich Hölderlin's Life, Poetry and Madness" (1830)

The Atomic Cafe

c/f The Atomic Bombers Speak

Shary Boyle: If I Had One Wish

Some Context:

Website

Why Feminist Art Still Matters | Hazlitt | Random House of Canada (Discussion with Shary Boyle, Vanessa Dunn, Aminah Sheikh)

Shary Boyle Represents Canada at 55th Venice Biennale

Everything under the Moon (with Christine Fellows) - A heartbreaking shadow play that achingly equates the show's illusory projections with vanishing peoples and species, the transitory symbols of art becoming the ghostly psychic debris of our terribly, evermore plausible extinction. And yet a children's story as well, a quest, a buddy movie, the story of friends around a campfire.

Canadian Artist Project (including commentary by Sholem Krishtalka).

New and Upcoming work.

Facebook (with art posts!).

One wishes, within the seemingly infinite crawl spaces and hobby-holes of the inter-web, that the site of a *lovvved* artist would represent all of their collected and studio work. The representative sample of Shary's work so inspires and gives voice to awkward, shapeless dodos of thought.

Below are a few of my own dodos.

- Sensitivity, skill in craft and imagination are pursued as peregrine themes in Shary Boyle's work. These three motivations are rarely pursued as separate from one another. Imagination is allowed a mischievous tentacle, transforming reality, not retreating from it.

- Sensitivity is sometimes a shying quality in the purveyor of commodities, as making commodities is a repetitive activity. In an artist, this often seems to lead to a heightened valuation of craft. The other route (not always exclusive, sometimes complimentary) is to become more machine-like. One could (arbitrarily) set up two default positions to illustrate the range of attitudes towards the art object and the commodity: the 19th Century Arts and Craft movement, at one pole, and Warhol, at the other.

- Shary's production schedule is regularly machine-like (Warhol). Each individual piece of work, however, has a great deal of particular patience and care put into it (Arts and Crafts).

- Art objects, knickknacks that demonstrate sensitivity in craft, now a rarer sight for a modern, resist the habitual quick scan of the senses. Such work is to involve one, imaginatively, sinuously, in the presented vignette. 

- Shary spends much effort digging up techniques of undervalued, outmoded (by the ever-efficient machines), excluded or forgotten artisanal practices. Among practices, thoughtfulness, sensibilities renewed in the twining, fluffy, shying-then-emboldening, leaky, leafy-lined aesthetic of Boyle's work is a generous array of stylistic preciousness.

- Here is a scrapbook note of what I imagine to be preciousness in her work: fairy tale or folklore sources; imaginative landscapes; animals and animal-people; fantastical flights of fancy; elfin and prepubescent bodies; daffy costumes; detailed depictions of cloth, material; gilt, decorative, flowery, ornate flourishes; a respect for field observation as in naturalism; brittle, dainty, breakable materials for the sculpture; delicate, complimentary colour palette for the paintings; drawer-ly pencil strokes and pencil textures for the drawings; arcane technologies (minded mostly in the service of creating wonder) for the projections (slide projectors, magic lanterns, manipulated, theatrically and moodily, in real time).

- The porcelain figurines also point to a further back historical source, in European rococo (I imagine the first originators of stylistic preciousness also sensed this continuity between the two practices, the delicate, aristocratically-refined rococo collectible on the one hand and the imaginative, industrial-democratic object of preciousness, on the other).

- No doubt the general dis-inclusion of preciousness from canonical museum art has--at least--socially patriarchal roots. Noting its remarkable influence on every nick and cranny of twentieth century creative output, glaring is the lopsided gender participation in either milieu's practitioners/members (museum=boys, preciousness=girls). Common from the Victorian era on, transmitted broadly via the pulp children's industries through the 20th then into our century, under Boyle's deft touch, preciousness has almost the appearance of a polemic; it also tests the redemptive quality of historically excluded material.

- I say "almost polemic" because so often the polemical tone in art leads to a certain brashness in presentation, broad strokes, blunted figurations, rhetorical outwardness. Again, sensitivity, the value which Boyle seems to place in preciousness, remains ice-cream-serene, supreme.

- However, Boyle's adoption of preciousness, is not in itself precious (if one is to mean by precious to be cloyingly taken with the sentimental, obsessively self-protected by the pretty and the quaint). Darkness, unsentimental frankness appears in this mythic retelling of the modern situation often, with a certain grounded literalness. And with humour.

- Darkness often comes in the form of a stylistic intrusion: the gothic, the grotesque, the violently flattened.

- Relatedly, despite the luster of pretty inherent in the materials and certain of the techniques (porcelain, ornament, floral patterning etc.), forms are often knotty, gnarled, organic in the way of old dead trees or mud.

- A lot of her illustrative qualities so reminiscent of children's picture story books, it is hard not to feel one is in the midst of a story. So, one makes up a story. Her figurines, also calling up qualities of toys (especially the off-limits-to-children toys of impeccable enchantment collected by grandparents) put one solidly over to a place of meaningful, fantastical, sentimental play.

- The stage is mythic, her girl children the heroes. Her girl children or also highly androgynous or effeminate boys; also near-hermaphrodites.

- Proportions or features of profiles, torsos, limbs, erogenous chassis, blemishes, blotches that lack ideal ratio or poise by corroboration of the beauty industries are studiously, lovingly attended to.

 - Departing from a gloomy Dickinsian suburbs of dingy interiors, looming, impersonal adults, coercive bullies, her heroes flee to take up residence in a savage and wonderful Never-Never Land. This land is frequently a woods or savanna-like. All of these locales possess an Edenic, private quality.

- Modern heroes, their adventures are complicated by embarrassment, awkwardness, genital compulsion, clumsiness.

- Heroes nonetheless, they are embarked upon a journey where they encounter as trials the strangeness of their bodies; evolving amorousness and/or self-pleasure; the compulsion of rituals; a battle with shyness and boldness before an implicit, all-present gaze (the gaze, in my mind, is a camera lens, the pose perhaps the remembered gesture of confinement during a vacation snapshot); a fight for equilibrium and fair footing within the catastrophes, excesses, self-sacrifice of desire; and the ever-present, lurking monsters of past trauma.

- Violence to the psyche is portrayed bodily (a severed head, a discombobulated anatomy).

- One suspects that the kaleidoscopes of fantasy start as nascent buds within the skin. Like leaves growing then falling from branches, these buds elaborate then self-shatter before the force and processes of the world. Responsible for these strange flowers and twirling vines, the literal crisis--its hard contours kept slightly off-frame-- is pictured in a transformed manner. The vignette is more bodily and remembered than based in the hard light of present perception.

 - Fate, the trans-formative point in stories, intervenes at moments of charged physicality, when a body seems in revolt against both environment and itself. The resulting, intimate metamorphoses convolute the flesh into endless, strange contusions and conjurations, often involving the return of spring-time or the appearance of animals. In these instances, the body can be like a disguise, an erratic shrub or sometimes a fountain.

- Otherworld Uprising (the title of Boyle's *really* good art book) is a designation which seems to refer to the condition of a literal spirit world. In the revolt, spirits, nature, body overlap one anothers' conventionally separate outlines.

- The just-below-the-surface, (half) presence of this Otherworld, its portals and rabbitholes located in bodily orifices, throws subjective turmoil and psychical discomfort in ribbons of stress against a semi-solid yet also fugitive, fleeing screen. This screen, made up of dreams and of shadows, often stands as a protective shield between two figures encountering one another, forestalling or warning off their first meeting. This outcome of these meetings is often either reconciliation/camaraderie or assault-dismemberment.

- I suspect the ectoplasm of this spirit world is made up of bodily juices.

- Poised together on a small pedestal of turf, possible murderers, potential companions, yet many times the figures stay half disinterested in one another, with the retiring tendency of shy but busily assessing, curious children.

- The contrast or collusion of gender roles (the same, different) is helpful in drawing out possible secretive meanings lodged in these frozen confrontations. Meaning plays out many ways: as fantasy fulfillment; as revenge; as appreciation and gauge of difference; as fetishistic worship; as friendship, fulfilling, joyful and intimate, but also brutal or conspiratorial; as wistful compensation; as jokey-making-fun; as critique; as ceremonial renewal; as violence. But, also, sometimes, inscrutably.

In the prolific stories of her art, Boyle seems attracted to rituals of visionary questing more usual to those swept aside, the misfits, the crackpots, the obsessive hobbyists, the shut ins (i.e. Blake, Darger). The import managed within each strange vacation slide or cameo often gives the sense of secrets within secrets, fleshed out in private and in locations of quiet, a remembrance of a remembrance (possibly dangerous), gaining not just velocity over time but also structure and a skeleton.

- Ever so often, with the kind of concentrated, slow pacing capable of affecting a shift in scene without hemorrhaging continuity or narrative sweep, Boyle's turbulent frame switches to almost-fulfillment and near-certitude in the sublime. The characters are alone, holding hands, with a planet to themselves, a planet worthy of the naturalistic raptures on the pages of a speculative edition of National Geographic. Within the context of Boyle's art, this is sublime in a heroic, personal sense, haunting one with the juxtaposition of the human with inhuman, and, in a sense, the unrepresentable landscape: Nature. It is not the sublime of the modern architect for whom the sublime is the habitat-equivalent of military shock and awe (Derived from Fredrick Jameson, the more habitual invocation of the word).

The Fantasy Is Already Much More Than You Can Say about It

Visit the Burj Khalifa. In Dubia.

 "Burj Khalifa, formerly called Burj Dubai, was formally inaugurated by His Highness, Sheikh Mohammad of Dubai on the of 4th of January, 2010. "

 

 "In addition to being the tallest building, Burj Khalifa is also the tallest structure ever to be made by man. It has wrested this honour from the Warsaw radio mast which has a height of 646m or 2,121ft. The Burj is a unique skyscraper, one of the most expensive ever to be built. It's developer, Emaar, has spent over US$1.5BN on construction. However, this investment will soon be recovered since the Burj is home to the world's first and only Armani Residences which are being sold at over USD$3,500 per square foot!"

Text Source: Travel Places.

"Burj Khalifa lifts the world's head proudly skywards, surpassing limits and expectations. Rising gracefully from the desert and honouring Dubai with a new glow. Burj Khalifa is at the heart of Dubai and its people; the centre for the world's finest shopping, dining and entertainment and home for the world's elite."

"More than just the world's tallest building, Burj Khalifa is an unprecedented example of international cooperation, symbolic beacon of progress, and an emblem of the new, dynamic and prosperous Middle East."