sculpture: April 2008 Archives

Yesterday, I was at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington DC (both the lovely, huge Dulles hangar and the nostalgically tatty one on the Mall), where the second Apollo Lunar Module is displayed.

... which brings us to two projects by Archigram, the Cushicle and the Fully Applianced House (for which I'm not finding a picture):

"The autonomous Cushicle unit could develop to become part of a more widespread urban system of personalized enclosures," stated Archigram 8's editorial. As was pointed out in class, it's not unlike the iPod, not unlike what Michael Bull said recently in an interview with Wired:

The iPod is a Sherpa -- it has all the things that you want...The iPod allows people to control their environment, more so than any other technology. In a world where we have little sense of control over our everyday lives, it can be very satisfying to control how you interact with your environment... IPod users, mobile phone users, are people who are always in another space. They warm up these alienated spaces with their own pleasure. But what we're really seeing is an increasing denial of shared space.

Another classmate talked about the vulnerability of these membranes. I'd like to imagine that maybe they could protect themselves. Consider this captivating project by Joshua Allen Harris: animals made of plastic bags and tied to the subway grates. They spring to life when the subway runs under the street. (via Boing Boing and Wooster Collective):