Project 1a - Reading Assignment - February 5th

Anthony Vidler begins the chapter analyzing the constituent parts of Death Cube K; a counter postmodern bar whose formal elements evoke the mannerisms of the architecture firm Morphosis.  Vidler describes the visitor’s experience as a scene “drawn directly from the recent past of 1980’s architecture, . . . a literal evocation of ‘Metamorphosis.’”  One such project that comes to mind is the firm’s 1998 design of the Tsunami Restaurant and Bar in Las Vegas. 

 A series of themed folded planes generate the spatial sequences of the two story promenade creating a didactic experience “locating the authentic within a radically synthetic place.”  Vidler goes on to describe the foundations of the deconstructionist movement as an intense desire to liberate space from the “hermetically sealed” conformism of the bankrupt bar building typology of postmodernism.  This new movement of breaking conventions literally manifests itself as a breaking out of the box, embracing architectural forms of fractured geometries, opened solids, intersecting planes, and the questioning of the perpendicular to ground members of the accepted, expedient style.  Morphosis takes the familiar entity of the wall, and cants it creating “a polemic quality, self-consciously posed against the ‘right angle’ of modernity, the horizontality and verticality announced by the Maison Domino prototype.”  Designing with fractured geometry opens up the capacity for new interpretations of architecture.  No longer restricted by conventional constructs, precedents including history, memory, nostalgia, desire, and innovation can be personified through the built form.