Prague's Nationale-Nederlanden building, commonly dubbed the "Dancing House", uses deformation to illustrate a narrative. The primitive form of the European concrete mid-rise is first cartoonized. Picture windows are detached from the mass and clumsily pasted back on and lines of horizontality are warped and shifted fluidly. This effectively suspends materiality, thus allowing a variety of cartoon physics to appear to take place. Sitting on a corner lot, the wider, more regular ("front") facade gives way to the (side) facade which is formed into two turrets. These turrets become characters which, as the narrative goes, are dancing. The narrative goes as far as assigning genders, a masculine (named Fred) and a feminine (named Ginger). Fred wears the rest of the building's cartoon-concrete material, while Ginger wears a sensual sheathing of glass. Following a decontructivist logic, the material surfaces are detailed as to retain an identity distinct from the building mass as a whole. The turrets also take on masculine and feminine form, with Fred strong and broad shouldered, and Ginger as a gracefully slender hour-glass.
Again, we've returned to anthropomorphism. The primitive, which has no distinctly human features, is creatively remolded so as to create such features. This potentially opens a new venue for exploration: assigning gender characteristics to conventionally inanimate forms. Perhaps this sort gender assignment is more common is some cultures than in my own. Latin and contemporary Romance languages use words which have gender forms after all. As another example, the classical orders are said to have gender; the Doric order being the most masculine, and the Corinthian order being the most feminine. Are these things relevant in an age where gender differences are being downplayed in the interest of equal opportunity? Is the discreet narrative the only appropriate use?
Image Source: HQWorld
No comments:
Post a Comment