Marking a Place : Land Art/Architecture/Propositional Drawings

Outpost 050923

Reticular Events/Tentative Surfaces.

Structures/Journeys/Maps/Diagrams

Buildings that include/contain areas for inhabitation, living, working, sleeping.

Marking a place in the seemingly infinite expanse of the desert. 

For Richard Serra, such a building serves as a barometer by means of which the landscape can be interpreted and known.

Architectural Fables/Unbuilt Projects, posited as ideal communities, projects living on as architectural fables long after constructed buildings have crumbled. 

Emilio Ambasz, speaks of architecture as a myth making act, my work is a search for primal things, being born, being in love, and dying. It has to do with existence on an emotional, passionate, and essential level.

Steven Holl, speaks of architecture and site as having an experimental connection, a metaphysical link, a poetic link.

Hannsjorg Voth has developed a feeling for the formal and spatial relationship between the artifact and the ideal pristine landscape, he is interested in finding traces of this 'ideal' original landscape or as he likes to call it, zero landscape, on the sea and in the desert. 

Sky Stairway, resembling the great archaic calendar structures (Jaipur) with its steps, which seem to lead into an endless distance, symbolise the link between the finiteness of earthly things and the infinity of the cosmos. Yet the symbol is transient, the clay was trodden in the traditional manner will not be able to withstand the erosive force of the Moroccan Desert indefinitely. A special place that will only live on in the tales of the nomads.   

Between Landscape Architecture and Land Art.

Udo Weilacher.

Himmelstreppe-Sky Stairway is a seemingly archaic clay structure in the Moroccan Plain of Marha. 

Voth has developed a form of dialogue with nature, landscape and civilization which clearly stands apart from works of Land Art, on account of its semantic complexity and close links with European cultural history.

Signs of Remembrance.

Hannsjorg Voth.

Voth's creativity has always been characterized by the desire to investigate the elemental relationships in nature and their their fundamental connections with humans. The artist's almost meditative treatment of the four elements, provides revealing insights into the potential force of artistic interventions in the complex relationship between landscape and natural environment. 

Christo has made a decisive contribution to making art in public space popular, my 'bindings' for The Field Marks 1975 had a great deal to do with bandaging a wound in the landscape, whereas Christo wraps in order to reveal. My work has also very clearly got something to do with escaping from people. Today people no longer seem to be capable of approaching nature and creative work with respect. The trend today is to drive to the ends of the earth and then to destroy everything there. It is difficult for me to come to terms with schizophrenic mixture of escape and dependence.

Hannsjorg Voth. 1999.

Casa De Retiro Espiritual

Spiritual Retreat.

Emilio Ambasz

Peter Buchanan.

Casa De Retiro Espiritual, makes explicit that the entire complex is conceived as a spiritual retreat and though offering magnificent views of the lake and estate, it is essentially introverted in character.

Isolated on its estate, it withdraws below the ground. At a simple remove are the bedrooms for deep dreams, and the bathrooms oozing oriental sensuality, and still further removed is the elevated balcony. Like those found throughout the Islamic world and following a traditional Andalusian pattern, this balcony is enclosed in a lattice of turned wooden spindles giving privacy and shade while admitting the breeze. 

Of the many ways of engaging with an architectural work, there are two especially pertinent to this spiritual retreat. A house devised both as a receptacle for the changing play of light and mood as well as a carefully choreographed sequence of experiences.

To move physically through the house, exploring and experiencing its spaces in sequence is the more active mode. While the other is observing patiently how slowly subtle changes of light, colour, temperature, movement and sound register and rotate through the days and seasons.

By means of these devices the viewer is gradually induced to open up to a contemplative mood and awareness of cyclical time in which even the simplest of daily rituals are now invested with a semi sacred intensity.

Emilio Ambasz

Steven Holl

Stuart Wrede

While Ambasz's work on the whole addresses the primal psychological urges in us that have been basic to humans since time in immemorial, Holl's architecture tends to address the more elusive, complex and brittle psychological states of modern urban humans.

Both architects' work reflects the schizophrenic nature of late 1960s attitudes towards engagement and withdrawal. Each has designed 'Mythic Retreats' placed below the earth's surface. Ambasz, partly sunk in the midst of open wheat fields outside Cordoda, Spain. Holl, floating underwater of the coast of St Tropez, France.

The Poetics of the Pragmatic

Emilio Ambasz

Anchoring

Steven Holl

Michael Heizer.

Nader Khalili.