Conférence
Lundi 3 Mars 2008, 18h00
Auditoire SG, EPFL
Dans le cadre de l’exposition Julius Shulman, photographe
Cold War: Cool Images
“It was beautiful while it lasted. For a brief period, the span of about fifteen years following the end of World War II, America seemed to embrace modern architecture. It was not, as with the International Style exhibition of 1932 at the Museum of Modern Art, the importation of some European ideas repackaged as a style. It was the development of a whole new mode of operation, one that fascinated Europe in the same way that European models had once fascinated the United States. Indeed, it would seem that the Europeans were more fascinated by the new American models than Americans themselves were. As Alison and Peter Smithson put it:
“There has been much reflection in England on the Eames House. For the Eames House was a cultural gift parcel received here at a particularly useful time. The bright wrapper has made most people-especially Americans-throw the content away as not sustaining. But we have been brooding on it-working on it-feeding on it.”
British architects were absorbing American architecture through the pages of architectural magazines, in the same way that they were absorbing other products of postwar America through advertisements in popular journals. Modern architecture was part of a general fascination, as attractive and colorful as the other products of the Good Life: the cars, the appliances, the food, the toys, the furniture, the dresses, and the lawns. It was yet another well-packaged, consumable object-a desirable image, good enough to eat”.
Beatriz Colomina
Elle est une historienne et théoricienne de l’architecture internationalement reconnue et qui a beaucoup écrit sur les relations entre architecture et media. Parmi ses livres, citons Privacy and Publicity : Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, The NIT Press, 1994), qui reçut en 1995 le prix international du livre par l’American Institute of Architects, Sexuality and Space (New York, Priceton Architectural Press, 1992), qui fût aussi primé en 1993 par l’ American Institute of Architects; et Architecture production (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992. Son livre le plus récent s’appelle Doble exposicion Arquitectura a través del arte (Madrid, Akal, 2006) and Domesticity at War (Barcelona:ACTAR and MIT Press, 2007). Elle a de plus publié Cold War Hot Houses Inventing Postwar Culture from Cockpit to Playboy, co-edité avec AnnMarie Brennan and Jeannie Kim (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004). Colomina a enseigné à l’Ecole depuis 1998, et elle a fondé et pris la direction du Programme Media and Modernity à l’Université de Princeton, un programme doctoral qui promeut l’étude interdisciplinaire des formes culturelles dominantes du dernier siècle et s’intéresse à l’interdisciplinarité entre architecture et technologies. En 2006-2007 elle a dirigé, avec un groupe de doctorants de Princeton, l’exposition “Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X” au Storefreont for Art and Architecture à New York et au Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) à Montreal. L’exposition est présentée dans plusieurs villes aux USA, en Europe et en Asie en commençant par la Documenta 12 à Kassel et l’ Architectural Association à London. Elle participe à de nombreuses collaborations comprenant la Fondation le Corbusier, CASVA et le CCA. Elle est actuellement Senior Mellon Fellow au CCA et travaille à son nouveau projet de recherche “X-Ray Architecture: Illness as Metaphor”. Elle a reçu en 2005 le prix de la Présidence de l’université de Princeton pour son enseignement.