Along the lines of some of the things we addressed in our long car ride (can the use of an object ever be forecast or secured...can it be defended...? Can an object, such as a chair, take on new meaning when cast into a new context, especially in a context so foreign from its intention? What does it mean to misinterpret the intention of an original, to use it elsewhere, out of context, to translate it, mismatch it -- whether innocently, by accident, for the sake of saving money, or because it is simply on hand. What happens when a design, say of Bauhaus, gets used in the "wrong" context? I offer some quotations from an article Nick once told me about, "Miestakes" by Rem Koolhaus (note the Wordsworthian dilemma!):
"Maybe it is a law that dogmas are defined by those that are most prone to violate them.
Mies’ work had an essence of formlessness, amorphousness, nothingness, perversion, and anxiety behind a stealth shield of serenity. By never ‘explaining’ himself except in the most lapidary terms, Mies condemned all of us –especially his intimates– to second guess his motives. Mies is (too) easily misread. To what extent is Mies –his pronouncements, his example, his method, his aura– to blame for his own misreading?"
"In a way, it was a triumph of the Miesian will: anything can be or become anything.
The Commons survived with an Olympian impassivity vis a vis the encroachment of the pragmatic, the flux of real life. The entire transformation took place on his acolytes’ ‘Mies Watch.’ Their obliviousness allowed alterations by others (‘food experts’, electricians) to remain outside the meticulously preserved limits of architectural consciousness."
"Where is Mies more beautiful, defaced or restored? As ruin, or reconstitution? The Commons could be read in two ways: a surprisingly accommodating, elegant shed, intended by Mies to be common, to absorb whatever iterations of student life are thrown up –to undergo brutal retrofits, each unit an addition to an ultimately aleatory, forever unfinished composition– or a pathetically martyred icon, full of wounds, scars, legible degradations."
*Photo of dancing Bauhaus chairs courtesy of Paul F*
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