Sketching and initial observation

This week I have done three drawings to express my view of the South bank as an area that merge together different architectural components. Indeed the buildings are a combination of different geometrical shapes that remind me of futuristic buildings, but also cubist paintings.

Festival of Britain

The Festival of Britain emblem, designed by Abram Games, from the cover of the South Bank Exhibition Guide, 1951

The idea of a Festival to commemorate the centenary of The Great Exhibition of 1851 first appeared in 1943 when Gerald Barry, the editor of the News Chronicle, wrote an open letter addressed to Sir Stafford Cripps, the president of the Board of Trade. Barry wanted to progress his idea of a cultural exhibition to promote Britain's design and manufacturing skill in the immediate post war era. It was completely dismateled when Winston Churchill and the Conservative party won the elections in 1951.

The official opening of the national exhibition was the 3rd of May 1951 and the principal site was the South Bank in London, an area that was badly damaged during the blitz.



Key buildings:

The largest project on site was The Dome of Discovery, a temporary building designed by Ralph Tubbs; made of concrete, steel and aluminium, it was also the largest aluminum structure in existece at that time and the largest dome in the world.





The Skylon was the “Vertical Feature”, symbol of the Festival of Britain. a futuristic-looking, slender, vertical, cigar-shaped steel structure located by the Thames in London, that apparently floated above the ground. It was designed by Hidalgo Moya, Philip Powell and Felix Samuely, and fabricated by Painter Brothers of Hereford, England, on London's South Bank between Westminster Bridge and Hungerford Bridge. The structure was dismanteled 1952, toppled into the Thames, cut into pieces and turned into ashtrays.




The Royal festival Hall designed by Holland, Hannen & Cubitts for London County Council was opened in 1951 and it is the only building from the Festival of Britain that survives. Today is one of the world’s leading performance venues.





(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festival_of_Britain, last accessed 18/10/10)
(http://whitstablepier.com/fob/index.html, last accessed 18/10/10)

Tate Modern - Expanded Cinema exhibition

Artists Lis Rhodes and Steve Farrer exhibited their works at the symposium about Expanded cinema held at the Tate Modern in 2009. Their works involves the use of lights and projections combined with sounds and shadows to create beautiful cinematic spaces.







Lis Rhodes - Light Music (1975, 16 mm, 2 screens, 25′00, B&W)

"Lis Rhodes has conducted a thorough investigation into the relationship between shapes and rhythms of lines and their tonality when printed as sound. Her latest work, Light Music, is in a series of movable sections. The film does not have a rigid pattern of sequences and the final length is variable. The imagery is restricted to lines of horizontal bars across the screen: there is variety in the spacing (frequency), their thickness (amplitude), and their colour and density (tone)".
(William Raban, extract from programme notes for Perspectives on British Avant-Garde at Hayward Gallery, 1977)




Steve Farrer - The Machine (Expanded cinema) 2009

Expanded cinema

Tony Hill - Point of Source 1973

"Expanded Cinema identifies a film and video practice which activates the live context of watching, transforming cinema's historical and cultural 'architectures of reception' into sites of cinematic experience that are heterogeneous, performative and non-determined"
(Expanded Cinema - Activating the Space of Reception http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/symposia/18016.htm,2009,last accessed 18/10/10)

Stan Vanderbeek is considered one of the pioneers of computer animation and multimedia art.He coined in the 1960's the expression "Expanded cinema" to indentify the process of using film in art developed from early twentieth Century avant-gardes movements that combined together filmmaking, media-technologies and performance art.His early films from the 1955 to 1965 involved animating paintings, drawings and collages; he would cut out pictures from magazines and books and combine them together in order to create different surreal images. His ironic juxtaposition were inspired by Max Ernst's dada collages and had the wild rough informality of the Expressionism of the Beat Generation.
(Moritz, W., "Stan Vanderbeek Biography", http://www.iotacenter.org/visualmusic/articles/moritz/vanderbeekbio,last accessed 18/10/10)



Movie-Drome
«Influenced by Buckminster Fuller’s spheres, Vanderbeek had the idea for a spherical theater where people would lie down and experience movies all around them. Floating multi-images would replace straight one-dimensional film projection. From 1957 on, Vanderbeek produced film sequences for the Movie-Drome, which he started building in 1963. His intention went far beyond the building itself and moved into the surrounding biosphere, the cosmos, the brain and even extraterrestrial intelligence.»
(Jürgen C.,Leonardo, Vol. 36, No. 3, 2003, p. 229.)