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According to the newspapers, the recent unveiling of Frank Gehry’s design for the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation – to be built in the Jardin d’Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne – left observers struggling for a suitable metaphor. However, as the Guardian reported it, the architect himself seemed in no doubt: ‘“It’s a cloud of glass – magical, ephemeral, all transparent,” Gehry said. It was, he added, “not stodgy.”’
Stodginess, certainly, is something that the appeal to clouds might well be hoped to ward off. Of all the flowmotifs available to oppose the heaviness of congealed and earth-bound stodge, the slow and complex three dimensional circulation, drift and dispersion of the nebular seems the most promising. Moreover, not only does the cloud seem opposed to all material loading, equally it appears to resist being weighted down and tethered by signification. As, symptomatically, the Guardian’s report concluded: ‘Gehry added that one of his main aims was to attract youngsters. He said: ‘I hope they will look at the building and say, “what is that?”’
While there is a long association of divine and fantastic architectures with cloud, from the heavenly city, to fairytale giants’ castles reached by beanstalks, to Swift’s flying island of Laputa buoyed upon the magnetic field of the giant lodestone at its core, it is only recently that we have had a situation in which the cloud has shifted from being a fabulous support for the building to a trope for the architectural project itself. Clouds of architecture have been accumulating, and the allusion has become increasingly visible as a sort of postmodern counterpart to the high modern metaphoric series of organism, crystal, machine, and so on. My intention here is to explore this architectural aspiration for the cloud, to try to make some suggestions about how we might understand it, and to try to describe the work that the cloud motif might be said to do for architecture and architects.
From one point of view it is unsurprising that the cloud is an area of interest for practices that see themselves as aiming to transgress architecture’s disciplinary constitution, opening architecture onto what is taken to be excessive to it, or mounting an assault upon it. At one point in his book A Theory of /Cloud/ – to which I’ll return – Hubert Damisch characterizes cloud as ‘“matter” aspiring to “form”’, thereby registering its infinite provisionality and imminence. But equally the cloud might be thought of as ‘matter after form’, the characteristic ‘thing’ that accompanies destruction and demolition, the dispersion and suspension of particles that follows
convulsions of matter and that is historically and iconographically fixed in photographs such as those of the dynamiting of the Pruitt-Igoe housing in St Louis in 1972, or the attack on the World Trade Center.
Curiously it was two buildings by the same architect, Minoru Yamasaki, that supplied the material for these two most iconic examples of the destructuring of form into cloud. At the same time, the Pruitt-Igoe demolition was famously promoted – by, for example, Charles Jencks – as the death rattle of modernism itself, thereby staging that particular cloud as the registration of not just the collapse of a specific architectural project but of an entire ideology.
1
The closest meaning of the word ‘stodgy’, as used in the passage, is
(a) A dynamic mass capable of swift movement.
(b) Resembling a cloud.
(c) Resembling a heavy mass.
(d) Both (a) and ©
2
Which of the following is true with regard to ‘the dynamiting of’ Pruitt - Igoe housing?
(a) Its dynamiting has been seen by a few as signifying the end of modernism.
(b) Its demolition has been famously promoted as being an example of the cloud as ‘matter after form’.
(c) Its dynamiting is viewed as being one of the iconic examples of matter aspiring to form.
(d) It is used as an example by those wanting to transgress architecture’s disciplinary nature.
3
Which of the following cannot be inferred from the passage?
(a) Gehry’s cloud reflects an attempt to avoid being symbolized as earthy and heavy, though it uses a proportion of heavy materials in its structure.
(b) The importance of Gehry’s cloud has shifted from being a mere structural support for a building to being an example of postmodern architecture which regards modern architecture as its rival.
(c) People interested in Gehry’s cloud include those who want to widen the scope of architecture beyond the rigid framework within which it operates.
(d) The Pruitt-Igoe housing and the World Trade Center are structures which have been designed by the architect Minoru Yamasaki.
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