Nigel Coates: The city in motion

Nigel Coates adalah arsitek yang surealis, provokatif, keterlaluan. Dia yang mengikat sayap pesawat ke fasad department store Tokyo dan membangun Bahtera Nuh yang membatu untuk menampung sebuah restoran. Tidak ada yang lebih baik menangkap suasana gelisah dan jenuh gambar di akhir 1980-an, di mana ide-ide memantul bolak-balik dari London ke Tokyo dan New York. Karyanya memadukan retorika Futuris dengan kepekaan budaya jalanan Inggris. Pendekatan menantang Coates berangkat untuk menciptakan kemungkinan yang lebih kaya untuk arsitektur di kota akhir abad kedua puluh. Hebatnya, Coates telah mampu mewujudkan ide-ide visionernya menjadi kenyataan, dengan gedung-gedung besar di Jepang dan serangkaian interior yang mencolok di London. Tidak ada yang berhasil melewati batas antara mode dan arsitektur seperti yang dimiliki Coates. Dia adalah bagian penting dari debat internasional tentang arah desain masa depan.Kata kunci: arsitektur, sureali

Conceptual Hybrids: Type in the 1990s

Abstract Rick Poynor's contribution to the conference Conceptual Type – Type led by ideas, Copenhagen, 19. November 2010. Where are the idealistic fonts, the artsy fonts, the non fonts, the political fonts, the funny fonts, the difficult fonts, the fonts that do not look like fonts, fonts that are frontiers of new belief? We would like to focus on the ideas and concepts behind type. Rather than talk about type by asking who made it and what does it look like, we will start a new decade by asking why do we make it and what does it mean? In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes art.'Sol LeWitt. 'Paragraph on Conceptual art', Artforum, 1967. We would like to borrow from Sol LeWitt's vision and replace ‘art’ with ‘type’, looking for the idea-type-machines of our time. [From the conference call

Specialism

It is widely assumed that everyone is ‘interdisciplinary’ nowadays, that we all work at the intersections of conventional disciplines. But if being flexible, multi-skilled and polymathic are the prerequisites of survival in today’s world, why do educators and art marketeers still find it imperative to maintain conditions of production that advocate specialist outcomes? The aim of this new anthology in the Occasional Table series is to critically reflect upon the role of specialism in art and society and to understand better how the claim of those who seek to transcend the parameters of specialisation contrasts to that of others who maintain that deep levels of achievement can only be attained within highly focused methods and forms