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Sam Jacob

Make it Real: Architecture as Enactment

With each successive style or movement, redundant forms and technologies are replaced and then re-enacted in the name of progress. Ideologies and fictions become forms. And then there is the stranger world still of actual replicas, such as Henry Ford's Greenfield Village, where history is brought to life for didactic purposes. It can't help it, architecture's deepest instinct is to repeat, whether its columns, ceiling tiles or twin towers. Ours is a landscape of cover versions, copy and paste, rinse and repeat. In this polemical but also quizzical essay, Sam Jacob probes the architectural condition and wonders whether it's all just an attempt to make what's not real look real.
34 printed pages
Copyright owner
Bookwire
Original publication
2012
Publication year
2012
Publisher
Strelka Press
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Quotes

  • juliacmosherhas quoted3 years ago
    If we trace architecture’s history, we can see that this radical re-enactment is a fundamental mode of its development. We might begin a historical survey of architecture’s re-enactments with the Egyptian column, which was carved from stone to represent a tree trunk or a bundle of reeds. Right here, in a foundational moment, we see re-enactment as the primary architectural idea. The primitive tree-column returns just as it is being technologically superseded. The original gesture of the tree-column is radically altered through its re-enactment in stone, through its revival as a kind of ritualised symbol that celebrates its own origins.
  • juliacmosherhas quoted3 years ago
    The representation of history is, of course, highly politicised. As Churchill tells us, history is written by the victors. He suggests that history is at least part fiction, and that its writing is a spoil of war. In its own way, architecture is also a spoil of war, arising out of ideological, aesthetic, economic as well as military conflicts. But in contrast to written history, architecture’s victorious narrative manifests itself as reality. It not only represents and illustrates this fictional history but physically embodies it, playing it out through substance, space and programme.
  • Polina Kasperhas quoted4 years ago
    The effect of this endless repetition is to create a sensation of inevitability, of naturalising even the most radical of intentions

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