Long architect lamp8/26/2023 ![]() a roaring motor car that seems to run on machine-gun fire-that is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace,” wrote Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909. ![]() A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath. “We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. Rejecting the “pensive immobility, ecstasy, and slumber” of the past, Futurism, instead, embraced the furious light and sound of the present and cried for a headlong plunge into the fiery unknown. ![]() The largely productivist vision of modernity found a kind of romantic contradiction in such schools as Italian Futurism. Their form and their substance are there for reasons that go far beyond contemporary economic constraints to reach back to the soul of architecture, to inclusiveness and responsibility, which equally reject sterility. Nor are Foster’s buildings imbued with the posturing gesticulation seen elsewhere. Though grids and modern materials are his forte, Foster also chose from the beginning of his career not to spin off empty space-his buildings are inhabited by a world of references and concerns they flow and curve with their sites and their environment they do not impose the barrenness of much modern architecture. There may be more than a bit of irony in the fact that Norman Foster proudly displays Le Corbusier’s iconic automobile, the Voisin C7 Lumineuse (1926), in his Madrid Foundation. What if the modern architect imagined not art, but, instead, the ex-nihilo creation of space itself? In the place of the richly storied heart of Paris, Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin (1922–25) imagined a new city of 18 identical skyscrapers occupying 240 hectares of the Right Bank. Related Article The Centre Pompidou Debuts the Largest Retrospective of Norman Foster’s Work in Parisīut was any architect capable of resisting the underlying forces of modernity? What of the “awareness of the past” that Foster affirmed? Was that idea not swept aside more than a century ago by Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-Ino (1912–16), with its tabula rasa of open-ended floors and slender columns? The removal of ornament and the introduction of industrial processes had the power to make modern architecture almost purely self-referential. Of course, figures like Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier did not wait for a prize to be famous, and it seems fitting that Wright’s literary alter-ego, Howard Roarke, would say: “Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value judgments." The modern architect/artist as demiurge, responsible for fashioning and maintaining the universe: “…how like an Angel in apprehension, how like a God?” Philip Johnson, the first winner of the shiny award, made his view clear: “Architecture is art, nothing else.” Essays, magazines, and books have delighted in the foibles, verbal and sartorial, of celebrated architects, the hats, and eyeglasses of genius. In a 2007 conference, Norman Foster stated: “As an architect you design for the present, with an awareness of the past, for a future which is essentially unknown." That talk was about the green agenda, which he termed the most important issue of the day, affirming that it is “not about fashion but about survival.” Admittedly, the rise in public interest in contemporary architecture that followed the creation of the Pritzker Prize in 1979 (Foster was the 1999 winner) has been focused on forms and personalities more than on substance. And the lamp head obstructed the monitor by about a half-inch, so we had to adapt to the lamp, rather than the other way around.This is an edited excerpt by Philip Jodidio from TASCHEN’s upcoming title Norman Foster. With our external monitor standing at a similar height, the two battled for elbow room. But this non-height-adjustable desk lamp proved to be a non-starter for our own desk setup. There’s also an app to pair the lamp’s geographic location, syncing the Solarcycle Morph’s color and brightness to the time of day. When the lamp is aimed at an angle toward a ceiling or wall, it outshines most other desk lamps-and even many floor ones. When you rotate the lamp head over its center stand tube, a sleeve slides up to lock satisfyingly into place and directs light down through its perforated stem-effectively transforming into a warm, ambient torchiere. Yet we couldn’t deny the appeal of the lamp’s buttery-smooth movement and its three-in-one adaptability as a task, spot, and ambient light source. An adaptable (but pricey) desk lamp: The Dyson Solarcycle Morph’s unique, industrial-modern design and hefty price tag won’t turn everyone on.
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