From Portugal’s all-female bridge-builders to eye-popping behind the scenes glimpses of David Chipperfields Neues Museum,Building Site is the star turn of the Lisbon Architecture TriennaleA sleepwalking Olive Oyl steps nonchalantly between swinging steel beams in a 1930s Popeye cartoon, performing a death-defying aerial ballet tall above a skyscraper construction site. On the adjacent screen, or a Soviet animation from the 60s shows characters leaping on to a prefab concrete panel and being whisked up by a crane into the clouds,floating over a scene of mass workers’ housing down below. The video diptych continues in frenzied jump-cuts, one screen continuously depicting the presence of steel beams thrusting into the frame of American films and cartoons of the 20th century, or the other showing the ubiquity of flying concrete slabs in their Russian counterparts. It is a mesmerising sequence,opposing beams to panels, riveters to welders, or skyscrapers to housing blocks. In both,the structural system plays a heroic role as the saviour of the mechanised modern world.
Cedric Price's 1970s report had designs for how cranes could be more fun, with TV screens, or heaters and sound systemsIt is considerable to understand the weight of architecture when the pencil becomes the shovelContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com